"Impractical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his feet on the ground," and his tendency to "live in the clouds" and to be generally impractical unfit this type for ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... a purely poetic, spiritual, impractical passion is perhaps the cause of Mr. Belloc's note and career. It is the passion of a poet. Assuredly actuated by such a feeling, he has developed his practical and political opinions: the true ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... which gives you your army and navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be but a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber." But this elevated and sublime wisdom was regarded as a philosophical abstraction, as a vain and impractical view of political affairs, well enough for a writer on the "sublime and beautiful," but absurd in a British statesman. Colonel Barre and Fox supported Burke; but their eloquence had not much effect on the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... syphilis in the last decade. If we are out of the current of these things, in the office or the store, or in the field of industry and business, announcements from the great laboratories of the world seldom reach us, and when they do, they have an impractical sound, an unreality for us. So one hears, as if in a speaking-tube from a long distance, the words that Schaudinn and Hoffmann, on April 19, 1905, discovered the germ that causes syphilis, not realizing that the fact contained in those few brief ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... for which he had risen, Mr. Scales averred that it was probable that he would be considered an impractical visionary when he made known his proposition; nevertheless, it had been long in his mind and no harm would come from voicing it. To his notion, the thing most needed to revitalize Prouty was an electric car-line. This line should ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... of intense and intolerable complexity. With the soda-jerker this period is so short as to be almost negligible. Men higher in the scale hold out longer in the attempt to preserve the ultimate niceties of relationship, to retain "impractical" ideas of integrity. But by the late twenties the business has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto been imminent and confusing has become gradually remote and dim. Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the lofty air of patronization with which the dominant commercial classes looked down upon the writer, the painter, the musician, the philosopher or the sculptor. Regarding these "sentimentalists" as easy, legitimate and defenseless objects of prey, and as incidental and impractical hangers-on in a world where trade was all in all, the commercial classes at all times affected a certain air of encouragement of the fine arts, which encouragement, however, never attempted to put a stop to piracies of publication or reproduction. How sordidly commercial ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... visitors—bunch of fat, rich, old Upper-West-Siders with passementeried bosoms, doing tea-table charity, and asking us impertinent questions, and telling a bunch of hard-worked slaves to be virtuous and wash behind their ears—the soft, ignorant, conceited, impractical parasites! But still, it's all sort of like a cranky boarding-school for girls—and you know what fun the girls have there, with midnight fudge parties and a teacher pussy-footing down the hall trying to ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... "Impractical, but sensible," commented the ambassador. He turned a page. "There's Darth. Its social system is practically feudal. It's technically backward. There's a landing grid, but space exports are skins and metal ingots and practically nothing ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... years ago. I thought that if I took the example of the Saviour's life for my guiding star, I would certainly get along very well. Undoubtedly this would have sufficed in a spiritual sense, but I found that it would be impractical as applied to my temporal welfare and the requirements of the present time. For I could not perform miracles nor could I live as the Saviour had done, roaming over the country and teaching the natives. And then, seeing that there were so many Jews ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... significant, explicit, luminous, positive, suggestive, comprehensive, and practical. Resolutely avoid all thoughts which are uncertain, recondite, obscure, immature, unimportant, shallow, weak, visionary, absurd, vague, extravagant, indefinite, or impractical. ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... we had to make some arrangement to operate the ships, and we again turned to our competitor, Mr. Mather, in the hope that he would add this to his cares. Unfortunately, because of his obligations to others, he felt that this was impractical. I asked Mr. Gates one day ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... dinner at noon is often very inconvenient and sometimes impossible, because frequently one or more members of the family are at business some distance from home and their coming home at noon for dinner is impractical. In such an event, the evening meal should be the heavy one, but it should not be made too hearty and ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... cent of clay is required to fill the voids and bind the sand grains together, because the clay spreads the sand grains apart during the mixing, thus having the effect of increasing the voids. As a matter of experiment, it is found to be impractical to secure by available construction methods mixtures of sufficient uniformity to render it necessary to exercise great exactness in proportioning the components, but reasonable care in ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... never even dreamed of such a thing," went on the repressed voice, "not even when at first you were slow to give your consent to our marriage. I fancied it was merely because you thought me impractical, because I cared nothing for a life that was different, was not my own. Nor again, even a bit ago when you asked me to promise—what I did promise—I did not suspicion such a thing. I thought it a compliment, the sincerest compliment ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... can do now. You could have shown me my mistake. How much better to have learned it then, from you, than later, by my own experience! You could have swept me off my feet, just as Frank did. You did nothing. If I had sought evidence to prove how impractical you are, as compared with my super-practical husband, I would have found it in the way you handled, or rather failed to ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... can not too much emphasize the fact that the leaders of this period were by no means impractical theorists but men who were scientifically approaching the social problem of their people. They not only anticipated such ideas as those of industrial education and of the National Urban League of the present day, but they also endeavored ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... clean ambitions, yet he was hungry. He could not understand it. No doubt an empty stomach inclines a man to much logic and the splitting of straws. There comes with an empty stomach less of grossness and more of abstract reason, and an exaltation which may be all impractical, but ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... impractical child," she said, deftly assisting Myrtle to finish dressing. "What you really need is some one to order you around and tell you what to do. So you must stop thinking about yourself, for a time, and let us do the thinking. Here—sit in this chair ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... none compelling men like Carl to give their lives and sacrifice their wives. These men of wealth made even greater sacrifices. They could have kept in comfort a dozen wives apiece—modest ones—on what they voluntarily preferred to turn over to the dear old college. Professors, being impractical and visionary, cannot always see these things ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... you do see him you'll understand. Nice old chap as ever lived. Only impractical, dreamy. Gentle as a sheep—and no more capable of running that big, expensive plant than a motherly old ewe. That's where the trouble is. When father's closed down on him and edged him out—quietly, ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... garden," snorted Mrs. Seeley, "it's clay she's fussin' with, thinkin' she's going to be able to make statues some day. Statues! What kind of a job is that nowadays! Artist jobs is impractical. Dulcie is awful impractical. I offered to send her to business college, she could make a good living, but no, she's gotta make statues! With the parks all full of 'em now and that kind of thing going out of style for parlors! I put ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... that I began on a double-cylinder engine. It was quite impractical to consider the single cylinder for transportation purposes—the fly-wheel had to be entirely too heavy. Between making the first four-cycle engine of the Otto type and the start on a double cylinder I had made a great many experimental engines ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... upset everything in a heap, but to call people's attention to the fact that things could be a lot better than they are. And that's hard to do. And who ever called more people's attention to that fact than an impractical, unbalanced nobleman who took to cobbling shoes for the peace of his soul? There wasn't a particle of sense to what Tolstoi did, but—" He stopped, hesitating in an uncertainty that Lydia understood with ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... either her own or the family support lest the family or herself suffer. It must be in the nature of a leasehold upon her chosen career to be retaken for full occupancy as soon as the children are out of hand and she has begun to feel the call of empty hours to the old familiar task. This is not an impractical plan, as many women are proving by experience. And as has been previously demonstrated, society in the past has wasted the work-power of women past the childbearing age in more ruthless and stupid prodigality than ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... out other animals' organs, or kill and dissect them, hoping thus to learn how to offset their neglect of themselves. Conditions among them will be such that this will really be necessary. Few besides impractical sentimentalists will therefore oppose it. But the idea will be to gain health by legerdemain, by a trick, instead of by taking the trouble to ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... consider the general method of putting the propeller-shaft in place. The young boat-builder will readily understand that it would be very impractical merely to bore a hole in the hull of the boat to put the propeller-shaft through. In this way water would surely leak into the hull and the boat would sink in a short time. Some method must be evolved to keep the water out of the ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... cases, however, where only a few, or possibly only one, of the fingers has sufficient ridge detail for identification. In such instances a search through the FBI files would be impractical. This, however, does not preclude the possibility of making a positive identification by the use of the one finger. Though a search through the file is not possible, a comparison can be made with the fingerprints of individuals who it is thought the deceased may be or, in some instances, with ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... are those defenders of property who look upon the Church as impractical; who consider the Golden Rule as something all right for the minister to talk about on Sundays, but something useless to try to follow during the week. Those men criticize the Church for preaching love, for talking ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... wise did the old servant fret and ponder, but no assurance came. A true insight into art might have opened many doors to her. Yet, through a life devoted to the externals of it, Mata had been tolerant of beauty, rather than at one with it. The impractical view of life which art seemed to demand of its devotees was enough to arouse suspicion, if not her actual dislike. Uchida was a hero because he had been bold enough to shake himself free from lethargic influences, and achieve a ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... have done well enough as the god of the new people. Such a god they had indeed made in their own image, as all peoples make the god they truly serve; though of course certain of the idealists went to church on Sunday, and there knelt to Another, considered to be impractical in business. But while the Growing went on, this god of their market-place was their true god, their familiar and spirit-control. They did not know that they were his helplessly obedient slaves, nor could they ever hope to realize ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... idea abandoned at the very moment of its birth. It's a good idea, and in no way impractical, in my opinion. So permit me to make another proposition. I will build the twenty theatres myself, and furnish the films for them, provided the young ladies will agree to assume the entire management of ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... that an artist who demands appreciation from the public on his own terms, and on none but his own terms, is either a god or a conceited and impractical fool. And he is somewhat more likely to be the latter than the former. He wants too much. There are two sides to every bargain, including the artistic. The most fertile and the most powerful artists are the readiest to recognise this, because their sense ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... was not an easy task or an enviable position. He was obliged to divorce himself from his political party as well as keep clear of the wild schemes of impractical enthusiasts, too practical "contractors," and the still more helpless bigotry of Christian civilizers, who would have regenerated the Indian with a text which he did not understand and they were unable to ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... location. If frosts are to be feared get late-blooming varieties, the leading ones established in Oregon being the Mayette and the Franquette. Other varieties will undoubtedly be introduced in the next few years that will withstand frost in regions where walnut planting now seems impractical. Mr. Henry Hewitt's one tree that blooms the fourth of July, at an elevation of 1,000 feet, is evidence of the possibilities in this direction. ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... Comanche was there on the white plain to serve the present, and temporary, purpose of housing and feeding the thousands who had collected there at the lure of chance with practical, impractical, speculative, romantic, honest, and dishonest ideas and intentions. Whether it should survive to become a colorless post-office and shipping-station for wool, hides, and sheep remained for the future to decide. As the town appeared under the burning sun of that August afternoon ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... of the —— Congress was not unlike the closing of the several preceding Congresses. There was the same unbusiness-like, impractical haste; the same hurried, unjust, and utterly inadequate adjustment of unfinished, ill-digested business, that would not have been tolerated for a moment by the sovereign people in any private interest they controlled. There were frauds ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... every attempt to settle them on a purely economic basis leads to conditions more confused than those from which we have emerged. The so-called purely economic basis is the basis where only Mammon's laws are considered, and God's are held to be impractical. ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... always been good—her father good. Every one was good,—even impractical, absurd Mary Lou, and homely Lydia Lord, and little Miss Sherman at the office, with her cold red hands, and her hungry eyes,—every one ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... that it drove me to sit down when I reached home and put my reflections into verse; into a form of verse, moreover, which (I was scornfully aware) Mr. Blank would understand as little as the matter of it. He would think them both impractical. Heaven help ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... such as {MICIO and DEMEA apart.} were added by the transcriber where the original format was impractical. ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... stupid faces of your fellow passengers. How can people be so clownish? Of course, there is always the chance that the elevator will fall and that you will all be terribly hurt. But that is too much to expect. You dismiss it from your thoughts as too impractical, too visionary. Things don't work out as happily as that ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... sheet was a banker's receipt for two hundred pounds, placed to the credit of Miss Swancourt, which the impractical girl had totally forgotten she carried ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... startled by the rise of Tasawwuf or Sufyism[FN248] a revival of classic Platonism and Christian Gnosticism, with a mingling of modern Hylozoism; which, quickened by the glowing imagination of the East, speedily formed itself into a creed the most poetical and impractical, the most spiritual and the most transcendental ever invented; satisfying all man's hunger for "belief" which, if placed upon a solid basis of fact and proof, would forthright cease to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... after an energetic September, succeeded in putting all the furniture to rights and in evoking curtains and linen. Anybody, even the impractical Father, can fill a house with furniture, but it takes two women and at least four weeks to make the furniture look as though it had grown there. She had roamed the fields, and brought home golden-rod and Michaelmas daisies ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... the permanent way. Originally a good track, with heavy steel, easy grades compensated for the curves, and a mathematical alignment, the roadbed and equipment had been allowed to fall into disrepair under indifferent supervision and the short-handing of the section gangs—always an impractical directory's first retrenchment when the dividends begin to fail. Lidgerwood had seen how the ballast had been suffered to sink at the rail-joints, and he had read the record of careless supervision at each fresh swing of the train, since it is the section foreman's weakness ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... opportunity. The right ones don't occur to you and the others seem absurd. Grim knew that, of course, but when you're dealing with a woman there's just one chance in a hundred that she may think of something vital that hasn't occurred to anybody else. Most women aren't practical; but it's the impractical ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... entirely neglected his school of vocal physiology, which was now abandoned. Georgie Sanders and Mabel Hubbard were his only pupils. Though Sanders and Hubbard were genuinely interested in Bell and his work, they felt that he was impractical, and were especially convinced that his experiments with the ear and its imitations were entirely useless. They believed that the electrical telegraph alone presented possibilities, and they told Bell that unless ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... you are a most impractical man to do business with, but I suppose you must have your way. Now just tell me—and put it in few and plain words—what is it you intend to do to get this affair through, for we must carry it to a finish at once, although it does seem ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... Aristotelian arithmetic. The college president who abandoned his college in order to run a cotton mill was free to make his own choice of a calling; but he was never pardoned for bankrupting the mill. If one is bound to be a low man rather than an impractical idealist, he should at least make sure ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... Impractical men have told me that right will always triumph of itself; it needs no fighters to support it. The man who believes that is ignorant, and such ignorance is dangerous. Right is always trampled down when no fighter upholds it. But men ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... backward or forward, as might be required, and thus deliver the concrete from the end of the belt directly over the place in which it was to be deposited in the bench-walls. As a matter of fact, it was found impractical in operation to move the gantry readily, owing to its great weight, which was supported on only four ordinary car wheels and their bearings, and it was found more convenient to leave the arm in one position near the center, letting the concrete drop on the platform above the bench- or sand-wall ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Bergen Hill Tunnels. Paper No. 1154 • F. Lavis
... the lower house of the State Assembly, one term in Congress, then a failure which drove him from public life. Now he returns as a bolter from his party, a leader in a new organization which the conservatives are denouncing as "visionary," "impractical," "revolutionary." ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... who yet occupy positions of great responsibility. The young engineer, fresh from college and a bit puzzled as to the game as a whole, if he accept a connection under an engineer, for instance, whose inventive ideas are impractical, will unwittingly absorb such a man's viewpoint on construction, and so spoil himself as an engineer for all time to come. Cases like this are not rare. The writer personally knows of more than one young man who enlisted under an engineer whose ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... was, disregarded altogether. Not that the colonial officials ever defied the King or his ministers, or ever failed to profess their intent to follow the royal instructions loyally and to the letter. They had a much safer plan. When the provisions of a royal decree seemed impractical or unwise, it was easy enough to let them stand unenforced. Such decrees were duly registered in the records of the Sovereign Council at Quebec and were then promptly pigeonholed so that no one outside the little circle of officials at the Chateau de St. Louis ever heard of them. In one ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... the various elements or divisions of psychological study as determined by a consensus of psychologists, and to illustrate each in turn from the three types of management; but the results from any such method would be apt to seem unrelated and impractical, i.e., it would be a lengthy process to get results that would be of immediate, practical ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... to wonder about complete food self-sufficiency. How did the early pioneers irrigate their vegetables? There probably aren't more than a thousand homestead sites in the entire maritime Northwest with gravity water. Hand pumping into hand-carried buckets is impractical and extremely tedious. Wind-powered pumps are expensive and ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... for removing carbon deposits from gas engine cylinders were very impractical and unsatisfactory. The job meant dismantling the motor, tearing out all parts, and scraping the pistons and ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly
... perhaps to the reader appear an impractical ideal, I would propose here to attempt to reach it by explaining the logical method which I have set ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... but most illuminating, thus to get at first hand the Eastern point of view as to ourselves; to hear the bloodless, gentle shell of Indian philosophy described by believers. They discussed the most minute and impractical points, and involved themselves in the ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... heard that it is not quite as large as the old sixteen-inch rifle that they had to throw away because of some trouble, I don't know just what. It was impractical, in spite of its size and great range. But this new gun they are going to test is considerably smaller, ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... I am in complete sympathy with individual initiative, for every man has the right to do good in the way he thinks best; but all the discussion concerning the government, the Red Cross, and so on, seemed to me inopportune and impractical. I imagined that with coolness and good humour, one might get round all the terrors and delicacy of the position, and that there was no need to go to the Minister about it. I went to Sahalin without a single letter of recommendation, and yet I did everything ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... Rifle 3. Progressive Introduction of Fire-Arms Into the Armament of the Infantryman 4. The Classes of Fire Employed with Each Weapon 5. Methods of Fire Used in the Presence of the Enemy; Methods Recommended or Ordered but Impractical 6. Fire at Will—Its Efficacy 7. Fire by Rank Is a Fire to Occupy the Men in Ranks 8. The Deadly Fire Is the Fire of Skirmishers 9. The Absolute ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... prevailed so generally regarding his character. He is called the inventor of inductive reasoning, the reformer of logic, the lawgiver of the world of thought; but he was no one of these. His grasp of the inductive method was defective; his logic was clumsy and impractical; his plan for registering all phenomena and selecting and generalizing from them, making the discovery of truth almost a mechanical process, was worthless. In short, it is not as a philosopher nor as a man of science that Bacon ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... appreciate the spirit with which a church member works, even if results are not always as anticipated, or even if the project itself is not always practical. He will cheerfully put his hand down into his pocket and pay the bill for some impractical scheme, rather than dampen the ardor of an enthusiastic worker. He knows that experience will come with practice, but that a willing, zealous worker is ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... and now dreams." He seated himself comfortably at her feet. "You would cause me to believe you a most impractical person, Miss Naida." ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... districts, which is the inevitable consequence of such artificial infiltration, seems to me to be the least of these evils. Far worse is the circumstance that unsatisfactory results tend to cast doubts on intelligent men. What is impractical or impossible to simple argument will remove this doubt from the minds of intelligent men. What is unpractical or impossible to accomplish on a small scale, need not necessarily be so on a larger one. A small enterprise may result in loss under ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... defective bodies concealed by garments; what are those garments, as conducive to health and beauty? Is the practical ugliness of our men's attire, and the impractical absurdity of our women's, any contribution to human beauty? Look at our houses—are they beautiful? Even ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... am particularly interested in Pete's opinion of your abilities," Addington rejoined coldly. "My dear little girl," he went on, palpably striving for patience and gentleness, "there's nothing you could do to help me. Women are too impractical. This is a man's work, besides. By the way, after we've had our little outing, I'll leave you with Lulu. Honey and Pete and I are going to meet at the Clubhouse ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... apparent favor the cause of colonization received from the press, it was an impractical, impossible, wild, and visionary scheme that could not be carried to the extent its projectors designed. It lost strength yearly, until all were convinced that the Negro would be emancipated here and remain here; that it was as impossible to colonize a race of people as to colonize the sun, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... silken garment evidently thrown on over her night attire, a little cap of lace and ribbon confining her hair, the most impractical of slippers on her feet, stood smiling at her cousin, sleep still clinging ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... first place, the get-rich-quick swindles, the out-and-out impostures, which have deceived the credulous into investments that never could pay. Bonanza mines, impractical inventions, town lots laid out on the prairie, orange groves that existed only on paper-such bogus hopes have enticed many an honest man and woman, who could ill afford to lose, into turning over their small earnings to the brazen exploiters.[Footnote: ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Philip simply; "I am sure you do. I am impulsive and impractical, but heart and soul, and body and mind, I simply want to do the will of ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... strange an aspect. We were invisible! At four hundred yards, even in the moonlight, the patrol could not distinguish us. Only ten of these X-flyers were in existence: they were the closest secret of the U. S. Anti-War Department. No other government had them except in impractical imitations. I had never even ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... as did the members of this squadron, knew that the cynical smile on his thin lips was but the forerunner of some mirthless thing from which only "The Flying Fool" would be able to wring a laugh. His was such a grotesque sense of humor; a highly impractical practical joke was his idea of a riotous time. Someone in the squadron, who had once felt the sting of one of his pranks, had called him a fool, and another member had responded, "Yeah, he's a fool, all right—but a flyin' fool!" The ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... agricultural pursuits ought to have been sufficient to bring together the necessary experience. The analysis of the vocational activities has given every evidence that even the oldest functions are performed in an impractical, inefficient way. The students of scientific management have demonstrated how the work of the mason, as old as civilization itself, is carried on every day in every land with methods which can be improved at once, as soon as a scientific study of the motions themselves is started. It could ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... not fallacious, and that there are still many designers who are unable to think in terms of the new material apart from the vestures of timber and structural steel, and whose designs, therefore, are cumbersome and impractical. The writer, however, cannot agree with the author that the practice is as radically wrong as he seems to think. Nor is he entirely in accord with Mr. Godfrey in his "constructive criticism" of those practices in which he concurs, that ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... said Carlisle, "you are, as usual, brilliant. Your imagination vaults—your daring is splendid. But as usual you are visionary and impractical. Buy them? To do this would require the credit of a nation! It would be subversive of all peace and all industry. You do not realize the sums required. You do not realize ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... did not discover the means by which the end was accomplished; he used the discovery of other men, and turned their impractical theories and inventions to practical uses, and, in addition, invented many theories of his own. The man who does old things in a new way, or makes new uses of old inventions, is the one who achieves great things. And so it was the reading of the ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... are the objections? First, Anarchism is impractical, though a beautiful ideal. Second, Anarchism stands for violence and destruction, hence it must be repudiated as vile and dangerous. Both the intelligent man and the ignorant mass judge not from a thorough knowledge of the subject, but either from ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... to the omission of any authority after a cultivar-name. Many cultivars are first described in reports of trials, in catalogues, and other anonymous publications; this makes the quoting of an authority impractical, but there is provision in the Code for writing the raiser's or introducer's name in brackets after the cultivar-name if so desired, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... the elder, though their characters (hers and his) were not made to comprehend each other; and her lack of enthusiasm in the days of his literary apprenticeship was natural enough in a parent who understood only too well the impractical, improvident mind he possessed, and feared its consequences. The fact was that Balzac ill supported remonstrances from his own family, and especially from his mother, and, when irritated by them, forgot every benefit he had received ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... blooms. Mankind has usually shown enormous solicitude lest the man of genius be insufficiently supplied with that trouble and sorrow which is supposed to be quite indispensable to his best work. But here and there the thinkers are beginning to realize that the irritable, impulsive, impractical nature of the genius, in even the most favorable environment, is formed for trouble "as the sparks to fly upward." They see that fortune has slain its hundreds of geniuses, but trouble its ten thousands. And they conclude ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... quite a different direction. The house, the surroundings, where she had lived luxuriously, dreaming her foolish and fatuous dreams, was not the place for such a struggle as was now upon her. And for that struggle she preferred, to sensitive, sober, refined, impractical Cyrilla Brindley, the companionship and the sympathy, the practical sympathy, of Agnes Belloc. No one need be ashamed or nervous before Agnes Belloc about being poor or unsuccessful or having to resort to shabby makeshifts ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... many teachers demand in the sphere of religion is no less impractical than the want of all guidance into rightly ordered meditations on religious subjects. It is natural that the lower form of intelligence should, in contrast with the higher, appear to be frivolous, because it has no need of change of form as the higher has, and on this account it looks upon ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... No: our chief business, as preachers, is to preach the content rather than the application of the truth. Not many people are interested in trying to find the substance of the truth. It is hated as impractical by the multitude of the impatient, and despised as old-fashioned by the get-saved-quick reformers. Nevertheless we must find out the distinctions between divine and human, right and wrong, and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... American life. Both their feet are firmly fixed upon the solid ground. They generally know just where they are, which is not surprising, for they do not, for the most part, either in the world of mind or spirit, frequent unusual places. The finespun speculations of the philosophers and the impractical dreams of the artist make small appeal to them; the world they live in is a sharply defined and clearly lighted and rather limited place. They like to say to this man come and he cometh, and to that man go and he goeth. They are enamored of offices, typewriters, telegrams, long-distance messages, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... to the head of the engine, while the compression stroke only moved the piston far enough to sufficiently compress the mixture. The unusual linkage necessary to create these unequal strokes in the Atkinson engine made it seem impractical for a carriage engine, where ...
— The 1893 Duryea Automobile In the Museum of History and Technology • Don H. Berkebile
... report dwindle. Young Dent grieves to see me injuring my own case. Too damned a fool to see what will happen to the report! You see if only they can convince themselves I am just a prig and an egotist and an impractical bore, they escape from a great deal more than my poor propositions. They escape from the doubt in themselves. By dismissing me they dismiss their own consciences. And then they can scamper off and be sensible little piggy-wigs ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... me to work: not that I hold that against him; he'd an idea I'd turn out a genius of some sort or other, I believe.... Well, he failed and died all in a week, and I found myself left with an extensive wardrobe, expensive tastes, an impractical education—and not so much of that that you'd notice it—and not a cent.... I was too proud to look to my friends for help in those days—and perhaps that was as well; I sought jobs on my own.... Did you ever keep books ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... issues, local dissatisfaction, friction, contemplated antagonism and the political arithmetic sounded. But I cannot but believe that the clannishness of the Negro has been the boomerang that has knocked him out of much sympathy, being impractical as a political factor and out of harmony with the material policies of the ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... warned them against being led away by the Socialists, those foolish, unreasonable, impractical people who wanted to see an immediate improvement in their condition; and he reminded them that Rome was not built ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... that JANIG didn't know much. After all, he pointed out, it was impossible to check everyone in an office building of that size, or at least impractical. Furthermore, it was a cover operation, and any kind of a careful check on people in the building would warn them that something was going on. Tom agreed, however, that it was better to be safe than sorry. JANIG would run a check on the barber, even though ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... tendency, in the midst of a variety of inconsistent doctrines, to leave the conclusion undetermined. He brought everything to a practical standard; he admired the exalted purity of stoical morality, but he feared that it was impractical. He believed in the existence of one supreme creator, in his spiritual nature, and the immortality of the soul; but his belief was rather the result of instinctive conviction, than of proof ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... venture into the jungle with me; yet someone must go in search of your father. He is more than apt to wandering off aimlessly, regardless of danger or direction, and Mr. Philander is only a trifle less impractical than he. You will pardon my bluntness, but our lives are all in jeopardy here, and when we get your father back something must be done to impress upon him the dangers to which he exposes you as well ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the most impractical men that ever lived, but in the exuberance of his nature and in his rare unselfishness he started a dozen social reforms in England, any one of which should have given fame to its founder. He gave away a great fortune in gifts to the public and in private generosity. He founded ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... state, was of an impractical, pensive turn. He despised industry, scoffed at Sunday-schooling, set up a private standard of morals, and rebelled against natural authority. He wouldn't be a dutiful son—not for money! He had no natural affections, and loved nothing ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... selfish. They believe that they merit all the blessings of health, distinction and wealth that may come to them, and they condemn their less fortunate brother as one deserving his fate. The poor, the weak and the impractical did not themselves bring about their condition. Who knows how large a part the mystery of birth and heredity play in one's life and what environment and opportunity, or lack of it, means to us? Health, ability, energy, ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... stage-coach journey of young Samuel L. Clemens across the plains to Nevada in 1861, which he describes in "Roughing It." Who was this Argonaut of the new era, and what makes him representative of his countrymen in the epoch of release? Born in Missouri in 1835, the son of an impractical emigrant from Virginia, the youth had lived from his fourth until his eighteenth year on the banks of the Mississippi. He had learned the printer's trade, had wandered east and back again, had served for four years as a river-pilot on the ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... scale. From both information and personal experience I know the contrary to be the case. With a tight floor or platform, a square-pointed shovel and a coarse wire screen, there is absolutely nothing impractical about it. The important thing is to see that all ingredients are evenly and thoroughly mixed. A scale for weighing will also be a convenience. Further information may be had from the firms which sell raw materials, or ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... mighty keen bird, was one of the first voyagers, and he didn't come back—he stayed there, living in a space-suit for three or four years, and got a brand-new education. Martian science always was hot, you know, but they were impractical. They were desperately hard up for water and air, and while they had a lot of wonderful ideas and theories, they couldn't overcome the practical technical difficulties in the way of making their ideas work. Now putting other peoples' ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... Fenger began. "You know that for the last year Haynes has been milling around with a herd of sociologists, philanthropists, and students of economics. He had some scheme in the back of his head, but I thought it was just another of his impractical ideas. It appears that it wasn't. Between the lot of them they've evolved a savings and profit-sharing plan that's founded on a kind of practical universal brotherhood dream. Haynes's millions are bothering him. If they actually put this thing through I'll get out. It'll mean ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... object of the man of practical affairs should be the same—that of establishing higher ideals of life and providing means for approximating these ideals. It frequently occurs that the individual who has centred his life on the accumulation of wealth ignores the educator and has a contempt for the impractical scholar, as he terms him. Not infrequently state legislatures, when considering appropriations for education, have shown more interest in hogs and cattle than ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... hour. Reedy watching with a gloating shrewdness the impractical fellow who had tried to farm with money. He knew Benson had lost money on the last crop, and besides had been thoroughly scared ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... tendency his unfortunate heritage from slavery, and we see at once that the race needs especially to be rooted and grounded in the underlying scientific principles of concrete things. The time when the world bowed before merely abstract, impractical knowledge has well-nigh passed; the demand of this age and hour is not so much what a man knows,—though the world respects and reveres knowledge and always will, I hope,—what the world wants to know is what a man can do and how well he ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... at the far side of the hut awaiting she knew not what impending fate. She could not sleep so filled was her mind with wild schemes of escape though each new one must always be discarded as impractical. Half an hour after the warrior had returned her to her prison he rose and entered the hut, where he tried to engage in conversation with her. Groping across the interior he leaned his short spear against the wall and sat down beside her, and ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... connections whom Tony had always adored and admired extravagantly. Just visiting her had always been like taking a trip to fairy land and to live with her—well, it would be just too wonderful, Tony thought. But Doctor Holiday had vetoed decidedly both these pleasant and impractical propositions. Tony was far too young and pretty to live alone. That was out of the question. And he was scarcely more willing that she should go to Mrs. Norman, though he liked the latter very well and was glad that his niece would have her to go to in any emergency. He knew ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... return. Poets like to tell us, also, that their pride, and a fine sense of honour, hold them back from illegitimate means of acquiring wealth. But tradition has it that there are other contributing causes. Edmund C. Stedman's Bohemia reveals the fact that the artist has most impractical ideas about the disposal of his income. He reasons that, since the more guests he has, the smaller the cost per person, then if he can only entertain extensively enough, the cost per caput will be nil. Not only so, but the poet is likely to lose sight completely ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... have, sometime or other, a silk petticoat, made up to her for this day's work and self-sacrifice. For Grandma was one of those rare practical people who yet believed in respecting the foolish dreams of impractical humans. ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... of this hateful alliance Which the ladies have form'd with impractical Science! They put out their washing to learn hydrostatics, And give themselves airs for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... first to introduce rifles into Ceylon, which were then regarded by the highest authorities in the island as impractical innovations, too difficult to sight, whereas an ordinary gun could be used with ball more quickly in taking ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... mean it for one, my dear, though I meant no reproach in it. You get too many compliments as it is. Frank, like all young, inexperienced people, has many impractical ideas, that time will cure. Young enthusiasts of every age are going to turn the world upside down, but I note that it goes on ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... and heard her soft breathing, which became a part of the muffled undercurrent of the sleeping city. In all those closely packed houses, where the obscurity was broken here and there by a lighted window, other human beings were breathing, sleeping, dreaming, like Patty and herself, of some impractical and visionary to-morrow. Of something which had never been, but still might be! Of something which they had just missed, but might find when the sun rose again! Of a miracle that might occur at any moment and ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... only a poet-naturalist, but also a philosopher, who shows the influence of the transcendental school, particularly of Emerson. Some of Thoreau's philosophy is impractical and too unsocial, but it aims to discover the underlying basis of enchantment. He thus sums up the philosophy which his ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... I convinced her that she was smarter than I was—then she threw me over. Said I was critical and impractical, you know. ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... his sign on the pass and said heavily, "All right then, Ben. That's it. Maybe if you go back up to that place for a few days and see that psycho who was writing a book again, perhaps you'll realize how impractical it is." ...
— The Real Hard Sell • William W Stuart
... it had him cowed, because in his long life he had known it to be the only reality in the world of men. And in that world he had known the only reality to be that if you didn't cut the other fellow's throat first he would cut yours. There wasn't any other reality. He had heard impractical, womanish men say there was, and try to prove it, only to have their economic throats cut considerably more promptly than any others. He had done his little indirect share of the throat-cutting always. He was not denying the need to do it. Only he had ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... gave him a small position as a tax-collector, but with such good-natured carelessness did he handle this uncongenial employ that he had repeatedly to make good from his own pocket the losses he entailed upon the government. Even this unsatisfactory labor failed the impractical author about the period of the death of King Philip II (1598). He was imprisoned for debt, and sank into such abject poverty that he depended on his friends for bread. How much the gloomy Philip II is satirized in Cervantes' masterpiece has ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... not grudge the hardship, for he carried on his back a bulky bundle of clothes for Lovin Child; enough to last the winter through, and some to spare; a woman would have laughed at some of the things he chose: impractical, dainty garments that Bud could not launder properly to save his life. But there were little really truly overalls, in which Lovin Child promptly developed a strut that delighted the men and earned him the title of Old Prospector. And there were little shirts and stockings and nightgowns and ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... impractical to put a church out there away from the town, but Elizabeth said that it was centrally located, and high up where it could be seen from the settlements in the valleys, and was moreover on a main trail that was much travelled. She longed to have some such spot in the wilderness that could be ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... union is not the impractical dream of an idealist is to be found in the fact that some of the greatest and most successful of the labor organizations have always adhered to the principle of the open shop. In the Pennsylvania coal-mines union and non-union miners labored together in the same mine and reaped ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... guarded by the Royalist Cossack clans, as lawless as they are brave. The Ufa Directorate derived its authority from the moderate Social Revolutionary party composed of the "Intelligenzia"—republican, visionary, and impractical. Kerensky was, from all accounts, a perfect representative of this class, verbose and useless so far as practical reconstructive work was concerned. This class blamed the unswerving loyalty of the Cossacks ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... arrogant. He knew when he had met one whom he could not drive. So he did not break with the new Governor. Roosevelt was wise, too, although he was honest. So he did not break with the "easy boss." His failure to do so was a disappointment to his impractical friends and supporters, who were more concerned with theoretical ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... awakening, have been dealt with somewhat fully, to show that the matters along the lines of man's interior, intuitive, spiritual, thought, soul life, instead of being, as they are so many times regarded, merely indefinite, sentimental, or impractical, are, on the contrary, powerfully, omnipotently real, and are of all practical things in the world the most practical, and, in the truest and deepest sense, the only truly practical things there are. And pre-eminently is this true when we look with a long range of vision, past the ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... rebellion, but for women thus to band themselves against the power enthroned in their own households is quite another matter. Hundreds have recommended your plan, so it is nothing new, but it is utterly impractical. There can be but one possible way for women to be freed from the degradation of disfranchisement, and that is through the slow processes of agitation and education, until the vast majority of women themselves desire ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... might demolish, once and for all, the reactionary proposals of Bakounin. To Marx, much of the program of the Alliance seemed a remnant of eighteenth-century philosophy, while the rest was pure utopianism, consisting of unsound and impractical reforms, mixed with atheism and schoolboy declamation. Altogether, the policies and projects of Bakounin seemed so vulnerable that the General Council evidently felt that little preparation was necessary in order to defeat them. They seemed ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... Corporations, the value to commerce of a proposed trade commission, and the steps which he has taken to secure the organization of a national chamber of commerce. I heartily commend his view that the plan of a trade commission which looks to the fixing of prices is altogether impractical and ought not for a moment to be considered as a possible solution ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... allowed more adjustment of sail area and thus would give better handling of the boat under all weather conditions. This was important because oyster dredging could be carried on in rough weather when tonging would be impractical. Like the Maryland terrapin smack, the Carolina sharpie schooner adhered closely to New Haven principles of design and construction. However, Carolina sharpie schooners were larger than terrapin smacks, having an over-all length of from ...
— The Migrations of an American Boat Type • Howard I. Chapelle
... her father, and North paused, placing a hand on the deputy's arm. The spirit of his renunciation had been strong within him, but another feeling was stronger still, he found; an ennobling pride in her devotion and trust. What a pity the finer things of life were so often the impractical! He pushed past the deputy and entered ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... at a junction, where a troop-train from the Front was already at a standstill. Tommies in steel helmets and muddied to the eyes were swarming out onto the tracks. They looked terrible men with their tanned cheeks and haggard eyes. I felt how impractical I was as I watched them—how ill-suited for campaigning. They were making the most of their respite from travelling. Some were building little fires between the ties to do their cooking—their utensils were bayonets and old tomato cans; others ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... transportation—could only move from their present position slowly and with extreme difficulty. The possibility of the vehicle itself moving occurred to us; but, as I pointed out, the task of replacing their heavy apparatus in it, and then reassembling the apparatus in a new position, made such a step impractical. ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings |
