"Imaginative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the jungle when they left the courtyard of the Three Elephants' Heads and ascended the stone steps towards the inner moat. They crossed the bridge, and entered the outer city in silence. The place was very dreary at that hour of the day, and to Codd, who was of an imaginative turn of mind, it seemed as if faces out of the long deserted past were watching him from every house. His companions, however, were scarcely so impressionable. They were gloating over the treasure they had won for themselves, and one, at least, was speculating as to ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... and produced a nymph, who, as he persuaded her and himself, was a much nobler performance than Andromache, but unfortunately she did not prove equally marketable. And he said it was quite plain that he could not succeed in anything imaginative till his health and spirits had recovered from the blow; but he was ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... investigators in the world. Herbert Spencer would have been swamped in a family, and the same with George Eliot. If they had married each other, as Herbert says they might (had Georgie been better-looking), philosophical and imaginative genius would have been lost in getting the meals and bending posterity over the parental knee to make sin seem undesirable. I had always felt that Jim was cut out to get married, and I stood ready to help him through the entire catalogue of crime and conspiracy, for I knew he could not undertake ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... been successfully repelled. Besides English and German troops, Burgoyne had the aid of several tribes of Indian auxiliaries, whose aid the British Government had been at some pains to secure—a policy denounced by Chatham in a powerful and much-quoted speech. Burgoyne was a clever and imaginative though not a successful soldier. He conceived and suggested to his Government a plan of campaign which was sound in strategic principle, which might well have succeeded, and which, if it had succeeded, would have dealt a heavy and perhaps a decisive blow to American hopes. How far its failure ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... Henty at his best. A Jacobite Exile is full of life, adventure, and movement, and admirably illustrated; it is in Mr. Henty's best manner, and while never losing sight of the imaginative and romantic interest, has a substantial value as a bit ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... particular, led more than once to disaster. His angry vanity suspected that while he was now thought incapable of the poetic or imaginative work in which he had once excelled, he was still considered—'like any fool'—good enough for portraits. This alone was enough to make him loathe the business. On two or three occasions he ended by quarrelling with the sitter. ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... present temper for this. The world has indorsed his great popularity with the heart, as much as with the brain. There are those who have objected that the last subject of his labor—the "Life of Washington"—was little suited to his imaginative tone of mind, and should have been worked up with a larger and more philosophic grasp of thought. It may well be that at some future time we shall have a more profound estimate of the relations which our great Leader held to his cause and to his time; but, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... beginning, we all knew how it would end. He had always been so quiet and conventional, although by nature an impulsive man; always so temperate and abstemious, although a man with a quick appreciation of pleasure; always so cautious and practical, although an imaginative man, that when, at last, one by one he loosed these bands, and gave himself up to a life, perhaps not worse than other lives which the world has accepted as the natural expression of their various owners, we at once decided ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... the earthly home of beauty, and if any real thing were fair as the tender thought of imaginative youth, heaven were not far. All we love is but our thought of what only thought makes known and makes beautiful, and for what we know love's thought may be ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... was not wretched, often even not uncomfortable. His religion was not real; but it had reality enough for present purposes; he was at once a sceptic and a mystic, a true disciple of Boehm as well as of Voltaire. For afflicted, irresolute, imaginative men like Schubart, this is not a rare or altogether ineffectual resource: at the bottom of their minds they doubt or disbelieve, but their hearts exclaim against the slightest whisper of it; they dare not look into the fathomless abyss of Infidelity, so they cover it over with the ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Works of any author—and especially of a poet who himself adopted a different plan—is that it shows us, as nothing else can do, the growth of his own mind, the progressive development of his genius and imaginative power. By such a redistribution of what he wrote we can trace the rise, the culmination, and also—it may be—the decline and fall of his genius. Wordsworth's own arrangement—first adopted in the edition of 1815—was designed by him, with the view of bringing ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... legendary lore. It has an earnest moral purpose, never lightly forgotten or thrown aside. It is remarkable for the deep and extensive knowledge it displays, and for the practical lessons of life and history which it reflects in imaginative form. We have humour and wit, often closely bordering on pathos and tragedy; exploits of war, of love, and of chivalrous adventure, alternate with the cheerful lightness and pleasantry of ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... papers. So the Tribune young man was taken off hotels and put on finance. After that he was not scooped. He came to know Lyman J. Gage and moved on to New York via Washington. To-day the poor young man who failed as a hotel reporter because he lacked the gift of imaginative fiction is president of the National City Bank of New York. Perhaps you have heard of him. ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... solitary little stranger, even if he had not been the Honourable Michael. So was the elder girl of the party, but, unluckily, Michael was just of the age to be a great nuisance to children who played combined and imaginative games which he could not ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he was still a mere student, and not recovered from that fine intoxication in which classical literature drenches a young imaginative soul, and that at last we find him 'resting in the hopes of an eternal day.' 'Lochleven' is the spent echo of the 'Seasons,' although, as we said before, its descriptions possess considerable merit. His 'Last Day' is more ambitious than ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... which Letty was not imaginative, and one of those lines ran parallel to Judith's experience. When it came to love at first sight, she could invent as many situations as there were millionaires in the subway. In interpreting a part she had views of her own beyond any held by Luciline Lynch. As to matters ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... went begging among the editors. His early work counted for nothing in his eyes except for the money it brought, and his horror stories, two of which he had sold, he did not consider high work nor his best work. To him they were frankly imaginative and fantastic, though invested with all the glamour of the real, wherein lay their power. This investiture of the grotesque and impossible with reality, he looked upon as a trick—a skilful trick at best. Great literature could not reside in such a field. Their artistry ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... son of Edward VII., upon his progress around the world, and the unanimity with which volunteers sprang to the aid of England in the South African War—this response of English hearts in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere to the drum-beat of the empire was the fulfillment of one of Beaconsfield's imaginative dreams. A writer in the "Spectator" two years earlier had made the prophecy which in the century's end ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... acquired from others. Some memory or imaginative effect, which does not come from the gazer's ordinary self. Revivals of ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... signature, it possessed the first essential of a superior autograph; for, although a rose under any other name may smell as sweet, yet it is clear that with regard to every thing coming from the pen, whether folio or billet doux, imaginative poem, or matter-of-fact note of hand, there is a vast deal in this important item, which is often the very life and stamina of the whole production. Then again, the subject of extreme want is one ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... great spirits, who, appearing about the same time, bore it up to sublimer heights and developed a more distinguished range of qualities. Bonifazio and Bordone lack the grandeur and sweetness of Titian, the brilliant touch and imaginative genius of Tintoretto, the matchless feeling for colour, design, and decoration of Veronese, but they continue Venetian painting on logical lines, and they form a ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... moody, imaginative Hawthorne of America, was guided and influenced in his literary career by his wife, whose inspiring but practical mind guided his impulsive and impressionable nature into ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... has been reared, and the damnable suggestions of hell and purgatory, of unpardonable sin and endless suffering, the stock-in-trade of poet, priest and prelate up to and overlapping our present brighter day, should remain forever a closed volume to this child, a book as wildly imaginative and as unacceptable as ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... tall blacks pressing forward toward where the white-clothed sailors were dispensing the precious fluid, and it struck him that their aspect was threatening. The next moment he set the idea down as being imaginative, and the result of the unreal-looking, dreamy scene before him. For it was impossible, he argued, for the slaves to be about to resent ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... us in generous measure the "certain jolly humors" which R.L.S. says we voyage to find. He throws off flashes of imaginative felicity—as where he says of canes, "They are the light to blind men." Where he describes Mr. Oliver Herford "listing to starboard, like a postman." Where he says of the English who use colloquially phrases known to us only in great literature—"There are primroses in their speech." And ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... imaginative people, these tales of daring courage and wild adventure have an inconceivable charm; though stained with blood, they are full of poetry and romance. Such stories have been eagerly seized upon by writers on Corsica,—they make excellent literary ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... his efforts, seemed to trip off his tongue with an easy confidence which surprised even himself, he took his departure. And he left the hut with the final picture of Scipio, still studying his pages of regulations with the earnestness of a divinity student studying his Bible, filling his strongly imaginative brain. He felt good. He felt so good that he was sorry there was nothing more to be ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... most unlikely to be transmitted in its entirety, and ill-balanced compounds of the same constituents are usually of little avail, and sometimes extraordinarily bad. A fourth reason is that the highest imaginative power is dangerously near lunacy. If one of the sanest of poets, Wordsworth, had, as he said, not unfrequently to exert strength, as by shaking a gate-post, to gain assurance that the world around him was a reality, ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster
... described, you may remember, as coming from certain voices. I cannot translate it into words,—only into feelings; and these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing, which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world or on the very threshold ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... the parcel from his father. What the deuce could it be? To the imaginative, an unopened parcel never quite loses its intriguing air of mystery. The shape suggested a ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... you, sir, fear nothing; I have a nimble soul that hath waked all my imaginative forces by this time, and put them in true motion: what you have possest me withal, I'll discharge it amply, sir. Make ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... greater, more just, and more pleasant than it really is. "So as it appeareth that Poesie serveth and conferreth to Magnanimitie, Moralitie, and to delectation." Here Bacon seems to imply that the essential pleasure of poetry is in affording vicarious experience through imaginative realization. Poetry does this by "submitting the shewes of things to the desires of the minde." It truly makes a world nearer to our heart's desire. But while Bacon derives the moral benefit of poetry from examples ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... and imagination were the pioneers who made earth habitable for the human spirit; they are still its lawgivers and where they have lodged their treasures, there is wisdom. I desire to renew the long discussion of the nature and method of idealism by engaging in a new defence of poetry, or the imaginative art in any of its kinds, as the means by which this wisdom, which is the soul's knowledge of itself, is stored up for the race in its most manifest, enduring, and vital forms. It is, by literary tradition and association, a proud task. May I not take counsel of Spenser and be bold at the first door? ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... the living races in the Mediterranean isles, in Sardinia, Sicily and Southern Italy. Finally, the Tuaregs of the Central Sahara belong to the same type. Everywhere the same tall, dark race, handsome, imaginative; with a quite definite form of head, of brow, of eyes; a well-marked character of visage, complexion, and ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... are large and irregular, but very beautiful, and each leaf is supported by a stem which comes directly from the ground, giving the impression of a miniature tree. A large dish of these little trees springing from the moss makes the Fairy Forest, and an imaginative girl, or possibly boy, well steeped in fairy lore, may imagine many ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... religion is to be longed for, not only because of its universal brotherhood, but also because it can decide between the inspirations of the Holy Spirit and the criminal conceits of passion or the dreams of an imaginative temperament. ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... lives existences full of spiritual richness,—women who find in religion not the mechanical acceptance of form, not a mere superstition which encrusts an outworn creed, but a vital, uplifting force; a power which fills their souls with imaginative warmth and fervor. The worth of an experience is to be estimated by the emotional fire which it kindles; and to the lives of such women the dull, colorless round of their daily existence gives no real clue. Theirs is the life ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... thing and intensely interesting, though, as is almost always the case with the author, strangely unexciting. The interest is purely intellectual, and is actually increased by comparison with Hugo's imaginative account of the battle itself; but you do not care the snap of a finger whether the hero, Fabrice, gets off or not. Another patch later, where this same Fabrice is attacked by, and after a rough-and-tumble struggle ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... novel, written as novels are, to entertain, to edify and to perform the spiritual functions of poetry and good literature. It is also unique in that it contains a story of love, a motive largely absent from Mr. Belloc's imaginative writing. ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... wrought and imaginative than Ariosto's; but it removes the man farther from ourselves, except under very special circumstances. Indeed, it might be taken rather for a picture of hypochondria than jealousy, and under that aspect is very appalling. But nothing, under more obvious circumstances, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... an unusually serious speech from the imaginative and sometimes irrepressible Dick, and the boys were correspondingly moved ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... Darkness. To the left, under lowered eyelids of sable clouds, there ran a band of red fire that seemed as if it must belt the earth with its fury, a red fire that might have flamed from the mouth of the very pit. Lagardere was not over-imaginative, but the strangeness of the contrast, the fierce splendor of the warring colors, touched the player's heart beneath the soldier's hide. "The gold of heaven," he murmured, and saluted the sky to the right. "The rod of hell," he thought, and pointed ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... invented by myself, I fared like other imaginative children. I could imagine the most marvellous things about every member of the household, and while telling them—but only during that time—I often fancied that they were true; yet the moment I was asked whether these things had actually occurred, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... greater elements of his art. In all these comparisons, it is not merely Wordsworth's theme and motive and dominant note that are different; the skill of hand is different, and the musical ear and the imaginative eye. ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... ex-counsellor Bunker discovered the thing was nothing to laugh at; patients were at the door—if he did not soon prescribe for their cases, his now numerous creditors would prescribe for him! What was to be done? Very dull and prosy people often become enterprising and imaginative, to a wonderful degree, when put to their trumps. This philosophical fact applied to ex-counsellor Bunker's case exactly. He was there to better his fortune, and he felt bound to do it, persimmons or no persimmons. It ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... he had often noticed in Julie that she had an imaginative tenderness for rank or great fortune. At first it had seemed to him a woman's natural romanticism; then he explained it to himself as closely connected with ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky,—our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains,—our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests,—and our hearts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... gifted of his generation of artists, not only in England, where art is, if not exotic, at least sporadic, but in Europe, and I consider that if he had been of Titian's time he would have been one of the greatest of the Venetians. His imaginative force and intensity were extraordinary, and some of the elaborate compositions he drew in pen and ink, for future painting, are as remarkable in invention and dramatic feeling as anything I know in art, and all drawn without a model. The "Hector," the "Hamlet and Ophelia," the "Magdalene at ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... perversely. It was irrational to walk, and he knew it, but he walked, and the knowledge that it was irrational irritated him further. The skin between his shoulder blades itched meditatively in its own imaginative anticipation of an entering needle. What good did it do him to be proud of his brains when he put himself in a spot where he ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... known Dick; she was a friend of George's, and, no doubt, in regular communication with her brother in Canada. It was possible that she might allude to Sylvia's doings when she wrote; but there was some consolation in remembering that George was neither an imaginative nor ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... am glad," replied the girl, choosing rather to answer in the matter-of-fact manner of the pale-faces than in the somewhat imaginative style of the Indians. She could adopt ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... rhythms and the forms of poetry to which high passions naturally move, become spontaneous. The emotion is paramount, and the knowledge conveyed is valuable as supplying fuel to the fire of feeling. There are, were, and always will be high imaginative points of vantage commanding the broad fields of knowledge, upon which the poet may take his station to survey the world and all that it contains. But it has long ceased to be his function to set forth, in any kind of metre, systems of speculative thought or purely scientific ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... by animals, because the secrets will be extremely valuable to mankind. As one floats over tide-water on a balmy evening after dark and watches the pulsating spots of phosphorescent light emitted by the lowly jellyfishes, his imaginative mood formulates the question, "Why are these lowly organisms endowed with such ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... climb the battlements of heaven, but because it is a flame of sulphur salt and bitumen, and was kindled in the dishonourable regions below, derived from Hell and contrary to God, it cannot pass forth to the element of love; but ends in barrenness and murmurs, fantastic expectations and trifling imaginative confidences; and they at last end in sorrows ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... probability is what the imagination will readily accept; and the imagination, he says, will bear a "strong Imposition." Reason, to be sure, demands that actions and speeches shall be "natural"—but natural within the framework of the situation and character as established by the dramatist on the imaginative level. The author's words on illusion recall the passage in Dryden about reason's suffering itself to be "hoodwinked" by imaginative presentation, foreshadow Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief," and directly suggest Johnson's passages on the subject. Experience will ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... imaginative youth, who revolts against his father's plans for him to be a servitor of big business. The love of a fine girl turns Bibb's ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... over you, which is one of the enjoyments of Christmastide. Coleridge (says the late Mr. George Dawson)[88] "holds the first place amongst English poets in this objective teaching of the vague, the mystic, the dreamy, and the imaginative. I defy any man of imagination or sensibility to have 'The Ancient Mariner' read to him, by the flickering firelight on Christmas night, by a master mind possessed by the mystic spirit of the poem, and not find himself taken away from the ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... the other, I am afraid," she answered shaking her head, "that is if by literature you mean imaginative writing, and I suppose that is the only way to get into notice. As I told you I lost my imagination—well, to be frank, when I lost my faith. At one time I used to have plenty, as I used to have plenty of faith, but the one went with the other, ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... if your head aches," said Bertha. "You can only do work of that sort if you feel calm and in a good humor. Above all things, for work of the imaginative order you must ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... acknowledged, to make it needful that it should be dwelt on here. A careful review of the circumstances of his life induces the belief, that his writings grew (if it may be permitted so to speak) out of his life. In his most imaginative passages, to whatever height his fancy soared, the starting point seems ever from a fact. The past appears to have been always spread out before him when he wrote, like a beautiful landscape, on which his eye rested with complacency, and from which his mind transferred and ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... stands among children and their parents of this generation where the books of Louisa May Alcott stood in former days. The haps and mishaps of this inimitable pair of twins, their many adventures and experiences are a source of keen delight to imaginative children everywhere. ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... superior to all other orators in, that he had been a pupil of Anaxagoras the natural philosopher. And it was owing to him, in his opinion, (though he had learnt also many other splendid and admirable accomplishments,) that he was so copious and imaginative, and so thoroughly aware—which is the main thing in eloquence—by what kinds of speeches the different parts of ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... alone of its arrival was sufficient to satisfy his imaginative sentiment. He was not anxious to open the epistle, and in truth did not begin to read it for nearly half-an-hour, anticipating readily its terms of passionate retrospect and tender adjuration. When at last ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... he rose from his chair and walked up and down the room in his excitement—"I shall expect to see you take your proper place in your generation. I shall say: 'Choose your own line, become a critical scholar, a practical mathematician, or—and perhaps that is what you are most suited for with your imaginative powers—a writer of fiction. For remember that fiction, properly understood and directed to worthy aims, is the noblest and most far-reaching, as it is also the most difficult of the arts.' In watching the success that will assuredly attend you in this or any other line, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... differ in this respect just as markedly as, for instance, the Dutch do from the French. And this is true not only of those who are classified by their friends as being respectively imaginative or unimaginative, but of those whose gifts or habits are not ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... in here—it was that of a young man in a large white coat with a red neckcloth, over which a dingy short collar was turned, so as to exhibit a dubious neck—with a large pin of bullion or other metal, and an imaginative waistcoat with exceedingly fanciful glass buttons, and trowsers that cried with a loud voice, "Come look at me and see how cheap and tawdry I am; my master, what a dirty buck!" and a little stick in one pocket of his coat, and a lady in pink satin on the other ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... church. It was not because he was without belief; there was a strong leaven of faith underlying his cynicism. Frankly, sermons bored him. It was so easy for his imaginative mind to reach out and take the thought from the preacher's mouth almost before he uttered it. Thus, there was never any suspense, and suspense in sermons, as in books and plays, is the only thing that ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... translation of Bloch into French. In English a portion of his book was translated for the general reader and published with a preface by the late Mr. W.T. Stead. It does not seem to have reached the British military authorities, nor was it published in England with an instructive intention. As an imaginative work it would have been considered worthless ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... never made. They even got to resemble each other, after the fashion of old married couples, or, rather, as in matrimonial partnerships, were subject to the domination of the stronger character; although in their case it is to be feared that it was the feminine Uncle Billy—enthusiastic, imaginative, and loquacious—who swayed the masculine, steady-going, and practical Uncle Jim. They had lived in the camp since its foundation in 1849; there seemed to be no reason why they should not remain there until its inevitable evolution into a mining-town. The younger ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... origin, and the intervening Intelligence. The rational soul again becoming permanent and fixed, there issued from it likewise a spark, giving rise to the animal soul. This latter is endowed with a cogitative and imaginative faculty, but is not permanent in its existence, because of the two intervening natures between it and the pure light of God. From the animal soul there likewise issued a splendor, which produced the vegetative soul. This soul, being so far removed from the original ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... to indicate the more important directions of the theoretic interpretation. We may in illustrating this set out from the convenient triple division of the factors in aesthetic experience: (A) the sensuous, (B) the perceptual or formal, (C) the imaginative, including all that is suggested by the aesthetic presentation, its meaning ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... vanity, or the pleasure of immediate enjoyment! What an easy triumph they win over the hesitation, the doubt, the repugnance of those who would fain cling to a belief in the possibility of the union of vivid feelings, passionate impressions, intellectual gifts, imaginative temperaments, with high integrity, pure lives, and courses of conduct in perfect ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... entirely to the habits of self-restraint which the Romans had engraved into their nature. They were called a nation of kings, kings over their own appetites, passions, and inclinations. They were not imaginative, they were not intellectual; they had little national poetry, little art, little philosophy. They were moral and practical. In these two directions the force that was in them entirely ran. They were free politically, ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... intensity of passion, is a splendid imaginative quality. Few writers of English prose have such command of figurative expression. It must be said, however, that Burke was not entirely free from the faults which generally accompany an excessive use of figures. Like other great masters of a decorative style, he frequently becomes pompous and ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... often to be seen swimming in pairs, male and female. Many sentimental stories were current, especially among the old writers, concerning the conjugal affection and unselfish devotion of the swordfish, but they seem to have originated in the imaginative brain of the naturalist rather than in his perceptive faculties. It is said that when the female fish is taken the male seems devoid of fear, approaches the boat, and allows himself easily to be taken, but if this be true, it appears to be the case only in the height of the breeding season, and ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... deep-seated problems must be subjected to a stepped-up attack. There is no single easy solution. Rather, there must be a many-sided assault on the stubborn problems of surpluses, prices, costs, and markets; and a steady, persistent, imaginative advance in the relationship between farmers ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... sky glowing with the hues of coming day they thought that the goddess of the dawn, with rosy fingers, was drawing aside the dark veil of night, to allow her brother, the sun-god, to enter upon his brilliant career. Thus personifying all the powers of nature, this very imaginative and highly poetical nation beheld a divinity in every tree that grew, in every stream that flowed, in the bright beams of the glorious sun, and the clear, cold rays of the silvery moon; for them the whole universe lived and breathed, ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... came to him at once, and he inwardly cursed himself for an imaginative fool before continuing. "Well, Ocky, to tell you the truth, I did see him—right here at the head of the trail. He had his back to the light so I couldn't make out any mask. Er—what made ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... silent, thinking over all she had just heard and finding much to interest her in it, because, to her imaginative and enthusiastic nature, there was something irresistibly attractive in the strong, solitary, self-reliant man. Mark watched her for a moment, then asked ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... boy would have expressed a doubt as to the possibility of the Grampus having, at any period of his existence, been so short as "half the length of a marlinespike;" but, being very imaginative by nature, and having been encouraged to believe in ghosts by education, he was too frightened to be funny. With a face that might very well have passed for that of a ghost, and a very pale ghost too, he said, ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... be so enthusiastic about it in two short months, how tremendously attached to it must be this cheerful Don Mike, who had been born and raised there, who was familiar with every foot of it, and doubtless cherished every tradition connected with it. He had imagination, and in imaginative people wounds drive deep and are hard to heal; he loved this land of his, not with the passive loyalty of the average American citizen, but with the strange, passionate intensity of the native Californian for his state. ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... personage or a splendid pageant of the past with the same affluence, the same rich vitality, that floods and warms the vast areas of canvas over which the full-fed genius of Rubens disported itself in the luxury of imaginative creation. ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... agency in producing this conjunction may be traced back to the oldest time; but the union of a precise Christological Gnosis, such as we find in Irenaeus and Tertullian, with the retention in their integrity of the imaginative series of thoughts about Antichrist, Christ as the warrior hero, the double resurrection, and the kingdom of glory in Jerusalem, is really a historical novelty. There is, however, no doubt that the strength of the old Catholic theology ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... was peaceful, imaginative, attentive to all the wonders of the forest, beholding wonders that others could not see, and the song went on, the gentle murmur of the river fusing and melting into the wind among the leaves. While he watched and listened, nothing ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... picture of a fairy archipelago of thickly clustering islands, intersected by a bewildering maze of channels winding hither and thither, with the thin sickle of the young moon, gleaming softly silver-white, hanging just above the whole. It was one of those skies that set the imaginative dreamer's fancy free to wander afar into the realms of fairyland and to picture all sorts of strange, unreal happenings; the sort of sky that probably suggested to the simple mind of the Indian the poetic idea that when gazing upon it he was vouchsafed a vision of ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... said the doctor out in the hall after he had finished telling us how near the sight of both eyes had come to being destroyed from not being kept drained. "And the two youngsters are the most remarkable I have yet encountered. Miss Phyllis, let me congratulate you on a nerve and a talent for imaginative description the like of which I have never met before. But please somebody explain that boy to me before ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... wealth of legend told of great Kings and heroes, of stately palaces, and mighty armies, and powerful fleets, and the whole material of an advanced civilization. But the legends were manifestly largely imaginative—deities and demi-gods, men and fabulous monsters, were mingled in them on the same plane—and it seemed impossible that we should ever get back to the solid ground, if solid ground had ever existed, on which these ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... method, we must get rid of definitions which are often applied to folklore in its attributed sense. Folk-tales are not fiction or art, were not invented for amusement, are not myth in the sense of being imaginative only.[182] Customs and superstitions are not the result of ignorance and stupidity. These attributes are true only if folk-tales, customs, and superstitions are compared with the literary productions and with the science and the culture of ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... have a censorship of the press as well as of the theatre, or why have the one if you will not have the other? The answer to the first question is that a censorship of the press is impossible in England. The multitude of publications forbids it. The most imaginative person would find his imagination fail him if he tried to realize in his mind the idea of the British public waiting for its morning {98} newspaper several hours while the censor was crawling over its columns to find out whether they contained anything ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... physicians of the time gave it a fictitious added importance by ascribing to its influence the existence of almost any obscure malady that came under their observation. Long after Napoleon's time gale continued to hold this proud distinction. For example, the imaginative Dr. Hahnemann did not hesitate to affirm, as a positive maxim, that three-fourths of all the ills that flesh is heir to were in reality nothing but various ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... (doubtless a hornbook) into Goldsmith's hands. Apparently he did not much profit by it, for she confessed he was one of the dullest boys she had ever dealt with, insomuch that she had sometimes doubted whether it was possible to make anything of him: a common case with imaginative children, who are apt to be beguiled from the dry abstractions of elementary study by the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... village of Sheikh Zowaid near by, were fruit trees and cactus hedged enclosures well covered with fresh grass; while to the south of us were some big areas of young crops. The effect of this change was immediate, and the least poetical and imaginative among us felt a thrill of joy in the relief from the desolation of eternal sand. To the north a high barrier of sand hills hid the sea, a barrier which runs right along the coast as far as Jaffa and beyond. But in the distance it was beautiful enough, and served to remind ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... the ground that he had assumed in opposition to the appropriation being made. It was granted; and, in a speech that does him honour, he brought forward facts that proved us to be in a much superior condition to that in which our imaginative enemies had described us. Ay! he did more—he proved us to be in advance of the whites in wealth and general intelligence: for whilst it was one in fifteen amongst the whites unable to read and write, it was but one in eighteen amongst ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... speeches of Grattan here published we have little to say. They are the finest specimens of imaginative eloquence in the English, or in any, language. There is not much pathos, and no humour in them, and in these respects Grattan is far less of an Irishman, and of an orator too, than Curran; but a philosophy, penetrating constitutions for their warnings, and human nature ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... oneself, represent oneself, picture, picture-oneself, figure to oneself; vorstellen[Ger]. float in the mind; suggest itself &c. (thought) 451. Adj. imagined &c. v.; ben trovato[It]; air drawn, airbuilt[obs3]. imagining &cv. v, imaginative; original, inventive, creative, fertile. romantic, high flown, flighty, extravagant, fanatic, enthusiastic, unrealistic, Utopian, Quixotic. ideal, unreal; in the clouds, in nubibus[Lat]; unsubsantial[obs3] &c. 4; illusory &c. (fallacious) 495. fabulous, legendary; mythical, mythic, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... big guns that came from time to time floating across the hills. The fact of the matter was that the poor girl was the victim of a presentiment that something was going to happen to John. Most people of imaginative mind have suffered from this kind of thing at one time or other in their lives, and have lived to see the folly of it; and there was more in the circumstances of the present case to excuse indulgence in the luxury of presentiments than as usual. Indeed, as it happened, she was not far out—only ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... malice at the back of it all—the mere imaginative exuberance of a race whose early poetry consisted in saying things ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... first beginnings of imaginative conception directed by the will? Are they, indeed, conscious at all? Do they not rather emerge unbidden from the vague limbo of sub-consciousness?" A.B. Walkley, Drama and ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... character fairly. Few men have so laid bare the thoughts and feelings of their hearts. It is easy to blame the unmanly laments which he utters over his health, his solitude, and his sufferings, real or imaginary; few imaginative writers have the every-day virtues. His egotism, too, is difficult to defend. If, as he himself admits, he invariably took an undue share of talk, often in fact monopolizing it, wherever he was, we must remember that the brilliance ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... polite, how complimentary, these French of Asia are, and how imaginative and fanciful their language! Not having shaved since leaving Teheran, after surveying myself in the glass, I feel called upon, in the interest of fellow-wheelmen elsewhere, to explain to our discerning visitors that all bicyclers are not distinguished from their fellow men ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... quite know either, and such impressions, for the imaginative mind, were always too fine, too floating, to produce on the spot their warrant. There was none the less for him, in the very manner of his host's allusion to satiety as a thinkable motive, a slight breath ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... from the course of discipline to which he had subjected himself at Manresa. The psychological soundness of Loyola's method is found in his discovery that the best way to win a man to an ideal is to kindle his imagination. His own thought was imaginative to the verge of abnormality and the means which he took to awaken and artificially to stimulate this faculty in his followers were drastic in ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... not know if I can give any kind of freshness to these words, but I wish to try. To begin with, I notice the highly-imaginative and picturesque form into which the Apostle casts his thoughts here. He, as it were, draws back a curtain, and lets us see two royal figures, which are eternally opposed and dividing the dominion between them. Then he shows us the issues to which these ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... that my group is utterly cut off from the newest developments in imaginative prose literature. No! What the bookseller, the book-pedlar, and the Free Library have failed to do, has been accomplished by Mr. Jesse Boot, incidentally benefactor of the British provinces and the brain of a large firm of chemists and druggists ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... darkest of the year, scarcely a night passed without the recurrence of these inexplicable cries. Nothing, it was said, had ever been seen,—at least, nothing that could be identified. Some people, bolder or more imaginative than the others, had seen the darkness moving, Mrs. Jarvis said, with unconscious poetry. It began when night fell, and continued, at intervals, till day broke. Very often it was only all inarticulate cry and moaning, but sometimes the words ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... that if I had been in love, especially if I had been disappointed in love, my novels would have been stronger and more interesting; but I kept a watch over myself, which I felt I knew I needed, for I was both imaginative and affectionate. I did not want to give my heart away. I did not desire a love disappointment, even for the sake of experience. I was 30 years old before the dark veil of religious despondency was ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... to satisfy our undiscriminating appetite. Someone a little stupider, a little less imaginative—though such conditions must have been difficult indeed to achieve—invented what is called the Control Experiment whereby, if theory tested be correct, half the subjects are condemned without trial ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... outlook is so foreign to Western habits of thought that it is well that we should try to understand it at its best. Prussia proper has not been rich, like the rest of Germany, in poets and imaginative writers; but she is fortunate to-day in possessing in the greatest living Greek scholar, Professor von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, a man who by birth and breeding is able to put the highest interpretation upon the aims and spirit of the Prussian State. To Wilamowitz Prussia is not only nearer and ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... the pretty picture which childhood's memories depict as adorning a page in our Physical Geography, with its fur-clad traveler sitting comfortably on his sledge, brandishing his whip and dashing gaily along behind a row of trotting dogs, is more imaginative than accurate. The real use of the dog-team, it would appear, is merely to drag the traveler's baggage. The men plough along through the snow in front, and the animals, harnessed in single file, drag the sledge behind ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... to her, in the fabrication of endless unwritten romances. Many persons, who do not astonish the world by their genius, have lived thus in their earliest youth. But, at a given moment, the fancy dies out of them: this often befalls imaginative boys in their first year at school. "Many are called, few chosen"; but it may be said with probable truth, that there has never been a man of genius in letters, whose boyhood was not thus fantastic, "an isle of dreams." We know how Scott and De Quincey inhabited airy castles; ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... of the political philosophers of the present day. Alone of all his contemporaries, his best works will bear a comparison with those of Machiavelli and Bacon. Less caustic and condensed than Tacitus, less imaginative and eloquent than Burke, he possesses the calm judgment, the discriminating eye, and the just reflection, which have immortalised the Florentine statesman and the English philosopher. Born and bred in the midst ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... doubtful quest. Be that as it may, his attitude did not encourage light conversation. Even Coke withheld some jibe at the unfortunate mate's expense. A chill silence fell on the little group. The more imaginative among them were calculating the exact kind of lurch taken by the unstable raft that would ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... purest truth. To learn whether any thing is as it ought to be, we have only to learn whether it is truly poetical. It is a popular fallacy to suppose that poetical things are necessarily fanciful, or imaginative, or sentimental in other words, that poetry resides in that which is both baseless and valueless. In the popular thought, poetry is shut out of the realm of truth and reality. The reason, I suppose, is, that poetry demands more of truth and harmony and ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb |
