"Unpractical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... misfortune that so much of that thoughtful patriotism which, both on account of its culture and its independence, must always be valuable to the country, should have been wasted, for some time past, upon what are apparently narrow and unpractical, if not radically unsound, propositions of reform in the civil service. There is unquestionably need of reform in that direction: it would be too much to presume that in the generally imperfect state of man his methods of civil government would attain perfection; but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... many of the Democrats will be amused and absorbed by it from time to time. They call this sort of nonsense "practical;" it SEEMS like doing something, while the steady propaganda of a principle which must prevail in the end is, according to them, doing nothing, and is unpractical. For the rest, it is not likely to become dangerous, further than as it clogs the wheels of the real movement somewhat, because it is sometimes a mere piece of reaction, as when, for instance, it takes ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... but, recalling it later, he experienced a stab of regret that his mother was not here to comfort Lorelei in the first great crisis of her womanhood. It had been Lorelei's wish that her own mother be kept in ignorance of the truth, and now, therefore, the girl had no one to lean upon except an unpractical stage-woman—and a drunken husband. In Bob's mind the pity of it grew ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... happy disposition; but, none the less, there had always been a certain jealousy of their father's evident preference for him, a jealousy mingled with surprise, or even resentment, Jimmy being essentially unpractical, and almost unconventional. Moreover, they had never liked the idea of his going to Sandhurst. None of the family had been in the Service before; and it was a matter of common knowledge that no man could make financial headway in the Army. So, when, through Mr. Marlow's ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... After my unpractical teacher had gone out on some official business, I ran over to Mrs. Wilhelm's quarters and said, "Will you let ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... committed these blunders. They spoke according to the best mercantile opinion of England. The City of London and the House of Commons both approved of what they said; those who dissented were said to be abstract thinkers and unpractical men. The Bank directors adopted the ordinary opinions, and pursued the usual practice of their time. It was this 'routine' that caused their moderation. They believed that so long as they issued 'notes' only at 5 per cent, and only on the discount of good bills, those ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... melancholy and little affectations had departed, and she was already the notable prosperous wife of a beneficed clergyman, of whose abilities she was very proud, though she patronised with good-humoured contempt his dreamy, unpractical, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that if Babar had been immortal he might possibly have beaten back Sher Shah. But that admission serves to prove my argument. Babar was a very able general. So likewise was Sher Khan. Humayun was flighty, versatile, and unpractical; as a general of but small account. It is possible that the Sher Khan who triumphed over Humayun might have been beaten by Babar. But that only proves that the system introduced by Babar was the system to which he had been accustomed all his life—the system which had alternately lost and won for ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... to the charge now made against him. But no man would so resolve who did not believe in his innocence,—as Madame Goesler believed herself. She herself knew that her own belief was romantic and unpractical. Nevertheless, the conviction of the guilt of that other man, towards which she still thought that much could be done if that coat were found and the making of a secret key were proved, was so strong upon her that she would not allow herself to drop it. It would not be sufficient for her that ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... can't help laughing to think that there was a time when I thought the teaching of Christ unpractical! Do you mind ringing the bell for me; the others will be in directly, and will be glad of tea after that ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... variety of her accomplishment in the kind was extraordinary: and in more than one of its species she went very near perfection. One is never quite certain whether the perpetual meddling of her rather celebrated father Richard—one of the capital examples of the unpractical pragmatists and clever-silly crotcheteers who produced and were produced by the Revolutionary period—did her more harm than good. It certainly loaded her work with superfluous and (to us) disgusting didacticism: but ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... insurance, because no one would dream of insuring Marion's stock boxes; there were no bills payable, because no travelling man would advise a line of credit to an inexperienced and, what was worse, an unpractical milliner. Marion did her own trimming, so there were no salaries except to Katie Dancing. It puzzled McCloud to find the leak. How could he know that Marion was keeping nearly all the block supplied with funds? So McCloud continued to raise the price of his table-board, ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... triumphantly brings forward to convict him of intentional deceit; and his features, if the portrait in Father Morris's book is an accurate representation of him, convey an impression of feeble, unpractical piety that one is loth to associate with a malicious impostor. In addition to this, one of the witnesses against him, Tyrell, was a manifest knave and coward; another, Mainy, as conspicuous a fool; while the rest were servant-maids—all of them interested ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... to think there must be, because of the surprise which the career of the German Emperor has generally evoked. When he came to the throne it became at once apparent that he was poetical; people assumed in consequence that he was unpractical; that he would plunge Europe into war, that he would try to annex France, that he would say he was the Emperor of Russia, that he would stand on his head in the Reichstag, that he would become a pirate on the Spanish Main. Years upon ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... suddenly became of overwhelming value; what I had been made with so much care in an English public school was here thought nothing but a hindrance and an absurdity. This had seemed to me first a miracle, then a grievous injustice, then most unpractical, and at last, like one that sees the answer to a riddle, I saw (when I had long lost my manners and ceased to care for refinements) that the French were attempting, a generation before any others in the world, to establish an army that should be a mere army, ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... him to help these queer, unsatisfactory people. Why, even in this last week, while he had been in Paris, he had come into close relation with one of Mrs. Archdale's "odd-come-shorts." This time the man was an inventor, and of all unpractical and useless things he had patented an appliance for saving ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... own weakness, for he had been complaining for months back without apparently growing worse, and she was convinced that the coming rest would speedily restore him to health. It made an excuse, however, and Bridgie sympathised and offered a dozen kindly, unpractical ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... is unequal to himself, so is man to his neighbour, and period to period. The entire method of action, the theories of human life which in one era prevail universally, to the next are unpractical and insane, as those of this next would have seemed mere baseness to the first, if the first could have anticipated them. One epoch, we may suppose, holds some 'greatest nobleness principle,' the other some 'greatest happiness principle;' and then their very systems ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... for the coming One outlined in these old pages. To many a modern all this must seem like the wildest dream of an utterly unpractical enthusiast. Yet, mark it keenly, this is the conception of this old Hebrew book that has been, and is, the world's standard of morals and of wisdom. The book revered above all others by the most thoughtful men, of all shades of belief. It is striking how the parts ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... the eyes of the men against their will. What an unpractical hole it was, where people planted cherry trees, where any one could take the cherries. The three Petters had considered it before as a nest of iniquity, full of cruelty and tyranny. Now they began to laugh at it, and even to ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... You see the stupid, brainy European, devoid of superstition as he thinks, and yet eaten up with natural superstition. You see also the emotional turbulent soul developing abnormality and mania on absurd stakes for money, the mad, unpractical Russian staking on zero or on the slenderest chance for the greatest of gains. The Russians and the Jews and the Americans ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... have neglected to attend its celebrations. He had besides some levelling catchwords, justly dreaded in the family circle; and when he could not go so far as to declare a step un-English, he might still (and with hardly less effect) denounce it as unpractical. It was under the ban of this lesser excommunication that Gideon had fallen. His views on the study of law had been pronounced unpractical; and it had been intimated to him, in a vociferous interview punctuated with the oaken staff, that ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... establishes itself in a fashion. It does one thing, indeed, which in a way refounds or even founds the whole conception—it establishes the heroine. There are certainly feminine persons, sometimes not disagreeable, who play conspicuous and by no means mute or unpractical parts in both Greek and Latin versions of the Ass-Legend; but one can hardly call them heroines. There need be no chicane about the application of that title to Chloe or to Chariclea, to Leucippe or to her very remarkable rival, to Anthia or to Hysmine. Without the heroine you can hardly have romance: ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the dilemma, or multilemma, more embarrassing, that whatever teaching is to be had from the founders and masters of art is quite unpractical. The first source from which we should naturally seek for guidance would, of course, be the sayings of great workmen; but a sorrowful perception presently dawns on us that the great workmen have nothing to say. They ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... letter seems to me rather interesting from a psychological point of view. It is extremely business-like, but perfectly unpractical. Frank states what he wants, but he wants an absurd impossibility. I like Jack Kirkby very much, but I cannot picture him as likely to be successful in helping to restore a strayed girl to her people. I suppose Frank's only excuse is that he did not know whom ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... what would be called the mysticism of St. Paul; and doctrines resembling this have sometimes been associated in religion with fantastic speculation and unpractical dreaming. In St. Paul, however, mysticism had no such results. If there was any part of his life on which the influence of Christ was more conspicuous than another, it was the practical part. To him any pretended connection or intercourse with ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... Robin's unpractical eyes thanked her mutely. He was as plain-looking a man as he had been a boy, more hatchet-faced than ever. He was long and lean and angular, and his positions were ungraceful. But his eyes were the eyes of Don Quixote. The eyes had appealed to Nelly ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... he showed her that he recognised Tante's case as so explicable. "I'm so glad that you see it all," she said. "For you do. She is oh! so unpractical, poor darling; she would forget everything, you know, unless I or Mrs. Talcott were there to keep reminding her—except her music, of course; but that is like breathing to her. And I am so sorry, so dreadfully sorry; because, of course, to know that she hurt ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... rent, interest, and profit, every penny of which is bound up with crime, drink, prostitution, disease, and all the evil fruits of poverty, as inextricably as with enterprise, wealth, commercial probity, and national prosperity. The notion that you can earmark certain coins as tainted is an unpractical individualist superstition. None the less the fact that all our money is tainted gives a very severe shock to earnest young souls when some dramatic instance of the taint first makes them conscious of it. When an ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... order, but for the partisan jealousies which prevailed in high places between the advocates of the different routes. Slavery, that enfant gate of our old-school and now happily obsolete statecraft, insisted on the expensive toy of a southern and unpractical line, until our representatives, harassed by the problem how to gratify her without incurring the contempt of the financial world, gave over to the drift of events the settlement of their country's chief commercial question. We are now in a position to decide coolly; no entangling alliances ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... they had spied Carlotta at my window this morning, they would have looked in for afternoon tea at my Aunt Jessica's and have waylaid Mrs. Ralph Ordeyne outside the Oratory. The question is: Shall Truth anticipate them? I think not. Every family has its irrepressible, impossible, unpractical member, its enfant terrible, who is forever doing the wrong thing with the best intentions. Truth is the enfant terrible of the Virtues. Some times it puts them to the blush and throws them into confusion; at others ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... in local matters: and if he had, he knew nothing of how to manage men, or to read an Act of Parliament; so, angry as Tom was inclined to be with him, he found it useless to quarrel with a man so utterly unpractical, who would, probably, had he been stirred into exertion, have done ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... confess that I was considerably upset. Andrew is just as unpractical and fanciful as a young girl, and always dreaming of new adventures and rambles around the country. If he ever saw that travelling Parnassus he'd fall for it like snap. And I knew Mr. Decameron was after him for a new book anyway. (I'd intercepted one of his letters suggesting ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... gloriously jesting.' The question of the monasteries is one that is solved by the simple statement that the King wanted money and the monasteries supplied it. Is there any justification for the crimes of Henry? For Chesterton 'it is unpractical to discuss whether Froude finds any justification for Henry's crimes in the desire to create a strong national monarchy. For whether or not it was desired, it was ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia. He felt that life was changeful, fluid, active, and that to allow it to be stereotyped into any form was death. He saw that people should not be too serious over material, common interests: that to be unpractical was to be a great thing: that one should not bother too much over affairs. The birds didn't, why should man? He is charming when he says, 'Take no thought for the morrow; is not the soul more than meat? is not the body more than raiment?' A Greek might have used the latter phrase. ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... have received your letter, and am surprised that you should expect me to help support you. You are my brother's widow, it is true, but your destitution is no fault of mine. My brother was always shiftless and unpractical, and to such men good luck never comes. He might at any rate have insured his life, and so made comfortable provision for you. You cannot expect me to repair his negligence. You say you have two boys, one eleven years of age. He is certainly able to ...
— Andy Grant's Pluck • Horatio Alger
... at least some good court cards in the other suits; we've got neither trumps nor court cards." "Et le General Trochu?" some one suggested. "My opinion of General Trochu," said a General, who was sitting reading a newspaper, "is that he is a man of theory, but unpractical. I know him well; he has utterly failed to organise the forces which he has under his command." The general opinion about Trochu seemed to be that he is a kind of M'Clellan. "Will the Garde Nationale fight?" some one asked. A Garde National replied, "Of course there are brave men amongst ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... for active service in the cause. But this group soon broke up, and Mr. Stephen ascribes their failure in part to their name, observing that the word '"Philosophical" in English is synonymous with visionary, unpractical, and perhaps simply foolish.' There would be less satire, and possibly more justice, in saying that the word gives a chill to the energetic hot-gospeller of active Radicalism, who pushes past the philosopher ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... seemed to him the major matters in life. So far it was pleasing fancy, but Alice soon entered to disturb with the disquieting glory of her hair. The family of the Haystouns had ever a knack of fine sentiment. Fantastic, unpractical, they were gluttons for the romantic, the recondite, and the dainty. But now had come a breath of strong wind which rent the meshes of a philandering fancy. A very new and strange feeling was beginning to make itself known. He had come to think of Alice with ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... Superior merit the only title to preferment! No longer can this be airily waved aside as a demand of a mere sect of political philosophers, for now it is recognized as the people's demand. No longer can Civil Service reform be cried down by the so-called practical politicians as the nebulous dream of unpractical visionaries, for it has been grasped by the popular understanding as a practical necessity—not to enervate our political life, but to lift it to a higher moral plane; not to destroy political parties, but to restore ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... half as much. That, of course, is just the simple, oldfashioned, illogical Socialism with which you probably all started life, and which doubtless lies in some forgotten chamber of the minds of all of you. You've given it up because you've decided that it was unpractical. I haven't. I believe that if we were to pull down the pillars which hold up the greatness of this nation, I believe that if we were to lay her in ruins about us, that in the years to come—perhaps I ought to say ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the unfastened straps of his long black military boots. His face, with its mild blue eyes, straggly fair moustache, expressed anxiety and pride, timidity and happiness, apprehension and confidence. He was in that first moment of my sight of him as helpless, as unpractical, and as anxious to please as any lost dog in the world—and he was also as proud as Lucifer. I knew him at once for an Englishman; his Russian uniform only accented the cathedral-town, small public-school atmosphere of his ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... set a limit to its future encroachments? And hence, with a kind of sanguine pedantry, he pursued his design of 'keeping up with the day' and posting himself and his family on every mortal subject. Of this unpractical idealism we shall meet with many instances; there was not a trade, and scarce an accomplishment, but he thought it should form part of the outfit of an engineer; and not content with keeping an encyclopaedic diary himself, he would fain have set all his ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are tempted to condemn the study of the classics as unpractical, and to turn instead to the modern languages and to the physical sciences. Now, it is, of course, a fair question to ask what should and what should not be regarded as forming part of a liberal education, and I shall ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... by a reference to a sermon preached by the average clergyman of the Church of England. This was, usually, he said, either a theological essay founded upon an obsolete system of theology, or a series of platitudes of morality delivered by an unpractical man. The first was an insult to the intelligence of an average man; the second was an insult to the intelligence of ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... Unfortunately for such hopes, France had never been consulted in the matter, nor was there ever any idea of coercing France into neutrality, and even the original proposal had to be abandoned on consideration as unpractical.[118] ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... all out while I've been here," replied Bob confidently. "Yes, I know I've been unpractical—a dreamer, in fact. But I'm going to alter all that. Now you've told me—that—that you love me, I feel I must become a man of action. You've wakened something in me that I didn't know existed. I haven't been half alive. I've imagined that only ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... degrees more supportable than was her position at Ridgeley, banned by its owner and patronized by his wife. I neither excuse nor blame her for thus deciding and transacting. Should I censure, a majority of my readers—nearly all of the masculine portion—would pick holes in my unpractical philosophy, scout my reasoning as illogical, brand my conclusions as pernicious—winding up their protest with the sigh of the mazed disciples, when stunned by the great Teacher's deliverance upon the subject ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... authors had asked me to lay plans for the debate. From both I had replies favourable to local option, and on my writing again to Chamberlain he answered: "The sentence about the Labour leaders escaped me because I am, I confess, impatient of their extremely unpractical policy, and also because I believe their real influence is immensely exaggerated. A political leader having genuine sympathy with the working classes and a practical programme could, in my opinion, afford to ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... he suffered from, for the anguish of doubt and fear; for compelling him—the practical and innocent Almayer—to such painful efforts of mind in order to find out some issue for absurd situations created by the unreasonable sentimentality of Lingard's unpractical impulses. ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... for them. In some cases, on the other hand, such relationships, especially when formed after school-life, are fairly permanent. An energetic emotional woman, not usually beautiful, will perhaps be devoted to another who may have found some rather specialized lifework, but who may be very unpractical, and who has probably a very feeble sexual instinct; she is grateful for her friends's devotion, but may not actively reciprocate it. The actual specific sexual phenomena generated in such cases ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... then cut away the background, leaving the simple elevated flat value, the shape of the proposed design. The modelling was then added by degrees, until the figure looked like half of a rounded object. While it is often unpractical to refer one's readers to examples of work in far and various countries, and advise them instantly to examine them, it is frequently possible to call attention to well-produced plates in certain modern art books which ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... that was inevitable, because I was convinced that there was absolutely nobody in the district except me to help the starving. The people surrounding me were uneducated, unintellectual, callous, for the most part dishonest, or if they were honest, they were unreasonable and unpractical like my wife, for instance. It was impossible to rely on such people, it was impossible to leave the peasants to their fate, so that the only thing left to do was to submit to necessity and see to setting the ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... many shades of Liberalism, and even Republicanism, but, as will be seen in another place, the real welfare of the people, and not the success of a mere political party, is the underlying motive of all, however wild and unpractical may be some of the dreams for the carrying out of these ideas of universal progress. It is impossible for a Spaniard to conceive of maligning or belittling his own country for merely party purposes; and, therefore, when he finds an English newspaper ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... but have noticed how little, during the years of my past professorship, I have introduced any questions as to the nature of beauty. I avoided them, partly because they are treated of at length in my books; and partly because they are, in the last degree, unpractical. We are born to like or dislike certain aspects of things; nor could I, by any arguments, alter the defined tastes which you received at your birth, and which the surrounding circumstances of life have enforced, without any possibility of your voluntary resistance ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... not then, and never did, overcome her grief at the loss of Prince Albert. In the decease of Bayard Taylor we remembered with pride that he was a self-made gentleman of a school for which there is no known system of education. Regarded as a dreamy, unpractical boy, nothing much was ever expected of him. When he was seventeen he set type in a printing office in Westchester. It was Bayard Taylor who exploded the idea that only the rich could afford to go to Europe, when on less than a thousand dollars he spent ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... is often left in the lurch at an awkward moment: hence genius, where real life is concerned, is more or less unpractical—its behaviour ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the cookin'; and we 'aven't so much as a box of matches. . . . That's the worst of boys, they 're so unpractical." ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... unscrupulous in his political methods as the oldest political campaigner; a statement which I believe to be entirely mistaken. "Practical politics," said Mr. Roosevelt once, "is not dirty politics. On the contrary in the long run the politics of fraud and treachery is unpractical politics, and the most practical of all politicians is the one who is clean and decent and upright." There is no evidence which I have been able to find that Mr. Roosevelt does not now believe this as thoroughly ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... himself to work out the benefits which women would derive from co-partnership with men in the government of the State, and those which such co-partnership would confer on the community. Finally, practising again upon himself the same imposition as in his Political Economy, this unpractical trafficker in abstractions sets out to persuade his reader that he has, by dealing with fictions of the mind, effectively grappled with the concrete problem of ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... such a man as he was, twenty years older than I, with great business responsibilities that filled every hour of his life, and caring for nothing else—he must have felt that there was a risk of great unhappiness in marrying the sort of girl I was, brought up to music and books and unpractical ideas, always enjoying myself in my own way. But he had really reckoned on me as a wife who would do the honors of his position in the world; and I ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... and war problems have not yet been accepted by some; for some regard them as games pure and simple and as academic, theoretical, and unpractical. It may be admitted that they are academic and theoretical; but so is the science of gunnery, and so is the science of navigation. In some ways, however, the lessons of the game-board are better guides to future work than "practical" and actual happenings ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... gave himself the finishing stroke in the parental eyes, by throwing up a lucrative employment which he had held for a short time on his mother's West Indian property, in disgust at the system of slave labour which was still in force there; and he paid for this unpractical conduct as soon as he was of age, by the compulsory reimbursement of all the expenses which his father, up to that date, had incurred for him; and by the loss of his mother's fortune, which, at the time of ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... only transport a few of these houses to the United States! Our country architecture is not only hideous, but frequently unpractical, being at worst shanties, and at best city residences set in the fields. An Appenzell farmer lives in a house from forty to sixty feet square, and rarely less than four stories in height. The two upper stories, however, are narrowed by the high, steep roof, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... portraiture. Architecture won new possibilities by the engineering genius which reared the aqueduct of Segovia and the Basilica of Maxentius.[1] But these are only practical expansions of arts that are in themselves unpractical. The greatest work of the imperial age must be sought in its provincial administration. The significance of this we have come to understand, as not even Gibbon understood it, through the researches of Mommsen. By his vast labours our horizon has ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... that we must deliberately aim at something different from the first. We must not block up the further views and wider prospects; we must keep the horizon open. What I here suggest has nothing whatever that is unpractical about it; it is only a deeper foresight, a more prudent wisdom. We must say to ourselves that whatever happens, the soul shall not be atrophied; and we should be as anxious about it, if we find that it is losing its zest and freedom, as we should be if ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... order to gather ideas that might be useful to himself, and also to observe character transpiring in conversation. Bourrienne has told us that Bonaparte took pleasure in provoking similar debates. Scott himself, a man essentially unpractical, afforded Nelson amusement as well as interest, and was the object of a good deal of innocent chaffing. He would, in those after-dinner gatherings which Gillespie mentions, lead the doctor into arguments on literature, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... intently, quite in contrast with his former cavalier manner of dismissing all consideration of ancient Inca lore as academic or unpractical. Did he know something of ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... glittering points, and the small white teeth close like a vise. It is then that I am sorry for the clergyman's daughter. We do not understand each other, I fear, because I am so unsentimental. He believes in unpractical things like Money, Success, Empire, Home Life, Football, and Wales for ever. How can a man who puts faith in such visionary matters understand one who builds on the eternal and immovable bedrock of literature and art? He has sober dreams ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... slow, wasteful, and dangerous. If we desire it to be swifter, safer, and more effective in the future, it must become the conscious expression of the trained and organized will of a people not despising theory as unpractical, but using it ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... this next particular thing our new President and a hundred million people and forty nations are all together going to try to do, as if it were rather unpractical and inefficient at just this time for our President to have a ghost ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... as well as lover, and graceful turns of expression came to his pen readily and without effort. In many pages of characteristic, hurried, irregular writing he set forth wild and unpractical schemes ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... deter us from inquiring into anything beyond the range of sensible experience, and especially from any inquiry into the future existence of the soul, which they denounce as utterly unpractical, and compare with obsolete and fruitless inquiries into the state of the soul before birth. We have already challenged the exclusive claim of the five bodily senses to be the final sources of knowledge; and we may surely add that it is at least as ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... a cotillion, or just bridge. You never know. The house is rather like a country house, and they behave accordingly. Even hide-and-seek, I believe, sometimes. And Mitchell adores unpractical ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... seemed expedient, because supplementary, then, to put next to it his work on Our Daily Life, which was meant for those who are "in the world"; and which may give pause to some who might otherwise criticise the first hastily, perhaps condemning it as unpractical, or even objectionable in a world where, after all, men must eat and drink and live, and where some, therefore must provide the necessary means. Most intensely practical is this second treatise, and perhaps nowhere more so than when it meets the needs of those who are inclined ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. General theories are everywhere contemned; the doctrine of the Rights ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... it was seen that we wanted more personal initiative and thought, and resourcefulness, and self-reliance, and many other qualities which our education had not tended to develop. It was seen that we were unpractical in our Instruction, that minds passed under the discipline of school and came out again, still slovenly, unobservant, unscientific in temper, impatient, flippant, inaccurate, tending to guess and to jump at conclusions, to generalize hastily, etc. ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... unpractical and he was no business man; he undertook more work than he could do, and when he came to payment he always lost his reckoning and so was always out on the wrong side. He was a painter, a glazier, a paper-hanger, and would even take on tiling, and I remember how he used to run about for ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... placed in the house of a highly respected family in Copenhagen, that of a prominent scientist, a good-natured, unpractical savant, very unsuited to be the mentor of such an unconventional young man. He was conspicuous among the native Danish freshmen for his elegant dress and cosmopolitan education, and was so quick at learning that before very many weeks ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... And so it will be till the reformers show the practical politician a better system, or human nature changes its spots. Indiana was bought for Lincoln in '64. It would take an unpractical man, even an unpatriotic man, to deny that the crisis did not justify ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... of an ally weaker than either of them. The project was not at this time seriously entertained by Napoleon. He had no motive to face a work of such enormous difficulty as the creation of a solid political order among the most unpractical race in Europe. He was glad to enrol the Polish nobles among his soldiers; he knew the value of their enthusiasm, and took pains to excite it; but, when the battle was over, it was with Russia, not Poland, that France had to settle; and no better fate remained, even for the Prussian provinces of ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... about Shakespeare's version is this: that Shakespeare has an open mind or, in other words, that Shakespeare has really written a problem play. Shakespeare sees quite as clearly as Shaw that Brutus is unpractical and ineffectual; but he also sees, what is quite as plain and practical a fact, that these ineffectual men do capture the hearts and influence the policies of mankind. Shaw would have nothing said in favour of Brutus; because Brutus is on the wrong side in politics. Of the ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... possessed the supreme ability and genius of a Frederick the Great, enlightened despotism might still be in vogue. The trouble was that even well-meaning monarchs like Joseph II were unpractical; and many sovereigns were not even well-meaning. In Prussia, the successor of Frederick the Great, King Frederick William II, had neither ability nor character; his weak rule undid the work of Frederick. The same thing happened in other countries: weakness succeeded ability, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... mother seem to gather virtue and sweetness from looking at him and talking to him, though they fight hard against his unpractical and exploded Church views, and think his zeal misdirected.... And all the while his mother's face gets brighter and kinder because she is looking at him. Happy are the parents who, when they have reached that time of life in which the world is ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Klesmer is not the man for you," said Mr. Arrowpoint. "He won't do at the head of estates. He has a deuced foreign look—is an unpractical man." ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... I am happy to have had the opportunity of doing that as well. I came to you, Mr. Holmes, because I recognized that I am myself an unpractical man and because I am suddenly confronted with a most serious and extraordinary problem. Recognizing, as I do, that you are the ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... picked her mother up, but lay upon her back through all, and thus assured her throne in Paradise. She was only fifteen when she died, which shows how much is within the reach of any school-girl. Those who think her life was unpractical need only think of the victories upon Poggibonsi, San Gemignano, Volterra, Siena itself—all gained through the invocation of her name; they need only look at the church which rose over her grave. The ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... He was nervously afraid of bodily pain; he would sob and roar under it. Eminently unpractical in the common things of life, he was gifted with mighty powers of imagination, elevation of mind, delicacy ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... home he found Adelaide about to set out for the Whitneys. As she expected to walk with Mrs. Whitney for an hour before lunch she was in walking costume—hat, dress, gloves, shoes, stockings, sunshade, all the simplest, most expensive-looking, most unpractical-looking white. From hat to heels she was the embodiment of luxurious, "ladylike" idleness, the kind that not only is idle itself, but also, being beautiful, attractive, and compelling, is the cause of idleness in ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... in earnest. Such milk-and-water, unpractical scruples were disgusting to his very soul. In thinking of them to himself, he would call them unmanly. What! was such a fellow as Bertram, a boy just fresh from college, to animadvert upon and condemn the practice of the whole bar of England? He had, ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... woman the suffering of that man for a year after his discovery of her sin. I doubted long the mercy of God. Rather I knew nothing about His mercy. I had no religion, no understanding of it, except in a vague, unpractical way. You know now that I am of the Puritan race ... Livingstone is of my family ... the race which dislikes the Irish and the Catholic as the English dislike them ... the race that persecuted yours! But you cannot say ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... if quite unendowed, than if a very clever child who is foreign to the notions of the defined situation. I should take intelligence only to be of next importance in such cases, and advise giving up separating clever from stupid children in favor of separating practical and unpractical children. The latter makes an essential difference. Both the children of talent and stupid children may be practical or unpractical. If a child is talented and practical he will become a useful member ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... familiarity that breeds contempt, but a familiarity producing Love, because as it increases we see more clearly the true Life of the Spirit as the continual interaction of Love and Beauty, and the Spirit's recognition of ourselves as an integral portion of Its own Life. This is not an unpractical dreamy speculation but has a very practical bearing. Death will some day cease to be, for the simple reason that Life alone can be the enduring principle; but we have not yet reached this point in our evolution. Whether any in this generation will reach it I cannot say; ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... concerned at the way those girls go on. They are as clever as you make 'em, but unpractical—God bless me! One of these days they'll go too far. Girls like that oughtn't to live alone in London. Until they marry, they ought to have someone to look after them. We must look in more often—we're better than no one. You like them, don't ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... marked by the scheme for aerial navigation proposed by the Jesuit, Francis Lana (1631-1687), in his book, published at Brescia in 1670, Prodromo ovvero Saggio di alcune invenzioni nuove promesso all' Arte Maestra. His idea, though useless and unpractical in so far that it could never be carried out, is yet deserving of notice, as the principles involved are sound; and this can be said of no earlier attempt. His project was to procure four copper balls of very large dimensions (fig. 1), yet so extremely thin ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... no more. He began wondering if, after all, the girl would not have been better than Jim Whaley. In a dim way it struck him that people for ever interfering with destiny do not always succeed in their intentions. It was an unusual and unpractical vein of thought for James Lorimer, and he put it uneasily away. Still over and over came back the question, "What if Lulu's influence would have been sufficient to have kept David from the wild reckless men with whom he was now consorting?" ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... these changes can be wrought without earnest and careful effort? I have but little sympathy with the glittering generalities and highly colored pictures of success in industrial pursuits, held before the public gaze by unpractical but well meaning public teachers. We need the dissemination of ideas of thoroughness and the knowledge necessary to put those ideas into practical use in order that the farmers of Illinois may make the fewest possible ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... like to think of Mliss. It was a selfish instinct, perhaps, which made him try to fancy his feeling for the child was foolish, romantic, and unpractical. He even tried to imagine that she would do better under the control of an older and sterner teacher. Then she was nearly eleven, and in a few years, by the rules of Red Mountain, would be a woman. He had done his duty. After Smith's death he addressed letters to Smith's relatives, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... boulevard at Paris during their wedding tour, should you go up to Bottles and say: 'Mr. Bottles, you are a profligate man!' Poor Mr. Matthew Arnold, upon this, emerged suddenly from his corner, and asked hesitatingly: 'But will any one dare to call him a man of delicacy?' The question was so utterly unpractical that I took no note of it whatever, and should not have mentioned it if it had not been for its extraordinary effect upon our Paris Correspondent.... My friend Nick, who has all the sensitive temperament of genius, seemed inexplicably struck by this ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... prepared—however reluctantly—to throw up that innocent little sop to President Wilson and his fellow idealists. After all, there was not much harm in it, it threatened no present national interest, and it gave great pleasure to a number of good unpractical people in most countries. Above all, President Wilson had to be conciliated, and this was the last and the greatest of the fourteen points on which he had set his heart and by which he was determined to stand or fall. And so he got his ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... nor Anti-Suffrage societies to think for themselves on this question. Until a few years ago, while most educated women were vaguely aware of the existence of a movement for giving women the vote, they only knew of it as something rather unpractical and remote; its reality had never been brought home to them. When women witnessed the eruption into the streets of a band of women—most of them apparently women much like themselves—who were so convinced that the franchise must be granted to women, here and now, that they were prepared to ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... temper; but the absorbing sophomoric joy in cakes and ale was now past and not to return. The pinch of necessity had come at last: the world no longer offered him the life of an elegant dawdler. He had a serious business before him,—to gain a competency for himself and his brother. The unpractical younger brother was to be after this the mainstay of the family fortunes. And what especially makes this the finest moment of his life is the sudden and clear perception that to gain this end he must depend upon the steady and fruitful exercise of his ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... York could not be acquired by precept, and example, somehow, was not in this case contagious. He wondered whether he were stupid and unskilled, and he was finally obliged to confess to himself that he was unpractical. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... wardrobe. He saw Cook put the account books on the small table, he heard her, he also comprehended her. And Feather at the window breathlessly watching the two cabs with the servants' trunks on top, and the servants respectably unprofessional in attire and going away quietly without an unpractical compunction—he saw these also and comprehended knowing exactly why compunctions had no part in latter-day ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... so. Still, I think 'twould have been better if Cyril could have selected some one that wasn't musical—say a more domestic wife. He's so terribly unpractical himself about household matters." ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... unknown to her parent, but in perfectly kindly temper. She is, though just a little imperious, a thoroughly "good sort," and, with occasional blunders, really a guardian angel to her good-hearted, not uncourageous, but visionary and unpractical lover and husband. She has the sharpest of tongues; the most housewifely and motherly of attitudes; the flamingest of bonnets. It is she who suggests Saint-Simonianism (as a resource, not as a creed), ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... note with what exaggerated importance the text seemed to accredit those relatives she did not esteem, and mentally to annotate each page with unprintable events "which everybody knew about"; and fourthly, to reflect, as with a gush of steadily augmenting love, how dear and how unpractical it was of Olaf to have concocted these date-bristling pages—so staunch and blind in his misguided gratitude toward those otherwise uninteresting people who had rendered possible the ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... one another we could bear anything, and not envy other people? It was n't all talk and sentiment, was it? It was n't on my part, Grif. I meant it then, and I mean it now, though I know there are many good, kind-hearted people in the world who would not understand it, and would say I was talking unpractical rubbish, if they heard me. Hardened! Grif, while you have me, and I have you, and there is nothing on our two consciences? Why, it sounds,"—with another most dubious shake of her small head,—"it sounds as if you would n't care about the ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... able to collect, from every part of this proposal for a practical and progressive human learning, based on the defects of the unpractical and stationary learning which the world has hitherto been contented with, the author's opinion as to the form of delivery and inculcation best adapted to effect the proposed object under the given conditions. This question of form runs naturally through the whole work, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... habits of vengeance still doing service among the lower classes instead of the orderly chicanery of modern justice;—these are the things, and a hundred others besides, concrete and spiritual, things too magnificent, too sordid, too irregular, too nauseous, too beautiful, and, above all, too utterly unpractical and old-fashioned for our times, which I call the rags of the Renaissance, and with which Italy still ekes out her scanty apparel of ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... because England, in the depths of its solemn soul, really wishes them to lark. All this is very human and pardonable, and would be even harmless if there were no such things in the world as danger and honour and intellectual responsibility. But if aristocracy is a vision, it is perhaps the most unpractical of all visions. It is not a working way of doing things to put all your happiest people on a lighted platform and stare only at them. It is not a working way of managing education to be entirely content with the mere fact that you have (to a degree unexampled ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... plan and place of the wigwam where he was to dwell apart in the proud independence of the woodchuck and the musquash. Emerson had the largest and kindliest sympathy with their ideals and aims, but he was too clear-eyed not to see through the whims and extravagances of the unpractical experimenters who would construct a working world with the lay figures they had put together, instead of flesh and blood men and women and children with all their congenital and acquired perversities. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... wanting in Alexander which prevented him from being great. He was vacillating in his policy, and his judgment was easily warped by fanciful ideas. "His life was worn out between devotion to certain systems and disappointment as to their results. He was fitful, uncertain, and unpractical. Hence he made continual mistakes. He meant well, but did evil, and the discovery of his errors broke his heart. He died of weariness of life, deceived in all his calculations," ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... the first time what a mad thing it was in me to have come at all—at least, to have come in the way I had come; I, so unpractical, so wofully lacking in that sterling common sense, that potent weapon with which women battled successfully with the stern realities of life; and thinking, too, with a dull pain at my heart, that doubtless ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Vater aus dem Hause stiess, und betrachtet die aermlichen Pfennige, die ihm das Mitleid auf den Weg gab,"[25] which further illustrates the extravagant idealism by which he allowed himself to be carried away, and the etherial and thoroughly unpractical trend of his mind. The flights of fancy of which Hoelderlin is capable are well illustrated by another passage in "Hyperion." Referring to Hyperion's conversation with Alabanda, he says: "Ich war hingerissen ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with a maximum of privation. If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this bepatched youth. I almost envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame. It seemed to have consumed all thought of self so completely, that ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... but one rule of conduct, always that of practical and successful politics, to let himself be guided by events, when they were sure to bring him out where he wished to go, though by what seemed to unpractical minds, which let go the possible to grasp at the desirable, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... conscious of her discontent; it was new to her to be conscious of it. "The world," she thought, "is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them." It was not surprising that Mrs. Honeychurch disapproved of music, declaring that it always left her daughter peevish, unpractical, and touchy. ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... continually upsetting civilized life, but the desires they produce and the mechanism of their operation seem to be different from what our customary psychology and interpretation of history imply. Just as these moods make the child play and be wholly unpractical when one might suppose he could be useful, and the individual, as man, live a certain life of adventure rather than in security and routine, so this spirit or mood that dominates nations makes them imperialistic, and causes them to crave those things which lead toward war, if they ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... patron; its resources are amply sufficient; no pains have been spared to secure the most scientific and perfect appliances. The whole work is made, in a degree, a matter of sentiment—exalted and humane sentiment, but, like all other emotional service, apt to be gusty and at times unpractical. The man who saves human life is rewarded with silver or gold medals: the individual lifeboats are themes of essays and song, and when one wears out a tablet is raised with the record of its services. It is the beautiful and touching custom, too, for mourners to offer ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... does it matter to me who you are, so long as you're you? Men are so unpractical. You can be the Shah of Persia if you like—I ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett
... a mistake. We are not visionaries. We are not "unpractical," as men pronounce us, when we worship. To try to follow Christ is not to be "righteous overmuch." True men are not rhapsodizing when they preach; nor do those waste their lives who waste themselves ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant and unpractical sons. The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and held the living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an extreme example of the clergy of the age. He was a handsome figure of a man; jovial and jocular; fond of his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... philanthropic associations; it was not to obtain crude data, such as fill the reports of labour commissioners. My purpose was to help the working girl—to help her mentally, morally, physically. I considered this purpose visionary and unpractical, I considered it pretentious even, and I cannot say that I had any hope of accomplishing it. What did I mean by help? Did I mean a superficial remedy, a palliative? A variety of such remedies occurred to me as I worked, and I have offered them gladly for the possible aid of ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... of his earnestness about this. But the Republican leaders, honourably enough, regarded this as an unpractical line to take, and indeed to the political historian this is the most crucial question in American history. Nobody can say that civil war would or would not have occurred if this or that had been done a little differently, but ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... an amount of houses, lands, plate, money, jewels, &c., which showed certainly that the poet had possessed some worldly skill and thrift in accumulation, and to divide them with a care and accuracy which would indicate that he was by no means of that dreamy and unpractical habit of mind which cares not what becomes of ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... sympathy with the poor which led him so often cruelly to misjudge and misrepresent the acts and lives of persons in authority whose views were not, like his own, spontaneously, kindly, and impulsively unpractical. The series of six cartoons was directed against abuses, the last, dealing with the subject of duelling, being entitled "The Satisfaction of a Gentleman"—in which two duellists appear attended by seconds wearing caps and bells, while the hangman ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... home and both went to the Bar, but with different results. Young Drayton was learned and unpractical. Oliver Hampden was clever, able, and successful, and soon had a thriving practice; while his neighbor's learning was hardly known outside the ...
— The Christmas Peace - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... "missionary" aroused suspicion in the average English unconventional mind—such as those of these clean, natural-minded boys—would be a great mistake. Unquestionably, as in the case of Dickens, a missionary was unpractical if not hypocritical, and mildly incompetent if not secretly vicious. I found myself always fighting against the idea that I was termed a missionary. The men I loved and admired, especially such men as those ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... up with, "are what Mr. Briscoe calls the vague, half-baked ideas of an unpractical inventor. He's an expert, Mr. Briscoe is! I'm not. I wouldn't know a supersaturated solution of methylcalcites from a stein of Hoboken beer; but I'm willin' to believe there's big money in handling either, providing you don't spill too much on the inside. ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... as she walked on, the picture she had formed of Kennedy Square. She thought of his mother's imperious nature absorbing all the love of his heart and inspiring and guiding his every action and emotion; of the unpractical father—a dreamer and an enthusiast, the worst possible example he could have; of the false standards and class distinctions which had warped his early life and which were still dominating him. With an abrupt gesture of impatience she ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Ernestine), and then on Matthew and his wife Verona, who not long ago were known as Swanzi and Akkusane. Matthew is interested to show and explain the weapons of the chase. His racket-shaped snow-shoes are the shortest I ever saw. Longer ones, unless like the Norwegian skydder, would be unpractical among these mountains. His harpoons hang on the wall next his gun. The blunt one, pointed with a walrus tooth, is used in the body of a seal, but the iron-pointed one is needed when the animal's head alone is above the water or the ice. Both are cleverly put together with ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... that when you have got them," said Monsieur de Bourmont. "To me, I must confess, this plan of a rising sounds premature and unpractical. What we want first is money—money from England, and stronger support, too—as well as a healthier public opinion all through this part ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... are; they have noble and lofty hopes for the future; they desire the welfare and the holiness of mankind. But they are too apt to want practical common sense. And so they are laughed at (and deservedly) as dreamers, as fanatics, as foolish unpractical people, who are wasting their talents on impossible fancies. Often while their minds are full of really useful and noble schemes, they neglect their business, their families, their common duties, till they cause misery to those around them, and shame to themselves. ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... its countless disguises and ramifications through every stage of life. Selfishness is opposed to a sense of the infinite and is inversely as real religion, and the study of it is not, like systematic ethics, apt to be confused and made unpractical by ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... into October's dim splendor before Harry McAlister could be carried up the river and over to Bartlett's, where his mother had been called to meet him. She was a widow, and he her only child; and, though she was rather silly and altogether unpractical, she had a tender, generous heart, and was ready to do anything possible for Scott and Sarah Peck to show her gratitude for their kindness to her boy. She did not consult Harry at all. He had lost much blood from his accident and recovered strength slowly. She kept everything ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... "Fantastic, fanatical, unpractical enthusiast as she often is—far from truthful as are many of her views of life—misled, as she is apt to be, by her feelings—George Sand has a better nature than M. de Balzac; her brain is larger, her heart warmer than his. The ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... peace. Nannie's perplexities had begun very far back. Of course she was too young when her father married his second wife to puzzle over that; but if she did not, other people did. Why a mild, vague young widower who painted pictures nobody bought, and was as unpractical as a man could be whose partnership in an iron-works was a matter of inheritance—why such a man wanted to marry Miss Sarah Blair was beyond anybody's wisdom. It is conceivable, indeed, that ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... as it trains the eye and hand, but unpractical if it leads a girl to think her commonplace pictures are works of art. It seems to me that a good way for girls to study art is for them to look at good pictures with older people who have taste and judgment, because this gives them new resources of enjoyment. Of course when a girl has special ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... the rare beings who have possessed "the vision and the faculty divine," who, to quote Ruskin, can "startle our lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of astonishment." There is about them nothing incomprehensibly transcendental, nothing "unpractical," nothing aloof from the life we live—if we live it fully—but wholly the contrary. Those who say otherwise are but exposing their own short sight, their own creeping imagination, their ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... written in the most unpractical and incomprehensible style: yes, I know it," interrupted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... said. "Of all the unpractical people! As soon as a place is mentioned you expect us to pull great piles of photographs out of our pockets showing the different styles ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... a majority of whose inhabitants are female, demoralization has naturally extended far and wide, till strict veracity has become unpractical. The first falsehood (after the serpent's) must have been humiliating to him who uttered it, and a fatal example to those who heard; but mankind soon grew used to the new fashion. I pass over the rude barbarian ages, whose gross and inartistic lying offers ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... giving him a chance to say good-bye. He took refuge by anticipation, as it were, in this reflection, whenever, for the next three or four days, he foresaw himself stopping short, as he had done before, and asking himself whether he had done an injury to Angela Vivian. This was an idle and unpractical question, inasmuch as the answer was not forthcoming; whereas it was quite simple and conclusive to say, without the note of interrogation, that she was, in spite of many attractive points, an abrupt and capricious young woman. ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... sympathy. Where the whole terrestrial business is only a meaningless blur upon the face of nothingness, why should we not linger by the way, under elm trees, or upon broken fragments of old temples, or on sunny benches in cloistered gardens, and listen to the arbitrary fancies of unpractical and incompetent persons whose countenances express an "audace craintive" and a "grace moqueuse," and who look with mild wonder and peaceful astonishment at "les choses de ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... his aims and aspirations, to a narrow sphere, within which he wandered incurably idealistic, pursuing prosaic or utilitarian objects—the favor of princes, place at Courts, the recovery of his inheritance—in a romantic and unpractical spirit.[82] Vacillating, irresolute, peevish, he roamed through all the towns of Italy, demanding more than sympathy could give, exhausting friendship, changing from place to place, from lord to lord. Yet how touching was the destiny of this laureled exile, this brilliant ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... objective life, we must work upon them from the objective stand-point. This is where many fall short of completed work. They realize the subjective or creative process, but do not see that it must be followed by an objective or constructive process, and consequently they are unpractical dreamers and never reach the stage of completed work. The creative process brings the materials and conditions for the work to our hands; then we must make use of them with diligence and common-sense—God will provide the food, but He ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... She was not, could not be, at fault. The fault was in himself. 'I am unpractical,' he thought. 'It is so, I know. Agnes used to say so, Bob and Thirza think so. They all think me unpractical and dreamy. Is it a sin—I wonder?' There were lambs in the next field; he watched their gambollings and his heart ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... said, "in the lives of some of the greatest moralists, one so often sees, or at all events hears it said, that their morality is useless because it is unpractical, too much out of the reach of the ordinary man, too contemptuous of simple human faculties. What is one to make ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... liberty identified with nature, the natural man taken for the whole man. The aspirations which such a book represents are generous and poetical, but in the first place dangerous, since they lead to an absolute confidence in instinct; and in the second, credulous and unpractical, for they set before us a mere dream man, and throw a veil over both present and past reality. The book is at once the plea justificatory of progress, conceived as fatal and irresistible, and an enthusiastic hymn ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... exuberant imagination from height to height, but the small boulders of difficulty trip them up, for they are hopelessly unpractical; they have neither strength of purpose nor fortitude, and their best-laid schemes are always frustrated at the critical moment, by either the incurable blight of vacillation, or by the determination to amplify their scheme ere it has proved successful, ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... to the world; second, that Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and that to these the Church would drag us back; third, that the people still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious—such people as the Irish—are weak, unpractical, and behind the times. I only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I looked into them independently I found, not that the conclusions were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts. Instead of looking ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... finally selected. No doubt one reason why the preference was given to Bognor was the fact that Blake’s cottage at Felpham was close by, for businesslike and unbusiness-like qualities were strangely mingled in Rossetti’s temperament, and it was generally some sentiment or unpractical fancy of this kind that brought about Rossetti’s final decision upon anything. Blake’s name was with him still a word to charm with, and he was surprised to find, on the first pilgrimage of himself and his friends to the cottage, that scarcely ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... wonder that Young Ireland has never loved Moore much. But I do not think that Thomas Brown the Younger meant it, or at least wholly meant it, as satire, and this is perhaps the best proof of his unpractical way of looking at politics. For Phelim Connor is a much more damning sketch than any of the Fudges. Vanity, gluttony, the scheming intrigues of eld, may not be nice things, but they are common to the whole human race. The hollow rant which enjoys the advantages of liberty and declaims ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury |
