"Chimera" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when the imagination overcomes the evidence of the outward senses, your fancy must have presented to you an unreal appearance. Nothing more likely, when the mind is on the stretch after something supernatural, than that the imagination should supply the place with a chimera, while the over-excited feelings render it difficult to dispel ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... sedentary life with a pen in my fingers. I liked talking, but I went to sit and mutely listen to professors who gave public lectures at the Bibliotheque or the Museum. I slept upon my solitary pallet like a Benedictine brother, though woman was my one chimera, a chimera that fled from me as I wooed it! In short, my life has been a cruel contradiction, a perpetual cheat. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... we shall not, as has so often been done, increase poverty by the very remedies which are intended to remove it, or diverge from the path of steady progressive development, into the chase of some wild chimera, which requires for its achievement only the radical alteration of all the data of experience. "Annihilate space and time, and make two lovers happy," was the modest petition of an enthusiast; and he would probably have been ready to join in the prayer, "make all men angels, and then we shall ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... intuition what had happened. Alfieri had failed in his quest. The Italian commander of the troops, refusing to sanction useless labor any longer, had marched north with his men. Alfieri, still clinging desperately to a chimera, had decided to remain and scour the desert until his stores gave out. And, at this crucial moment in his enterprise, came Hussain, the unconscious emissary of his rivals. The fact that the Arab was a prisoner spoke volumes. He had tried to communicate ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... being a golden hemlet cristatus of the Grecian type." Swiss and Tyrolean artists also produce exquisite carving, but use wood as a material; and in the famous collection of Baron de Watteville will be found a marvelous piece of carving representing Bellerophon overturning the Chimera. But French pipes are the most interesting of all to collectors, from the fact that tobacco was introduced into that country long before it was known in England, and also from the ingenuity of a people who ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... spent three years together." Men who, without boasting, have the right to say such things must never be spoken of lightly: the fortunate ages, when men of talent could propose such things, then no chimera, are rather to be envied. The ages called by the name of Louis XIV. or of Queen Anne are, in the dispassionate sense of the word, the only true classical ages, those which offer protection and a favourable climate to real talent. We know only to well ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... secular prince, and will make them all barons living in beautiful castles and receiving the tribute of the Goyim. One may reason and plead with them and show them that their belief contradicts their own Scriptures, that their Talmud is filled with palpable falsehoods, and that their hope is a chimera; but they turn a deaf ear to argument and entreaty, and turn upon you with fierce resentment at your efforts to show them the truth. Although they know that their habits of grasping and hoarding ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... no longer be haunted, driven as I am now. But, Uniacke, do you know what it is that I fear most of all, what it is that dogs me, night and day; though I strive to put it from me, to tell myself that it is a chimera?" ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... drama is the gainer by the latitude which history affords it. It will be seen that here the latitude is ample and unique; this is, in truth, the decisive hour, the turning-point in Cromwell's life. It is the moment when his chimera escapes from him, when the present kills the future, when, to use an expressive colloquialism, his destiny misses fire. All of Cromwell is at stake in the comedy being ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... "In truth," he exclaimed, "you amaze me. You talk about these mysterious matters with such a careless security, as I have never yet met with; and it perplexes me the more since my reason tells me that your pursuit is a mere chimera, and the discovery of such an ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... stare of unconsciousness, that the opening of it will reveal to us. Let us all thank God, and take heart again, and try to revive those notions of human dignity and common human sense which this story sets at nought, and see if we cannot heal that great jar in our abused natures which this chimera of the nineteenth century makes in it—this night-mare of modern criticism which lies with its dead weight on all our higher art and learning—this creature that came in on us unawares, when the interpretation of the Plays ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... GALILEI SONETTO. Mostro son' io piu strano, e piu difforme, Che l'Arpia, la Sirena, o la Chimera; Ne in terra, in aria, in acqua e alcuna fiera, Ch' abbia di membra cosi varie forme. Parte a parte non ho che sia conforme, Piu che s' una sia bianca, e l' altra nera; Spesso di Cacciator dietro ho una ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... the citizens of the Pacific slope, under the influence of the labour question, are writing and speaking as though war between the great republic and the Far Eastern empire were an inevitable outcome of the future. This chimera is unthinkable by anyone really familiar with the trend of Japanese sentiment, but it may encourage in China a dangerous mood, and it helps always to foster an unquiet feeling. On the whole, when we add the chaotic condition into which China is apparently falling, it has to be admitted ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... I have conceded something to curiosity, it is because I thought it necessary to relieve a subject whose seriousness may cause discouragement. It is with that in view that I have introduced into this dissertation the pleasing chimera of a certain astronomical theology, having no ground for apprehension that it will ensnare anyone and deeming that to tell it and refute it is the same thing. Fiction for fiction, instead of imagining that the planets were suns, one might conceive that they were masses ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... let me die of hunger and despair for the chimera of nobility, which has no reality to-day unless it has the ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... Months and months went by, and the colonists waited and waited, while the fever carried off someone every few days; and then their hearts failed them, and they longed for the lands they had left for a chimera. A sad two months passed, and then one day another steamer—the Nouvelle Bretagne—came into Liki Liki Bay. She had brought out some three hundred more colonists, Spanish people, who listened, with doleful faces, to the tale of those who had preceded them to the Utopia of Charles du ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... With head of woman, soaring, bird-like wings And serpent's tail on lion's trunk, were things Puzzling in history; And men invented For it an origin which represented Chimera and a monster double-headed, By myths ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... firm it must have lain Full oft its touch of power rare Upon the curling lion-mane Of some chimera caught ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... the shameless maxims would revolt his soul; impure resting-places offered to the bastard characters of a century by the unworthy complacency of philosophers; on the other side, a pretended system of perfectibility, not less suspicious, which, to realize the chimera of a general perfection common to the whole universe, would not be embarrassed for a choice of means. This is what would meet his attention. So he carried there, where the most pressing danger lay and reform was the most urgent, the strongest forces of his principles, and made it a law ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the savings bank on her own account, and thirty thousand on Fanny's, and thus the pair of them would be amply provided for for life. And what was to be given in exchange for this nice sum of money? Why, nothing at all, so to speak—a mere chimera, which is no good to anybody while they have it, and only becomes profitable when it is parted with—a ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... bewilderment; above him only the boundless dome of heaven, around him only endless mountain ranges! Dazed by the strangeness, the isolation of the scene, he began for an instant to doubt his sanity; was this a reality or a chimera of his own imagination? But only for an instant, for with his first movement a large collie had bounded to his side and now began licking his hands and face with the most joyful demonstrations. There was something soothing and reassuring ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... differences with Jeremy Taylor, which may be characterized in one sentence; ideas 'versus' conceptions and images. I contend that the Church in the Christian sense is an idea;—not therefore a chimera, or a fancy, but a real being and a most powerful reality. Suppose the present state of science in this country, with this only difference that the Royal and other scientific societies were not founded: might I not speak of a scientific public, and its influence on the community at ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... he had been long revolving in his mind, he at length determined to attempt carrying his design into execution; but knowing that such an undertaking was fit only for some sovereign prince or state, he made the proposal, in the first place, to the republic of Genoa, where it was looked upon as a chimera. He then communicated his design to John II. of Portugal, who gave him a favourable hearing, but was so much occupied with the discoveries along the western coast of Africa, that he was unwilling ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... consciousness was the one actually affected, and that the colonel and the general and Watts were mere hallucinations of his. The general held that Jake and the others were accessory phantasms of his own dream, and Watts and the colonel, being of more poetical temperament, held that the whole outfit was a chimera in some larger consciousness, whose entity it is not given us to know. As for Oscar, he claimed the parliament was crazy, and started to prove it, when it was thought best to shift and modify the discussion; and, therefore, early in September, when the upper currents ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... where the cotton-plant is perennial, and a single acre, as we are assured by Mr. Squier, yields semiannually a bale of superior cotton. But let us hope that the South may abandon her dream of a Southern Empire, and the chimera which now haunts her, that the Northerner is hostile to the Southerner, when in reality he has no such feeling, but merely recoils from institutions which he believes to be at variance with moral ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Miss Stevenson, to wean your thoughts away from so unhappy a subject. Why permit yourself to be worried? The thing will happen, or it will not happen. If it does happen, you will be powerless to prevent. If it does not, you will have been anxious over a chimera of the imagination." ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... men told him of the terrible chimera that was in the west of his kingdom. This strange creature had the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a crocodile. Its breath was flames of fire, so the peasants said. Nobody dared ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... And both were silent to our journey's end. An eager glance he gave me as he touched My hand to help me from the carriage. He Has told me since that I returned the look With one which, if not actually scorn, Was next of kin to scorn, and much resembling:— All the chimera ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... hearing from the shrewd man of business. And though he himself was increasingly confident that the treasure had been hidden out of spite, and not really made away with, and that some day it would be found, he knew that this opinion would be regarded by the world at large as a chimera of ardent youth, and that Martin Holt for one would bid him lay aside all such vain and idle dreams, and strive by steady perseverance in business to win for himself a modest independence. Only to the young, the ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... anticipations which had elevated Columbus above all mercenary interests; which had made him regardless of hardships and perils, and given an heroic character to the early part of this voyage. It is true, he had been in pursuit of a mere chimera, but it was the chimera of a splendid imagination, and a penetrating judgment. If he was disappointed in his expectation of finding a strait through the Isthmus of Darien, it was because nature herself had been disappointed, for she appears to have attempted to make one, but ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... know that I love you? That there is none other in the whole world whom I would care to marry but you? Nay, Barbara, when happiness is within our reach, let us not throw it away upon a chimera." ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... certain illusion by which something which is in reality advantageous to the species alone seems to be advantageous to himself; consequently he serves the latter while he imagines he is serving himself. In this process he is carried away by a mere chimera, which floats before him and vanishes again immediately, and as a motive takes the place of reality. This illusion is instinct. In most instances instinct may be regarded as the sense of the species which presents to the will ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... swiftly course over almost the identical pathway once followed by the overland stage-coach, the pony express, and the slowly plodding ox caravans in the days when the possibility of a transcontinental trail of steel was regarded as a chimera. ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... the sake of argument. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that a man has come to the conclusion that there probably was such a person as St. George, in spite of all the nonsense about dragons and the chimera with wings and claws that has somehow interwreathed itself with his image. Perhaps he is a little biased by patriotism or other ethical aims; and thinks the saint a good social ideal. Perhaps he knows that early Christianity, so far from being a religion of ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... political purposes, and with offers of his aid, through the foreknowledge and spiritual intercourse by which he thought himself favoured, yet he still cherished the hope of promotion by such visionary follies. That chimera of the imagination, the invention of the philosopher's stone, still haunted him, and he did not yet despair of one day becoming a ruler among princes, the supreme arbiter and depositary ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... done hoped I could tell ma friends w'en I returned dat we done was successful, an' cure some ob dem ob craziness in de haid by applyin' some ob de bypunktater. If we don't find it, den dey all say we been follerin' a chimera-infantum—in odder words, dat we needs some ob de bypunktater ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... movements. He saw something gruesome among them—a misshapen figure, decked with tapes and jaundiced paper, out of whose mouth a ticket hung, on which "Lessing" was written. My friend went close up to it and learned the worst: it was the Homeric Chimera; in front it was Strauss, behind it was Gervinus, and in the middle Chimera. The tout-ensemble was Lessing. This discovery caused him to shriek with terror: he waked, and read no more. In sooth, Great Master, why have you written ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Grand Duke of Tuscany, he told him that it was meet that that which the higher authorities had determined should be believed and obeyed, and that he considered his treatise "as poetry or as a dream, and as such I desire your highness to receive it." And at other times he calls it a "chimera" or a "mathematical caprice." And in the same way in these essays, for fear also—why not confess it?—of the Inquisition, of the modern, the scientific, Inquisition, I offer as a poetry, dream, chimera, mystical caprice, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... a rebellion and bloodshed will open the eyes of that deluded people; though were they alone concerned, I think it is no matter what becomes of them.... Our government has become a chimera, and is too perfect, in point of liberty, for so rude a beast as an Englishman; who is a man, a bad animal too, corrupted by above a century of licentiousness. The misfortune is that this liberty can scarcely be retrenched without danger of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... served only to make them the laughing-stock of their antagonists, they assumed the offensive; and, showing that the socialists understood nothing at all themselves of this organization that they held up as a scarecrow, they ended by saying that it was but a new socialistic chimera, a word without sense,—an absurdity. The latest writings of the economists are full of these ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Europe! Gipsy race! Your Eastern manners, garb, and face Appear a strange chimera; None, none but you can now be styled Romantic, picturesque, and wild, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... time I have reasoned in the supposition that the South would remain an independent power. But unless the West joins the confederates, and the Union reestablishes itself against New England, this independence is a chimera: it might last for some time; but in ten or twenty years, when the free population of the West would have doubled or trebled itself, how would the South, necessarily much enfeebled by slave culture, compare with a people, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... witness, till its mood, Grown fierce o'er failing hopes, doth rend and tear Its own illusions grown too thin and bare To wrap it longer; for within the gate Where all must pass, a veiled and hooded Fate, A dark Chimera, coiled and tangled lies, And he who answers not its questions dies,— Still changing form and speech, but with the same Vexed riddles, Gordian-twisted, bringing shame Upon the nations that with eager cry Hail each new solver of the mystery; Yet he, of these the best, Bold guesser, hath ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... solidarity of all economic interests has among us become a truth; but elsewhere it is nothing more than one of those numerous self-deceptions of which the political economy of the exploiting world is composed. Where the old system of industry prevails, universal increase of production of wealth is a chimera. Where consumption by the masses cannot increase, there cannot production and wealth increase, but can be only shifted, can only change place and owner; in proportion as the production of one person increases ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... the chimera, to ward off the dark hours of advancing age, of a friendship equal to that with which the good Schmucke enveloped even the whims of his poor Pons? Have you appreciated the sovereign power of secret societies, and ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... Pickle and his confederates; so that he began to entertain suspicion of Mr. Jennings, who he could not help thinking had been at the bottom of them all, and spirited up principles of rebellion in the school, with a view of making himself independent. Possessed with this chimera, which was void of all foundation, the German descended so low as to tamper in private with the boys, from whom he hoped to draw some very important discovery; but he was disappointed in his expectations; and this mean practice reaching the ears of his usher, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... have to lament and say: Alas, we were not wise enough! We took transient superficial Semblance for everlasting central Substance; we have departed far away from the Laws of this Universe, and behold now lawless Chaos and inane Chimera is ready to devour us!—'Nature in late centuries,' says Sauerteig, 'was universally supposed to be dead; an old eight-day clock, made many thousand years ago, and still ticking, but dead as brass,—which the Maker, at most, sat looking at, in ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... chosen the little town where he now stood for even a temporary residence. It was not a perversity, but rather a fascination. His whole life had been a flight and a pursuit—a vain endeavour to escape from the evil spirit that pursued him—and a chase of a chimera. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... be represented at all. The representation, at the best, will only be a representation of your Missionaries, not at all of the Chinese Church. Therefore, we assert that such a union would not be real, not even apparent, only nominal. In striving after it, we are pursuing a chimera, destroying a substance for the ...
— History and Ecclesiastical Relations of the Churches of the Presbyterial Order at Amoy, China • J. V. N. Talmage
... world, was longing for a sacred King, for a Prince of Peace, who should come from the East and bring to the people some higher and truer happiness than that deceiving chimera of political bigness. Well, Christ should be this universal, sacred King, this Prince of Peace, and Messenger of a durable happiness. It is not true that Christ had His prophets among the people of Israel only. His prophets existed in every race and ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... neglect his present life, nay court and covet death, if he but imagines that it will add to the glory he had acquired before.' But the most notable institution of pride is the love of honour. Honour is a 'chimera,' having no reality in nature, but a mere invention of moralists and politicians, to keep men close to their engagements, whatever they be. In some families it is hereditary, like the gout; but, luckily, the vulgar are destitute of it. ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... caverns of the piratical Saracens that honeycombed the clifts, or yet, again, taking a hand at the nets! Sometimes he grew very lonely; for without a woman, either of one's blood or of one's choice, life holds little. Ah, that woman in the mask, that chimera of a night, that fancy of ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... Government at that period, and chiefly by the personal resistance of Lord Melbourne. Let that minister be held responsible, if any ground has been lost that could have been peacefully pre-occupied against the schism. This, however, seems to us a chimera. For what is it that the bill concedes? Undoubtedly it restrains and modifies the right of patronage. It grants a larger discretion to the ecclesiastical courts than had formerly been exercised by the usage. Some contend, that in doing so ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... The order-book each evening, reminding us of the danger, inculcated strict vigilance on picket and on guard. So long did this last without any attack being made that the shadowy expectation of what never occurred became our bugbear, a chimera which haunted us ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... howsoever these symptoms be common and incident to all persons, yet they are the more remarkable, frequent, furious and violent in melancholy men. To speak in a word, there is nothing so vain, absurd, ridiculous, extravagant, impossible, incredible, so monstrous a chimera, so prodigious and strange, [2536]such as painters and poets durst not attempt, which they will not really fear, feign, suspect and imagine unto themselves: and that which [2537]Lod. Vives said in a jest of a silly country fellow, that killed his ass for drinking up the ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... gifted with arts, and adorned with graces; that she should choose me, me for the partner of her fortune; her affections; and her life! It cannot be. Yet, if it were; if your guesses should—prove—Oaf! madman! To indulge so fatal a chimera! So ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... his absence would be more agreeable than his company. So, when the following day likewise passed without any reappearance of the suspicious stranger, both the lads began to think that their fear of being attacked by pirates was only a chimera, founded, as the captain had said, on Mohammed's fabulous narrative; for Charley had been quite as nervous in the matter as Tom, and had shared his anxious watch with him all through ever since he had recognised the ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... a bank of national credit, supported by public funds and secured by Parliament, be a chimera or impossible thing? And if not, what would follow from the supposal ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... is inexplicable, this chimera of a moon-struck skull! We shall never solve or comprehend it. I shall not return to my former residence. What does it matter to me? I am afraid of encountering that man again, and I shall not ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... romance—I have too often faced the music of life to the tune of hardship to waste time in snivelling and gushing over fancies and dreams; neither is it a novel, but simply a yarn—a real yarn. Oh! as real, as really real—provided life itself is anything beyond a heartless little chimera—it is as real in its weariness and bitter heartache as the tall gum-trees, among which I first saw the light, are real ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... difficult," he mused, communing with the thought which had come to him. "It would be something real, and not a chimera." ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... ere thou wert born, ere I was call'd Unto a burden heavier, than man Unsuffering may bear; but, daughter, listen! I am not guilty! if the human mind May keep account with its own issuings forth To act and do; if thought deceive us not, And reason live in man. I am not guilty, if The blind chimera of an earth-crown'd king Be less than God's truth—not, if it be well To love this people; to have drawn the sword For mercy's sake alone. I am not guilty! (O God! call back her eyes' fast fading light, Lest she die judging me.) I am not guilty! Except in loving thee too well. My ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... no chimera of heathen imagination, could be so appalling. No sooner is the impassable bar placed between God and itself than what theologians call the creature's radical love of the Creator breaks out in a perfect tempest of undying efforts. ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... measures of precaution against want, sickness, and distress in all its forms, the aim is a real one, and something may be achieved which will be great in proportion as the plan is not disturbed by striving after the chimera of positive happiness. This agrees with the opinion expressed by Goethe in the Elective Affinities, and there put into the mouth of Mittler—the man who is always trying to make other people happy: To desire to get rid of an evil is a definite object, but ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... now with incredible swiftness upward and outward an Aladdin edifice of illusion. It was as though indeed this genius who had waved his wand and bidden this fairy palace of chimera to arise, had used for his material the intangible, iridescent film of bubbles, light as air. Wider and wider spread the balloon of phantasm. Higher and higher it floated, on it fixed the eyes of France. And France laughed, and asked that yet ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... cogitations, apprehensions, and reflections, it came into my thoughts one day that all this might, be a mere chimera of my own, and that this foot might be the print of my own foot, when I came on shore from my boat: this cheered me up a little, too, and I began to persuade myself it was all a delusion; that it was nothing else but my own foot; and why might I not come that way from the ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... the glow of ambition in his fine, mobile face she stifled the altruistic yearnings, which she had come to feel made her husband uncomfortable, and joined him as he gazed into the crystal ball of the future and saw its glistening chimera. ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... not. At the age of twenty-one he wrote in his Journal, "I know that I know next to nothing." A very unusual, but a very promising frame of mind for a young man. "It is not certain that God exists, but that He does not is a most bewildering and improbable Chimera." ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... not my new dignity—I, in the Cabinet of England's ministry, vast fortunes opening to my gaze, the proudest station not too high for my reasonable ambition! You, wedding yourself to some grand chimera of an object, aimless when it eludes your grasp. I, swinging, squirrel-like, from scheme to scheme; no matter if one breaks, another is at hand! Some men would have cut their throats in despair, an hour ago, in losing the object ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Franchi's profession of faith reduces itself to these very simple terms:—"The world is what it is, and it is because it is; any other reason whatever of its essence and of its existence can be nothing but a sophism or an illusion."[84] All inquiry into the origin of things is a pure chimera, and we must therefore limit ourselves to the experience of the present life, and look for nothing beyond it. The author treats with sufficient disdain arguments which satisfied Descartes, Newton, and Leibnitz. It has seemed to me that his understanding, a little obscured ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... their opponents, as a means of warding off the results which they draw from the theory of evolution. When science breaks its sword, religion assails it, with the fragment. It is not at once evident that if this chasm were shown to exist, knowledge would be a chimera; for there would be no outer world at all, not even a phenomenal one, to supply an object for it. We must postulate the ultimate unity of all beings with each other and with the mind that knows them, just ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... pocket—attempts by general behaviour, by professional services when the occasion offered, by putting his original and fertile pen at the service of the government, to win confidence, and to overcome the manifest indisposition of those in power to think that a man who cherished the chimera of universal knowledge could be a useful public servant. On the other hand, all the while, in the crises of his disappointment or triumph, the one great subject lay next his heart, filling him with fire and ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... That must or fall or turn with every change of state? Poor bard! if thy hot zeal for loyal Wem[29a] Forbids thy tacking, sing his requiem; Sing something, prithee, to ensure thy thumb; Nothing but conscience strikes a poet dumb. Conscience, that dull chimera of the schools, A learned imposition upon fools, Thou, Dryden, art not silenced with such stuff, Egad thy conscience has been large enough. But here are loyal subjects still, and foes, Many to mourn, for many to oppose. Shall thy great master, thy almighty ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... some would fain postpone this era, Reluctant as all placemen to resign Their post; but theirs is merely a chimera, For they have pass'd life's equinoctial line: But then they have their claret and Madeira To irrigate the dryness of decline; And county meetings, and the parliament, And debt, and what ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... must be repressed; and government can pretend to no more. When the refined politician would lend an active hand, he only multiplies interruptions and grounds of complaint; when the merchant forgets his own interest to lay plans for his country, the period of vision and chimera is near, and the solid basis of commerce withdrawn. He might be told, that while he pursues his advantage, and gives no cause of complaint, the ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... clear-headed man, the late Wizenmann, whose early death is to be lamented, in which he disputes the right to argue from a want to the objective reality of its object, and illustrates the point by the example of a man in love, who having fooled himself into an idea of beauty, which is merely a chimera of his own brain, would fain conclude that such an object really exists somewhere. I quite agree with him in this, in all cases where the want is founded on inclination, which cannot necessarily postulate the existence of its object even for the man that is affected by it, much less can ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... what I tried to do might be so easily frustrated in that cauldron—why should I risk personal happiness—the most precious and the rarest thing in life, for what may be a chimera—wasted years and a wasted life. Why are we made as we are, if to coax that hidden spark into a steady flame is not our highest destiny? It certainly is our manifest right. . . . Dreams of doing great things in this world are nine-tenths personal vanity. I believe that when we leave ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... unwilling to sacrifice to me this chimera of virtue," exclaimed Napoleon, "although she has already disregarded it by loving me. She is not courageous enough to give up the semblance after having already parted with the substance. Like all ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... population where it was impossible for him to enjoy it. They resolved also to prove that slavery was the normal and natural state of the negro; that the Northern people, in taking any other ground, had been deceived by a sentiment and had been following a chimera; that the Southern people alone understood the question, and that interference with them by war or by law should end in establishing their justification before the public opinion of the world. The Southern men believed and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... down the inveterate habits, and to reform the life of an abandoned sinner, we see in the result, in the reformation of morals which appeared incorrigible, in the reclamation of a human soul which seemed to be irretrievably lost, something more than could be produced by a mere chimera of the slumbering fancy, something more than could arise from the capricious images of a terrified imagination; but once presented, we behold in all these things, and in their tremendous and mysterious ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... followed? Was the reader sensible, in the practical effect upon his ear, of any beauty attained? By no means; all the difference, sensibly perceived, lay in the occasional constraints and affectations to which the writer had been driven by his self-imposed necessities. The same chimera exists in Germany; and so much further is it carried, that one great puritan in this heresy (Wolf) has published a vast dictionary, the rival of Adelung's, for the purpose of expelling every word of foreign origin and composition out of ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... is that the original Lamb Walnut was a chimera. Such a tree would have mixed tissues in its growing points, some having the curly grain character and others not. In such a tree some scions would produce curliness and others straight grain. It may be that these were mixed in ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... object that human beings can set before themselves is not the pursuit of any such chimera as the annihilation of the unknown; it is simply the unwearied endeavour to remove its boundaries a little further from ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... have been for so long a time at the court of your Highnesses in opposition and contrary to the opinions of so many distinguished personages of your household, who all opposed me, treating my project as a dream, and my undertaking as a chimera. And I hope still, nevertheless, in our Lord, this voyage will bring the greatest honor to Christianity, although it has been ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... long time, but at last I let it slip, and committed myself fortunately, to but one person, and that my daughter; and, even so, I hardly think she understood me. I recollected myself before I had disclosed the grotesque and infernal chimera that haunts me." ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... an idea, a chimera, entered my head, of gathering during the progress of my life, notes and materials for a work embracing three divisions, Morals, Politics, Education, and I commit this notice to paper now, that many years hence, if it please God, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... ominous even in relation to ourselves from these professedly inert associates, these sleeping partners in our Chinese dealings, is, that their presence with no active functions argues a faith lurking somewhere in the possibility of talking the Chinese into reason. Such a chimera, still surviving the multiform experience we have had, augurs ruin to the total enterprise. It is not absolutely impossible that even Yeh, or any imbecile governor armed with the same obstinacy and brutal arrogance, might, under ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... has been sacrificed to the liberty of the few, which is the essence of tyranny? Absolute individual liberty is incompatible with social liberty. The liberty of each must, in Mill's phrase, be bounded by the like liberty of all. Absolute personal liberty is a chimera, ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... on. Not only because his hand was heavy and his head too honest, but because he had allowed himself to be befooled by a chimera. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... herself on to a sofa, and with her chin in her hands, and in the posture of a chimera on the look out for the pleasures she wishes, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... glanced through the casements, possessed my fancy with ideas of Noah's ark, and almost persuaded me I beheld that extraordinary vessel. The representation one sees of it in Scheutzer's "Physica Sacra" seems to be formed upon this very model, and for several moments I indulged the chimera of imagining myself confined within its precincts. How willingly, could I but choose my companions, would I encounter a deluge, to float whole years instead of months ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... systems,—that is, on account of the supposed paradoxes they involve? It may be but a little argument with you, who seem to demand demonstration of religious truth; but for myself, I feel that, whatever be the truth, such a chimera as scepticism, bristling all over ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... completed this agreeable task. It is true, I met on all sides with indications of sympathetic interest in the completion of my great lyric work, although most of my acquaintances regarded the whole thing as a chimera, or possibly a bold caprice. The only one who entered into it with any heartiness or real enthusiasm was Herwegh, with whom I frequently discussed it, and to whom I generally read aloud such portions as were completed. Sulzer was much annoyed at the remodelling of Siegfrieds Tod, as he regarded ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... much, and no more. Like a ship on a magic lantern slide the Idalia had crossed the illuminated circle of the consul's little world, and was gone. Save for the tiny cloud of smoke that was left hanging over the brim of the sea, she might have been an immaterial thing, a chimera of ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... marks the race of the Dennises. With a half-consciousness of deficient genius, they usually idolize some chimera, by adopting some extravagant principle; and they consider themselves as original when they ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Pueblos;(6) for the Iroquois, to Lafitau, a missionary of the early part of the eighteenth century. Lafitau was perhaps the first writer who ever explained certain features in Greek and other ancient myths and practices as survivals from totemism. The Chimera, a composite creature, lion, goat and serpent, might represent, Lafitau thought, a league of three totem tribes, just as wolf, bear and turtle represented the ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... I do not blame the arrangement this day in question, as a preference given to the debt of individuals over the Company's debt. In my eye it is no more than the preference of a fiction over a chimera; but I blame the preference given to those fictitious private debts over the standing defence and the standing government. It is there the public is robbed. It is robbed in its army; it is robbed in its civil administration; it is robbed in its ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... our aptitude to be frightened by a chimera, and deceived by such words as "nature" and "cause." Laws and rules, by which we express Order, are restrictive only in a condition of intelligence short of completeness, only therefore in that province of thought which concerns itself with material facts. The musician is not ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... still seems abstruse, had we the key to the mystic phraseology they were compelled to adopt, might open the way to yet more noble acquisitions. The Philosopher's Stone itself has seemed no visionary chimera to some of the soundest chemists that even the present century has produced. (Mr. Disraeli, in his "Curiosities of Literature" (article "Alchem"), after quoting the sanguine judgments of modern chemists ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... appreciated and described in Prussia, and even in Austria verified, not long before the last campaign. Under such circumstances, what must be thought of the discoveries and conclusions of writers who assert that 'the Polish nation is a mere chimera'? As no individual, mighty as he may be, can by a blasphemous word suppress the existence of the Eternal Father, so neither passion nor love, favor nor animosity, interest nor purpose of the most talented or ambitious, can erase at pleasure a nationality ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in detail[146] that the hypothesis of a "creative instinct," if the expression is used not as an abbreviated or metaphorical formula but in the strict sense, is a pure chimera, an empty entity. In studying the various types of imagination we have always been careful to note that every mode of creation may be reduced, as regards its beginnings, to a tendency, a want, a special, determinate desire. Let us recall for the last time these initial conditions ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... terrified and remorseful conscience. Many a time they overwhelmed him with agony and a dread of the future, mingling with his slavish terrors of a material Gehenna, and stirring up his turbid thoughts until they drove him to the verge of madness. But the inward chimera of riotous passions was too fierce for the weak human reason, and while he hated himself he ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... of being admitted into the legislative body. There is, I am aware, a party in the colony, by whom the very notion of granting such a privilege to a class of men who have been subject to the lash of the law, would be treated as a chimera pregnant with the most fatal consequences to this infant community. In this, as in most other societies, there is an aristocratic body, which would monopolize all situations of power, dignity and emolument, and put themselves in a posture to domineer alike over the ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... people who frequent the theatres, and who can believe nothing beyond what themselves have seen: any thing above the reach of what they are accustomed or habituated to admire, always seems to them a chimera. ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... inexorable! Yes, poor Louis, Death has found thee. No palace walls or life-guards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt buckram of stiffest ceremonial could keep him out; but he is here, here at thy very life-breath, and will extinguish it. Thou, whose whole existence hitherto was a chimera and scenic show, at length becomest a reality: sumptuous Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void Immensity; Time is done, and all the scaffolding of Time falls wrecked with hideous clangour round thy soul: the pale Kingdoms yawn open; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... man, that you could not believe me; this seems a dream, a chimera to you!... and to me, too!... and yet the grades and the honors I obtained were no illusions; those soldiers I led to the cannon's mouth, those redoubts stormed, those flags won, those victories with which all France has rung ... all that was my work ... ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... must recall out of the grave the armies and sailors that are perished- -and that must make thirteen provinces willing to receive the law, without the necessity of keeping ten thousand men amongst them. The gigantic imagination of Lord Chatham would not entertain such a chimera. Lord * * * * perhaps would say he did, rather than not undertake; or Mr. Burke could form a metaphoric vision that would satisfy no imagination but his own: but I, who am nullius addiclus itrare in verba, have no hopes either in ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... moderate men. Let us not impose our petty and commonplace ideas on these extraordinary movements so far above our every-day life. Let us continue to admire the "morality of the gospel"—let us suppress in our religious teachings the chimera which was its soul; but do not let us believe that with the simple ideas of happiness, or of individual morality, we stir the world. The idea of Jesus was much more profound; it was the most revolutionary ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... the Chian's vessel. I recognize the vine tree and the image of the Bromian god; and surely that other one is the Chimera under Uliades, the Samian. They come hither, the Ionian with them, to harangue against ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... with Bax that compensation for property acquired would be inadvisable and impracticable. "In a pamphlet called 'Collectivism and Revolution' M. Jules Guesde said, 'Expropriation with indemnity is a chimera. And whatever regret one may feel, however difficult may appear to peaceful natures the last method, we have no other way than to retake violently that which belongs to all, by—let us say the word—the Revolution.' He added, 'Capital which it is necessary to take from individuals, ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... some declamation I do not remember. I know that it was sincere, and that my wish and aim were to absolve her to herself. In fact, in her case self-accusation was a chimera. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... hours of vacuous idleness; but this self-contempt of a man who catches himself in the very act of flagrant nonsense was nevertheless succeeded by the hope of not losing all the advantages of an honest delusion; and he could remount on a chimera which he thought less wild, as leading to a via media, a compromise, fancying that by moderating his ideal he ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans |
