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More "Idealist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an undulatory theory of light. It is different with us, you know, who have emerged from the land of darkness by the regular classical and literary highway. We feed upon Rabelais and Burton; he flits carelessly from flower to flower of the theory of Quantics. If he were an idealist painter, like Rossetti, he would paint great allegorical pictures for us, representing an asymptotic curve appearing to him in a dream, and introducing that blushing maiden, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... had set no limits on his patriotism. The cause of the Allies was the cause of humanity, the cause of humanity was the cause of Christ. He would have had the marching hymn of the Americans "Onward, Christian Soldiers." His Master was not a shrinking idealist, but a prophet unafraid. "Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Woe unto thee, Bethsaida! . . . It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of Judgment than for you. And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto Heaven, shall be brought down ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... was the woman with whom, at the age of twenty, I fancied myself in love. She wanted to get a husband, and she thought me—rightly—ass enough to accept the post. I was very young then even for my years,—a student, an idealist, with an imagination highly developed, and no knowledge whatever of the world as it actually is. Anyhow, before I had known her a month, I had determined to make her my wife. My parents were abroad at the ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... fixed principle that art implied selection. He was neither idealist nor realist, in the exclusive and opposing sense in which we understand these terms; he recommended a scrupulous observance of nature, and that every writer should draw as close to it as possible, but only in order to interpret it, to reveal it with a true feeling, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... time of firm friendships and unforgotten hospitalities. And in my gratitude I must mention here Mrs. Gould, "the first lady of Sulaco," whom we may safely leave to the secret devotion of Dr. Monygham, and Charles Gould, the Idealist-creator of Material Interests whom we must leave to his Mine—from which there is no escape in ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... the wailings of babies and the clamour of futile little girls, who, after the manner of women, had no idea of political crisis, and the shrill objurgations of slattern mothers and the raucous cries of an idealist vendor of hyacinths, and, cocked hat on head and wooden sword in hand, he looked at his fawning army. Then came the touch of genius that was often to characterize his actions in after years. It was mimetic, as he had read of such a thing ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... that he was the idealist historian of the poet, and that the adventures which he related of him were not to be taken in the literal ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... but the grave remonstrances and solemn exhortations of Maltravers reconciled her at last, and she promised to work hard and pay every attention to her lessons. I am not sure, however, that it was the tedium of the work that deterred the idealist—perhaps he felt its danger—and at the bottom of his sparkling dreams and brilliant follies lay a sound, generous, and noble heart. He was fond of pleasure, and had been already the darling of ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and fashions have been put away and taken out a thousand times. Most people have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions, but such people, least of all, are fitted to find in them that pleasure of the rococo which consoles the idealist when the old moods ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... fortnight he lived a dream—and that dream was Paradise. He forgot the past, ignored the future, and lived solely for the moment—with the joy of Nature's own child. It was the pure love of the idealist and ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... his sentiment had failed to impress her. His pride kept him from appealing to her strangely practical nature, although he had recognized and accepted it, and had even begun to believe it an essential part of the strong fascination she had over him. But being neither a coward nor a weak, hesitating idealist, when he deliberately took his seat beside her he as deliberately made up his mind to accept his fate, whatever it ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... first. In this case, the job of defeating the enemy.... But what does that have to do with us? Nothing, eh? You're right. Sometimes I like to talk, and I suppose that's one of my privileges. I'm not the idealist I used to be, I guess. I remember when I was your age. I saw things differently than I do now. What used to seem important no longer does. Each stage of development has its unique biological imperatives: a child, a youth, a mature man, look out on the world from a body held in focus to different ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... freedom, if at the same time one gains the conviction that millions of God's creatures have been created as a mockery, that they will never be capable of using their freedom, that these poor rebels can never turn into giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese that the great idealist dreamt his dream of harmony. Seeing all that he turned back and joined—the clever people. Surely ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... pretend to strength, too? He-he-he! You surprised me just now, Rodion Romanovitch, though I knew beforehand it would be so. You preach to me about vice and aesthetics! You—a Schiller, you—an idealist! Of course that's all as it should be and it would be surprising if it were not so, yet it is strange in reality.... Ah, what a pity I have no time, for you're a most interesting type! And, by-the-way, are you fond of Schiller? I am awfully fond ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... remembered, lest I appear to be taking a too eager interest in the girl, that up till now the world of woman had been terra incognita to me; that I had lived a singularly cloistered life, and that first and last I was an idealist. This girl had distinction, mystery and charm, and it is not to be wondered at that I found a joy in her presence. I proved myself a perfect artesian well of conversation, talking freely of the ship, of our fellow-passengers ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... done for. Between the drunkenness of the peasant incapable of action and the dream-intoxication of the idealist incapable of perceiving the reason of things, and the true character of men. It was a sort of terrible childishness. But children had their masters. "Ah! the stick, the stick, the stern hand," thought Razumov, longing for power to ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy. The Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil. A leader, a politician, an orator, a "boss," an intriguer, an idealist,—all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in number. The combination of a certain adroitness with deep-seated earnestness, of tact with consummate ability, gave him his preeminence, and helps him maintain it. The type, of course, ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... yet endlessly deep the reply: 'Art thou a bishop?' Both alike false to their callings—as father of men and shepherd of souls. Yet the one cold, self-seeking sceptic, the other ignorant, passionate, fanatic idealist. 'Why hast thou destroyed the town and my folk?' 'Priest, I have not destroyed one little maid of thine. Thou hast again thy town, and I can repay thee a hundredfold.' The bishop demands with much curiosity how this miserable captive can possibly repay him. 'I know we must die, and die terribly, ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... the ardent pursuit of knowledge soon experience the necessity of indulging in assumptions concerning force and matter, the hypothetical ether and molecules, atoms and vortices, which are as purely metaphysical as any assumptions concerning the soul. The distinction between the realist and the idealist is a matter of temperament. All that separated Huxley from Gladstone was a word; each argued from the unknowable, but disputed over the name and attributes of the inconceivable. Huxley said he did not know, which was equivalent to the dogmatic assertion that he did; Gladstone ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... Materialism and Idealism as they have always actually manifested themselves, but only of the distinguishing principle of these systems when pushed to its extreme result. It is quite possible to be a materialist or an idealist with respect to the immediate phenomena of consciousness, without attempting a philosophy of the Unconditioned at all. But it is also possible, and in itself natural, when such a philosophy is attempted, ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... much English as—European, cosmopolitan. I mean, of course, Edgar Allan Poe, who has left perhaps a deeper impress upon literature outside the English-speaking countries than any other imaginative writer of the century, with the exception of Byron. Poe was a born idealist, a creature of pure intelligence. Whether in poetry or fiction, he was always solving problems; and it is hard to be distinctively national in an exercise of pure intelligence. We do not look for local colour in, for example, the agreeable essays ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... study of Daven Judd, who although he is described as "lover, idealist and sometime fugitive from justice," comes at last to strange and beautiful happiness, it is difficult to believe that an author could have evolved such a book out of his own inventive faculties. One feels rather that Mr. Edwards has dared to reveal the emotions of creatures who ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... chance now for some mind of deep integrity, of real spirituality, to do something for this chaotic, vulgar mass of humanity that is grabbing, feeding, trying to foment war with Mexico. I am sure of it. Why this contempt of his for the idealist, the reformer? He classes all sorts of grotesque, half-insane people with the high-minded thinkers of the East. And now that he is in Congress, and will have to face some of them, Adams for example, I expect ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... law of the order; and that the attributes inhere in this external cause or substratum, viz. matter. But at last it was seen that the existence of matter could not be proved by extrinsic evidence; consequently, now the answer to the idealist argument simply is, that the belief in an external cause of sensations is universal, and as intuitive as our knowledge of sensations themselves. Even Kant allows this (notwithstanding his belief in the existence of a universe of things in themselves, i.e. Nouemena, as contrasted with the ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... himself. There is not a collection of stories in French of greater nobility than these Histoires Souveraines in which a regal pomp of speech drapes a more than regal sovereignty of soul. The Villiers who mocked mean things and attacked base things is no longer there; the idealist is at home in his own ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... perfume of their own which never deceives. One look had sufficed for Francis to go down into the depths of this heart; he was too kind to submit Clara to useless tests, too much an idealist to prudently confine himself to custom or arbitrary decorum; as when he founded the Order of Friars, he took counsel only of himself and God. In this was his strength; if he had hesitated, or even ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... It is the utterance of that bitter and heartrending period of youth which comes before we realise the one grand and logical basis of all optimism—the doctrine of original sin. The boy at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regards all his faults as frightful secret malformations, and it is only later that he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benignant explanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. That ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... and idealism. These also are sides of human nature, which, when unconnected, bring forth disastrous results. Their opposition is as old as the beginning of culture, and till its end can hardly be set aside, save in the individual. The idealist is a nobler but a far less perfect being; the realist appears far less noble, but is more perfect, for the noble lies in the proof of a great capacity, but the perfect in the general attitude of the whole and in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... to be feared that intimate acquaintance with Lady Calmady's present attitude of mind would not have proved altogether satisfactory to that ardent idealist Honoria St. Quentin. For, unquestionably, as the busy weeks of the London season went forward, Katherine grew increasingly far from "hating it all." At first she had found the varied interests and persons presented to her, the rapid interchange of thought, the constant movement of society, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Concert. This was of itself sufficient to turn Lancelot's head away from all but thoughts of Fame, even if Mary Ann had not been luckless enough to be again discovered cleaning the steps—and without gloves. Against such a spectacle the veriest idealist is powerless. If Mary Ann did not immediately revert to the category of quadrupeds in which she had started, it was only because of Lancelot's supplementary knowledge of the creature. But as he passed ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... irrefragable argument for the existence of God is that which is supplied by the idealistic line of thought, I should be sorry to have to admit that a man {20} cannot be a Theist, or that he cannot be a Theist on reasonable grounds, without first being an Idealist. From my own point of view most of the other reasons for believing in the existence of God resolve themselves into idealistic arguments imperfectly thought out. But they may be very good arguments, as far as they go, even when they are not thought out to what seem ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... saint nor hero, except in Mary's fancy sketch of the Coming Man. He remonstrates against canonization strenuously—dissent that passes with the idealist for modesty, and enhances her admiration. She is oftener to blame for the disillusion than he. With the perverseness of feminine nature she construes strength into coarseness of fibre, slowness into brutal indifference. Until women get at the truth in this matter ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... woman. I've been in Bohemia too long. I like cheery friends, even if their names are not in Debrett, and I must have some one to care for me, or to pretend to care for me. You know I've cared for you—only you in a certain way—but I'm not heroic enough to be content with a shadowy love. I'm not an idealist. Imagination doesn't content me in the least. I'd rather have an inferior substance than ideal perfection. You see, I'm a very commonplace person at heart, Lawrence—almost vulgar. But these are my last words to you, ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Alexander I dominates this epoch. His character exhibits a very curious mixture of autocratic ambition and a mystical vein of sheer undiluted idealism. Probably it would be true to say that he began by being an idealist, and was forced by the pressure of events to adopt reactionary tactics. Perhaps also, deeply embedded in the Russian nature we generally find a certain unpracticalness and a tendency to mystical dreams, far remote from the ordinary ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... wondered, why I've not yet been put into a madhouse—why I'm still wearing this coat instead of a strait-waistcoat? I still have faith in justice, in goodness. I am a fool, an idealist, and nowadays that's insanity, isn't it? And how do they repay me for my honesty? They almost throw stones at me and ride rough-shod over me. And even my nearest kith and kin do nothing but try to get the better of me. It's high time the devil fetched an old fool ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Melema, D'Artagnan, Pere Grandet, Rosalind, Tartufe, Hamlet, Ulysses—embody truths of human life that have been arrived at only after thorough observation of facts and patient induction from them. Cervantes must have observed a multitude of dreamers before he learned the truth of the idealist's character which he has expressed in Don Quixote. The great people of fiction are typical of large classes of mankind. They live more truly than do you and I, because they are made of us and of many men besides. They have the large reality of general ideas, which is a truer thing than the actuality ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... 'A very idealist, just so,' returned Harry. 'Well, the way I've been a martyr to that man's caprice is perfectly heart-rending. He came of some gorgeous family in the middle of Pennsylvania, where all the tribes, like leaning towers, incline toward Germany. To be sure, you'd never ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the fact, for idealism is the most significant quality of humanity. The term will be better understood if we place it beside "materialism," which expresses an opposite view of life. The difference may be summarized in the statement that the idealist is a man of spirit, or idea, in that he trusts the evidence of the soul; while the materialist is a man of flesh, or sense, in that he believes only what is evident to the senses. One judges the world by himself; the other ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... one of 'em. They may be the best fellows going, honorable, high-minded, generous—why expect them to be martyrs more than other Englishmen? Isn't life hard enough without inventing a new hardship? I declare there's no narrower creature in the world than your idealist; he sets up a moral standard which suits his own line of business, and rails at men of the world for not conforming to it. God's witnesses, indeed! I say nothing of those who are rather the Devil's witnesses, but think of the host of Jews like myself who, whether ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... yes. But he's wrong. He's inclined to fall for a million silly enthusiasms. If it wasn't that he's absorbed in realism and therefore has to adopt the garments of the cynic he'd be—he'd be credulous as a college religious leader. He's an idealist. Oh, yes. He thinks he's not, because he's rejected Christianity. Remember him in college? just swallow every writer whole, one after another, ideas, technic, and characters, Chesterton, Shaw, Wells, each one as easily as ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... proved him to be not merely an idealist in politics, but a practical man, Mr. Crewe took his leave. And he was too much occupied with his own thoughts to pay any attention to the click of the key as it turned in the lock, or to hear United States Senator Whitredge ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... A young idealist, aetat four, was selling stars to put in the sky. She had cut them with her own scissors out of red tissue paper, so that she was able ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... If the poet were truly an idealist,—if he found for the world conceptions as pure as those of mathematics, which can be applied equally well to any situation, then, indeed, he might regard himself as the author of progress. But it is the poet's failing that he gives men ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... the original: but the substance of them, seen through Mdme. Dacier's version, acted powerfully on the poet's sympathetic intellect. In fact, although at the time he had adopted the conclusions of materialism, he was at heart all through his life an idealist. Therefore the mixture of the poet and the sage in Plato fascinated him. The doctrine of anamnesis, which offers so strange a vista to speculative reverie, by its suggestion of an earlier existence in ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... at war— refused to remember. And so we cried "Lusitania!" against thousands of men who had no choice in the matter at all. Remedy? There's only one. Somehow we must get men to believe that Christ wasn't a mad idealist when He preached His Sermon on the Mount; that what He showed for the world's salvation then was not a sign only, but the very Instrument itself. We've got to make men see that there's something in human ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... and indolence and shake him into a Great Emotion. He had looked for her at all times and places, though without any troublesome optimism or personal energy, and had almost come to believe that she was to him what the end of the rainbow is to the idealist. In marrying Alice he had followed the path of least resistance. She was young, pretty and charming, and had been very much in love with him. Also it pleased his mother, and she had been worth pleasing. He gave his wife all ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... brains without beauty, with all the diverted passion of her nature), Aimee von Erkel, who was persistent, incisive, and so alarmed at the prospect of all the men in the world being killed, that she would have hastened peace on any terms; Princess Starnwoerth, a Socialist and idealist, a brilliant and persuasive speaker, to whom war was the ultimate horror; Johanna Stueck, whose revolt had been deep and bitter long before the war and who was one of Gisela's fervent disciples and aides—these and six others were sent on one pretense or another into the various States of Germany—the ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... on the other hand, he is a keen observer and an apt student. Although an idealist by nature, many of the race have proved themselves good business men. But under the reservation system they have developed traits that are absolutely opposed to the racial type. They become time-serving, beggarly, and apathetic. Some of their finest characters, such as Chief Joseph, have ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... surrounded her name with so much misrepresentation and slander, it would seem almost a miracle that, in spite of this web of calumny, the truth breaks through and a better appreciation of this much maligned idealist begins to manifest itself. There is but little consolation in the fact that almost every representative of a new idea has had to struggle and suffer under similar difficulties. Is it of any avail that a former president of a republic pays homage at Osawatomie to the memory ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... overwhelmed in the diplomat, the intriguer. The year is 1806. The monstrous apparition of Napoleon has loomed an omen of the doom of ancient authority and the shattering of nations in Europe. That faithless, incalculable idealist Alexander, plans he knows not what of imperial glory in the Eastern and Western world. Rezanov is his servant, a man of ambition, perhaps in all favor at court, desirous of doing some great service for his master. He dreams of dominion in this ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... of this difference before us. The idealist, his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill up the interval with detail of the conventional order, briefly touched, soberly suppressed in tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with a fine intemperance, ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I admire his administrative capacity; it is wonderful. But I don't believe for a moment that it was his mind that projected this big scheme. That must have been the work of an idealist, perhaps of a dozen of them, all adding and helping. I think he almost said as much to me one night. His business is to keep the machinery in working order, and he does it ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... Philosophy and, by his character, ability, and enthusiasm on social questions, exercised a powerful influence. His chief works are an Introduction to Hume's Treatise on Human Nature (Clarendon Press ed.), in which he criticised H.'s philosophy severely from the idealist standpoint, and Prolegomena to ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... needn't mind me," said Beatrice calmly. "If this is true, I wash my hands of Eleanor Watson." She turned to Frances, and her face softened. "You dear old idealist," she said, pulling Frances down on the seat beside her. "Can't you see that appealing to Eleanor Watson wouldn't do at all? Can't you see that if she is mean enough to plagiarize 'The Quiver's' story, she is probably ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... reflection that differs only in extent and persistence from the reflection that guides and justifies his life. He may not consciously identify himself with any one of the three general groups which have been characterized. But if he is neither an idealist, nor a philistine, nor a pleasure lover, surely he is compounded of such elements, and does not escape their implications. He desires something most of all, even though his highest ideal be only an inference from the gradation of his immediate purposes. This highest ideal represents ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... a special interest for the Marxian student, as they exhibit the grafting of a materialist philosophy upon the idealist philosophy of Hegel, and show the employment of the Hegelian dialectic in the investigation of political ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... of the course was primarily historical, though certain essays have been added of a more idealist type. It is hoped that the point of view suggested, though prompted by current events, may be found to have some permanent value. It could obviously be applied to many other aspects of European life, e.g. morality and politics, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... exalts the power of ideas, he is no idealist, but practical to the last degree; for he denies the worth of any art, science, event or institution which does not directly or indirectly contribute to the elevation of the individual man or woman, the common average ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... indeed, was a grand, solitary, shining figure, "the first idealist in history," and a poetic thinker in whom the religion of Egypt attained its highest reach. Dr. Breasted puts his lyrics alongside the poems of Wordsworth and the great passage of Ruskin in Modern Painters, as celebrating the divinity of Light (Religion and Thought ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... old, ungracefully waiting for dead men's shoes. The infinite capacity for taking pains which Senators have is not genius. If the gods have been good to you, as they were to Henry Cabot Lodge, you enter the upper house young, a scholar and idealist, with the hope of the Presidency as the reward of generous service. Where the race is to the slow you lay aside your winged gifts one by one and your ambition centers finally not on the Presidency but on some committee chairmanship clung ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... time at night, and then open the blind to look out. The moon would be full upon the lake, and the calm breath, pure light, and the deep voice harmonized well with the thought of the Flemish hero. When will this country have such a man? It is what she needs; no thin Idealist, no coarse Realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens, while his feet step firmly on the ground, and his hands are strong and dexterous for the use of human implements. A man religious, virtuous, and—sagacious; a man ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... every other idealist movement, contains a sprinkling of unpopular pessimistic souls, who drive home, in season and out of season, a few unpopular truths. One of these unwelcome truths is to the effect that the world is not following after the idealists half as ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... to make a world; and it is not in the least necessary that everybody should have that love of subtle and unobtrusive perfections in the matter of manners or literature which does often go with the type of the ethical idealist. It is not in the least desirable that everybody should be earnest. It is highly desirable that everybody should be honest, but that is a thing that can go quite easily with a coarse and cheerful character. But the ineffectualness of most protests ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... information which it would then seem obliged to carry. One of the many reductiones ad absurdum of pluralism by which idealism thinks it proves the absolute One is as follows: Let there be many facts; but since on idealist principles facts exist only by being known, the many facts will therefore mean many knowers. But that there are so many knowers is itself a fact, which in turn requires its knower, so the one absolute knower has eventually to be brought in. All facts lead to him. If it be ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... many legal statutes and social institutions, in the complex that is called sentiment, to which science looms as the sacrilegious ogre who devours romance. Without spending space upon the ravages of the sentimental idealist, certainly responsible for as much human disaster as the brutal realist, it is manifest that a revolution in sex standards and relations is inevitable as soon as the new doctrines filter down as matters of fact to the levels of the common intelligence. And surely, nothing else ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... instincts. Men and women without feeling or imagination are justly called brutes; yet Plato takes away these qualities and puts nothing in their place, not even the desire of a noble offspring, since parents are not to know their own children. The most important transaction of social life, he who is the idealist philosopher converts into the most brutal. For the pair are to have no relation to one another, except at the hymeneal festival; their children are not theirs, but the state's; nor is any tie of affection to unite them. Yet here the analogy ...
— The Republic • Plato
... "Impatient idealist! By what means? By law, or by force? Leave us to draw a cordon, sanitaire round the tainted States, and leave the system to die a natural death, as it rapidly will if it be prevented from enlarging its field. Don't fancy that a dream of mine. None know it better than the Southerners themselves. ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... own self-respect was his respect for others. An impenetrable idealist, he lived surrounded by a radiant humanity, by men become as Gods. With no conscious hyperbole did he address one as 'Angel.' Intellect and goodness were his pole-stars. And what airy courage in his mundane affairs, what invincible ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... idealist movement in its beginnings a predominantly ethical tone. It was really started in the interest of moral ideals as well as of intellectual thoroughness; and its contribution of greatest value to English thought was a work on ethics. The 'Prolegomena ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... promised a culmination which has been guessed at and yearned for since the beginning of time. It is within, and still without, the scope of metaphysics. Those of you who have attended my lectures have heard me call myself the material idealist. I am a mystic sensationalist. I believe that we can derive nothing from pure contemplation. There is mystery and wonder in the veil of the occult. The earth, our life, is merely a vestibule of the universe. ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... so skilfully does he bring in minor characters, with their transient sidelights, that the total impression is that of a book in which much happens. No realist could exceed the fidelity with which Signor Fogazzaro outlines a landscape, or fixes a passing scene; yet being an idealist through and through, he has produced a masterpiece in which the ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... Nathaniel Hawthorne, who took up his residence there first at the "Old Manse," and afterward at "The Wayside." Though naturally an idealist, he said that he came too late to Concord to fall decidedly under Emerson's influence. Of that he would have stood in little danger even had he come earlier. He appreciated the deep and subtle quality of Emerson's imagination, but his own shy genius always jealously guarded its independence and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... le pot au lait [Fr.]; dream of Alnashar &c (hope) 858 [Obs.]. illusion &c (error) 495; phantom &c (fallacy of vision) 443; Fata Morgana &c (ignis fatuus) 423 [Lat.]; vapor &c (cloud) 353; stretch of the imagination &c (exaggeration) 549; mythogenesis^. idealist, romanticist, visionary; mopus^; romancer, dreamer; somnambulist; rhapsodist &c (fanatic) 504; castle-buildier, fanciful projector. V. imagine, fancy, conceive; idealize, realize; dream, dream of, dream up; give to airy nothing ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... My father was an idealist of 1851; he showed the enthusiasm and nursed in his bosom the hopes and beliefs of the promoters of the International Exhibition of that year. There was a plentiful planting of foreign stock in England ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... night, undermined his health. He fell sick, and was compelled to give up his hap-hazard calling, to the great gain of Hebrew poetry. He went into the brokerage business, and his small leisure he devoted to his muse. Harassed by petty, sordid cares, this broker was yet a genuine idealist, though it cannot be maintained that Lebensohn was of the stuff of which dreamers are made and great poets. But in his mind, rationalistic and logical to the point of dryness, there was a secluded recess pervaded with melancholy and real feeling. The Hebrew language ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... his which changed even cowards to brave men, "see those three hundred thousand men—all innocent. And yet to-morrow thirty thousand of them will be lying dead, dead for their country! Among those Prussians there is, perhaps, some great mathematician, a man of genius, an idealist, who will be mown down. On our side we shall assuredly lose many a great man never known to fame. Perhaps even I shall see my best friend die. Shall I blame God? No. I shall bear it silently. Learn from this, mademoiselle, that a man must die for the laws of his country ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... injured the prospects of her boy by the way—the romantic, idealist way—in which she had brought him up. Her Harry!—with whom she had read poetry, and talked of heroes, into whose ears she had poured Ruskin and Carlyle from his youth up; who was the friend and comrade of all the country folk, because of a certain irrepressible interest in his kind, a certain ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... course, but then he was an idealist!" Barry spoke rather impatiently. "No, Jim, there's not much hope of that. I've made a study of the girl—I don't mind telling you I did my best to prevent Rose marrying her—and I'm perfectly certain ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... keep his roots deep in the past, and he tempers all his creative insights with a judicious mixture of the experience of the past and the ideas which time has made sacred. He will not satisfy the idealist who wants leaps, and he will not please the radical in any period; but if he is brave, wise, and sincere, and, withal, possessed of rare gifts of interpretation and unusual powers of leadership, he may be able to shape the course of history no less effectively, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... had foregathered with the angels of the earth. But Fate had hurled him headlong down to the tropics, where flamed in his bosom a fire that was seldom quenched. In Coralio they called him a beachcomber; but he was, in reality, a categorical idealist who strove to anamorphosize the dull verities of life by the means of brandy and rum. As Beelzebub, himself, might have held in his clutch with unwitting tenacity his harp or crown during his tremendous fall, so his namesake had clung to his ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... the realist and not the idealist who is generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and that the struggle with darkness is as yet mostly an ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... desirable to observe that, in modern times, the term "Realism" has acquired a signification wholly different from that which attached to it in the middle ages. We commonly use it as the contrary of Idealism. The Idealist holds that the phenomenal world has only a subjective existence, the Realist that it has an objective existence. I am not aware that any mediaeval philosopher was an Idealist in the sense in which we apply the term ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... see in the last lines that Mr. Squire has escaped finally from the idealist's disgust to the idealist's exaltation. He has learned to express the beautiful mystery of life and he is no longer haunted in his nerves by the ugliness of circumstances. Not that he has shut himself up in an enchanted world: he still ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... between wealth and love. Jerry, the idealist who is poor, loves Mimi, a beautiful, spoiled ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the walls thoughtfully, "make the best men obtainable, once they're tamed. Nothing beats an idealist who can face facts. And the intelligent ones usually grow up. Captain, I've studied your strategy against Throm on that last drive after Dayole was killed. Brilliant! I need a good man, and I can pay for one. If you give me a chance, I can also show you why you should ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... with realism. The photograph is an utter misrepresentation of life, and this not merely because of its false shades and its lack of colour, but because the photographer is not content with literalness. He aspires to art. So far from being a realist, he is the greatest idealist of all. He not only puts you into poses you would never fall into naturally, he not only arranges you so as to hide your characteristic uglinesses, and bids you call up an expression you never use, but he touches up and tones down after you are gone, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... without cavil into the front rank of modern writers; Tolstoy the idealist has been constantly derided and scorned by men of like birth and education with himself—his altruism denounced as impracticable, his preaching compared with his mode of life to prove him inconsistent, if not insincere. ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Among us the Idealist objects to the Materialists that the latter cannot agree upon fundamental points; that they cannot define what is an atom; that they cannot account for the transformation of physical action and molecular motion into consciousness; and vice versa, that they cannot say what ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... an idealist in its broad sense. The idea of a juster and more rational social state pleased him. He felt himself honored, and was very grateful for the appreciation of the men and women by whom he was surrounded in the literary circle of the Transcendental Club, but he never surrendered ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... one of the chief writers of the modern epoch. "He is really an idealist," writes Verissimo, "but an idealist who has drunk deeply of the strong, dangerous milk of French naturalism." He sees nature through his soul rather than his eyes, and has been much influenced by the mystics ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... paradox is that the men who have done the most for North America did not intend to do so. They set out on the far quest of a crack-brained idealist's dream. They pulled up at a foreshortened purpose; but the unaccomplished aim did more for humanity ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... to hurt Clara. He had never in his life felt that he was of the slightest importance to any one. Clara felt that sense stirring in him and she fed it; let him into the story of their struggles and the efforts she had made to bring her idealist to London, and urged upon him the vital ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... contemporary the Journal of the explanation given by the ancient Athenian who voted against Aristides: he was tired of hearing him called "the Just." It is an entirely human sentiment, one of the few that justify the term "human race." It swept away Woodrow the Idealist, and all the other issues that the parties set up. If it were not for the saturation point, the race would be in danger of ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... to 'Dramatis Personae' represented his own creed; though this was often accentuated in the sense of a more personal privilege, and a perhaps less poetic mystery, than the poem conveys. The Evangelical Christian and the subjective idealist philosopher were curiously ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... in Illinois than Lincoln could lose without losing his election. But beyond that point, a little farther away in time, much deeper down amid enduring results, Lincoln's judgment was ultimately seen to rest upon fundamental wisdom, politically as well as morally. For Lincoln was no idealist, sacrificing realities to abstractions; on the contrary, the right which he saw was always a practical right, a right which could be compassed. In this instance, the story goes that he retorted upon some of those who grumbled about ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... those of Bonar Law, a serious, honest, well-balanced man, an idealist with the appearance of a practical person, revealed nothing. On the eve of the dissolution of Parliament, Lloyd George, speaking at Wolverhampton, November 24, 1918, did not even hint at the question of the reparations or indemnity. He was impelled along that track by the movement coming ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... eulogize himself. He was absorbed in generous admiration for the other man and with enthusiasm for the glorious chance that Rockefeller seemed to have to make a new Magna Charta of brotherhood between Capital and Labour. In this he was a tremendous idealist. In many respects one was forced to regret that the world somehow did not seem quite so full of brotherly intention as Mr. King ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... of the vitalized teacher. She is a practical idealist. In the words of the poet, her reach is beyond her grasp, and this proclaims her an idealist. In her capacity as a politician she makes a close study of the wants of her constituents, both pupils and parents, and so learns how best to articulate school work with the interests of the community. ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... madly and I believe truly in love with her. In his way he is great; in his way, too, he is a potentate. He can give her more than luxury, more, even, than success. You know Elizabeth," he went on. "She is one of the finest women who ever breathed, an idealist but a seeker after big things. She deserves the big things. Is she more likely to find them with me ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his pupils—most of them Americans who come to Paris to study with him. Yet with the reputation he has attained, due to you entirely"—she waved away an interruption—"he refuses to write songs or piano music that will sell. He is an incorrigible idealist and I confess I am discouraged. What can be our future?" She drew the deep breath of one in peril; this plain talk devoid of all ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... State"; he might have recalled and reawakened the enthusiasm of fifty years ago; he might have reminded the people that there were still in Holland and in Switzerland, in Austria and in Russia, Germans who were separated from their country, and languishing under a foreign rule. Had he been an idealist he would have done so, and raised in Germany a cry like that of the Italian Irredentists. Or he might have claimed for his country its natural boundaries; after freeing the upper waters of the Rhine from foreign dominion he might have claimed that the great river should flow to the sea, German. ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... themselves out. It was better so—better to live his own life than the one into which he was being ground by the inexorable facts of his environment. He was a young man and ambitious, but his hopes were not selfish. At bottom he was an idealist, though a practical one. He had had to shut his eyes to many things which he deplored, had been driven to compromises which he despised. Essentially clean-handed, the soul of him had begun to wither ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... better, therefore, to treat the subject in a philosophic way. The question which the Editors of the Idler ask is, after all, a question as to the relative advantages of Idealism and Realism—spelled with the largest kind of capital letters. The small boy is ordinarily an Idealist, unless, of course, he belongs to the unhappy class of small boys who have to earn their own living when they ought to be at play, and who, having no time for dreaming, become Realists of the most hardened ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... hopes nor aims beyond the body, are very slow to realise the fact of their dissolution, and remain, therefore, chained to the earth by earthly affections and interests, haunting the places or persons they have most affected. But the young artist was not of this order. Idealist and genius, he was already highly spiritualised and vitalised even upon earth, and when death rent the bond between him and his body, he passed at once from the atmosphere of carnal things into a loftier sphere. But at the moment of his death, the phantom father was watching beside ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... desire to reform, but the perfectly practical resolve to enjoy the political rights to which he had a claim was his leading motive. It is important to understand this because it will explain much of his action as a statesman. Roosevelt is the greatest idealist in American public life since Lincoln; but his idealism, like Lincoln's, always had a firm, intelligent, practical footing. Roosevelt himself thus describes his work during his first year in the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... Home?... We feel its meaning. But, Dare, we'll have no home—no place.... We are old—we are through—we have served—we are done.... What we dreamed of as glory will be cold ashes to our lips, bitter as gall.... You always were a dreamer, an idealist, a believer in God, truth, hope and womanhood. In spite of the war these somehow survive in you.... But Dare, old friend, steel yourself now ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... and rioting the transformed idealist passed through many stages of the journey down a certain dark and mephitic valley not of amelioration. With the bitter industrial conflict to feed it, a slow fire within him ate its way into all ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... enthusiastic student but a man of talent and feeling who has found his true course. In what concerns the revelation he has had from science, he is reserved and circumspect. Happily, man that is borne of woman, however great, if a simpleton and an idealist, almost always is the prey of the sex in one form or another. When they escape feminine influence, they are impregnable, and ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... "Not at all. We've already agreed that I could make as much as I want by selling it to you. No; it's just that I'm an idealist of sorts. I intend to manufacture the Converter myself, in order to make sure it gets into the hands ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... have made a wiser choice; for it was Talleyrand who made the Concordat with the Pope, the Treaty of Luneville, and the Peace of Amiens. Napoleon wanted a practical man in the diplomatic post,—neither a pedant nor an idealist; and that was just what Talleyrand was,—a man to meet emergencies, a man to build up a throne. But even Napoleon got tired of him at last, and Talleyrand retired with the dignity of vice-grand elector of the empire, grand chamberlain, and Prince ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... conquered by the Quaker crusader, it all was still as of another life. True it was, that when his safe return to Cairo was announced she had cried with joy and relief; but there was nothing emotional or passionate in her feeling; it was the love of the lower for the higher, the hero-worship of an idealist in passionate gratitude. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... doubtless aware that philosophers have still further extended the idea of illusion by seeking to bring under it beliefs which the common sense of mankind has always adopted and never begun to suspect. Thus, according to the idealist, the popular notion (the existence of which Berkeley, however, denied) of an external world, existing in itself and in no wise dependent on our perceptions of it, resolves itself into ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... accommodating of husbands. Knows all about Kyril and would gladly shut both eyes if they let him. Melita might, if pressed very hard, for adultery has no terrors for her, but Kyril affects the idealist. Sure sign that he really loves her. If he was mine, I would be afraid of this Kyril. No doubt he is jealous as ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... presents to us again one of those ragged ones, one of 'the poor in spirit,' the idealist Punin, a character whose portrait challenges Dostoievsky's skill on the latter's own ground. That delicious Punin! and that terrible grandmother's scene with Baburin! How absolutely Slav is the blending of irony and kindness in the treatment of Punin, Cucumber, and Pyetushkov, few English ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... find that the man who was thus the first philosopher, the first observer who took a metaphysical, non-temporal, analytical view of the world, and so became the predecessor of all those votaries of 'other-world' ways of thinking,—whether as academic idealist, or 'budge doctor of the Stoic fur,' or Christian ascetic or what not, whose ways are such a puzzle to the 'hard-headed practical man,'—was himself one of the shrewdest men of his day, so shrewd that by common consent he was placed foremost in antiquity among ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... then, is the work of a Hindu idealist who personified Bengal under the form of a purified and spiritualized Kali. Of its thirty-six lines, partly written in Sanskrit, partly in Bengali, the greater number are harmless enough. But if the poet sings the praise ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... adventures had been filling the newspapers of two hemispheres for three weeks past. She was not realistically like her portraits. She was a little, thin, pale, obviously nervous woman, of any age from thirty-five to fifty, with fair untidy hair, and pale grey-blue eyes that showed the dreamer, the idealist and the harsh fanatic. She looked as though a moderate breeze would have overthrown her, but she also looked, to the enlightened observer, as though she would recoil before no cruelty and no suffering in pursuit of her vision. The blind dreaming force behind her ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... when he illustrated the deed with the corresponding expression, as in the thrill of eagerness that perceptibly pervaded the whole figure of a thirsty man who stooped down to drink. But Giotto was no mere realist though he was a great realist; he was also in the highest light an idealist. His sense of harmony and beauty was true and noble; he rose above the real into 'the things unseen and eternal,' of which the real is but a rough manifestation. He was the first to paint a crucifixion robbed of the horrible triumph of physical power, and of the agony which is at ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... in Russia of what occurs when one side flings away its arms, practising the idealistic reasonings which this book propounds: the more brutal side conquers. While the Blonde Beast runs abroad spreading rabies, the only idealist who counts is the idealist who carries a rifle on his shoulder—the only gospel to which the world listens is the gospel which saviours are ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... its meaning. But, Dare, we'll have no home—no place.... We are old—we are through—we have served—we are done.... What we dreamed of as glory will be cold ashes to our lips, bitter as gall.... You always were a dreamer, an idealist, a believer in God, truth, hope and womanhood. In spite of the war these somehow survive in you.... But Dare, old friend, steel yourself now against disappointment ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... notion of stewardship about his property, but very few have it about their knowledge," said Bishop Phillips Brooks, and he added: "One grows tired of seeing cultivated people with all their culture cursed by selfishness." To the true idealist—as distinct from the mere emotionalist with aesthetic tastes—selfishness is an impossible prison. The only spiritual freedom lies in the perpetual sharing of the fuller life. The gift shared is the gift doubled. Art is the spiritual glory of life; the supreme manifestation, the very ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... now the matter of this difference before us. The idealist, his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill up the interval with detail of the conventional order, briefly touched, soberly suppressed in tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with a fine intemperance, ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this idealist neglects his outward appearance," her good-natured glance, half-apologetic, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... war of Independence, and their worthy successors in the war of Freedom; lawyers and statesmen like Samuel Hoar and his descendants; ministers like Peter Bulkeley, Daniel Bliss, and William Emerson; and men of genius such as the idealist and poet whose inspiration has kindled so many souls; as the romancer who has given an atmosphere to the hard outlines of our stern New England; as that unique individual, half college-graduate and half Algonquin, the Robinson Crusoe of Walden Pond, who carried ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of a piskie's changeling. Already the first innocence of childhood was wearing away, and the deliberate cleanliness of mind achieved, if at all, in the malleable years between fifteen and twenty was as yet far ahead. Nevertheless, Parson Boase was not wrong in scenting the idealist in Ishmael, and he wondered how far the determined but excitable child, with the nervous strain of his race and all the little bluntnesses of a boy ungently reared, might prove the prey of circumstance; or whether, after all, he might not so build up resisting ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... composing of his. He neglects his pupils—most of them Americans who come to Paris to study with him. Yet with the reputation he has attained, due to you entirely"—she waved away an interruption—"he refuses to write songs or piano music that will sell. He is an incorrigible idealist and I confess I am discouraged. What can be our future?" She drew the deep breath of one in peril; this plain talk devoid of all sham ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... English people, and also all the monstrous abuses to which his system would inevitably lead, in his desire to see a practical establishment of the most obnoxious and high-toned claims of his church. He is evidently half way between an idealist and a sentimentalist, with hardly an atom of practical sagacity or knowledge of affairs. The cool dogmatism with which he condemns the great statesmen of his country, is particularly offensive as coming ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... aside too. "He's no doubt an idealist of some sort," says he, "a man with high hopes, ambitions. If I ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... than the average society has yet disclosed to its members." Nor were these ideas and principles betrayed by Stephens's successor, Terence V. Powderly, who became Grand Master in 1879 and served during the years when the order attained its greatest power. Powderly, also, was a conservative idealist. His career may be regarded as a good example of the rise of many an American labor leader. He had been a poor boy. At thirteen he began work as a switch-tender; at seventeen he was apprenticed as machinist; ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... of course, but then he was an idealist!" Barry spoke rather impatiently. "No, Jim, there's not much hope of that. I've made a study of the girl—I don't mind telling you I did my best to prevent Rose marrying her—and I'm perfectly certain that as far as anything beyond the merest ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... collar and tie. But Miller observed in the tanned face a tender, humorous mouth and eager, friendly eyes that looked out upon the world with a suggestion of inner mirth. In course of time he found out that his friend was an unconquerable idealist. ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... here to decry R. L. Stevenson. I only desire faithfully to try to understand him, and to indicate the class or group to which his genius and temperament really belong. He is from first to last the idealistic dreamy or mystical romancer, and not the true idealist or dealer direct with life or character for its own sake. The very beauty and sweetness of his spirit in one way militated against his dramatic success—he really did not believe in villains, and always made them better than they should have ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... An idealist defending his system by the fact, that when asleep we often believe ourselves awake, was well answered by his plain neighbour, 'Ah, but when awake do we ever believe ourselves asleep?'—Things identical must be convertible. The preceding passage ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... responsive and recognizant of human beings, my dear Beers, and it "sets me up immensely" to be treated by a practical man on practical grounds as you treat me. I inhabit such a realm of abstractions that I only get credit for what I do in that spectral empire; but you are not only a moral idealist and philanthropic enthusiast (and good fellow!), but a tip-top man of business in addition; and to have actually done anything that the like of you can regard as having helped him is an unwonted ground with me for self-gratulation. I think ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... at all. We've already agreed that I could make as much as I want by selling it to you. No; it's just that I'm an idealist of sorts. I intend to manufacture the Converter myself, in order to make sure it gets into ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... illustrated the deed with the corresponding expression, as in the thrill of eagerness that perceptibly pervaded the whole figure of a thirsty man who stooped down to drink. But Giotto was no mere realist though he was a great realist; he was also in the highest light an idealist. His sense of harmony and beauty was true and noble; he rose above the real into 'the things unseen and eternal,' of which the real is but a rough manifestation. He was the first to paint a crucifixion robbed of the horrible triumph of physical power, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... the shell of the chronic idealist that was, suddenly was disturbed in his ruminations by a sound at the door. Looking up, he saw Hope Georgia Langdon standing, shyly, embarrassed, in the ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... literature, its religious belief, and so forth. Solid, practical John Bull is a mutton, beef, and pudding eater. He drinks strong ale or beer, and thinks beer. He drives fat oxen, and is himself fat. He is no idealist in philosophy. He hates generalization and abstract thought. He is for the real and concrete. Plain, unadorned Protestantism is most to the taste of the middle classes of Great Britain. Music, sculpture, and painting add not their charms to the Englishman's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... in Debrett, and I must have some one to care for me, or to pretend to care for me. You know I've cared for you—only you in a certain way—but I'm not heroic enough to be content with a shadowy love. I'm not an idealist. Imagination doesn't content me in the least. I'd rather have an inferior substance than ideal perfection. You see, I'm a very commonplace person at heart, Lawrence—almost vulgar. But these are my last words to you, ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of Europe. But he had not the habit of screaming blasphemies which my Great Example failed to convince anybody that she had discovered in Huxley. In brief, he did not conform to the unscientific idea of what a scientific man must be like. He was a cultured idealist. I will try to recall a few of the marvellous things he said ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... thing: Alfred Grahame, when he founded, started, this colony, was a true idealist. But success has turned his head, worsened him, since,—as it has done with many a good man before. Now he goes about the country lecturing, on Shakespeare, God, the Devil, or anything else that he ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... the other side our idealist pessimists were represented by the old remnant of the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius and his friends had really given up the idea of any god in the universe and looked only to the god within. They had no hope of any virtue in nature, ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... meaning, just as the more thoughtful of the poets doubtless assisted the idealising tendency of fifth-century art. And it might well seem that, for example, Plato's theory of ideas supplies a more satisfactory basis for an idealist art than any other system, since it might be maintained that the true artist represents not the material object which he sees before him, but the ideal prototype of which it is but a faint and inadequate reflexion. This theory is peculiarly applicable to statues ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... of the most venerated men of history have been criminals; their lives and teachings have been in greater or lesser conflict with the doctrines, habits and beliefs of the communities where they lived. From the nature of things the wise man and the idealist can never be contented with existing things, and their lives are a constant battle for change. If the anti-social individual should be punished, what of many of the profiteers and captains of industry who manipulate business and property for purely selfish ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... busy man of affairs, but in him the poet and the scholar always predominates. He writes as the idealist, describing men not as they are but as he thinks they should be; he has no humor, and his mission is not to amuse but to reform. Like Chaucer he studies the classics and contemporary French and Italian writers; but instead ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... temple of white stone and set it on a hilltop to rule and watch over the land, builded better than they knew. To the simple and ardent idealist its white stateliness must always suggest something symbolic, and, after all, it is the ardent and simple idealist whose dreams and symbols paint to prosaic human minds the beautiful impossibilities whose unattainable loveliness so allures as to force even the unexalted world ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... saddest and wildest aspects of womanhood only deepened his conviction of the sanctity of the sex. Some called him old-fashioned or quixotic, because he was not altogether in sympathy with modern feministic movements; they called him an idealist, because he had preserved his belief in the sacred mission of women upon earth—his childlike faith in the purity of their souls. They were a humanizing influence, the guardian angels of mankind, the inspirers, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... He read widely and loved letters. He was a student of philosophy and religion, a thinker, and, best of all, a man of ideals—"the glory of youth," as he called them in his valedictory oration. But he was something still better and finer than a mere idealist; he was a man of action, eager to put his ideals into practice and bring them to the test of daily life. With his mind full of plans for raising the condition of workingmen while he made his own career, ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... man as he would have seen himself. There is not a collection of stories in French of greater nobility than these Histoires Souveraines in which a regal pomp of speech drapes a more than regal sovereignty of soul. The Villiers who mocked mean things and attacked base things is no longer there; the idealist is at home in his own world, among ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... many-sidedness. We ordinary mortals are incapable of such Protean versatility and are sure to find points, often many and important points, where we are strongly repelled by his teachings and his personality. The idealist is scandalized by his vigorous realism, the realist and materialist by his idealism, the dogmatist by his free thought, the free-thinker by his reverence towards religion, while the scientific expert ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... factory. He left me five or six years ago without rhyme or reason, and went over to the Ohio Glass Works, where he has made quite a name for himself. I had a tussle to get him back, but he comes to take charge next month. He is one of those rare men you read about, but seldom find, a practical idealist." ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... concealed in it the seed of illustrious deeds, but only too often disappointment and contempt lie scornfully in wait when the deed is accomplished. For the heaven we erect on earth always comes to naught, and the idealist is always vanquished in the strife ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... similar change took place in Hawthorne's consciousness; although his consciousness was so profound and his nature so reticent that what happened in the depths of it was never indicated by more than a few bubbles at the surface. He was emphatically an idealist, as every truly great artist must be, and Transcendentalism was the local costume which ideality wore in Hawthorne's time. He was a philosopher after a way of his own, and his reflections on life and manners ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... many customs, beliefs and habits, many legal statutes and social institutions, in the complex that is called sentiment, to which science looms as the sacrilegious ogre who devours romance. Without spending space upon the ravages of the sentimental idealist, certainly responsible for as much human disaster as the brutal realist, it is manifest that a revolution in sex standards and relations is inevitable as soon as the new doctrines filter down as matters of fact ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... and I am paying her high praise when I say it. You are not so narrow, Leroy, as to suppose for a moment that the only sort of passion a woman is capable of is that which she entertains for a man. How do I know what is going on in your wife's soul? But it is nothing which even an idealist of women, such as I ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... with whom, at the age of twenty, I fancied myself in love. She wanted to get a husband, and she thought me—rightly—ass enough to accept the post. I was very young then even for my years,—a student, an idealist, with an imagination highly developed, and no knowledge whatever of the world as it actually is. Anyhow, before I had known her a month, I had determined to make her my wife. My parents were abroad at the time, George and Lucy here, so that it ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... but scales of value change and emphases shift, within the calling itself, with our changing civilization. The mediaeval world brought forth, out of its need, the robed and mitered ecclesiastic; a more recent world, pursuant to its genius, demanded the ethical idealist. Drink-sodden Georgian England responded to the open-air evangelism of Whitefield and Wesley; the next century found the Established Church divided against itself by the learning and culture of the Oxford Movement. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... have been created as a mockery, that they will never be capable of using their freedom, that these poor rebels can never turn into giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese that the great idealist dreamt his dream of harmony. Seeing all that he turned back and joined—the clever people. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... them. One feels quite sure that he would never cease to believe that so long as society is imperfect it is the right and duty of individuals to experiment. The fact is, Morris was at once a practical craftsman and an idealist. In practical affairs and private prejudices he could be as truculent and wrong-headed as the rest of us; but he was always conscious of something much more important than practical affairs and private prejudices. He ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... the great political idealist of the Italian struggle for independence, was born at Genoa, June 22, 1805. His faith in democracy and his enthusiasm for a free Italy he inherited from his parents; and while still a student in the University of Genoa he gathered round him a circle of youths who ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... I've heard that m'self!" said Mrs. Beasley, the wife of the Grange storekeeper. She had heard no such thing, but Mrs. Beasley was an idealist of no mean order, and she at once got a feeling about the matter that was little short of knowledge, and went on with headlong impetus, "I've heard that m'self. Yes, ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... any transcendental idealist who reads this article ought to discern in the fragmentary utterances which I have quoted thus far, the note of what he considers the truer dialectic profundity. He ought to extend the glad hand of fellowship to Mr. Blood; and if he finds him afterwards palavering with ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... better so—better to live his own life than the one into which he was being ground by the inexorable facts of his environment. He was a young man and ambitious, but his hopes were not selfish. At bottom he was an idealist, though a practical one. He had had to shut his eyes to many things which he deplored, had been driven to compromises which he despised. Essentially clean-handed, the soul of him had begun to wither at the contact ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... clergymen's wives—was now absorbed by her own misfortune. Her very cap-strings seemed to hang limp with depression, as she followed Sarah dejectedly into the kitchen, and gave what attention she could to those second-best arrangements so depressing to the idealist temper. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Death uninjured by him or his, he would be a very welcome visitor at her house, and might consider himself for a season the master of everything it contained. Messer Griffo was in his way an amorist and in his way an idealist, to the extent of regarding one pretty woman as more important than another pretty woman, so he took Monna Vittoria's money and fooled Messer Simone, and spared the lives of the young Florentine gentlemen, and rode with them and fought with them, ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... doctrine of the Idealist metaphysicians, that objects are nothing but our sensations and the laws which connect them, has not been generally adopted by subsequent thinkers; the point of most real importance is one on which those metaphysicians are now ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... at. Only a man of a certain kind, with a certain sympathy and antipathy, could laugh as he laughs. The comic writer, however much of a scoffer and a skeptic, and however much he may deny it, is always an idealist. And it is for the revelation of themselves as much as for the revelation of the people whom they portray that we value the work of a Swift, a Voltaire, or ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... however, is a mere detail. The work that has to be done invariably gets done, and the ultimate profit of the discoveries and the inventions goes to the mass of those same people who have always decried the man of vision as an unpractical idealist. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... money, he had lost everything. 'Be thankful that you exist, that these morsels of food are still granted you. Man has a right to nothing in this world that he cannot pay for. Did you imagine that love was an exception? Foolish idealist! Love is one of the first things to be frightened away by poverty. Go and live upon your twelve-and-sixpence a week, and on your memories of ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... prose age, Crevecoeur lived a kind of pastoral poetry; in an age largely blind, he saw the beauties of nature, less through readings in the Nouvelle Heloise and Bernardin's Etudes than with his own keen eyes; he was a true idealist, besides, and as such kindles one's enthusiasm. The man's optimism, his grateful personality, his saneness, too—for here is a dreamer neither idle nor morbid—are qualities no less enduring, or endearing, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... explanation given by the ancient Athenian who voted against Aristides: he was tired of hearing him called "the Just." It is an entirely human sentiment, one of the few that justify the term "human race." It swept away Woodrow the Idealist, and all the other issues that the parties set up. If it were not for the saturation point, the race would be ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... previous evening, introducing himself as a pacifist who had been arrested and beaten up during the war. Somehow he did not conform to my idea of a pacifist, being a solid and rather stoutish fellow, with nothing of the idealist about him. But Carpenter took him, as he took ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... which changed even cowards to brave men, "see those three hundred thousand men—all innocent. And yet to-morrow thirty thousand of them will be lying dead, dead for their country! Among those Prussians there is, perhaps, some great mathematician, a man of genius, an idealist, who will be mown down. On our side we shall assuredly lose many a great man never known to fame. Perhaps even I shall see my best friend die. Shall I blame God? No. I shall bear it silently. Learn from this, mademoiselle, that a man must die for the laws of his ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... science, the modern mind has perhaps been influenced most by the great idealist movement in philosophy—the movement which in Germany began with Kant and culminated in Hegel. This idealism, just like physical science, gives a certain stamp to the mind; when it takes possession of intelligence it casts ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... said Beatrice calmly. "If this is true, I wash my hands of Eleanor Watson." She turned to Frances, and her face softened. "You dear old idealist," she said, pulling Frances down on the seat beside her. "Can't you see that appealing to Eleanor Watson wouldn't do at all? Can't you see that if she is mean enough to plagiarize 'The Quiver's' story, she is probably capable of lying out of it? And how should we know whether ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... between capital and labor showed plainly in the reception of the news. Capital berated Bonbright; labor was inclined to fulsomeness. Capital called him on the telephone to remonstrate and to state its opinion of him as a half-baked idiot of a young idealist who was upsetting business. Labor put on its hat and stormed the gates of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, seeking for five-dollar jobs. Not hundreds of them came, but thousands. The streets were blocked with applicants, every one eager for ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... Ibsen als Idealist. Vortraege ueber Henrik Ibsen's Dramen, geh. an d. Humboldt-Akademie zu ...
— Henrik Ibsen - A Bibliography of Criticism and Biography with an Index to Characters • Ina Ten Eyck Firkins
... perhaps even more developed in the hero of the tragedy than in the Hamlet of earlier days. It is intensely characteristic. Nothing, I believe, is to be found elsewhere in Shakespeare (unless in the rage of the disillusioned idealist Timon) of quite the same kind as Hamlet's disgust at his uncle's drunkenness, his loathing of his mother's sensuality, his astonishment and horror at her shallowness, his contempt for everything pretentious or false, his indifference to everything merely ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Consul at Pri[vs]tina, took part in the Balkan War, for instance at the siege of Scutari, as an artillery officer, and after some years found himself inside the town as Yugoslav Envoy. He is now Minister at Tirana, a delicate post which could not be in better hands. Ljuba Yovanovi['c] was the idealist whose work was to arouse his fellow-countrymen by articles and poems. In the war against Bulgaria he was wounded and in hospital contracted cholera. On the day of his death he wrote to a brother of Ne[vs]i['c], now one of Belgrade's leading lawyers; he was ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... few minutes later, however, the idealist seemed to have simmered down into the materialist, the extraordinary to have become merged in the ordinary, for he found his famous ally no longer studying the beauties of Nature, but giving his whole attention to the sordid commonplaces of man. He was standing before a glaringly printed bill, one ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... a dreamer—was Charming Billy Boyle; perhaps an idealist—possibly a sentimentalist. He had never tried to find a name for the side of his life that struck deepest. He knew that the ripple of a meadow-lark swinging on a weed against the sunrise, with diamond-sparkles all on the grass around, gripped him and hurt him vaguely ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... more than a biologist, he was a philosopher and an idealist. Such words have sometimes been used as terms of reproach, but wisdom can only ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... there," he panted a little later, resisting Martin's effort to relieve him of the two demijohns. "Norton's an idealist—a Harvard man. Prodigious memory. Idealism led him to philosophic anarchy, and his family threw him off. Father's a railroad president and many times millionnaire, but the son's starving in 'Frisco, editing an anarchist sheet ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... scholar's world we're known because of him. And really, Holden's not a radical—in the worst sense. What he doesn't see is—expediency. Not enough the man of affairs to realize that we can't always have literally what we have theoretically. He's an idealist. Something of the—man ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... substance of which he is conscious in his own person." So far, however, from this being a philosophy of Realism, it is in effect, if not indeed in actual terms, a philosophy of Idealism. I, at least, am unable to see how any Idealist, from Berkeley downwards, could ask for a better definition of his theory of the external world than that it "partakes of reality by virtue of the same substance of which he is conscious in ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... interested rather in expression than in action; interested in life itself rather than in its reconstruction or reformation. The Negro is, by natural disposition, neither an intellectual nor an idealist, like the Jew; nor a brooding introspective, like the East Indian; nor a pioneer and frontiersman, like the Anglo-Saxon. He is primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake. His metier is expression rather than action. He is, so to speak, the lady ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... to his impression. He renders not the object itself but his mental image of it; and that image is the result of his way of seeing and feeling, his habit of mind, his interest, and his store of memories. The idealist must base his work upon some kind of reality, or it is a monstrosity; he is obliged to refer to the external world for his symbols. The impressionist, who concerns himself with the play of light over surfaces in nature, is seeking for truth, and he cares to paint ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... large hearted, high minded, sympathetic and logical man; and it is only a pity that he had not some Boswell of a friend who could have recorded his wise sayings and valuable criticism of men and things. He was more of an idealist than Doctor Johnson, and at the same time like Doctor Johnson in personal solidity, his English aplomb of character. They were both men of sterling quality. He was in all things especially human. His sympathies equalled the breadth of his mind. There was ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... the opinion, first luminously suggested by Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must not be judged as a political moralist of our time and race would be judged. He thinks that Machiavelli was in earnest, as none but an idealist can be, and he is the first to imagine him an idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like the visionary issues of reverie. The Machiavelli whom he depicts does not cease to be politically a republican and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of Philosophy was designed as a contribution to the History of Modern Philosophy under the heads: first of Different Schools of Thought—Sensationalist, Realist, Idealist, Intuitivist; secondly of different Subjects—Psychology, Ethics, Aesthetics, Political Philosophy, Theology. While much had been done in England in tracing the course of evolution in nature, history, economics, morals and religion, ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... this, although the most often quoted, is the least typical of the man and his writings. Those in search of really typical statements of his theology will find them in such specimens as, "God and real existence is the same. God is and there is nothing else." He was a theological idealist, believing that all the varied phenomena of the universe are "constantly proceeding from God, as light from the sun." Such statements suggest Shelley's ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... depressed than when I won the first case in which I knew my client's opponent was in the right and had lost only because I outgeneraled his stupid lawyer. I was, like most of the sons and daughters of the vigorous families of the earnest, deeply religious early-West, an idealist by inheritance and by training; but I suppose any young man, however practical, must feel a shock when he begins those compromises between theoretical and practical right which are part of the daily routine of active life, and without which ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... back at the Weatherbys' Sally asked her if she and Amory had had a "time" in the den. Isabelle turned to her quietly. In her eyes was the light of the idealist, the inviolate dreamer ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist or a pantheist, a materialist or an idealist, a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer. The one thing on which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Physiocrats found economics in peasant life; and thus too Adam Smith renewed their science, with due academic logic, doubtless, but from his experience of Glasgow and Kirkcaldy manufactures and trade. Even the idealist Berkeley owed much of his theory to his iridescent tar-water; while surely the greater ethicists are those who have not only been dialecticians, but moral forces in the ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... and labored the first of the Maskilim, an idealist from beginning to end. Persecution did not embitter, nor poverty depress him. And when he passed away quietly (February 12, 1860) in the obscure little town in which he had been born, and which has become famous through ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... realization of his imagined visions. He felt like a child among old savages of a war tribe. Yet he was fascinated by this close-up suggestion of man to man in battle, of German to American, of materialist to idealist, and beyond all control was the bursting surge of his blood. The exercises he had gone through, the trick he had acquired, somehow had strange power to liberate ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... advantages that a connection at Court and the favour of King James might have given him—he was only too pleased to retire, "the world forgetting, by the world forgot," while he was yet on the sunny side of fifty. Man of affairs sufficiently to seek the law-courts on the smallest provocation, idealist to the extent of preferring a simple country life to all the glamour of London, a man seemingly endowed with all the ambitions of the most sober and unimaginative middle class—truly he presents strange ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... people you have got to consider. First of all, I hope that the Government of India, so long as I am connected with it and responsible for it to Parliament and to the country, will not be hurried by the anger of the impatient idealist. The impatient idealist—you know him. I know him. I like him, I have been one myself. He says, "You admit that so and so is right; why don't you do it—why don't you do it now?" Whether he is an Indian idealist or a British idealist I sympathise with him. Ah! gentlemen, how many of the ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... But it is the originals that chiefly interest us, and first of these in bronze is the David, of which I have already spoken, and first of these in marble the S. George. This George is just such a resolute, clean, warlike idealist as one dreams him. He would kill a dragon, it is true; but he would eat and sleep after it and tell the story modestly and not without humour. By a happy chance the marble upon which Donatello worked had light veins running through it just where the head is, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... oath, bursting forth from a patriotic heart, was, like Uncle Toby's, blotted out by the recording angel. I have quoted it more than once to show how the average American—though apparently a crude materialist— is, at heart, a thorough idealist. ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... doing it she had to abandon the easy life of a scholar and the aristocratic environment of a cultured, prosperous, Quaker family, of Moorestown, New Jersey, for the rigors of a ceaseless drudgery and frequent imprisonment. A flaming idealist, conducting the fight with the sternest kind of realism, a mind attracted by facts, not fancies, she has led fearlessly ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... a product or result of matter, while the idealist holds matter to be a result of consciousness, and a third maintains that matter and spirit are identical; with all this the physiologist, as such, has nothing whatever to do; his sole concern is with the fact that ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... has imagination. He is an idealist, but he is a scholar, too, and a very grim realist. Lenin was a statistician by profession. He had long been trying to foresee the future of society under socialism, and he had marked down definitely the resources, the machinery, and the institutions existing under the old order, ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... American home and go back to England, where he set up his lares at Rottingdean, in Surrey. There he has remained, averaging a book a year, until now he has over twenty-five large volumes to his credit. In 1907 Kipling was given the Nobel prize "for the best work of an idealist tendency." ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... high standard of unity set forth in his epistles, Paul has been branded an idealist. But what shall we say of Christ who prayed for such visible unity and died for it? An idealist is one who forms picturesque fancies, one given to romantic expectations impossible of accomplishment. The idealist usually has but few practical results. But Paul accomplished things. He ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... happiness and stood for a moment in the outer courts of the House of Love. He had no friends who could have helped him, and no qualifications for earning his living at any other trade or profession. He had begun life with a luxurious home, a refined and useless education, and the mind of a dreamer, an idealist. None of these things were valuable assets in ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... Administration that Huerta should resign and that Great Britain should assist the United States in accomplishing his dethronement, and that the Mexican people should have a real opportunity of setting up for themselves. He was not enough of an "idealist," however, to believe that the Mexicans, without the assistance of their powerful neighbours, could succeed in establishing a constitutional government. In early August, 1913, President Wilson sent Mr. John Lind, ex-Governor of Minnesota, to Mexico as his personal ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... the President made a mistake in not going at once to the wrecked districts before the Peace Conference opened—and no one has insisted on this more strongly than American correspondents—it is clear that it was an idealist's mistake. Ruins, the President seems to have said to himself, can wait; what is essential is that the League of Nations idea, on which not Governments only, but peoples are hanging, should be rapidly "clothed upon" by some practical shape; otherwise the ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... governors of New York City. Not the altruistic desire to reform, but the perfectly practical resolve to enjoy the political rights to which he had a claim was his leading motive. It is important to understand this because it will explain much of his action as a statesman. Roosevelt is the greatest idealist in American public life since Lincoln; but his idealism, like Lincoln's, always had a firm, intelligent, practical footing. Roosevelt himself thus describes his work during his first year in the New ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... moods and fashions have been put away and taken out a thousand times. Most people have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions, but such people, least of all, are fitted to find in them that pleasure of the rococo which consoles the idealist when the old moods ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Bar, which is this. That because it offers material victories only and never spiritual ones, that because there can be no standard by which its disciples are judged save the earthly standard, that because there is no place within its ranks for the altruist or the idealist—for these reasons the Bar is not ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... ugly, but it was a grandiose ugliness, to adopt the expression of a woman who had exercised a peculiar influence over his life. This ugliness had yielded him some satisfactory adventures. Miss Mary Gordon, a blonde-haired idealist, daughter of the governor of an English archipelago in Oceanica, traveling through Europe accompanied only by a maid, had met him one summer in a hotel at Munich. She it was who first became impressed, and it was she who took the first steps. According to the young lady, the Spaniard was ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... everything is instinctively kept as near to the practical heart of the matter as possible. He is—to the eye of an artist—distressingly matter-of-fact, a tempting mark for satire. And yet he is in truth an idealist, though it is his nature to snub, disguise, and mock his own inherent optimism. To admit enthusiasms is "bad form" if he is a "gentleman"; "swank" or mere waste of good heat if he is not a "gentleman." England produces more than its proper percentage of cranks and poets; it ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... months rolled past them both, Catie the young materialist and potential tyrant, and Scott Brenton the idealist. The years carried the children out of the perpetual holidays of infancy and into the treadmill of schooling that begins with b, a, ba and sometimes never ends. Side by side, the two small youngsters entered the low doorway of the primary ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... come; he perceives the wanderings of the way, and in one supreme hour or in one shining moment he gives indefeasible pledges of the loyalty which he has forfeited. Shelley in Alastor, the influence of which on Browning in writing Pauline is evident, had rebuked the idealist within himself, who would live in lofty abstractions to the loss of human sympathy and human love. Browning in Pauline also recognises this danger, but he indicates others—the risk of the lower ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... parole, by which our prisoners of one day were in the field against us on the next, called imperatively for an example, and it was probably rather for his broken faith than for his hare-brained scheme that Cordua died. At the same time it is impossible not to feel sorrow for this idealist of twenty-three who died for a cause which was not his own. He was shot in the garden of Pretoria Gaol upon August 24th. A fresh and more stringent proclamation from Lord Roberts showed that the ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sure that Mr. Skimpole, in his brilliant study of Bernard Shaw, is quite correct when he says 'the whole case against Chesterton, of course, is that he is a Romantic.' Why is it a something against him that he chooses to be an idealist? Because, says Mr. Skimpole, 'he does not seem to have grasped the fact that the most important difference between the Real and the Ideal aspects of anything is that while the Ideal is permanent and unchangeable ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... the key to most of what is praised and most of what is blamed in him; the key to the comparative sanity, toleration and modern efficiency of many of his departures; the key to the comparative coarseness, earthiness, cynicism, and lack of sympathy in many others. He was the reverse of an idealist; and he cannot without absurdity be held up as an ideal; but he was, like most of the squires, a type genuinely English; not without public spirit, certainly not without patriotism. His seizure of personal power, which destroyed an impersonal and ideal ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... standard of human idealism was no part of his duty. In any case he greatly preferred the solid assurance of the Primrose League. And, speaking generally, as I have tried to do throughout, I find that New Worlds for Old presents a clearer indication to the possible path for the idealist than any of the other sociological essays. Mankind in the Making dealt very largely with education directed to a particular end, but in the book I am now considering may be found certain outlets for the expression of the less consistently strenuous. Education, whether of individual children ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... sidelights, that the total impression is that of a book in which much happens. No realist could exceed the fidelity with which Signor Fogazzaro outlines a landscape, or fixes a passing scene; yet being an idealist through and through, he has produced a masterpiece in which ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... change in the whole land," said David musingly. He had forgotten to eat. His face was aglow and a side of his nature which Marcia did not know was uppermost. Marcia saw the man, the thinker, the writer, the former of public opinion, the idealist. Heretofore David had been to her in the light of her sister's lover, a young man of promise, but that was all. Now she saw something more earnest, and at once it was revealed to her what a man he ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... mind the historical aspect of the matter we can understand how it has come about that the individualistic idealist in America has been much more resolute than in England to effect reforms, much more determined that they shall be very thorough and extreme reforms, and, especially, much more eager to embody his moral aspirations in legal statutes. But his tasks are bigger than in England, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... who leads the world; he is a rebel and he is an idealist. Yet when you analyse him you find what a poor devil he is. His noble crusade against vivisection is due to the abnormal strain of cruelty he is repressing in himself; his passion for Socialism comes from his ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... regarded as a poetizer of rural life, an arch-idealist of her humbler country-folks. At Quissac I made more than one acquaintance that might have stepped out of La petite Fadette or La ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... painfully fastidious. He could not fully understand nor appreciate Beethoven, whose works are full of lion-marrow, robust and masculine alike in conception and treatment. He did not admire Shakespeare, because his great delineations are too vivid and realistic. Our musician was essentially a dreamer and idealist. His range was limited, but within it he reached perfection of finish and originality never surpassed. But, with all his limitations, the art-judgment of the world places ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... for human welfare is what at bottom determines the broad lines of such men's lives, it often happens that, in the detail of their speech and writing, hatred is far more visible than love. The impatient idealist—and without some impatience a man will hardly prove effective—is almost sure to be led into hatred by the oppositions and disappointments which he encounters in his endeavors to bring happiness to the world. The more certain he is of the purity of his ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... writings, in their untiring freshness, in their purity, love of truth and of virtue, their perpetual aspiring to the loftiest height of knowledge and of excellence, much more than in their positive doctrines, lies the secret of their charm and of their unfailing power. Plato is often styled an idealist. But this is true of the spirit rather than of the form of his doctrine; for strictly he is an intense realist, and differs from his great pupil, Aristotle, far less in his mere philosophical method than in his lofty moral and religious aspirations, which were perpetually ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... experience a sense of moral release. Fleur felt no remorse when she left June's house. Reading condemnatory resentment in her little kinswoman's blue eyes-she was glad that she had fooled her, despising June because that elderly idealist had not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Idealist objects to the Materialists that the latter cannot agree upon fundamental points; that they cannot define what is an atom; that they cannot account for the transformation of physical action and molecular motion ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... order; and that the attributes inhere in this external cause or substratum, viz. matter. But at last it was seen that the existence of matter could not be proved by extrinsic evidence; consequently, now the answer to the idealist argument simply is, that the belief in an external cause of sensations is universal, and as intuitive as our knowledge of sensations themselves. Even Kant allows this (notwithstanding his belief in the existence of a universe of things in themselves, i.e. Nouemena, as contrasted ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... This, I believe, should be the only sound basis for reform. The real question is not what people ought to do, but what they actually do and are likely to go on doing. It is these facts that the idealist fails to face. Love is a very mixed game indeed. And all that the wisest reformer has ever been able to do is to make bad guesses at ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... that Mihalevitch was not discouraged, but as idealist or cynic, lived on a crust of bread, sincerely rejoicing or grieving over the destinies of humanity, and his own vocation, and troubling himself very little as to how to escape dying of hunger. Mihalevitch was not married: but had ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... fighting back some things, taking on other things. He gazed at the care-worn, rugged face—face of a worker and a dreamer, reading in those lines the story of that life, seeing more clearly than he had ever seen before the beauty and futility of it. Here was the idealist, the man who would give his whole lifetime to a dream he had dreamed. He loved his father very tenderly as he looked at him, read ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... in his character of idealist all impressions, all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith, astronomy, history, and religion, enter upon equal terms into his notion of the universe. He is not against religion; not, indeed, against any religion. He wishes to drag with a larger net, to make a more comprehensive ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... served and they talked of the Peace Conference and of the general pessimism that prevailed. Same old diplomacy. Same old diplomatists. Same old ambitions. Same old European policies. An idealist had about as much chance with those astute conventionalized brains dyed in the diplomatic wiles and methods of the centuries as an unarmed man on foot with a pack of wolves....At the moment all the other Commissions were cursing ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... instance," said Mark, "should make direct for my goal, and should be sure of victory. You may do the same, but you would do so penetrated by the conviction that you stood on the heights and had drawn her up to you, you idealist. Show that you understand your calling, and you may succeed. It's no use to wear yourself out with sighs, to be sleepless, to watch for the raising of the lilac curtain by a white hand, to wait a week for ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... they develop their plots, and for the absorbing, if often over-sensational, nature of their incidents; but whilst Mr. Collins excites and fascinates our attention by an intense power of realism which carries us with unreasoning haste from cover to cover of his works, Le Fanu is an idealist, full of high imagination, and an artist who devotes deep attention to the most delicate detail in his portraiture of men and women, and his descriptions of the outdoor and indoor worlds—a writer, therefore, through whose pages it would be often an indignity ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... human race be were it not for the ideals of men? It is idealists, in a large sense, that this old world needs to-day. Its soil is sadly in need of new seed. Washington, in his day, was decried as an idealist. So was Jefferson. It was commonly remarked of Lincoln that he was a "rank idealist." Morse, Watt, Marconi, Edison—all were, at first, adjudged idealists. We say of the League of Nations that it is ideal, and we use the term in a derogatory sense. But that was exactly what was said of the Constitution ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... fool; on the other hand, he is a keen observer and an apt student. Although an idealist by nature, many of the race have proved themselves good business men. But under the reservation system they have developed traits that are absolutely opposed to the racial type. They become time-serving, beggarly, and apathetic. Some of their finest ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... since 1827, and between that time and 1840 came a considerable awakening among the laboring classes which was part of a general humanitarian movement throughout the country. Robert Owen, an English industrial idealist, had visited this country about 1825 and provided the initiative for a short-lived communistic settlement at New Harmony, Indiana. Similar enterprises were established at other points; the most famous of these was that at ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... to us again one of those ragged ones, one of 'the poor in spirit,' the idealist Punin, a character whose portrait challenges Dostoievsky's skill on the latter's own ground. That delicious Punin! and that terrible grandmother's scene with Baburin! How absolutely Slav is the blending of irony and kindness ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... well in expending so much cleverness in telling Susie's story. Certainly those who think of marriage as a high calling, for which the vocation is love, will be as much annoyed with her as was her cousin Lucy, the idealist, at once the most amusing and most pathetic figure in the book. I am quite sure that Susies and Lucys both abound, and that Mrs. DOWDALL knows all about them; but I am not equally sure that the Susies deserve the encouragement of such a brilliant dissection. Yet the men whose happiness she played ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... nothing idealistic in the plan of Lord Robert Cecil, although he was reputed to be an idealist favoring a new international order. An examination of his plan (Appendix) shows it to be a substantial revival of the old and discredited ideas of a century ago. There could be no doubt that a plan of this sort, materialistic and selfish as ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... moral judgments always in prospect, why should Bradley, or any idealist, have pursued ethical studies at all? Since all phases of life were equally necessary to enrich an infinite consciousness, which must know both good and evil in order to merge and to transcend them, he could hardly ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... the lowest rank, who have thought that this intermediate character of all perception was so evident that there was no need to insist further upon it. John Stuart Mill, who was certainly and perhaps more than anything a careful logician, commences an exposition of the idealist thesis to which he was so much attached, by carelessly saying: "It goes without saying that objects are known to us through the intermediary of our senses.... The senses are equivalent to our sensations;"[4] and on those ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... people, I mean? But that is what everyone—once we were at war— refused to remember. And so we cried "Lusitania!" against thousands of men who had no choice in the matter at all. Remedy? There's only one. Somehow we must get men to believe that Christ wasn't a mad idealist when He preached His Sermon on the Mount; that what He showed for the world's salvation then was not a sign only, but the very Instrument itself. We've got to make men see that there's something in human nature waiting to respond to a new law. ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... reformers would have triumphed, but in their folly they tried to sweep back the tide, with the result we have seen. For when everything is put to the touch, when victory is the price of self-sacrifice, it is the idealist who comes to the front, and as the nineteenth-century prophet Mazzini taught, men will lay down their lives for principles but ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... had been fair. It was she who had obtained the divorce, and the court had given her the child. But Waythorn knew how many ambiguities such a verdict might cover. The mere fact that Haskett retained a right over his daughter implied an unsuspected compromise. Waythorn was an idealist. He always refused to recognize unpleasant contingencies till he found himself confronted with them, and then he saw them followed by a special train of consequences. His next days were thus haunted, and he determined to try to lay the ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... remained heart-whole, as at nineteen: still looked confidently forward to the best that life has to give. For, despite a strong practical strain in her nature, she was an idealist at the core. She could not understand that temper of mind which sets out to buy a gold watch, and declines upon a silver one because the other is not instantly attainable. She would have the best or none: and, ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... divides itself into two rough classes—the idyllic and the satiric. War has defiled one to produce the other. At heart Siegfried Sassoon is an idealist. ...
— Counter-Attack and Other Poems • Siegfried Sassoon
... swiftly in the opposite direction, came in sight at the same time, and Grant almost groaned aloud when the newcomer stood stock still and looked at the mournful procession. He, be it remembered, was somewhat of an idealist and a poet; it grieved his spirit that those two women, the quick and the dead, should meet on the bridge. He took it as a portent, almost a menace, he knew not of what. He might have foreseen that unhappy eventuality, and prevented it, but his brain refused to work clearly that morning. ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... as much a long time ago. Your uncle is the modern type of business man. Not very much of an idealist, I'm afraid. But tell me why you decided to thwart the plans of ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... knowing where they were, timidly crawling across motor-infested roads with their hearts in their mouths, all the time permanently ingraining their lungs with black filth. An able man, Lord Curzon, skilful to gauge the British Idealist, ever so absorbed in his own dream of comfort or of cash that he is even blind to the world he lives in, "pinnacled dim in the intense inane" in another sense than the ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... that I am an idealist, in a way," he was saying. "That is, if you come often. I hope you will, by the way. I am perpetually dissatisfied with things as they are, and wanting them changed. With the single exception of my wife"—he bowed to Elinor, "and this little ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... is with the cut of his coat and the smile of his mistress. The world for once is in error. I am nothing of the sort. Appearances are against me, I admit. Even you I fancy were deceived. No, my dear sir, while every one judges me to be a mere butterfly of fashion, I am an idealist at heart. And the worst of it is that no one will believe me. All that I want is a chance, an opportunity to prove I am that which I claim; but nobody will give it to me. If I venture to suggest that I am in earnest, the statement excites sneers or ridicule. For nearly two years I have been trying ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... with Portuguese, I used Chang Wei-hua's monograph.—While there is no satisfactory, comprehensive study in English on Wang, for Lu Hsiang-shan the book by Huang Siu-ch'i, Lu Hsiang-shan, a Twelfth-century Chinese Idealist Philosopher, New ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... about the higher spiritual kingdom, and chops a little logic about the I and the not-I, the Reality and the non-Reality.—"God," says the Hermit. "Thought," says the Idealist, "that is the only Reality." And what is Thought, and what is God, and what is Matter, and what is Spirit? They are the mysterious vessels of Life, which are always being filled by Love and emptied by Logic. "The external world," says the Materialist—"Does ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... that a form of imaginative life is clearly pathologic? In my opinion, the answer must be sought in the nature and degree of belief accompanying the labor of creating. It is an axiom unchallenged by anyone—whether idealist or realist of any shade of belief—that nothing has existence for us save through the consciousness we have of it; but for realism—and experimental psychology is of necessity realistic—there are two distinct forms ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... woman be her own worst enemy; I was big enough to overlook her unfortunate attitudes and see through the cranky exterior to the worthy idealist and true woman beneath. I was interrupted in my thoughts ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... To the liberal idealist the thought of a possible Swiss system or group of Swiss systems comes readily to mind. One thinks of a grouping of groups of Republics, building up a United States of Eastern Europe. But neither Hohenzollerns nor Tsar would welcome that. The arm of ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... strength of his tastes and passions. So we shall find it all through the course of these studies. It would be preposterous to deny some sort of idealism to almost any pagan who has ever lived. The contrast between pagan and idealist is largely a matter of proportion and preponderating tendency: yet the lines are clear enough to enable us to work with this distinction and to ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... of France and England. His experience of American politics and knowledge of foreign affairs, whether derived from men or from books, were matched by an almost unerring penetration in the analysis of a political situation, domestic or European. As a liberal idealist and pacifist, he saw eye to eye with Wilson; his sense of political actualities, however, was infinitely ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... to see in the last lines that Mr. Squire has escaped finally from the idealist's disgust to the idealist's exaltation. He has learned to express the beautiful mystery of life and he is no longer haunted in his nerves by the ugliness of circumstances. Not that he has shut himself up in an enchanted world: he still ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... vital in death. He had wrought, in his silent, lonely detachment, better even than he knew. His charities, shorn of the degrading elements of many similar ones, were carried on without a hitch. Dr. McPherson, under his crust of hardness, was an idealist and almost a sentimentalist; but above all he was a man to inspire respect and command obedience. No hospital with which he had to deal was unmarked by his personality. Neglect and indifference were fatal attributes ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... man and something of an idealist. His first interview with Sir Matthew Bale made him open his eyes wider than ever ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... be desirable to observe that, in modern times, the term "Realism" has acquired a signification wholly different from that which attached to it in the middle ages. We commonly use it as the contrary of Idealism. The Idealist holds that the phenomenal world has only a subjective existence, the Realist that it has an objective existence. I am not aware that any mediaeval philosopher was an Idealist in the sense in which we apply the term to Berkeley. In fact, the cardinal defect of ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... of the idealist. We shall see how, in the midst of what the world calls immorality and sordidness, this quality in him was ever present; even when it led to harshness to persons or facts. Not fitting into the world, his attitude toward it, his actions in it, and his judgment of it, are keen and impassioned, ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
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