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Idealism   Listen
noun
Idealism  n.  
1.
The quality or state of being ideal.
2.
Conception of the ideal; imagery.
3.
(Philos.) The system or theory that denies the existence of material bodies, and teaches that we have no rational grounds to believe in the reality of anything but ideas and their relations.
4.
The practice or habit of giving or attributing ideal form or character to things; treatment of things in art or literature according to ideal standards or patterns; opposed to realism.
5.
A belief in the feasibility of the implementation of ideal principles and noble goals, and the practice or habit of pursuing such goals; opposed to realism and cynicism.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Idealism" Quotes from Famous Books



... Douglas was not a reader. I had found Emerson through Abigail; I read the North American Review, and Cooper's novels as they appeared. But Douglas had contempt for the moral idealism of New England. He thought it impractical. "You can't have a brain without a body," said Douglas. "Let the country develop its bones, its muscles, attain its stature. These men think the world is run by righteousness, especially if you let them prescribe ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... accomplish anything for the country his business was to combine decency and efficiency; to be a thoroughly practical man of high ideals who did his best to reduce those ideals to actual practice. This was the choice that he made in those first days, the companionable road of practical idealism rather than the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... domain by introducing psychological discussions on the mental faculties, such as imagination and wit, metaphysical, discussions on the origin of knowledge and the different kinds of certitude, according to the difference of the objects (idealism, scepticism, and so on), or anthropological discussions on prejudices, their causes and remedies: this attempt, on the part of these authors, only shows their ignorance of the peculiar nature of logical science. ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant

... ruefully. "Why, it's mostly health and muscles and things that have nothing to do with music." He was dazed and offended by this uncovering of the mechanism of the art—by the discovery of the coarse and painful toil, the grossly physical basis, of what had seemed to him all idealism. He had been full of the delusions of spontaneity and inspiration, like all laymen, and all artists, too, except those of the higher ranks—those who have fought their way up to the heights and, so, have learned that one does not achieve them by being caught up to them gloriously ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips

... from his father's example and instruction, and at the age of 15 was taught by philosophers of the Stoic, Platonist, Peripatetic, and Epicurean schools. He became initiated, writes Dr. Moore, into "the idealism of Plato, the realism of Aristotle, the scepticism of the Epicureans, and the materialism of the Stoics." At the age of 17 he was destined for the profession of medicine by his father in consequence of a dream. He studied under the ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... foreign politics, on law, on social life, has been upon the whole beneficial. Nevertheless, they will never have justice done to them, for they do not agree either with the better feeling of the multitude or with the idealism of more refined thinkers. Without Bentham, a great word in the history of philosophy would have remained unspoken. Yet to this day it is rare to hear his name received with any mark of respect such as would be freely granted ...
— Philebus • Plato

... lakes. The pioneer days had passed away, and civilization and prosperity were rampant in the land. There were those, too, who thought that perhaps the country had lost something in all its gaining; that perhaps there was less idealism and less unreckoning hospitality in the brick house on the hill than there once had been in the sod shack In ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... bewildered interest. Till now he had worshipped Watts and Burne-Jones. The pretty colour of the first, the affected drawing of the second, had entirely satisfied his aesthetic sensibilities. Their vague idealism, the suspicion of a philosophical idea which underlay the titles they gave their pictures, accorded very well with the functions of art as from his diligent perusal of Ruskin he understood it; but here was something quite different: ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... find represented in the Aldus Homer the revival of Greek learning, in the Stephanus Testament the application of this to the free criticism of the scriptures, in the Froben Plato the substitution of Platonic idealism for the scholastic philosophy based on Aristotle, in the Nuremberg book the epitome of mediaeval superstition, credulity, and curiosity on the verge of the new era, and in Morte d'Arthur the fond return of the modern mind, facing an unknown future, ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater

... fitting starting-point for our reflections: for they bring vividly before us both the idealism which should inspire all who labour at the task of government and the vastness and variety of the field with which they are concerned. Looked at in this broad light, the history of man's common life in the world will, I think, show two great streams of progress—the progress of man over Nature, ...
— Progress and History • Various

... against France; only a mere handful of enthusiastic men in England and America, still fewer elsewhere, were in sympathy with her efforts. The stolid common sense of the rest saw only ruin ahead, and viewed askance the idealism of her unreal subtleties. The French nobles, sickened by the thought of reform, had continued their silly and wicked flight; the neighboring powers, now preparing for an armed resistance to the spread ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... personal liberty, such as it is understood in the United States, has never prevailed in Santo Domingo; but the adoration of these conceptions continues and it is to be hoped that now, with American assistance, it will bring real and lasting liberty to the country. Perhaps it is their idealism, as much as their isolation, which causes the Dominicans to take themselves so very seriously and renders them so extremely sensitive to criticism or jokes on the subject of their country, ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... to the Infallible Critic. The book is as ludicrous as "Hamlet" from one aspect and as profound as "Don Quixote" from another. In its pages the wonder tales and wonder facts meet and resolve; realism and idealism are joined—above all, there is a mystery no critic may solve. It is useless to criticize genius or a miracle, except to increase its wonder. Who remembers anything in "Crusoe" but the touch of the wizard's hand? Who associates the Duke of Athens, Hermia ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison

... but there is—and out of it grows the prevailing foreign view of America and the Americans, for the foreigner who stays at home does not derive his ideas from the glittering, lascivious phrases of Dr. Wilson or from the passionate idealism of such superior Americans as Otto H. Kahn, Adolph S. Ochs, S. Stanwood Menken, Jacob H. Schiff, Marcus Loew, Henry Morgenthau, Abram Elkus, Samuel Goldfish, Louis D. Brandeis, Julius Rosenwald, Paul Warburg, Judge Otto Rosalsky, Adolph Zukor, the ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan

... Populi S.F. decreto electus.' This inscription is differently given. See Varchi, vol. i. p. 266; Segni, p. 46. Nothing is more significant of the difference between Venice and Florence than the political idealism implied in this religious consecration of the republic by statute. In my essay on 'Florence and the Medici' (Sketches and Studies in Italy) I have attempted to condense the internal history of the Republic and to analyze ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... protected from the white race. In its organization and administration it was an impossible combination of the practical and the theoretical, of opportunism and humanitarianism, of common sense and idealism. It failed to exert a permanently wholesome influence because its lesser agents were not held to strict accountability by their superiors. Under these agents the alienation of the two races began, and the ill feelings then aroused ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming

... soul he considers as united to nothing; but on these details he falls into much mysticism, and it is often difficult to see clearly his precise meaning, as when he says that Reason is surrounded by Eternity, but the Soul is surrounded by Time. He carries Idealism to its last extreme, and, as has been said, looks upon the visible world as a semblance only, deducing from his doctrine moral reflections to be a comfort in the trials of life. Thus he says that "sensuous life is ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... Eleanor Hamlin, of Colhassett, Massachusetts, owed the change in her fortune. At least it was to Beulah that she owed the initial inspiration that set the wheel of that fortune in motion; but it was to the glorious enterprise and idealism of youth, and the courage of a set of the most intrepid and quixotic convictions that ever quickened in the breasts of a mad half dozen youngsters, that she owed the actual fulfillment of ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... For God's sake, Stephen, stop before it's gone past mending. Don't ruin your life with Katherine. Hubert was her favourite brother; you are backing those who killed him. Think what that means to her! Drop this—mad Quixotism—idealism—whatever you call it. Take Katherine away. Leave the country till the thing's over—this country of yours that you're opposing, and—and— traducing. Take her away! Come! What good are you doing? What earthly good? Come, my boy! Before ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... thought, if not as matters of objective fact. Yet religion would be rather rational than supernatural; obedience to duty instead of communion with Deity; and unless the mind can find ground for a belief in God and the divine attributes through some other faculty, the idealism must destroy the evidence of revealed religion. Or at least, if the mind admit its truth, it must renounce the right to criticise the material of that which it confesses to be beyond the limits of its own consciousness; and thus, by abdicating its natural powers, blindly submit to external ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... her sleek beauty, Edith was a grave, slow-thinking girl. There was a streak in her of that same desire to ponder, of that adolescent idealism that had turned her brother socialist and pacifist. Henry Bradin had left Cornell, where he had been an instructor in economies, and had come to New York to pour the latest cures for incurable evils into the columns of a ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... reserves grown large enough for the venture, she set sail for the siege of Paris. To her charm and sterling worth it had soon capitulated—a quicker victory than she had dared to hope for. Around her studio in a street off the Champs Elysees she gathered a coterie of kindred souls. She told of the idealism and camaraderie of the little circle, while its foibles she touched upon with much merriment. Behind this outward jesting I gained a glimpse of the fight she had made ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams

... be but the result of the laborious and continuous study of history and science, and therefore tacitly repudiates all connection with philosophy. For the Philistine captain and his "We," Kantian philosophy does not exist. He does not dream of the fundamental antinomy of idealism and of the highly relative sense of all science and reason. And it is precisely reason that ought to tell him how little it is possible to know of things in themselves. It is true, however, that people of a certain age cannot possibly understand Kant, especially when, in their youth, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... life. For here lies the solution of a mystery that has baffled the sages, who have failed to discover it chiefly because they have blinded themselves by their own theological and philosophical delusions, idealism and monotheism. Why is it, that gazing at Nature's inexhaustible beauty, thrown at us with such lavish profusion in her dawns and her sunsets, her shadows and her moods, in the roar of her breakers and the silence ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain

... amount to a row of pins in civil life." Something of that sense of bitter disillusionment, of blasted idealism, which is the immediate aftermath of war, had crept into his voice. "The only thrill I ever got out of its possession was in the service. My colonel was never content merely with returning my salute. He always uncovered to me. That ribbon will have little weight with your father, I fear, when ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... preferred action to word, example to sermon, abandoned their studies, and emigrated to Palestine in order to become peasants there,—Jewish peasants on historically Jewish soil. Deeply moved by this idealism of a peculiarly enthusiastic elite, cooler headed Jews in Russia and Germany began also to form societies in order to support from a distance the Palestine settlements of the Jewish pioneers. This took place ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau

... idealism and that gloomy species of metaphysics which, seeking subtilely for first causes, wishes to place on such foundations the legislation of a people, instead of adapting the laws to their knowledge of the human heart, and to the lessons of history, that it is necessary to attribute all the misfortunes ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... a bypath of the publishing business, and try to bring to my tasks some small measure of honest idealism. But what I love (I use this great word with care) in my friend is that his zeal for beauty and for truth is great enough to outweigh utterly the paltry considerations of expediency and comfort which sway most ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... internal politics and social advancement, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, Finland (until the paw of the Bear was on her) and Belgium (till the claw of the Spread-Eagle) have been well to the fore. It is they who have carried on the banner of idealism which Germany herself uplifted when she was a small people or a group of small peoples. It is they who have really had prosperous, healthy, independent, and alert populations. How much more interesting, ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter

... "Physical Basis of Life," but with more detail, he explains how far materialism is legitimate, is, in fact, a sort of shorthand idealism. This essay, too, contains the often-quoted passage, apropos of the] "introduction of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... hundred thousand to a million; while they lost a good deal of sympathy both in England and in France, from all I heard, through the number of able-bodied refugees who were disinclined to serve. It was a mistaken idealism that swept over the world, early in the war, characterizing a whole nation with the gallantry of its young king and ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... It is coloured by delicate imaginative genius as well as by robust and practical worldliness. Not his writings only, but the facts of his private life—his mode of managing his private property, for example—attest his alert knowledge of the material and practical affairs of human existence. Idealism and realism in perfect development were interwoven with the texture of ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... resembles man both in the order and number of his teeth." We catch here what is perhaps the fundamental paradox of his character—the combination of a curious rational hardness with the wildest and most romantic idealism. For all its airiness, his verse was thrown off by a mind no stranger ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow

... that there were at this time two enemies, materialism and skepticism, and that there rose against them a spirituality carried to idealism, to mysticism. "To the right of nature was opposed the divine right, to popular sovereignty legitimacy, to individual rights the State, to liberty authority or order. The middle ages returned in triumph.... Christianity, hitherto the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... itself was just. There was nothing ideal in the work. It was simply the representation of a naked woman doing what no woman could like to be seen doing. And a picture of a mere naked woman, however well executed, is never art if art means idealism. The realism of the thing was its offensiveness. Ideal nakedness may be divine,—the most godly of all human dreams of the superhuman. But a naked person is not divine at all. Ideal nudity needs no girdle, because the charm is of lines ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... a symptom of the American's strength—not admirable in itself, yet, as the index to something admirable, not, perhaps, altogether to be scorned. Nor must it be supposed that the lack of reverence implies any want of idealism, or any poverty of imagination, any absence of love or desire of the good and beautiful. The American is idealist and imaginative ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson

... that there is no such thing as the Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian, Armenian, Georgian, question, that there is only one question—the Russian. Yes, we would like to, but we cannot; the Russian people have yet to earn the right to say that, and therein lies their tragedy.... The moment Russian idealism ventures to tackle any of those complicated national home problems,—it becomes weak, impotent ...
— The Shield • Various

... for each other is at the very bottom of all marital unhappiness. The practical man despises his wife's impulsive idealism and tries to make her over. The wife despises his "cold and calculating" tendencies and tries to make him over. That means war, for it is impossible to ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne

... who have this work in hand I have seen enough—in France and in my own country, at least—to know their worth, and the selfless idealism which animates them. Their devotion, courage, tenacity, and technical ability are beyond question or praise. I would only fear that in the hard struggle they experience to carry each day's work to its end, ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy

... had to talk to them on the lines of leading articles in The Morning Post. Their patriotism, their knowledge of human nature, their idealism, and their imagination were restricted to the traditional views of English country gentlemen of the Tory school. Anything outside that range of thought was to them heresy, treason, or ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... time offending the sensibilities of their new friends. It was an unanswerable argument. I couldn't share my young friend's surprise and indignation. My practice of reflection had also convinced me that there is nothing on earth that turns quicker on its pivot than political idealism when touched by the ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... individualism in Strauss—"the spirit that hates the dogs of the populace and all that abortive and gloomy breed; the spirit of wild laughter that dances like a tempest as gaily on marshes and sadness as it does in fields."[176] That spirit laughs at itself and at its idealism in the Don Quixote of 1897, fantastische Variationen uber ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters ("Don Quixote, fantastic variations on a theme of knightly character"), op. 35; and that symphony marks, I think, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... Professor Johnson approached his theme, Union and Democracy, in a different spirit. He is neither a champion of the wholesome nationalism which gave the Federalists their place in history nor a defender of the radical idealism which Professor Becker has shown to be the mainspring of the Revolution of 1776, and which Jefferson called to life again in his struggle to win control of the national machinery, 1796 to 1800. In treating the period 1783 to 1828, Professor ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... knew little Billy o' Oliver's o' Deaf Martha's. He was a smart lad of eight years, with a vivid imagination and an active brain. His childish idealism, however, found little food in the squalid cottage in which he dragged out his semi-civilized existence; but among the hills he was at home, and there he roamed, to find in their fastnesses a region of romance, and in their gullies and cloughs the grottoes and ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather

... a vein of idealism running through our country that would hold the American people to the thought that the United States has a world wide mission. It is the dream of this class that shackles, whether physical, political or spiritual, shall fall from every man ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... democracy and equality were the goals of Christianity and with a dozen similar platitudes none of which had any authentic contact with the life of the nation, thus confronted, the proletaire was forced to lift itself up by its boot straps and rise to the defence of a Frankenstein idealism of which it was the parent-victim. Disillusionment with the causes of the war has, however, served no high purpose. The Frankenstein God, the Frankenstein virtue is still enshrined in the Heaven of ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... quietly) And I think a society which permits things to go on which I can prove go on in our federal prisons had better stop and take a fresh look at itself. To stand for that and then talk of democracy and idealism—oh, it shows ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell

... which exactly suits Sumner. It does not, of course, imply that a man can think. Sumner was conspicuous even among politicians for his ineptitude in this respect. But it implies a pose of superiority both as regards culture and as regards what a man of that kind calls "idealism" which makes such an one peculiarly offensive to his fellow-men. "The Senator so conducts himself," said Fessenden, a Republican, and to a great extent an ally, "that he has no friends." He had a peculiar command of ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... to adorn or idealize natural fact according to its own notions: it puts red spots in the middle of the hands, and sharpens the thumbs, thinking to improve them. Here you have the most pure type possible of the principles of idealism in all ages: whenever people don't look at Nature, they always think they can improve her. You will also admire, doubtless, the exquisite result of the application of our great modern architectural principle of beauty—symmetry, or equal ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... terms than the common. The Brook Farm scheme was, as such things go, a reasonable one; it was devised and carried out by shrewd and sober-minded New Englanders, who were careful to place economy first and idealism afterwards, and who were not afflicted with a Gallic passion for completeness of theory. There were no formulas, doctrines, dogmas; there was no interference whatever with private life or individual habits, and not the faintest adumbration of a rearrangement of that difficult ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... of these terms, we are not speaking of Materialism and Idealism as they have always actually manifested themselves, but only of the distinguishing principle of these systems when pushed to its extreme result. It is quite possible to be a materialist or an idealist with respect to the immediate phenomena of consciousness, without attempting a philosophy ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel

... the German Chancellor sees them: it is the great human army of "little people," normal, simple, for the most part honest, whose selfish stake in the community is not large enough to stifle their deepest instincts. In them, I believe, lies the real idealism of any nation, also its plain virtues and ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... moving theme that holds the multitude at the movie theatre bound in a spell? What is it that answers deep unto deep between the literature vended at drug stores and the people?—Concern for money overthrown by idealism! The triumph of ethereal love over the base temptation of lucre! Is it not so: the rich wooer in the top hat and the elegant Easter-parade coat is turned away, and the poor lover with his flannel shirt open at the collar and a dinner-pail hung upon his arm is chosen for bluebird happiness—and ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday

... idealist may not look or act like an idealist, but in reality his idealism is one of the practically-wise construction. He allows his memory to hold all that is helpful of the past, both of the ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness

... this idealism of the West in mind. The very materialism that has been urged against the West was accompanied by ideals of equality, of the exaltation of the common man, of national expansion, that makes it a profound mistake to write of the West as though it were engrossed in mere material ends. It has ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... if George Sand's surroundings and Chopin's character and tastes are kept in view nothing seems to be more probable than that his over-delicate susceptibilities may have occasionally been shocked by unrestrained vivacity, loud laughter, and perhaps even coarse words; that his uncompromising idealism may have been disturbed by the discordance of literary squabbles, intrigues, and business transactions; that his peaceable, non-speculative, and non-argumentative disposition may have been vexed and wearied by discussions of political, social, religious, literary, and ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... of a book, a series of clear, scientific lectures, or a common-sense talk with either the man or woman will often do away with most of the repugnance to physical union. When the repugnance is gone, the way is open to that upliftment through sex idealism which is the birthright ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... what we have been saying to each other. You attack my idealism, call me dreamer, and accuse me of being out of joint with the time, which itself is rigorously in joint with the laws of growth. And I class you with the Philistine because of your exaggeration of practical values. I hold that it is gross to respect the fact tangible at the expense ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... successful teacher. In the second group, other qualities are of greater importance. While a certain degree of pedagogical skill is just as necessary here as there, it is now no longer a question of the systematic development of habits, but of the ability to create sympathetic understanding, idealism, depth of knowledge, and literary taste—in short, to strive for humanistic education in the fullest sense of the word. This is true not only for colleges with a professedly humanistic tendency; the broadening and deepening influence of foreign ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... admission that, so far as we can know, there may be no difference between the substance of matter and the substance of spirit ("Disquisitions," p. 16). A step farther would have shown Priestley that his materialism was, essentially, very little different from the Idealism of his contemporary, the ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... nothing is exactly right. This may be the operation of the law of progress, doubtless it is, but it occasions a mighty unrest, and keeps the world wondering what will happen next. This law of progress is but another name for idealism to which the world owes everything. Idealism is that which sees a better condition than the one which now obtains. The process of realizing this better condition is in ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger

... related: nor to the strange history, geography, and chronology, for the two divisions are very much on a par there also. But strong as the fantastic element is in them, the chansons de geste possess a realistic quality which is entirely absent from the gracious idealism of the Romances. The emperors and the admirals, perhaps even their fair and obliging daughters, were not personages unknown to the contemporaries of the Norman conquerors of Italy and Sicily, or to the first ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... others are not. He has wit without charity. Alcibiades makes war on his city because others have not the rough-and-ready large practical justice of men used to knocks. He has a large good humour without idealism. Timon, the great-natured, truly generous man, whose mind is as beneficial as the sun, cannot be currish, nor stoop to the baseness of revenge. Finding men base, he removes himself from them, and ministers with bitter contempt to the baseness that infects them. The flaming out ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield

... in Blackwood's Magazine.) "Of course, if —— found his ideal in —— he must dislike you in Portia, or in anything where it is a case of grace and spontaneity and Nature against affectation, over-emphasis, stilt, and false idealism—in short, utter lack of Nature. How can the same critic admire both? However, the public is with you, happily, as it is not always when the struggle is ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry

... as the artist is an arrant realist or an arrant idealist. Each, by his own method, seeks to save and perpetuate the same significance or charm; the one by suppressing, the other by forcing, detail. All other idealism is the brown foreground over again, and hence only art in the sense of a game, like cup and ball. All other realism is not art at all - but not at all. It is, then, an insincere and ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... upon practical social objects. Part of it she had put into her business, the nucleus of a model typewriting emporium; part of it was distributed in various leagues and causes for the advancement of such work among women. How far Joan, her sister and partner, shared this slightly prosaic idealism no one could be very sure. But she followed her leader with a dog-like affection which was somehow more attractive, with its touch of tragedy, than the hard, high spirits of the elder. For Pauline Stacey had nothing to say to tragedy; she was understood ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... Germany. These nations might seem as though designed, whether by nature or by the unconscious hand of political history, to be half-willing, half-reluctant complements to each other. English common sense, French lucidity, German idealism; English liberty, French equality, German organization; English breadth, French exactitude, German detail,—how much poorer the world would be if any one of these had been allowed to develop on its own lines without ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... a biped deity, as Professor Hegel declared to me that I was twenty-five years ago." The deification of man: such is the popular translation of the philosophy of the idea. Would you have a further proof of this? The following anecdote was current in my youth, when German idealism was at the height of its popularity. A student going to call on one of his fellow-students, found him stretched on his bed, or his sofa, and exhibiting all the signs of an ecstatic contemplation. "Why, what are you doing there?" inquired the visitor. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville

... no less a mystery, a greater warmth and implied reality from him. Cytherea and Mina Raff shared nothing; somehow the latter lacked the magnetism essential to the stirring of his desire. This, perhaps, was inevitable to his age, to the swift passage of that young idealism: after forty, the nebulous became a need for sensuous reality. Certain phases of Mina, as well, were utterly those of a child—she had the eluding sweetness, the flower-like indifference, of Helena, of a temperamental virginity so ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... why we do not take advantage of conditions in Mexico in order to conquer and hold that unfortunate country. They could not believe that we were actuated by a spirit of idealism and that we were patiently suffering much in order really to help Mexico. They could not believe that we were waiting in order to convince not only Mexico but the other States of Central America and the great friendly republics of South America, that it was not our policy to use the dissensions ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard

... setting up for wild animals impossible mental and moral standards. The student must not deceive himself by overestimating mental values. If an estimate must be made, make it under the mark of truth rather than above it. While avoiding the folly of idealism, we also must shun the ways of the narrow mind, and the eyes that refuse to see the truth. Wild animals are not superhuman demigods of wisdom; but neither are they idiots, unable to reason from cause to effect along the simple lines that ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... literature is the Voyage of Bran. In this tale idealism is the inspiration that leads the hero into the unknown world. A woman appears who is invisible to all but Bran, and whose song of the beauteous supernatural land beyond the wave is heard by none but him; so that, after refusing to go with her the first time she appears, at length he steps ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... so awake to all beauty and grandeur, a spirit so elate, that as we read we catch the energy and elation. The reading of the riddle is this: the religion against which Lucretius made his attack was not the soaring idealism of Plato, nor the inspiring and consolatory faith of Christianity, but an outworn mythology in which this world was ruled by capricious and unworthy despots, and the next world was gloomy with terrors and almost unlighted by hopes. Such had become the popular mythology in its later ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... it awakens the latent idealism of both, It is not by accident that men in love are found trying to write poetry, though it may be a bad accident if other people have to try to read it. Of course we laugh at this nave habit, because ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray

... She glanced at him from under her long, pale lashes. A man of fifty, he was tall and thin, with a fine florid face set off by a mass of thick, white hair. His eyes were brown and youthful, full of serenity and kindliness, with a shadow of the idealism that characterized his whole face. His voice was good, his speech elegant, appealing particularly to one accustomed to the tones and inflections of the West. Looking forward to meeting his wife, who would probably be equally pleasing, Elsie felt that in any event she should be as ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray

... perhaps stirred in the soul of man that desire that we have not yet satisfied, the desire to know the connection between Beauty and Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order of the Kosmos. The problems of idealism and realism, as he sets them forth, may seem to many to be somewhat barren of result in the metaphysical sphere of abstract being in which he places them, but transfer them to the sphere of art, and you will find that they ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde

... things would be to wrong the theory of fiction as I understand it, which is not to offer mock history or a substitute for fact, but to present a thought in the form of a story, with as much realism as the requirements of idealism will permit. In presenting the thought which is the motive of "The Christian" my desire has been to depict, however imperfectly, the types of mind and character, of creed and culture, of social effort and ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... of heaven" sinks down and disappears. There is no room here for the Job who abhors himself and repents in dust and ashes nor for Plato's One behind the Many; no perceptible room, in such a world, for any of the absolute values, the transcendent interests, the ethics of idealism, any eschatology, or for Christian theodicy. That which has been the typical contribution of the religious perceptions in the past, namely, the comprehensive vision of life and the world and time sub specie aeternitatis is here abandoned. Eternity is unreal ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... reconciliation. His wise and kindly influence removed, the North committed what is now recognised as the fatal blunder of forcing unrestricted negro suffrage on the South. This measure was dictated partly, no doubt, by honest idealism, partly by much lower motives. Then the horde of "carpet-baggers" descended upon the "reconstructed" States, and there ensued a period of humiliation to the South which made men look back with longing even to the sharper ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... 28.—Special Correspondence.—The "great awakening" of the time of Jonathan Edwards has been paralleled during the last decade by a wave of idealism that has swept over the country, manifesting itself under several different aspects and under various names, but each having the common identity of spiritual demand. This movement, under the guise of Christian Science, and ingenuously ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy

... DESIRE: Ambition is idealism. Desire is faith. You cannot have either without the possibility of their fulfillment. Desires come from Supreme Intelligence in the Universe, and they are divine. Therefore, they are real, possible of positive realization. Keep them sacred. Let them become the ideals ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft

... their repressive measures. Yet again and again it arose responsive to the actual needs of the time, and became toward the end of the century one of the most impressive movements the world has ever known. Filled with idealism for a new social order, and determined to change fundamentally existing conditions, the working class has fought onward and upward toward a world State and a socialized industrial life. There can be no doubt that the amazing growth ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... Parliament, in the pulpit, and in the press. But the criterion of happiness, however widely diffused (and that it had not gone far in 1837 Disraeli's Sybil will attest), was not enough to satisfy the ardent idealism that blazed in the breasts of men stirred by revolutions and the new birth of Christian zeal. In contrast to the ordered pursuit of reform, the spirit of which the Utilitarians hoped to embody in societies and Acts of Parliament, were the rebellious impulses of men filled ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... natural merchandisers. We care less for the making of a thing than for the selling of it. Salesmanship is the great American game. It calls forth all our native genius; it is the expression of our originality, our inventiveness, our ingenuity, our idealism," and so on, for a full column slathered with deadly and self-betraying encomiums. For the Reverend Bland believed heartily that the market was the highest test of humankind. He would rather sell a thing than make it! In fact, anything made with any other purpose than ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... to-day. They told me what I ought to do in a way that caused me to do it, and all my consequent intellectual action is to be traced to this purely moral source. To Carlyle and Emerson I ought to add Fichte, the greatest representative of pure idealism. These three unscientific men made me a practical scientific worker. They called out 'Act!' I hearkened to the summons, taking the liberty, however, of determining for myself the direction which effort ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... depth of its prison of cloth could see all my actions, and I arrived at such a ridiculous extremity, that if I wanted to scratch myself, pull up my sock, or do anything else not in keeping with the idealism of my chaste love, I first drew out the miniature, put it in a safe place, and then considered myself free to do whatever I wanted. In fact, since I had accomplished the theft, there was no limit ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various

... description of natural, unsought visions on the part of people who meant no harm, but who believed what they wished to believe. They are the story of a great mistake, but a mistake proceeding simply, in the most natural way in the world, from excess of "idealism" and attachment. Unaffected by the circumstance that there never were narratives less ideal, and more straightforwardly real—that they seem purposely framed to be a contrast to professed accounts of visions, and to exclude the possibility of their being confounded with such accounts; and that ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... life, and has been much studied by the pathologists. De-Gaudenzi, who has written one of the best psychopathological studies of Tasso, shows clearly that his father, Bernardo, was a man of high intelligence, of great emotional sensibility, with a tendency to melancholy as well as a mystical idealism, of somewhat weak character, and prone to invoke Divine aid in the slightest difficulty. It was a temperament that might be considered a little morbid, outside a monastery, but it was not insane, nor is there ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... War].... They rested on their laurels and fell into a doze. And while they dozed they had dreams. The cultivated, and especially the half-cultivated, public in Denmark and Norway dreamed that they were the salt of Europe. They dreamed that by their idealism—the ideals of Grundtvig and Kierkegaard—and their strong vigilance, they regenerated the foreign nations. They dreamed that they were the power which could rule the world, but which, for mysterious and incomprehensible reasons, had for a long ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... minds of your children the real goal to be striven for. I make exception of the few homes on your planet where the parents are in spiritual growth, but these homes are not ideal—just a beginning of Idealism. But they are better far than the masses in their home conditions ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon

... Melanchthon and Luther; and in philosophy, Plato and Aristotle. At the risk of pushing the analogy too far, it may be added that Cornelius was positive as Aristotle, impetuous as St. Peter and Luther, defiant as Michelangelo; while in contrast, Overbeck shared with Plato idealism, with St. John love, with Melanchthon gentleness, and with ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson

... of the Bulgarians presents a singular contrast to that of the neighbouring nations. Less quick-witted than the Greeks, less prone to idealism than the Servians, less apt to assimilate the externals of civilization than the Rumanians, they possess in a remarkable degree the qualities of patience, perseverance and endurance, with the capacity for laborious effort ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... said, these bourgeois socialists act in this way through love of popularity! This is a strange form of selfishness, at all events, which prefers to the quickly reaped rewards and profits of bourgeois individualism, "the socialist idealism" of popular sympathy, especially when it might gain this sympathy by other means which would compromise it less in the eyes of ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... long, long self-deception; he laughed at his folly. What filth and corruption lay behind this hypocritical morality, this insane desire for emancipation from healthy, natural instincts. It was the ascetic teaching of idealism and Christianity which had implanted this germ into ...
— Married • August Strindberg

... when the Constitutional Convention had completed its work, and the Constitution was ready for adoption, there were those who actually left the hall rather than sign it. They were good men but they were looking at stern facts and they wanted no idealism in theirs. Good men, some animated by the partisan spirit, it is true, earnest in their beliefs—but unequipped with the long vision. Their names are now recalled only through the search of ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... has been said concerning the child pictures in any way similar to those of Sir Joshua Reynolds, it must still be admitted that his work is entirely unique in what may be termed the universality of its idealism. Other pictures of child-life there are,—many of them of equal and even of superior merit as works of art,—which are marked by a fine quality of idealism; but this idealism is limited in its range ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll

... old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world—in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death—the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... 'prophet fresh from God,' as he styles himself, is a man of peace and brotherly love—oh, yes, of course! We know these wolves in sheeps' clothing, these pacifists and lovers of man with the gold of the Red International in their pockets, and slavering from their tongues the fine phrases of idealism which conveniently protect them from the strong hand of the law! We have seen their bloody work for four years in Russia, and we tell them that if they expect to prepare the confiscation of property and the nationalization ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair

... intimation, some outline, of the character of the men who composed the directors and stockholders of the California Insurance Company, who acted well their part, who fought the good fight and held the faith, whose stern sense of duty and heroic courage led them to lay upon the altar of their idealism the financial ...
— The Spirit of 1906 • George W. Brooks

... the light of a serious human being who ought to have a vote; and he did not mind Miss Arrowpoint's addiction to music any more than her probable expenses in antique lace. He was consequently a little amazed at an after-dinner outburst of Klesmer's on the lack of idealism in English politics, which left all mutuality between distant races to be determined simply by the need of a market; the crusades, to his mind, had at least this excuse, that they had a banner of sentiment round which generous feelings could rally: of course, the scoundrels ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... also financial recovery. And this, likewise, is sentimentality. Even Booth Tarkington, in his excellent "Turmoil," had to dodge the logical issue of his story; had to make his hero exchange a practical literary idealism for a very impractical, even though a commercial, utopianism, in order to emerge apparently successful at the end of the book. A story such as the Danish Nexo's "Pelle the Conqueror," where pathos and the idyllic, each intense, each beautiful, are made convincing by ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... Fielding for relegating circumstance to its true level, the detached idealism that moulded his genius, are, indeed, shown once for all in the fact that the exquisite picture of virtue, the whole-hearted attack on vice, the genial humour, the sunny portraits of humanity, the splendid cheerfulness ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... own country as well as that of Austria. [Footnote: See below, Chapter XVI.] He might even have perceived that a personal despotism, built by bloodshed and unblushing deceit, was hardly proof against a nation stirred by idealism and by a consciousness of its own rights ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... is bound to criticise a State so long as in any degree it rests on the principles of "Penguin Island"—"respect for the rich and contempt for the poor," and to modify or repeal the rights of property where they clearly conflict with human rights. But its idealism and its practical responsibilities forbid it to accept the elimination of private enterprise and the assumption by the State of all the instruments of production and distribution. Socialism has great power of emotional and even religious appeal, of which it would be wise for Liberalism ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... a hint of the identity of his assassins, announcing that if he got well he "would attend to that little matter himself." Much of the romance surrounding crime and criminals, on examination, "fades into the light of common day"—the obvious product not of idealism, but of ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train

... emancipation from metempsychosis, through the absorption of the soul into Brahm, or the universal being. According to the different principles which philosophers adopt in attaining this supreme object, their doctrines are divided into the four following systems: 1st, Sensualism; 2d, Idealism; 3d, Mysticism; ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... body, and living in a land where dreams are realities, and all things are credible, and history is only a fairy tale: the land of the moon and the lotus and the snake, old gods and old ruins, former births, second sight, and idealism: it falls back, unconsciously mesmerised, under ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain

... as thoroughly human as the plain people he mentions who had successively owned or thought they owned the house-lot on which he planted his hearthstone. But he was at home no less in the interstellar spaces outside of all the atmospheres. The semi-materialistic idealism of Milton was a gross and clumsy medium compared to the imponderable ether of "The Over-soul" and the unimaginable vacuum of "Brahma." He followed in the shining and daring track of the Graius homo ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... aware that two ideas, or principles, struggle in my mind for mastery. One is the idea of the super-mechanical and the super-chemical character of living things; the other is the idea of the supremacy and universality of what we call natural law. The first probably springs from my inborn idealism and literary habit of mind; the second from my love of nature and my scientific bent. It is hard for me to reduce the life impulse to a level with common material forces that shape and control the world of inert matter, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... attitude with William was not a form of romantic idealism bordering on lunacy; it was instead a token of his blundering stupidity; also in a sense his four-square frankness in owning that Prussia was playing second fiddle to Austria, at this interesting moment. And, in truth, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... REALISM. Among the most important literary qualities also are Idealism, Romance, and Realism. Realism, in the broad sense, means simply the presentation of the actual, depicting life as one sees it, objectively, without such selection as aims deliberately to emphasize some particular aspects, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... The word 'idealism' is used by different philosophers in somewhat different senses. We shall understand by it the doctrine that whatever exists, or at any rate whatever can be known to exist, must be in some sense mental. This doctrine, which ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell

... to represent life as it is, the worth of realism must be acknowledged. In its proper application it places the novel on an immovable basis. While idealism shows us how life might be or ought to be, realism shows how it actually is. Unfortunately, realistic writers have not, in many cases, been true to their fundamental principles. The great continental leaders of realism—Tolstoi, ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... humanity and its logical sequence in socialism and equality, equal opportunity or whatever you like.—But this time he stinketh—and I'm sorry for any Christus who brings him to life again, to stink livingly for another thirty years: the beastly Lazarus of our idealism." ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... to promote knowledge, culture, idealism, the Menorah Societies are in keeping with the university spirit which has helped to call them into existence. The Societies are an expression of the liberality and freedom of American universities. Membership is open to all students ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... to instil into every soul a deeply religious consciousness, to ennoble every heart by moral aspirations, to indoctrinate every individual with an unequivocal theory of life, to inspire every member of the nation with lofty ideals. Their work did not fail to leave its traces. Slowly but deeply idealism entered into the very pith and marrow of the national consciousness. This consciousness gained in strength and amplitude century by century, showing itself particularly in the latter part of the first period, after ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow

... taken in the imagination of power to part with that with which we have no intention of parting, is one of the most curious, though commonest forms of the Eidolon, or Phantasm of Wealth. But the political economist has nothing to do with this idealism, and looks only to the practical issue of it—namely, that the holder of wealth, in such temper, may be regarded simply as a mechanical means of collection; or as a money-chest with a slit in it, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... Count Solsky got after the plotting school teachers and rebellious students, the propaganda against my reign which has honeycombed the Empire with sedition might have been checked in time to prevent this dissolution,—for it is more than a "revolution." It is idealism run amuck. France, England, the people of America, have been duped by the intelligentia—the Kadets—who never seemed to realize that in order to hold this Empire together not only FORCE but SUPERSTITION was required,—'si mundus vult decipi decipiatur,' ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe

... boards of his theater five months after the hostile reception of L'Ecole des Femmes, Hauptmann gives us a naturalistic tragedy and, at the same time, its criticism and defense. His tenacity to the ideals of his youth is impressively illustrated here. In his own work he has created a new idealism. But let it not be thought that his understanding of tragedy and his sense of human values have changed. The charwoman may, in very truth, be a Muse of tragedy, all grief is of an equal sacredness, ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann

... ever tried to think and act and feel as He did—and if we have not, what wonder that our religion, being wholly theoretical, appears to us tainted with unreality, a thin-spun web of barren, fragile idealism which ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson

... that there was no place in Ireland for a man of his talents and his temperament. His enemies called him an opportunist: but he was a opportunist gone wrong, abandoned to an obstinate idealism, one of those damned and solitary souls that only the north of Ireland produces in perfection. For the Protestantism of Ulster breeds rebels like no other rebels on earth, rebels as strong and obstinate and canny as itself. Before he ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair

... "boys", the young professor of English literature gave his enthusiasm, his idealism, his love of all that was fair in art and the world of books. His enthusiasm inspired them with a love of artistic excellence, which, neither in his own work, nor in that of his pupils would tolerate anything commonplace. Before coming to Thornbrook, he ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles

... am sure he is right! You leave nothing to the imagination. Now a subtile veiled idealism—" He was ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... romance; Sentiment and humour; Russian middle class; The man of the future; Descriptions of nature; Superfluity of detail; The Russian proletaire; Psychology of murder; Artistic inaccuracy; Moujik and outcast; A poet's idealism. ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald

... presenting nothing appreciable but its inertia, nothing intelligible but its forms, manifests itself nowhere as cause (voluntary and free), and disappears from view entirely as substance; and we arrive at pure idealism, that is, nihility. But nihility is inconsistent with the existence of living, reasoning—I know not what to call them—uniting in themselves, in a state of commenced synthesis or imminent dissolution, all the antagonistic attributes of being. We are compelled, then, to ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... we now come to the wonder-worker. There is this difference between the miracle and the myth—a myth is an idealism of a fact, and a miracle is a counterfeit of a fact. There is some difference between a myth and a miracle. There is the difference that there is between fiction and falsehood and poetry and perjury. Miracles are probably only in ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... concentrating sight and hand and foot on a momentary physical act—in the close hair, the chastened muscle, the perfectly poised attention of the quoit-player; for men's sense, again, of ethical qualities—restless idealism, inward vision, power of presence through that vision in scenes behind the experience of ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... corresponded to a vague feeling after a real element of interest. But, in truth, our criticism, I think, applies as much to Richardson as to Fielding. Realism, taken in what I should call the right sense, is not properly opposed to 'idealism'; it points to one of the two poles towards which all literary art should be directed. The artist is a realist so far as he deals with the actual life and the genuine beliefs of his time; but he is an idealist so far as he sees the most essential facts and utters the deepest ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... stolidly along, felt curiously in sympathy with his environment. Hayter's news brought him face to face with that inner problem which had so suddenly become the dominant factor in his life. For the first time he knew what love was. He felt the wonder of it, the far-reaching possibilities, the strange idealism called so unexpectedly into being. He recognized the vagaries of Philippa's disposition, and yet, during the last few days, he had convinced himself that she was beginning to care. Her strained relations with her husband ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... alone, Kelmar would have had no rule within her doors. Rufe, to be sure, had a fine, sober, open-air attitude of mind, seeing the world without exaggeration—perhaps, we may even say, without enough; for he lacked, along with the others, that commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and money. Sanity itself is a kind of convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly, he was unable to see that croquet or poker were in any way less important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... had not occupied the best of his energies, we can only guess. His point of view was that of a Politician, not that of a man of religion. Such reforms as he might have been prepared to introduce would not have been the outcome of any lofty idealism, but only such as seemed to be dictated by public decency. As a Statesman, he was alive to the advantages of education, desired much of the wealth of the Church to be turned into that channel, and founded colleges, which ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... preserves the recorded tradition, the native history, the continuity of mind, and, until yesterday, of speech and song, that connect the half of Europe with its ancestral past. For early Europe was very largely Celtic Europe, and nowhere can we trace the continuous influence of Celtic culture and idealism, coming down to us from a remote past, save ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... kindly rule the Burgundian device: "Tout par l'amour, rien par la force." The people doubly Celt in origin, added to the Celtic ardor the quick imagination, the gift of playing lightly with life, and a high and passionate idealism expressing itself in an unequaled and valorous devotion to their rulers, together with an arcadian union of simplicity and finesse, the individual mark of their sunny ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven

... shoulder and beagle in leash. Thereupon he shouldered a wooden sword, and dragging his reluctant black kitten by a string, sallied forth upon the dusty Vermont road "to get a lion for breakfast." That is the true sporting temper! Let there be but a fine idealism in the quest, and the particular object is unessential. "A true fisherman's happiness," says Mr. Cleveland, "is not dependent upon his luck." It depends ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry

... the past and shall comprehend more steadily the currents of our own life, their direction and their value. This is, we take it, of considerable importance for life as a whole, whether for correct thinking or for true idealism. ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman

... is something that is both weak and perilous. It is really, he contends, a false idealism which tends to try and make people locally discontented, contented with pseudo visions of distant realms where the cities are of gold, where blue skies are never hidden by yellow fog. But is it a false idealism? If it is, it is that conception which ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke

... Mr. Harding with her; and the four sat out under the trees and talked. She was a girl some three years older than Corydon, but much more mature; she was short, but athletic in build, and with a bright personality. Thyrsis could see at once those fine qualities of idealism and fervor which had attracted Corydon; and to his surprise he found that, in addition to her religious virtues, the Lord had generously added a sense of humor. So Delia Gordon was really a person with whom one ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... know everything without doing so; this definition leads straight to the concept of false opinion, a thing whose object both is and is not. "That which is not" provokes an inquiry into what is, Being. Dualism, Monism, Materialism and Idealism are all discussed, the conclusion being that the Sophist is a counterfeit of the Philosopher, a wilful impostor who makes people contradict ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb

... our minds. Modern philosophers have quite generally accepted this conclusion, and every attempt to overturn Berkeley's reasoning has hitherto resulted in complete and disastrous failure. In admitting this, we do not admit the conclusion of Absolute Idealism, that nothing exists outside of consciousness. What we admit as existing independently of our own consciousness is the Power that causes in us those conscious states which we call the perception of material qualities. We have ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... Nature in man that gave him the dance, and it is his godlike fight against Nature that gave him impassioned speech; beauty of form and motion on one side, all that is divine in man on the other; on one side materialism, on the other idealism. ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell

... far, of being too ideal, too mystical. Neither character exhausts the ideal of humanity, but the intimate union of both. Both are founded in human nature; the contradictions lying at their basis, when cleared in thought from the poetical faculty, are realism and idealism. These also are sides of human nature, which, when unconnected, bring forth disastrous results. Their opposition is as old as the beginning of culture, and till its end can hardly be set aside, save in the individual. The idealist is a nobler but a far less perfect being; the realist appears ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... ferment, of sex problems and political friction, that sent so many unlikely types of manhood straight as arrows to that universal target—the Front. The War offered a high and practical outlet for their dumb idealism; to their realism, it offered the 'terrific verities of fatigue, suffering, bodily danger—beloved life ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... forces in a civilization are hunger, fear, greed, ambition. In practice these forces have proved far more effective than whips and clubs in the hand of slave drivers. They animate the rat-race for pelf, power, "success", which attracts idealism, energy, ability and throws out the carcases of those no longer able to make a contribution to the wealth and power of ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... a happy blend of the best of his father and mother; whereas, in point of fact, his father and his mother lived in him with their personalities almost intact. There was his mother, with her idealism and her high sense of honour; and his father, with his boundless ambition and his lack of principles. In the earlier years of Blake's manhood his mother's qualities had dominated. He had sincerely tried to do great work for Westville, and had done it; and the reputation he had then ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott

... must play your part in our renewal. I challenge a new generation of YOUNG Americans to a season of service, to act on your idealism, by helping troubled children, keeping company with those in need, reconnecting our torn communities. There is so much to be done. Enough, indeed, for millions of others who are still young in spirit, to give of themselves in service, too. In serving we recognize ...
— Inaugural Presidential Address • William Jefferson Clinton

... which her mind recoiled from the first stirrings of change, she was beginning dimly to realize that the car of progress would move through the quiet streets before the decade was over. The smoke of factories was already succeeding the smoke of the battlefields, and out of the ashes of a vanquished idealism the spirit of commercial materialism was born. What was left of the old was fighting valiantly, but hopelessly, against what had come of the new. The two forces filled the streets of Dinwiddie. They were embodied ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... The people admire old Grover's strength so much, he is a positive man and an honest man, and when the people see these two exceptional virtues mixed happily in a candidate they grow to love and admire him out of the very idealism ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... metaphor, the Revelator, immortal scribe of Spirit and of a true idealism, furnishes the 571:24 mirror in which mortals may see their own image. In significant figures he depicts the thoughts which he beholds in mortal mind. Thus he 571:27 rebukes the conceit of sin, and foreshadows its doom. With his spiritual ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... and Campoamor in Spain, like many before them, have given metrical form to the expression of their philosophical views. And other poets, who had an intuitive aversion to science, have taken refuge in pure idealism and have created worlds after their own liking. To-day prose is recognized as the best medium for the promulgation of scientific or political teachings, and those who are by nature poets are turning to art for art's sake. Poetry is less didactic than formerly, and it is none the less ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... real need to worry. We can still encourage the unsuccessful author, who has been befogged by romance and idealism, to peg away for a year or two at some, if possible, unique form of manufacture, going into it from the bottom and learning its tricks and its manners. He will have at least the opportunity of becoming a good mechanic, and probably some ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... passionate strife with the encroaching mood that was a mocker of his idealism. Many times during the strange, long martyrdom of his penance had he faced this crisis, only to go down to defeat before elemental instincts. His soul was steeped in gloom, but his intelligence had not yet succumbed to passion. The beauty of Columbine's character and the nobility of Moore's ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey

... in those comments, criticisms, and judgments which pass from man to man through a wide area and sometimes through long periods of time. The opinion which appears at first glance to be an expression of materialism often shows, upon closer study, an element of idealism or a touch of spiritual discernment. It is customary, for instance, to say of a man that he lives in his works; as if the enduring quality of his fame rested in and was dependent upon the tangible products of his genius or his skill. There ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie



Words linked to "Idealism" :   philosophical theory, romanticism, idealistic, noble-mindedness, quixotism, high-mindedness, idealist, knight errantry, philosophical doctrine



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