"Imaginative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reasonable," Rochester remarked, calmly. "Imagine, if you please—you seem to have plenty of imaginative force—that I am a fairy godfather. I may not look the part, but at least I can live up to it. I will provide the key for your escape. I will set you down in the world you are thirsting to enter. You shall take your place with the others, and run ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... merits high praise. He is no "dry" philosopher; he is highly imaginative and picturesque; many of his passages might be styled, like those of Macaulay, "purple," for at times he rises to a high pitch of feeling and oratory. Yet this has been urged against him by some ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... which have taken place in Mexico the Pan-American Congress of 1902 was of some importance. The feasting and eloquence, the society functions and self-congratulations which ran riot, were characteristic of this imaginative and enthusiastic race of Latin America. If these matters were more in evidence than practical results—as is often characteristic of such assemblies—at least the important step was taken of calling together their neighbours of ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... agency in producing this conjunction may be traced back to the oldest time; but the union of a precise Christological Gnosis, such as we find in Irenaeus and Tertullian, with the retention in their integrity of the imaginative series of thoughts about Antichrist, Christ as the warrior hero, the double resurrection, and the kingdom of glory in Jerusalem, is really a historical novelty. There is, however, no doubt that the strength of the old Catholic theology in opposition to the Gnostics ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... that Dummie protested his innocence. A violent coup-de-pied broke off all further parlance. He made a clear house of the Mug; and the landlady thereof, tottering back to her elbow-chair, sought out another pipe, and, like all imaginative persons when the world goes wrong with them, consoled herself for the absence of realities by the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for he writes out of a careless abundance; and from the moment I first read him I have wished to have between two covers something of all the moods that do. I believe that I have it in this book, which I have just been reading aloud to an imaginative young girl more French than English, whose understanding, that of a child and of a woman, and expressed not in words but in her face, has doubled my own. Some of my selections, those that I have called 'A Miracle' and 'The Castle of Time' are passages from stories of some length, and I give but ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... her impetuous relation; it is infused throughout with the same degree of philosophical ardor, and one follows as one does a wonder tale the rapid sequence of events, tracing with an awakened interest the national issues, which, presented in this new, concise, imaginative way, take on a fresh, an enchanting charm. Nothing could be clearer to the mind of a child eager to know the reason of things, nor to that of a grown person, fatigued by the jostling memories of both important and useless events, than this return to the fundamental, the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 36, July 15, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... difficult to trace the origin of the nervous and mental disease from which she suffered. Kerner's account of her childhood shows plainly that she was born temperamentally imaginative and unstable and that she was raised in an environment well calculated to exaggerate her imaginativeness and instability. Ghosts and goblins were favorite topics of conversation among the peasantry of Prevorst, while ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... stories of battles, of voyages, of invasions, of destructions, of slaughters, of sieges, of tragedies and deaths, of courtships, of military expeditions; and all this strictly historical. For we do not here speak of their "imaginative tales," which give still freer scope to fancy; such as the Fenian and Ossianic poems, which are also founded on facts, but can no more claim the title of history than the novels ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... I'm imaginative; but I wouldn't like the night-watchman's job just now," he remarked to Featherstone. "Hulton's illness can't have spoiled his nerve, or he'd have asked us to meet him at his house, in view of what he ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... will secure you from the idolatry of the present times and fashions, and create the noblest kind of imaginative power in your soul, that of living in past ages; wholly devoid of which power, a man can neither anticipate the future, nor even live a truly human life, a life of ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of a ball in Brussels gave plenty of scope for imaginative scribes to quote, in some cases almost correctly, the lines about 'there was a scene of revelry by night.'"—"Mr. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... the very finest masterpieces of modern oratory. The description of the feelings of the murderer has a touch of the creative power, but, taken in conjunction with the wonderful picture of the deed itself, the whole exhibits the highest imaginative excellence, and displays the possession of an extraordinary dramatic force such as Mr. Webster rarely exerted. It has the same power of exciting a kind of horror and of making us shudder with a creeping, nameless terror as the scene after ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... of three precious Liebig tablets, prepared from the choicest morsels of the Pampas ruminants. Some slices of beefsteak succeeded them, compressed by the hydraulic press, as tender and succulent as if they had just come from the butchers of the Paris Cafe Anglais. Michel, an imaginative man, would have ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... on it, and his phrase, "the honorable and astronomical manager," never failed to excite merriment. Boutwell bore it well, though disturbed. Like other men of logical habit of mind, when proposing to ornament his production with something imaginative, he struck upon the extravagant, and, feeling that he was doing a fantastic thing, gave rein ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... to name single pieces like "The Ancient Mariner," and "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and "Rose-Mary," of a rarer imaginative quality and a more perfect workmanship than Scott often attains; yet upon the whole and in the mass, no modern balladry matches the success of his. The Pre-Raphaelites were deliberate artists, consciously reproducing an extinct literary form; but Scott had ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... gracious worlds. I was duly qualified by a painfully acquired ignorance of dead languages cautiously to approach my own; and 'twas no better. Along Milton's margins the Gryphon must needs pursue the Arimaspian — what a chance, that Arimaspian, for the imaginative pencil! And so it has come about that, while Milton periods are mostly effaced from memory by the sponge of Time, I can still see that vengeful Gryphon, cousin-german to the gentle beast that danced the Lobster ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... slept. He thought of that mass of Henner hair—he loved to think of her as a creation of the fanciful Henner—he thought of her asleep and dreaming in blissful security while he, with all the loyalty of an imaginative boy, was standing guard just as he had pictured himself in those heroic days when he substituted himself for the story-book knight who stood beneath the battlements and defied the covetous ogre. His thoughts, however, did not contemplate the Princess fair in a state of wretched insomnia, with ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... of Sienkiewicz in this volume is perhaps the most interesting and fascinating he has yet produced. It is in the very first rank of imaginative and historical romance. The time and scene of the noble story are laid in the middle ages during the conquest of Pagan Lithuania by the military and priestly order of the "Krzyzacy" Knights of the Cross. And the story exhibits with splendid force the collision of race passions and fierce, violent ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the ravages of insects or worms, or to prevent corrosion when applied to metal piers. But it is worthy of a better purpose, and is capable of yielding far more useful and interesting substances than even the most imaginative individual could have dreamed ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... a powerful grip on life and good things. He was young, just twenty-six, strong and healthy, though slim-built in body, alert and vigorous in mind, unperturbed in soul, buoyant and warmly imaginative. Just at that moment the joy of life was almost at full flood in him, for he had recently been reveling in a new and glorious experience, and now carried it with him, a ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... imaginative man; some of his best friends thought him a cold and prosaic one, but he never forgot that walk or the sensations accompanying it. Dark as it still was, the way would have been impassable for a stranger, had it not been for the guidance given by the noisy passing to and fro of the awakened ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... its day is that of unconscious deception on the part of those who claimed to have seen the resurrected Christ, such persons having been victims of subjective but unreal visions conjured up by their own excited and imaginative condition. The independence and marked individuality of the several recorded appearings of the Lord disprove the vision theory. Such subjective visual illusions as are predicated by this hypothesis, presuppose a state of expectancy ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... beginning the stories had, as a rule, some basis in fact, though it was often very slight. As time went on the element of fact grew smaller and the element of fiction larger; stories which were originally very short were expanded into long tales and became highly imaginative. In the Thirteenth Century the Legenda Aurea, or Golden Legend, which became one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages, appeared. In time, as the taste for this kind of writing grew, the word legend came to include ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... a mere student, and not recovered from that fine intoxication in which classical literature drenches a young imaginative soul, and that at last we find him 'resting in the hopes of an eternal day.' 'Lochleven' is the spent echo of the 'Seasons,' although, as we said before, its descriptions possess considerable merit. His 'Last Day' is more ambitious than successful. If we grant the 'Cuckoo' ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... with drinks and cakes and pastry, but, so far as I saw, no substantial victual. About in the centre of the garden there was an actual, homely-looking, small dwelling-house, where perhaps the overlookers of the place live. Now this might be wrought, in an imaginative description, into a pleasant sort of a fool's paradise, where all sorts of unreal delights should cluster round some suitable personage; and it would relieve, in a very odd and effective way, the stern realities of life on the outside of the garden-walls. I saw a little girl, simply dressed, who ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... believed he had not committed a crime by achieving justice where otherwise there would have been no justice. Yet outwardly he cursed himself for a lawbreaker. And he loved life. He loved the stars silently glowing down at him tonight. He loved even the gray, lifeless rock, which recalled to his imaginative genius the terrific and interesting life that had once existed—he loved the ghostly majesty of the grave-like pinnacle that rose above him, and beyond that he ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... mechanical, the material; but this was a mistake. It was a house of dreams. The right knock at one of those ugly doors would permit one to step into the presence of the most cheery, the most learned, the most imaginative of individuals—the man of germs, poet, dreamer, and experimentalist, absorbed in the pursuit of the unattainable, concerned with the ultimate structure of organic life, baffled, yet toiling on for love of his work, while the sick of the world believe in ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... His imaginative emotions were largely absorbed by religion. The early Biblical training had had its effect, and he was, to use his own words, 'passionately religious' in those nursery years; but during them and many succeeding ones, his mother ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... subject of these Stanzas is rather an elementary feeling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, than an exertion of it. The one which follows [A] is strictly a Reverie; and neither that, nor the next after it in succession, 'Power of Music', would have been placed here except for the reason ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... became a schoolmistress in the Glendale public school at twenty-two she regarded her employment as a transient occupation, to be terminated presently by marriage. She possessed an imaginative temperament, and one of her favorite and most satisfying habits was to evoke from the realm of the future a proper hero, shining with zeal and virtue like Sir Galahad, in whose arms she would picture herself living ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... which they had constructed together in mutual supposition, but Ewbert felt a sacredness in them, while he longed so strangely to break them one by one and cast them in the old man's face. Like all imaginative people, he was at times the prey of morbid self-suggestions, whose nature can scarcely be stated without excess. The more monstrous the thing appeared to his mind and conscience, the more fascinating it became. Once the mere horror of such a conception as catching a comely parishioner about the waist ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... their Santons: at the little white building which covers the reputed tomb of Aaron, sheep are slaughtered and boiled in a huge black cauldron. The "pile of large rounded boulders" bearing "cut Sinaitic inscriptions" (p. 423) are clearly Wusm: these tribal-marks, which the highly imaginative M. de Saulcy calls "planetary signs," are found throughout Midian. The name of the Wady is, I have said, not El-Ithem, but El-Yitm, a very different word. Lastly, the "Mountain Eretwa," or "Ertwa" (p. 404), is probably a corruption of El-Taur (El-Hism), the "inaccessible ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... a wide field of verse, not without finding much to admire, but never quite happening upon that final touch of successful achievement where art and inspiration join. I am especially sorry to leave unrepresented a writer—more imaginative, possibly, than any American poet except Poe—whose utter contempt for technique in the ordinary sense places him wholly outside my ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... 8,000 of Dr. O'Donovan's pages. Here are, at any rate, materials enough with a vengeance. These materials fall, of course, into several divisions. The most literary of these divisions, the Tales, consisting of Historic Tales and Imaginative Tales, distributes the contents of its Historic Tales as follows:- Battles, voyages, sieges, tragedies, cow- spoils, courtships, adventures, land-expeditions, sea-expeditions, banquets, elopements, loves, lake-irruptions, colonisations, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... as Act II three hours later. PROFESSOR HOLDEN is seated at the table, books before him. He is a man in the fifties. At the moment his care-worn face is lighted by that lift of the spirit which sometimes rewards the scholar who has imaginative feeling. HARRY, a student clerk, comes hurrying in. ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... absolute fact that he was left there alone and powerless, doomed to watch with a horrible fascination the steady relentless approach of the Grim Enemy in his most terrible form, and to suffer the while in imaginative anticipation all the agonies of a thousand fiery deaths. Oh, God! it was too much. Mercy! mercy!" And with a demoniac yell he stood clutching and tugging at his hair with both hands, his teeth clenched, his eyes fixed and almost bursting from their sockets, foam bubbling from his ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... causes and recurrence we can distinctly trace. Other nations and races have had creeds, and have lost them; they have thought, as some of us think, that the loss would ruin them: and yet they have not been ruined. Creeds, it is contended, were imaginative, provisional, and mistaken expressions of the underlying and indestructible sense of the nobility of human life. They were artistic, not scientific. A statue of Apollo, for instance, or a picture of the Madonna, were really representations of what men aimed at producing on ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... away all softness, leaving only sternness and desolation for the terrible drama which was about to be played in the Wilderness. The night was dark, and to Harry's imaginative mind the forest turned to some vast stretch ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Church on earth. They will impress upon our minds with an intensity peculiarly their own, the reality of the invisible world and the ensnaring tendencies of every thing that we possess. Weak and ignorant as is the imaginative and sensitive portion of our nature, it needs every possible help that it can find to counteract the paralysing effects of the worldliness of the world, of the lukewarmness of Christians, and of the enthralling nature of the universe of sight and sense. Our courage is ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... most sustained piece of imagination in the whole of English poetry; and it has almost every definable merit of imaginative narrative. It is the only poem I know which is all point and yet all poetry; because, I suppose, the point is really a point of mystery. It is full of simple, daily emotion, transported, by an awful power of sight, to which the limits ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... by us, but which were not within the reach of Wirt. Accordingly, in his lack of much of the detailed testimony that then lay buried in inaccessible documents, Wirt had to trust largely to the somewhat imaginative traditions concerning Patrick Henry which he found floating in the air of Virginia; and especially to the supposed recollections of old people,—recollections which, in this case, were nearly always vague, not always disinterested, often inaccurate, and generally made ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... imaginative person; that is why engineering captured my fancy. It was through his trying to make an architect (a person who quarrels with women about their kitchen sinks!) of a boy who wanted to be an engineer that my grandfather and ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... find meaning in the things, which I had read or heard about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture. But it was some time longer before I began to know this by personal experience. The only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from childhood taken great pleasure, was music; the best effect of which (and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists in exciting enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated kind which are already in the character, ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... with the most poetical imagery, and marked in every part with the happiest graces of expression, while it is calm, chaste, and flowing, and transparent as water. There is a habit among nearly all the writers of imaginative literature, of adulterating the conversations of the poor with barbarisms and grammatical blunders which have no more fidelity than elegance. Hawthorne's integrity as well as his exquisite—taste prevented him from falling into this error. There is not in the world a large rural population ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... lives on spiritual commodities—the part of us including ambition, ideal, sympathy, and all that I have called ideas? Would it not be worth while to find such ideas as all people can live upon without diminishing each other's share, instead of the ideas, the imaginative satisfactions which each must refuse to his neighbour, and about which, therefore, all of us are bound to fight like hungry animals? Thus to reform our notions of what is valuable and distinguished ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... a tendency to imaginative fancies. He would at times stop his work and let fall his frame to listen to the child as she read or repeated the legends, and, carried away for the moment by her enthusiasm, it seemed as if his hair were ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... near the Southern Cross, occurs a terrible circular abyss, the Coal Sack. So sharply defined is it, so suggestive of a void and bottomless cavern, that the contemplation of it afflicts the imaginative mind with vertigo. To the naked eye it is as black and as dismal as death, but the smallest telescope reveals it beautiful ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... doctor himself—short, rotund, rubicund, displaying behind a pair of clear, thick, gold-rimmed glasses, round, dancing, incisive eyes. Imaginative grip, buoyant, self-delusive self-respect were written all over him. The two men eyed each other—one with that broad-gage examination which sees even universities as futile in the endless shift of things; the other with that faith in the balance ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... imaginative, remained awake. Presently he saw a figure moving near the churchyard. It was white—at least the upper half ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... supposed imaginative, or, at least, premature in discovering all these characteristics in a boy of fourteen; and possibly in thus writing of him I may unwittingly be drawing a little from after-experience; however, being the truth, let ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... first indeed vocal in the midst of the riot, and even stimulated by it, as birds are by a heavy shower of rain, but soon stunned and silenced by horrors incompatible with the labour of the Muses. The wars of the Fronde made a sharp cut between the heroic age of imaginative literature and the classical age which presently succeeded it, and offer in this respect a tolerable parallel to the civil wars raging in England about the same time. It is specious, but convenient, to discover a date at which a change of this kind may be said ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... stirring rhymes had marked effect, and this had one curious sequence. Tales of the lance and tilting have ever captivated boys, and Grant was no exception. Alf did not read so much, was of a nature less imaginative, and his younger brother, Valentine, read not at all, but among them was enacted a great scene of chivalry which ended almost in a tragedy. Grant, his mind absorbed in jousting and its laurels, explained the thing to Alf and induced him to read the tales ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... foster the poetic temperament. "He has got," wrote Professor Wilson, "a poet's education: he has lived the greater part of his days amidst pastoral scenes, and tended sheep among the green and beautiful solitudes of nature." Sufficiently imaginative, he does not, like his minstrel predecessor the Ettrick Shepherd, soar into the regions of the supernatural, or roam among the scenes of the viewless world. He sings of the mountain wilds and picturesque valleys ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... was put upon the spot," Miriam went on, with a certain imaginative seriousness; for she loved romance and mystery so well, and was of a temperament so poetical, that the wildest fairy-tales had a sort of reality for her. "No one can find the treasure while the spell remains. ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... romantic movement in life, but the very basis of his nature was the same as that of the nature of the artist—an intense and flamelike imagination. He realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation. He understood the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the rich. Some one wrote to me in trouble, ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... far from me to cast doubt on the truth of that which follows. The record is found in "Memoirs of the Queensland Museum," vol. ii., page 43: "Although the scientific worker is hopelessly handicapped by the vividly imaginative journalist when snake stories are told, yet occasionally there are noticed incidents startling enough in their way. During the cooler months a young and lithe DIEMENIA PSAMMOPHIS, Schleg, popularly known as a 'whip snake,' usually retired under a piece of bark placed in its case, and it was ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... remember how "Baily Junior," who was once bootboy at Mrs. Todger's boarding-house, imagined that Mrs. Gamp was in love with him, and that her life was blighted by the suspicion that such a passion was hopeless. I, in common with other imaginative boys, was frequently beatified by the magic of a not unlike illusion. My practical hopes for the future, so far as I troubled to form any, were to enter the diplomatic service as soon as I left Oxford, and it seemed to me that this or that distinguished and beautiful lady, old enough to be ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... imaginative, and more skilled in wood-lore, saw a great blue heron, sitting huddled together on a stump, its head drawn in, its yellow eyes glaring ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... dehumanised modern fantasies depend on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer must be sane. The dragon without St. George would not even be grotesque. So this inhuman landscape was only imaginative by the presence of a man really human. To Syme's exaggerative mind the bright, bleak houses and terraces by the Thames looked as empty as the mountains of the moon. But even the moon is only poetical because there is a ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... somewhat scandalised Lady Gruntham, driven to the point of madness by the never-ending stream of wisdom, advice, and plans which from morning till night flowed unceasingly from the store of Mary's book-gleaned knowledge, Jill had cleared up the situation all round by suddenly announcing the imaginative fact that Hahmed was coming to Cairo to fetch her home. Whereupon Mary Bingham had arranged everything to her own entire satisfaction in the twinkling of an eye, told Jack Wetherbourne that she and her mother were leaving for England if he'd like to come too, had worked ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... of nature is a marvellous and fascinating one, full of a serious sadness and large peace, which gives us back our birthright as children of the planet and naturalizes us upon the earth. This is the poetic value of the scientific Weltanschauung. From these two benefits, the practical and the imaginative, all the value ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... amusing story, dealing with the adventures of eighteen jovial, big hearted Montana cowboys. Foremost amongst them, we find Ananias Green, known as Andy, whose imaginative powers cause many ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... verse, and they minister to that sense of melody that dwells in every human brain. What the world owes to its great poets can never be fully measured. But some faint idea of it may be gained from the wondrous stimulus given through them to the imaginative power, and from the fact that those sentiments of human sympathy, justice, virtue, and freedom, which inspire the best poetry of all nations, become sooner or later incarnated in their institutions. This is the real significance of the oft-quoted ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... of them to memory, and by fully understanding their structure, it will soon be evident that an intellectual study of music, pursued with a true love of it, can, more than any other study, strengthen the imaginative faculty. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... deity himself, uttered vocal sounds and language, alone, without an organized body and members fitted for speech. But where history seems in a manner to force our assent by the concurrence of numerous and credible witnesses, we are to conclude that an impression distinct from sensation affects the imaginative part of our nature, and then carries away the judgment, so as to believe it to be a sensation: just as in sleep we fancy we see and hear, without really doing either. Persons, however, whose strong feelings of reverence to the deity, and tenderness for religion, will not allow them to deny or ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... more or less extensive and elaborate manipulation and combination of such figures, motives, phrases or Parts of the Exposition as prove inviting and convenient for the purpose, or challenge the imaginative faculty of the composer. In this division, opportunity is provided for the exhibition of technical skill, imagination and emotional passion; for the creation of ingenious contrasts and climaxes, and, in a word, for the development of unexpected resources ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... book as deserves any sort of admiration, and attribute the blameable parts to the prejudices of the party with whom the writer 'fell in,' and not to a want of honesty or brotherhood in his own intentions. I admire Mr. Dickens as an imaginative writer, and I love the Americans—I cannot possibly admire or love this book. Does ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Susie's sun-bleached pigtail, which, as Meeteetse took frequent occasion to remind her, looked like a hair-cinch. Her eyes, set rather too far apart for beauty, were round, with pupils which dilated until they all but covered the blue iris; the eyes of an emotional nature, an imaginative mind. Her other features, though delicate, were not exceptional, but the tout ensemble was such that her looks would have been considered above the average even in a country where pretty girls were plentiful. In her present surroundings, and by contrast with the womenfolk ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... often referred to as "contemporary". But Bacon was not born till fifty years after Henry's death, and did not write the history till he was over fifty himself. His work contains much that is merely rhetorical amplification of above named contemporary authorities, with occasional imaginative variations and misreadings: nor does he appear to have had ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... them more readily to practise the art of lying and deception upon their gullible listeners. Then again, with reference to the Gipsies having a religion of their own. There is not a word of truth in this imaginative notion prevalent in the minds or some who have been trying to study their habits. Excepting the language of some of the old-fashioned real Gipsies, and a few other little peculiarities, any one studying the real hard facts of a Gipsy's life with reference ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... and individual interpretation of the old mythical story of Penthesilea and Achilles, between whom love breaks forth in the midst of mortal combat. The clash of passions creates scenes in this drama that transcend the humanly and dramatically permissible. Yet there is a wealth of imaginative beauty and emotional melody in this tragedy beyond anything in Kleist's other works. It was written with his heart's blood; in it he uttered all the yearning and frenzy of his first passion for the unattainable and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... in James Hogg, despite the waywardness of this imaginative genius, is one of the most beautiful traits in his character. Readers of Mr. Lockhart's Life, do not require to be reminded of the active part he took in promoting the welfare of the "Ettrick Shepherd" on many occasions, from the outset of their ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... undercurrent of sympathy with the forlorn waif her father had brought from the city some months before. The very love and awe with which the mountains filled her imaginative soul gave her comprehension of the fear with which they imbued the dull-witted offspring of San ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... dead have not only the power of revisiting this earth at their will, but that, when here, they have the power of action, or rather, of exciting to action? Let me put a definite case. A spiritualist friend of mine, a sensible and by no means imaginative man, once told me that a table, through the medium of which the spirit of a friend had been in the habit of communicating with him, came slowly across the room towards him, of its own accord, one night as he sat alone, and pinioned ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... But how is this to be done? Science must somehow find out. To leave it to nature is treason to the mind. Man may be an ass on the whole, but nature is even more of an ass, especially when it stands for human nature minus its saving grace of imaginative, will-directed intelligence. So let us hope that one day people will marry intelligently, and that the best marriages will be the richest in offspring. I believe that the spiritual is not born of the sickly; and at any rate ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Rogers could not execute the imaginative exercise I prescribed; so he strapped my hold-all with an ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... New York's shadow, the ghostly skeleton of our city as it appears today. For instance, when you have thought of old Washington Square, you have probably thought of it pretty much as it is now, only of course with an old-time atmosphere. The whole Village, with all your best imaginative efforts, persists—does it not?—in being a part of New ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... drummed his fingers on the desk, and stared meditatively at the pigeon-holes before him. His was an interesting face, with large, melancholy, and almost fanatical eyes, and a poet's mouth and forehead; but it was probably exactly his imaginative faculties that enabled him to picture public affairs from the points of view of the very various persons concerned in them; and thereby to cope with the complications arising out of ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... is so foreign to Western habits of thought that it is well that we should try to understand it at its best. Prussia proper has not been rich, like the rest of Germany, in poets and imaginative writers; but she is fortunate to-day in possessing in the greatest living Greek scholar, Professor von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, a man who by birth and breeding is able to put the highest interpretation upon the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... man who would always keep the vision of the end through any enterprise, who would always put the curb of expediency on emotional impulses, who would invariably judge a theory not by its underlying principle, but by its practical application. A charming face, too, complex and imaginative, a face which made the rugged and open countenance of the Governor appear primitive and undeveloped. Corinna admired Benham; she respected him; she liked—was it even possible, she asked herself, that she loved him? Yet here ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... invited to the house of the Moro pandita[124] "to see the spirit Diwata." During several nights the son of the pandita impersonated the spirit and appeared in the darkened room. Over his chest and forehead he had stretched thin gauze and beneath this had placed many fire-flies, which to the imaginative people made him appear superhuman. His entrance into the room was attended by a vigorous shaking of the house, caused by a younger brother stationed below. A weird dance followed and then the spirit advised the people ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... with its attendant evils into statues which sink out of sight; in "Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue," Atlas figures represented as an old man, his shoulders covered with snow, and Comus, "the god of cheer or the belly," is one of the characters, a circumstance which an imaginative boy of ten, named John Milton, was not to forget. "Pan's Anniversary," late in the reign of James, proclaimed that Jonson had not yet forgotten how to write exquisite lyrics, and "The Gipsies Metamorphosed" displayed the old drollery and broad humorous ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... the sun, was ascribed to the grief of Apollo. Various persons were found to assert various prodigies. Some said that it had rained blood, others that the moon and stars had been obscured; while others, still more imaginative, asserted that beasts had uttered words, and that the dead had risen ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... tell her the news, and give advice upon other matters. The two had long talks at night. Sally suddenly knew how valuable a friend she had in Miss Summers. She knew the value of an unselfish readiness to serve; and she herself was generous enough and, in a sense, imaginative enough not to exploit Miss Summers. There was a good understanding between them. And Sally, as she looked round at the mahogany furniture in this old house, and saw the dull carpets and engravings which ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... made on the imaginative faculties of the designers of that day by the metal-workers, the gold and silversmiths, the jewellers, and all connected with such decorative manufactures as the luxury of wealth and taste calls into exertion. The name of Cellini stands ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... They were of the impressionistic school, which requires of the audience, as well as of the artist, high imaginative powers. And here the audience of one moment was the actor of the next, whose duty it was not to mind too closely the letter that killeth, but to mimic irreverently, to exaggerate, to make of themselves caricatures of the mannerisms of others, ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... in the spring of 1855, and on giving a seance at Cox's Hotel, in Jermyn Street, he contrived to deceive Sir David Brewster (then seventy-four years old), but was less successful with another septuagenarian, Lord Brougham. Later, he captured the imaginative Sir Edward Bulwer (subsequently Lord Lytton), who as author of "Zanoni" was perhaps fated to believe in him, and he also impressed Mrs. Browning, but not Browning himself The latter, indeed, depicted Home as "Sludge, the Medium." Going to Italy for a time, the already notorious ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... demonstrate that she has capacity for high literary effort. In the process of that demonstration, I am fully persuaded that the Anglo-African—with his brilliant wit and humor, his highly imaginative disposition and his innate fondness for literary pursuits—will contribute largely to give the South ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... detail the methods of plant dispersion, the more we shall come to agree with a statement made by Darwin concerning the devices for securing cross-fertilization of flowers, that they "transcend, in an incomparable degree, the contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of the most imaginative man could suggest with unlimited time ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... territory. Things were touch and go. The Montenegrin army was preparing to fall on Cattaro. War seemed inevitable, for England's attitude caused the Montenegrins to believe that they had only to begin and British aid was certain. Imaginative people actually saw the Mediterranean fleet coming up the Adriatic. They were spoiling for a fight. I was sure our bark was far worse than our bite was likely to be, but was very anxious, for we had no British representative in ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... answer. I think one of the most beautiful plays I have ever seen was a play called "Romance"; yet to me the play seemed rather a tragic story.... I have looked up the word in an English dictionary and it gives the definition, "An imaginative story, fiction." How prosaic! To me Romance has always been something poetical and very ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... unquestionably; but one condition of health is to be alive, and I don't see how to manage that. Look here, Dick, I have just had a quarrel with my father; he is an excellent man and an impressive preacher, but he fails in the imaginative qualities. Nature has been a niggard to him in inventiveness. He is the minister of a little parish called Aghadoe, in the North, where they give him two hundred and ten pounds per annum. There are eight in family, and he actually does not see his way to allow ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... England was the special bailiwick for such sowing, though Virginia partakes of this seed and harvest. The rich old English names, having in them so much history and memory,—how good to see them on our soil! Those early colonists were not original, nor particularly imaginative, but loyal lovers they were; and to give to their home here the name attaching to their home there was pledge of fidelity to dear old England. In Virginia, one will find what he can not find in New ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... was only reckoned inferior to Crawley, and his words of approval were very gratifying to Buller, who felt himself a step nearer one particular goal. He did not indulge in daydreams, however, not being of an imaginative disposition. The actual difficulty which he had to master at the time took up all his thoughts and energies, and the distant object to be attained, though never absolutely lost sight of, was never dwelt upon ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... goal, deep-seated problems must be subjected to a stepped-up attack. There is no single easy solution. Rather, there must be a many-sided assault on the stubborn problems of surpluses, prices, costs, and markets; and a steady, persistent, imaginative advance in the relationship between ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... puff me up," murmured Uncle Issy, charmed with this imaginative and wholly flattering sketch. "No—really now! Though, indeed, strange words have gone abroad before now, touching my wisdom; but I ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... have made a capital ghost story," said Lillyston, "if you had been a little more imaginative and nervous. And still more if the illusion had only been partially optical, and partly ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... contains an equally good harbour in Port Victoria Mahe. The Seychelles are remarkably healthy islands—thirty in number—and Gordon recommended them as a good place for "a man with a little money to settle in." He also advanced the speculative and somewhat imaginative theory that in them was to be found the true site of the ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... herself down in wild rebellion and abandonment so that epilepsy had been suspected. But it was not epilepsy. It was pity. She, in her inexpressive, childish way, shared with the love-martyr of Galilee the heartrending capacity for imaginative sympathy. In common with Him and others of her kind, she was not only acquainted with grief, but reviled and rejected. In her schooldays boys brought maimed frogs and threw them in her lap, to watch, from a safe distance, her almost crazy ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... said to be in the rudiments of Real Art. Let us suppose one born with every natural endowment, with imagination, and a power of imitation. The mind, after all, is fed with realities; there is in it also process of digestion, which converts the real into the imaginative. Now, in early years, how rare it is that the naturally endowed artist is not ill fed—unhealthy diet of the mind entices him every where. If in the country, he is sparingly fed—sees little or nothing of Art, little perhaps beyond the Sign of an Inn—and is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... obliterated from his remembrance. The present testified not only to the work of Sheffield hands, but to the warmth and generosity of Sheffield hearts. It was his earnest desire to do right by his readers, and to leave imaginative and popular literature associated with the private homes and public rights of the people of England. The case of cutlery with which he had been so kindly presented, should be retained as an heirloom in his family; and he assured them ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... it was of great, persistent, and indeed dogged labor, was, from the predominance of the nervous system in his organization, excitable, and therefore needed and relished excitement—the more intense the better. He found this in his keen political tastes, in imaginative literature, and in fiction. In the highest kind of poetry he enjoyed the sweet pain of tears; and he all his life had a steady liking, even a hunger, for a good novel. This refreshed, lightened, and diverted his mind from the strain of his incessant exegesis. ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... solitary exception of Mrs. Oliphant we have no living novelist more distinguished for variety of theme and range of imaginative outlook than Mr. ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... it will give any comfort are those who have sent food and clothing to our prisoners. But I am glad that this book came my way, because I would choose to read facts of the War baldly written by a soldier rather than any war fiction composed by imaginative civilians. "Of course I'm not an author," he writes, and as far as grammar and spelling go it is not for me to contradict him, but he has seen and suffered, and in these days no one who has handled a bayonet need apologise for taking a turn with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... admitted, must be interesting. It would be truer to say that the possessor of the supreme literary gift will make his matter interest us, however light or serious, however literal or imaginative, it may be. But, when once of interest, the matter ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... hundred cases, but here, this sort of thing is all right for a highly speculative imaginative newspaper man. Both you and McCall infected me with your—let us go outside and enjoy ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... other men of an ardent and imaginative temperament, I was dissatisfied with the dull routine of ordinary things. I used to feed my fancy with creatures of the possible, and, without the aid of artificial stimulants of the brain, often ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... was going to say startled me, but only imaginative people are startled—the letter, then, that started me from Bronx Park to the South I print without the permission of my superior, Professor Farrago. I have not obtained his permission, for the somewhat exciting reason that nobody knows where he is. Publicity being now recognized as the annihilator ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... of this is true, let it be recorded of me that my exhortations and entreaties have been successful, in preserving the works of the most imaginative and creative genius that our Italy, or indeed our world, hath in any ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... him at once, and he inwardly cursed himself for an imaginative fool before continuing. "Well, Ocky, to tell you the truth, I did see him—right here at the head of the trail. He had his back to the light so I couldn't make out any mask. Er—what made you think ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... other hand, all that goes with the aesthetic side of education, with imaginative literature and the cult of beauty. Here women are, or at least ought to be, the superiors of men. Women were in primitive times the first story-tellers. They are still so at the cradle side. The original college woman was the witch, with ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... first annalists, or writers of Irish history, may have compiled their narratives, would, therefore, be—1. The Books of Genealogies and Pedigrees. 2. The Historic Tales. 3. The Books of Laws. 4. The Imaginative Tales and Poems. 5. National Monuments, such as cromlechs and pillar stones, &c., which supplied the place of the brazen tablets of Roman history, the libri lintei,[71] or the ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... what are known as hereditary diseases. Thus talent, like the gout, sometimes skips over two generations. We have an illustrious example of this phenomenon in George Sand, in whom are resuscitated the force, the power, and the imaginative faculty of the Marechal de Saxe, whose ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... In that land of strange and surprising forms of every sort, her husband has been very happy in the realization of an America surpassing even his wildest dreams, and he has richly stored his note-book with philological curiosities. He hears around him the vigorous and imaginative locutions of the Pike language, in which, like the late Canon Kingsley, he finds a Scandinavian hugeness; and pending the publication of his Hand-Book of Americanisms, he is in confident search of the miner who uses his pronouns ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... practical men suggested the theory that Mr. Hawkins was simply drilling himself in the elaborate duties of hospitality against a probable event in his history. A few ventured the belief that the house was haunted. The imaginative editor of the Five Forks "Record" evolved from the depths of his professional consciousness a story that Hawkins's sweetheart had died, and that he regularly entertained her spirit in this beautifully furnished mausoleum. The occasional spectacle of Hawkins's ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... said, ostentatiously slanting her parasol in a marvelous simulation of hiding a purely imaginative blush on a cheek that was perfectly infantine in its unchanged pink; "company talk is much pootier than what we've been saying. And—meaning me—for I reckon yo' wouldn't say that of any other girl but the one yo' 're walking with—what's the matter ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte |
