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More "Quixotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very moment of triumph, quixotic as such scruples may seem to some, Ventimore's conscience smote him. He could not help a certain pity for the old creature, who was shaking there convulsively prepared to re-enter his bottle-prison rather than ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... up the nefarious gains their slave-trading fathers made, while enjoying the twenty years lease of the African slave trade, granted by the Federal Constitution. Ridicule as we may the family pride or State pride of Virginia, or the sometimes Quixotic chivalry of her sons, they have reason to be proud of their noble mother, for her great names belong to American fame, and her history is our nation's glory. In view of all the past, I hope that day may never ...
— The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery - Delivered at Fort Wayne, Ind., October 30th 1860 • Joseph Ketchum Edgerton
... back to his lodgings in Thirty-second Street. Wild, Quixotic notions of sacrifice flooded his mood of dejection. If the worst came, he could go West with the family and learn how to do something. And yet—Mrs. Wybert. Of course it must be that. The other idea was absurd—too wild for serious consideration. He was thirty ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... Jerry earned the wild applause of the crowd by an act of magnanimity that was nothing less than Quixotic. But it was like Jerry. He wanted to take no unfair advantages. He bent forward, lifting the upper rope, and helped Clancy into the ring. There the round ended in a roar of cheering that did my heart and Jack's ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... place of freedom and mutiny from taking the place of law. He left Caracas, his native city, and here again he was taking a last farewell. In July he was in Cartagena, where the people received him with genuine affection. He recalled that it was from here he had begun his first quixotic expedition to his country in 1812. Fifteen years had elapsed since then, and he was again in Cartagena, his great work of redemption fulfilled but now ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... Colonel C—-'s family were at breakfast, of which they made us partake; and after vainly endeavouring to dissuade us from what appeared to them our Quixotic expedition, Mrs. C—- added a dozen fine white fish to the contents of the sack, and sent her youngest son to help Mr. T—- along with his burthen, and to bear us ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... touched. The Englishman, Captain Rallywood, has, as you once remarked the knack of making himself picturesque, which appeals in fact to the imagination. I am myself sensible of something of the kind when dealing with him. Valerie imagines him to be quixotic.' ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... student of history, who may read Paine's opening sketch of the French Revolution, written to refute Burke's narrative of the same events, will not deny Paine's complete success. He will even meet with sentences that Burke might have composed. For instance: Paine ridicules, as Quixotic, the fine passage in the "Reflections on the Decay of Chivalry"; and adds, "Mr. Burke's mind is above the homely sorrows of the vulgar. He can only feel for a king or for a queen. The countless victims of tyranny have no place in his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... a man in your line who would not do certain things the doing of which has contributed to the making of your fortune, would by the ordinary dealer be regarded as Quixotic?" ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... she had felt before. Sir Philip turned homewards to seek his mother, who was a woman of whom many people stood in awe, but whose kindness of heart was never known to fail. To her Sir Philip at once poured out his story with the directness and Quixotic ardor which some of his friends found incomprehensible, not to say absurd. But Lady Ashley ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... know the world, and isn't like it. I supposed him an awkward, eccentric young countryman, that, from his very verdancy, would be difficult to manage, and he writes to me like a knight of olden time, only such language seems Quixotic in our day. The foolish fellow, to idealize poor, despised, faulty Edith Allen into one of the grand heroines of his interminable romances, and that after seeing me hoe my garden like a Dutch woman. If I wasn't so sad and he so earnest, I could laugh till ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... reader. They led over many lands, but this book is only a narrative of my search after Livingstone, the great African traveller. It is an Icarian flight of journalism, I confess; some even have called it Quixotic; but this is a word I can now refute, as will be seen before the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... the glory of being the first to surpass Columbus, that I did not realize the full meaning. I thought, also, you seemed rather ready to leave me," she added gently, "and so said little; you do not know how it almost breaks my heart now that I am about to lose you. It was quixotic to let you undertake this journey." "An undertaker would have given me his kind offices for one even longer, had I remained here," replied Ayrault. "I cannot live in this humdrum world without you. The most sustained excitement cannot even palliate what seems to me like unrequited ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... inspired by this mad story, and how many battles have been actually won for England in the spirit thus engendered. It is only with a measure of habitual foolhardiness that you can be sure, in the common run of men, of courage on a reasonable occasion. An army or a fleet, if it is not led by quixotic fancies, will not be led far by terror of the Provost Marshal. Even German warfare, in addition to maps and telegraphs, is not above employing the WACHT AM RHEIN. Nor is it only in the profession of arms that such ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... authorise you to give me up for trial if you think that best—or, if you think it unnecessary, in the meanwhile to make preparations for their defence. I hope, sir, that I am as little anxious to be Quixotic, as I am determined to ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... doctor's orders? Would it not be better to use her eyes to the end, and trust to charity to send her to an infirmary when she became blind? Why had she been foolish enough to refuse Mr. Ramsay's property? But for a quixotic theory, she would not now have been at ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... has been educated in the country, occasionally trying the temperature of the City—to rub off the rust—but hold a moment, it is enough she pleases me in the qualities of her person and mind—. Like a true quixotic lover, I made proposals to her father—he has answered them in the most gentlemanly manner—. You have my consent to address my daughter if you will gain the approbation of your mother—He also informs me that his daughter has an estate ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... She had a hard task before her. Alwyn's absurd conscience and Quixotic ideas were difficult to cope with. After his last indiscreet talk she had ventured deftly to remonstrate, and she well remembered ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... replied that Fan was my father's daughter, and as much to me as if we had been born of one mother as well, and that I had nothing more to say. Then I got letter after letter, reasoning with me about my quixotic ideas, and trying to convince me that my action would only result in spoiling the girl, and in creating a coldness between myself and relations. It was rather hard, because I am really fond of my aunt and my cousins. My only answer to all her letters was to give ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... I see! Should ask? I take it there are certain sacrifices you would not ask,' returned the king. 'We here in France would say that your position was Quixotic. However, your King Charles is a weak fool, easily imposed upon. Is the lady quick and resourceful in expedients, calm and thoughtful in emergencies, and silent on ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... imaginings he had never imagined this. Ever since he had sent his own letter, he had been doubtful of its wisdom, and yet he had not been able to think of any other course that he would have preferred. He knew that the step he had taken in warning the criminal was quixotic, and yet it seemed to him that Lord Blandamer had a certain right to see his own family portrait and papers, before they were used against him. He could not feel sorry that he had given the opportunity, though he had certainly ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... little plot to force me to my own good. It went decidedly against the grain with me to requite Richards' hospitality and friendship by claiming back the money I had lent him, and for which he no doubt had good use. At the same time, it would have been rather Quixotic to let my own plantation go to rack and ruin for want of the funds by which he was profiting; and moreover, I had given Menou my word to be guided by him; so I put the receipt and my romantics in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... there were more. Less than a month before her death, she wrote to a friend a list of benevolent enterprises she has in mind and says, "Oh, it is such a luxury to be able to give without being afraid. I try not to be Quixotic, but I want to rain down blessings on all the world, in token of thankfulness for the blessings that have been ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... thinking as much. What have you had in your mind? Some foolish Quixotic notion. What ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... you did it, you quixotic child, but you must not expose yourself in this way, for any ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... not long before Floyd began to be known more widely. He had schemes for the amelioration of the condition of the poor. They were pronounced quixotic; but he kept on. He said he got good out of them if ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... pleaded for Jervas that a good deal of this rigidity is due to his abhorrence of the light, flippant, jocose style of his predecessors. He was one of the few, very few, translators that have shown any apprehension of the unsmiling gravity which is the essence of Quixotic humour; it seemed to him a crime to bring Cervantes forward smirking and grinning at his own good things, and to this may be attributed in a great measure the ascetic abstinence from everything savouring of liveliness ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... to poor mother during her declining days and those of her brief but painful illness. Margaret could not bear to speak of it to Miss Loomis. It was Agatha herself who calmly asked, "And when is he to be married?" In answering Mrs. Cranston found it impossible to conceal that she thought it both quixotic and unnecessary. Miss Loomis quietly but decidedly took the opposite view. No honorable man could have done otherwise. They had long been engaged. It was not only their own but his mother's choice. She ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... Tony, all women are more or less creatures of impulse, liable to do the most unexpected and quixotic things," her worldly-wise Ladyship told him, when he had explained what had happened and asked her to advise him what to do. "That is what makes us so interesting. We do not understand ourselves, and if men understood us we should cease ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... Nothing of the kind had ever before happened there. Two ladies and a most respectable old gentleman sailing away under the skull and cross-bones! That was altogether new in the Caribbean Sea. To those who talked to him about his quixotic expedition, Captain Ichabod swore—and at times, as many men knew, he was a great hand at being in earnest—that if he carried not his passengers through their troubles and to a place of safety, the Restless, and all on board of her, should ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... She said things that you and I couldn't say, and she did things. I felt the catastrophe in the air long before it came. But I couldn't warn Roger. I just had to let him find out. I wasn't there when the blow fell; but I'll tell you this, that Roger may have been a quixotic idiot in the eyes of the world, but if he failed it was because he was a dreamer, and an idealist, not a coward and a shirk." Her eyes were blazing. "Oh, if you could hear what some people ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... ought to be looked at first and foremost from the man's point of view. The truth is, Theo, that you have simply appealed to me in the hope of having your own Quixotic notion confirmed. You want me to say, 'Yes, go; you will be doing quite right.' And—think what you will of me—I ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... in upholding Peytel's contention that his crime had been homicide, not murder, and brought forward the plea of "no premeditation." His energetic efforts were of no avail: Peytel was executed at Bourg on November 28th, 1839, and Balzac, who had espoused his cause with quixotic enthusiasm, was genuinely sorry. He wrote to Madame Hanska in September: "I am extremely agitated by a horrible case, the case of Peytel. I have seen this poor fellow three times. He is condemned; I start in two hours for Bourg." On November 30th ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... would be responsible. Some half-sustained tidings of Carry's presence in Salisbury and of the Vicar's various visits to the city were current in Bullhampton, and with these were mingled an idea that Carry and Sam were in league together. That Fenwick was chivalrous, perhaps Quixotic, in his friendships for those whom he regarded, had long been felt, and this feeling was now stronger than ever. He certainly could bring up Sam Brattle if he pleased;—or, if he pleased, as might, some said, not improbably be the case, he could keep him ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... did you expect?" snorted the detective indignantly. "Did you think I'd encourage you to let Maxon rot in jail just to humor your quixotic notions about gossip and a woman's name? I sympathize with your difficulty, but that's as far as I can go. There are two things I've never done and never expect to do knowingly—let an innocent man suffer unjustly ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... with equal austerity and resolution, yet in a voice persuasive and conciliatory rather than arbitrary or dictatorial, the mere form and manner of this quixotic undertaking thrilled all my fibres in defiance of its sense. It was like the blare of bugles in a dubious cause; one's blood responded before one's brain; and but for Raffles, little as his friends were to me, and much as I repudiated his sacrifices on their ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... deliberate choice that Ireen and I have been imprisoned in the narrow limits of Millbrook society. For myself I do not complain. If Mr. Carstyle chooses to place others before his wife it is not for his wife to repine. His course may be noble—Quixotic; I do not allow myself to pronounce judgment on it, though others have thought that in sacrificing his own family to strangers he was violating the most sacred obligations of domestic life. This is the opinion of my pastor and of other valued friends; ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... until yesterday he had not even dreamed existed outside the covers of some old impossible romance—the magic of the darkening sky, the invisible flocking presences of the dead, the shock of imaginations that had no words, of quixotic emotions which the stranger had stirred in that low, mocking, furtive talk beside the broken stones of the Huguenot. Was the 'change' quite so monstrous, so meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously had he seemed to be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... side to his character, and though he was saved from sentimentality by his extreme trenchancy, and by his irritable temper, yet his whole temperament is beautiful, winning, attractive, rather than salient and picturesque. He had the qualities of a poet, a quixotic ideal, and an exuberant fancy; but though his spell over those who understand him is an almost magical one, his point of view is bound to be misunderstood by ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the car and Sir Lucien alighted, glancing at the clock inside as he did so, and smiling at his own quixotic behavior. He entered an imposing doorway and rang one of the bells. There was an interval of two minutes or so, when the door opened and ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... lines of credit, to whom there came daily the vision of a native Arcadia of art, letters and travel. It was good business to allow Hazelhurst to harbor its illusions; it was excellent pastime and good spiritual nourishment for Amidon to harbor his; and one can see how it may have been with some quixotic sense of seeking adventure that ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... repented now that she had given him any such promise. What good was she to do by interceding between her son and Miss Nevill? and why was she to lay herself open to the chance of a rebuff from that young lady? It had been a senseless and quixotic idea on Maurice's part altogether. Young women do not take back a jilted lover because the man's mother advises them to do so; nor is a broken-off marriage likely to get itself re-settled in consequence of the interference ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... fiance is very musical, composes charming things, and plays delightfully on the piano; my future mother-in-law is a dear old lady, musical and universally talented; my future father-in-law is a bona-fide American, a dear quixotic old gentleman who speaks the most awful French. Although he has lived in Paris for forty years, he has never conquered the pronunciation of the French language, but has invented a unique dialect of his own. Every word that can be pronounced in English he pronounces in English, ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... 'remembered his relating [about the year 1756] a strange Quixotic scheme he had in contemplation of going to decipher the inscriptions on the written mountains, though he was altogether ignorant of Arabic, or the language in which they might be supposed to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... this point we stumble against the problem that has prompted the ebullitions of the wit and the sarcasm of the critic. A casual reference to the science immediately suggests to the layman an impossible or quixotic system of marriage by force. Even the word "eugenics" is associated in the minds of many otherwise estimable old ladies, and others who should know better, with a species of malodorous free love, and their hands go up in holy horror at the intimation of a scientific ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... anything else, and I have this only grudge against him, that he intrigued me to the point of feverishly "skipping," out of sheer excitement to know if and how the deplorable misunderstanding between Flora and her quixotic Captain Anthony was to be cleared up, just like any ordinary decent library-subscriber, instead of the case-hardened critical fellow I naturally take myself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... be rewarded for his noble resolve by learning that there was no need to make the sensational story public. If the girl had died or could not be found, it would be—in Mr. Reeves's opinion—foolishly quixotic to rouse sleeping dogs, and ruin himself, to put money in the pockets of the Reynold Dorans, who had ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... generosity of the East India directors was not strained in Lamb's case. It should be recorded as an agreeable commercial phenomenon that these officials, men of business acting in "a business matter,"—words too often held to exclude all such Quixotic matters as sentiment, gratitude, and Christian equity between man and man,—were not only just, but munificent. [16] From the path of Charles and Mary Lamb—already beset with anxieties grave enoughthey ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... a mistake to suppose that he ever intended to go to war for Poland. In fact, he stated—what will be very disheartening to hon. Gentlemen below me—that he never supposed we were going to war for such a Quixotic object; that the case of Poland is one that is hopeless, and therefore it would be madness in England and France—not indiscretion—not a doubtful undertaking—but positive madness in England and France to take any part in promoting ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... thought was that now she might embrace celibacy with a good conscience. The St. Quentins are not precisely millionaires, you know. Her wealth left her free to espouse the cause of womanhood at large. She is a little bit Quixotic, dear thing, and given to tilting at windmills. She wants to secure to working women a fair business basis—that is the technical expression, I believe. And so she starts clubs, and forms circles. She says women ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... rescue was a natural impulse, but to have obeyed it would have been worse than quixotic. In the first place, the drowning man was close upon half a mile astern; in the second place, others had seen the hat and the white coat as clearly as I; among them the third officer, standing upright in the stern of the boat—which, with commendable promptitude, had already been swung into ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... their appeal to the intelligence and conscience of all classes, instead of to the interests of a special class, they could probably double their numerical strength at once. To many, therefore, it seems a fatuous and quixotic policy to preach such a doctrine, and it is very often charitably ascribed to the peculiar intellectual and moral myopia ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... of quixotic generosity at Enkhuisen, I promised Phyllis, as a newly adopted, if reluctant, brother, that I would make everything right for her. Afterwards, I was inclined to repent of the plan which had sprung, Minerva-like ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... quarters, feeling as if the whole of my military career had come to an end through my passionate, quixotic behaviour; and yet somehow I could not deeply regret ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... understand us, but I was learning to restrain my feelings. She looked at me wistfully.... I knew that she would insist on telling my father, and thus possibly frustrate my plans. That I was not discovered was due to a certain quixotic twist in my father's character. I was working now, and though not actually earning my own living, he no longer felt justified in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... A.J. Munby pointed out that Smollett, in one of his letters dated March 18, 1765, giving an account of his journey from Nice to Turin, describes how he ascended "the mountain Brovis," and on the top thereof met a Quixotic figure, whom he thus pictures: "He was very tall, meagre, and yellow, with a long hooked nose and twinkling eyes. His head was cased in a woollen nightcap, over which he wore a flapped hat; he had a silk handkerchief about his neck, and his ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... from disinterested parties. The boy has done a good big thing. I've got to help him out. It seems too bad to offer him only half of what he needs, but I'm not a very wealthy man. I can't be utterly Quixotic. We've all got to help him all ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... amends for the ill fortune which, unwittingly and indirectly, I had been the means of bringing upon him. When I had made up my mind, I mooted the project to Captain Galsworthy, who laughed at it as quixotic, but confessed that he saw no better ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... His lordship commands the York hussars, in defence of whose whiskers he sometime since made a Quixotic attack upon a public writer. As he is full six feet high, and we are not quite five, prudence bids us place our finger on ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... a bundle of Cissie's clothes. Tump took the bundle of dainty lingerie, the intimate garments of the woman he loved, and set forth on his quixotic errand. He tied it to his shoulder-holster and set out. Peter went a little of the way with him. It was almost dusk when they started. The chill of approaching night stung the men's faces. As they walked past the footpath ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... knowledge, and at once he had filled in and coloured the sketchy outlines of the picture drawn by the rather foolish if kindly natured Miss Weatherfield. Yes, it was true that he had been a fool, though a quixotic fool—so Blanche had felt on hearing his version of the story. At the time of the marriage Varick had been nineteen, his wife five years older. The two had soon parted, but they had made up their differences after a separation which lasted four years. Varick's fortunes had ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... think of the Australians in France I always think of a windmill. This is not implying that they were in any sense Quixotic or that they tilted at a windmill, there being nothing left of the windmill to tilt at when their capture of its ruins became the crowning labor of their first tour on the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... hazard, without some useful purpose to guide the exercise of courage. These intrepid fellows merely knew that a man had fallen overboard, and that was all; so away they leaped out of the ports and over the hammock-nettings, without knowing whereabouts the object of their Quixotic heroism might be. The boats were obliged to pick up the first that presented themselves, for they were all in a drowning condition; but the two unhappy men who had been flung from aloft, being furthest ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... The strange catastrophes which one sees so often in human life, where a man by one act of rashness, or moral folly, upsets the tranquil tenor of his life—a desperate love-affair, a passion of unreasonable anger, a piece of quixotic generosity—are often a symptom of a great effort of the soul to free itself from prudential considerations. A good thing done for a low motive has often a singularly degrading and deforming influence on the soul. One ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he. Indeed, he always felt that Government stood alone and desperate, with its back to the wall. He was too quixotic to have ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... piece of Shaw therefore, the thing is of the best. But it is also something much better than Shaw. The writer touches certain realities commonly outside his scope; especially the reality of the normal wife's attitude to the normal husband, an attitude which is not romantic but which is yet quite quixotic; which is insanely unselfish and yet quite cynically clear-sighted. It involves human sacrifice without in the ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... lead direct to the abominable ferry. I said, "I know nothing of them;" but now I verily believe you mean to twit me with my former experiment in railway knowledge, and have no intention to purchase shares in the La Mancha Company (and I doubt if there be any such) to countenance your Quixotic pleasantry. I did speculate once, it is true, in one—London and Falmouth Scheme—with very large promises. I was then living at W——, when one day, just before I was going to sit down to dinner, a chaise stops at my door, out steps a very "smart man," and is ushered into ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... Burke, who had begun politely enough, became obstreperous and abusive. Froude's life was in danger, and he was put under the special protection of the police. The English newspapers, except The Pall Mall Gazette, gave him no support, and The Times treated his enterprise as Quixotic. A preposterous rumour that he received payment from the British Ministry obtained circulation among respectable persons in New York. He had intended to visit the Western States, but the project was abandoned in consequence of growing Irish hostility which ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... be considered whether the movement toward Utah appeared any less Quixotic in 1846 than does the idea of an emigration to Papua now. On that island the Mormons would encounter no such obstacles to material prosperity as their indomitable industry has already conquered in Utah. They would find a fertile soil, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... a move. The idea that the Public School boy's code of honour forces him to own up at once is entirely erroneous. Boys only own up when they are bound to be found out; they are not quixotic. ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... quixotic to urge teachers who tell stories to little children to bear these thoughts, and better ones of their own, in mind? Not, I think, if it be fully accepted that the story hour, as a play hour, is a time peculiarly ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... sad that I could not endure it, and I went straight to her and took her hand as I said: 'Miss Burton, is there anything Ik Stanton can do to make you happier? It's none of my business, I suppose, but it's breaking my heart to see you becoming so sad and pale. I may seem to you very foolish and Quixotic, but there is no earthly think I would not do or suffer for you.' She did not withdraw her hand as she replied, very gently: 'Mr. Stanton, please do me the kindness to be happy yourself, and forget me.' I could only say, in honesty: 'You have asked just the ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... gratitude. But I never met with very warm support in carrying on this object, but was often exposed to some sarcastical insinuations or sardonic smiles from those who thought the attempt to ameliorate the condition of the Gipsies, only Quixotic. ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... place, lighted only by a single candle set upon the floor. The mountebank lay on his back upon a pallet; a large man with a Quixotic nose inflamed with drinking. Madame Tentaillon stooped over him, applying a hot water and mustard embrocation to his feet; and on a chair close by sat a little fellow of eleven or twelve, with his feet dangling. These three were the only occupants except the shadows. But the shadows were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... minute." The speaker bowed. "In defense of my promise to fight fair, let me assure you, however, that I did not start this. As a matter of fact, I knew nothing about it until you had been hooked. Apropos of that quixotic promise, please remember that your own actions have ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... not been ten days in office before he realized the futility of resistance to the established order, as represented in his superior. He had accepted his nomination, and welcomed his election, with an almost Quixotic elation in the opportunity thus opened to him. He would accomplish—oh, there was no telling what ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... would be a sin to allow it; it would be spoiling a saint to patch up a sinner. Thayer's future is too broad to be limited by a futile creature like Lorimer. If he turns Quixotic, I'll poison him. At least, that will ensure his dying in the ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... seen the "wahoo," or winged elm of the South, and there are several other native elms, as well as a number of introductions from the Eastern Hemisphere, with which acquaintance is yet to be made. All of them together, I will maintain with the quixotic enthusiasm of lack of knowledge, are not worth as much as one-half hour spent in looking up under the leafy canopy of our own preeminent American elm—a tree surely among those given by the Creator for the healing ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... en algo to abide by something. quehacer m. business, duty. queja lament. quejar vr. to complain. quemar to burn. querellante plaintiff. querer to wish, love. quien, quien who, whom, which. quijotesco Quixotic. quimerico chimerical, extravagant. quince fifteen. quinientos, -as five hundred. quinta conscription. quinto conscript. quitar to take away, remove. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... standard,[346] the Boers had shown themselves utterly unworthy of the administrative autonomy conferred upon them by Great Britain. Judged by the laws of war,[347] they had been saved from the alternatives of physical annihilation or abject submission by the almost quixotic generosity of the enemy who fed and housed their non-combatant population. From a constitutional point of view, the presence of Article IV.[348] in the London Convention was in itself sufficient to refute the claim of the republic to ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... we should simply declare we will defend the neutrality of Belgium by arms in case it should be attacked. Now, the sole or single-handed defense of Belgium would be an enterprise which we incline to think quixotic; if these two great military powers [France and Prussia] combined against it—that combination is the only serious danger; and this it is which by our proposed engagements we should, I hope, render improbable to the very last degree. I add for myself this confession of faith: If the ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... like a magic-lantern show of peculiarly enlivening character, at which we looked on like merry children. Hans, who was in an equally happy mood—for we all seemed to each other to be embarked on some Quixotic adventure—called my attention to Brendel, who was sitting not far from us, and seemed to be expecting me to recognise him. I found it entertaining to prolong this suspense thus occasioned, by pretending not to know him, whereat, as it appears, the poor man ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... tried to reconcile our asking for a band of horsemen with our professed trust in God's hand; and there would have been plenty of excuses very ready about using means as well as exercising faith, and not being called upon to abandon advantages, and not pushing a good principle to Quixotic lengths, and so on, and so on. But whatever truth there is in such considerations, at any rate we may well learn the lesson of this story—to be true to our professed principles; to beware of making our religion a matter of words; to live, when ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... he was, wished to move on. Gaston lifted his hat to the girl and bade her good-bye. Then she saw that his motives had been wholly unselfish—even quixotic, as it appeared to her—silly, she would have called it, if silliness had not seemed unlikely in him. She had never met a man like him before. She ran her fingers through her golden- brown hair nervously, caught at a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "Notely has quixotic ideas in many ways: if he had given any ground for a foolish confidence in his boyhood he would hold to it now, against all his life's advancement, filial duty—yes, even against personal inclination, for ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... emancipation. To do this, he stirs up such agitations as lure his enemies into measures that will do him no injury. The venal politician is always at his call, and assumes the form of saint or sinner, as the service may demand. Nor does he overlook the enthusiast, engaged in Quixotic endeavors for the relief of suffering humanity, but influences him to advocate measures which tend to tighten, instead of loosing the bands of slavery. Or, if he can not be seduced into the support of such schemes, he is beguiled into efforts that waste his strength on objects ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... will never do one quixotic thing," said a Queenslea professor, who had a habit of uttering rather mysterious epigrams, "but if he ever does it will supply the one thing lacking ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a Quixotic idea you have gotten into your head that you should go back to the mountains and spend your life trying to help your people," Mr. ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... indeed, the great doubt in his mind was echoed in that of every man present: what would be the outcome of Ivan's audacity? If Brodsky took the remonstrance in bad part—and who doubted that he would?—what would be the fate of Gregoriev? Poor fellow! He had undertaken a quixotic task; and more than one of his fellow-officers regretted that they had not had the generosity to warn him of what he certainly should himself have realized—the strong possibility ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... the girl's swift retort. "But there," as a horrified exclamation came from the bed, "he won't ask me, auntie," the girl went on, with a dash of angry impatience in her voice, "so you needn't worry. Seth has a sense of honor which I call quixotic, and one that might reasonably shame the impecunious fortune-hunters I've met since I have lived in England. No, I'm afraid if I were to marry Seth ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... development and education of superior feminine minds, in the wealthier circles. Not because there are not noble objects for interest and effort, abundant, and within reach of such minds; but because long-established custom has made it seem so quixotic to the majority, even of the professed followers of Christ, for a woman of wealth to practice any great self-denial, that few have independence of mind and Christian principle sufficient to overcome such an influence. The more a mind has its powers ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that to Lyons. Either of these promotions would have had the advantages of a considerable increase of income, less laborious duties, and a much more agreeable residence. Turgot, with a high sense of duty that probably seemed quixotic enough to the Controller-General, declined the preferment, on the very ground of the difficulty and importance of the task that he had already undertaken. 'Poor peasants, poor kingdom!' had been Quesnay's constant exclamation, and it had sunk deep into the spirit of his ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... carry your knapsack," said Arnfinn, who was flitting about like a small nimble spaniel trying to make friends with some large, good-natured Newfoundland. "You must be very tired, having roamed about in this Quixotic fashion!" ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... an able-bodied man of her blood above ground to earn it for her. Nor could there be any disgrace so lasting, even to the third and fourth generation, as the stigma an outraged community would place upon the renegade who refused her aid and comfort. An unprogressive, quixotic life if you will—a life without growth and dominant personalities and lofty responsibilities and God-given rights—but oh! the sweet mothers that it gave us, and the wholesomeness, the cleanliness, the loyalty of ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... dishonour of one century can become the honour of the next. I am inclined to believe just the opposite. I believe that the man who has so sensitive a conscience about what is honourable or not, that he is called a Quixotic fool by his contemporaries, is far more likely to be right than the coarser majority who only see that a certain course is expedient. I should believe that he saw some truth of morality clearly which the rougher sort ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a moment to do a quixotic act, to say to the woman, "I will find this money for your husband; don't trouble Mrs. Crofton," and but for what had happened not an hour ago he would almost certainly have done so. But now he felt as if he never wanted to hear Enid Crofton's name mentioned again, and he would have given ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... is above the middle size, with marked features, and an air somewhat stately and Quixotic. He reminds one of some of Holbein's heads, grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour, kept under by the manners of the age or by the pretensions of the person. He has a peculiar sweetness in his smile, and great depth and manliness ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... must look to France in the first instance for protection against Germany, to Germany if she is assailed from the French side. In either case we should hold ourselves bound to exercise our influence, but not as principals. Any other course would be impossibly quixotic, and would only have the effect of destroying our power to help the states within ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... defence are within our reach. One of two things—either we must retain the Indians, who are bound to us in one common interest, or we must, by discarding them, quietly surrender the Canadas to your armies. Few will be Quixotic enough to hesitate as to which of the alternatives we should adopt. If the people of the United States condemn us for employing the Indians, they are wrong. They should rather censure their own Government, either for declaring ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... save her dog's life? Did he not marry her daughter to the brigadier of gendarmes (sale voyou!), who would otherwise have left her lamenting? Was he not the most wonderful of God's creatures?—Mme. Bidoux, although not quite appreciating Aristide's quixotic delicacy, took the forlorn and fragile wisp of misery to her capacious bosom. She made her free of the cabbages and charcoal. She provided her, at a risible charge, with succulent meals. She told her tales of her father and mother, of her neighbours, of the domestic differences between the ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... whole life into an adventure, a kind of quixotic pursuit of the lost loved one, Pleasure. In the mean time, his heart was dead to all the better and nobler feelings. But, at one time, it seemed as if a higher and more serious inclination promised permanently to enchain this dreaded rival of all ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... her enthusiasm. "The people over at Danby are all crazy about him, I think," said Stephen. "He is a very good man no doubt, and does no end of things for the college boys, that none of the other professors do. But I think he is quixotic and sentimental; and all this stuff about those niggers at the Cedars is moonshine. They'd pick his very pocket, I daresay, any day; and he'd never suspect them. I know that lot too well. The Lord ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... different man from the chivalrous and quixotic Essex now took the reins. Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, had expected to be sent to Ireland when Essex had suddenly been appointed with ampler powers and a more extended consequence, and the disappointment had caused him to follow the course of that ill-starred favourite with ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... dear face of the woman for whom he had chosen to cross that arbitrary will which would brook no disobedience, and sought to intimidate him with disinheritance. Through his mind passed in slurred detail the sordid story which had given him a brother's hate in return for a quixotic championing of the weak—a hate which proved to have power enough behind it to draw a devastating hand across the promise of ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... education of the deaf was received with scarcely concealed skepticism, and despite the enthusiasm of the promoters and despite the cordial interest manifested in many quarters, there were not a few doubters. Efforts to educate the deaf were even declared quixotic and absurd. When the state of Illinois was erecting a building to be used as a school, it was by some called "the state's folly."[194] The legislatures themselves occasionally had misgivings, and now and then an appropriation ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... He knew the type with which he had to deal. Quixotic and generous to the verge of folly, the type that will sacrifice itself without reserve for an illusion, an ideal; the type that filled monasteries, and Siberian prisons, and made a jest for half the world. Such men were valuable to the Cause, because they gave ungrudgingly, ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... had asserted itself, and asserted itself successfully. It had been enabled to do so by Sir Charles's action. To him the matter represented the mere carrying out of a bargain; but friends were, as is natural in such a case, remonstrant, and he was accused of "needless self-sacrifice," of "Quixotic conduct," of "self-abnegation," of "your usual disinterestedness in politics," and the bargain was much criticized. A letter from Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, congratulating Sir Charles on the stand he had made, added: "Not that I am altogether satisfied with the result. I had assumed that ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... Miss Cunningham, March 17, 1869). 'I am thoroughly and grievously out of spirits about these plans of ours. On the whole I incline towards them; but they not unfrequently seem to me cruel to Mary, cruel to the children, undutiful to my mother, Quixotic and rash and impatient as regards myself and my own prospects.... I have not had a really cheerful and easy day for weeks past, and I have got to feel at last almost beaten by it.' He goes on to tell how he has been chaffed with the characteristic freedom of barristers for his consequent ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... not sufficiently Quixotic to attempt a defence of the Carthaginians on the western coast of Africa, or any where else, but I submit that the accusation brought against them by Mr. S. Bannister, formerly Attorney-General of New South Wales, is not sustained by the only ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various
... during those years of suspense, Marsden was willing to venture forth among the cannibals, but he was forbidden by Governor Macquarie. That all-powerful functionary was determined that such a valuable life should not be thrown away on what appeared to be a quixotic scheme. But the chaplain was not to be altogether balked. He received into his parsonage whatever Maoris of good standing he could find; showed them the varied activities of his model farm; and explained to them the principles of the laws which he was called to administer ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... so much being disposed of, what is left? Why, he is contending for the right of the People, when they come to make a State Constitution, to make it for themselves, and precisely as best suits themselves. I say again, that is Quixotic. I defy contradiction when I declare that the Judge can find no one to oppose him on that proposition. I repeat, there is nobody opposing that proposition on principle. * * * Nobody is opposing, or has opposed, the right of the People when they form a State Constitution, to form it for themselves. ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... one who is wrong-headed. This intended invasion of Italy by the Orientals was simply ridiculous, and nothing but a product of the impotent imagination of despair. Through the prudent coolness of their leader the Romans were prevented from Quixotically pursuing their Quixotic antagonist and warding off in the distant Crimea an attack, which, if it were not nipped of itself in the bud, would still have been soon enough met at the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... monosyllable voiced disillusionment. With a partial return to the academic calm of his normal life Bernard Graves candidly told himself that the actual basis of his resentment against Shelby was trivial; that the editor's outlook on politics was Quixotic, not to say Micawberesque; and that his own wisdom in venturing for such a cause, with such a pilot, on such uncharted seas, was questionable to ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... less punished; and I authorise you to give me up for trial if you think that best—or, if you think it unnecessary, in the meanwhile to make preparations for their defence. I hope, sir, that I am as little anxious to be Quixotic as I am determined to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... interest in missions, look on missionaries as good men engaged in a Quixotic enterprise, and know almost nothing about their work, but still they treat them with courtesy. There are, however, some of our own countrymen who take a deep interest in our work, visit our schools, occasionally attend our native ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... so," returned Constance earnestly. "You know I've taken a queer interest in this quixotic attempt of Mr. Gamble's to make his million. It's like a fascinating game, and I almost feel as if I were playing it myself—I'm ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... him on his mettle and call out his chivalry. The mass of his critics are roundly made game of, in a boisterously genial sally, as "sweeps" officiously concerned at his excess of "smoke." Pacchiarotto is a whimsical tale of a poor painter who came to grief in a Quixotic effort to "reform" his fellows. Rhyme was never more brilliantly abused than in this tour de force, in which the clang of the machinery comes near to killing the music. More seriously, in the finely turned stanzas At the Mermaid, and House, he avails himself of the habitual reticence ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... in spite of his effort to keep the blood back from his face. "You have solved the problem, and won't make use of the greatest invention of all the ages! Surely, Professor, that is a little quixotic, is ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... the preponderance of our neighbour's good over out own may be. If we have to undergo an almost equal risk in order to save another, or, in order to promote another's interests, to forego interests almost as great, is not our conduct more properly designated as weak or quixotic, than noble or generous? This would not, I think, be the answer of mankind at large to the question, or that of any person whose moral sentiments had been developed under healthy influences. When a man, at the risk of his own life, saves another from drowning, ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... enlisted many blacks in his project for insurrection. But before the plot was ripe it was betrayed by a slave woman, and several negroes were arrested. Boxley thereupon marched with a dozen followers on a Quixotic errand of release, but on the road the blacks fell away, and he, after some time in hiding, surrendered himself. Six of the negroes after conviction were hanged and a like number transported; but Boxley himself broke jail ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... East. Henry the Fourth sanctioned a scheme with this object, but it came to nothing; and Colbert only succeeded in obtaining the right for his countrymen to land their goods at Whampoa, the river port of Canton. But French commerce never flourished in China, and a bold but somewhat Quixotic attempt to establish a trade between that country and the French settlements on the Mississippi failed to achieve anything practical. But what the French were unable to attain in the domain of commerce they ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... she managed to win Vandervelde's interest and sympathy. That she had won young Peter Champneys's didn't surprise him. He was glad that she had had that one disinterested and kindly deed to look back to. The boy's quixotic behavior brought a smile to the lawyer's lips. Fancy his wishing to send such a girl to his uncle and being sure that old Chadwick wouldn't misunderstand! Gracie cast a new light upon Peter Champneys, and a very ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... Furthermore, he intended to follow this work with a universal history in eight volumes with a view to establishing, as far as may be gathered, Little Russia and the world in proper relation, connecting the two; a quixotic task, surely. A poet, passionate, religious, loving the heroic, we find him constantly impatient and fuming at the lifeless chronicles, which leave him cold as he seeks in vain for what he cannot find. "Nowhere," he writes in 1834, "can I find ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... fact! and I can't learn. I suppose you would be glad to see me rubbing around in old calico dresses, wouldn't you? and keeping only one girl, and going into the kitchen, like Miss Dotty Peabody? I think I see myself! And all just for one of your Quixotic notions, when you might just as well keep all your money as not. That is what it is to marry a reformer! I never have had any peace of my life on account of your conscience, always something or other turning up that you can't act like anybody ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the monarch so ordered affairs that the conditions under his edict were kept in force for many days. He proposed to give a thorough test to his quixotic ideas. The portion of the workmen was hard manual labor by day in the upper regions of air and light, and by night the relaxation of enervating luxury; and the portion of the brokers was deep dejection, deep curses, and ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... conquer the Philippines. To many this eventuality did not seem objectionable, as is indicated by the remark, already quoted, of an American official to certain Germans: "We don't want the Philippines; why don't you take them?" That this attitude was foolishly Quixotic is obvious, but more effective in the molding of public opinion was the feeling that it ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... a woman, no longer perhaps externally attractive, whom you could never possibly respect or love for her own internal qualities! Don't go and wreck your own life, and your brothers' lives, for any mistaken and Quixotic notions of false honour! You mayn't like to throw her over, after you've once been inveigled into saying "Yes" (and the feeling, though foolish, does your heart credit); but reflect, my dear boy, such a promise, so obtained, can hardly be considered ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... ever been heard of the tragedy mentioned by Dr. Farr; it was probably never completed. The same gentleman speaks of a strange Quixotic scheme which Goldsmith had in contemplation at the time, "of going to decipher the inscriptions on the written mountains," though he was altogether ignorant of Arabic, or the language in which they might be supposed to be written. "The salary of three hundred pounds," adds Dr. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... have improved under her influence, had she chosen to exert any. Tasma's more recent work is better both in spirit and literary construction. Very sympathetic and entertaining is the narrative, in Not Counting the Cost, of the adventures of the Clare family in their quixotic travels in search of the cousin who is to restore them a long-lost heritage. In this story and The Penance of Portia James the author gives some interesting scenes of Paris life. But to get the best samples of her humour, one must return ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... He almost wished that he had left the Democrats to their own devices. But no! he had done the right, and that was the main point. The sense of failure, however, robbed him of confidence in regard to the future. How should he act? Since high motives were ineffectual, Quixotic, ought he to discard them and come down to the ordinary level? 'Twould be better not to live at all. The half-life of a student, a teacher, dwelling apart from the world, would be preferable ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... indeed, was it possible not to despair of that untamable nature which age and reason, which so much attention and affection had left unmoved in her prejudices and her hatred? How was it possible to understand, and, above all, ever to overcome the quixotic sentiment, or rather the mania which had taken possession of that concentrated soul, and which was smoldering in it, ever ready to break forth in ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... my brothers and sisters of the pen, I am capable of impulsive, even quixotic action, and I ought, in justice to myself, to mention here that I had not then read that noble book "The Treasure of Heaven," in which it will be remembered that a generous-souled woman takes in from the storm, and nurses back to health in her lowly cottage, an aged tramp ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... are you to know till you have taken the matter up and sifted it? But what you propose is Quixotic in every way. It will not hold water for a moment. You know as well as I do that no barrister would keep a wig on his head who pretended to such a code of morals in his profession. Such a doctrine is a doctrine of puritanism—or ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... up from her perch on the armchair and would have followed, but a movement of obstinacy or Quixotic wrath, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lost all my manhood," he answered, roughly. "Yesterday you assumed the blame for this trouble, and spoke of sacrifices—and— well, I don't know much about women; but for all I know, you may have some ridiculous, quixotic strain in your make-up. I ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... decided to speak to Mary about it. Her clear common-sense point of view seemed to drive, like the sun, through the mists of his obscurity; she always saw straight through things—never round them—and her practical mind arrived at a quicker solution than was possible for his rather romantic, quixotic sentiment. ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... afraid Eric Marshall will never do one quixotic thing," said a Queenslea professor, who had a habit of uttering rather mysterious epigrams, "but if he ever does it will supply the one ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... else, and I have this only grudge against him, that he intrigued me to the point of feverishly "skipping," out of sheer excitement to know if and how the deplorable misunderstanding between Flora and her quixotic Captain Anthony was to be cleared up, just like any ordinary decent library-subscriber, instead of the case-hardened critical fellow I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... what my young Japanese friend, the new light, to whom I listened once on board ship, while he launched into a diatribe upon the jinrikisha question, the degrading practice, as he termed it, of using men for horses,—I wonder, I say, what he would have said to this! He was a quixotic youth, at the time returning from abroad, where he had picked up many new ideas. His proposed applications of them did him great credit, more than they are likely to win among the class for whom they were ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... insufficiently represented, bearing in mind the large amount of scientific and theoretical leadership. This is in accordance with the dictates of caste, inherited from Spain. The upper class have always had Indians to wait upon them, and a Quixotic tendency to the despising of manual labour has naturally resulted, as among the leisured class of any other country. Any occupation that cannot be performed in the habiliments of the frock-coat and silk hat seems derogatory ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... a typical business man of the present day, is not conscious of any such feeling. If by chance, an idea of this kind did creep into his head, he would dismiss it as quixotic, not practical. He believes that "business is business." If you ask him whether Shylock was right and justified in demanding his pound of flesh, he might hesitate a moment, but after thinking it over, he would ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... it is not customary to suppose that devotion to the service of mankind is rational; it is taken to be gratuitous, if not quixotic. But once let it be granted that goodness accrues to action in proportion to its fruitfulness, it follows that that action is most blessed that is dedicated without reservation to the general life. There is only one course which can recommend itself to that fair and open mind to which I conceive ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... who may read Paine's opening sketch of the French Revolution, written to refute Burke's narrative of the same events, will not deny Paine's complete success. He will even meet with sentences that Burke might have composed. For instance: Paine ridicules, as Quixotic, the fine passage in the "Reflections on the Decay of Chivalry"; and adds, "Mr. Burke's mind is above the homely sorrows of the vulgar. He can only feel for a king or for a queen. The countless victims of tyranny have no place in his sympathies. He is not affected by the reality ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... years I never thought of appointments or of getting on in the world in a pecuniary sense. My friends often laughed at me, and when I think of it now, I confess I must have seemed very Quixotic to many of those who tried for this and that, got lucrative appointments, married rich wives, became judges and bishops, ambassadors and ministers, and could hardly understand what I was driving at with my Sanskrit ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... in missions, look on missionaries as good men engaged in a Quixotic enterprise, and know almost nothing about their work, but still they treat them with courtesy. There are, however, some of our own countrymen who take a deep interest in our work, visit our schools, occasionally attend our native services, and contribute liberally to our ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... for the right, and she found by indirection many excuses for avoiding its performance. "Of course," she said to herself, "if heirs should be found in my lifetime, I would revoke this testament; but it is not right that I should bind those who come after me for all time to yield to his Quixotic notions. Besides, why should I be juster than the law? This property has been in the family for a long time, and ought to ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... Chrzanowski, 'because you landed 10,000 men, and occupied the isthmus which connects Kinburn with the main land. The garrison saw that they were invested, and had no hope of relief. They were not Quixotic enough, or heroic enough, to prolong a hopeless resistance. ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... The Dutch, equally quixotic, refrained from taking advantage of the enemy's inability to use his broadsides while thus approaching nearly head-on. Arrayed in a close column, the ships about six hundred feet apart, the crews at the guns, and the marines drawn up on the poops, they waited in silence ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... Cunningham, March 17, 1869). 'I am thoroughly and grievously out of spirits about these plans of ours. On the whole I incline towards them; but they not unfrequently seem to me cruel to Mary, cruel to the children, undutiful to my mother, Quixotic and rash and impatient as regards myself and my own prospects.... I have not had a really cheerful and easy day for weeks past, and I have got to feel at last almost beaten by it.' He goes on to tell how ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... chance there for work, and at least see the city, which I had never seen, and get my cyclopaedia and magazine. It was the least offer the Public ever made to me; but just then the Public was in a collapse, and the least was better than nothing. The plan of so long a journey was Quixotic enough, and I hesitated about it a good deal. Finally I came to this resolve: I would start in the morning to walk to the lock-station at Brockport on the canal. If a boat passed that night where they ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... of his marriage, and the criticism of his wife, had another effect on Jackson which in time became important to the whole country. Through that experience his chivalrous feeling for women was developed into a quixotic readiness to be the champion of any woman whom he found distressed ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown
... other purpose. She recked nothing of the imaginary rights of others. She had no patience with her husband when he declared to her that he could not accept the hospital unless he knew that Mr. Harding had refused it. Her husband had no right to be quixotic at the expense of fourteen children. The narrow escape of throwing away his good fortune which her lord had had, almost paralysed her. Now, indeed, they had received a full promise, not only from Mr. Slope, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... Mr. Vetch, and do something in the practice of law to make amends for the ill fortune which, unwittingly and indirectly, I had been the means of bringing upon him. When I had made up my mind, I mooted the project to Captain Galsworthy, who laughed at it as quixotic, but confessed that he saw no ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... Armstrong gave his new ally a faithful account of the family difficulty: of Captain Oliphant's embarrassing relations to the claimant, of Miss Rosalind's dilemma, of Roger's quixotic determination to find his lost brother, and of his own—the tutor's—conviction of the hopelessness ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... school companion of his sister, from whom he was separated within three years; under the influence of WILLIAM GODWIN (q. v.) his revolutionary ideas of politics and society developed apace; engaged in quixotic political enterprises in Dublin, Lynmouth, and elsewhere, and above all put to practical test Godwin's heterodox view on marriage by eloping (1814) to the Continent with his daughter Mary, whom he married two years ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... be for us, as truly as for Joshua and his host, a revelation of who is our true leader, surely all of us in our various degrees, and especially any of us who have any 'Quixotic crusade' for the world's good on our consciences and on our hands, may take the lessons and the encouragements that are here. Own your Leader; that is one plain duty. And recognise this fact, that by no other power than by His, and with no other weapons than those which He puts into our hands, in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Answer.—To McKinley and his supporters, engaged in a sanguinary struggle to maintain American supremacy, such talk was more than quixotic; it was scarcely short of treasonable. They pointed out the practical obstacles in the way of uniform self-government for a collection of seven million people ranging in civilization from the most ignorant hill men to the highly cultivated inhabitants of ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... Quixotic is his enterprise, and hopeless his adventure is, Who seeks for jocularities that haven't yet been said. The world has joked incessantly for over fifty centuries, And every joke that's possible has long ago ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... rehearsal affected us like a magic-lantern show of peculiarly enlivening character, at which we looked on like merry children. Hans, who was in an equally happy mood—for we all seemed to each other to be embarked on some Quixotic adventure—called my attention to Brendel, who was sitting not far from us, and seemed to be expecting me to recognise him. I found it entertaining to prolong this suspense thus occasioned, by pretending not to know him, whereat, as it appears, the poor man was much ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... never thought of getting it without paying for it. Lady Ongar, I really can not advise you to take any such step as that—indeed, I can not. I should be wrong, as your lawyer, if I did not point out to you that such a proceeding would be quite romantic—quite so—what the world would call Quixotic. People don't expect such things ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... QUIXOTIC, adj. Absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote. An insight into the beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective is unhappily denied to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman's ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... connected with the more vivid interest that youth awakens. There was in him still so much of viva, city and fire, in his errors and crotchets so much of the self-delusion of youth, that one could scarce fancy him other than young. Those Quixotic, exaggerated notions of honor, that romance of sentiment which no hardship, care, grief, disappointment, could wear away (singular in a period when, at two and twenty, young men declare themselves blases!), seemed to leave him all the charm of boyhood. A season ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... champeen bone-dome?" muttered Bill. Such an attitude seemed to him both senseless and quixotic, for he had never attached the least sentiment to money. Money was an elemental necessity, therefore he looked upon it with practical, unromantic eyes, and helped himself to it as he helped himself to such elemental necessities as air or water. Most of ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... advantage, but for its help in advancing his political and imperial schemes. He employed it creditably and without ostentation, and spent none of it in social display in London. By his will he left the greater portion of it to the University of Oxford for the establishment of an amiable if somewhat quixotic system of bringing the various branches of the Anglo-Saxon race into association at a centre of learning and athletics, where they were to be leavened by a ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... that the boy was anything but foolish," she added hastily. "I'll do him the justice to admit that he's more of a fool than a villain—and I hardly know whether it's a compliment that I'm paying him or not. He got some quixotic notion into his head that Harry Maupin insulted the girl in his presence, and he called him to account for it. As if the honour of a barkeeper's daughter was ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... with scarcely concealed skepticism, and despite the enthusiasm of the promoters and despite the cordial interest manifested in many quarters, there were not a few doubters. Efforts to educate the deaf were even declared quixotic and absurd. When the state of Illinois was erecting a building to be used as a school, it was by some called "the state's folly."[194] The legislatures themselves occasionally had misgivings, and now and then an appropriation was voted for a school ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... had really had some thoughts of owning, somewhere about this point, that he had lost his head; but when it came to the point he saw that this admission was unnecessarily quixotic, and that he would be far safer if he suggested that Elise had lost hers. In fact, it was Fanny who had suggested it in the first place. It might not be altogether a fair imputation, but, hang it ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... thing that has often to be deliberately unlearnt at a later stage. The strange catastrophes which one sees so often in human life, where a man by one act of rashness, or moral folly, upsets the tranquil tenor of his life—a desperate love-affair, a passion of unreasonable anger, a piece of quixotic generosity—are often a symptom of a great effort of the soul to free itself from prudential considerations. A good thing done for a low motive has often a singularly degrading and deforming influence on the soul. One has to remember ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... decisive events of the Revolutionary struggle, Burgoyne's campaign deservedly holds the foremost place, as well for what it led to, as for what it was in inception and execution—at once the most daring, most quixotic, and most disastrous effort ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... the porter hurried from the entrance. Mr. Cupples uttered an exclamation of pleasure as a long, loosely built man, much younger than himself, stepped from the car and mounted the veranda, flinging his hat on a chair. His high-boned, quixotic face wore a pleasant smile; his rough tweed clothes, his hair and short moustache were ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... Charette and other of the French officers went to the battlefields of their prostrate country, and thus it came to pass that the Pope's defenders were found fighting side by side with Garibaldi; they, indeed, only doing their simple duty, but he, acting on an impulse of Quixotic generosity which was ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... staggered me. Could there be anything in what he said? If it was true that Jasper Titus contemplated such a quixotic move, there could be but one compelling force behind the whim: sentiment. But not sentiment on the part ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... Her Description of the Poet His Recitations Her renewed Visit A Pension from the King Proposed Journey to England The Westminster Review Angus B. Reach's Interview with Jasmin His Description of the Poet His Charitable Collections for the Poor Was he Quixotic? His Vivid Conversation His Array of Gifts The Dialect ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... of Goldsmith's friends 'remembered his relating [about the year 1756] a strange Quixotic scheme he had in contemplation of going to decipher the inscriptions on the written mountains, though he was altogether ignorant of Arabic, or the language in which they might be supposed to be written.' Goldsmith's Misc. Works, ed. 1801, i. 40. Percy says that Goldsmith applied ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... of a woman," he said to Brian, "I don't care who she is, it's absurdly Quixotic. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and if my neck was in danger I'd spare neither man, woman, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Life's a complex maze, And Nature's laws are most despotic. Vice is not killed by kindly craze. Nor suffering quelled by zeal Quixotic. Big questions the Big Scheme beset. Bid Pity think, and do not ask it Too blindly all its eggs to get ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 29, 1890 • Various
... at this point we stumble against the problem that has prompted the ebullitions of the wit and the sarcasm of the critic. A casual reference to the science immediately suggests to the layman an impossible or quixotic system of marriage by force. Even the word "eugenics" is associated in the minds of many otherwise estimable old ladies, and others who should know better, with a species of malodorous free love, and their hands go up in holy horror at the intimation of a scientific regulation ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... said the ranger, handing over his Winchester. Quixotic, perhaps, but it was Bob Buckley's way. Another man—and a braver one—might have raised a posse to accompany him. It was Buckley's rule to discard ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... Madame Caraman, aghast. "You, surely, do not mean again to face the dangers of this barbarous country, to go upon another Quixotic expedition, and drag me with you? Remember you are a woman! Besides, there are plenty of men ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... Compton having determined to rescue her, if possible, from the suspicious custody of her relatives, and naturally apprehensive of the legal difficulties which she could not doubt would impede the execution of her generous, if somewhat Quixotic project, resolved on at once sending off an express for Mr. Ferret, on whose acumen and zeal she knew she could ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... hand. The conviction had been with him before—that he could not back out just then and leave those poor people to shift for themselves, as anxious as he was to be off about his own affairs; his undertaking was quixotic, but if he abandoned it at that juncture a queer story would chase him alongcoast, and he knew what sort of esteem ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... murmured, looking after her. All her quixotic notions of honour would eventually yield to argument—of course they would. Yet his heart strangely misgave him as he ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... interest in you," he replied. "By-the-bye, I have just seen him perform a quixotic but a very fine action," Francis said. "He stopped a carter from thrashing his horse; knocked him down, bought the horse from him ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the Senate's treatment of the Numidian envoys, to leave Numidia in ten days. Of course the Senate would not acknowledge the treaty. Nor did they even go through the farce of surrendering the man who had made it. The chivalry of the era of Regulus would have seemed quixotic to cynics like Scaurus. The other Albinus, hastening to Africa, found the troops mutinous, and could effect nothing. Another tribune now stepped forward to impeach all, whether soldiers or civilians, who had assisted Jugurtha to the prejudice of the State. ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... As to confessing, I told her that I believed that if she came to peace without such a confession wisdom would dictate not to make it, and that perhaps a little romanticism was still present in the quixotic idea of confession. Discretion is sometimes the better part of veracity, and I felt sure that she would not find it difficult to forget ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... "wahoo," or winged elm of the South, and there are several other native elms, as well as a number of introductions from the Eastern Hemisphere, with which acquaintance is yet to be made. All of them together, I will maintain with the quixotic enthusiasm of lack of knowledge, are not worth as much as one-half hour spent in looking up under the leafy canopy of our own preeminent American elm—a tree surely among those given by the Creator for the healing of ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... protested, but she was utterly unable to swerve him a hair's breadth from his determination and purpose. So she was obliged to see him start off by himself on his useless and Quixotic errand. She knew that he would return disappointed, saddened, doubly depressed, and ill both in ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... see that it did break it down, appear as casual as possible. But, at the same time, he must make it quite clear to her that he could secure her safety. He felt that though she might think his firm resolve that no one should swing for the murder quixotic, she would perceive that it was only in keeping ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... selfish basis. The brutal taunt thrown out by his late adversary still rankled in his heart. It was possible, he thought, that such a construction might be put upon his affection for the child, which at best was foolish and Quixotic. Besides, had she not voluntarily abnegated his authority and affection? And what had everybody else said about her? Why should he alone combat the opinion of all, and be at last obliged tacitly to confess the truth of all they predicted? And he had been a participant in a low barroom fight ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... "enskied and sainted" wear. This is the romancist's tribute to a minister of God; and sweet the tribute is. With not a few, the bishop is chief hero, next to Jean Valjean. He is redemptive, like the purchase money of a slave. He is quixotic; he is not balanced always, nor always wise; but he falls on the side of Christianity and tenderness and goodness and love—a good way to fall, if one is to fall at all. We love the bishop, and can not help it. He was good to ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... run their course; he agreed with Erica all the time, though his heart impelled him to keep her at home. And as to Eric Haeberlein, it would have needed a far stronger mind than that of the sweet-tempered, quixotic German to resist the generous help offered by such ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... this is something that the ordinary civilized white man would not do, even if his legitimate wife and all his outside concubines were to have twins or triplets every nine months; so that, even as strange as it may appear, civilization must need go to the wild Bushmen in search of that grand old Quixotic chivalry that was in ancient times always ready to sacrifice itself ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... quality in Olga's lover, and liked though she could not approve of him. Powers of fascination in a man very often go together with lax principle, if not with active rascality; Kite was an instance to the contrary. He had a quixotic sensitiveness, a morbid instinct of honour. If it is true that virile force, preferably with a touch of the brutal, has a high place in the natural woman's heart, none the less does an ideal of male purity, of the masculine subdued to gentle virtues, make strong appeal to ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... to his lodgings in Thirty-second Street. Wild, Quixotic notions of sacrifice flooded his mood of dejection. If the worst came, he could go West with the family and learn how to do something. And yet—Mrs. Wybert. Of course it must be that. The other idea was absurd—too ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... depart from all intelligent male Parisians, he wept. Since that moment, however, a gaiety, serene and imperturbable, has been the mainstay of his happily constituted character. The girl to whom his uncle desires to see him united—odd, quixotic, intelligent, with a sort of pathetic and delicate grace, and herself very religious—belongs to an old-fashioned, devout family,. resident at Varaville, near by. M. Feuillet, with half a dozen fine touches of ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... application, even to any single department of human activity, and with such power as Mr. Ruskin's, is a prophet for his generation." In all his various labors and aims, Mr. Ruskin set before himself a high, if somewhat quixotic, ideal of life, and with great earnestness did much, not only for the elevation of his fellow-men, but for the development of sound artistic taste and the enriching and spiritualizing of life by seeking to surround it at all times with the true and the beautiful, and with the old-time ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... voice. And even in her Garden of Paradise she had heard it. And even from her Garden of Paradise she had obeyed it. For the first time she saw that act of renunciation as the average man or woman would probably see it; as an extraordinary, quixotic act, to be wondered at blankly, or, perhaps, to be almost angrily condemned. She stood away from her own impulsive, enthusiastic nature, and stared at it critically—as even her friends had often stared—and realized that it was unusual, perhaps extravagant, ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Colonel Starbottle and Jack Folinsbee look like immortals. The vagabond with the melodious voice who did something virtuous and went away warbling into the night is alive in new as in old pages, in defiance of fatigue. Preternaturally murderous gamblers with a Quixotic eye to the point of honour, saintly blackguards with superhuman splendours of affection and loyalty revealed in the final paragraph of their history, go on and on in his pages with changeless aspect. The oddest mixture of staleness and of freshness is to be found there. Since he first ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... 'so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door, but it is enough.' Of course they wouldn't work with him, and my uncle Surrey, begging your pardon, should not have attempted anything so Quixotic." ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... party angry and others who thought that there was something almost Quixotic in Mr. Gladstone's honorable resignation, because so soon as he felt himself free he gave his support to the Maynooth Bill and also to the scheme for the extension of academical education in Ireland, ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... his friends at camp shared his Quixotic ideas. They had come together from farms and shops and mills and mines, boys from college and boys from tough joints in big cities; sheepherders, street car drivers, plumbers' assistants, billiard markers. Claude had seen hundreds of them when they first came in; "show men" in cheap, ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... the York hussars, in defence of whose whiskers he sometime since made a Quixotic attack upon a public writer. As he is full six feet high, and we are not quite five, prudence bids us place our finger ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... which Richard Brithwood will not pay, and John Halifax will not go to law to make him. Nay, father dear, I am not going to quarrel with any one of your crotchets." She spoke with a fond pride, as she did always, even when arguing against the too Quixotic carrying out of the said crotchets. "Perhaps, as the reward of forbearance, the money will come some day when we least expect it; then John shall have his heart's desire, and ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... pledged the other way. I don't see how I can get off my word—to Randal Leslie. I'm not over nice, nor what is called Quixotic; but still my word is given that if I retire from the election, I will do my best to return Leslie instead ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rest of his life. If he never had another grief, ache, or pain in the whole of his life, he must have had more than ten times his share already. Anyhow whether he'll marry me or whether he won't—in his stupid quixotic ideas of his 'fitness' to do so—I'm never going to ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... in the very moment of triumph, quixotic as such scruples may seem to some, Ventimore's conscience smote him. He could not help a certain pity for the old creature, who was shaking there convulsively prepared to re-enter his bottle-prison rather than incur a wholly imaginary doom. Fakrash had aged visibly within the last hour; now he ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... they had arrived. A smattering of Italian literature, art, and manners was carried back to Spain and Germany by Spanish and German princes and governors, to be transmitted to a few courtiers and humanists; but the imagination of the lower classes of Spain and of Germany, absorbed in the Quixotic Catholicism of Loyola and the biblical contemplation of Luther, never came into fertilizing contact with the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... was, she managed to win Vandervelde's interest and sympathy. That she had won young Peter Champneys's didn't surprise him. He was glad that she had had that one disinterested and kindly deed to look back to. The boy's quixotic behavior brought a smile to the lawyer's lips. Fancy his wishing to send such a girl to his uncle and being sure that old Chadwick wouldn't misunderstand! Gracie cast a new light upon Peter Champneys, and a very ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... a palm-tree in Batavia, on that momentous morning of the 27th, was a sailor who had been left behind sick by Captain Roy when he went on his rather Quixotic trip to the Keeling Islands. He was a somewhat delicate son of the sea. Want of self-restraint was his complaint—leading to a surfeit of fruit and other things, which terminated in a severe fit of indigestion and indisposition to life in general. He was smoking—that ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... this is very sad, if every one should think as you do about my poor girls! and Phillis does so object to being called romantic;" for he had hinted in a gentlemanly way that he thought the whole scheme was crude and girlish and quixotic ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... Coates's lean Quixotic form, being duly clothed in velvets and in silks, and his bonnet richly fraught with diamonds, (whence his appellation,) his entrance on the stage was greeted by such a general crowing, (in allusion to the large ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... earnestness, and said, "No, we will not leap down. We will stop the train." With these words you left me, and crept along the foot-board towards the front of the train. Full of half angry anxiety at what seemed to me a Quixotic act, I followed. In one of the carriages we passed I saw my mother and eldest brother, unconscious as the rest. Presently we reached the last carriage, and saw by the lurid light of the furnace that the voice had spoken truly, and ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... girls and your fine ship to back it. I think Miss Stanton's idea of venturing abroad unattended, to nurse the wounded, was Quixotic in the extreme. Some American women are doing it, I know, but I don't approve of it. On the other hand, your present plan is worthy of admiration and applause, for it is ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... me has interested me so much, and the lad himself has made such a favourable impression upon me, that I believe I shall really feel more than half-inclined to undertake the somewhat Quixotic task of seeking his relatives myself when we reach England. Who knows but that it might be my good fortune to gladden the heart of a father or mother whose life has been embittered for years by the loss of perhaps an only son?" ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... was Henry Grey. An amazing encounter! I had never seen him, as you may know. I did not wait to reply to him because the Rebel pickets were not so considerate as their colonel. I recalled Uncle Jim's casual mention of Henry Grey as a rather light-minded, quixotic man. I am glad he is, but imagine what a tragedy failed to materialize because two men were awkward with the pistol. But what a strange meeting too! It is not the only case. A captain I know took his own brother prisoner last month; the Rebel would not shake hands with him. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... ears bells seemed suddenly to be ringing. His head was awhirl, his pulses fairly pounding with the weird, quixotic purport of his impulse. ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... not prevent my keeping a sharp lookout on his movements against the good Turk." As regards Paul I., ferocious and half crazy as he was, this imputation of merely interested foresight scarcely did justice to the quixotic passions which often impelled him to the most unselfish acts, but the general tendency was undeniable; and Nelson's watchful attitude exemplifies the numerous diplomatic, as well as military, responsibilities that weighed upon him. He was, practically, commander-in-chief in ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... guarantee of part of a national debt?—an undertaking too hazardous and by far too ambiguous, even for a monarch who is not backed by his kingdom—flow doubly frantic, then, for a subject! Necker imagined that the above declaration and his own Quixotic generosity would have opened the coffers of the great body of rich proprietors, and brought them forward to aid the national crisis. But he was mistaken. The nation then had no interest in his financial system. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and I also completed the story which I had begun in Sir Robert's office that morning, with the result that I was able to make my innocence as clear to him as I had already done to his wife. Sir Robert expressed the opinion that my action in taking the blame upon myself had been somewhat quixotic; but when I explained my reasons in full for doing so, he admitted that it seemed to be the only thing possible, and was good enough to say that it reflected the greatest ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... of tears. Even Belmont had ceased to be attractive in her eyes—the stern privations that surrounded her banished all thoughts of love. The realities of life had cured her in one day of all her Quixotic notions. ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... talk to "clear their ideas." She raised her eyes sometimes and looked at him as he sat there. His shabby, hapless appearance always appealed to her. She knew that he was, in reality, anything but hapless, but his clothes never fitted him, and it was impossible for him to escape from the Quixotic embarrassments of his thin hair, his high cheek-bones, his large spectacles. His smile, however, gave him his character; when he smiled—and he was always smiling—you saw a man independent, proud, wise and gentle. He was not a fool, Mr. ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... aroused Quixotic sentiment he was sick with horror. He knew that what Krevin Crood had told at last was true. He knew, too, that it would never have come out if Krevin himself had not been in danger. A feeling of almost physical nausea came over him as he remembered the callous, brutal cynicism of ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... Admitting all the beauty and charm and wholesomeness and good of this wonderful country, still it is no place for you, Madeline Hammond. You have your position, your wealth, your name, your family. You must marry. You must have children. You must not give up all that for a quixotic life in ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... do. She wears a dinky miniature of you against her naked heart. Yes, I guess I understand.... And I guess she's that kind of a girl all unselfishness and innocence, and generous perversity and—quixotic love.... It's too bad, Louis. I guess you're up against ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... questions!) The Captains' vaunting I heard, their boasts of glory and victory, While red, red, red their hands dripped red with the blood of the butchered workers. I heard the Judges' self-glorification, Quixotic fighting of windmills, Heard also the unclean jests that those respected Leaders told. And as I looked and listened, I still observed the Socialist, Unmoved and patient and serious, calm, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... on, keeping his eyes upon his companion's face and guiding himself thereby, "I'm afraid some Quixotic idea of defending this little pimpernel of ours moves you to take this step. Believe me, nothing you can do in that direction—unless indeed you have gone too far already—can avail, if ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... taking the place of freedom and mutiny from taking the place of law. He left Caracas, his native city, and here again he was taking a last farewell. In July he was in Cartagena, where the people received him with genuine affection. He recalled that it was from here he had begun his first quixotic expedition to his country in 1812. Fifteen years had elapsed since then, and he was again in Cartagena, his great work of redemption fulfilled but now in danger of ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... without some useful purpose to guide the exercise of courage. These intrepid fellows merely knew that a man had fallen overboard, and that was all; so away they leaped out of the ports and over the hammock-nettings, without knowing whereabouts the object of their Quixotic heroism might be. The boats were obliged to pick up the first that presented themselves, for they were all in a drowning condition; but the two unhappy men who had been flung from aloft, being furthest off, went to the bottom before their turn came. Whereas, had not their undisciplined ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... between his somewhat morbid and warped self and the bigness and nobility of his friend passed through Aladdin's mind. He glanced covertly at the strong, emaciated face beside him, and noted the steadiness and purity of the eyes. A little quixotic flame, springing like an orchid from nothing, blazed suddenly in his heart, and for the instant he was the better man of ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... protection against Germany, to Germany if she is assailed from the French side. In either case we should hold ourselves bound to exercise our influence, but not as principals. Any other course would be impossibly quixotic, and would only have the effect of destroying our power to help the states within ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... folding it stopped; it occurred to her that he might think courtesy demanded a formal refusal of his proposal. It was, of course, quite unnecessary; the refusal went without saying; she would no more have dreamed of accepting his quixotic offer than he would have dreamed of avoiding the necessity of making it; the one was as much a sine qua non to her as the other was to him. From which it would appear that in some ways at least their notions of honour were not ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... doctor grew alarmed, insisted on absolute quiet, and conveyed Crayme in his own carriage to the boat, saw him into his berth, and gave to Fred Macdonald a multitude of directions and cautions, the sober recording of which upon paper was of great service in saving Fred from suffering over the Quixotic aspect which the whole project had begun, in his mind, to take on. He felt ashamed even to look squarely into Crayme's eye, and his mind was greatly relieved when the captain turned his face to ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... was the girl's swift retort. "But there," as a horrified exclamation came from the bed, "he won't ask me, auntie," the girl went on, with a dash of angry impatience in her voice, "so you needn't worry. Seth has a sense of honor which I call quixotic, and one that might reasonably shame the impecunious fortune-hunters I've met since I have lived in England. No, I'm afraid if I were to marry Seth it ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... nationality, could discern quite marvelously the weaknesses of others, and his own, and was extremely skilful in playing upon them, so that he had no difficulty in gaining an ascendancy over Canet. It amused him to drag this Sancho Panza into Quixotic pranks. He made no scruple about using him, disposing of his will, his time, his money,—not for his own benefit, (he needed none, though no one knew how or in what way he lived),—but in the most compromising demonstrations of the cause. Canet submitted to it all: he tried to persuade himself ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... unfulfilled. She half repented now that she had given him any such promise. What good was she to do by interceding between her son and Miss Nevill? and why was she to lay herself open to the chance of a rebuff from that young lady? It had been a senseless and quixotic idea on Maurice's part altogether. Young women do not take back a jilted lover because the man's mother advises them to do so; nor is a broken-off marriage likely to get itself re-settled in consequence of the interference of ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... him. Only, I wish to save you. If you were alone, why, I do not say that I should trouble myself, for you yourself would not be troubled. But I have grown to love that child of yours. It is all for her. Do you now understand why I make the request? It appears Quixotic? Not at all. Put my money in jeopardy? Not while the kingdom exists. If you can not pay back, your kingdom will. Perhaps you ask what is the difference, whether I or the duke becomes your creditor? This: in ten years I shall be happy to renew the loan. In ten years, if I ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... the wreck of the Vendome. Three years and more than seven hundred thousand pounds sterling, or to make it seem more prodigious, nearly eighteen million francs, were consumed in its building. An army of skilled artisans had come out from France and Austria to make this quixotic dream a reality before the two old men should go into their dreamless sleep; to say nothing of the slaving, faithful islanders who laboured for love in the great undertaking. Specially chartered ships had carried material ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... Eleanor Hamlin, of Colhassett, Massachusetts, owed the change in her fortune. At least it was to Beulah that she owed the initial inspiration that set the wheel of that fortune in motion; but it was to the glorious enterprise and idealism of youth, and the courage of a set of the most intrepid and quixotic convictions that ever quickened in the breasts of a mad half dozen youngsters, that she owed the actual fulfillment of ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... her. She thought Collie's half promise to Overland Red to turn to their old life had been too easily made. Her pride in him was touched. She was hurt, and not a little angry. She saw the flaw in his ultimate decision to sacrifice himself and his prospects through a too stringent and quixotic interpretation of his duty. To go back to the ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... after my views; but when a quarter of the human race assume to tell me what I must do, I may be too much disturbed by the circumstances to see so clearly the absurdity of their command. Therefore all public ends look vague and quixotic beside private ones. For any laws but those which men make for themselves, are laughable. If I put myself in the place of my child, and we stand in one thought and see that things are thus or thus, that perception ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... about that. Look here; go ahead, pull whatever stunt is up your sleeve. I give you my word that if you see Leyden and feel as you do about him then, we'll hold back our own vessel until he's under weigh, no matter what we lose by it. Does that soothe your blessed Quixotic scruples?" ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... "How quixotic!" she thought discontentedly. "But he won't catch them," came the consoling afterthought, as she turned to ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... honourable of you to own up to it. If every boy in the school was as honest as you, Newall, we should soon find out who was the culprit who went to my desk. Moncrief was guilty of a Quixotic act of disobedience, as it turns out, and I think, in the circumstances he has been sufficiently punished. It is due to you that ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... disposed of, what is left? Why, he is contending for the right of the people, when they come to make a State Constitution, to make it for themselves, and precisely as best suits themselves. I say again, that is quixotic. I defy contradiction when I declare that the Judge can find no one to oppose him on that proposition. I repeat, there is nobody opposing that proposition on principle. Let me not be misunderstood. I know that, with reference to the Lecompton ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... in Norman's career—a brief and very early time—when, with the maternal peasant blood hot in his veins, he had entertained the quixotic idea of going into politics on the poor or people's side and fighting for glory only. The pressure of expensive living had soon driven this notion clean off. Norman had almost forgotten that he ever had it, was no longer aware how strong it had been in the last year at law school. ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... so close to his! He had yearned for that with all his soul for years now! And she was here, standing beside him, and his hand was upon her arm; and here, in his own den, in his own house, he was listening to another call to arms for the Gray Seal from her own lips! Honour! Was he but a poor, quixotic fool! He had only to step to the desk and switch on the light! Why should—he steadied himself with a jerk, and drew away his hand. She was in HIS house. "Go ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... life be credited with too much gravity and import, or it seem to be assumed that life is all knight-errantry, let us turn to our less quixotic, and perhaps more effectual, man of affairs. He works for his daily bread, and for success in his vocation. He has selected his vocation for its promise of return in the form of wealth, comfort, fame, or influence. He likewise performs such additional ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... account; he surveyed him with a sense of disappointment; he had always supposed that he would ultimately turn Jesuit in sober earnest, and die a martyr's death in the Far East. This would, in his opinion, have been a fine end to a Quixotic, very touching, most remarkable life. Would he now immaturely fall a victim to an enticing face and the cares of a household? Would he be able to sustain his character? One thing was certain. He could never again expect to exercise precisely the ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... became master of the Roman world. Two years later the Council of Nicaea met to utter its verdict on the Arian controversy and to establish the terms of the orthodox symbol. A generation later Julian took up the reins of empire and commenced his quixotic and fruitless attempt to revive the glories of Paganism. Athanasius died in 373: but fourteen years later Augustine, his successor in the championship of the faith, was baptized, and in 395, at the death of Theodosius, when ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... phrase. "I suppose Grexon thinks I am very Quixotic," he thought, "coming to London to tilt with the windmills of the Press. But Don Quixote was wise in spite of his apparent madness, and Grexon will recognize my wisdom when he sees my Dulcinea, bless her! Humph! I wonder if Hay could pacify ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... and editing books he conceived of a rather quixotic plan for starting a publishing house. In a letter written June 8, 1879, to his brother, Lanier urges him to come to Baltimore and go into the publishing business with him. They can then both become writers, and thus resume the plan of working together that they ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Anglo-French-Spanish movement to compel the Republic of Mexico to discharge her debts to European bondholders, and after a disagreement between the allies which led to the withdrawal of the British and the Spaniards—forty thousand French troops were engaged upon the quixotic task of disciplining Mexican opinion, suppressing civil war, and imposing upon the people an unwelcome and absurd sovereign in the person of Maximilian of Austria. His throne endured as long as the French battalions remained to support it. When they withdrew, Maximilian was deposed, court-marshalled, ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... look for joys, Quixotic hazards run; A lass annoys with trivial toys, Opposing man ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... Premier hesitates; for the Queen, Montmorin, and Breteuil are for the measure. Should it take place, all may yet come to rights, except for the Turks, who must retire from Europe, and this they must do, were France Quixotic enough to undertake to support them. We, I hope, shall be left free to avail ourselves of the advantages of neutrality: and yet, much I fear, the English, or rather their stupid King, will force us out of it. For thus I reason. By forcing us into the war against them, they ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... federation dominated by Guatemala and its masterful President. Though he "persuaded" Honduras to accept the plan, the three other republics preferred to unite in self-defense, and in the ensuing struggle the quixotic Barrios was killed. A few years later the project was revived and the constitution of a "Republic of Central America" was agreed upon, when war between Guatemala and Salvador ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... at present. I'll think about it;" and the doctor took his leave, wondering whether it could be possible that Mr. Granby intended to keep the boy; he was not much used to such Quixotic proceedings. ...
— Wikkey - A Scrap • YAM
... empty hands after the loss of his prize, the student had the quixotic delicacy to make the offer in dumbshow to lay aside his cane and undertake to chastise the insulter of womanhood with the naked fist. But this is a weapon almost unknown in the sword-bearing class which Von Sendlingen adorned, ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... child he had been, poor dear—the very pearl of the Rohans! What Rohan of them all was ever a patch on this poor bastard of Antoinette Josselin's, either for beauty, pluck, or mother-wit—or even for honor, if it came to that? Why, a quixotic scruple of honor had ruined him, and she was Rohan enough to understand what the temptation had been the other way: she had ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... the strangest contrast to the calm countenance which I saw so tranquilly listen to its own tale. It was Quixotic, and two hundred years ago could scarcely have escaped the pen of some French Cervantes. He had begun life as an officer in the French household troops in absolute boyhood. At sixteen he had married! at eighteen he had formed his political principles, and begun his military career by crossing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... This was quixotic and unpractical, if nothing worse. What other means of imparting spiritual knowledge could a young girl like Sophie have, than to exhibit to her pupil the structure and workings of her own soul? ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... Belgium. Montenegro is the next to go; and it would seem that the great belligerent nations look to themselves only, and use their weaker neighbours for their own purposes. This war is not waged by any of the great Powers as a quixotic enterprise for lofty ideals. 'Small nationalities' and other such sentimental pretexts are good enough for platform addresses to an imaginative but uninformed people, but they do not reveal the true inwardness of this war. ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... his sane moments, Peter knew that things were very bad, indeed. He was still not in love with the girl. He analyzed his own feeling very carefully, and that was his conclusion. Nevertheless he did a quixotic thing—which was ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... opium habit. Four years ago, when the news went out that China had resolved to put an end to the opium habit within ten years—had started on a ten years' war against opium—there were many who scoffed at the whole project as too ridiculous and quixotic even for praise; there were more who regarded it as praiseworthy but as being as unpromising as a drunkard's swearing off at New Year's, while those who expected success to come even in twice ten years hardly dared express their confidence ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... to pursue this Quixotic quest will find the literature abundant and very interesting. For example, such essays as that by F.W. Brockbank in Manchester Association for Research, vol. i, 1909-10; and another by A.F.A. Woodford, A. Q. C., i, 28. Better still is the Real History of the Rosicrucians, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... of the monarch so ordered affairs that the conditions under his edict were kept in force for many days. He proposed to give a thorough test to his quixotic ideas. The portion of the workmen was hard manual labor by day in the upper regions of air and light, and by night the relaxation of enervating luxury; and the portion of the brokers was deep dejection, deep ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... things. I felt the catastrophe in the air long before it came. But I couldn't warn Roger. I just had to let him find out. I wasn't there when the blow fell; but I'll tell you this, that Roger may have been a quixotic idiot in the eyes of the world, but if he failed it was because he was a dreamer, and an idealist, not a coward and a shirk." Her eyes were blazing. "Oh, if you could hear what some people said ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... think Forbes would have won, had not Hopkins forced this unfortunate issue upon him. As it is, our young friend cannot avoid the consequences of his quixotic action." ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... "by simply being turned out to grass!" So it was then that they had tried to drug their first rising doubts with the tumult of incessant travel and change. His wife had lured him to secluded places, she had struggled to interest him in a language or two, she had planned quixotic courses of reading—as though a man such as he might be remolded by a few months of modern authors!—and carried him off to centres of gaiety—as though the beat of Hungarian bands and outlandish dances could drive that inmost fever ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... General Joe Shelby. There were meetings and an exchange of plans and confidences, and the end of it all was, that Appleman rode into Mexico on that famous foray led by Shelby, when the tottering throne of Maximilian was almost given new foundation by the quixotic raiders. The story of that foray is well known, and there is no occasion for repeating it. It need only be said that when Shelby's men rode gayly home again, John Appleman was not in their company. He had met an old friend in the turbulent City of Mexico; had, with due permission, ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... the following morning with his two elder children, and I was now confronted with the task of managing them and making them useful. Upon one thing I was certainly resolved—there should be no quixotic sentiment in our relations, and no companionship between ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... I read "The Children of the Abbey," and this opened a new field of thought. My dreams, instead of being peopled with fairies and genii, were now filled with distressed damsels who met with all sorts of persecutions and Quixotic adventures, and finally ended where they should ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... our hearts I think we all honoured and loved him for them. For without forcing it in any way upon others he himself followed a code of honour that differed from, and was stricter than, that of the world around him. He was quixotic, especially in anything to do with money, and often to his own personal loss. I think we were all the better for having known him. He seemed hardly to think of ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... charity had in it even something of the quixotic. When a man came to him for assistance, he was wont to help him according to his previous position in life. Thus, in one instance where a man had formerly enjoyed great wealth but had suffered reverses, Hillel not only provided for him ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... man bowed us inside, and we proceeded on our quixotic search for a topi not entirely hideous. Half an hour later we came out of the shop, the shopman more obsequious than ever, not only wearing topis, but laden with boxes of Turkish Delight, ostrich-feather fans, tinsel scarves, and a string of pink beads ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... later that the real joke lay in the fact that Larry was English-born, and that his devotion to Ireland was purely sentimental and quixotic. His family had, to be sure, come out of Ireland some time in the dim past, and settled in England; but when Larry reached years of knowledge, if not of discretion, he cut Oxford and insisted on taking his degree at Dublin. He even believed,—or thought he ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... months at the station, the Colonel's palanquins and bearers made their appearance, and Elvira Wilkins went away weeping as a widow should. Why did she abuse Newcome ever after at Calcutta, Bath, Cheltenham, and wherever she went, calling him selfish, pompous, Quixotic, and a Bahawder? I could mention half a dozen other names of ladies of most respectable families connected with Leadenhall Street, who, according to Colonel Newcome's chum—that wicked Mr. Binnie—had all conspired more or less to ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... habit? He was not in reality thinking of her at all, but her conscience pricked her, though her pride kept her silent. It was such an unheard-of course for a person in her station, that none but fanatics could expect her to take it. Quixotic, irrational, eccentric, visionary, were words that flitted incoherently through her brain; but her tongue refused to utter them. Was Christ then so prudent, so cautious, so anxious to secure innocent indulgences and to grasp worldly advantages? Could she think of Him making life easy and ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... parliamentary cant.'[58] Although the danger which frightened Smith was evaded, this was the argument which really brought conviction even to Tories in 1829. In any case the Whigs, whose great boast was their support of toleration, would not be prompted by any Quixotic love of the church to encounter tremendous perils in defence of ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... no. In the general Holton mess he thought he ought to surrender the property. Rather quixotic, but creditable to the boy. You see Charlie was executor of their father's estate. Charlie's beyond doubt a very smooth young person. And no end plausible. He got Fred to take that farm in settlement of all claims against Samuel's estate. And when Fred found out there was trouble over his ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... my dear Ormond, which I wish you to lay to heart very seriously. Now do take an old man's advice and do not get up upon your Quixotic hobby-horse the moment you sniff what it is—for I suppose you have guessed it already. Yes, it is what you feared: I want to urge you to follow your mother's ardent wish and add commission business to your other work. I know very well that young men must dream their ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... been a (p. 082) father to me in kindness." To this generosity, it is to be added that his sense of personal honor was of the loftiest kind. It was sometimes, indeed, carried to an extreme almost Quixotic; so that men morally fat-witted could not even comprehend his principles of action, and men who contented themselves with conventional morality resented his assertion of them as a reflection upon themselves. His loyalty to those who had become dear to him was, ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... Peter,' she said at last. 'You are so chivalrous and unselfish. You're quixotic. It's that that is troubling me. Are you marrying me just because you're sorry for me? Don't speak. I can tell you now if you will just let me say straight out what's in my mind. We have known each other for two years ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... friends learned of her resolution, they were unanimous in urging her to reconsider what they called her Quixotic fancy. Lady Ludlow was greatly concerned at losing her friend for an indefinite period; she pointed out the uselessness of the proceeding; she endeavoured to overwhelm Mavis's obstinacy in the matter with a torrent of argument. She may as well have talked to the Jersey cows which grazed ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... found the sight a pleasant one. If he could but quiet his sister's troublesome scruples, he might erelong see her fondling beautiful children of her own. Even if Rena were willing to risk her happiness, and he to endanger his position, by a quixotic frankness, the future of his ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... pointed to a scrupulous nicety of view that the City, of course, deemed foolishness. And Rogers, aware of this, had taken to him, seeking as it were to make this loss good to him in legitimate ways. Also the fellow belonged to leagues and armies and 'things,' quixotic some of them, that tried to lift humanity. That is, he gave of his spare time, as also of his spare money, to help. His Saturday evenings, sometimes a whole bank holiday, he devoted to the welfare of others, even though the ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... these were between seventeen and eighteen years of age. One of them explained to me since that they did not want older men because they were afraid that such would not take their Quixotic notions seriously enough. Among them was Lorenzo Tonti, direct descendant of the Tonti, of insurance fame. The youngster had been brought to the United States by one of the followers of Garibaldi, the Italian liberator, who spent a few years in New ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... conditions were clearly stated to old Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, but that formidable lady belonged to an earlier generation, and saw no reason for Quixotic behaviour. Her conscience had been trained in the eighteenth century, and all her blame was for Rosina Wheeler. Torn between his duty and his filial affection, Bulwer-Lytton now passed through a period of moral agony. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... so sure. There is a quixotic streak in him—in all you Holidays, for that matter. You can't say much. Think of the stray boys you have taken in at one time or another, some of them ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... even thought of taming some hyenas, and training them to the hunt. This idea was by no means quixotic. The hyena is often used for such a purpose, and performs even better than many kinds ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
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