Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Ideal   /aɪdˈil/   Listen
Ideal

adjective
1.
Conforming to an ultimate standard of perfection or excellence; embodying an ideal.
2.
Constituting or existing only in the form of an idea or mental image or conception.
3.
Of or relating to the philosophical doctrine of the reality of ideas.  Synonym: idealistic.



Related searches:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Ideal" Quotes from Famous Books



... the base of the hills, was bare of trees, the soil being covered with a dense growth of guinea-grass, with a few bushes and flowering shrubs sparsely dotted about here and there—it therefore offered ideal facilities for camping. ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood

... will of its surroundings and to rise above the pressure of time and race and circumstance,[21] to choose the star that guides his course, to correct, and test, and assay his convictions by the light within,[22] and, with a resolute conscience and ideal courage, to re-model and reconstitute the character which birth and ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton

... Mrs. Hopkins, Sam failed to produce a favorable impression upon her. He was by no means her ideal of a boy, though it must be added that this ideal was so high that few living boys could expect to attain it. He must have an old head on young shoulders, and in fact be an angel in all respects except the wings. On these Mrs. Hopkins ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger

... beautifully made. That is nine-tenths of the matter. Your head is set logically on your neck, and your neck is correctly placed on your spine, and your legs and arms are properly attached to your torso—your entire body, anatomically speaking, is hinged, hung, supported, developed as the ideal body should be. It's undeformed, unmarred, unspoiled, and that's partly luck, partly inheritance, and mostly decent ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... as everybody knows, of the Oxford Movement, in which Hurrell Froude acted as a pioneer. Hurrell's ideal was the Church of the Middle Ages represented by Thomas Becket. In the vacations he brought some of his Tractarian friends home with him, and Anthony listened to their talk. Strange talk it seemed. They found out, these young men, that Dr. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... was an ideal spot for a school. The picturesque old orchard and grounds provided an almost unlimited field of amusement. Those girls who were interested in horticulture might have their own little plots at the end of the potato patch, ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil

... track and seize that burrower, and scrub and cleanse him; by which process, during the course of it, you will arrive at the conception of the right heroical woman for you to worship: and if you prove to be of some spiritual stature, you may reach to an ideal of the heroical feminine type for the worship of mankind, an image as yet in poetic outline ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... brightness brought a frown to her eyes, which she shielded with a hand cupped to her brow. A creature as entrancing as that, Grant decided, should now recite prose poetry in contralto tones to make his ideal complete. ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll

... "magic crucible" notion of assimilation is the theory of "like-mindedness." This idea was partly a product of Professor Giddings' theory of sociology, partly an outcome of the popular notion that similarities and homogeneity are identical with unity. The ideal of assimilation was conceived to be that of feeling, thinking, and acting alike. Assimilation and socialization have both been described in these terms ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... the lieutenant, who had already constituted him his heir. He even parcelled out his hours among the necessary cares of the world, the pleasures of domestic bliss, and the enjoyments of a country life; and spent the night in ideal parties with his charming bride, sometimes walking by the sedgy bank of some transparent stream, sometimes pruning the luxuriant vine, and sometimes sitting in social converse with her in a shady grove of ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... the difficulties experienced by the far more powerful and populous Northern States in quelling the secession of the Southern, when between the two there was no other frontier than at most a river, very often a mere ideal line, and when armies could be raised by 100,000 men at a time. England attempted a far more difficult task, with forces which, till 1781, never exceeded 35,000 men, and never afterwards exceeded 42,075, including 'Provincials,' i.e., American Loyalists." (But England, repeatedly on the ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson

... element of separateness, Esther was very much absorbed in her work. Not seeking, like most of the others, to pass a good examination, but studying in the love of learning, and with a far-off ideal of attainment in her mind with which she hoped one day to meet Pitt, and satisfy if not equal him. I think she hardly knew this motive at work; however, it was at work, and a powerful ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner

... German widows for every one in our country. With these we have no quarrel; we know that family affection is strong in Germany, and we are sorry for them. They, like our own suffering women, are the victims of a barbarous ideal of national glory, and a worse than barbarous perversion of patriotism, which in our opponents has become a kind ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers

... great churchman, as well as scholar and poet. As a preacher, he had few if any equals. Of dignified aspect, gifted with a rich sonorous voice, and visibly impressed at all times with the solemn character of his mission, he presented the very ideal of the pulpiteer; and, whenever and wherever he appeared, he was attended by admiring crowds composed of all ranks and classes of the people.[C] As a hymn-writer he had also great success; and ...
— The Angel of Death • Johan Olof Wallin

... of human greatness, was thirsty for something higher and more solid than any human personality. Adoration of great personalities being the very wisdom of this world, the East stretched its hands to a superhuman ideal, to the Holy Wisdom. It is a psychological fact that youth sees his ideal in personal greatness, progressed age in holiness. The East asked for something more eternal than Peter, Paul or John. There is wisdom, ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic

... late suppers without turning quite away to those ideal tea-takings of the Wordsworths at Grasmere. "Plain living and high thinking," was the motto of the philosopher-poet, and that table was never crowded with viands. One can well believe, that, as De Quincey said, in the quiet walks ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... 'red clay,' and before we were fully aware of the nature of these, we were in the habit of indicating them as 'grey ooze' (gr. oz.) We now recognise the 'grey ooze' as an intermediate stage between the Globigerina ooze and the red clay; we find that on one side, as it were, of an ideal line, the red clay contains more and more of the material of the calcareous ooze, while on the other, the ooze is mixed with an increasing proportion of ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... correspondence with you, and, incidentally, my study of man. He is really very interesting, Aunt Jennie, with the tiniest bit of secretiveness as to his own purposes in life which, of course, makes one more curious about him. In a frock coat, with gardenia in his button hole, he would make an ideal usher at a fashionable wedding. A few days ago, when we took that trip to Will's Island, I observed that he has capable limbs, properly clean-cut features and a general appearance of energetic efficiency. ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick

... do you remember that Salmasius began his vituperations of Milton with gratuitous speculations upon his supposed ugliness, and that great was his grief when he was assured that he contended with an ideal of beauty. Have you forgotten that the Antinoeus won the distinguished favor of his merry, courteous queen Christina, and that the satirist and man of 'taste' died of obscurity in a year? Beware, my little Narcissus, lest the next autumn flowers ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... far-seeing, patient; surveying all great things, disdaining no small things, but with tireless industry pursuing after all necessary knowledge. Add to these intellectual excellences the moral graces of ideal purity of life, chivalrous faithfulness of heart, magnanimous self-suppression, and fervent piety, and we have a slight outline of a character which, in the order of Providence, acted very strongly and ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling

... invincible dislike to the callow representative of the McHulish, who he felt had in some extraordinary way imposed upon Custer's credulity. But then he had apparently imposed equally upon the practical Sir James. The thought of this sham ideal of feudal and privileged incompetency being elevated to actual position by the combined efforts of American republicans and hard-headed Scotch dissenters, on whom the soft Scotch mists fell from ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... of this ocean of flesh, but he had met bitter disillusioning. As he looked into the faces of his Board of Trustees, dominated by that little bald-headed man, he felt the cruel force of Overman's sneer at the modern church as the home of the mean and the crippled and the sick. The appeal to the ideal seemed to ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... tartuffery—the histologist, Ramon y Cajal, who, as a thinker, has always been an absolute mediocrity, explains what the young scholar should be, in the same way that the Constitution of 1812 made it clear what the ideal Spanish ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... his studio. The servants never came down in this sub-cellar, and with Mrs. Whitney's connivance, I frequently managed to keep the limousine in the repair shop—and my time was my own. My surroundings were ideal, even the location of this ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... low; and every now and then, when the circumstance occasions it, it goes down lower than low ... If I read the books in the Greek, the Latin or the French course, in almost every one of them there is something with an ideal ring about it—something that I can read with positive pleasure—something that has what the child might take with him as a [Greek: ktema eis dei]—a perpetual treasure; but if I read the Irish books, I see nothing ideal ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory

... so small, and Raphael was but a boy when he painted it, the picture has the true romantic air, characteristic of the joyful years of the early Renaissance. He does not seem to have felt the conflict between the old religious ideal and the new pursuit of worldly beauty as Botticelli felt it. Yet he chose the competition of these two ideals as the subject of this picture. The Knight, clothed in bright armour and gay raiment, bearing no relation at all to the clothes worn in 1500, rests ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway

... the two girls as they travelled, in the year 1886, from New York to Rochester. Soon, all too soon, disillusionment awaited them. The ideal conception of America was punctured already at Castle Garden, and soon burst like a soap bubble. Here Emma Goldman witnessed sights which reminded her of the terrible scenes of her childhood in Kurland. The brutality and humiliation the future citizens of the ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... country of antiquity, not even excluding the Egypt of the Pharaohs, where the development of the subjective ideal into its demonstration by an objective symbol has been expressed more graphically, more skillfully, and artistically, than in India. The whole pantheism of the Vedanta is contained in the symbol of the bisexual deity Ardhanari. It ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... afford the most convenient material, as they offer the chance for constantly changing programmes and hence the ideal conditions for a novelty seeking public. No actors are needed; the dramatic interest is furnished by the political and social importance of the events. In the early days when the great stages for the production of photoplays had not been built, ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg

... surely, from his words of petition; one who had suffered much, but was willing to suffer more. The strength chiselled in that upturned face, those deeply marked features, revealed no common mental equipment. Here was a real man, with convictions, one who would die for an ideal; without doubt a radical, ready to go to any extreme ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish

... taste of CUMMING'S Five Years of a Hunter's Life in the last number of The New Monthly Magazine, from which it will be seen that the writer is a fierce, blood-thirsty Nimrod, whose highest ideal is found in the destruction of wild-beasts, and who relates his adventures with the same eagerness of passion which led him to expatriate himself from the charms of English society in the tangled depths of the African forest. Every page is redolent ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... as in all domains of ideal speculation, the dangers of deception are closely linked to the rich and certain profit to ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... note: second-smallest South American country (after Suriname); most of the low-lying landscape (three-quarters of the country) is grassland, ideal for cattle ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... I drew his half reluctant hand around my throat, then I exerted every part of my brain force ... to hold him. Ceaselessly I talked of our old days together—camping trips to the Northern woods of Canada, wonderful weeks of idling down the river in our launch, days of ideal happiness, spent together. I appealed to his love for me, his old love, and the memory of our early married life. He was unresponsive, and I could feel the restlessness of his fingers ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett

... becomes less and less scanty. When the colonists came to the east coast, they found plains and dales which were open, grassy, almost treeless. Easy of access, and for the most part fertile, they were an ideal country for that unaesthetic person, the practical settler. Flocks and herds might roam amongst the pale tussock grass of the slopes and bottoms without fear either of man, beast, climate, or poisonous plant.[1] A few wooden buildings and a certain extent of wire fencing represented ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... value to us in the battle, and aggravated by a rising distrust of the chief, to whom, more or less, every subordinate attributes as a fault the fruitless efforts he has made; and this feeling of being conquered is no ideal picture over which one might become master; it is an evident truth that the enemy is superior to us; a truth of which the causes might have been so latent before that they were not to be discovered, but which, in the ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz

... holy, to prove fatal to my soul (vii. 13)? He did not. The Law was not fatal, though sin was all but fatal. Sin was permitted to do its worst that its real hideousness might be apparent. This is what took place. The Law gave me an ideal, but my better self, which corresponds to the Law, could not keep me from ding wrong or make me do right. I became involved in a terrible conflict. This was the opportunity of Christ. He has delivered ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan

... a magical and quite ideal site, is the finest pleasure-house that ever yet the sun shone on. The park and the gardens are in the form of an amphitheatre, and are, in my opinion, sublime, in a far different way from those of Vaux. M. Fouquet, condemned to death, in ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... with Christine also up on the bluff to see Father Joseph, a Catholic priest, who represented to me a new class of men, whom I had known before only in books. His eyes were as clear blue as Emerson's ideal ones, that tell the truth; and I knew he meant it, when he answered a question I asked him, in a way that surprised me, and which I should have taken, in some men, for cant. I asked him if it was not ever solitary there; and he said, "It is enough like ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton

... is eager, keen and alert, and if there is one article of faith that moulds and colors all his life more than anything else, it is a firm and unfaltering belief in the "main chance." He has made up his mind to be rich, and his highest ideal of existence may be expressed in four words—getting on in life. To this object, he is ready to sacrifice time, talent, energy and every faculty, which he possesses. Nay, he will go farther; he will spend honor, conscience and manhood, in an eager search for gold. He will change his heart into ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

... interest, that half an hour sufficed the party to become perfectly acquainted with it; but they were repaid for their trouble by the discovery of a long, shallow, saucer-like depression, with a smooth bottom, that offered perfectly ideal facilities for the deposit of the oysters while undergoing the process of decomposition, which is the preliminary to the finding of such pearls as they may contain. There was no doubt that this would render the island and its immediate vicinity almost intolerably offensive to the olfactory nerves; ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... continually, and now that train yonder disappears again behind a group of trees. Really magnificent! And how the sun shines through the white smoke! If St. Matthew's Churchyard were not immediately behind it it would be ideal." ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... how jolly this life is, and for that matter, how jolly everything connected with the Army is. I was wondering why so many young fellows let their earlier manhood slip by without finding out what an ideal place the Army is." ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock

... flourishes, on any account. Now it is fair to say, that, just as music must have all these, so conversation must have its partial truths, its embellished truths, its exaggerated truths. It is in its higher forms an artistic product, and admits the ideal element as much as pictures or statues. One man who is a little too literal can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men of esprit.—"Yes," you say, "but who wants to hear fanciful people's nonsense? Put the facts to it, and then see where it is!" —Certainly, if a man is too fond ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... continent, which in their turn, advancing at different rates of velocity, but in the same direction, along the line of progress, form in the landscape of American history a beautiful perspective of the future, reaching to a horizon where the real and the ideal are mingled, and on whose blue field the great nationality that fills all the present ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root

... Here was precisely the popular Irish idea. Her "ancient king"—who actually lived in the wattled walls of Tara, enjoying barbarian feasts of beer and hecatombs of lean kine and sheep—is supposed to have been a refined and splendid prince, dwelling in ideal "halls," (doubtless compounded out of the Dublin Bank and Rotunda,) and enjoying the finest music on a double-action harp. As a fact, there is no evidence whatever that the old Irish Pentarchy was much better than any five chieftainships of the Sandwich Islands. Even the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... of the Snow To the Bay of Dublin To Ethna "Not Known" The Lay Missioner The Spirit of the Ideal Recollections Dolores Lost and Found Spring Flowers from Ireland To the Memory of Father Prout Those Shandon Bells Youth and Age To June Sunny Days in Winter The Birth of the Spring All Fool's Day Darrynane A Shamrock from the Irish Shore Italian Myrtles The Irish Emigrant's Mother ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy

... mark of negligence, uncouth and awkward in his appearance, with every possible mannerism, talking through his nose, indistinctly and unsteadily mumbling over his sentences, careless of all outward form and polish, awakens anything but pleasant feelings, as the preconceived ideal must give way to the living reality. And yet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... himself into the literary movement in full consciousness of his social standing. And it was just this self-consciousness, which stamped him as a personality, that accounted for his extraordinary success. It was obvious that, as one of a new and aspiring class, a class that once more cherished ideal aims and was not content with actual forms of existence, Gorki, the proletaire and railway-hand, would not disavow Life, but would affirm it, affirm it with all the force ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald

... women of our days as sexual beings, Professor V. Krafft-Ebing expresses himself: "A not-to-be-underrated source of insanity with woman lies in her social position. Woman, by nature more prone than man to sexual needs, at least in the ideal sense of the term, knows no honorable means of gratifying the need other than marriage. At the same time marriage offers her the only support. Through unnumbered generations her character has been built in this direction. Already the little girl ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... Annie Forest had a very comprehensive scheme drawn out with regard to the proposed characters which the different members of the party were to adopt. Molly would make an ideal shepherdess. Hester was to be in white, and was to represent St Agnes. Nora was to be Queen of the Fairies, and Nan little Bo-Peep. Annie had not yet decided on her own character, but was strongly inclined to act the part of a gipsy. Annie further suggested that it would save ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade

... the father did not think it "an ideal arrangement," as some modern married folks do, to be thus separated, wife and husband, one from the other; but by her coming as near as could be allowed, she showed her undying love. Even to-day, good ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis

... Lion intended to found a colony of Latter Day Saints, who, under his patriarchal sway, should regenerate the world and glorify his name for ever. Here Abel Lamb, with the devoutest faith in the high ideal which was to him a living truth, desired to plant a Paradise, where Beauty, Virtue, Justice, and Love might live happily together, without the possibility of a serpent entering in. And here his wife, unconverted but faithful to the end, hoped, after many wanderings over the face of the ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various

... from which so much was anticipated was not satisfactory. The eminent prelate did not realise Tancred's ideal of a bishop, while his lordship did not hesitate to declare that Lord ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... interesting revelation to the young girl. He not only did not seem to care for the profit his devotion brought him, but even his one beloved ideal might be displaced by another. So like ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte

... happy enough to fall under his personal influence can never overstate what we owe to his genius and his sympathy. He showed us the highest ideal of character and conduct. He taught us the science of good citizenship. He so interpreted nature that we knew her as we had never known her before. He was our fascinating and unfailing guide in the tangled paradise of literature. And, while for all this we bless his memory, we claim for him ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell

... century the air was full of ideas upon these social subjects. The temptation was irresistible to turn from the confusion of squalor, oppression, license, distorted organisation, penetrative disorder, to ideal states comprising a little range of simple circumstances, and a small number of types of virtuous and unsophisticated character. Much came of the relief thus sought and found. It was the beginning of the subversive process, for it taught men to look away from ideas of practical ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley

... disinterested, for he gave a picture of ordinary life exactly as it was. He painted man in all the varieties produced in his nature by passion and the force of circumstances, and avoided mixing up with these portraits what was merely ideal. Persons gifted with this power of forgetting themselves, as it were, and of assuming in succession an infinite series of varied characters, who live, speak, and act before us in a thousand ways that affect or delight us, such men are often susceptible of feelings ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various

... by profession, and he won by genius combined with superior efficiency in the personnel under his command. In his courage, resourcefulness, in the spirit he inspired, and the high pitch of skill he developed among his officers and men, he is an ideal type for every later age. Little is known of his life and character beyond the story of these two exploits, but they are sufficient to give him the name of the first great ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... been obscured by the mists of selfishness that he found it difficult to let them appear—and more difficult with his sister than with his mother. Lettice seemed to him to exact too much, to be too intense in feeling, too critical in observation. He was fond of her, but she was not at all his ideal woman—if he had one. Sydney's preference was for what he called "a womanly woman": not one ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... years quite identified himself with the Abyssinians both in dress and mode of life. He was a man of sound judgment, brave, well-informed, appreciated all that was great and good; and seeing in Theodore an ideal he had often conceived, he attached himself to him with disinterested affection—almost worshipped him. Theodore gave him the rank of likamaquas, and always kept him near his person. Bell slept at the door of his friend's tent, dined off the same dish, joined in every expedition, ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc

... since seeing Ogden's portrait, he had realized still more clearly that the scheme had draw-backs. But he badly wanted Stanborough to make one of the party. Whatever Ogden might be, there was no doubt that Billy Stanborough, that fellow of infinite jest, was the ideal companion for a voyage. It would make just all the difference having him. The trouble was that Stanborough flatly refused to take an indefinite holiday, on the plea that he could not afford the time. Upon which his lordship, seldom blessed with great ideas, had surprised himself by producing ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse

... require any such kindly toleration. His temperament led him to a placid life, where there were few temptations, and that life with its quiet walks, its occasional drives, its simple recreations, has stood for a whole century as our English ideal. It is what, amid the strain of the severest commercialism in our great cities, we look forward to for our declining years as a haven on this side of ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter

... undoubtedly among the causes of Greek vigor of mind and body. Physicians prescribed its rhythmic exercise for many ailments. Plato specifies dancing among the necessities for the ideal republic, and Socrates urged it upon his pupils. The beauty of harmonized movements of healthy bodies, engendered by dancing, had its effect on the ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn

... heart was bitterly visited by a thing like this. The Sawyer, though not of great human rank, was gifted with the largest human nature that I had ever met with. And though it was impossible as yet to think, a hollow depression, as at the loss of some great ideal, came over me. ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... warmed more and more to Richard. He not only called out in her a tenderness and veneration for his age and attainments which her own father had never permitted her to express, but his personality realized for her an ideal which, until she knew him, she had despaired of ever finding. While his courtesy, his old-time manners, his quaintness of speech and dress captivated her imagination, his perfect and unfailing sympathy and constant kindness ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... melody rising through the luminous air, which announced to him the approach of Beatrice and the nearness of those 'shining tablelands whereof our God Himself is moon and sun.' For eternal life, the ideal state, is not something future and distant. Dante knew it when he talked of 'quella que imparadisa la mia mente.' Paradise is here, visible and tangible by mortal eyes and hands, whenever self is lost in loving, whenever the narrow limits of personality are ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... purely ethical view rests on ground not only higher but incontestable. And so in our time theologians prefer to rest it on foundations that cannot be shaken, on his moral oneness with God, the divineness of his spirit, the ideal perfectness of his life. The strength of this position being realized, the world begins to hear from Christian thinkers the innovating affirmation that belief of the miraculous birth can no longer be deemed essential to Christianity; else ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... the expressions of Praise or Prayer which are common to them all. Local colouring and personal references are admissible only when they arouse a common emotion. The Lord's Prayer {18} is in this, as in other respects, an ideal Form of Worship. ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson

... I had, he seemed much interested with the picture—indeed, I painted the picture of my daily routine in almost too perfect colors, for, when I had finished, he observed quietly that I appeared to him to lead the ideal life, and added that he supposed I knew very ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... way, sailing ahead fast with the wonderful clippers Donald McKay was building at Boston, to show us a tow rope. The best sailers ever launched were those Yankee ships, and the Thames building yards were working to create the ideal clipper which should beat them. This really was the last effort of sails, for steamers were on the seas, and the Americans were actually making heroic efforts to smother them with canvas. Mr. Green, of Poplar, worried over those Boston craft, declared ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... it. I live like a man in a troubled dream, a night-mare. Several members of our church have been taken, and I, who prided myself on my strict churchmanship, have been left behind. My boon companion, the rector of our parish, a man who always seemed to me to be the beau ideal clergyman, he too is left, and is as puzzled and angry as I am. I think he is more angry and mortified than I am, because his pride is hurt at every point, since, as the Spiritual head (nominally at least) of this ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson

... in after years Graham would recall him, as he stood there, his handsome head thrown back, looking the ideal of an old Norse viking, laughing and chatting with the merry, innocent girls around him, his deep-blue eyes emitting mirthful gleams on every side! According to his nature, Graham drew off to one side and watched the scene with a smile, as he had viewed similar ones far back in the years, and far ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... possibility become available in his person; not, therefore, even as an enemy by intention or premeditation; not even as an apparent competitor, but in the rare character of a competitor presumptive; one who might become an ideal competitor by the extinction of a whole family, and even then no substantial competitor until after a revolution in France, which must already have undermined the throne of Bonaparte. To his own subjects, and his own kinsmen, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey

... rebels destroy a part of the railway. They threaten an assault on Manila. 377 General Camilo Polavieja succeeds Blanco as Gov.-General. 378 General Lachambre, the Liberator of Cavite. Polavieja returns to Spain. 379 Dr. Jose Rizal, the Philippine ideal patriot; his career and hopes. 381 His return to Manila; banishment, liberation, re-arrest, and execution. 383 The love-romance of Dr. Jose Rizal's life. 387 General Primo de Rivera succeeds Polavieja as Gov.-General. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... forward and rob you of the prize unless you put in a claim. A woman desires to be loved. Love is what her heart feeds upon, and the man who appears to love her best, even if in all things he is not her ideal of manhood, will be most apt to win her for his bride. You can win Miss Loring ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur

... cruel trials of a life reflecting all the national and social misfortunes of the community, she realized the highest conceptions of duty as a wife, a mother, and a patriot, sharing the exile of her husband and representing nobly the ideal of Polish womanhood. Our uncle Nicholas was not a man very accessible to feelings of affection. Apart from his worship for Napoleon the Great, he loved really, I believe, only three people in the world: his mother—your ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad

... the struggles of the past came up to him; each had seemed a triumph when he was in the glory of strength and hope. The splendid aims of a higher and nobler government, built by sheer truth and nobility of purpose upon the ashes and dust of present corruption, the magnificent purity of the ideal State of which he had loved to dream—all that he had thought of and striven after as most worthy of a true man to follow, dwindled now away into a hollow and mocking image, more false than hollowness itself, poorer and of less ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford

... it and hold it with ease. There must be no unnecessary extension of the palm and fingers, for it adds so much to the fatigue. Unhappily, every volume does not fulfil this requirement, and the requisite selection must be made with care. Moreover, the ideal bedside book should be not only small, and light, and agreeable to the touch, but distinguished by special internal characteristics. Not only must the print be legible; the matter it furnishes must be in brief instalments. What is wanted is a series ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams

... formation, no glory, no brilliancy, skirmishing with outlawed white men and cunning Indians, that was the extent of his knowledge by experience. True, these self-same men in dingy blue fought with a daring such as few soldiers living possessed; but they lacked the ideal picturesqueness which made ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath

... stop at the villa to take care of mamma," she had said; whereupon Mr. Hawkehurst had assented, with a careless nod, and the description of the ideal cottage had ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... life which sometimes resulted—especially when, as frequently happened, the seeming mutual devotion was also real—might often be regarded as beautiful and almost ideal, it has been customary to repeat with an emphasis that in the end has even become nauseous. For it was usually overlooked that the self-centred and enclosed family, even when the mutual affection of its members was real enough to bear all examination, ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis

... riddling process. The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men; and I should imagine that neither Luther nor John Bunyan, for example, would have satisfied the modern demand for an ideal hero, who believes nothing but what is true, feels nothing but what is exalted, and does nothing but what is graceful. The real heroes, of God's making, are quite different: they have their natural heritage of love and conscience which they drew in with their mother's milk; they ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... policy of his agitated life, and that policy was ever militant in Boniface, the chief apostle of Germany, and may be said to have triumphed when the Roman Empire was renewed in harmony with the Holy See, and Charles was crowned in 800. Wilfrid, more than any other man, appears as the ideal representative of that varied influence, religious, literary, political, which the Anglo-Saxon Church exercised upon ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... great and beneficent revolution. The very reasons which made Juvenal hate it most are its best justification to a modern mind. It gave hope of a future to the slave. By creating a free industrial class it helped to break down the cramped social ideal of the slave owner and the soldier. It planted in every municipality a vigorous mercantile class, who were often excellent and generous citizens. Above all, it asserted the dignity of man."[789] But for the freedmen the society seems to have ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... feelings of the liveliest appreciation that I look back on the letter given me by Ambassador White in Berlin to Count Leo Tolstoy. A lifetime of diplomacy, added to the sincerest and most generous appreciation of what an ideal hospitality should be, have served to make this representative of the American people perfect in details of kindness, which can only be fully appreciated when one is far from home. Nothing short of the completeness and yet brevity ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell

... Though Comte's character and aims were as far removed as possible from Franklin's type, neither Franklin nor any man that ever lived could surpass him in the heroic tenacity with which, in the face of a thousand obstacles, he pursued his own ideal of a vocation. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley

... our interest, our sympathy; and it gives us two characters, the Parson and the Schoolmaster, who live in our memories with the best of Chaucer's creations. Moreover, it makes the commonplace life of man ideal and beautiful, and so appeals to readers of widely different tastes or nationalities. Of the many ambitious poems written in the eighteenth century, the two most widely read (aside from the songs of Burns) are Goldsmith's "Village," which portrays the life of simple ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... to pursue his own interests, and enough of a politician to prevent any infringement or perversion of his rights. He never doubted that the desired combination of business man, politician, and good fellow constituted an excellent ideal of democratic individuality, that it was sufficiently realized in the average Western American of the Jacksonian epoch, that it would continue to be the type of admirable manhood, and that the good democrats embodying this type would ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... the ideal industrial condition of the word is free manufacture and free trade. [Hear, hear! A voice: "The Morrill tariff." Another voice: "Monroe."] I have said there were three elements of liberty. The third is the necessity of an intelligent ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various

... forms of the serpent and lizard exhibit almost every element of beauty and horror in strange combination; the horror, which in an imitation is felt only as a pleasurable excitement, has rendered them favorite subjects in all periods of art; and the unity of both lizard and serpent in the ideal dragon, the most picturesque and powerful of all animal forms, and of peculiar symbolical interest to the Christian mind, is perhaps the principal of all the materials of mediaeval picturesque sculpture. By the best sculptors it is always used with this symbolic ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... above him as those pale stars of the early dawn. It was clear to him that no one must ever guess how dearly he loved her; but he knew that it was far, far more essential that he, in his unworthiness, should not profane his own ideal. She was not for his touch, scarcely for his thoughts. The kiss which did not reach her lips burned into his soul instead, and cleansed it with its ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes

... flew wildly about in perplexity as to the proper course. Perhaps the village lights embarrassed them, or perhaps the constant changes in the face of the country, from the clearings then going on, introduced into the landscape features not according with the ideal map handed down in the anserine family, and thus deranged ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... "What an ideal" she replied. "Study is a most excellent thing, and without it a whole lifetime is a mere waste, and what good comes in the long run? There's only one thing, which is simply that when engaged in reading your books, you should set your mind on your books; and that you should think of home when not ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... festival theatre where, humanly speaking, ideal performances of all the great operas could be given—this was long a dream of Wagner's. He knew what could be done and how to do it; he knew also that it was not done because managers, conductors, bandsmen and ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman

... keep always a high ideal before us, and as civilisation increases and brings ever new possibilities of enjoyment, the maintenance of that high ideal becomes always more difficult. Nothing helps so much to keep us from low ideals as the ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various

... important mail is much more likely to end up in the bit bucket than junk mail, which has an almost 100% probability of getting delivered. Routing to the bit bucket is automatically performed by mail-transfer agents, news systems, and the lower layers of the network. 3. The ideal location for all unwanted mail responses: "Flames about this article to the bit bucket." Such a request is guaranteed to overflow one's mailbox with flames. 4. Excuse for all mail that has not been sent. "I mailed you those ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10

... years in separating her from the past, and throwing over it a mystic veil of tenderness and grace. Old times and old friends, when thus viewed from the beautiful shores of Lake Leman, appeared to the memory in a softened light and invested with something of that ideal loveliness which the grave itself imparts to the objects of our affections. Many of these old friends, indeed, had passed through the Grave—some, long before, some recently—and to talk of them was sweet talk about the blessed home above, as well ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... wonderful lyrics, Shelley is like a wanderer following a vague, beautiful vision, forever sad and forever unsatisfied. In the latter mood he appeals profoundly to all men who have known what it is to follow after an unattainable ideal. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... in the evening and frequently met their countrymen. She had no objection to the smell of tobacco, and was never in the way. Everybody said that it was an ideal marriage; no one had ever known a ...
— Married • August Strindberg

... in communion become one. The self-control of it breathes power, and principle, and courage. One would expect a Quaker meeting to exert an imperious rule upon the community. It is an expression of the majesty of an ideal. I believe that the Quaker Hill meeting has been able to accomplish whatever it has put its hand to do. The only pity is that the meeting tried to do ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson

... earth's petty strife, Some pure ideal of a nobler life? We lost it in the daily jar and fact, And now live idly in a vain ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... so many to-day. The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, these are the three august Divine Ones before which we bow the knee in adoration; in the unforced combination and mutual supplementing of these we gain the pure idea of God.[20] To this "triune" Divine Ideal shall the coming ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel

... of millions in which our national debt is set forth seem to have often confused the brains of our most practical arithmeticians and financiers. They seem to have felt as if these did not represent real money, but something ideal; or perhaps we might say, they have treated them like certain results of the operation of figures which might be neutralised by others, as the equivalents on the two sides of an equation exhaust each other. We never hear of a ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various

... growing up in the cold penumbra of our civilization and material prosperity. But his scene and characters were exceptional, or, if typical, only so of a very limited class, and his book, full of fine imagination as it is, is truly a romance, an ideal and artistic representation, rather a poem than a story of manners general and familiar enough to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... new American manager of the Great Eastern Railway, says that his ideal is to satisfy the public. This disposes of the absurd rumour that his appointment was made in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various

... bored, and he would have been disappointed and restless. I think he would have taken to wandering again; but there is no fear of that now. You will see that this will be an ideal marriage." ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney

... beautiful, the religious Wisdom, which may still, with something of its old impressiveness, speak to the whole soul; still, in these hard, unbelieving utilitarian days, reveal to us glimpses of the Unseen but not unreal World, that so the Actual and the Ideal may again meet together, and clear Knowledge be again wedded to Religion, in the life and business ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... I not ask the indulgence of my readers for a few moments, simply to say that Louis and Minnie are only ideal beings, touched here and there with ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

... in 1815. He began life under highly favourable auspices; but becoming tired of a university career, in 1823 he threw up the position he held in the capital to lead a colony of friends to the wilds of Wermland. This ideal Scandinavian life soon proved a failure; Almqvist found the pen easier to wield than the plough, and in 1828 he returned to Stockholm as a teacher in the new Elementary School there, of which he became rector in 1829. Now began his literary life; and after bringing out ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... look to." Such was the son of Jesse when brought before Samuel. The fancies of men have been ever since ruled by the description. Poetic license has extended the peculiarities of the ancestor to his notable descendants. So all our ideal Solomons have fair faces, and hair and beard chestnut in the shade, and of the tint of gold in the sun. Such, we are also made believe, were the locks of Absalom the beloved. And, in the absence of authentic history, tradition has dealt no less lovingly by her whom we are ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... and Barrowe had much in common, but were not identical. Both maintained the right and duty of the Church to carry out necessary reforms without awaiting the permission of the civil power; and both advocated congregational independency. But the ideal of Browne was a spiritual democracy, towards which separation was only a means. Barrowe, on the other hand, regarded the whole established church order as polluted by the relics of Roman Catholicism, and insisted on separation ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... in a roundabout way over six weeks ago that an attempt would be made by the Germans to establish a radio station somewhere along this portion of the coast. The hills back of Timminsport and Henryville would make an ideal spot for such ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)

... and which boasts of a "Mission of Jewdom," said to consist in this, that the Jews must live forever in dispersion among the peoples in order to act as their teachers and models of morality, and to educate them gradually to pure rationalism, to a general brotherhood of mankind, and to an ideal cosmopolitanism. They declare the mission swagger to be either presumption or foolishness. They, more modest and more practical, demand only the right for the Jewish people to live and to develop itself, according to its abilities, up to the natural limits of its type. They have become convinced ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau

... leaned forward and laid his hand upon the sleeper, and whispered to it, smiling; and this only she heard—"This shall be thy reward—that the ideal shall ...
— Dreams • Olive Schreiner

... child-life were the swings nailed to the lintels of a few doors, in which, despite the cold, toothless babes swayed like monkeys on a branch. But the Square, with its broad area of quadrangular pavement, was an ideal playing-ground for children, since other animals came not within its precincts, except an inquisitive dog or a local cat. Solomon Ansell knew no greater privilege than to accompany his father to these fashionable quarters and whip his humming-top across the ample spaces, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... Millennium. The State indeed is a moral sphere, a moral unit, which has long been outgrown by enlightened opinion; and the trouble is that we are now in a transition stage in which the boundaries of the State survive as a limitation instead of setting an ideal ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato

... foreign affairs came wholly from me while we would sit and cure the air of our front room with our smoking corncobs. And dad, who used them in his smokehouse, used to say they beat sawdust for flavor. We mixed a little short-cut tobacco to sweeten the cob. This was not our ideal way of spending the evening, for we had a Perfecto ambition. For ten years, though, we had been gradually squeezing ourselves to fit circumstances and had come to realize that the pipe and kerosene oil are the cheapest fuel and light the trusts offer in New York. A gallon of oil a week, a pound ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... opposition because of the dissatisfaction with President Grant, who knew little about politics and politicians. He felt that his Cabinet should be made up of personal friends, not of strong advisers, and that the military ideal of administration was the proper one. He was faithful but undiscriminating in his friendships and frequently chose as his associates men of vulgar tastes and low motives; and he showed a naive love of money and an ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming

... however, Mr. White presents us with two humorous lyrics of his own, and makes us feel like men who, in the first moments of our financial disorder, parted with a good dollar, and received change in car-tickets and envelopes covering an ideal value in postage-stamps. It seems hard to complain of an editor who puts only two of his poems in a collection when he was master to put in twenty if he chose, and when in both cases he does his best ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... admiration for the Skunk. Indeed, I once maintained that this animal was the proper emblem of America. It is, first of all, peculiar to this continent. It has stars on its head and stripes on its body. It is an ideal citizen; minds its own business, harms no one, and is habitually inoffensive, as long as it is left alone; but it will face any one or any number when aroused. It has a wonderful natural ability to take the offensive; and no man ever yet came to grips ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton

... we read history. All the rest of human fortunes is in the nature of an introduction or an epilogue. Now by a period of history we mean the tract of years in which this balance of harmonious activities, this reconciliation of the real with the ideal, is in course of preparing, is actually subsisting, ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis

... she live?" he cried, breaking in upon himself, "the undiscoverable Venus of the older time, for whom we have sought so often, only to find the scattered gleams of her beauty here and there? Oh! to behold once and for one moment, Nature grown perfect and divine, the Ideal at last, I would give all that I possess.... Nay, Beauty divine, I would go to seek thee in the dim land of the dead; like Orpheus, I would go down into the Hades of Art to bring back the life of art from among the ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac

... as our Worthington boys are, there isn't one of them who could appeal to the imagination and idealism of a girl like Esme Elliot. For Esme, under all that lightness, is an idealist; the idealist who hasn't found her ideal." ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... This is an ideal manner of dealing with offenders of a less serious type, minors and criminaloids, who have fallen into bad ways, since, instead of punishing them, it seeks to encourage in them habits of integrity and to check the growth of vices by means of a benevolent but strict supervision. The offender ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... about jingoism? They are people who have never forgiven Almighty God for suffering them to be born American sovereigns instead of British subjects. They are those whose ideal man is some stupid, forked, radish "stuck o'er with titles, hung 'round with strings," and anxious to board with a wealthy American wife to avoid honest work. They are the people whose god is the dollar, their country the stock exchange, and who suspect that a foreign policy with as much backbone ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... he determined to close his house, place Toinette in some "ideal" school, and travel for six months, or even longer, little dreaming that the six months would lengthen into as many years ere he again saw her. The trip begun for diversion was soon merged into one for business interests, as the prominent ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... in order to escape the duties both of their native and their adopted country, and to avail themselves of the privileges of both citizenships without one thought of the duties of either, using them often in careers of scoundrelism,—one feels that Russia is nearer the true ideal in this ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... not particularly attractive. The old streets are narrow and tortuous, paved with pointed stones; but a fine broad street—the Rue de la Republique—has recently been erected through the heart of the old town, which greatly adds to the attractions of the place. At one end of this street an ideal statue of the Republic has been erected, and at the other end a life-like bronze statue of ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles

... differences of inborn capacity and temper, to a false superficial appearance of equality. From this low and stagnant condition of affairs, which demagogues and dreamers in later times have lauded as the ideal state, the Golden Age, of humanity, everything that helps to raise society by opening a career to talent and proportioning the degrees of authority to men's natural abilities, deserves to be welcomed by all who have the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... managed to repress a sigh. In spite of himself he could not help liking Anstruther. The man was magnetic, a hero, an ideal gentleman. No wonder his daughter was infatuated with him. Yet the future was dark and storm-tossed, full of sinister threats and complications. Iris did not know the wretched circumstances which had come ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... not appear, that Shakespeare thought his works worthy of posterity, that he levied any ideal tribute upon future times, or had any further prospect, than of present popularity and present profit. When his plays had been acted, his hope was at an end; he solicited no addition of honour from the reader. He therefore made no scruple to repeat the same jests ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson

... for natural scenery is quite different from the wild sublimity of the descriptions of nature in Beowulf. Cynewulf's verse is essentially the verse of an agriculturist; it looks with disfavour upon mountains and rugged scenes, while its ideal is one of peaceful tillage. The monk speaks out in it as cultivator and dreamer. Its tone is wholly different from that of the Brunanburh ballad or the other fierce war-songs. Moreover, it contains one or two rimes, preserved in this translation, whose full significance ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen

... remains present in her and active through her. He has committed to her his revelation. She alone, expressly delegated by Christ, possesses second sight, the knowledge of the invisible, the comprehension of the ideal order of things as its Founder prescribed and instituted, and hence, accordingly, the custodianship and interpretation of the Scriptures, the right of framing dogmas and injunctions, of teaching and commanding, of reigning over souls and intellects, of fashioning belief ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... away from those who governed the machine, who ran it and oiled it, and turned it to their own pleasures. He had chosen to be of the multitude whom the machine ground. The brutal axioms of the economists urged men to climb, to dominate, and held out as the noblest ideal of the great commonwealth the right of every man to triumph over his brother. If the world could not be run on any less brutal plan than this creed of success, success, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... prayer was that at each one of them a special office of devotion was to be said. Beginning before sunrise with matins there was to be daily a round of services at stated intervals culminating at bedtime in that which, as its name indicated, filled out the series, Complene. To what extent this ideal scheme of devotion was ever carried out in practice it is ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... funny country; something of a joke of a country when you come to think of it. Instead of setting out trees that will become both useful and beautiful, in accordance with the old Greek ideal of combining beauty and utility we set out Norway spruces that will make people hate evergreens in general. We set out poplars and all sorts of bunches of leaves in our parks and along the highways, instead of trees still more beautiful that would yield tons of coupon ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various

... that of a real ship at sea; while, moreover, there is something that kindles the imagination more than the reality would do. If we see a real, great ship, the mind grasps and possesses, within its real clutch, all that there is of it; while here the mimic ship is the representation of an ideal one, and so gives us a more imaginative pleasure. There are many schooners that ply to and fro on the pond, and pilot-boats, all perfectly rigged. I saw a race, the other day, between the ship above ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... already to hear the reproach that to adopt such a course would be to renounce brotherly love, for Christians should seek the salvation and welfare of others besides themselves. He was reproached again with disowning by his conduct the Protestant ideal of religious freedom and the equal rights of Confessions. Very differently will he be judged by those who realise the legal and constitutional relations then existing in Germany, and the ecclesiastico-political views shared in common by Protestants and Catholics, and who then ask what was to be gained ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... truth, to perform a promise to the utmost, to reverence all women, to be constant in love, to despise luxury, to be simple and modest and gentle in heart, to help the weak and take no unfair advantage of an inferior. This was the ideal of the age, and chivalry is the word that expresses that ideal. In all our reading we shall perhaps find no more glowing example of it as something real, than in the speech of Sir Jean de Vienne, governor of the besieged town of Calais who, ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)

... Clearly, therefore, the species which naturally inhabits a country is not necessarily the best adapted to its climate and other conditions." Australian aboriginals having given way before a race better fitted to flourish, what will the future of the new race be? What ideal is at present pursued? ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... place, boys, and it's no use going any further. Just an ideal spot to pitch the tent, and the background will make a dandy picture when I get my camera in focus on it in the morning, for the sun must rise, let's see, over across the river, and shine right on the front of the tent. I've been baffled so often in trying for that same effect ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne

... securing universally, alike in Church and in State, the recognition of the paramountcy of principles over interests, of liberty over tyranny, of truth over all forms of evasion or equivocation. His ideal in the political world was, as he said, that of securing suum cuique to every individual or association of human life, and to prevent any institution, however ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... with some soft ideal scene The work of Fancy, or some happy tone Of meditation, slipping in between The beauty coming ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... noon time we had crossed the valley and gained our new camp, which was an ideal one. There was a spring of hot and a spring of cold iron and sulphur water within ten feet of each other, each near a stream of cold, clear mountain water. The first thing we did was to take a bath in the hot sulphur ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves

... engine is proportional to the expression (t - t{1})/t in which t and t{1} are the absolute temperatures of the saturated steam at admission and exhaust respectively. While actual engines only approximate the ideal engine in efficiency, yet they follow the same general law. Since the exhaust temperature cannot be lowered beyond present practice, it follows that the only available method of increasing the efficiency is by an increase in the ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.

... real man! The practical, always—the ideal, never! Once I dreamed of the companionship of a congenial spirit, but, alas! 'A good way from the station!' Were I a man, I would, to reside in such a bower, plod cheerily ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton

... were necessarily desirous of knowing where or how far they were to march, and suffered greatly from a feeling of helpless ignorance of where they were and whither bound—whether to battle or camp. Frequently, when anticipating the quiet and rest of an ideal camp, they were thrown, weary and exhausted, into the face of a waiting enemy, and at times, after anticipating a sharp fight, having formed line of battle and braced themselves for the coming danger, suffered all the apprehension and got themselves in good fighting trim, they were marched ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy

... the middle of the play, and after a narcotic had been administered to him, that Anthony got there; but we were in Wonderland almost from the start, without the aid of drugs. For we were asked to believe that Mr. CHARLES HAWTREY was a visionary, amorous of an ideal which no earthly woman could realise for him. Occasionally he had caught a glimpse of it in the creations of Art—at the Tate Gallery or Madame TUSSAUD'S or the cinema; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various

... precarious and he did not stay long in it. Close to the side of the wagon—the side opposite that from which the shots had come—was a shallow gully, deep enough to conceal himself in and fringed at the rear by several big boulders. It was an ideal position and Calumet did not hesitate to take advantage of it. Dropping from the rear of the wagon, he made a leap for the gully, landing in its bottom upon all fours. He heard a crash, and a bullet flattened itself against one of ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer

... man created in the image of his God there is this strange mystical susceptibility, this urge to lay all he has upon the altar of the ideal that he feels has the right to demand his uttermost. Nothing else so fully demonstrates man's spiritual nature: it is the one great fact that differentiates ...
— No. 4, Intersession: A Sermon Preached by the Rev. B. N. Michelson, - B.A. • B. N. Michelson

... that night at a little beach which came down to the river and offered an ideal place for their bivouac. Tall pines stood all about, and there was little undergrowth to harbor mosquitoes, although by this time, indeed, that pest of the Northland was pretty much gone. The feeling of depression they sometimes had known in the big mountains had now left ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Trail • Emerson Hough

... furniture of a bygone age, and as such link us with the past of our people, and are such a sacred and venerable legacy that I can only undertake to speak of the future of our educational institutions in the sense of their being a most probable approximation to the ideal spirit which gave them birth. I am, moreover, convinced that the numerous alterations which have been introduced into these institutions within recent years, with the view of bringing them up-to-date, are for the ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... clothes. Now, I suppose your ideal girl wears plain tailor-made suits, and stiff white collars, and small hats without much trimming,—just a ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells



Words linked to "Ideal" :   standard, thought, exemplar, jimhickey, humdinger, abstract, good example, perfect, criterion, jimdandy, model, perfection, crackerjack, idealise, idol, example, value, class act, idea, role model



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com