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Iconoclast   Listen
noun
Iconoclast  n.  
1.
A breaker or destroyer of images or idols; a determined enemy of idol worship.
2.
One who exposes or destroys impositions or shams; one who attacks cherished beliefs; a radical.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Iconoclast" Quotes from Famous Books



... will be put down, just as you have always been, though others may rise up after you; the true religion is image-worship; people may strive against it, but they will only work themselves to an oil; how did it fare with that Greek Emperor, the Iconoclast, what was his name, Leon the Isaurian? Did not his image-breaking cost him Italy, the fairest province of his empire, and did not ten fresh images start up at home for every one which he demolished? Oh! you little know the craving which the soul sometimes feels ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... about this etiquette and considered it frivolous in the face of his need, or whether his need, now grown desperate, unhinged his mind, I know not, but Pombo the idolater took a stick and suddenly turned iconoclast. ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany

... ease, and at last life, to his seignorial aspirations. On one occasion he was even carried beyond the bounds of propriety by his opposition to the Whig chief. The Cavalier was his political ancestor, the Covenanter the ancestor of his political enemy. The idols which the Covenanting iconoclast broke were his. He would have fought against the first revolution under Montrose, and against the second under Dundee. Yet he is perfectly, serenely just to the opposite party. Not only is he just, he is sympathetic. He brings out their worth, their valour, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... history come to be considered essential to Christianity. Sacraments and ceremonies dropped to a lower level for him as things of no importance. With his characteristic breadth and sweetness, he does not smite them as an iconoclast would have done; he does not cry out against those who continue to use them. He merely considered them of no spiritual significance. "Ceremonies," he writes in his dying confession, "in themselves are not sin, but whoever supposes that he can attain to life either by baptism or by partaking of ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... aloud. He was an iconoclast, seldom went to church, and was entirely lacking in reverence. Also he really ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln

... of Mark Twain are, with one or two exceptions, of very doubtful value. Their great popularity for a time was due largely to the author's reputation as a humorist,—a strange reputation it begins to appear, for he was at heart a pessimist, an iconoclast, a thrower of stones, and with the exception of his earliest work, The Celebrated Jumping Frog (1867), which reflected some rough fun or horseplay, it is questionable whether the term "humorous" can properly be applied ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... baby, he said, made him think of Aulus, futilely carried about by the trend of the age among ideas and achievements beyond his understanding. But in fairness I must add that when this was repeated to Marcus Aurelius he retorted: 'Better a child than an iconoclast in the presence of beauty. I should call Gellius an honest errand boy in Athena's temple.' So there you have two ways of looking at your future host. If Lucian is the most enlightened wit of the day, Aurelius is the ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... warfare; no assassin is worthy of the name of enemy. Sometimes, however, those who are worthy of the name, and entitled to respect, may make injudicious and unfair use of censure and invective. It is unwise, when the necessity arises to set aside a worthless or an imperfect image, to turn Iconoclast and demolish those surrounding it which are worthy of a place in the temple. True criticism, for its own sake, if prompted by no ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various

... regarded as the great iconoclast whose business it was to destroy all that had gone before him in art, but no one ever more profoundly reverenced Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Weber than he. The public was persistently informed that his compositions ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore

... this be true or not, it is a fact that a prayer occurs in four of the operas which Rossini composed for the Paris Grand Opera and that the formula is become so common that it may be set down as an operatic convention, a convention, moreover, which even the iconoclast Wagner left undisturbed. One might think that the propriety of prayer in a religious drama would have been enforced upon the mind of a classicist like Goethe by his admiration for the antique, but it was the fact that Rossini's opera showed the Israelites upon their ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... man so dear to the masses of its people as Thomas Jefferson. He was an iconoclast, but the images broken by him were the idols of a past age, and no longer deserved the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... dramatic and conversational, and the characters represented as contributing their opinions to the symposium of discussion were modeled on actual personages. He himself was personified under the dual form of Florestan and Eusebius, the "two souls in his breast"—the former, the fiery iconoclast, impulsive in his judgments and reckless in attacking prejudices; the latter, the mild, genial, receptive dreamer. Master Raro, who stood for Wieck, also typified the calm, speculative side of Schumann's nature. ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris

... hold their hands when the sudden blow had told—just men, who could keep their plighted word. No border thief pretended that the British could not rule him; to a man, they laughed because the possible was not imposed. And to the last bold, ruffianly iconoclast they stole when, ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... scientific mind, here agreeing with the practical mind, will ask, "Will the beliefs thus said to be capable of being shown to be illusory ever cease to exercise their hold on men's minds, including that of the iconoclast himself? Is the mode of demonstration of such a kind as to be likely ever to materially weaken ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully

... former occasions, and so far as it relates to the university and the penitentiary, my statement was questioned by Minnesota's greatest historian, Rev. Edward D. Neill, in a published article, signed "Iconoclast;" but I sustained my position by letters from surviving members of the convention, which I published, and to which no answer was ever made. The same statement can be found in Williams' "History of St. Paul," published ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... terrible blankness—this misty unreality of things? Surcease from craving—yes. But what to take its place—what to fill in, occupy mind and body? What sop to his restless soul? What had this young iconoclast offered him after her infernal era of destruction? A distorted world, a cloudy mind, the body-substance of a ghost? And for the magic world she had destroyed she offered him a void ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... from Bazarov being a burlesque, he was his "favourite child," is hard to understand even to-day. The novelist said that with the exception of Bazarov's views on art, he himself was in agreement with practically all of the ideas expressed by the great iconoclast. Turgenev probably thought he was, but really he was not. Authors are poor judges of their own works, and their statements about their characters are seldom to be trusted. Many writers have confessed that when they start to write a book, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... He then went to his assay office and drew down the blinds and sat in the shadows like a cunning old spider in hiding waiting for the unwary fly for which he had wove his web. His life had been that of the iconoclast who creates nothing to adorn the world's great gallery of gods. But he was not philosophical enough to evolve an idea that would disrupt ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds

... image (of a divinity), effigy, graven image; Juggernaut. Associated Words: idolater, idolatrous, idolatry, idolize, iconoplast, iconoclast, iconodule, idolomania, iconography, iconology, idoloclast, iconomachy, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... permit no misplaced sentiment to deter him. He knew that in order to do what he had in mind, he would have to reckon with the habits and traditions of centuries, but, seeing clearly the task before him he must needs become an iconoclast and accept the consequences. For two days and nights he had been without sleep and under a physical and mental strain that would have meant disaster to any, save Philip Dru. But now he began to feel ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... in that way, for otherwise her life would have been wrecked; nor could you, who would lay down your life for her happiness, have spared or saved her,—her young affections, her young faith and joy in life, all shattered, and Life the iconoclast! That is the saddest part of it. It is women who suffer most and always. In making this appeal to you, I have had continually in mind his mother, and you, the father of a woman. I know how your pride must have suffered in ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... without feeling his sincerity and integrity, even in his most impracticable vagaries. In Addison, Goldsmith, and Irving we find a genial, uplifting amiability; and Whittier, in his deep love of human freedom and justice, appears as a resolute iconoclast ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... among the many leaders of this revolt, to quote that clever but unbalanced German iconoclast, Nietzsche. Typical of his doctrine is the following: [Footnote: Genealogy of Morals (ed. Alex. Tille), Foreword, p. 9.] "Never until now was there the least doubt or hesitation to set down the 'good' man as of higher ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... now extant, and although rude statues of Odin were once quite common they have all disappeared, as they were made of wood—a perishable substance, which in the hands of the missionaries, and especially of Olaf the Saint, the Northern iconoclast, was soon ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber

... the growth of Symbolism is the most significant literary expression. It was not confined to France, or to poetry. We know how the drama of Ibsen became charged with ulterior meanings as the fiery iconoclast passed into the poet of insoluble and ineluctable doubt. But by the French symbolists it was pursued as a creed, as a religion. If the dominant poetry of the third quarter of the century reflected the prestige of science, the dominant poetry of the fourth reflected ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... us to the whole problem of Causality. The sketch which I gave you last time of Bishop Berkeley's argument was a very imperfect one. Bishop Berkeley was from one point of view a great philosophic iconoclast, though he destroyed only that he might build up. He destroyed the superstition of a self-existing matter: {32} he also waged war against what I will venture to call the kindred superstition of a mysterious causal nexus between the physical antecedent and the physical consequent. ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... stood before her, one half of her lithe body concealed by this strange black shadow and the other half gleaming in the moonlight so that she resembled a beautiful ivory statue which some iconoclast had ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... to the Emperor Leo, had the effect of mitigating the persecution in Italy, where the work of destruction could not be carried out to the same extent as in the Byzantine provinces. Hence it is in Italy only that any important remains of sacred art anterior to the Iconoclast dynasty ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson

... Such an attitude was a testimony to his own capacity for culture, since he knew not the meaning of vulgar adulation, and did in truth perceive the beauty of those qualities to which the uneducated Iconoclast is wholly blind. It was a joyous day for him when he saw his daughter the wife of Godfrey Eldon. The loss which so soon followed was correspondingly hard to bear, and but for Mrs. Eldon's gentle sympathy he would scarcely have survived the blow. We know already how his character ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... of groundless fears And narrow prejudice of caste—, Now greets the cultured black with sneers And, barring him from high careers, Breaks, like a mad iconoclast, The nation's idols of ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard

... the truth. To oppose, to refuse, to deny, is not to know the truth, is not to be true any more than it is to be false. Whatever good may lie in the destroying of the false, the best hammer of the iconoclast will not serve withal to carve the celestial form of the Real; and when the iconoclast becomes the bigot of negation, and declares the non-existence of any form worthy of worship, because he has destroyed so many unworthy, he passes into a fool. That he has never conceived a deity such as he ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... of the East, of which the chief was Leo III., surnamed the Isaurian, born in Isauria; raised to the imperial throne by the army, defeated by sea and land the Saracens who threatened Constantinople; ruled peacefully for nine years, when he headed the ICONOCLAST MOVEMENT (Q. V.), which provoked hostility and led to the revolt of Italy from the Greek ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... wherever a true heart sought its God through the sole formulas it knew, but spurs forward to the end, a mighty power to destroy, to do away with old corruptions and break down idols on their altars,—saint and iconoclast! Did the heart of stone within him know its ancestry,—track its hard, loveless descent from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... this twelve-volume set of Brann is simple. The first volume is composed of articles of various length gathered from miscellaneous sources, and includes some of the better known articles from The ICONOCLAST. Volume II to XI inclusive are the files of The ICONOCLAST (from February, 1895 to May, 1898, inclusive), with the matter arranged approximately as it appeared in the original publication. Volume XII contains the story of Brann's death and various biographical and critical articles from ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... like all innovators, was considered by his contemporaries as a revolutionary and iconoclast, he only strove to develop and perfect an art that had already existed in a primitive form. This was the art of animating a poetic idea by means of melopoeia; which Wagner later developed ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... which we write. "Billy Brown" had been a notable evangelist among them. Indeed, he had been the father in the gospel of the churches in Brown and Schuyler Counties. He was popularly described as having a head "as big as a half bushel," surmounted by a great shock of hair. He was an iconoclast, and devoted his life to the business of image-breaking, and, of course, the breaking in pieces of the idols of the people created a great tumult. There was this difference, and only this difference, between the work of Billy Brown and Sam Jones; Sam Jones declaims ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler

... day the Stoics underwent a complete change. The whole nature of the society was altered. Ferrers was so absolutely different from anything that a master had appeared to be from time immemorial. He was essentially of the new generation, an iconoclast, a follower of Brooke and Gilbert Cannan, heedless of tradition, probing the root of everything. At the end of the term Christy resigned his presidency. He could not keep ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh

... railway stations, he does not differ in essential attitude from Mr. Lytton Strachey, delicately "laying bare the facts of some cases." The only real difference consists in the finer tact, the greater knowledge of history—in short, the superior equipment of the English iconoclast. Each of them—and all the troop of opponents who grumble and mutter between their extremes—each of them is roused by an intense desire to throw off the shackles of a dying age, in which they have taught themselves ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... increase in the circulation of his next work, and, if at all sensitive as to his own shortcomings, he would certainly be spared a considerable amount of pain, for it is trying for a man who rather enjoys being idolised to be compelled to act as his own iconoclast. ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey

... Story and a New Character John the Immortal Eye Witness The Peculiar Theology of Jesus John agreed as to the Trial and Crucifixion Credibility of the Gospels Fashions of Belief Credibility and Truth Christian Iconolatry and the Peril of the Iconoclast The Alternative to Barabbas The Reduction to Modern Practice of Christianity Modern Communism Redistribution Shall He Who Makes, Own? Labor Time The Dream of Distribution According to Merit Vital Distribution Equal Distribution The Captain and the Cabin Boy ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... to really drastic, original thought by Nietzsche's writings is an evidence of the importance of what might be called cruel positivity in human thinking. Shelley has, however, an advantage over Nietzsche in his recognition of the transformative power of love. In this respect, iconoclast though he is, he is rather with the Buddha and the Christ than with ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... sacrificed to the substance without itching to set the police on somebody; and the vigilance and sagacity of Byzantine civilians has become proverbial. We learn from a letter written by Pope Gregory II to the Emperor Leo, the iconoclast, that men were willing to give their estates for a picture. This, to Pope, Emperor, and Mr. Finlay the historian, was proof enough of appalling demoralisation. For a parallel, I suppose, they recalled ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... attitude,—for the change from the careless gaiety of "Tartarin of Tarascon" to the sombre satire of "Port-Tarascon"? What caused the joyous story-teller of the "Letters from my Mill" to develop into the bitter iconoclast of the "Immortal." ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... only a guide to it. The picture which is looked to for an interpretation of nature is invaluable, but the picture which is taken as a substitute for nature, had better be burned; and the young artist, while he should shrink with horror from the iconoclast who would tear from him every landmark and light which has been bequeathed him by the ancients, and leave him in a liberated childhood, may be equally certain of being betrayed by those who would give him the power and the ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... destruction during the Terror was by no means assuaged by the destruction of human beings only; there was an even greater destruction of inanimate things. The true believer is always an iconoclast. Once in power, he destroys with equal zeal the enemies of his faith and the images, temples, and symbols which recall ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon

... implacable Iconoclast Whose images of ivory and gold Make proud the dust that his enthusiast In her dark trance may very God behold. From the clear music of his delicate Peripheries and porches of delight He draws her down through cruel gate on gate, Through ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor

... in painting the "Last Judgment" of S. Maria Nuova, and 1506, he is supposed never to have touched the pencil. When he resumed it Savonarola had been burned for heresy, and Fra Bartolommeo was a brother in his convent of S. Marco. Savonarola has sometimes been described as an iconoclast, obstinately hostile to the fine arts. This is by no means a true account of the crusade he carried on against the pagan sensuality of his contemporaries. He desired that art should remain the submissive handmaid of the Church and the willing servant ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... easily or so clearly. The ennobling angers which are the emotion of superiority in the iconoclast do not rise so spontaneously. And one does not say "People are this and people are that...." No, one pauses and stares at the dark chatter of the rain and a ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... of 1872, a prying iconoclast, unawed by the glamor of their public repute and the contemplation of their wealth, began an exhaustive investigation of their custom house invoices. This inquiring individual was B. G. Jayne, a special United States Treasury agent. He seems to have been either a duty-loving ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... the Spider," "Tell and the Apple," "Galvani and the Frog," "Volta and the Damp Cloth," "Washington and His Little Hatchet," a string of gems, amongst the most precious of our legendary possessions. Let no rude iconoclast attempt to undermine one of them. Even if they never occurred, it matters little. They should have occurred, for they are too good to lose. We could part with many of the actual characters of the flesh in history without much loss; ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie

... rare and brave exceptions, met the formidable array of Facts with which the work bristled, by sciolistic criticisms, bigoted denunciations, or timid, faint praise. Conservatives in Politics and Religion exhibited him as a dangerous innovator, a social iconoclast, the would-be destroyer of all that was sacred in Institutions and in Religion. Theologians branded him as immoral and atheistic, and poured upon him a ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... of the interview of the old iconoclast with a French politician, a doctrinaire Republican, who wanted to get a glimpse of this man, and found him in a noisy tavern, seated in the midst of his disciples, dry, wrinkled, laughing with an unforgettable laugh, eating and tearing ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... the new vocabulary. Monte San Mateo slinks in unmerited shame to hide its heralded deformity as Baldhead Butte. What devilish inspiration impelled the Forty-Niners to damn Monte San Pablo to go down to eternity as Bill Williams' Mountain? Who but an iconoclast would rend the sensitive ear with such barbarities as the Loss Angglees of to-day for the deep-vowelled Los Angeles of the last century? Who but a Yankee would swap the murky "Purgatoire" for Picketwire, and make ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King

... to be set up at each place where her body rested. One of these crosses was erected at the west end of Cheapside. After the Reformation the images with which the cross was ornamented, like the image of Becket set over the gate of the Mercers' Chapel, roused the anger of the iconoclast, who took ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe

... paper came to town it was the habit of the grain-buyers to gather at their little central office, and while Morley, the man with the seal ring, read the lecture aloud, the others listened and commented on the heresies. Not all were sympathizers with the great iconoclast, and the arguments which followed were often ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... deer-poacher, and Rousseau as a thief. Yet, neither the one nor the other, as far as we know, was a plagiarist. This, however, does not disprove the contrary proposition, that he who begins as a thief or an iconoclast is likely to end as such. But the actuating motive has nothing to do with what we, in our retrospective analysis, are pleased to prove. Not so far forth are we willing to piddle among the knicknacks of Shakib's ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... interesting to know how many performances, if any, have been given by the great unpaid of pieces by the now successful theatrical iconoclast. Who knows whether his wrath has not a touch of the spretae injuria formae? Perhaps he is longing to have Caesar and Cleopatra represented by some amiable association that has hitherto confined itself to the comedies of Bulwer Lytton and ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... sister of the radiant Apollo! enshrined in the enchanting strains of Virgil and Homer, which I only half learned at college, and therefore unfortunately forget just now! Otherwise what pleasure I should have had in hurling them at the heads of Barbican, M'Nicholl, and every other barbarous iconoclast of ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... Wherefore in order to corrupt virtuous souls it is sufficient for it to appear in a potential form. This is the form in which the Platonicians deified it. In all ages, in order to justify the passions, it was necessary to apotheosize them. What am I saying? Am I so bold as to play the iconoclast with an accredited superstition? What temerity! Do I not deserve to be persecuted by all women for attacking their ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.

... it ignores the researches of Morelli and Berenson. Gebhart attributes to Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi about eighty-five pictures, many of which were long ago in Morelli's taboo list—that terrible Morelli, the learned iconoclast who brought many sleepless nights to Dr. Wilhelm Bode of Berlin. Time has vindicated the Bergamese critic. Berenson will allow only forty-five originals to Botticelli's credit. Furthermore, Gebhart does ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... OF THE WORK OF ROUSSEAU. The inspirer of the new theory as to the purpose of education was none other than the French-Swiss iconoclast and political writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose work as a political theorist we have previously described. Happening to take up the educational problem as a phase of his activity against the political and social and ecclesiastical ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... thought that the young iconoclast, as nothing could be perceived of him on the lawn or flower-beds, had been blown up in the air over the laurel hedge and into the lane; as, however, nothing could be discovered of him here, either, after the most careful search, this ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson

... though a professor of mathematics at Pisa, he had begun that onslaught upon the old Aristotelian ideas which he was to continue throughout his life. At the famous leaning tower in Pisa, the young iconoclast performed, in the year 1590, one of the most theatrical demonstrations in the history of science. Assembling a multitude of champions of the old ideas, he proposed to demonstrate the falsity of the Aristotelian doctrine that the velocity of falling bodies ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... most questionable action, the promotion of the group of martyr saints of the third century to thrones of uncontested dominion in heaven, had better be distinctly understood, before we debate of it, either with the Iconoclast or the Rationalist. This apotheosis by the Imagination is the subject of my present lecture. To-day I only describe it,—in my next lecture I will ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin

... breaks them is influenced by any general hatred of Napoleon. Considering how many hundreds of statues of the great Emperor must exist in London, it is too much to suppose such a coincidence as that a promiscuous iconoclast should chance to begin upon three specimens ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle

... compromise," the Duke said. "He stands for a ministry of his own selection. Heaven only knows what mischief this may mean. His doctrines are thoroughly revolutionary. He is an iconoclast with a genius for destruction. But he has the ear of the people. He is to-day ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... truer and a more helpful love of man. Any faith is good in so far as it makes us more humane and sympathetic. In this regard, the radicalism of George Eliot was a great advance on much of the free-thinking of our century. She desired to build, not to destroy. She was no iconoclast, no hater of what other men love and venerate. Her tendencies were all on the side of progress, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... and gracious, outside all the gross materialism of life. He felt that Lily would never lose her dignity and loveliness, which in her were one, and in his mind she ever stood like a fair statue out of reach of the mud and the contumely of the common street; and ashamed, an unsuccessful iconoclast, he could not do ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore

... ceiling was covered with white and glistening stalactites; underfoot, the floor was strewn with bits of carbonate and the broken bases of stalagmites, which had been shattered to make a path for the ruthless iconoclast who had made his home in this pearly-white temple, built ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace

... to him afterwards that, after all, the moss did not begin to grow until he had settled down in Ashcroft. So he lost his knighthood as an iconoclast. ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)

... thought a trick to catch their attention. But trick or not, he did catch their attention, and he held it; he ceased to be the utterer of pompous platitudes; dropping his paper to show that he had done with it, he leaned across the pulpit and brought his long arms into action. He became the caustic iconoclast ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... was: "Ah, don't destroy that; I remember that ever since I was a baby!" Sally was more apt to say: "I believe I could use this; it's old, but it could be put in order cheaper than buying new!" Martie was the iconoclast. ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... Our two prize members, fortunately for us, sat at our table. The first was the Swedish professor aforementioned. He was large, benign, paternal, broad in mind, thoroughly human and beloved, and yet profoundly erudite. He was our iconoclast in the way of food; for he performed small but illuminating dissections on his plate, and announced triumphantly results that were not a bit in accordance with the menu. A single bone was sufficient to take the pretension out of any fish. Our other particular friend ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... believed that Woman was the one thing which God came nearest to creating perfect. I believe they should be perfect. And because they have not quite that perfection which should be theirs I have driven the cold facts home as hard as I could. I have been a fool and an iconoclast instead of a builder. This confession to you is proof that you have brought me face to face with the greatest ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... first week in February, 1881, the world hovered over the death-bed of Thomas Carlyle. He was the great enemy of all sorts of cant, philosophical or religious. He was for half a century the great literary iconoclast. Daily bulletins of the sick-bed were published world-wide. There was no easy chair in his study, no soft divans. It was just a place to work, and to stay at work. I once saw a private letter, written by Carlyle to Thomas Chalmers. The first part ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage

... good, as a teetotaler, to hear his scathing denunciation of the liquor traffic. He was fierce in his wrath against "the horrible and detestable damnation of whuskie and every kind of strong drink." In this strain the thin and weird looking old Iconoclast went on for an hour until he wound up with declaring, "England has joost gane clear doon into an abominable cesspool of lies, shoddies and shams—down to a bottomless damnation. Ye may gie whatever meaning to that word that ye like." ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... taken somewhat at unawares by this answer, pronounced the interjection "Umph!" in a tone better befitting a Lollard or an Iconoclast, than a Catholic Abbess, and a daughter of the House of Berenger. Truth is, the Lady Abbess's hereditary devotion to the Lady of the Garde Doloureuse was much decayed since she had known the full merits of another gifted image, the ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... they would do. There is no iconoclast in the world like an extreme Mohammedan. Last time they overran this country they burned the Alexandrian library. You know that all representations of the human features are against the letter of the Koran. A statue is always an irreligious object in their eyes. ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... fiction and misunderstanding. If only a man and a woman made their several motives for marrying quite clear to one another, and were not quite so anxious to preserve a veneer of romance up to the very altar, matrimony would not be the terrible iconoclast it too often is." This is plain speaking, and one wonders how many marriages would ever take place if this precept were carried out. It is true that much has to be revealed after marriage. The {96} lover ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux

... various ideas adverse to the representation of animal, and especially of human, form, originating with the Arabs and iconoclast Greeks, had begun at any rate to direct the builders' minds to seek for decorative materials in inferior types, and when diminished practice in solid sculpture had rendered it more difficult to find artists capable of satisfactorily reducing the high organisms to their ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin

... has been the custom of Sahara caravans to travel not more than five miles the first day. Abdullah, the iconoclast, made thirty-three. Ali came to him at ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith

... admit that in Mr. Odger, as in Lord Elcho, there is manifestly, with all his good points, some insufficiency of light. The excess of the working-class, in its present state of development, is perhaps best shown in Mr. Bradlaugh, the iconoclast, who seems to be almost for baptizing us all in blood and fire into his new social dispensation, and to whose [87] reflections, now that I have once been set going on Bishop Wilson's track, I cannot forbear commending this maxim ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold

... to become either a cynic, a pessimist, or an iconoclast. To aspire in either of these directions is bad for the digestion, and good digestion is the foundation and source of much that is desirable in human affairs. Introspection has its uses, to be sure, but the stomach should have exemption as ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson

... this whole theory, however beautifully or piously expressed, that the protest has come. The Spirit of Democracy is a bold iconoclast, and goes about smashing our idols. He laughs at the pretensions of the Strong and the Wise and the Rich to have created the things they possess. They are not the masters of the feast. They are only those of us who have got at the head of the line, ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers

... of June I spent in New York city, where I attended several of Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll's receptions and saw the great orator and iconoclast at his own fireside, surrounded by his admirers, and heard his beautiful daughters sing, which gave all who listened great pleasure, as they have remarkably fine voices. One has since married, and ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... that would have been to attain the Impossible," he answered her. "Oil and flame, old and new, living and dying, tradition and scepticism, iconoclast and idolater, you cannot unite ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... exorcised by the Protestant preacher John Darrell, whose performances as an exorcist created quite a domestic sensation in England at the close of the sixteenth century.[1] The whole affair was investigated by Dr. Harsnet, who had already acquired fame as an iconoclast in these matters, as will presently be seen; but it would have little more than an antiquarian interest now, were it not for the fact that Ben Jonson made it the subject of his satire in one of his most humorous plays, "The Devil is an Ass." In it he turns the last-mentioned ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding

... Hugh, that Christian child who was fabled to have been crucified by the Jews of Lincoln. The Cathedral is not particularly rich in monuments; for it suffered grievous outrage and dilapidation, both at the Reformation and in Cromwell's time. This latter iconoclast is in especially bad odor with the sextons and vergers of most of the old churches which I have visited. His soldiers stabled their steeds in the nave of Lincoln Cathedral, and hacked and hewed the monkish sculptures, and the ancestral memorials ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... was the masonry, and mighty the walls in their frowning strength, there is but little of them left, and of the rose garden not a trace. Time, the great iconoclast, has touched them with his finger and they have passed away like the humble maker of history, while Francois Villon's tinkle of rhyme, leavened with human nature, still leaves its imprint on a whole nation. Perhaps the reason is that the makers of history could have ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond

... to find in a farm-house built two centuries ago, when light and air were rigorously excluded from interiors. The two windows told the history of The Hollies at a glance. The little one had served the needs of a "best" room for several generations of Sussex yeomen. Then had come some iconoclast who hewed a big rectangle through the solid stone-work, converted the oak-panelled apartment into a most comfortable dining-room, built a new wing with a gable, changed a farm-yard into a flower-bordered lawn, and generally ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy

... raised a rebellion against the pope. When the learned De Launoi had successfully attacked the legends of saints, and was called the Denicheur de Saints,—the "Unnicher of Saints," every parish priest trembled for his favourite. Raynaud entitled a libel on this new iconoclast, "Hercules Commodianus Joannes Launoius repulsus," &c.; he compares Launoi to the Emperor Commodus, who, though the most cowardly of men, conceived himself formidable when he dressed himself as Hercules. Another of these maledictions is a tract ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... The Iconoclast and the people whose pride it is that their senses are dead will see in a river nothing more than so much moisture gathered in a narrow place and falling as the mystery of gravitation inclines it. Their mood is the mood of that ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc

... though yet unbaptised, hath done this." After this vision Martin received baptism and remained steadfast in the faith. The illiterate and dauntless soldier became the fiery apostle of the faith, a vigorous iconoclast, throwing down the images of the false gods, breaking their altars in pieces and burning their temples. Of the Roman gods, Mercury, he said, was most difficult to ban, but Jove was merely stupid[12] and brutish, and gave ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... its glass roof and letting in the hailstorms? Here was a protest that outflanked the extreme left of liberalism, yet so calm and serene that its radicalism had the accents of the gospel of peace. Here was an iconoclast without a hammer, who took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed like an act ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... should not woman seek to be a reformer? If she is to shrink from being such an iconoclast as shall "break the image of man's lower worship," as so long held up to view; if she is to fear to exercise her reason, and her noblest powers, lest she should be thought to "attempt to act the man," and not "acknowledge ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... with the Past, Why with so rude a gesture take your leave? None hinders, go your way; but wherefore cast Contempt and boorish scorn Upon the womb from which even you were born? Begone in peace! Forbear to flout and grieve, Vulgar iconoclast, Those of a faith you cannot comprehend, To whom the Past is as a lovely friend Nobly grown old, yet nobly ever young; The temple and the treasure-house of Time, With gains immortal stored Of dream and deed and song, Since man from chaos first began to climb, His ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne

... unceasing march? How many vicissitudes do they undergo before giving way to modern progress, the exigencies of commerce, the wants or whims of new masters? The edifices, did we say? Their origin, their progress, their decay, nay, their demolition by the modern iconoclast—have they no teachings? How many phases in the art of the builder and engineer, from the high-peaked Norman cottage to the ponderous, drowsy Mansard roof—from Champlain's picket fort to the modern citadel of Quebec—from our primitive legislative meeting-house to our stately Parliament Buildings ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... up amongst the scrubs, and was shaking a trembling fist at the boat and snarling out the word "iconoclast." ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

... like a worm, and without faith, without love, without hope. It excites you pleasurably, and when you see life through its medium you never suspect that the vision is distorted. It makes you think the Iconoclast the greatest hero, and causes you to feel that you share his glory when you help him with your approval to overthrow all the images you ever cherished; but when the work of destruction is over, and you ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand

... preacher hates the heretic, the politician hates the reformer, the doctor hates the bacteriologist and the chemist, the old woman hates the new—all these in varying proportions according to the degree in which the iconoclast attacks laziness or livelihood. Finally we all hate any and all new ideas because they seem to imply that we, who have held the old ideas, have been ignorant and stupid in so doing. A new idea is an attack upon the vanity of ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips

... temptation attends upon man: to keep his eye on pleasures, even when he will not share in them; to aim all his morals against them. This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) proclaimed a crusade against dolls; and the racy sermon against lust is a feature of the age. I venture to call such moralists insincere. At any excess or perversion of a natural appetite, their lyre sounds of itself with relishing denunciations; but for all displays of the truly diabolic—envy, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... ruthless idol-breaker, Smileless, cold iconoclast, Though he rob us of our altars, Cannot rob us ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker



Words linked to "Iconoclast" :   assailant, uprooter, waster, destroyer, assaulter



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