"Idealize" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... resolve neither to soar into romance nor drop into poetry (as even Chicago drummers do here), nor to idealize nor quote too many prodigious stories, but to write such a book as I needed to read before leaving my "Abandoned Farm," "Gooseville," Mass. For I have discovered that many other travellers are as ignorant as myself regarding practical information about every-day life here, and many others at ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... Frederick, it seems to us, there was a striking and unusual union of two totally opposite tendencies of the emotional nature, which elsewhere are engaged in an unending struggle. He had in equal degree the need to idealize life for himself, and the impulse to destroy ideal moods without mercy in himself and in others. This first peculiarity of his was perhaps the most beautiful, perhaps the saddest, with which a human being was ever equipped in the struggles of ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... very odd page indeed! Not a creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look at. You can make your own comment; I am fanciful, you know. I believe she is trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of beauty, as the hyperbola and parabola belong to the conic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... in Germany, and all the children idealize him. Whatever he puts his name to, goes. He and a popular pastor worked up a huge subscription for war-waifs, and when the money had been raised it was found the waifs were already well provided for. I believe the money was appropriated ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... be called nature romance. Its purpose is both to entertain and to awaken sympathy and love for animals. Stories of this kind, like other romances, idealize the characters and may have a strong appeal to the emotions. Of the stories in this section, we may classify as nature romance Beatrix Potter's "Peter Rabbit," Sewell Ford's "Pasha, the Son of Selim," Ouida's "Moufflou," and Rudyard Kipling's ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... convey her meaning. The charm and grace of her manner, all during the talk, her winsomeness, and the almost spiritual kindness and tenderness that characterized her, made me feel that she embodied all those qualities with which we of this earth idealize our own womanhood. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... vapor &c (cloud) 353; stretch of the imagination &c (exaggeration) 549; mythogenesis^. idealist, romanticist, visionary; mopus^; romancer, dreamer; somnambulist; rhapsodist &c (fanatic) 504; castle-buildier, fanciful projector. V. imagine, fancy, conceive; idealize, realize; dream, dream of, dream up; give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name [Midsummer Night's Dream]. create, originate, devise, invent, coin, fabricate; improvise, strike out something ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... region, the feeble lamp above the stage door, the shadows opposite, have a peculiar charm, especially at night. One would not think that within that door is a short corridor leading to the mystic realm which the people "in front" idealize into a wonderful inaccessible country, the playworld. Back here, especially on a rainy night and before the playworld's inhabitants begin to sally forth to partake of terrestrial beer and sandwiches, one seems millions of miles away from the crowds of men and women ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... besides, he believes in the biblical attitude of woman. Put a woman on the mantelpiece and call her luscious, poetic names and then see how soon she'll hop down when another man simply cries 'I love you.' If a man wishes to spoil a woman successfully let him idealize her." ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... have found the path without me. I cannot claim that. I saw from the first that you were destined to find it. And, unlike Beatrice, I too was lost, and it was you who lifted me up. You mustn't idealize me." . . . She stood up. "Come!" she said. He too stood, gazing at her, and she lifted her hands to his shoulders . . . . They moved out from under the tree and walked for a while in silence across ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... feeling;" but as spring advanced, imperceptibly yet surely, in spite of pauses and apparent retrogressions, just so surely she revealed a certain warmth of sympathy. He was engaged in a work which made it easy for her to idealize him. His unselfish effort to help men live, to keep bitter tears from the eyes of their relatives, appealed most powerfully to all that was unselfish in her nature, and she was beginning to ask, "If I can make this man happier, ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... at the boys in their copper-toed boots and overalls, at the good-natured, but hopelessly common-place Martha Spriggs, with her thin hair drawn tight into a knob the size of a bullet, and her bare arms akimbo. 'Idealize her real!' Would it be possible to ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... it is as if an earthquake had burst up through the floor, which afterwards had been imperfectly trodden down again. The room is whitewashed and very clean, but wofully shabby and dingy, coarsely built, and such as the most poetical imagination would find it difficult to idealize. In the rear of this apartment is the kitchen, a still smaller room, of a similar rude aspect; it has a great, rough fireplace, with space for a large family under the blackened opening of the chimney, and an immense passage-way for the smoke, through which Shakspeare may have seen the blue sky ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... decidedly remarkable scene, pictorially, I agree with you. And an artist, of course—but isn't it a trifle quixotic, Peter, to idealize them because they are having a good time? There's no virtue in it. It is conceivable that they might have to work just as hard and have just as many little children to look after, and yet not have these dances you praise ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... his learned and elaborate work, Des Types et des Manieres des Maitres Graveurs, though usually moderate in praise, speaks of these sketches as "possessing a boldness and delicacy which charm, being taken, at the height of his genius, by the painter who knew the best how to idealize ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... had not attained a moral and intellectual culture which enabled him even to idealize so beautiful and perfect a creature. She was not a saint in the mystical or imaginative sense of the word, but, as a queen reigning by the divine right of her surpassing loveliness and grace in even Hillaton's exclusive society, she was practically ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... inserted without order or method. Even the mural paintings of Pompeii have escaped from control; and show no purposeful arrangement. Law and order have given place to individual fancy, unless in cases where earlier schemes are adopted. And with artistic arrangement has disappeared all attempt to idealize, to produce forms nobler and more beautiful than those seen every day. The figure of Antinous is the latest in which we find any attempt to produce a type of ideal beauty. Even the Virgin Mary and her Son are depicted without any attempt to render ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... about the pagan cities of antiquity than concerning the places consecrated by the sufferings of our Lord. He cared more to swim across the Hellespont with Leander than to wander over the sacred hills of Judaea; to idealize a beautiful peasant girl among the ruins of Greece, than converse with the monks of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... situation had changed in a very important way. In Herndon, Lincoln had for a partner a talented young man who looked up to him, almost adored him, who was quite willing to be his man Friday. Fortunately, for all his adoration, Herndon had no desire to idealize his hero. He was not disturbed by his grotesque or ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... woman was there as well as the artist. Who was she? Would she realize the sanctity of her mission, and keep herself fit and pure for its accomplishment? Had she character to sustain her, and imagination to idealize her calling? She was on a pinnacle now, but it was a pinnacle as dangerous as the feet of woman could press. If only she could keep herself unspotted from the world, which would do its best to drag her down, they all felt, painter, poet, and musician, that her influence ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... yet could not credit it. He was abashed—ashamed; nay, he could not define the feeling in his breast. He knew that what he read was the true interpretation of her speech, for in some manner—he guessed not how—she had begun to idealize him, to feel that the touch of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... "Don't idealize me too much, either, Mr. Haines. I didn't think it was much. Perhaps I don't understand business ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... character, in renown, Judas, in his estimation, towered like a giant above all other men of his generation. Lycidas had met the chieftain but once; but in that one meeting had received impressions which made him idealize Maccabeus into a being more like the demi-gods of whom poets sang, whom worshippers adored, than one of the denizens of earth. He was in the eyes of the young enthusiast, conqueror, patriot, and prince—a breathing embodiment of "the heroism of virtue." The Greek ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... the hopeless strife of Churches, the fundamental attraction of Christianity for human nature remains every bit as strong—to be able to say to all people, 'Imagine and idealize the best human being possible; put into him all the best qualities of all the best people you have ever known—give him strength, sympathy, power beyond the most powerful on earth, and add to that a great deep individual affection for you yourself, of a kind that is never moved by insults, or chilled ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... said, "I warned you not to idealize me. Men ought not to idealize any woman. We aren't worth it. We've done nothing to deserve it. And it hampers us. You don't know the thoughts we have; the things we can do and say. You are a sisterless man; you have never ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... cider to come, that wife and I might overwhelm you with a joint letter of thanks, laudation, and praise. But I can wait no longer. That is, the cider does n't come, and I begin to think it is a myth. Poets, you know, deal in such. They imagine, they idealize, nay, it is said they create; and if we were poets, I suppose we should before now have as good as drank some of that Long Island champagne. Speaking of poets reminds me that I did n't tell you how charmed I was with those translations from the ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... use deceiving ourselves," she thought. "We're not in the good old Tennysonian days. There's precious little chivalry now! Men don't idealize women as they used. They're grown far more suspicious—and harder. Perhaps because women have grown so critical of them! Anyway something's gone—what is it? Poetry? Illusion? And yet!—why is it that men still ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Shakespeare I would say of Calderon, of Moliere, of Corneille, of Racine, of Voltaire, of Alfieri, of Goethe, of those dramatists, in many forms, and with genius the most diverse, who have so steadily set themselves to idealize the great types of public life and of the phases of human history. Let us all beware lest worship of the idiosyncrasy of our peerless Shakespeare blind us to the value of the great masters who in a different world and with different aims have presented the development of civilization in a series ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... idealize the woman he loved, for he was not a man of ideals, nor of much imagination. Such defects as she might have, he did not see, and if he had seen them he would have been indifferent to them. To such a man, loving meant everything ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and unworthy by people who would like to have him show how Shakespeare's men talked and looked, or Scott's, or Thackeray's, or Balzac's, or Hawthorne's, or Dickens's; he is instructed to idealize his personages, that is, to take the life-likeness out of them, and put the book-likeness into them. He is approached in the spirit of the pedantry into which learning, much or little, always decays when it withdraws itself and stands apart from experience in an attitude ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... his appearance reminded her of the heroic type of manhood which the ancients had sought to depict in their marbles. In him she had unconsciously recognized the true spirit of the Argonaut on whose brow rests the star of empire. She did not idealize him; she simply recognized him for what he was—a man; one in whose soul the sentiment and enthusiasm of youth still sat enthroned, not smothered by the crushing process of modern civilization which was the case with the men she knew. A terror seized her as she compared ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... better living conditions, or merely in search of new experience. It is usually the younger generation, the more restless, active, and adaptable, who go out from the security of the old home to seek their fortunes in the new. Once settled on the new land, however, immigrants inevitably remember and idealize the home they have left. Their first disposition is to reproduce as far as possible in the new world the institutions and the social order of the old. Just as the spider spins his web out of his own body, so the immigrant ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... you grasp the offence of these facts, do not be carried away into supposing that this age is therefore unprecedentedly evil. Such dirt, toil, cruelty have always been, have been in larger measure. Don't idealize the primitive cave, the British hut, the peasant's cottage, damp and windowless, the filth-strewn, plague-stricken, mediaeval town. In spite of all these crushed, mangled, starved, neglected little ones about ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... said Hans. "Agrippa's legs were possibly bad; I idealize that and make them impossibly bad. Art, my Eugenius, must intensify. But never mind the legs now: the third sketch in the series is Berenice exulting in the prospects of being Empress of Rome, when the news has come that Vespasian is declared ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... "I don't idealize 'em," cried Rankin. "Good Lord! Don't I say they're just like men? They amount to something if they're given something worth while ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... objective reality, will always be in advance of it. So it is with all man's activities when he comes to man's estate. In science he has always an ideal of a more perfect knowledge before him though he becomes scientific by experience. In art he is always striving to idealize fresh things, though he first becomes an artist from the pure spontaneous pleasure of expressing what is in him. The deliberate projection of the ideal into the future, seeing how far it will take us and whether we are journeying in the right direction, is a late stage. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... a little hard on the women of Elisabeth's type, who idealize their fellows until the latter lose all semblance of reality; for experience, with its inevitable disillusionment, can not fail to put their ideal lovers and friends far from them, and to hide their etherealized ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... million men here in Russia—roughly speaking. Very strong, very simple, possibly very brutal men, but brutal as a fine dog is brutal, a simplicity about that. I do not idealize them. I have lived among them. I know this: They might be led to virtue, instead of to wickedness. My heart bleeds for them being led to slaughter again. The hard thing is to make them see, but the reason for that is simple, too. If they could see—they would not be ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... true that in certain respects, Fra Angelico might be said to belong to the same school as Masolino. They are, however, at the antipodes from each other in sentiment and artistic interpretation, for while the saintly Giovanni endeavoured to idealize the human figure and render it divine, Masolino, like most of his contemporaries, followed a style distinctly realistic; yet it may be proved that in technique, both followed the same rules, and worked on similar principles. ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... "Most women idealize the men they love, honey-girl." Winston Morgan was from the South, and he drew upon its store of picturesque endearments to express his joy and pride in his own Peggy. "And if they didn't where should ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... said the Baron, "we must pardon much to men of genius. A delicate organization renders them keenly susceptible to pain and pleasure. And then they idealize every thing; and, in the moonlight of fancy, even the deformity of vice ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... from the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, as he came over it on his journey from Galilee; to conceive how the temple and the ritual would fill him with awe in his readiness not to criticise, but to idealize everything he saw, and to think only of the significance given by it all to the scripture; to imagine how eagerly he would talk in the temple court with the learned men of his people about the law and ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... awkwardness in her presence. The West itself appealed to her, its bigness, its nearness to the absolutely primeval, but not the people she had so far met. They were not wrapped in a glamor of romance; she was altogether too keen to idealize them. They were not her kind, and while she granted their worth, they were more picturesque about their own affairs than when she came in close contact with them. Those were her first impressions. And so she looked ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the Tuileries gardens, the place which I had chosen as my destination, before I saw the prototype of the matrimonial situation which has last been described in this book. Had I desired to characterize, to idealize, to personify marriage, as I conceived it to be, it would have been impossible for the Creator himself to have produced so complete a symbol of it as ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... they talked about in public, and nothing at all of golden streets, golden harps, angel wings, and thrones; it was a mere extension, somewhat improved, of the present. Bankers, manufacturers, merchants, and mechanics seldom so idealize their own occupations; they work fifty weeks a year to go free ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... not with woods or waters; they furnish the conditions, and are what you make them. Did Shelley interpret the song of the skylark, or Keats that of the nightingale? They interpreted their own wild, yearning hearts. The trick of the poet is always to idealize nature,—to see it subjectively. You cannot find what the poets find in the woods until you take the poet's heart to the woods. He sees nature through a colored glass, sees it truthfully, but with ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... fact a secret, or otherwise dispose of them by pensions or emigration, but she could not bear to KNOW IT HERSELF! She never could be happy as the mistress of Scrooby Priory with that knowledge; she did not idealize it as a principle! Carefully weighing it by her own practical common sense, she said to herself that "it wouldn't pay." The highest independence is often akin to the lowest selfishness; she did not dream that the same pride which kept her grandfather from ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... passed through the rain, on their way to the fields. But the contrast between them and the chief in his soldier's uniform seated at breakfast was rather too striking; and incidentally it etched in bold lines the folly of those who idealize the life of even exceptionally good and ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... doubted her resolution; and this first night of the westward journey was one of them. She had thought at one time that she might be able to idealize David Kent, but he had gone his way to hew out his fortune, taking her upstirrings of his ambition in a purely literal and selfish sense, so far as she could determine. And now there was Brookes Ormsby. ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... not a popular religion, and to thousands of educated men it did not appeal. Few people are so immaterialistic that they can dispense with symbols; many can idealize symbols in which others see nothing but matter; and only those devoid of artistic perception deny the religious value of sculpture, painting, and music. Protestantism might be an ideal religion if men were compounded ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment of relativity theory involves thinking about a man in an elevator accelerating through space.) Gedanken experiments are very useful in physics, but must be used with care. It's too easy to idealize away some important aspect of the real world in constructing ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... whom the realities are very instant, urges him to do as others do, to entertain, to hunt, at least to do something practical. For her he has abandoned the ideal world he had built up for himself from his books and his dreams and is trying farming. Yet his temperament is such that he must idealize even this. When the curtain rises he is still busy with the project, long since undertaken, of reclaiming a wind-swept heather field fronting the Atlantic and of making it into the best of pasture ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... warm, corner in Jimmy Wallace's bachelor heart for youth, and innocence, and enthusiasm. Especially for young girls who were innocent and enthusiastic. But since he suspected himself of a tendency to idealize these qualities, even to sentimentalize upon them, he generally kept a cautious distance off. Rose, with the bloom that was on her, and the glow that radiated from her the night he was introduced to her at a dinner party at the Williamsons', had ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... develop a tendency to exalt and idealize the common-place phases of life beyond all limits of reason or possibility. We flatter our buoyant expectations with the conviction that there is honey in the heart of every trifling flower we must gather by life's dusty roadside, and that it needs but the magic touch of our own hand to have it ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... I merely suggest that you don't idealize the victim in this instance. I dare say she hasn't suffered half as much as you have. Remember that she's a person of commonplace traditions, and probably took a simple view of the matter, and let it go as something ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... gains importance by a poet's fancy, when his genius vividly represents to our imagination a clearer, but not an ennobled image of men and objects which have an existence; then alone he understands how to idealize."—H. HERTZ. ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... first the wilful closing of its eyes to natural facts;—for, however ignorant a person may be, he need only look at a human being to see that it has a mouth as well as eyes; and secondly, the endeavour to adorn or idealize natural fact according to its own notions: it puts red spots in the middle of the hands, and sharpens the thumbs, thinking to improve them. Here you have the most pure type possible of the principles of idealism in all ages: whenever people don't look at Nature, they always ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... an instant understood? Ah, well, if he had been so transfigured in her sight, she might well idealize Stanistreet.) ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... relation to the Buddhism of Ceylon, while Bigandet has set forth that of Burmah, and Alabaster that of Siam. Sir Monier Williams, in his more recent work, "Buddhism," has done much to counteract the fashionable tendency of most Orientalists to idealize the ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... me to confess that I had sometimes written verses, but I had never shown her any. She did not much like that artificial and set form of speech, which, when it does not idealize, generally impairs the simplicity of feeling and expression. Her nature was too full of impulse, too feeling, and too serious, to bend itself to all the precision, form, and delay of written poetry. She was Poetry without a lyre—true ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... which equality of condition and intelligence is realized. Through diversity of function, it gives rise to proportionality of products and equilibrium in exchange, and consequently opens for us the road to wealth; as also, in showing us infinity everywhere in art and Nature, it leads us to idealize our acts, and makes the creative mind—that is, divinity itself, mentem diviniorem—immanent and ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... nobility of the Moro in contrast to the other tribes of the archipelago, by his unfortunate treatment and his possibilities for development, I found myself taking up his cause, and was repaid by intense interest wherever I launched forth on my pet subject. I was so successful that gradually I began to idealize the Moro, weaving around him, not the "might have beens," but the "might be's." Hence, ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... Communications Officer, was neurotic, but an old Armed Force man. Discipline meant a lot to him. Kirschenbaum, Power Chief, was a joker, with cold eyes, and smarter than he seemed. The question was whether he was smart enough to idealize the ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... Occasionally Mr. Abner Nott, in a practical relapse, raged against the derelicts, and talked of dispossessing them, or even dismantling his tenement, but he was easily placated by a compliment to the "dear old ship," or an effort made by some tenant to idealize his apartment. A photographer who had ingeniously utilized the forecastle for a gallery (accessible from the bows in the next street), paid no further tribute than a portrait of the pretty face of Rosey Nott. The superstitious reverence in which Abner Nott held his monstrous ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... tell you, Kenny," he added honestly, hoping to spur the culprit on to more and better work. "It may help. They said downstairs that you interpret everything, even trees and snow, in terms of unreality. You over-idealize. I suppose it's your eternal need of illusion. We've spoken of ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... lofty or tender sentiments which form the connecting links between youth and genius; for if poets sing to the young, and the young hail their own interpreters in poets, it is because the tendency of both is to idealize the realities of life,—finding everywhere in the real a something that is noble or fair, and making the fair yet fairer, and the noble ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I think needful; but it renders that previous avowal of faithlessness to Antony altogether superfluous, the sole fault in an almost perfect portrait. For, as I have said already, Shakespeare's mistakes in characterization nearly always spring from his desire to idealize; but here his personal vindictiveness comes to help his art. The historical fact compels him now to give his harlot, Cleopatra, heroic attributes; in spite of Caesar's threats to treat her sons severely if she dares ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... a right to that also," he thought and his mind began to idealize the marriages of men and women. "On every hand here I see them, the neat, well-dressed, handsome women like Clara. How ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... not wish to idealize the polygamous relation—but in monogamy a man is not persecuted for his marriage, and sometimes he does not appreciate the tie. In polygamy, the men and women alike had been compelled to suffer on its account by the grim trials of the life itself ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... exceptional beings. I am one myself. Moreover, I need them to give relief to my common characters; and I never sacrifice them without necessity. But these common characters interest me more than they interest you. I aggrandize them; I idealize them in an inverse direction, in their ugliness or their stupidity. I give to their deformity terrifying or grotesque proportions. You could not do this. You are wise not to look at people and things that would cause you nightmare. Idealize ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... song is an admirable and faithful interpretation of the old Hawaiian manner of cantillation, having received at the hands of the foreign musician only so much trimming as was necessary to idealize it and make it reducible ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... It was never written.] will have for its object an application of these principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, and a defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners and opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative and creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic development of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free development ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... for the male sex. On the other hand, they are easily stimulated to eroticism by pictures or novels, if they are sufficiently aesthetic, or even moral. This is a great danger for both sexes, especially for woman—eroticism dissimulated under hypocritical forms, and intended to idealize dishonest intentions (vide de Maupassant: "Ce Cochon ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... rely on him for any serviceable friendship Laura was uncertain. As a youth he had inclined to idealize women, but she was suspicious of his later record. Good or bad it had left no mark on him. Probably he had not much principle where women were concerned. Few of the men Laura had known in early life had had any principles of any sort except a common spirit ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... to idealize the village when one views it from this height. To the tourist, who comes merely to admire, it is a view that possesses the glamour of enchantment. How happy should be the people who dwell in this peaceful village, surrounded by such charming scenery! ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... "Oh, Webb, how you idealize nature!" she said. "You make every object suggest something fanciful, beautiful, or entertaining. How have you ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... will understand and even idealize plant and animal life if he learns of plant and animal life first in human terms. His moral development is menaced if this process is reversed so that a counter-tendency is set up,—a tendency to interpret ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... successful with this, if he makes it for the study of it, as if he made it for the sake of making a picture—better probably. The making of a picture for the picture's sake is dangerous to the student. His is less likely to be sincere. He is apt to "idealize," to make up something according to some notion of how a picture should be, rather than from knowledge of how nature is. Real pictures grow from study ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... will ever convince me of their folly. . . . . . I have been painting a great deal, beside my regular exercises, for my own amusement; I take such delight in testing my power to reflect the visible charm of beauty, and in endeavoring, however faintly, to idealize humanity. Among other efforts, I have finished a miniature of one of the young sisters here, whose sad, placid face, seemed to sketch itself upon my memory. Of course, the likeness was drawn without her knowledge—she ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... hearts of tender babes. I am opposed to the Jew bible because it is bad. I don't deny that there are many good passages in it, nor that among all the thorns there are some roses. I admit that many Christians are doing all they can to idealize the frightful things in the old testament. It is the protest of human nature. Now, they tell me that this book is inspired. Let us see what inspired means. If it means anything, it is that the thoughts of God, through the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... natural ecstasy is not produced merely by the physiological effects of music on the organism, by the education of our sense of beauty, and of our reminiscences of earlier mythical emotions, but also by the innate impulse which still persists, leading us to idealize and vivify all natural phenomena, ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... the kind, Cecily. But remember how young you are. You know very little of the world, and often see things in an ideal light. It is your tendency to idealize. You haven't the experience necessary to a woman who goes about in ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... was evidently the foremost dupe of her inventions. She had a fictitious history in which she believed much more fondly than in her real one, and an infinite capacity for extemporized reminiscence adapted to the mood of the hour. She liked to idealize herself, to take interesting and picturesque attitudes to her own imagination; and the vivacity and spontaneity of her character gave her, really, a starting-point in experience; so that the many-colored flowers of fiction ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... negro" merely amounts to saying that the writer has been bold enough to stem the current of traditional opinion, and find a poetic view of humanity at the present time and in its most despised portion. The end of dramatic writing is not to reproduce Nature, but to idealize it; a literal copying of the same, as everybody knows, is the merit of the photographer, not of the artist. Again, it should be remembered that the highly wrought characters among the slaves are whites, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... that," he said quickly, "but it is a great puzzle at present and I am thankful to say, I think it is quite safe to wait a year or two yet. You and I live so much apart from society that we idealize it a good deal, though you are a stray-away bit of it. We too seldom see the ideal gentleman or lady; we have to be contented with keeping the ideal in our minds, it seems to me, and saying that this man is gentlemanly, and that woman ladylike. But I do believe in aiming at the best things, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... and down the long piazza, indifferent for the first time in his life to the loveliness of the soft April atmosphere, that seemed to blend, raise and idealize the features of the landscape until earth, water and sky were harmonized into celestial beauty. Paul was growing very anxious for the reappearance of Miriam, or for some news of her or her errand, yet dreading every ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... girl with the distorting medium of his prejudice pushed aside. Therefore she was a sudden beautiful revelation to him, as vivid as unexpected. He did not believe any such being existed, and indeed there did not, if we consider into what he came to idealize Edith. But a better Edith really lived than the unnatural paragon that he pictured to himself, and the reality was capable of a vast improvement, though not in the direction that his ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... in my opinion, both of the writer and of the poet, is to idealize woman too much, and ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... story seems very strange. Davis and Falconroy are both pretty considerable cowards, but so are lots of other men. I would not hang a dog on my own opinion about this. But I think," he went on softly and reflectively, "I think you Americans are too modest. I think you idealize the English aristocracy—even in assuming it to be so aristocratic. You see a good-looking Englishman in evening-dress; you know he's in the House of Lords; and you fancy he has a father. You don't allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... possession of this God who had arisen in the human consciousness as a consequence of the sense of divinity in man, and tended to define him and convert him into an idea. For to define a thing is to idealize it, a process which necessitates the abstraction from it of its incommensurable or irrational element, its vital essence. Thus the God of feeling, the divinity felt as a unique person and consciousness external to us, although at the same time ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... exciting literature Dr. Ray attributes to "feverish pulse, disturbed digestion, and irritable nerves." No doubt he is right,—within limits. But may not a healthy laborer find in the startling effects of the younger Cobb refreshment as precisely adapted to idealize his life, and divert his thoughts from a hard day's work, as that for which the college-professor seeks a tragedy of Sophocles or a romance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... by pushing reality to the point of making of it a positive suffering. In the first case his heroes are like one another by their analogy in the use and abuse of strength; in the other they are like Byron, because he has almost instilled a portion of his own life into them, in order to idealize them. ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... concerned with conduct, any dualisms which are set up between mind and activity must reflect themselves in the theory of morals. Since the formulations of the separation in the philosophic theory of morals are used to justify and idealize the practices employed in moral training, a brief critical discussion is in place. It is a commonplace of educational theory that the establishing of character is a comprehensive aim of school instruction and discipline. Hence it is important ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... not ended yet," answered Ronald, with as much cheerfulness as he could command, for his friend's depression affected his sympathetic nature. "We may not comprehend our roles in the beginning; we may have to study long before we can thoroughly conceive, then idealize, then act them." ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Sheila. You see, Clyde, Casey and I are too much two of a kind. We'd never get on. You'll idealize him; I'd call him down. He'll talk out of his heart to you; he'd talk irrigation, and crops, and horses to me. You'll accept his judgment in most things as final; I'd want him to take my opinion instead of his own. Oh, we'd make an awful mess of it! And so, my dear, don't you think that ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... well break off here as anywhere, so far as England is concerned. England is one great burial-ground to an American. As islands are built up out of the shields of insects, so her soil is made the land of Burns, and see what one man can do to idealize and glorify the common life about him! Here is a poor "ten-footer", as we should call it, the cottage William "Burness" built with his own hands, where he carried his young bride Agnes, and where the boy Robert, his first-born, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... ambitious members of the race are doing in their various fields of endeavor. An effort is made to get away from former biographical works largely given to eulogy of individuals unduly advertised. The aim seems rather to idealize the life of obscure men, who have achieved merit in applying themselves to the ordinary duties of life. Referring to the failure to treat more extensively the biographical material of the whole race the editor states that such accounts cannot be secured in many instances for the reason that, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... it is realized, however, that wars are not inevitable, men cease to idealize Demaetia, unless they are sure she did her best to keep the peace. To a realistic poet of war such as Mr. Sassoon, she is an object of pity rather than praise. His sonnet, Glory of Women, suggests that there is another point of ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... the joy that flooded him. "I must tell you the truth so that you won't idealize me... and the situation. I am enlisted in this fight for life. Where it will lead me I don't know. But I must follow the road I see. You will lose your friends. They will think me a crank, an enemy ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... and with him, so it seemed, all veils and draperies, all misty sublimations. One doesn't idealize one's self too much, with curses ringing ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... we take our beginning? From Space, istud litigium philosophorum, which leaves the mind equally dissatisfied, whether we deny or assert its real existence. To make it wholly ideal, would be at the same time to idealize all phenomena, and to undermine the very conception of an external world. To make it real, would be to assert the existence of something, with the properties of nothing. It would far transcend the height to which a physiologist must confine his flights, should ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
