"Visionary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are that are turned aside from the career they might have accomplished, by a visionary and impracticable fastidiousness. They can find nothing that possesses all the requisites that should fix their choice, nothing so good that should authorise them to present it to public observation, and enable them to offer it to their contemporaries as something ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... how a man situated as Smith is must be beset with requests of all kinds. Now it is an inventor needing capital; again it is some visionary who comes to advocate a brilliant scheme which must surely yield millions of profit. A choice has to be made between these projects, rejecting the worthless, examining the questionable ones, accepting the meritorious. To this work Mr. Smith ...
— In the Year 2889 • Jules Verne and Michel Verne
... loves its ancient sea- margin or its Roman remains; nor is it because the little Bresle winds gracefully through its soft bed, beneath forests green in the sunshine, glorious in the gloom; it is not for the memories of Rollo and William the Conqueror, which fill with visionary shapes, grander than the living, the corridors of its half-desolate chateau. It is because these storied walls, often ruined, often rebuilt, still shelter a gallery of historic portraits such as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... big ... but his daughters is the gals though—always DOIN' somethin'." Old Man Alcott, however, was usually "doin' somethin'" within. An internal grandiloquence made him melodious without; an exuberant, irrepressible, visionary absorbed with philosophy AS such; to him it was a kind of transcendental business, the profits of which supported his inner man rather than his family. Apparently his deep interest in spiritual physics, rather than metaphysics, gave a kind of hypnotic mellifluous effect to his voice when ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... has been elegantly described, "Philosophy teaching by Example,"—what example more necessary to be held out to public view, and transmitted to posterity, than that which shews the dreadful effects of a Revolution attempted by force? Where the visionary politician enjoys for so short a time his sanguinary triumph—suspected even by those whom he calls his friends, he is superseded by such as are more ferocious than himself, while the fury of Fanaticism ...
— An Impartial Narrative of the Most Important Engagements Which Took Place Between His Majesty's Forces and the Rebels, During the Irish Rebellion, 1798. • John Jones
... sweep of the pen, he annihilates all the treaties that have been made with that people—tramples under foot the laws of nations, and deprives the Indian of his hunting-grounds, one of his sources of subsistence. He says,—"But it seems to me visionary to suppose that, in this state of things, claims can be allowed on tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountain, or passed them in the chase." ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... occasion and circumstance. He was constructing what seemed to be some kind of a frail mechanical toy; and was apparently very much interested in his work. He was a white-headed man, now, but otherwise he was as young, alert, buoyant, visionary and enterprising as ever. His loving old wife sat near by, contentedly knitting and thinking, with a cat asleep in her lap. The room was large, light, and had a comfortable look, in fact a home-like look, though the furniture ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... course at college. She had naturally supposed that, on going out into the world, mixing with young men and meeting young women, he would outgrow his romantic fancy concerning Ida; but the event was very different. As year after year he returned home to spend his vacations, it was evident that his visionary passion was strengthening rather than losing ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... Northward", haunts me like a soul-devouring Sphinx. It is part of the martyrdom which I endure for the cause of the Truth that there are seasons of mental weakness, when Cubes and Spheres flit away into the background of scarce-possible existences; when the Land of Three Dimensions seems almost as visionary as the Land of One or None; nay, when even this hard wall that bars me from my freedom, these very tablets on which I am writing, and all the substantial realities of Flatland itself, appear no better than the offspring of a diseased imagination, or the baseless ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... Winter-Head and Long-Back, gravely bright, Stood firm as if for ever and a day and a night— As they were more than a wave before 'tis caught Back to the tossing tide, more than a flying thought, More than a dream that an old God once dreamed When visionary not ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... direction quite the contrary of his. Run over the names that will readily occur of modern novelists and short-story writers, and ask yourself whether the vivid coloring of these realistic schools must not inevitably have blanched to a still whiter pallor those visionary tales of which the author long ago confessed that they had "the pale tints of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade." With practice has gone theory; and now the critics of realism are beginning to nibble at the accepted estimates of Hawthorne. A very damaging bit of dissection is the ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... who captained or accompanied the exodus from existing forms and associations into the doubtful wilderness that led to the promised land, should find more to their purpose in the Old Testament than in the New. As respects the New England settlers, however visionary some of their religious tenets may have been, their political ideas savored of the realty, and it was no Nephelococcygia of which they drew the plan, but of a commonwealth whose foundation was to rest on solid and familiar earth. If what they did was done in a corner, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... if we should have been given the chance to adopt that course. And without absolute, irrefutable proof, it was all so cleverly woven, stretched over so many years, that our charge must have been held to be too visionary and fantastic to have any ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... the cessation of the music, looked at Gambara, who, with fixed gaze, in the attitude of a visionary, murmured the word: "God!" ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... say that at the instant of laughter we regard not that something is wrong, but that the reverse of it is right? When humour is brought before us, do we feel in any way instructed? This rebirth from a negation must seem somewhat visionary. What, for instance, is the truth to be gathered from the following. "I wish," said a philanthropic orator, "to be a friend to the friendless, a father to the fatherless, and ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... question of watershed protection and utilization of the mountains for conserving the sources of all our great Western streams, by which millions of acres are to be irrigated and millions of homes built up in the West. He was from the first no "tenderfoot" adventurer, no visionary enthusiast, but a practical, hard-headed man far more earnestly and disinterestedly concerned in the Westerners' future than ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... the other hand, these long fingers were smooth jointed, he would, while having the same desire for ideality and for everything intellectual, be impulsive and inspirational, would lack a sense of detail and a love for detail in his own work, would be visionary, artistic, emotional. Such a person would be suited to artistic work, such as painting, making designs, models, etc., but could not be trusted to perform anything requiring detail, research or science, and would be utterly useless in any position where ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... their apparent exemption from want and care and servitude to business, excites impracticable hopes in the minds of those who are even more ignorant and unreflecting—and their locomotive habits fit them for a dangerous agency in schemes, wild and visionary, but disgusting and annoying. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... this matchless creature, with a full acknowledgment of its beauty. A single word would have impaired it; but she did not utter a syllable. On retiring, she slowly raised her expressive countenance, fixing her eyes above, as if she thanked some visionary protector of France for this crowning triumph; and then, with hands clasped, and step by step, sank back ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... journals of the day. As I was expressly asked whether I did not regard such a token as a sign of grace both in the giver and in the receiver, I said that I thought it should neither have been given nor have been taken. My theory was repudiated with scorn, and I was told that I was strait-laced, visionary, and impracticable! In all that the damage did not lie in the fact of that one present, but in the feeling on the part of the critic that his office was not debased by the acceptance of presents from those whom he criticised. ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... Lords itself the Duke of Wellington, acting as he almost always did under the influence of Peel, recommended the Tory peers not to carry their opposition too far, and before long Lord Lyndhurst, who was by temperament and intellect a very shrewd and practical man, with little of the visionary or the fanatic about him, thought it well to accept Wellington's advice, and to urge its acceptance on his brother Conservatives. Lord John Russell recommended the House of Commons to accept a compromise on a few insignificant details in no wise affecting the general ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... on the whole business of government. And even if there were a prospect, it is extremely doubtful whether many of us would wish to be bothered, or would take the time to form an opinion on "any and every form of social action" which affects us. The only prospect which is not visionary is that each of us in his own sphere will act more and more on a realistic picture of the invisible world, and that we shall develop more and more men who are expert in keeping these pictures realistic. Outside the rather narrow range of ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... Maria, do you never retrace in your memory the time we passed here when together? to mine it recurs for ever! And yet I think I rather recollect a dream, or some visionary fancy, than a reality.-That I should ever have been known to Lord Orville,-that I should have spoken to-have danced with him,-seems now a romantic illusion: and that elegant politeness, that flattering attention, that high-bred delicacy, which so ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... record of his achievements in the past when his foot rested firm and steady on native soil, of a long history full of vicissitudes from the time when the invaders battled against the kings of Canaan to the days when the last visionary steeled the nation's endurance in its struggle with the heathen. They are the charter of Jewish nobility, linking those of the present to the wanderer from Ur of ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... his full height, while his eyes seemed starting from their sockets, and gleaming like two balls of living fire, and his whole frame agitated, and as if it were dilating with the internal workings of his wild visionary spirit. Macpherson shook ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... Professor Meiser, one of the least visionary men of the age, was persuaded that science could put a living being to sleep and wake him up again at the end of an infinite number of years—arrest all the functions of the system, suspend life itself, protect an individual against ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... stride has been taken since those olden times, when the philosophic visionary devised his Utopian society with all the freedom, because with all the irresponsibility, of dreams! He so little contemplated any practical result, that he did not even venture to bring his new commonwealth on the old soil of Europe, lest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... provided the NATIONAL CHURCH be founded on the broad principles of virtue, and on the practice of those morals which are so beautifully expounded in the New Testament; and provided the parochial clergy do not mix themselves with those visionary topics which depend for success more on zeal and credulity, than on argument or reason. Such a church must flourish, as long as common sense, and a respect for virtue, govern the majority. In this ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... carnal wisdom. Thou hast laughed at and derided the inexperience of thy brethren—stoop thyself in turn to their derision—tell what they may not believe—affirm that which they will ascribe to idle fear, or perhaps to idle falsehood—sustain the disgrace of a silly visionary, or a wilful deceiver.—Be it so, I will do my duty, and make ample confession to my Superior. If the discharge of this duty destroys my usefulness in this house, God and Our Lady will send me where ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... teaching and human service, while Herbart taught only as a traveling private tutor for three years, and later a class of twenty children in his university practice school. Pestalozzi was a social reformer, a visionary, and an impractical enthusiast, but was possessed of a remarkable intuitive insight into child nature. Herbart, on the other hand, was a well-trained scholarly thinker, who spent the most of his life in the peaceful ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... today, so with those interested in the welfare of the blind—we look to the children for the fulfillment of our highest ideals, and hope, in their advancement, to see our "dearest dreams come true." I am often called visionary, and I am proud to confess that I have a vision, a wonderful vision of the future of the blind. It may not be realized during my lifetime, but if some of the children I have inspired will take up the torch, and carry it on unfalteringly, I shall be satisfied. Meantime, I walk by the light ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... his castle in the air, Brian naturally thought of giving it a mistress, and this time actual appearance took the place of vision. He fell in love with Madge Frettlby, and having decided in his own mind that she and none other was fitted to grace the visionary halls of his renovated castle, he watched his opportunity, and declared himself. She, woman-like, coquetted with him for some time, but at last, unable to withstand the impetuosity of her Irish lover, confessed in a low voice, with ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Goethe says—"feeling is all in all; the name is sound and smoke." What he felt were Christian feelings, the feelings of a Mystic, a Visionary, a Flagellant. What matter by what name you call them? Christ? Dionysus? It is the secret creative passion of the human heart that sends them Both ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... painfully clear evidence beneath the direct light falling from the glass roof. The drawn face, the scanty beard of the young man, to whom the bright colour of his eyes, the narrow height of his forehead, his long and fair hair thrown backward gave the air of a visionary, everything was accentuated in the crude light; and also the resolute will in that clear glance which settled upon Jenkins coldly, and in advance to all his reasonings, to all his protestations, opposed an ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... it prudent so far to meet the objection suggested by Mr. O'Connell, as to make a slight alteration in this edition, which will probably prevent the objection, if correct, being of any material practical effect on the disposition of that visionary El ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the living father; still, the child innocently tortured her with the consciousness of deceit. The faithless man from whom the law had released her, possessed himself of her thoughts, in spite of the law. He, and he only, was the visionary companion of her solitude when she was ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... more steady, his mouth had lost its vague pensive expression, and was rendered sterner by the dark moustache; definite thought, purpose, and action, had moulded his whole countenance and person into hopeful manhood, instead of visionary boyhood. The other face, naturally the most full of fire and resolution, looked strangely different in its serious unsmiling gravity, the deeply worn stamp of patient endurance and utter isolation. There was much of rest and calm, and even of content—but withal ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... requireth from me that it should be so—that I should know one thing, and not know all else: they are a loathing unto me, all the semi-spiritual, all the hazy, hovering, and visionary. ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... be, could not resist the secret influence which had already taken possession of him. To see this woman, so beautiful, fair as the brightest vision, to see her by turns overcome with grief and threatening; to resist at once the ascendancy of grief and beauty—it was too much for a visionary; it was too much for a brain weakened by the ardent dreams of an ecstatic faith; it was too much for a heart furrowed by the love of heaven that burns, by the hatred of men ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... affectionately and freely as she had done while they had been alone. William Pressley did not speak to the boy at all or notice him in any way. He did not dislike him, for he never disliked anything that was not of some importance. He disapproved of his impractical, visionary character, and thought that it might have rather an undesirable influence over Ruth. For this reason he tacitly discouraged all intimacy between them, but he did not take the trouble to express it and merely ignored the lad. And David, seeing how it ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... of Schopenhauer is the life of a recluse—a visionary—a hermit who lost himself amid the maze of city streets, and moved solitary in the throng. Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Gottingen, Frankfort, engaged him, and from one to the other he turned, looking for the rest he never found, and which he knew he would never find, so in the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... presence of spiritual and ghostly beings. Perhaps the pains endured in the various ordeals, the long fastings, the silences in the depth of the forests or on the mountains or among the ice-floes, helped to rouse the visionary faculty. The developments of this faculty among the black and colored peoples—East-Indian, Burmese, African, American-Indian, etc.—are well known. Miss Alice Fletcher, who lived among the Omaha Indians for thirty years, gives a most ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... recall the day when the idea of fall wheat west of Lake Superior elicited a hoot of derision. I have lived to wander through fields of six hundred acres north of the Saskatchewan. Thirty years ago any one suggesting settlement on Peace River, or at Athabasca, would have been regarded as a visionary fool. Yet wheat is ground into flour on Peace River, and the settler is at Athabasca; and soft Kansas fall wheat sent to Peace River has by a few years' transplanting been transformed into Number One Hard spring wheat. Canada's arctic belt has shrunk a little each year, and ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... miracle, contrary to all reason, is worthy of acceptance only by the blind, childish, credulity of infidelity. Whatever the object before him, then, it is real; his convictions are soberly and well founded; he runs his race to no visionary, misty goal; but some actual reality is the lode-star of his life. Let us listen to his own explanation: "forgetting those things that are being, reaching forth unto those that are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... said, "is of a rather vague, not to say visionary, character, and I doubt if you can help me. But at any rate I will explain the trouble as well as I can. In the first place, am I right in supposing that you were in some way professionally engaged in connection with that extraordinary ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... town, and a glance at the Princess Lucia, his resolution changed. Yet he wavered, one time openly reproaching himself for enduring such a life of inaction and ignominy, and at another deriding Felix and his visionary schemes. The canoe was now completed; it was tried on the pool and found to float exactly as it should. It had now to be ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... laughed again, but not heartily. He felt that this marble ship was a conception of high humor and was not without its pathetic element. The whimsicality of the idea amused him, but the sad earnestness of the nervous, unstrung visionary at his side ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... own that I am no visionary, and that you will allow others to watch over you, since you will not ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... country beyond, all the land of the To Be, all the giant valley of the Mississippi, all the rolling, endless plains, all Mexico with snowy peaks and mines of gold. The apparition did not come dazzlingly. He was no visionary. He weighed and measured and reckoned carefully with his host. But there, beyond the mountains, lay no small part of the habitable world,—and the race of conquerors had not died with Alexander or Caesar, Cortez or Pizarro! Witness Marengo and ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... not rank with thee! (A knock.) Oh death! I know it—'tis my famulus— My fairest fortune now escapes! That all these visionary shapes A soulless groveller should banish thus! (WAGNER in his dressing gown and night-cap, a lamp in his hand. ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... there was nothing visionary about Garraway's. "Garraway's, twelve o'clock. 'Dear Mrs. B., Chops and Tomato Sauce, Yours, Pickwick,'" not only implicated Mr. Pickwick, but conjured up an old and historic coffee house of city fame. It stood in Exchange Alley, and was a noted ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... one. You talk of experience—here it is. And with these facts and this experience before us, I call on those soi-disant men of experience—those men who scoffed at us—who laughed to scorn at what they called our visionary, theoretical schemes—schemes that never could be carried into effect without rebellion and the loss of the colonies—I say, my lords, I call on these experienced men to come forward, and, if they can, deny one single iota of the statement I am now making. Let those who thought ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... found her unconscious. The ladies were out, the old Aunt had a stroke. It is such a sweet, promising life, and can be developed into something worth while. You may think me visionary—" ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... long window; the view over a lawn and flower-garden; the pattering of the rain against the glass; the stretching out of the Shadow's arm, and the fall of the statue in fragments on the floor—these objects and events of the visionary scene, so vividly present to his memory once, were all superseded by later remembrances now, were all left to fade as they might in the dim background of time. He could pass the room again and again, alone and anxious, and never once think of the boat drifting away in the moonlight, and the ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... incarnation of thrift, of peace at any price, and of commercial development, was elected President in 1879. M. Leon Say, a man of wealth and of business, from whom more circumspection might have been expected, lent himself, as Minister of the Finances, in combination with the rather visionary M. de Freycinet, to a grand scheme devised by M. Gambetta 'in a single night,' like Aladdin's Palace, for spending indefinite millions of money upon docks, railways and ports all over France, wherever there was a seat in the Chamber to ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... practicable to supply this want by tunnelling through the wall of the plateau, which rises abruptly in the rear of the town, until some subterranean stream is encountered, the current of which can be conducted to the city. More visionary projectors have gone further, and imagined that advantage might be taken of the natural tunnels under the Karst for the passage of roads, railways, and even navigable canals. But however chimerical these latter schemes may seem, there is every reason to believe that art might ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... your pardon; the very non-existence proves that it ought not to be—'whatever is, is right'—you might as well expect to find perfect happiness or perfection in the individual. Your father must be a visionary." ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... escape further bloodshed; it was guarded by the Royalist Cossack clans, as lawless as they are brave. The Ufa Directorate derived its authority from the moderate Social Revolutionary party composed of the "Intelligenzia"—republican, visionary, and impractical. Kerensky was, from all accounts, a perfect representative of this class, verbose and useless so far as practical reconstructive work was concerned. This class blamed the unswerving loyalty of the Cossacks and the old army officers ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... mamma, who was in her attitude, holding up the end of her boa as a visionary tambourine, and Mr. Walker, who was looking at her, and in his amusement at the mother's performances had almost forgotten the charms of the daughter—both turned round at once, and looked at her with many expressions of sympathy, ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... like the great characters of true history. It has ever been my opinion, that only the clear and steady light of truth can guide men to virtue, and that the lesson which is impracticable must be unuseful. Whoever shall design to regulate his conduct by these visionary characters will be in the condition of superstitious people, who choose rather to act by intimations they receive in the dreams of the night, than by the sober counsels of morning meditation. Yet I confess it has been the practice of many nations to incite men to virtue by relating ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... not the most interesting part of it. He wanted to pay me in flesh—human flesh, and he offered to make me a king into the bargain, if I would forgive him the debt. The latter part of the proposal was purely visionary. The promise to pay in so much humanity he is able to perform. I have not made ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... to generation had been hoarded up that it might be a doom to men. If Foy were affianced to Elsa, it was his inheritance as well as hers, for those trusts of Hendrik Brant's will were to Lysbeth things unreal and visionary, and its curse would fall upon him as well as upon her. Moreover it might be said that he was marrying her to win ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... The Romans wandered several days in the country to the eastward of Bagdad; the Persian deserter, who had artfully led them into the spare, escaped from their resentment; and his followers, as soon as they were put to the torture, confessed the secret of the conspiracy. The visionary conquests of Hyrcania and India, which had so long amused, now tormented, the mind of Julian. Conscious that his own imprudence was the cause of the public distress, he anxiously balanced the hopes of safety or success, without obtaining a satisfactory ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... must for me be memorable. I sometimes fancied myself in a dream—I could scarcely credit the reality of what passed. For instance, when I walked into the room and put my hand into Miss Martineau's, the action of saluting her and the fact of her presence seemed visionary. Again, when Mr. Thackeray was announced, and I saw him enter, looked up at his tall figure, heard his voice, the whole incident was truly dream-like, I was only certain it was true because I became miserably destitute of self-possession. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... preternatural communications, in modern times, to falsify those who are of a different opinion, they may easily refute the doctrine of their opponents, who impute a belief in second sight to superstition. To entertain a visionary notion that one sees a distant or future event, may be called superstition; but the correspondence of the fact or event with such an impression on the fancy, though certainly very wonderful, IF PROVED, has no more connection with superstition, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... explore the wonders of the canyon, to shoot in the patches of forest, to fish in the river, and find he knew not what in those wondrous solitudes where man had probably never yet trod, he heard a call, and, brought back to himself from his visionary expedition, he ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... teach modern economics, social science and psychology—and this in the face of opposition from trustees. Successful business men, as a rule, have had neither the time nor the inclination to read books which they regard as visionary, as subversive to an order by which they have profited. And that some Americans are fools, and have been dazzled in Europe by the glamour of a privilege not attainable at home, is a deplorable yet indubitable fact. These have little sympathy with democracy; they have even been heard ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Institution on the virgin soil of Minnesota. Then he would give his life to training boys to live without meat or practical jokes, to love truth, honesty, and hard lessons; he would teach girls to forego jewelry and cucumber-pickles, to study physiology, and to abhor flirtations. Visionary, was he? You can not help smiling at a man who has a "vocation," and who wants to give the world a good send-off toward its "goal." But there is something noble about it after all. Something to make you and me ashamed of our selfishness. Let us not judge Charlton by his green flavor. When these ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... if she were in a dream. Could this unlooked-for, bewildering satisfaction be indeed real, and not a visionary thing which would presently fade? She looked about. There was actuality in the scene. The cottonwoods rustled crisply, Alejandro Vigil was calling to his dog, and the tinkle of his herd stole softly upon her ear. The great ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... her future lay visualized before her, heroic deeds, great ambitions, wide charity, he planned years with her, selfish, contented years. As different as smug, satisfied summer from visionary, palpitating spring, he was for her—but she was for ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... there is a charm in thy quiet, a cessation, a coolness from business, an indolence almost cloistral, which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at eventide! They spake of the past; the shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... cherished only the ideals of the purest and highest sort of either passion, and seemed to find satisfaction enough in the endeavor to embody such in his verse, without even imagining himself in communication with any visionary public. The era had not yet dawned when every scribbler is consumed with the vain ambition of being recognized, not, indeed, as what he is, but as what he pictures himself in his secret sessions of thought. That disease ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... who among the generous, impetuous, ill-balanced friends that surrounded her? Not the noble-minded geographer, Elisee Reclus; not the fiery citizen-count, Rochefort; not the handsome, cultivated Gustave Flourens, already "fey" with the doom to which he had been born; not that kindly visionary, the Vicomte de Coursay-Delmont, now discarding his ancient title to be known only among his grateful, penniless patients as Doctor Delmont; and surely not Professor Tavernier, nor yet that militant hermit, the young Chevalier de ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... about the beetle's being "the index of his fortune." Upon the whole, I was sadly vexed and puzzled, but at length, I concluded to make a virtue of necessity—to dig with a good will, and thus the sooner to convince the visionary, by ocular demonstration, of the fallacy ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... in the student is wonder that the thought of it could ever have entered a sane mind. A wilder or more chimerical scheme never disturbed the dreams of a schoolboy; yet no one has ever pressed a reasonable undertaking with more earnestness and confidence than Burr his visionary purpose. He exhibited, throughout, an infatuation and a degree of incompetency for great achievements, which would cover the enterprise with ridicule, were it not for the misfortunes which it brought upon himself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... one in a dream. She had married a vision of perfection, and entered on a romance of happy poverty, and she had no desire to awaken; so she never exerted her mind upon the world around her, when it seemed oppressive; and kept the visionary James Frost before her, in company with Adeline and the transformed Sir Hubert. It was much easier to line his tent with a tapestry of Maltese crosses, than to consider whether the hall should be ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... months of his life; he busied himself so intensely in visionary bustle that he forgot his real solitude. But one day the consciousness of his own folly and inaction pierced him deeply. He compared twenty months with the life of man. "The period of human existence," said he, "may be reasonably estimated at forty years, of which I have mused ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... might not have carried him beyond the customary platitudes of the drawing-room visionary if accident had not reinforced his stock-in-trade of mystical lore. In company with a friend, who was interested in a Ural mining concern, he had made a trip across Eastern Europe at a moment when the great ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... excited his enthusiasm. He never tired of listening to his stories of what he had done and of what he was going to do. As for Washington, Harry thought he was a man of ability and comprehension, but "too visionary," he told the Colonel. The Colonel said he might be right, but he had never noticed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... charming man, were frequent visitors at our house. They often earnestly discussed the tales of Hoffmann, which at that date were comparatively new, and had created some sensation. It was now that I made my first though rather superficial acquaintance with this romantic visionary, and so received a stimulus which influenced me for many years even to the point of infatuation, and gave me very peculiar ideas ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... metaphysical disquisition. But while we condemn his speculative notions as degrading to human nature, and subversive of the most important interests of mankind, we must admit that he has prosecuted his visionary hypothesis with uncommon ingenuity. Abstracting from it the rhapsodical nature of this production, and its obscurity in some parts, it has great merit as a poem. The style is elevated, and the versification in general harmonious. By the ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... Cutchery court and the grand jury of Salem could be regulated on a similar plan. I was persuaded that government was a practical thing, made for the happiness of mankind, and not to furnish out a spectacle of uniformity to gratify the schemes of visionary politicians. Our business was to rule, not to wrangle; and it would have been a poor compensation that we had triumphed in a dispute, whilst ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... world with observant eyes and found it beautiful. When he had flowers to paint, he painted the whole plant accurately, not the blossoms individually, like the painter of Richard II. He liked fine stuffs, embroideries, jewels, and glittering armour. He was no visionary trying to free himself from the earth and live in contemplation of the angels and saints in Paradise, like so many of the thirteenth ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... nearly always vividest when the art is weakest; and the technical skill only reaches its deliberate splendor when the ecstacy which gave it birth has passed away forever. It is as vain an attempt to reason out the visionary power or guiding influence of Athena in the Greek heart, from anything we now read, or possess, of the work of Phidias, as it would be for the disciples of some new religion to infer the spirit of Christianity from Titian's "Assumption." ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... speech to mean that since she had sacrificed her life to the old man on the opposite side of the box, she was able to judge whether Giovanni would do wisely in making a marriage of convenience, for the sake of an end which even to her mind seemed visionary. She turned quickly upon him, and there was an angry gleam ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... know what I promised Alexander at Tilsit, and by what means I succeeded in winning his heart. He is an idealist; the plans of his grandmother Catharine are constantly haunting him, and his thoughts are fixed on Turkey—particularly on Constantinople. He is ambitious, fickle, and visionary. I promised to realize his visions, and thereby gained his confidence. I promised when the time came, not only not to oppose his plans against Turkey, but to support them to the best of my power. In consideration of this promise, he approved my ideas with regard to Spain, ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... of the mystical visionary feeling of the Spaniards even in his religious pictures. He was too much in love with life for that, and so, sometimes, we are offended by stout Flemish Saints and Madonnas too healthy to accord with our notions of their abstemious ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... delighting in beauty. The sky was grey and heavy,—floating mists on the hill-sides, which softened the objects, and where we lost sight of the lake it appeared so near to the sky that they almost touched one another, giving a visionary beauty to the prospect. While we overlooked this quiet scene we could hear the stream rumbling among the rocks between the lakes, but the mists concealed any glimpse of it which we might have had. This small lake is called ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... neither the same amount of personal knowledge on the part of the electorate, nor do the consequences of a mistaken policy recoil so directly and so unmistakably upon them. These subjects, therefore, are the happy hunting-ground of the visionary and the phrase-maker. I have seen the people of this country talked into a policy with regard to South Africa at once so injurious to their own interests, and so base towards those who had thrown in their lot with us ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner
... sacred body unto Dunum; and they stayed not to follow its track, believing that it carried the precious burden, until it came within the borders of Ardmachia, unto a certain river which is named Caucune. Then the visionary wain disappeared; and the people, frustrated of their hope, unsatisfied and sad, returned unto ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... not read it. He thought he could read it, and read it that way, in the way of hate and deliberate preference of her own will to all law and justice. There could be no such tremendous testimony to the power of that long continued, absolutely-faithful, visionary love which John Tatham bore to Elinor than that this discovery which he thought he had made did not destroy it. He was greatly shocked, but it made no difference in his feelings. Perhaps there was more of the brotherly character in them than he thought. For a moment they looked ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... starving workers of the soil, the vision among the mountains of an exulting mad spirit in a mighty body, and many other visions worthy of attention. And they are exact visions, for this idealist is no visionary. He is in sympathy with suffering mankind, and has a grasp on real human affairs. I mean the great and pitiful affairs concerned with bread, love, and the obscure, unexpressed needs which drive great crowds to prayer in the holy places of ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... she told with some confusion and Dismay, the usual consequence of dreams Of the unpleasant kind, with none at hand To expound their vain and visionary gleams. I've known some odd ones which seemed really planned Prophetically, or that which one deems A "strange coincidence," to use a phrase By which such things are ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... of the Middle Ages in Europe was first broken by the light that shone from the spires of Gothic cathedrals in the eleventh century. About the twelfth century the German mind was further illuminated by that mysterious, visionary, titanic, Teutonic epic, the Niebelungen Lied; and a little later appeared the troubadours in the south of Europe and the minnesingers (love-singers) in Germany. Next came Dante and Giotto in Italy, then Chaucer in England; so that by the end of the fourteenth ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... was nearly 'found' in French. What would you call the parallel to a nom de plume? Nom de chien? Nom de—something visionary, at all events. He'll be sitting up day after to-morrow and ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... done." Writing in "The Outlook" for June 27, 1896, Lady Henry Somerset says, in closing a sketch of Frances Willard: "The Temperance cause, in spite of the gigantic strides it has made of late years toward success, is still relegated to the shadowy land of unpopular and supposedly impracticable and visionary reform." ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... relapsed into uneasiness. "Do you?" she said, making an effort to stay balanced under the visionary gaze of the ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... of Europe and America had definitely rejected his program. The one case of nation-wide socialism had proved too great a failure not to impress the laboring classes in the more advanced countries of the world as a visionary and unworkable scheme. ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... break up this momentary hallucination. For half a minute only the doctor lingered on the borders of that fairyland where time and duty are not, but only one ineffable moment always passing, never past. Then with a long sigh, the breath of which dispersed a whole gleaming world of visionary delights, he got down doggedly on the commonplace pavement. Ah, what a descent it was! the moment his foot touched these vulgar flags, he was once more the hard-worked doctor at everybody's command, with a fretful patient waiting for him a mile ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... admittedly a visionary. It was to the benefit of his fellow Europeans and to the detriment of the South American tribes that to his dreams he joined the practical side of his nature. Certainly the value of imagination ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... our good King had proved a bloody knave; my visionary lands and riches all had vanished; instead of silk attire and sword, I wore a rifle-shirt and skinning-knife; and out of the dawn-born glory of the hills had stepped no silken damsel of romance to pause and worship me—only a slender, ragged, grey-eyed waif who came indifferent ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Supernumerary Ornaments to the Universe, and make it more agreeable to the Imagination? We are every where entertained with pleasing Shows and Apparitions, we discover Imaginary Glories in the Heavens, and in the Earth, and see some of this Visionary Beauty poured out upon the whole Creation; but what a rough unsightly Sketch of Nature should we be entertained with, did all her Colouring disappear, and the several Distinctions of Light and Shade ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... this early period of its history the most visionary ideas were formed by the company and the public of the immense riches of the eastern coast of South America. Everybody had heard of the gold and silver mines of Peru and Mexico; everyone believed them to be inexhaustible, and that it was only necessary to send the manufactures ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... came to Willey Water, the lake lay all grey and visionary, stretching into the moist, translucent vista of trees and meadow. Fine electric activity in sound came from the dumbles below the road, the birds piping one against the other, and water mysteriously plashing, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... I old letters may con o'er, And dream on faces seen no more, The buried treasure of the years, Too visionary now for tears; Open old cupboards and explore Sometimes, for an old sweetheart's sake, A delicate romantic ache, Sometimes a swifter pang of pain To read old tenderness again, As though the ink were scarce yet dry, And She still She and I still I. What if I were to write as though Her ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... 11 Now this he spake because of the stiffneckedness of Laman and Lemuel; for behold they did murmur in many things against their father, because he was a visionary man, and had led them out of the land of Jerusalem, to leave the land of their inheritance, and their gold, and their silver, and their precious things, to perish in the wilderness. And this they said he had done because of the foolish imaginations ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... the event was of great national importance; but they connected it with the development of transcontinental communication, and trade with China and Japan, rather than with internal development, or what railroad men call local traffic. They were somewhat visionary, no doubt, but none of them dreamed that the future of the Pacific road depended more on the business that would grow out of the peopling of the deserts it traversed ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... fancies sluggish here I' the head that needs the hand she would not take And I shall never lift now. Lo, your wood— Its turnings which I likened life to! Well,— There she stands, ending every avenue, Her visionary presence on each goal I might have gained had we kept side by side! Still string nerve and strike foot? Her frown forbids: The steam congeals once more: I'm old again! Therefore I hate myself—but how much worse Do not I hate who would not ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... will have to be met. I for one, leaving out of consideration for the present details which are subject to modification and change, believe that it will be a fatal error for the nation to commit itself to the practically hopeless and visionary sea-level project and to delay for many years the opening of this much needed waterway connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific. I for one am opposed to a waste of untold millions and to additional burdens of needless taxation, while the project of a lock canal offers every practical advantage, ...
— The American Type of Isthmian Canal - Speech by Hon. John Fairfield Dryden in the Senate of the - United States, June 14, 1906 • John Fairfield Dryden
... great things that to other men would seem impossibilities; and then his intensely practical side his intense efficiency, his power, his skill, his patience, his fine earnestness, his mastery over others, develop his dreams into realities. He dreams dreams and sees visions—but his visions are never visionary and his dreams ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... of imminent dismay, my thoughts flew out as to a fair protecting saint; until the inspiration of her visionary presence wrought in my fancy with such a dramaturgic power, that I seemed to walk daily with her, and to know all those delicate and sweet propinquities by which liking passes into affection and affection is glorified into love. So far did these happy day-dreams carry me, that they brought me ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... his heart that no human being could ever be the actual comrade of this man. This lord of the voiceless desert needed no human companionship; yet as the marshal glanced from the black shadow of Satan to the gleaming eyes of Bart, and then to the visionary face of Barry, he felt that he had been admitted by Whistling Dan into the mysterious company. The thought stirred him deeply. It was as if he had made an alliance with the wandering wind. Why he had been accepted he could not dream, but he had heard the word "partner" and ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... of the warm sunny shower The visionary boy from shelter fly; For now the storm of summer rain is o'er, And cool, and fresh, and fragrant is the sky. And, lo! in the dark east, expanded high, The rainbow brightens to the setting Sun! Fond fool, that deem'st the streaming glory nigh, How vain the chase ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... looked round him at the river and the hills. There was a flush of sunset through the air, and the blue of the river was interlaced with rosy or golden reflections from a sky piled with stormy cloud and aglow with every "visionary majesty" of light and colour. The great cloud-masses were driving in a tragic splendour through the west; and hue and form alike, throughout the wide heaven, seemed to him to breathe a marvellous harmony and poetry, to make ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he knew of my determination; and was it filial and just to let him remain in ignorance of it? Yet I reasoned that after all I had made no final decision. I was attracted, it is true, by what might be called a visionary theory; but when I had given the principles of moderation further thought, I might conclude not to devote myself to them. It would be time enough later to speak of the subject. At present I was only too poorly prepared to ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... dreamer yet, in spite of all, Is man, that splendid visionary child Who sent his ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... appetite beyond his natural sphere, But starv'd and died. My sweetest Indian, here, Here will I kneel, for thou redeemed hast My life from too thin breathing: gone and past Are cloudy phantasms. Caverns lone, farewel! And air of visions, and the monstrous swell Of visionary seas! No, never more Shall airy voices cheat me to the shore Of tangled wonder, breathless and aghast. Adieu, my daintiest Dream! although so vast 660 My love is still for thee. The hour may come When we shall meet in pure elysium. On earth I may not love thee; and therefore ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... Kitty's side. As he approached her his eyes fastened on the loveliness of her attitude, her fair head. In his own expression there was a visionary, fantastic joy; it was the look of the dreamer who, for once, finds in circumstance and the real, poetry adequate ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... apparitions of angels and demons, and of souls separated from the body. The reality of these apparitions is considered as certain by many persons, while others deride them and treat them as altogether visionary. ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Tis sweet in boyhood's visionary mood, When glowing Fancy, innocently gay, Flings forth, like motes, her bright aerial brood, To dance and shine in Hope's prolific ray; 'Tis sweet, unweeting how the flight of years May darkling roll in trials and in tears, To dress the future in what garb ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... dismissed Columbus as a visionary, and thus left it to Spain to acquire the fame and the profit of discovering the new world of America. But he was diligent in making enquiries, with regard to the East. He sent two of his equerries, Joao Peres de Covilhao and Affonso de Paiva, overland to India, and the former ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... tasted in the successive dishes. When it came to the black coffee, and then to the 'petits verres' of cognac, with lumps of sugar set fire to atop, it was something that so far transcended my home-kept experience that it began to seem altogether visionary. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... her as he is yours, we may reasonably hope that Heaven will restore to us what is ours, as it is still in existence and not yet alienated or destroyed. And as we have this consolation springing from no very visionary hope or wild fancy, I entreat you, senora, to form new resolutions in your better mind, as I mean to do in mine, preparing yourself to look forward to happier fortunes; for I swear to you by the faith of a gentleman and a Christian not to desert you ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... conception of the Doppelgaenger, which exists in a modified form as the wraith of Scottish legendary superstition, is rendered infinitely more appalling by being taken out of its misty highland half-light of visionary indefiniteness, and produced in frock-coat and trousers, in all the shocking distinctness of commonplace, everyday, contemporary life. The Germans are the only people whose imaginative faculty can cope with the homeliest forms of reality, and infuse into them vagueness, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... difficulty of church government under these conditions confronted the nobler impulse of humility in the visionary's mind. "When have I said, Brother Darling, that they all should think what they like? But, behold, I say unto thee, it is not with the Lord to save with many or with few, but ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... effect than a common waggon on the highway; yet those subjects are so poetically treated throughout, the parts have such a correspondence with each other, and the whole and every part of the scene is so visionary, that it is impossible to look at them without feeling in some measure the enthusiasm which seems to have ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... Akhnaton's doctrine of Peace and Goodwill had lost. Under his direction the purged worship of the old gods, which for him meant but the maintenance of some time-proved customs, had gained the mastery over the chimerical worship of Aton; without force or violence he had substituted the practical for the visionary; and to Amon and Order his grateful subjects were able to cry, "The sun of him who knew thee not has set, but he who knows thee shines; the sanctuary of him who assailed thee is overwhelmed in darkness, but the whole ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... The system is a combination of socialism and Islam derived in part from tribal practices and is supposed to be implemented by the Libyan people themselves in a unique form of "direct democracy." QADHAFI has always seen himself as a revolutionary and visionary leader. He used oil funds during the 1970s and 1980s to promote his ideology outside Libya, supporting subversives and terrorists abroad to hasten the end of Marxism and capitalism. In addition, beginning in 1973, he engaged in military operations in northern ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... music similar to those in Europe, embracing the best elements, attaining the most satisfactory results at the least possible cost to the student. This project, for a youth without capital, dependent upon his abilities for his personal support, was regarded even by sympathetic friends as visionary. But nothing progressive is accepted as a mere optimistic vision by the predestined reformer. Remote Huguenot and immediate Yankee ancestry is perhaps a good combination for pioneer material. However this may be, his efforts were crystallized, shaped, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... surely soften, When his foolish hopes decay, And his older love rekindle, As the new one dies away. Visionary hills will haunt him, Rising from the glassy sea, And his thoughts will wander homewards Unto ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... the thing I love. My breast is warmed with such unusual fire, I wish him absent whom I most desire. And now I faint with grief; my fate draws nigh; In all the pride of blooming youth I die. Death will the sorrows of my heart relieve. Oh, might the visionary youth survive, I should with joy my latest breath resign! 90 But oh! I see his fate involved in mine.' This said, the weeping youth again returned To the clear fountain, where again he burned; ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... he won't come?—suppose he begins to fight?"—we asked these questions simultaneously. They were quite unnecessary, for the man would not come and, moreover, he would fight; but Monsieur's earnestness and visionary ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... continue strongly to insinuate, that England is prepared for an insurrection, and Scotland already in actual rebellion: but I know the character of our countrymen too well to be persuaded that they have adopted new principles as easily as they would adopt a new mode, or that the visionary anarchists of the French government can have made many proselytes among an humane and rational people. For many years we were content to let France remain the arbitress of the lighter departments of taste: lately she has ceded this province to us, and England has dictated ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... fountain, and the air; Another frenzy came—there seemed a being Within me—a strange load my heart did bear, As if some living thing had made its lair Even in the fountains of my life:—a long 2970 And wondrous vision wrought from my despair, Then grew, like sweet reality among Dim visionary woes, an unreposing throng. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and then she believed that her sweet eloquence had prevailed, for her lips trembled with thanks; she murmured nothing but soft blessings upon the man who had been to her worse than a murderer. Another change, and she passed on to some new hallucination, visionary as the last, for day and night her brain never rested. When they questioned her, the poor woman always answered that she was not ill, that nothing was the matter, nothing whatever—she only wondered the people would tease her so with inquiries that ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... things that are valuable: but they are not practical; they all fail in the application of knowledge to useful ends. I am not an educated man myself, but I have known many who are, and they are all alike—shallow, superficial, visionary. They need to put away their books and sit down among the everlasting hills and think. You have done well to come out here, young man. This is good; ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... ardor cools off their energies become dormant, and by the time they are ready to commence business they are as unfit to do so as they were visionary in making ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... trappings stern Bellona smiles; The brazen trump, the spirit-stirring drum, That bid the foe defiance ere they come; The hero bounding at his country's call, The glorious death that consecrates his fall, 290 Swell the young heart with visionary charms. And bid it antedate the joys of arms. But know, a lesson you may yet be taught, With death alone are laurels cheaply bought; Not in the conflict Havoc seeks delight, His day of mercy is the day of fight. But when the field is fought, the battle won, Though drenched with gore, his woes ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... with tobacco, looked at it longingly and returned it to his pocket. This process he repeated at intervals from sheer force of habit. With his pipe alight he was an ideal listener; without it his attention wandered and grew drowsy. But Malcolm, wrapt up in his own visionary conceits, did not see the ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... I took a sentimental view of our subject. We women always instinctively take the sentimental view, you know. My doctor was severely scientific and frightfully sceptical. He thought me an absurd visionary." ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... "Mathematicians, too frequently taking the means for the end, have embarrassed Natural Philosophy with a crowd of analytical labours, founded upon hypotheses extremely hazardous, or even upon conceptions purely visionary; and consequently sober-minded people can see in them really nothing more than simple mathematical exercises, of which the abstract value is sometimes very striking, without their influence, in the slightest degree, accelerating the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... feeling despondency and never despair, he did not deceive himself with false or impossible expectations. He was quick to perceive the real and the practical, and while enterprising in the extreme he was not in the least visionary. His nerve, his powers of discrimination, the readiness with which he could surrender schemes found to be impracticable, if by chance he became involved in them, and his energy and close attention to his affairs, made him very successful in business, and undoubtedly the same qualities, ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... the Carpocratians of the second century we find already the tendency towards that deification of humanity which forms the supreme doctrine of the secret societies and of the visionary Socialists of our day. The war now begins between the two contending principles: the Christian conception of man reaching up to God and the secret society conception of man as God, needing no revelation from on high and no guidance but the law of his own nature. And since that nature is in ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... me then to vast embowering shades, To twilight groves and visionary vales, To weeping grottos and prophetic glooms; Where angel-forms athwart the solemn dusk Tremendous sweep, or seem to sweep along; And voices more than human, through the void, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... not been a cheerful one, subjected to the ever-changing whims of a visionary father, with whom one of her practical cast of mind could have no point of sympathy. And since she came to Lindsleyville it was harder than ever, for there was no neighbor nearer than Gager's, ten miles away, and there was ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... true that I am going to earn my bread at last, and with my pen? that I shall impoverish the dear mother no longer; and that I may gain a name and reputation in the world, perhaps? These are welcome if they come, thought the young visionary, laughing and blushing to himself, though alone and in the night, as he thought how dearly he would relish honour and fame if they could be his. If fortune favours me, I laud her; if she frowns, I resign her. I pray Heaven I may be honest if I fail, or if I succeed. I pray Heaven ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... power of imagination exerted upon real things; but we should have to explain that with Mr. Browning the real includes everything which a human being can think or feel, and that he is realistic only in the sense of being never visionary; he never deals with those vague and incoherent fancies, so attractive to some minds, which we speak of as coming only from the poet's brain. He imagines vividly because he observes keenly and also feels strongly; and this vividness of his nature puts him in equal sympathy with the real and the ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... wondering at the words she said, When lo, the shadowy spirit, as I turned, Dissolved in air, and in a moment fled. Thrice round the neck with longing I essayed To clasp the phantom in a wild delight; Thrice, vainly clasped, the visionary shade Mocked me embracing, and was lost to sight, Swift as a winged wind or slumber ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... centripetal and forceful in its action, appears to throw off the soul-images, afterwards going out towards them in a mood of speculative inquiry. The passive temperament, however, centrifugal and sensitive, most frequently feels first and sees afterwards, the visionary process being wholly devoid of speculation or mental activity. The one sees and thinks, the other feels and sees that, in a word, is the ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... vain. The feeling grew upon her that belief or unbelief was a matter of education and temperament, and that the feelings of which Dennis spoke were but the deceptive emotions of our agitated hearts. To that degree that the Divine love seemed visionary and hopeless, she longed for him to speak of his own, if in truth it still existed, that she could understand and believe in. If during what remained of life she could only drink the sweetness of that, she felt it was the best she could hope ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... laid to him in this trial but that of having indulged certain heretical notions, which any other tribunal but that of the Inquisition would have looked upon as the delirious fancies of a fanatical old man. Will posterity believe, that in the eighteenth century an aged visionary was led to the stake for having said, amongst other extravagances, that "The holy Virgin having commanded him to write the life of Anti-Christ, told him that he, Malagrida, was a second John, but more clear than John the Evangelist; that there were to be three ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... world, I teach myself to encourage, to share, to exult in it. Do you know what a difference there is between the absent one and the present one—between the distant image against whom our doubts, our fears, our suspicions, raise up hosts of imaginary giants, barriers of visionary walls, and the beloved face before the sight of which the hosts are fled, the walls are vanished? Isaura, we meet again. You know now from my own lips that I love you. I think your lips will not deny that you love me. You say that you are affianced to another. Tell the man frankly, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... kingdom which he had seized, on the plea of revolutionary necessity and the welfare of England, for he also was able and wise. But what was the fruit of Cromwell's well-intended usurpation?—a hideous reaction, the return of the Stuarts, the dissipation of his visionary dreams. And if the states which Frederic seized, and the empire he had founded in blood and carnage had been as well prepared for liberty as England was, the consequences of his ambition might ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord |
