"Ideal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gymnosophist among men, that they suffice to themselves, and can walk in a high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being. I declare, although the reverse of a professed ascetic, I am more obliged to women for this ideal than I should be to the majority of them, or indeed to any but one, for a spontaneous kiss. There is nothing so encouraging as the spectacle of self-sufficiency. And when I think of the slim and lovely maidens, running the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... affairs. Society is so at fault in these matters, and women generally have such false ideas of them, that I despair of reforming any one. If I can educate my daughter to live, or rather approximate in some degree, to my ideal of a true woman's life, it is all I can expect. Are you fond of domestic life, ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... self-gratulation, flattering yourself you had done it rather diplomatically, without compromising your boasted freedom by word or sign. Perhaps, two hours later, you figured conspicuously in a train of shadowy captives adorning the conqueror's ideal ovation. A change of color of which you were unconscious, a tremulous pressure of fingers that you risked involuntarily—a sentence that was meant to be careless and indifferent, but ended by being earnest and imploring—all these were commented upon ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... example of the desire to offset natural leadership by artificial contrivance. It is an article of faith among orthodox socialists that personalities do not count, and I sincerely believe I am not exaggerating the case when I say that their ideal of government is like Gordon Craig's ideal of the theater—the acting is to be done by a row of supermarionettes. There is a myth among socialists to which all are expected to subscribe, that initiative springs anonymously out of ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... their privilege to teach to the Greeks; their conception of God and the government of the world was truer than any other; their conception of man's duty more righteous; even their conception of the state more ideal. ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... different sea of London; and it is the influence of London that is most perceptible in his mature works. Here his work was done, his battles fought, his mind formed; and you may observe in his writings a certain romantic and ideal way of speaking of the country, which shows that to him it was a place of retreat and luxury, rather than of sober, practical living. This is not uncommon with literary men whose lot has been cast in a great city, if they possess, as Jerrold did, that poetic temperament which is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the Heimskringla, I have been able to give the shorter text, which is admirably suited for the purposes of this book. The story of Auðun is not only a beautiful one in itself, but, together with the preceding piece, gives a vivid idea of the Norse ideal of the kingly character, which was the foundation of their whole political system. As the Reader does not include poetry (except incidentally), I have added one of the finest of the Eddaic poems, which is at the same time freest from obscurity and corruption—the song ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet
... all these predecessors in that he grasps the idea that the basis of all such computations should be not theory, but fact. He drew his isothermal lines not where some occult calculation would locate them on an ideal globe, but where practical tests with the thermometer locate them on our globe as it is. London, for example, lies in the same latitude as the southern extremity of Hudson Bay; but the isotherm of London, as Humboldt ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... sponges, she said, only their nice cool hands; and she wished "they" would come and take care of her again. But Christine had resigned in toto. If Felipa did not prefer her to all others, then Felipa could not have her: she was not a common nurse. And indeed she was not. Her fair beauty, ideal grace, cooing voice and the strength of her long arms and flexible hands were like magic to the sick, and—distraction to the well; the well in this case being Edward Bowne looking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... to go into details—life is too short! I don't know where my patience ends and my laziness begins, but I'd rather be cheated than lock things up, or try to keep track of what Margaret wastes. She's not an ideal 'general,' but it's only one in a hundred that would stand the children pottering about in the kitchen ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... will; and till then we can only wait and pray.' Or, 'The miraculous powers which dwelt in the early Church have been withdrawn, and therefore the progress is slow.' The strong imaginative tendency to make an ideal perfect in the past leads us to think of the primitive age of the Church as golden, in opposition to the plain facts of the case. We fancy that because apostles were its teachers, and the Cross within its memory, the infant society ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... scene, wherein he says, "God shall be truly known!" It may be said, that in both these instances the expressions are true to the characters of Wolsey and Cranmer. It may be so; for both are wanting in that ideal elevation which Shakspeare never fails to give. That, with this reservation, he becomes the mouth-piece of each character, is most true; and a curious instance of the writer's utter forgetfulness of his assumed character of contemporary ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... burden and marriage a mockery. He who had been insanely in love, and who was unable to live out of her presence, proved an indifferent husband before the honeymoon was over. Why? John had thought his wife an angel, and marriage had shattered his idol. His ideal woman had fallen so far below his expectations that disappointment drove him to indifference. His wife thought herself his superior, and John, to her, was more a convenience ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... had destroyed. It made no appeal to human sympathies, and ignored all the highest motives to human action. The especial materialistic standpoint from which Pyrrhonism judged all that pertains to knowledge and life shut out the ideal, and all possibility of absolute truth. It was an expression of the philosophic decadence of the age when it flourished, and although it possessed some philosophic worth, yet it bore in itself the causes ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... respects and among my visions is a love worthily fixed and fully returned. So few seem to find this, that I fear I shall miss it—either miss it altogether or find it too late. The thought is a sad one, and that song seems insensibly to blend with it. When I am singing 'Ever of Thee,' I am singing to my ideal love that may be escaping beyond the reach ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... that I have not the highest opinion of that sort of behavior, which does not answer my idea of the duties of a woman, and even of a woman of the world; nevertheless, I take side without hesitation with these giddy ones; and their conduct even appears to me the very ideal of truth and sincerity, when I hear nightly certain pious matrons distilling against them, amid low and vulgar gossip, the venom of the basest envy that can swell a rural heart. Moreover, it is not always necessary to leave Paris ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... which he is rearing. This affords an admirable basis for the practice of his art, which is still further favored by the fact that pigeons reproduce rapidly and the progeny are ready to mate in a few months after they come into the world. Thus the species affords really ideal conditions for that process of selection on which the improvement of all domesticated ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... have taken it into my head that that is not the only object in life, and that if one must live one had better live in a mansion? That is my choice, my desire. You will only eradicate it when you have changed my preference. Well, do change it, allure me with something else, give me another ideal. But meanwhile I will not take a hen-house for a mansion. The palace of crystal may be an idle dream, it may be that it is inconsistent with the laws of nature and that I have invented it only through my own stupidity, through ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... journalist would be only an ideal portrait; there are, however, some acquirements which are indispensable. He must be tolerably acquainted with the subjects he treats on; no common acquirement! He must possess the literary history of his own times; a science which, Fontenelle observes, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the ideal of government laid down by Hamilton; they will submit to neither checks nor balances, and would subvert the whole scheme of representative government and replace it with an out-and-out democracy. In accord with this mistaken view they have adopted the initiative and referendum, carried ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... statesman-like rather than a political view as far as his inexperience could do so. He had no axe to grind, and from the standpoint of his ignorance, progress looked easy and demanded no more than that good will of which Estelle so often spoke. But in practice he began to perceive the gulf between ideal legislation and practical politics and, in moments of physical depression, as the election approached, his heart failed him. He grew despondent at night. Then, after refreshing sleep, the spirit of hope reawakened. He felt very ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... or so. The large limbs reach out with equal boldness a every direction, showing no weather side, and no other tree has foliage so densely massed, so finely molded in outline and so perfectly subordinate to an ideal type. A particularly knotty, angular, ungovernable-looking branch, from five to seven or eight feet in diameter and perhaps a thousand years old, may occasionally be seen pushing out from the trunk as if determined to break across the ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... for the game was an ideal one, clear and not too warm. The students from Pornell arrived early, and so did the other visitors, and by two o'clock the grounds ...
— The Rover Boys at School • Arthur M. Winfield
... in her own eyes. Alas! she had strong evidence that Ephraim's affection, on which she had staked all earthly hope of happiness, had in some way failed. Now under Smith's eye all courage to hold the unrealised ideal was lost; as the fixed stars twinkle, so her faith went out for the moment of his interrogation. Her head sank in a shame she could ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... somewhat fortunate even in this respect, since, although she has no antiquities of her own, she is placed close to Wimborne and Poole on the one hand, and to Christchurch, with its ancient Priory, on the other. Poole itself is not an ideal place to live in, while Wimborne and Christchurch are out-of-the-way spots, interesting enough to the antiquary, but dull, old-fashioned towns for holiday makers. The clean, firm sands of Bournemouth ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath
... after Johnson departed without taking his degree. Gibbon was a gentleman commoner, and was permitted by the easy discipline of Magdalen to behave just as he pleased. He "eloped," as he says, from Oxford, as often as he chose, and went up to town, where he was by no means the ideal of "the Manly Oxonian in London." The fellows of Magdalen, possessing a revenue which private avarice might easily have raised to 30,000 pounds, took no interest in their pupils. Gibbon's tutor read a few Latin plays with his pupil, in a style of dry and literal translation. ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... not at fault; her failings were actually more patent to Christopher than to the world at large. But here her perception ended; and she did not see, further, that it was because Christopher had formed such a high ideal of her, that he minded so much when she fell short of it. She had not yet grasped the truth that whereas the more a woman loves a man the easier she finds it to forgive his faults, the more a man loves a woman the harder he finds it to overlook ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... themselves, who undoubtedly appear to have been spawned forth by Nature with a contemptuous bitterness; she having plastered them up out of her refuse stuff, after all the swine were made. As respects all things else, the poet's ideal was the truest truth. ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... in its underlying principle, the system gradually evolved in America but never as yet given a fair chance for adequate translation into practical execution, is an almost ideal one. If preserves for the country, in the conduct of its railroads, the inestimable advantage of private initiative, efficiency, resourcefulness and financial responsibility, while at the same time through governmental regulation and supervision it emphasizes the semi-public character and duties ...
— Government Ownership of Railroads, and War Taxation • Otto H. Kahn
... a restaurant a little way off Broadway where one could be served almost al fresco in a tropic array of screening flora. Quiet and luxury and a perfect service made it an ideal place in which to take luncheon or refreshment. One afternoon I was there picking my way to a table among the ferns when I felt ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... professor. Forty years in this country made vast changes. Floyd was simply pelting them with some of his ridiculous theories about the common people, their rights and wrongs. Lincoln, not Washington, was Floyd's ideal of the good and great and grand type of the American, and it had spoiled him. All this was what was said to one another in excited household chat. What was written was more diplomatic, but quite to the purpose. They could not endorse his choice, ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... special set of prejudices along the lines of which it moves, and which it mistakes for exclusive truths or reasoned conclusions. Touch human society anywhere, it is rotten, it crumbles into a myriad notes of interrogation; the acid of analysis dissolves every ideal. Humanity only keeps alive and sound by going on in faith and hope,—solvitur ambulando,—if it sat down to ask questions, it would freeze like the traveller in the Polar regions. The world is ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... study of this body of dogma or systematized prediction which we call the law, for men who want to use it as the instrument of their business to enable them to prophesy in their turn, and, as bearing upon the study, I wish to point out an ideal which as yet our law has ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... calm, peaceful satisfaction, when he reads the moral precepts and wise instructions of the Chinese sages; he will find that virtue is in every place the same; and will look with new contempt on those wild reasoners, who affirm, that morality is merely ideal, and that the distinctions between good and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... brass buttons, white waistcoat, white gloves three sizes too big for him, and a huge white cravat flaring out almost to the tips of his ears. Nothing was too good for Alec—so his mistress thought—and for the best of reasons. Not only was he the ideal servant of the old school, but he was the pivot on which the whole establishment moved. If a particular brand or vintage was needed, or a key was missing, or did a hair trunk, or a pair of spurs, or last ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... v, 4): "Happy whoso knoweth Thee, though he know not these," i.e. creatures. Now it is not possible to see the types of creatures in the very essence of God without seeing It, both because the Divine essence is Itself the type of all things that are made—the ideal type adding nothing to the Divine essence save only a relationship to the creature—and because knowledge of a thing in itself—and such is the knowledge of God as the object of heavenly bliss—precedes knowledge of that thing in its relation to something else—and such ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... they are governed by passions, or at all capable of passions, but of passiuncles. And thence it is that few men go, or can go, beyond a little love-liking, as it is called; and hence also, that, in a world where so little conformity takes place between the ideal speculations of men and the gross realities of life, where marriages are governed in so vast a proportion by convenience, prudence, self-interest,—any thing, in short, rather than deep sympathy between the parties,—and, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Dad most," pursued Barbara seriously. "Mother's so much with Ted now, anyway." She frowned at the fire. "Mother's curious, Ju," she added presently. "Every one says she's an ideal mother, and so on, and I ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... degeneracy from the able combinations of Monk, Ruyter, and Tourville to the epoch of mere seamanship is clearly marked by the battle of Malaga, and gives it its only historical importance. In it was realized that primitive mode of fighting which Macaulay has sung, and which remained for many years the ideal of ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... poet and orator, presses him to write more lyrics (Ep. II, ii). For many reasons, no, he answers. I no longer want money. I am getting old. Lyrics are out of fashion. No one can write in Rome. I have become fastidious. His sketch of the ideal poet is believed to portray the writings of his friend Virgil. It ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... between the merely professional, official, hireling ministers of that system, with their ignorant worship of system for its own sake, and the true child of light, the humanist, with reason and heart and senses quick, while theirs were almost dead. He reaches out towards, he attains, modes of ideal living, beyond the prescribed limits of that system, though in essential germ, it may be, contained within it. As always happens, the adherents of the poorer and narrower culture had no sympathy with, because no understanding of, a culture richer ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... impossible) that the unfathomed Space is ever teeming with new Births, the younger still inheriting a greater Perfection than the elder. But as this doth not fall within my present View, I shall content my self with taking Notice, that the Consideration now mentioned proves undeniably, that the Ideal Worlds in the Divine Understanding yield a Prospect incomparably more ample, various and delightful than any Created World can do: And that therefore as it is not to be supposed that God should make a World merely of inanimate Matter, however diversified; or inhabited only by Creatures of no ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... toward the house, the other young people appeared clad for their excursion; their horses were tethered to the porch. And it was an ideal day for a ride—warm, bright, and inviting. Over to the northward the hills, mysteriously purple, invited exploration; to the south and east the golden prairie undulated gently into a hazy realm of infinite possibilities; the animals themselves turned ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... Augustine is speaking in that passage of the ideal types which regard the proper nature of each single thing; and consequently in them there is a certain distinction and plurality, according to their different relations to things, as stated in the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... the petty aim, Mere speculators in the rise Of programmes and of party cries, Expert in all those turns and tricks That make this senate-house of ours, Westminster, with its lordly towers, The stock-exchange of politics. But that ideal Parliament Did all it said, said all it meant, And every Minister of State Was ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... pains to keep my father from visiting my mother's grave, that grave which I often stole privately to look at; but now never without awe and reverence, for my uncle used to tell me what an excellent lady my mother was, and I now thought of her as having been a real mamma, which before seemed an ideal something, no way connected with life. And he told me that the ladies from the Manor-House, who sate in the best pew in the church, were not so graceful, and the best women in the village were not so good, as was my sweet mamma; and that if she had lived, I should not have been forced to pick up ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Battle of Maxentius. What is characteristic of the full-grown Raphael is his universal comprehension, his royal faculty for representing past and present, near and distant, things the most diverse, by forms ideal and yet distinctive. Each phase of the world's history and of human activity receives from him appropriate and elevated expression. What is characteristic of the frescoes in the Sala del Cambio, and indeed of the whole ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... England and saturated the minds of the Americans with the ideas of republicanism. The minds of the American people were so imbued with the ideas of republicanism that a republican form of government was the ideal of the entire race. Had General Washington—the leader of the revolutionary army—had the desire to become a monarch himself he would probably have been successful. But Washington's one aim was to ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... might see her courted, receiving attentions from and bestowing smiles on others, not casting one look or one thought on him, who for her would have gladly died. The idea was agony, and it was the sufferings occasioned by the anticipation of ideal misery that had produced the change in face and form which Herbert had ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... Mexico were. They were thrown down at the time of the conquest and buried from sight. It is an immense block of bluish-gray porphyry, about ten feet high and six feet wide and thick, sculptured on front, rear, top and bottom, into a most complicated and horrible combination of animal, human, and ideal forms." This idol is generally stated to be that of the goddess of death. But Mr. Bandelier, after carefully reviewing all the authorities, concludes that it represents the well-known war-god ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... floor of her own home she gazed destructively down upon all that, and into the chill, crimson eye of the descending sun. Her own home was not ideal, but it was better than all that. It was one of the two middle houses of a detached terrace of four houses built by her grandfather Lessways, the teapot manufacturer; it was the chief of the four, obviously the habitation of the proprietor of the terrace. One of the corner houses comprised ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... all things have two faces, a light one and a dark. It is true, in three centuries much imperfection accumulates; many an Ideal, monastic or other, shooting forth into practice as it can, grows to a strange enough Reality; and we have to ask with amazement, Is this your Ideal! For, alas, the Ideal always has to grow in the Real, and to seek out its bed and board there, often in a very sorry way. No beautifulest ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... of nests, the ideal nest, after we have left the deep woods, is unquestionably that of the Baltimore oriole. It is the only perfectly pensile nest we have. The nest of the orchard oriole is indeed mainly so, but this bird generally builds lower and shallower, more after the ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... light over all the countries of the 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 stands out ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... or anything. Still was my district sergeant hopeful, and, as always, respectful. But I was hopeless this time, and I knew that the next day Fausta would be plunging into the war with intelligence-houses and advertisements. For the night, I was determined that she should spend it in my ideal "respectable boarding-house." On my way down town, I stopped in at one or two shops to make inquiries, and satisfied myself where I would take her. Still I thought it wisest that we should go after tea; and another cross-street ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... situations, it is nevertheless dramatically constructed, unflagging in interest, abounding in beauty, grace and pathos, and filled with the tenderest feeling of sympathy, which will go straight to the heart of every lover of the ideal in the world of humanity, and every worshipper in the world of nature. Its brief essays upon theology, literature and social habits, contained in the dialogues between the hero and the heroine, will commend themselves to the thoughtful reader by their clearness and ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... no argument to show that happiness, as defined in the last section, can never be perfectly realized in this life. Aristotle took his definition to represent an ideal to be approximated to, not attained. He calls his sages "happy as men" (Eth., I., x., 16), that is, imperfectly, as all things human are imperfect. Has Aristotle, then, said the last word on happiness? Is perfect happiness out ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... of things, personal difficulty of a petty sort could not arise. Official rank was as nothing between them. They were capable and loyal; the morale of their party was ideal; and under their guidance was wrought out what has been well called our national ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... interest in your art, are you? I will confess to you that the thing that brought me down upon you was your news of this commission for the series of station-gardens. I think you will probably work better after this side of your nature is at rest. Of course, a union with Mr. Hall would be ideal for you. You must consider ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... distorted, to work upon humanity—fits are feigned and wounds manufactured—rags, and other appearances of the most squalid and abject poverty, are assumed, as the best engines of deceit, to procure riches to the idle and debaucheries to the infamous. Ideal objects of commiseration are undoubtedly to be met with, though rarely to be found. It requires a being hackneyed in the ways of men, or having at least some knowledge of the town, to be able to discriminate the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... least under such as might be advantageously modified." But are not many individuals and some races of men placed by the Creator "under unfavorable circumstances, at least under such as might be advantageously modified"? Surely these reviewers must be living in an ideal world, surrounded by "the faultless monsters which our world ne'er saw," in some elysium where imperfection and distress were never heard of! Such arguments resemble some which we often hear against the Bible, holding that book responsible ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of a mile brought them to the fine estate, where an imposing mansion stood in the middle of a beautiful park. The interior of the dwelling was in perfect keeping with its exterior—luxury and beauty prevailed on every hand, and it was really an ideal place in which ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... marked a new ideal in English; that of impassioned prose, as he himself expresses it,—prose which deliberately exalts its subject-matter, as the opera does its. And it was really as an opera that De Quincey conceived of the essay. It was to have its ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... grass sloped down to the water's edge, this being the only visible spot where landing was possible. When we had nearly reached it the inner end of the cove became revealed, and I saw, about a mile and a quarter farther on, a small strip of sandy beach that offered an ideal landing-place, and, sweeping the boat's head round, I steered for it. At that point, which was now on our left hand, the miniature estuary narrowed to a stream scarcely wider than the length of the ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... to be, not merely to appear, distinguished, and he fails because, while the manner is there, the moral qualities which should support it are not. Though he does not know it, this failure to realize his own ideal of himself is the fly in the amber. Sir Matthew was an ambitious man, and believed that all that was necessary in order to "arrive" was to will it sufficiently. Up to a point his career supports his theory, ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... think his home life has been against him. He is such a profound student, and has had no relaxation. The wheels just buzz in one direction all the time," said the nurse with a very attractive smile. Cleo had always a high regard for the graduate nurse, but she decided this girl was her ideal of the type. ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... was called Nginging. She had two attractive and extremely well-behaved sons of twelve and fourteen years, who trusted implicitly in her and showed absolute obedience, while she was kindness itself coupled with intelligence. In fact their relations were ideal, and it seemed a pity that these fine boys should grow to manhood and die ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... There seemed to be a great tradition which enriched and upheld him. Mr. Beagle senior used to stand on the little balcony at the rear of the main floor, transfixed with the pleasure of seeing Gissing move among the crowded passages. Alert, watchful, urbane, with just the ideal blend of courtesy and condescension, he raised floorwalking to a social art. Female customers asked him the way to departments they knew perfectly well, for the pleasure of hearing him direct them. Business began to improve before he had ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... not to trust, with too implicit a reliance, the enthusiastic descriptions of my friend the artist, when indulging in comments upon the loveliness of woman. When beauty was the theme, I well knew with what facility he soared into the regions of the purely ideal. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... bloom peculiar to brunette's, instead only a warm, bright and ruddy hue, which some might consider as approaching the rustic. Her eyes, as they sparkle with delight at the pretty array of bright colors, might not be admired as of the poetic or ideal type, but in their depths lurks a keen and significant expression of the peculiarly intelligent and earnest appeal that seldom speaks in vain. The neat and cosy parlor, with its many articles of female ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... the close of the war, the town sent men to the front who fully maintained its honorable reputation gained in former wars. A Ladies' Soldiers' Aid Society was organized and has received much merited praise for its useful services. The ideal volunteer soldier of the war was William F. Bartlett. He was a student at Harvard, not yet of age when the war broke out. In April he enlisted as a private, was appointed Captain before going to the front, and in his first engagement showed ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... description; one who has really assisted me, though she does not know it, to bear the burden of my troubles more than any one else in the whole world has, and all through the mere fact of her existence, through her being what she is—partly an ideal and partly an influence: a suggestion of what one might become as well as a real help towards becoming it; a soul that renders the common air sweet, and makes what is spiritual seem as simple and natural as ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... the river they followed forked and they took the deeper branch. This in turn split in two and again they followed the deeper branch. Near the close of a day of hard work the stream they were following opened out on a beautiful park-like prairie, while beside the canoe was an ideal camping site fitted by Nature ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... the faith healer is the ideal of the animal. The animal trusts implicitly, it has absolute faith; guided by instinct, God, or Nature, it follows the promptings of its appetites and passions without worrying about right or wrong. It acts today as it did ten ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... an ideal summer Sunday: sunshiny, clear and still. I believe if I had been some Rip Van Winkle waking after twenty years' sleep I should have known it for Sunday. Away off over the hill somewhere we could hear a lazy farm boy singing at the top of his ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... the bonds of Purgatory would also be loosened, and if they should drop dead there, or die before having committed another sin, they would fly straight to heaven as larks into the morning sky. No passing from a miserable present to a miserable Purgatory, but unimaginable bliss in an instant. Their ideal bliss might not be the highest which the human mind is capable of conceiving, but it was the highest that they could conceive, and their souls strained blindly upward to that point where imagination faints ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... He had heard the reason a dozen times before, but he longed to hear it again. He lifted his face from his hands—an ideal face for a poet; clean-cut, sensitive, with deep-set eyes, curved lips, and a finely-modelled chin. ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... interpretation of Parsifal, he likened it among operas to the Jungfrau amid the Bernese Alps. "In its sweep of vision, beauty, greatness, whiteness, glory, and grandeur, it stands alone ... to show the greatness, the ideal of Wagner, including the conflict of all time,—the upbuilding of individual character,—and ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... genius. But it placed him at once in the modern school which aims to discard the factitious devices of the "well-made" play, and to present upon the stage a picture of life approximately as it is. If he frequently deviated from this ideal (the farthest in La de San Quintn), it was due more to his innate romanticism, of which we shall speak later, than to a straining for effect. Never, except in the play just named, did he restore to the stock coincidences ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... except through a stricken conscience which He provokes and the renewal of the heart which He brings about. Here is the master conception, consisting of duty erected into the absolute sovereign of human life, and which prostrates all other ideals at the feet of the moral ideal. Here we reach what is deepest in man; for, to explain this conception, we must consider the race he belongs to, say the German, the Northman, the formation and character of his intellect, his ways in general of thinking and feeling, that tardiness and frigidity of sensation which ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... place, with its black shadowy niches and caves at the surface of the water, had a strange fascination for him. In fact, with its solemn twilight and irregular crag, arch and hollow, it looked quite an ideal entrance to some mermaid city such as is described by the poets who ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... honoured in English life, and this should ensure a favourable reception for one of his chief works admirably rendered into idiomatic English. And the substance of the Cyropaedia, which is in fact a political romance, describing the education of the ideal ruler, trained to rule as a benevolent despot over his admiring and willing subjects, should add a further element of enjoyment for the reader of this famous book in its ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... ways Dodie was a big girl. In clothes she could never be the fashion ideal, but she certainly made a good thing out of nakedness. Her soft, heavy, white breasts made old men blanch and young men start to grab. She was tall, with a narrow waist, flaring hips, long curvy legs and arms; with those big, innocent blue eyes, wearing ...
— The Glory of Ippling • Helen M. Urban
... which were painted included foregrounds with beautiful children playing about the clearing, and graceful women, wives of the happy squatters, flitting in and out of log houses and sheds, clothed and occupied after the manner of our ideal grandmothers; with the health and strength of Amazons, the refinement of high-bred ladies, and wondrous skill in all domestic works, confections, and contrivances. The log-houses would also contain fascinating select libraries, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... the scope of Blaine in debate. These speeches also clearly show why he is so dearly beloved, or so bitterly hated. But that Mr. Blaine is an orator of the first order cannot be gainsaid. The preceding speeches represent the highest attainment of one ideal of an orator, and in a role in which Mr. Blaine is almost without parallel. In his Memorial address on Garfield, delivered in the hall of the House of Representatives, he presents the lofty style which is the beau ideal of oratory. ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... limit is exceeded, observation of foreign navies goes to show that the numbers of the fleet will be diminished and its aggregate gun-power not increased,—that is, ships of 15,000 tons actually have little more gun-power than those of 10,000. Both results are deviations from the ideal of the battle-fleet already given. In the United States Navy the tendency to huge ships needs to be particularly watched, for we have a tradition in their favor, inherited from the successes of our heavy frigates in the early years of this century. It must be recalled, therefore, that those ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... association, had in turn given unceasing interest and pleasure; and, above all, Amabel had been growing more and more into the depths of her husband's mind, and entering into the grave, noble thoughts inspired by the scenes they were visiting. It had been a sort of ideal happiness, so exquisite, that she could hardly believe it real. A taste of society, which they had at Munich, though very pleasant, had only made them more glad to be alone together again; any companion would have been an interruption, and Philip, so intimate, yet with his carping, ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the well-meant counsels of my kindly old friend, to laugh at his lugubrious countenance and the portentous shaking of his silvery head. We remained firm friends, however, and, though my dear old mentor has long since passed away, I still revere his memory. Dr. Yates was an ideal Texan, brave, determined, plain, and straightforward, either a warm, true friend or an uncompromising enemy. He wished to be at the front, and was never satisfied with hospital duties. Mrs. Yates was a favorite with all. Dr. Jackson, of ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... in the name of her husband, drew up for the Convention the plan of a republic as a substitute for the throne. From childhood she had yearned for a republic, with its liberty and purity, fascinated by the ideal of Roman virtue, from which her lively imagination had banished all human corruption. But now that the throne and hereditary rank were virtually abolished, and all France clamoring for a republic, and the pen in her hand to present to the ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... consists in her exact correspondence in her three departments with these three periods of development, and in the illustration she thus affords—more closely and markedly even than literature—to the all-important truth that men stand or fall according as they look up to the Ideal or not. For example, the Architecture of Egypt, her pyramids and temples, cumbrous and inelegant, but imposing from their vastness and their gloom, express the ideal of Sense or Matter—elevated and purified indeed, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... you; selfishness will fall from your shoulders and you will follow lightly. And at the end, and along the way you will have the glory of effort, the joy of fighting and winning, the beauty of the heights where only an ideal can take you." ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... from the hills, it looked like something very different to those who approached the front, for upon that side was a portico with massive Doric columns, which were nothing more nor less than maple logs. Andrew maintained that the natural form of the trunk of a tree was the ideal and perfect form ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... give best results; but if the cane itself is very big and stout, or if it is very weak and slender, he does not expect good results from any of its buds. A hard, well-ripened cane the diameter of a man's little finger is the ideal size. ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... poppy carries out its plan. It never would have occurred to me to {91} doubt whether an iris had three of its leaves smaller than the other three, because an iris always completes itself to its own ideal. Nevertheless, on examining various poppies, as I have walked, this summer, up and down the hills between Sheffield and Wakefield, I find the subordination of the upper and lower petals entirely necessary and normal; and that the result of it is to give two distinct profiles to ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... among the priceless collections of Rome, had his eyes ever rested upon so wonderful, so living a picture! It was a living, a breathing form, which there, drawing aside a hanging, seemed to come forth to meet the gazer. Upon the countenance there was the perfection of ideal beauty. Loveliness, angelic, heavenly, was radiant upon the face, and that face was one well known to him, for Stella stood there, but Stella-glorified ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... on the other hand, depending for Salvation on your own labour to build up a good character, and to live a decent, honourable, and honest life? Conscious of advance, but not of victory? The servant of a high ideal, but without liberty? The devotee of your own self? All the powers and qualities of your nature growing towards maturity, except the powers of your soul? The casket—as life goes on—growing more and more adorned, while the eternal spirit, the priceless jewel ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... I lingered on the word!—"in some poky lodgings in London, while I am spending my day among dusty boxes and files of deeds in a dark old office, isn't just my ideal of our wedding-journey; but, Bessie, if you ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... 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,' ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... tired brain and sorrow-worn heart were able to think and reason, I realised that it was not the man I had worshipped as an ideal, who had come to me and asked me to lower my standard of womanhood. It was another and less worthy man—and this other was to be my companion through time, and perhaps eternity. When I learned that your insane wife was my sister, and that knowing this fact you yet planned our flight, an ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... describes an ideal republic where many of the problems that confront us are worked out. The book describes in an interesting and readable way how government is administered in this ideal republic. The government is one in which women take their full share of responsibility, the school children ...
— Eurasia • Christopher Evans
... which had lifted itself like a tower in the eyes and minds of Englishmen for a hundred generations had disappeared, and the ideal government of the people had not ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... called him "Khoshi-ke-Nna", which means "I am the Chief". A firm but just Englishman, with a striking military gait, he would have been an ideal leader of the native contingents had the offer of native help been ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... majority in whom my father inspired interest. She talked to me in an exemplary way, and held up before me, as I remember it, a sort of blend of little Lord Fauntleroy and the dreadful child in East Lynne, as an ideal to ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... but as garbage compared with it—no one ever recognised that gratifying truth more thoroughly than I do myself. Still, the shopkeeper—I beg your pardon, financier I should have said—is not wholly exempted, by the ideal character of his calling, from keeping his promises even to poor devils of scholars and ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... the adoption of our present form of government, in which it is natural to search for revelations of those qualities which we now feel to be essential to our national character. Certain epochs of our history, in other words, have been peculiarly "American," and have furnished the most ideal expression of ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... have been recovered in the versions of the East, [56] which possessed and studied the writings of Aristotle and Plato, of Euclid and Apollonius, of Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen. [57] Among the ideal systems which have varied with the fashion of the times, the Arabians adopted the philosophy of the Stagirite, alike intelligible or alike obscure for the readers of every age. Plato wrote for the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... against the fatal drift of our age toward over-education could find in Alice Tarleton, foster daughter of Gaspard Roussillon, a primitive example, an elementary case in point. What could her book education do but set up stumbling blocks in the path of happiness? She was learning to prefer the ideal to the real. Her soul was developing itself as best it could for the enjoyment of conditions and things absolutely foreign to the possibilities ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... longer possible to express the educational status of a community in the percentage of people who can merely read and write. Educational progress has become a national ideal. The elementary schools in towns and cities have been greatly strengthened both in curriculum and teaching. High schools have been organized and splendidly equipped, and ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... Tennyson portrays him, will always hold the first place with English readers as the ideal knight of the Holy Grail. The matchless diction of Tennyson has given the less perfect form of the legend a supreme charm and beauty. But Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parsifal, as spiritualized and humanized ...
— Parsifal - A Drama by Wagner • Retold by Oliver Huckel
... of his age and its progress—the history of man and his destiny to be free. But whether character or achievement be regarded, the riches before us only expose the poverty of praise. So clear was he in his great office that no ideal of the Leader or the Ruler can be formed that does not shrink by the side of the reality. And so has he impressed himself upon the minds of men, that no man can justly aspire to be the chief of a great free people who does not adopt his principles and emulate his example. We look with ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... to a person, to a cause, to an ideal, and the sacrifice of individual advantages, worldly prosperity, temporal successes to these—such, stated in a broad and general way, is the theme of special interest to Browning in his dramas. These loyalties may be well and wisely fixed, or they may contain ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... so many people appeared contemptible and insignificant creatures, and he so longed to find in someone the living ideal of that perfection toward which he strove, that he readily believed that in Speranski he had found this ideal of a perfectly rational and virtuous man. Had Speranski sprung from the same class as himself and possessed the same breeding and traditions, Bolkonski would soon have discovered ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... thing his eye glances upon, that he enters into with a depth of affection which identifies him with it for a time, be the object what it may. There is a singular interchange also of actuality and of ideal substratum and suggestion. While he sees men, with even abnormal exactness and sympathy, as men, he sees them also "as trees walking," and admits us to perceive that the whole show is in a measure spectral and unsubstantial, and the mask of a larger ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... What message did it carry from Deborah's warm, true heart that its influence should be so miraculous? "Miss Weeks, you have forgotten my interest in Oliver Ostrander. He was my daughter's lover. He was my own ideal of a gifted, kind-hearted, if somewhat mysterious, young man. No calumny uttered against him can awaken in you half the sorrow and indignation it does in me. Let me see those lines or what there ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... the emotions of the funeral service in the Quincy church, with its surroundings of national respect and family pride. By another dramatic chance it happened that the clergyman of the parish, Dr. Lunt, was an unusual pulpit orator, the ideal of a somewhat austere intellectual type, such as the school of Buckminster and Channing inherited from the old Congregational clergy. His extraordinarily refined appearance, his dignity of manner, his deeply cadenced voice, his remarkable English and his fine ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Bishop Callaway's work, the "Religious System of the Amazulu." Briefly, Umkulunkulu's character seems to vary from the idea of an ancestral spirit, or the spirit of an ancestor, to that of a god. In the case of an able and highly intelligent person like the Mopo of this story, the ideal would probably not be a low one; therefore he is made to speak of Umkulunkulu as the ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... the carefully perfected, the oral, the written—heretofore explained in this chapter. In your final work on a passage you should aim at a faultless rendition, and should spend time and ransack the lexicons rather than come short of this ideal. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... from the lips of ignorance and brutality that esprit de corps of blood, which never scruples to sacrifice all minor resentments to any opportunity of extending the cause, as it is termed, of that ideal monster, in the promotion of which the worst principles of our nature, still most active, are sure to experience the greatest glut of low and gross gratification. Oh, if reason, virtue, and true religion, were only as earnest and vigorous in ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... following features constitute, I trow, The beau ideal of a short-horn cow:— Frame massive, round, deep-barrell'd, and straight-back'd; Hind quarters level, lengthy, and well pack'd; Thighs wide, flesh'd inwards, plumb almost to hock; Twist deep, conjoining thighs in one ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... earlier inspiration knew not change: The great tradition died not: near the bridge From Magdalen's tower still rang the lark-like hymn On May-day morn: high ranged in airy cells, Facing the East, all Sciences, all Arts, Yea, and with these all Virtues, imaged stood, Best imaged stood in no ideal forms, Craft unhistoric of some dreamer's brain, But life-like shapes of plain heroic men Who in their day had fought the fight of Faith, Warriors and sages, poets, saints, and kings, And earned their rest: the long procession paced, ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... widely different conclusion. Among those works is man—a being who, in spite of the utter insignificance of his greatest performances, is capable of forming most exalted conceptions of justice, benevolence, and goodness in general, and of feeling the most eager desire to act up to his own ideal. If the divine notions of goodness in its several varieties be not identical with the human, it can only be because they are superior; and so, too, of the divine love of, and zeal for, goodness. It cannot be that the Creator is inferior to ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... a magnificent ball-room—a polished floor of dark wood—a narrow line of light under the projecting cornice, the famous Paul Veronese, the world-renowned Rubens, the adorable Titian—ideal beauty looking down with art's eternal tranquillity upon the whisk and whirl of actual life—here a calm Madonna, contemplating, with deep unfathomable eyes, these brief ephemera of a night—there Judith with a white muscular arm holding the tyrant's head aloft above the dancers—yonder Philip of ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... was thought, for girls, was one of accomplishments and of routine work, with conversational knowledge of French. The ideal of a girl's character was that she was to be merely amiable, ready to please and be pleased; it was, as was somewhat severely said by one of the Assistant Commissioners, not to be good and useful when married, but to get married. There ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... struggle to gratify ambition or for love of war; but in the conscientious discharge of sacred duty. Into that struggle North Carolina had sent more than a hundred and fifty thousand of her sons, and to them all he was ever the ideal of the soldier, the gentleman and the Christian. At his command they laid down their arms, returned to their homes and in time renewed their allegiance to ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore |
