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Visionary   Listen
noun
Visionary  n.  (pl. visionaries)  
1.
One whose imagination is disturbed; one who sees visions or phantoms.
2.
One whose imagination overpowers his reason and controls his judgment; an unpractical schemer; one who builds castles in the air; a daydreamer.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Visionary" Quotes from Famous Books



... the basis of religious doctrine, but also practically, as the starting point of legislation. It was to be realized in the daily walks of the people, which at this very time attained to political independence. Sublime religious conceptions were not to be made the content of a visionary creed, the subject of dreamy contemplation, but, in the form of perspicuous guiding principles, were to control all spheres of individual and social life. Men must beware of looking upon religion as an ideal to be yearned for, it should be an ideal to be applied directly, day by day, ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow

... brittle fleet (I thought I could have died to save it) near'd, Touch'd, clink'd, and clash'd, and vanish'd, and I woke, I heard the clash so clearly. Now I see My dream was Life; the woman honest Work; And my poor venture but a fleet of glass Wreck'd on a reef of visionary gold.' ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson

... wild and erratic imagination of our ancestors manifested itself, was in the creation of a world of visionary beings of a less terrific character, but which did not fail to annoy their thoughts, and perplex their determinations, known by the name ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... shock of sudden wealth after a life of poverty, people said, had unsettled his mind. He claimed to see things that others did not see, to hear voices, and to have visions. Evidently, he was not of the harmless, foolish, visionary order, but a man of character and of great personal force, for the people became divided in their opinions, and the vicar, good man, regarded and treated him as a "special case." For many, his name and atmosphere became charged almost with a spiritual influence that was ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... faith was so strong and simple, my Mother possessed no quality of the mystic. She never pretended to any visionary gifts, believed not at all in dreams or portents, and encouraged nothing in herself or others which was superstitious or fantastic. In order to realize her condition of mind, it is necessary, I think, to accept the view that she had formed ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... our hero's rod was speedily flung aside. Society and example, which, more than any other motives, master and sway the natural bent of our passions, might have had their usual effect upon the youthful visionary. But the neighbourhood was thinly inhabited, and the home-bred young squires whom it afforded were not of a class fit to form Edward's usual companions, far less to excite him to emulation in the practice of those pastimes which composed the serious ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... mountains for conserving the sources of all our great Western streams, by which millions of acres are to be irrigated and millions of homes built up in the West. He was from the first no "tenderfoot" adventurer, no visionary enthusiast, but a practical, hard-headed man far more earnestly and disinterestedly concerned in the Westerners' future than they ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... altogether ignorant of Arabic, or the language in which they might be supposed to be written.' Goldsmith's Misc. Works, ed. 1801, i. 40. Percy says that Goldsmith applied to the prime minister, Lord Bute, for a salary to enable him to execute 'the visionary project' mentioned in the text. 'To prepare the way, he drew up that ingenious essay on this subject which was first printed in the Ledger, and afterwards in his Citizen of the World [No. 107].' Ib. p. 65. Percy adds that the Earl of Northumberland, who was Lord Lieutenant of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... over the parapet and away, followed by his Company. In that long, steadily-advancing line were many of our friends. Mucklewame was there, panting heavily, and cannily commending his soul to Providence. Messrs. Ogg and Hogg were there, shoulder to shoulder. M'Ostrich, the Ulster visionary, was there, six paces ahead of any other man, crooning some Ironside canticle to himself. Next behind him came the ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay

... the position of a mere purveyor of motive to morality is not more dishonorable to the ethics which must ask than to the religion which will render such assistance.... The feeling Schleiermacher advocates, is not the fanaticism of the ignorant or the visionary emotion of the idle. It is not an aimless reverie shrinking morbidly from the light of clear and definite thought. Feeling, in its sound condition, affects both our conception and our will, leads to knowledge and to action. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... Stephen, I've never looked on you as a crank; I always believed you sane and honest. But this is—visionary mania. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... reaching out my hand and shaking it in the air with my visionary friend—"thanks. I've studied these things with some care, and I've tried to find a reason for everything in life as I know it. I have always regarded Henry as a moral man—as is natural, since in spite of all you can say he is the real head of the English Church. ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs

... was Mrs. Barnes' only near relative, a brother. Always a visionary, easy-going, impractical little man, he had never been willing to stick at steady employment, but was always chasing rainbows and depending upon his sister for a home and means of existence. When the Klondike gold fever struck the country he was one of the first to ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln

... great, but a less motive than yourself would easily carry me thither; and such credentials also of who, and what I am, as, I flatter myself, would not appear contemptible in the eyes of your friends:—the prospect therefore is not so visionary as you seem to think, provided I ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood

... a cad, for it mattered little whether or not I loved her. I had won her trust, and my first duty was to speak her name with pride. But I had had that brief glimpse of Penelope Blight, the companion of my boyhood; I had walked with her, grown lovelier than my dreams, through visionary woods and fields. She was before me, a dainty woman of the world; behind her the firelight fanned the leaves carved for her long ago by the old Italian artist; from above Reynolds's majestic lady looked down at her kindly, at me with a haughty stare, as if she read presumption in my mind. Never ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... procuring it. He warned me when I left him that he was not to be hoodwinked: he must see the money standing in my name on the day appointed. His doubts were evident, but he affected to be expectant. Not a word of Sarkeld could be spoken. My success appeared to be on a more visionary foundation ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... displayed the lack of tact and penetration which made the people doubt the solidity and coolness of his judgment. His methods of dealing with the most intricate problems of finance seemed experimental and rash. The sensitive interests of business shrank from his visionary theories and his dangerous empiricism. His earlier affiliation with novel and doubtful social schemes had laid him open to the reproach of being called a ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... case from our own experience in order to show what has actually been accomplished in the way of fostering the love of music in one Public School. We are aware that this standard would appear entirely visionary to the authorities of some other schools: there are some to whom the idea of one choir singing in two parts seems more than is practicable. But when music is recognised as an integral part of education, as it used to be in Greece, then we may look forward to a different ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt

... of the warm sunny shower The visionary boy from shelter fly; For now the storm of summer rain is o'er, And cool, and fresh, and fragrant is the sky. And, lo! in the dark east, expanded high, The rainbow brightens to the setting Sun! Fond fool, that deem'st the streaming glory nigh, How vain the chase thine ardour ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... is associated another dialogue called the Critias, which remains only as a fragment. In it is contained a description of the celebrated visionary kingdom of Atlantis, lying far beyond the pillars of Hercules, a land of splendour and luxury and power, a land also of gentle manners and wise orderliness. "The fiction has exercised a great influence ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... Like brain sick frenzy in its feverish mood. Fills the light air with visionary terrors And ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton

... the inexperience of thy brethren—stoop thyself in turn to their derision—tell what they may not believe—affirm that which they will ascribe to idle fear, or perhaps to idle falsehood—sustain the disgrace of a silly visionary, or a wilful deceiver.—Be it so, I will do my duty, and make ample confession to my Superior. If the discharge of this duty destroys my usefulness in this house, God and Our Lady will send me where ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... thought practicable to supply this want by tunnelling through the wall of the plateau, which rises abruptly in the rear of the town, until some subterranean stream is encountered, the current of which can be conducted to the city. More visionary projectors have gone further, and imagined that advantage might be taken of the natural tunnels under the Karst for the passage of roads, railways, and even navigable canals. But however chimerical these latter schemes may seem, there is every ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... of the warm sunny shower, The visionary boy from shelter fly! For now the storm of summer-rain is o'er, And cool, and fresh, and fragrant is the sky. And, lo! in the dark east, expanded high, The rainbow brightens to the setting sun! Fond fool, ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie

... call heroic, the saint works miracles, the warrior performs exploits beyond the strength of natural man. In ages less visionary, which are given to ease and enjoyment, the tendency is to bring a great man down to the common level, and to discover or invent faults which shall show that he is or was but a little man after all. Our vanity ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... suppose that Peter Cartwright was a mere visionary or dreamer. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He was abundantly possessed with what, in Western parlance, is known as "horse sense." He was a student of men, and kept in close touch with the affairs of this world. His shrewdness, no less than ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... courses, which they feel they have not the moral force to continue. "May I die," said the Cynic, "rather than lead a life of pleasure." "May I die," says the Epicurean, "rather than make a fool of myself." The Idealist is to them, if not {227} a hypocrite, at least a visionary,—if not a Tartuffe, at least a Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Yet even for poor Don Quixote, with all his blindness and his follies, the world retains a sneaking admiration. It can spare a few or a good many of its worldly-wisdoms, rather than ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... over and over in my mind; and when I found myself in London, in the autumn of 1854, just after the battle of Alma had been fought, and my old friends were fairly before the walls of Sebastopol, how to join them there took up far more of my thoughts than that visionary gold-mining speculation on the river Palmilla, which seemed so feasible to us in New Granada, but was considered so wild and unprofitable a speculation in London. And, as time wore on, the inclination to join my old friends of the 97th, 48th, and other regiments, battling with worse ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole

... one of the cleanest of all the world's great books. It is not merely technically clean, but clean-minded. It has the form of a satire on chivalry, but its meaning goes much deeper. It is really a satire on a more persistent weakness of the Spanish character, visionary unrealism. We have this quality held up to ridicule in the learned man and the ignorant man, for Sancho Panza is as much of an unrealist as his master, only he is a groveling visionary while Don Quixote ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman

... over Hindustan as the representative of the forgotten peshwas. The stampede of the sepoys to Delhi was fatal to his mad ambition. He overtook the mutineers, dazzled them with fables of the treasures in Wheeler's intrenchment, and brought them back to Cawnpore to carry out his vindictive and visionary schemes. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne

... of the most unattractive kind, who had persistently refused to accept Sunchildism, while Mrs. Nosnibor was the recipient of honours hardly inferior to those conferred by the people at large on my father and mother, with whom, indeed, she believed herself to have frequent interviews by way of visionary revelations. So intolerable were these revelations to Zulora, that a separate establishment had been provided for her. George said to my father quietly—"Do you know I begin to think that Zulora must ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler

... how could any such message be delivered? And already the steamer was away from the land, standing out to the lonely plain of waters, and the sound of the engines had ceased, and the figures on the deck had grown faint and visionary. But still there was that one speck of white visible; and the man knew that a pair of eyes that had many a time looked into his own—as if with a faith that such intercommunion could never be broken—were now trying, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various

... Chartist, a Communist, all that is commonly called wild and visionary. Ay! but being visionary is something. It shows a soul, a being not altogether sensual; a creature who looks forward for others, if not ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... realistic representation of pure unrealities. His saints and angels are beings the like of whom we have hardly seen upon the earth. Yet they are displayed before us with all the movement and the vivid truth of nature. Next we feel that what constitutes the superhuman, visionary quality of these creatures, is their uniform beauty of a merely sensuous type. They are all created for pleasure, not for thought or passion or activity or heroism. The uses of their brains, their limbs, their every feature, end in enjoyment; innocent ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... it, Amine, since you are so earnest. I can refuse you nothing; but I have a foreboding that yours and my happiness will be wrecked for ever. I am not a visionary, but it does appear to me that, strangely mixed up as I am, at once with this world and the next, some little portion of futurity is opened to me. I have given my promise, Amine, but from it ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat

... improvements. Later theories were no more satisfactory. The French Revolutionary philosophers, especially Rousseau, with his theory of voluntary social contract, and the Utopian dreamers who followed, were longing for justice and political efficiency, but their theories seem crude and visionary from the point of view of the social science of the ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... usual stages of popular distempers; would have had its access, its crisis, and decline; and when the scourge had passed, the public would have awakened to a full sense of the madness of which they had been the victims; but in that process there was the danger of society going to pieces—of the visionary frenzy of the possessed being taken up by fanatics as the foundation of a new and abominable religion, and of the hostility of the ignorant and uneducated class, among whom chiefly the possession prevailed, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... celebrated musaeum; statues, busts, pictures, medals, tables inlaid in the way of marquetry, cabinets adorned with precious stones, jewels of all sorts, mathematical instruments, antient arms and military machines, that the imagination is bewildered, and a stranger of a visionary turn, would be apt to fancy himself in a palace of the fairies, raised and adorned by the power ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... wain which had borne the sacred body unto Dunum; and they stayed not to follow its track, believing that it carried the precious burden, until it came within the borders of Ardmachia, unto a certain river which is named Caucune. Then the visionary wain disappeared; and the people, frustrated of their hope, unsatisfied and sad, returned ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various

... at Kilmainham—I will not particularize any man, or the conduct of any man—has been most severe, most harsh, not fit for a beast, much less a human being. I was brought to Kilmainham, so far as I know, without any warrant from the Lord Lieutenant. I was brought on a charge the most visionary and airy. No man knew what I was. No one could tell me or specify to me the charge on which I was detained. I asked the magistrates at Dungarvan to advise me of these charges. They would not tell me. At last ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown

... unfortunately have never enjoyed domestic happiness, such as we have just described, will perhaps suppose the picture to be visionary and romantic; there are others—it is hoped many others—who will feel that it is drawn from truth and real life. Tastes that have been vitiated by the stimulus of dissipation might, perhaps, think these simple ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth

... 11 Now this he spake because of the stiffneckedness of Laman and Lemuel; for behold they did murmur in many things against their father, because he was a visionary man, and had led them out of the land of Jerusalem, to leave the land of their inheritance, and their gold, and their silver, and their precious things, to perish in the wilderness. And this they said he had done because of the foolish imaginations ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous

... save Arthur himself, the cause of it. Since the night when the "ghost," as he called it, first entered his heart, and since the dream of home hovered over his pillow, he had felt as if it might be possibly a visionary counterpart of one of those events which "cast their shadows before," and he had striven right manfully against every impulse which might in any way tend to make himself the fulfiller of it. Often, when the stern reproof, or the sly ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa

... costly volumes in glazed cases. The house must have been taken furnished; for it had no congruity with this man of the shirt sleeves and the mean supper. As for the earl's daughter, the earl and the visionary consulships in foreign cities, they had long ago begun to fade in Challoner's imagination. Like Doctor Grierson and the Mormon angels, they were plainly woven of the stuff of dreams. Not an illusion remained to the knight-errant; not a hope was left him, but to be speedily ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson

... friend of this elder poet, and was encouraged to pursue his visionary history of the earlier years of his life and his fantastic adoration for Beatrice Portinari. The Vita Nuova was read by the poet's circle, who had a sympathetic interest in the details of the drama. The young lover did not confess his ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead

... fought by the side of King Richard in the Holy Land a visionary?" said Tancred. "All I ask is to be allowed to follow in his footsteps. For three days and three nights he knelt in prayer at the tomb of his Redeemer. Six centuries and more have gone by since then. It is high time that we renewed our intercourse with the Most High in the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... Southerner as he was, but imbued with the vigor of the Jackson school, believed that each question should be taken up by itself and settled on its own merits. A policy which seemed wise to three such different men as Taylor, Seward, and Benton, could hardly have been so utterly impracticable and visionary as Mr. Webster's partisans would like the world to believe. It was in fact one of the cases which that extremely practical statesman Nicolo Machiavelli had in mind when he wrote that, "Dangers that are seen afar off are easily prevented; but protracting till they are near at hand, the remedies ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... now before us contains, in my opinion, one of those visionary provisions, which, however infallible they may appear, will be easily defeated, and will have no other effect than to promote cunning and fraud, and to teach men those acts of collusion, with which they would ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson

... this there was a strangeness that attracted and enchanted me. He was, as it were, now awakened from his long, visionary sleep, and he felt some what like one of the seven sleepers, or like Nourjahad,[17] in that sweet imitation of an eastern tale: Diana was gone; his friends were changed or dead, and now on his awakening I was all that he had ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

... evil genius engaged him in the study of Hebrew, and the mysteries of the Jewish religion, which fairly disordered his brain, and rendered him incapable of managing his temporal affairs. When he ought to have been employed in the functions of his post, he was always wrapt in visionary conferences with Moses on the Mount; rather than regulate the economy of his household, he chose to exert his endeavours in settling the precise meaning of the word Elohim; and having discovered that now the period ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... resided near this place, and we have no hesitation in saying that we consider them destitute of that moral character which ought to entitle them to the confidence of any community. They were particularly famous for visionary projects; spent much of their time in digging for money which they pretended was hid in the earth, and to this day large excavations may be seen in the earth, not far from their residence, where they used to spend their time in digging for ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... corners of the streets without danger, provided the NATIONAL CHURCH be founded on the broad principles of virtue, and on the practice of those morals which are so beautifully expounded in the New Testament; and provided the parochial clergy do not mix themselves with those visionary topics which depend for success more on zeal and credulity, than on argument or reason. Such a church must flourish, as long as common sense, and a respect for virtue, govern the majority. In this view, I lament, however, that a revision has not taken place of those ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips

... the excitability and often rash and dangerous elan, which are popularly supposed to be the chief distinguishing features of France—at the very moment of beginning such a fairy tale, such a wonderful embodiment of the visionary and ideal, as is the story of Jeanne d'Arc. To call it a fairy tale is, however, disrespectful: it is an angelic revelation, a vision made into flesh and blood, the dream of a woman's fancy, more ethereal, more impossible than that of any man—even a poet:—for the man, ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... how a man situated as Smith is must be beset with requests of all kinds. Now it is an inventor needing capital; again it is some visionary who comes to advocate a brilliant scheme which must surely yield millions of profit. A choice has to be made between these projects, rejecting the worthless, examining the questionable ones, accepting the meritorious. To this work Mr. Smith devotes ...
— In the Year 2889 • Jules Verne and Michel Verne

... he, "that fellow Florent hasn't an idea about politics, and would have done far better to seek a berth as writing master in a ladies' school! It would be nothing short of a misfortune if he were to succeed, for, with his visionary social sentimentalities, he would crush us down beneath his confounded working men! It's all that, you know, which ruins the party. We don't need any more tearful sentimentalists, humanitarian poets, people who kiss and slobber ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... those works with which no man, fond of typographical and bibliographical pursuits, can comfortably dispense. I had nearly forgotten to warn you against the capricious works of BEUGHEM; a man, nevertheless, of wonderful mental elasticity; but for ever planning schemes too vast and too visionary for the ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... and full of light, Fair town, arrayed in robes of white, How visionary ye appear! All like a floating landscape seems In cloud-land or the land of dreams, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... know a bit about such things. A big surgery journal, back in the '40s, had published a visionary article on grafting a whole limb, with colored plates as if for a real procedure[A]. Then they'd developed techniques for acclimating a graft to the host's serum, so it would not react as a foreign body. First, they'd transplanted ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker

... and almost abject figure of the little provincial official, the coarse and jealous family despot, the miserly money-lender who picked up the candle-ends and scraps left from dinner, and was at the same time a passionate believer in some visionary future "social harmony," who at night gloated in ecstasies over fantastic pictures of a future phalanstery, in the approaching realisation of which, in Russia, and in our province, he believed as firmly as in his own existence. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... devoted himself almost exclusively to journalism, working hard and without much reward, but acquiring the pen of a ready writer and obtaining command of a style which has proved serviceable in his subsequent career. In 1870 he published "The Visionary,"—"Den Fremsynte"—of which a translation is now, for the first time, offered to English readers. In the following year he revisited Nordland and travelled into Finmark. Having obtained a small travelling pension from the Government, immediately after his journey to ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie

... is without cause, visionary, unreasonable, jealousy partakes of the nature and malice of envy. It is even more malignant a passion, and leads to greater disorders and crimes, for while envy is based on nothing at all, there is here a true foundation in the right of possession, and a motive in right ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... distinguished in its outset by the most unusual promise, is tarnished. His sensibility is shrunk up and withered by events the most disgustful to his feelings. His mind was fraught with all the rhapsodies of visionary honour; and, in his sense, nothing but the grosser part, the mere shell of Falkland, was capable of surviving the wound that his ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin

... chamber. Her wildest dreams, and they had been at times fantastic, had never showed her anything measurably approaching the scene that smote her eyes now. For the moment death, Red Jabez, her destiny, everything melted into the visionary beyond and left her capable ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle

... below,—as I drove thus in the balmy air, and saw of a sudden a vision of creamy walls and orange roof, draped in fantastic festoons of roses, with a single curving palm-tree stuck black and feathery against the gold sunset, it is hardly to be wondered at that I should slip into a mood of visionary enjoyment, looking for a time on the whole thing as the misty phantasm ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various

... passed from the earth two years ago; but to those who knew him his memory is as fresh as the verdure above his grave at Greenwood. More lately, one who had been from the outset associated with what to many appeared this visionary plan, to whose capacity and experience, his legal skill, his legislative influence, his social distinction, the work has been always largely indebted, and who was for years the President of the Board, has followed into the ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley

... very picturesque and interesting figure, is Gabriele d'Annunzio—very much in earnest, wholly sincere, but fanatical, egotistical, intolerant of the rights or opinions of others, a visionary, and perhaps a little mad. I imagine that he would rather have his name linked with that of that other soldier-poet, who "flamed away at Missolonghi" nearly a century ago, than with any other character in history save Garibaldi. D'Annunzio, like Byron, was ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell

... Massachusetts, commercial from its infancy, did not come into the Union to surrender its commerce, navigation, or seamen to any visionary theories of the South. For nearly two centuries it had struggled for all its liberties with the parent empire. It had learned in the cruel school of oppression that the price ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... the difficulty of a new invention, and the fact that the paddle-boat had established itself in public estimation. The engineering and shipbuilding world were dead against him. They regarded the project of propelling a vessel by means of a screw as visionary and preposterous. There was also the official unwillingness to undertake anything novel, untried, and contrary to routine. There was the usual shaking of the head and the shrugging of the shoulders, as if the inventor were either a mere dreamer or a projector ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... more or less visionary and advanced by men of theory with little or no capital. They had the effect of awakening public interest and paved the way for a more feasible plan. The question of a Pacific railway, its practicability, earnings, and effect, were constantly before the people. In ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey

... purer nuptials of the soul; And one not pale of blood, to human touch Not tardily responsive, yet may know A deeper transport and a mightier thrill Than comes of commerce with mortality, When, rapt from all relation with his kind, All temporal and immediate circumstance, In silence, in the visionary mood That, flashing light on the dark deep, perceives Order beyond this coil and errancy; Isled from the fretful hour he stands alone, And hears the eternal movement, and beholds Above him and around and at his feet, In million-billowed ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... known, and measures the most extravagant were proposed and discussed. No one seemed to be deterred by the consideration that it would be dishonorable to break the truce, taking advantage of the darkness and giving the enemy no notification, and the wildest, most visionary schemes were offered; they would resume the march on Carignan, hewing their way through the Bavarians, which they could do in the black night; they would recapture the plateau of Illy by a surprise; they would raise the blockade of the Mezieres ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... of priority to their heart's content; the historic fact is that the telephone dates from a dramatic moment in the year 1876. Sanders and Hubbard, much annoyed that Bell had abandoned his harmonic telegraph for so visionary an idea as a long distance talking machine, refused to finance him further unless he returned to his original quest. Disappointed and disconsolate, Bell and his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, had started work on the top floor of the Williams Manufacturing Company's shop in Boston. And now another ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick

... consumed our midnight oil; and not only that, but also burnt a great deal of daylight.— Our work, we say, is ended— and such as it is we commit it to the world. Horace says Carm. Lib. iii, Ode XXX. (an ode which by some strange association of ideas, is always connected in our mind with the visionary image of a jug of ale,) "Exegi monumentum aere perennius," I have perfected a work more durable than brass. Whether our production is characterized by the durability of that metal or not, is a question which we leave to the decision of posterity; we cannot, however, help thinking that, ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh

... Museum is a very comprehensive and instructive volume. It is a triumphant refutation of the opinions of those who, to the vast injury of literature, and serious inconvenience of men of letters, slight common sense and real utility in favour of visionary schemes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 213, November 26, 1853 • Various

... of the revival of learning. Hippocrates and Galen were studied, and were translated into Latin. Paracelsus, a German physician (1493-1541), besides broaching various theories more or less visionary, advanced the science on the chemical side, introducing certain mineral remedies. Vesalius, a native of Brussels (1514-1564), who became chief physician of Charles V. and Philip II., dissected the human body, and produced the first comprehensive and systematic view ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... company—she had indulged in an unspoken conviction that each guest was ever afterward slightly indebted to her. They owed her a sort of moral ten dollars apiece, and should she ever be in need she might, so to speak, borrow from them this visionary currency. But they were gone, scattered like chaff, mysteriously and subtly vanished in essence ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... it to your partiality for that detestable wine called Port. Confine yourself to Hock and Moselle, sirrah: I fear me, you have a base hankering after mutton and beef. Restrict yourself to salads, and do not sin even with an omelette more than once a week. Coridon must be visionary and diaphanous, or he is no Coridon for me. Remove my night-gloves, and assist me to rise: it is past four o'clock, and the sun must have, by this time, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... system of philosophy. In the famous Ode on Intimations of Immortality, the poet doubtless does point to a set of philosophic ideas, more or less complete; but the thought from which he sets out, that our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, and that we are less and less able to perceive the visionary gleam, less and less alive to the glory and the dream of external nature, as infancy recedes further from us, is, with all respect for the declaration of Mr. Ruskin to the contrary, contrary to notorious fact, experience, and truth. It ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... better able to perform it; for I am just now particularly hungry, and am always better able to resist temptation with a full stomach than an empty one. As I find it displeasing to Sir Ralph, I will not insist upon my visionary partner in the dance, at least until I am better able to substantiate the fact; and I shall listen to your lectures, worthy sir, with great delight, and, I doubt not, with equal benefit; but in the meantime, as carnal wants must be supplied, and mundane ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... pleasures, but would stick to his business, and employ his leisure time in profitable reading. This, Mr. Parton calls his "regeneration." Others might view it as the completion of "sowing his wild oats." He certainly made himself very useful to the old visionary Keimer, who printed banknotes for New Jersey, by making improvements on the copper plate; but he soon left this employment and set up for himself, in partnership with another ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... constitution; those who wished such a convention merely to amend the existing charter-constitution; and those, until 1800, predominately in the majority, who were convinced that whether the state had a constitution or not was a most frivolous and baneful question, mooted only by "visionary theorists," or by those who were desirous of a change, no matter how disastrous it might be to good government. The conservative party held that, since the charter had been drawn according to the tenor of a draft submitted by Winthrop and outlining the government according ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.

... life again, as you say—how sweet and terrible and glad it would be! But I know, oh, I know myself and I know you! I am like one who has lived forever. I am not good, and I am not foolish, I am only mad; and the madness in me urges me to that visionary world where you and I could live and work and wander, and be content with all that would be given ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... a great multitude of selected men, chosen volunteers, will be collaborating upon this new step in man's struggle with the elements. Bacon's visionary House of Saloman [Footnote: In The New Atlantis.] will be a thing realised, and it will be humming with this business. Every university in the world will be urgently working for priority in this aspect of the problem or that. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... sheets of this whaleboat, and as the boat touched the beach it seemed to Mr. Gibney that this man sprang ashore and ran swiftly toward him. And—Mr. Gibney twisted his suffering lips into a wry smile as he realized the oddities of this mirage—it seemed to him that this visionary white man bore a striking resemblance to Neils Halvorsen. Neils Halvorsen, of all men! Old Neils, "the squarehead" deckhand of the green-pea trade! Dull, bowlegged Neils, with his ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne

... tendency to correct some of the erroneous impressions current among us as to the intellectual qualities and temperament of the Italian people. The common, or, at least, a very prevalent, notion concerning them is that they are an impassioned, imaginative, excitable, visionary race, capable of brilliant individual efforts, but deficient in the power of organization and combination, and in patience and practical sagacity. Some of us go, or have gone, farther, and have supposed that the Austrian domination in Italy was the necessary consequence of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... Crusade; and having won that splendid victory which laid distracted France at his feet, he only waited to complete the conquest as thoroughly and rapidly as might be; and, lest his grand purpose should be obstructed, this great practical visionary, though full of kindness and generosity, kept in thraldom a whole troop of royal and ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Lenski also had outpoured, But Olga would not such peruse. When poets lachrymose recite Beneath the eyes of ladies bright Their own productions, some insist No greater pleasure can exist Just so! that modest swain is blest Who reads his visionary theme To the fair object of his dream, A beauty languidly at rest, Yes, happy—though she at his side By ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... by one, he should adjourn practical success to his only son,—myself. Quiet, but unremitting, were his efforts to make me avoid the rock on which his worldly fortunes had been wrecked. In vain: to me there was a light in his eye which lured me on to those visionary shores from which he warned me; and whilst he was holding out the labors and duties of a regular and steadfast practitioner as merciful and honorable among the highest, there was an undertone in his voice, of which he was unconscious, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... intercourse with unearthly beings, he has, by his writings and speech, left room for simple-minded people who have read his works and history, to suppose that he did. His belief in presentiment was very strong, as also visionary warnings of imminent danger ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... low murmur of human voices, by the chime of the vesper bells, borne over the water, and the sounds of music raised at intervals along the canals. The poetry, the romance of the scene stole upon me unawares. I fell into a reverie, in which visionary forms and recollections gave way to dearer and sadder realities, and my mind seemed no longer in my own power. I called upon the lost, the absent, to share the present with me,—I called upon past feelings to enhance that moment's delight. I did wrong—and memory avenged herself ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... in this visionary house and did not awaken until the sun was high up and hurrying men and women to work. So he rose quickly, for he counted himself among this working-class, felt his responsibilities, and began to reckon with the difficulties he had ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... she had married a fool in the hope that this thankless wit, reflecting on it, would conclude that she had no appreciation of merit, and that he had flattered himself in supposing that she cared for his own. Restless, discontented, visionary, without personal ambitions, but with a certain avidity of imagination, she was, as I have said before, eminently incomplete. She was full—both for good and for ill—of beginnings that came to nothing; but she had nevertheless, morally, a spark ...
— The American • Henry James

... had observed so many times before. Nearby were the same booths and from within them came the same laughter and chatter and suppressed song. Opposite the tiny table the same man with the broad, good-natured face was making critical, smiling observation, as of yore. As ever, the look recalled the visionary to the present. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... that a dog shall not find shelter from a snow-storm, nor a wren find an apology for breakfast."] miles— northwards for six hundred; and the sympathy of our Lombard Street friends at parting is exalted a hundredfold by a sort of visionary sympathy with the yet slumbering sympathies which in so vast a succession we ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... life, there leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life ... Everything else in our lives is transitory. Every other good is visionary. But the acts of love which no man knows about, or can ever ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman

... the ridicule and contempt of the world has crushed truth in the embryo or stifled it in the cradle, which makes me so eager to examine and support those opinions which mankind generally condemn as visionary and irrational.' In later times these interests became a bond between W. R. Greg and Miss Martineau. He finally let the subject drop, with the conviction that years of practice had brought it no farther on its way either to scientific ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley

... impossible to understand or appreciate Vathek apart from Beckford's life and character, which contain elements almost as grotesque and fantastic as those of his romance. He was no visionary dreamer, content to build his pleasure-domes in air. He revelled in the golden glories of good Haroun-Alraschid,[69] but he craved too for solid treasures he could touch and handle, for precious jewels, for rare, beautiful volumes, for ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... 1792 a decree passed the convention for issuing a "Commission for the examination of monuments." Mercier was appointed one of the thirty-three members of which the commission was composed, and the famous Barrere was also of the number. Barrere, fertile in projects however visionary and destructive, proposed to Mercier, as a bright thought, "to make a short extract from every book in the national library: to have these extracts superbly printed by Didot;—and to ... BURN ALL THE BOOKS FROM WHICH THEY WERE TAKEN!" It never occurred ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... Lamb laid such stress. Imagination played the very mischief with him. He had evidently little grasp of fact, and moved in a kind of haze, through which all clear outlines would show blurred and unreal. Sometimes—most often, perhaps—that haze would be irradiated with sanguine visionary hopes and expectations. Sometimes it would be fitfully darkened with all the horrors of despair. But whether in gloom or gleam, the realities of his position would be lost. He never, certainly, contracted a debt which he did not mean ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials

... convalescence Mary-Clare had strange visionary moments. She seemed to be able at times to detach herself from her surroundings and, guided by almost forgotten words of Northrup's, find herself—with him. And always he was alone. She never visualized his mother; she could, thank ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock

... dream of a visionary? Is it merely the fancied perception of an inexistent star? Is it nothing more than a groundless hope and an alluring vagary? The answer is visible everywhere. And the hope of peace finds its safest assurance among the institutions of learning in America. James Bryce has referred ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... the journey ends is more openly fanciful, down-right visionary in tone, but the manner is very emphatically not that of Sterne, though in the midst the Sterne motif of nettle-plucking is introduced. This sentimental episode took hold of German imagination with peculiar force. The hobby-horse idea also was sure of its appeal, and Bock did not fail ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer

... mystery, keeping his imagination always awake and strong. That castle in the air,—so much more vivid than other castles, because it had perhaps a real substance of ancient, ivy-grown, hewn stone somewhere,—that visionary hall in England, with its surrounding woods and fine lawns, and the beckoning shadows at the ancient windows, and that fearful threshold, with the blood still glistening on it,—he dwelt and wandered so much there, that he had no real life in the sombre house on the corner of the graveyard; ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... purple slates. Ursula went on towards Willey Green. She lifted her face and walked swiftly, seeing the passage of light across the shallow valley, seeing the colliery and its clouds of steam for a moment visionary in dim brilliance, away in the chaos of rain. Then the veils closed again. She was glad of ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... of its history the most visionary ideas were formed by the company and the public of the immense riches of the eastern coast of South America. Everybody had heard of the gold and silver mines of Peru and Mexico; everyone believed them to be inexhaustible, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... he exclaimed, "the confines of vision." Snatching it violently out of his hands, he walked away with the Taoist, under a lofty stone portal, on the face of which appeared in large type the four characters: "T'ai Hsue Huan Ching," "The Visionary limits of the Great Void." On each side was ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... thus to work on my vanity, calls me "Pasha Effendi." Finding that toward their entreaties I give but the same reply, one of the younger men coolly advocates the use of force to coerce me into giving them an exhibition of my skill on the araba. As far as I am able to interpret, this bold visionary's argument is: "Behold, we are seven; Effendi is only one; we are good Mussulmans - peace be with us - he is but a Frank - ashes on his head- let ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... England took a wholly literary form. In France it was what people did that was wild and elemental; in England it was what people wrote. It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... we had such confidence in the fundamental value of the concern that we were willing to assume this risk. There are always a few men in an undertaking of this kind who would risk all on their judgment of the final result, and if the enterprise had failed, these would have been classed as visionary adventurers, and ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller

... She had the same visionary optimism in regarding her daughters' futures. The girls were all to marry, of course, and marry well, far ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris

... popular feeling. With rare dexterity he took the tone, not of an advocate, but of a judge. The danger which seemed so terrible to many honest friends of liberty he did not venture to pronounce altogether visionary. But he reminded his countrymen that a choice between dangers was sometimes all that was left to the wisest of mankind. No lawgiver had ever been able to devise a perfect and immortal form of government. Perils lay thick ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Patapouf was busy with a game of make-believe—pretending that the longish grass was a jungle, and himself a tiger, stalking I know not what visionary prey: now gingerly, with slow calculated liftings and down-puttings of his feet, stealing a silent march; now, flat on his belly, rapidly creeping forward; now halting, recoiling, masking himself behind some inequality of the ground, peering warily over it, while his tail swayed responsive to the ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... take me for a visionary. Curious, indeed, if that man who, a poor son of the people, took the lead in abolishing feudal injustices a thousand years old, created a currency of millions in a moneyless nation, and suddenly organized armies out of untrained masses of civilians; ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth

... though his bruised face betrayed not his cast of thought, still evinced a participation in the ideal transactions of the night, by the frequent involuntary motions of his body, and repeated endeavours to avoid visionary dangers. ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones

... married a vision of perfection, and entered on a romance of happy poverty, and she had no desire to awaken; so she never exerted her mind upon the world around her, when it seemed oppressive; and kept the visionary James Frost before her, in company with Adeline and the transformed Sir Hubert. It was much easier to line his tent with a tapestry of Maltese crosses, than to consider whether the hall should be ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge

... on a sudden so discreet? I had been told thou wert a visionary,— A wanderer from the paths of common men. Thou lov'st the marvellous. So have I now Cull'd out for thee a task of special daring. Another man might pause and hesitate;— Thou dashest at it, ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

... on in a droning tone, giving theories of his own as to the nature of the Magrepha, and I, with my arms around Sigmund, half listened to the sleepy monotone of the good old visionary. But what spoke to me with a more potent voice was the soughing and wuthering of the sorrowful wind without, which verily moaned around the old walls, and sought out the old corners, and wailed, and plained, and sobbed in a way that was enough ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill

... upon some special point in the cloudy phantasmagoria of human history. The image of a past existence is projected for a moment upon our eyes, to make us feel how transitory is life, and how rapidly one visionary existence expels another. We are such stuff as ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... the jubilation of his home-coming, he had been disquieted by a presentiment of evil, a visionary dream that now confronted him in such ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein

... audibly (to me) who they are. A clever young man, whose language is the language of the future, and whose humour is of a date to which I humbly hope my own days may not be prolonged. A Psychical Researcher, with a note-book; he gets at the Duchess at once, and cross-examines her about a visionary Piper who plays audible pibrochs through Castle Blawearie, her ancestral home. Does she think the pibroch could be taken down in a phonograph. Could the Piper be snapped in a kodak? The Duchess does not know what a phonograph is; never heard of a kodak. She does not like the note-book any ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various

... sky was grey and heavy,—floating mists on the hill-sides, which softened the objects, and where we lost sight of the lake it appeared so near to the sky that they almost touched one another, giving a visionary beauty to the prospect. While we overlooked this quiet scene we could hear the stream rumbling among the rocks between the lakes, but the mists concealed any glimpse of it which we might have had. This small lake ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth

... deliverance from even the suggestion of thraldom—all of which his enfranchisement contemplates; or that these would assure, in greater degree, his national weal, would be to indulge a wild chimera, which could but superinduce the purest visionary picture of his condition under the operation of the gift. Some might be found, as well, to discredit the notion that there would supervene, on the consigning to the limbo of inutile political systems of the ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie

... her different. I had not expected it. But I had become such a totally different person myself that her attitude to life, which had appeared to me so romantic and natural when I was eighteen, now appeared irremediably pathetic, visionary, out of touch with reality. Perhaps, however, it was I who had become disillusioned and matter-of-fact. I saw with a kind of pitying wonder that her youthful romance still supplied to her, as it had done since she was nineteen, a certain atmosphere of pensive, prayerful resignation, a background ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley

... famous university, solemnly asserted that mankind is growing better, day by day, he must have had before his inner eye fair visions of a future race—the Future of Truth, which come it must—some day—but now lies dormant in the lap of the gods, its alluring, visionary, transcendental form depicted, for an optimistic instant, in the fervent, hopeful heart of a sincere but far-sighted reformer. But it is written: false prophets must come, deceiving in respect to all things in heaven and earth. "Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur." ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann

... them. But evidently Morel's theories of the degeneration of man had made a much livelier impression on his imagination; and his leap from these remote theories to his interpretation of the plasmodia seemed an achievement of "genius." It may be said that this "feat of genius," this visionary generalization, prevented Laveran from seeing the truth. A form of arrogance and levity is apparent ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... determined to buy some of these mud-lots," said Windham to his son. "He believes some day they will be valuable and that he will make his fortune." He sighed. "I fear my son-to-be is something of a visionary." ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... one who would bear any sufferings with which it should please God to visit him, more patiently and serenely, than yourself, this nevertheless, is an affliction of the heaviest kind. It is very far from being the habit of my mind to indulge in visionary hopes, but from what I recollect of the nature of your complaint, it is an inveterate inflammation, and this I believe to be completely ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... feel no doubt that reason is not absolutely sufficient to reveal all that we wish to understand, to reconcile all that we wish to see in harmony with the workings of the deity. But it may be dangerous to seek for help in the regions of our feelings and imagination, to give ear to our visionary forebodings. They try to set up their own supremacy, and may easily fall out with reason, though at the outset they seem to uphold her. If they gain their aim, and this noble mediatorial power, which seated in the centre of all our spiritual powers, irradiating and swaying ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... what a dreamer yet, in spite of all, Is man, that splendid visionary child Who sent his fairy beacon through ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger

... have been accustomed to look upon these hours as mere visionary hours, I beseech ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell

... smoking-room I turned over with this gentleman a very curious collection of the works of Blake, which were new to him. Finding that he evidently knew something about art, I explained to him that Blake was a very strange visionary—that he believed that the spirits of the dead appeared to him, and that ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... called to mind the poor fellow's speech about the beetle's being "the index of his fortune." Upon the whole, I was sadly vexed and puzzled, but, at length, I concluded to make a virtue of necessity—to dig with a good will, and thus the sooner to convince the visionary, by ocular demonstration, of the fallacy ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... She, to whom he had scarcely spoken before, who had been so entirely out of his sphere, had now come into it so strangely, so closely, that she could never be separated from his thoughts. She might break violently the visionary tie between them,—she might break it, angry to have been drawn into so close a relation to any strangers,—but it never ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... asking careless questions of Andrews, without coming in and risking the freshness of her draperies by contact with London top-floor grubbiness. The child was, in fact, too full of the reality of her happiness with Donal and Donal's mother to be more than faintly bewildered by a sort of visionary conundrum. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that class of beings with whom my lot has been so long cast.'' This vow he carried out in no visionary scheme of mutiny or foolish "paying back'' to the captain, but by awakening a "strong sympathy'' for the sailors "by a voice from the forecastle,'' in his ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... of specie payments was deemed impossible. The most charitable of Sherman's opponents looked upon him as an honest but visionary enthusiast who would fail in his policy and be "the deadest man politically" in the country. Others deemed resumption possible only by driving to the wall a majority of active business men. It was this sentiment which gave strength to the majority in the House of Representatives, ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... his journey is of less consequence than the direction in which his face is turned. The arrow may fall short, but to what mark was it shot? In all regions of life a wise classification of men arranges them according to their aims rather than their achievements. The visionary who attempts something high and accomplishes scarcely anything of it, is often a far nobler man, and his poor, broken, foiled, resultless life far more perfect than his who aims at marks on the low levels and hits ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... tilled, and, he thought reverently, with the God who had made him and them. He had made a mistake in his early youth, but it was a mistake which every tenth man makes—which had no doubt driven half these men and women about him into their visionary creeds and hard work—that of an unhappy marriage. It was many years since he had heard of his wife: she had grown tired of warning him of the new paths of shame and crime she had found for herself. In fact, the year ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various

... varied now and then by one or two men revolting enough in speech and aspect to drive Hitty to her own room, where, in a creaking chair, she rocked monotonously back and forth, watching the snapping fire, and dreaming dreams of a past that seemed now but a visionary paradise. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... some of my fair readers exclaim, "Is this the early rising this new correspondent of the MIRROR means to enforce? Drag us from our beds at peep of day! The visionary barbarian! Why, ferocious as our Innovator is, he would just as soon drag a tigress from her's! We will not obey this self-appointed Dictator!" Stay, gentle ladies; in the first place I am not going to enforce this or any other hour; in the second place, I am not going to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various

... future retribution, they yet agree with Benjamin Whichcote, the Cambridge Platonist, that "heaven is first a temper, then a place"; while of hell there is much to recall the noble sentence of Juliana of Norwich, the fourteenth-century visionary, "to me was showed no harder hell than sin." "Nothing burneth in hell but self-will," is a saying in the "Theologia Germanica."[24] They insist that the difference between heaven and hell is not that one is a place of enjoyment, the other of torment; it is that in the one we are with Christ, ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge

... reply. Our friend, like many other Corsicans we met with, still nourished the visionary hopes which had caused his country so much blood and misery during her long and fruitless struggles for a ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... was in her attitude, holding up the end of her boa as a visionary tambourine, and Mr. Walker, who was looking at her, and in his amusement at the mother's performances had almost forgotten the charms of the daughter—both turned round at once, and looked at her with many expressions of sympathy, while ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray

... looked coldly on and said, "A visionary Scottish nobleman! a dreamer a hundred years before his time! Is it worth while?" while he himself saw a dream of sunshine when he visited his Colonists on Red River, when he made allocations for their separate homes for them, when he pledged his honor and estate ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce

... Prague, covers the greater part of Shakespeare's life. In spite of many failings and mistakes, this monarch did much to foster the study of the arts and sciences of his age, so far as he was able to understand them. That he was for a time the dupe of adventurers and alchemists, such as the half-visionary John Dee and the altogether unscrupulous Edward Kelley, was no unusual experience in those days, when the dividing line between true science and charlatanism was too indistinctly marked to ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz

... attentive ear Receive my words, and credit what you hear. Late as I slumber'd in the shades of night, A dream divine appear'd before my sight; Whose visionary form like Nestor came, The same in habit, and in mien the same.(80) The heavenly phantom hover'd o'er my head, 'And, dost thou sleep, O Atreus' son? (he said) Ill fits a chief who mighty nations guides, Directs in council, and in ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... Gospel he had none. Our only friend in the neighbourhood was one Abner Thurstan, a farmer who lived over the border in Blundell parish; but as he was an Anabaptist—or Baptist as they were then beginning to call themselves—and my father had a great contempt and dislike for the visionary ideas of that sect, even he came but seldom to our house. His daughter Patience was a great favourite with my mother; and for that matter I did not dislike the child, and would oftentimes pluck her an apple from our trees or cut a whistle for her ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward

... for the dead was not a devotion cautiously recommended by some obscure or visionary writer, but an act of religion preached and inculcated by all the great Doctors and Fathers of the Church, who are the recognized ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier

... Demand seems an unreal power because it is intangible; but it is the mightiest power in the world. It is a power that is free for you to use. No one can use it for you. The Mental Demand is not a visionary one. It is a potent force, which you can use freely without cost. When you are in doubt it will counsel you. It will guide you when you are uncertain. When you are in fear it will give you courage. It is the motive power which supplies the energies necessary to the ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont

... embarrassments to think of playing the nabob on eight hundred pounds currency a-year. The interview terminated with a strong exhortation from my guardian not to think of abandoning my books for any project as visionary and useless as the hope of seeing the world in the character of a ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... indoctrinating disciples in private with his peculiarities; and, when they were numerous enough, he wanted to leave the Jesuits. By reasonings and kindness, they managed to retain him for a while; but he grew more odd and visionary, fasting often, eating only herbs, and having divine revelations. After a dangerous illness, which brought him to death's door, he did obtain his dismissal from the Jesuit order in April 1639, and went over France propagandizing. The Bishop of Amiens, caught by ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... was set on marrying her daughters "advantageously," and she gave all of her narrow mind to that thankless department. Josephine insisted on a romantic attachment, and pursued a visionary spouse with all the ardor and obstinacy of first-rate stupidity. Adelaide had the weakness to hate Josephine, the shrewdness to fear Madeline, and the viciousness to despise her mother; she skilfully and diligently devoted herself to the thwarting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... the cruising-ground, he fished all night in his dreams, and that many a time he has rubbed the skin off his knuckles by striking them against the ceiling of his bunk when he raised his arms to thrust the harpoon into visionary monster swordfishes. ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey

... church," said Udell thoughtfully; "Well, Mr. Wicks, I'll tell you why I don't go to church. Just because I've got too much to do. I make my own way in the world and it takes all the business sense I have to do it. The dreamy, visionary, speculative sort of things I hear at meeting may be all right for a fellow's soul, but they don't help him much in taking care of his body, and I can't afford to fill my mind with such stuff. I am living this side of the grave. Of course I like to hear a good talker, and I enjoy the music, ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright

... at him for a thief and supplanter, drove at his throat with a knife. He missed: but the next instant, these two fond friends, whose friendship had fenced us others off almost as strangers, were wallowing and knifing one another on the bottom-boards,—all over the visionary legacy of a Jew, thousands of miles away, whose picking of their pockets had been their common reminiscence and their standing joke through days of horror! And political economists used to tell us that money is a ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... forgeries have diminished in a most remarkable degree. Yet within five and thirty years, Lord Eldon, with tearful solemnity, imagined in the House of Lords as a possibility for their Lordships to shudder at, that the time might come when some visionary and morbid person might even propose the abolition of the punishment of Death for forgery. And when it was proposed, Lords Lyndhurst, Wynford, Tenterden, and Eldon—all Law ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens

... a mystic worker of miracles, O my sweet visionary! for on that very day when you dreamed yourself away to me I beheld you suddenly standing before me, so life-like and appearing so wistfully beautiful that I reached out my hand to touch you—but grasped only the impalpable air. All day and late into the night I had been reading and reflecting, ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More

... language of Plato, a meditation or practising of death. This excessive preoccupation with a problematic future has been a fruitful source of the most fatal aberrations both for nations and individuals. In pursuit of these visionary aims the few short years of life have been frittered away: wealth has been squandered: blood has been poured out in torrents: the natural affections have been stifled; and the cheerful serenity of reason has been exchanged for ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... necessary to self-government and the prosecution of the Kaffir wars. The Treasury was empty—save for the much-quoted 12s. 6d. The Government L1 bluebacks were selling at 1s. Civil servants' salaries were months in arrear. The President himself—the excitable, unstable, visionary, but truly enlightened and patriotic Burgers—had not only drawn no salary, but had expended his private fortune, and incurred a very heavy liability, in the prosecution of the unsuccessful Secocoeni war. No amount ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick



Words linked to "Visionary" :   futurist, soul, airy, idealist, fantast, anticipator, anticipant, individual, prognosticator, mortal, utopian, somebody, seer, someone, dreamer, soothsayer, vision, predictor, windy, illusionist, diviner, impractical, person, intellect, intellectual, Laputan



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