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Ideal   /aɪdˈil/   Listen
Ideal

noun
1.
The idea of something that is perfect; something that one hopes to attain.
2.
Model of excellence or perfection of a kind; one having no equal.  Synonyms: apotheosis, nonesuch, nonpareil, nonsuch, paragon, saint.



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"Ideal" Quotes from Famous Books



... My extraordinary companion, who gave himself out to be the humble attendant of the richest individual in the world, was remarkable for his dexterity; in short, his singular address and promptitude admirably fitted him to be the very beau ideal of a rich man's lacquey. But he never stirred from my side, and tormented me with constant assurances that a day would most certainly come when, if it were only to get rid of him, I should gladly comply with his ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various

... information concerning the Bahama Islands, the Caribbean Sea, and the island of Cuba. Of the finest and most extensive culture, Mr. Ballou is the ideal traveler.—Boston Traveller. ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou

... out of all the monopolies which he concedes or tolerates; it is, as we have said, the indemnity of the poor, the permit granted to property. Such was the form and spirit of the tax in all the old monarchies: feudalism was its beau ideal. Under that regime the tax was only a TRIBUTE paid by the holder to the universal proprietor or ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... my ideal?" Mr. Linden said with a smile, and softly bringing her face round again. "Faith, do you know what a dear little 'minister's wife' you will make?—Mignonette is so suitable for a parsonage!—so well calculated to impress the people with a notion of the extreme ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner

... Watchman, you know, sub-editor. I took an article from him the other day—article on 'Ideal Sites for Campers-Out.' He came to the office about it. So this was in the dead ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher

... and glorious sunshine in combination might seem to constitute a climate unsuitable to persons of English birth, or at least trying to their preconceptions of the ideal. My own experience is entirely, enthusiastically favourable. I proffer myself as an example, since there is none other upon whom publicity may be thrust, and really in the spirit of performing an inevitable duty, such duty being comprehended in the fervent desire to proclaim from the ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... There shone out of each of them a little melancholy ray—a spark of timid passion which touched Isabel to the heart. At the same time a wave of envy passed over her soul, as she compared the tremulous longing, the definite ideal of the child with her own dry despair. "Poor ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James

... brothers,—now and then with the one small book that she had carried with her, a selection of Bible stories compiled for children,—sometimes when I saw her thus, how I wished that Lilian, too, could have seen her, and have compared her own ideal fantasies with those young developments of ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the representation of "the internal movements of the mind warmed by imagination," yet "exposed in the happiest and most agreeable attitudes" (p. xxxv). The relation between the empirical and the ideal is a crux common to Ogilvie and neoclassic theory, not entirely resolved here by the practical and referential method of citing Horace's shorter odes. But it is a subject which comes in for more extended treatment in his second letter, in my judgment a far more ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie

... speak the truth, my lord," was the response, as calm as ever, for nothing disturbed or ruffled this ideal servant. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... its getting up an hour sooner and sooner every day, he sagely replied, "Then it must come to the same thing at last" which was a speech worthy of an infant Halley! The Lion in the 'Change by no means came up to his ideal standard. So impossible it is for Nature in any of her works to come up to the standard of a child's imagination. The whelps (Lionets) he was sorry to find were dead, and on particular enquiry his ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... reign supreme as the deep-water pleasure craft, that trails its elegance perforce ever up and down the same prescribed channels. The ideal houseboat is the light-draft water gypsy, that turns often from the buoyed course and wanders off into the picturesque world of little waters; along streamlets that lead in winding ways to quaint bits of nowhere, and into quiet shallows of forgotten lagoons that have ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins

... much, your exiles, Mademoiselle Olivia," said he. "When first I met with them I was a man without an ideal or a name, without a scrap of faith or a cause to quarrel for. It is not good for the young, that, Baron, is it? To be passing the days in an ennui and the nights below the lamps? Well, I met your Scots after Dettingen, renewed the old ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... we were required to relinquish the most rational of all our amusements, when the clergy were enjoined celibacy, and when the laity were denied the right to read their Bibles? He thought that it must have been from a notion of penance that they erected the drama into an ideal place of profaneness, and spoke of the theatre as of the tents of sin. He did not mean to dispute that there were many excellent persons who thought differently from him, and he disclaimed the slightest idea of charging them with bigotry or hypocrisy on ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott

... even the optimists had reckoned that they would be lucky if they got off with ten. As far as the bulk of the guests were concerned, there was no grumbling. Fillmore's, to their thinking, had been the ideal after-dinner speech. ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse

... approbation or blame, but doleful like the unnatural quiet of a deserted city, then they call that peace, and the man's uncontrolled passions and unbridled desires dwell solitary in the fortress of his own spirit! You may almost attain to that. Do you think it is a goal to be set before you as an ideal of human nature? The loss of peace is certain—the presence of agony is most likely—from ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... reviving in fuller vigor under new forms, hovered before his soul. Heart and head had contributed to its outlines; nor was its realization, by means of a sincere and general effort, beyond the range of possibility. Can it then be imputed to him as a crime, that so few comprehended his ideal, that the time was not ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger

... furnished each family with milk and cheese. The chapel was the only edifice that presided over these dwellings, the supreme head of this pure Commonwealth; the members of which existed in the midst of a powerful empire, like an ideal society or an organised community, whose constitution had been imposed and regulated by the mountains which protected it. Neither high-born nobleman, knight, nor esquire, was here; but many of these humble ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... of a miniature torrent which rolled out of the desert during the infrequent rains. Now it was dry, packed hard, free of all obstructions except the great boulders, and led in a comparatively straight line toward the sea. It was an ideal stretch for running. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... the vicissitudes of seasons. It has been shewn, that these qualities often fail us when most we want their aid; that their possessors can solace themselves with their imaginary exertions in behalf of ideal misery, and yet shrink from the labours of active benevolence, or retire with disgust from the homely forms of real poverty and wretchedness. In fine, the superiority of true Christian charity and of plain practical beneficence has been ably vindicated; and the ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... to this time; the beautiful, the religious Wisdom, which may still, with something of its old impressiveness, speak to the whole soul; still, in these hard, unbelieving utilitarian days, reveal to us glimpses of the Unseen but not unreal World, that so the Actual and the Ideal may again meet together, and clear Knowledge be again wedded to Religion, in the life and ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... his ideal of salary by the sum of five pounds a year, and was taken at that into a driving establishment in Clapham, which dealt chiefly in ready-made suits, fed its assistants in an underground dining-room and kept them until twelve on Saturdays. He found it hard to be cheerful there. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... least their equals in art, science, and civilization; and the Italy of 1300 was a century in advance of the rest of Europe. In 1268 two brothers of the King of Castile, with 800 other Spanish gentlemen, were serving under the banners of the Muslim in Tunis. The knightly ideal of both Moors and Spaniards was ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... mankind and their doings. In the mass they may possibly not be deserving of high admiration, but Frederick had never done them even justice; and in the latter years of his life, he entirely lost sight of the direction they were taking; he formed an ideal world to himself, and governed his country and subjects accordingly. He was the admired wonder of the age; a brilliant, if not spotless sun, that cast far aloft its vivid beams, indeed, but remained stationary and concentrated within itself, while all surrounding ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various

... beguilement. She was curious, she told herself, to see whether a man like Hilmer would be impressed by feminine artifice... Did a black silk gown, with spotless lace at wrist and throat, spell the acme of Hilmer's ideal of womanhood? Was woman to him something durable and utilitarian or did his fancy sometimes carry him ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... with the one little flake of flint in his possession, and, as he worked, paused from time to time note how well he was rounding the notch in the end of the slight hardwood shaft. It was just as he was holding up to her eyes the arrow, now made almost an ideal one, according to his fancy, when there came to the ears of the two a sound, distinct, ominous and implying to them deadly peril, a sound such that, though nerves spoke and muscles acted, they were very near the momentary paralysis which sometimes come from sudden fearful shock. From ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo

... hemmed him in, and has suddenly found himself, not above competition indeed, but still able to meet it. He will not have been too proud of that endeavour; it will have seemed but a little thing to him—a thing full of faults and imperfections, and falling far short of his ideal. He will not even have attached a great importance to his success, because, if he is a person of this calibre, he must remember how small it is, when all is said and done; that even in his day there are those who can beat him on his own ground; and also that all worldly success, like the most ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard

... Neck was the old Garrison "shanty"—Notely's ideal; well preserved; built onto it a spacious dwelling, with stables attached, after ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... immediate economic needs of the people of the nation, but also of their personal liberties—the most precious possession of all Americans. I am thinking of our democracy and of the recent trend in other parts of the world away from the democratic ideal. ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt

... large ornamental gateway to the Park, and the grounds within are neatly laid out, with borders of shrubbery. There is a sheet of water, with swans and other aquatic fowl, which swim about, and are fed with dainties by the visitors. Nothing can be more beautiful than a swan. It is the ideal of a goose,—a goose beautified and beatified. There were not a great many visitors, but some children were dancing on the green, and a few lover-like people straying about. I think the English behave better than ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... he hankered to meet the stranger and take him there, and still he feared that the secret would get out. This was his little kingdom; the Wild Geese had brought him here, as the Seagulls had brought Columbus to a new world—where he could lead, for brief spells, the woodland life that was his ideal. He was tender enough to weep over the downfall of a lot of fine Elm trees in town, when their field was sold for building purposes, and he used to suffer a sort of hungry regret when old settlers told how plentiful the Deer used to be. But now he had ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton

... make her temperament like Thyrsis'; she despised her own temperament utterly, and set up his qualities as her ideal. He was self-contained and masterful; he knew what he wanted and how to get it; he was not dependent upon anyone else, he needed no one's approval or admiration; he could control his emotions, and destroy those ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... to the heights, as silent electricity goes. You have done very well; and many will know it ever better by degrees.—Only one thing farther I will note: How you go as if altogether on the "Over-Soul," the Ideal, the Perfect or Universal and Eternal in this life of ours; and take so little heed of the frightful quantities of friction and perverse impediment there everywhere are; the reflections upon which in my own poor life made me now and then very sad, as I read you. Ah me, ah me; what a vista it ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... this day I stood in silent admiration of Uncle David's easy powerful attitudes as he caught each bundle in the crook of his arm and spread it out into a broad, smooth band of yellow straw on which the whirling teeth caught and tore with monstrous fury. He was the ideal man in my eyes, grander in some ways than my father, and to be able to stand where he stood was the ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... is aptly, though not elegantly, characterized as a "hole." The mountain-grass is of the most nutritious quality; groves of cottonwood trees and willows are scattered through the sequestered spot, and the river, which enters it from the north, is a magnificent stream; in fact, it is the very ideal of a ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman

... no doubt that the embalmed body of the King still rests here, untouched by the ravages of eight centuries. As we look upon the lovely face of Henry's daughter-in-law, who lies at his feet, we forget that this is no portrait but a conventional and ideal queen. We think only of the young Spanish princess in the early days of her married life, before the birth of thirteen children in quick succession, the loss of many of these little ones, and the privations ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith

... punctilious warmth of manner. He walked along with her a few paces as he talked, lifting Zaidee over a flooded crossing, before going once more on his way. He was nothing to her, the stranger who had killed her ideal; yet all day it was as if his image were photographed in the colors of life upon the retina of her eye. She could not push it ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... majestic in its simplicity, glorious in its humility, the Ideal of Humanity, the Mystery of Godliness, that these Gospels are meant to show us. If they only bring him clearly before us, make his personality real and familiar and vivid before our eyes, so that we may know him and love him, that is all we want of them. Infallibility in details would be worthless ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden

... "caloric," which ordinary matter could absorb and emit. A hot body was one which had absorbed an imponderable substance. It was, therefore, no heavier than before, but it possessed ability to do work proportional to the amount absorbed. Carnot's ideal engine was described by him in terms that imply the materiality of heat. Light was another imponderable substance, the existence of which was maintained by Sir David Brewster as long as he lived. Electricity and magnetism were imponderable fluids, which, when allied with ordinary matter, ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear

... [B.C. 493] said of Ssu-ma Jang-chu: "His civil virtues endeared him to the people; his martial prowess kept his enemies in awe." Cf. Wu Tzu, ch. 4 init.: "The ideal commander unites culture with a warlike temper; the profession of arms requires a combination of hardness ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu

... could be employed to advantage. This was found by Mr. W. H. Pickering, after many experiments in Colorado, California, and Peru, at Arequipa, on a slope of the Andes, 8,000 feet above the sea-level. Here the post provided for by the "Boyden Fund" was established in 1891, under ideal meteorological conditions. Temperature preserves a "golden mean"; the barometer is almost absolutely steady; the yearly rainfall amounts to no more than three or four inches. No wonder, then, that the "seeing" there is of the extraordinary excellence attested ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... of the ideal industrial condition of the word is free manufacture and free trade. [Hear, hear! A voice: "The Morrill tariff." Another voice: "Monroe."] I have said there were three elements of liberty. The third ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various

... in suggestion of details, "Utopia" is the work of a scholar who had read Plato's "Republic," and had his fancy quickened after reading Plutarch's account of Spartan life under Lycurgus. Beneath the veil of an ideal communism, into which there has been worked some witty extravagance, there lies a noble English argument. Sometimes More puts the case as of France when he means England. Sometimes there is ironical praise ...
— Utopia • Thomas More

... saved Germany in 1915 and is largely responsible for the three years of war agony which followed. It can only have missed specific reference in the Treaty on account of its claim to represent the fertiliser rather than the explosives industry. To yield to such views, however ideal the motives, is to threaten the greater ideal of ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden

... a type of the fanatic, and a representative of that type, moreover, who exemplified in his blood the fatalism of his ascendants. Yet the glimpse I had of the man was interesting. I began to understand him, and even to sympathise with him. He had foregone much for the sake of an ideal, and that was something. But just then I should like to have known exactly what his sister's attitude to that ideal might be. For Princess Alix, strange as her brother was, was even more ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... that Mr. Aubrey Gilbert is by no means ideal as the leading juvenile of our piece. The time still demands some explanation why the leading juvenile wears no gold chevrons on his left sleeve. As a matter of fact, our young servant of the Grey-Matter Agency had been declined by a recruiting station and a draft board ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley

... those who had been attacked succumbed, although the hospitals of Koenigsberg were ideal ones compared with those ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose

... pleasure, for Graeme wished to know the young lady who had long been Rosie's ideal of all that was sweet and beautiful, and Miss Elphinstone was as pleased to become the friend of one whom her cousins Allan and Charlie admired so much. And when she begged permission to call upon her and Rose, what could Graeme ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson

... crawlers often transfer the grains from one blossom to another. A degraded flower like this has little need of color and perfume, one would suppose; yet it may be even now slowly perfecting its way toward an ideal of which we see a part only complete. In deep, rich, moist woods and thickets the sessile trillium blooms in April or May, from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Minnesota southward nearly ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... like to have some competent person give us a History of Moral Progress as a part of the History of Invention. I know there is a distrust of Invention on the part of many good people who are so enamored of the ideal of a simple life that they are suspicious of civilization. The text from Ecclesiastes, "God made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions," has been used to discourage any budding Edisons of the spiritual realm. Dear old Alexander ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers

... did not complain. His life was noble and happy! He smiled with pleasure as he thought of his good friends; his heart beat in great throbs as he thought of love; he wept with rapture over beautiful verses. The spectacle of life, through hope and the ideal, seemed to him transfigured. Happy Amedee! He was not yet ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee

... and this sweet air. Soeur Monique, Had he more, who set you there? Was his music-dream of you Of some perfect nun he knew, Or of some ideal, as true? ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell

... stream is the ideal scene of Border romance. See the Border Minstrelsy, and cp. the works of Hamilton of Bangour, John Leyden, Wordsworth's Yarrow poems, the poems of the Ettrick Shepherd, Prof. Veitch, and Principal Shairp. John Logan's 'Braes of Yarrow' also deserves special mention, and many singers of ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott

... interest of all would be furthered by establishing such a social order; but we held at the same time that the moral baseness and self-blinding selfishness of man would forever prevent him from realizing such an ideal. In vain, had he been endowed with a godlike intellect; it would not avail him for any of the higher uses of life, for an ineradicable moral perverseness would always hinder him from doing as well as he knew and hold him in hopeless subjection ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... artificial base of support, by no means ideal, because it interferes to a greater or less degree with the physiology of the foot, but indispensable except for horses at slow work on soft ground. Since a proper surface of support is of the greatest importance in preserving the health of the feet and legs, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... in his last absorbing passion. Respect and tenderness for her he certainly felt and expressed; but there is no indication that she ever enkindled his ardent imagination, or filled for him the place of an ideal, which his mental constitution imperatively demanded as an object of worship. The present attachment went so far with him that he wrote to his uncle William Suckling, asking for an allowance to enable him to marry. "If nothing can be done for me," said ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... only of minimum strength, but it may, on the other hand, be of much more than average calibre. The Third Hand has yet to be heard from, and if, as is possible, he have considerable strength in the suit that the Second Hand thinks of declaring, such a bid will offer an ideal opportunity for a profitable double. The Second Hand, therefore, should be somewhat diffident about bidding two in a suit. He should make the declaration only when his hand is so strong that in spite of ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work

... follower of the "Skylark" stories which were so much appreciated by our readers. We think that they will find this story superior to the earlier ones. Dr. Smith certainly has the narrative power, and that, joined with his scientific position, makes him an ideal author ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith

... advance upon the citadel of privilege, I was forced to admit that his main thesis was right. Unrestricted individual ownership of the earth I acknowledged to be wrong and I caught some glimpse of the radiant plenty of George's ideal Commonwealth. The trumpet call of the closing pages filled me with a desire to battle for the right. Here was a theme for the great orator. Here was opportunity for ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... patches of armour and grit and callous cruelty. Above all, she was determined upon having money. Money was the essential thing. Money meant safety. And safety, when starvation threatens, becomes the one imperious if ignominious ideal. Once one has known physical hunger, no act is inconceivable as a means of averting the risk of a ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton

... in protest against such a description of civilization. Until quite recently the word "civilization" has been used in academic circles to symbolize a social idea or ideal. Professor of History Anson D. Morse of Amherst College presents such a view in his Civilization and the World War (Boston: Ginn 1919). For him, civilization is "the sum of things in which the heritage of the child of the twentieth ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... federate too, I tell you; we'll decapitate those aristocrats, the Titians and Paul Veroneses; we'll establish, instead of a jury, a revolutionary tribunal, which shall condemn to instant death any man who troubles himself about the ideal—that king whom we have knocked off his throne; and at this tribunal I will be at once complainant, lawyer, and judge. Yes! my brother painters, rally around me, and we will die for the Commune of Art. As to those who are not of my opinion, I don't care the snap of a finger about them." ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... they were married, and none supposed the beautiful being to be aught but a very attractive woman; in time there was born to them a little son. The knight adored both wife and child, and for some years lived a life of ideal domestic happiness. But there came a time when another interest entered into his life. Rumours of fighting reached him from France; he saw the knights of neighbouring fortresses leading their troops to the war, and a martial spirit stirred within him. His wife was not ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... the best elements of noble, upright and manly cadethood? Do you remember, suh, and fellow classmen, the wild enthusiasm that prevailed when we, by our suffrages, had declared Mr. Prescott to be our ideal of the man to lead the class in all the ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock

... strenuously maintained by a host of philosophers, at the head of whom stands the great Plato, that temperate sage, who threw the cold water of philosophy on the form of sexual intercourse, and inculcated the doctrine of Platonic love—an exquisitely refined intercourse, but much better adapted to the ideal inhabitants of his imaginary island of Atlantis than to the sturdy race, composed of rebellious flesh and blood, which populates the little matter-of-fact island ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... village some fifteen miles off, where there was a small but good inn. Here they evidently meant to stay, for letters were to be sent after them there for the next week. The place was described to me as pretty and retired; it seemed, therefore, an ideal spot for my purpose. I made up my mind at once. I started the next day after luncheon, took the journey easily, and came in sight of the little inn about seven o'clock in the evening. All went well. The only question was as to the disposition of Miss Dibbs toward me. I prayed ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope

... which was the ruling passion of my boyhood; I had better confess that, however unrequited, it held me in the eager bondage of a lover still, so that I never wished to escape from it, but must try to hide the fact whenever the real Spain fell below the ideal, however I might reason with my infatuation or try to scoff it away. It had once been so inextinguishable a part of me that the record of my journey must be more or less autobiographical; and though I should decently endeavor to keep my past out of it, perhaps I should not try very hard and ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... and laid his hand upon the sleeper, and whispered to it, smiling; and this only she heard—"This shall be thy reward—that the ideal shall be ...
— Dreams • Olive Schreiner

... necessity of more explicitly bringing out our ideal if we would give a sufficient motive for our students and members, keep them in the community, bring about unity of action, and accomplish the good which the Holy Spirit demands at our hands. A Paulist, as a distinct species of a religious man, is ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... that is to harmonize the world; and give reality to those ideal gardens of paradise, and ages of gold, the possibility of which, as the records of fable shew, could ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... association of the "Leather Bottle," Cobham, with The Pickwick Papers, which has spread its fame to the uttermost parts of the world. That is the chief reason why in certain seasons of the year the "Leather Bottle" and Cobham are visited by thousands of admirers of the novelist, and also why the ideal Kentish village has become a magnet to lovers of England's rural lanes and arable fields; but the charm of it all is that when it is reached both it and the inn are to be found exactly as Dickens so faithfully ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz

... of our epoch and how it is likely to be regarded in the future, when the paradise of ideal living is regained, a modern writer says: "Will not the intense preoccupation of material production, the hurry and strain of our cities, the draining of life into one channel, at the expense of breadth, richness, and beauty, appear as mad as the Crusades, and ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given

... still more clearly that the scheme had draw-backs. But he badly wanted Stanborough to make one of the party. Whatever Ogden might be, there was no doubt that Billy Stanborough, that fellow of infinite jest, was the ideal companion for a voyage. It would make just all the difference having him. The trouble was that Stanborough flatly refused to take an indefinite holiday, on the plea that he could not afford the time. Upon which his lordship, seldom blessed with great ideas, ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse

... our most versatile man-of-letters—James Russell Lowell. Born at Cambridge, in the old house called "Elmwood," so dear to his readers, spending an ideal boyhood in the midst of a cultured circle, treading the predestined path through Harvard, studying law and gaining admission to the bar—such was the story of his life for the first twenty-five years. As a student at Harvard, he had written a great deal of prose and verse of considerable ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... three tipped sticks and its wooden poles, 25 kilog. Set up, it forms a ridge roof 7 feet high and shelters fully ten men. It suits servants perfectly well. For the master who wants to work, to write, to draw, occasionally to receive officials, the ideal tent would be one of the same material, but of larger proportions, and comprising two parallel vertical partitions and surmounted by a ridge roof. The round form of Kirghiz and Mongol tents is also ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... More ideal hunting ground could not be found. The hills here are partly wooded and in the valleys nestle lakes literally black with wild-fowl—bittern that rise heavy-winged and furry with a boo-m-m; grey geese holding political ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut

... the Lord Keeper, the Lord Keeper with the council, and the council with the king [queen], that before the company dismissed (which was, indeed, rather at an early hour than a late one), every man of note in the village was ascending to the top-gallant of some ideal preferment by the ladder of ropes which Caleb had presented to their imagination. Nay, the cunning butler regained in that moment not only all the influence he possessed formerly over the villagers, when the baronial family which he served were ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... golden clue to guide the modern seeker through the labyrinths of the mediaeval mind is that which I have tried to suggest in the title "Hero-Myths and Legends of the British Race"—the pursuit and representation of the ideal hero as the mind of Britain and of early and mediaeval England imagined him, together with the study of the characteristics which made this or that particular person, mythical or legendary, a hero to the century which sang or wrote about him. The interest goes deeper ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt

... reverenced thanin the hour of his fall. He had not taken part in the struggle to gratify ambition or for love of war; but in the conscientious discharge of sacred duty. Into that struggle North Carolina had sent more than a hundred and fifty thousand of her sons, and to them all he was ever the ideal of the soldier, the gentleman and the Christian. At his command they laid down their arms, returned to their homes and in time renewed their allegiance to the ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore

... and biographer, exhibit a remarkable precocity. Even as a school-boy and a college student he had made deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might have been predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the existence of matter. In passing from Mather to Edwards, we step from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. There is the same difference between them in style and turn of thought as between Milton and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... that evil instead of good is made a prominent feature of religious teaching. To be haunted by the thought of evil and the dread of losing our soul, as if it were a danger threatening us at every step, is not the most inspiring ideal of life; quiet, steady, unimaginative fear and watchfulness is harder to teach, but gives a stronger defence against sin than an ever present terror; while all that belongs to hope awakens a far more effective response to good. Some realization of our high destiny as heirs of heaven ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart

... he had shared his brother's veneration of the Madonna, and though, when he grew up, his natural romanticism had not led him his brother's way, the boyish ideal had remained, and unconsciously all his later attitude towards women was tinged with it. Joanna was certainly not the Madonna type, and all Martin's soul revolted from her broad, bustling ways—everywhere he went he heard stories of her busyness and her bluff, of "what she had ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith

... her head and made the suspicion shudder its way out of her. Lou Macon, she decided, was just the sort of girl who would think Jack Landis an ideal. Besides, she had never had an opportunity to see Donnegan in his full glory at Milligan's. And as for Donnegan? He was wearied out; his nerves relaxed; and for the deeds with which he had startled The Corner and won her own heart he was now paying the penalty in the shape ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand

... if I err not, my reason had little to do. My convictions, or I forget myself, were in no manner acted upon by the ideal, nor was any tincture of the mysticism which I read to be discovered, unless I am greatly mistaken, either in my deeds or in my thoughts. Persuaded of this, I abandoned myself implicitly to the guidance of my wife, and entered with an unflinching heart into the intricacies ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... times (as we know they do). (4) Suppose, further, that the Designer did not make "out of nothing" the series of finally developed animals as we now have them, but "made the animals make themselves"—that is to say, created the type, the ideal form, and adapted the laws and forces which constitute environment, so that development of form should go on regularly towards the appointed end, but in separate and appropriate channels, each terminating ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... which contains a detailed table of the bureaucracy of the country. However, we know now from inscriptions that the bureaucracy at the beginning of the Chou period was not much more developed than in late Shang time. The Chou-li gave an ideal picture of a bureaucratic state, probably abstracted from actual conditions in feudal ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard

... nothing to be got by it, and I own the fact that his subjects like him willingly. Probably no man in his kingdom understands better than Edward VII. that he is largely a form, and that the more a form he is the more conformable he is to the English ideal of a monarch. But no Englishman apparently knows better than he when to leave off being a form and become a man, and he has endeared himself to his people from time to time by such inspirations. He is reputed on all hands to be a man of great good sense; if ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells

... lived at ease. The country was prosperous and Chopin the elder became a professor in the Warsaw Lyceum. His children were brought up in an atmosphere of charming simplicity, love and refinement. The mother was an ideal mother, and, as George Sand declared, Chopin's "only love." But, as we shall discover later, Lelia was ever jealous—jealous even of Chopin's past. His sisters were gifted, gentle and disposed to pet him. Niecks has killed all the pretty fairy tales of his ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... Woman was bursting upon the scene, but she was not to be found amongst the governesses. No one in Polchester had learnt yet to cycle in rational costume, it was several years before the publication of "The Heavenly Twins," and Mr. Trollope's Lilys and Lucys were still considered the ideal of England's maidenhood. Mrs. Cole, therefore, had to choose between idiotic young women and crabbed old maids, and she finally chose an old maid. I don't think that Miss Jones was the very best choice that she could have made, but time was short. Jeremy, aided by Hamlet, was growing ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole

... Rodogune, are his masterpieces; it is they which have won for him, by the consent of all nations, the surname of "le Grand Corneille." But still it is not nature which is generally represented in his tragedies. It is an ideal nature, seven foot high, clad in impenetrable panoply, steeled against the weaknesses, as above the littlenesses of humanity. Persons of a romantic, lofty tone of mind, will to the end of the world be fascinated by his pages; heroic resolutions, great deeds, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... second bishop), the Rev. Abraham Jarvis. They are quite too long for reading here; but it must be said of them that they are admirably conceived and expressed, and set forth a much truer and sounder ideal of the Church of God in its obligation to the State on the one side, and its spiritual duties, under the one Headship of Him Whose "kingdom is not of this world," on the other, than seems to have then prevailed in the mother country. Two passages ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut

... man standing there trying to make up his mind to try it. A second's glimpse of him and all that he is is revealed. One knows immediately that his favorite song is "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," and that his ideal man is Governor Allen and that he is on his way to spend his "remaining days" with his ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey

... actual fact, but it scarcely admits of doubt that the young merchant of Assisi was engaged in trade and commerce till his twenty-fourth year, living in the main as others live, but perhaps early conspicuous for aiming at a loftier ideal than that of his everyday associates, and characterized by the devout and ardent temperament essential to the religious reformer. It was in the year 1206 that he became a changed man. He fell ill—he lay at Death's door. From the ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... of beauty, there must be indefiniteness. 'I know,' he says, 'that indefiniteness is an element of the true music—I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any undue decision—imbue it with any very determinate tone—and you deprive it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character.' Do we not seem to find here an anticipation of Verlaine's 'Art Poetique': 'Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance'? And is not the essential part of the poetical theory of Mallarme and of the French ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... rays of the lamp, of a pale, delicate figure seated in a Gothic chair not far from the sick man. It was Odile of Nideck. Her long black silk dress, her gentle expression of calm self-devotion and complete resignation, the ideal angel-like cast of her sweet features, recalled to one's mind those mysterious creations of the pencil in the Middle Ages when painting was pursued as a true art, but which modern imitators have found themselves obliged to give up in despair, while at the ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian

... scenery is quite different from the wild sublimity of the descriptions of nature in Beowulf. Cynewulf's verse is essentially the verse of an agriculturist; it looks with disfavour upon mountains and rugged scenes, while its ideal is one of peaceful tillage. The monk speaks out in it as cultivator and dreamer. Its tone is wholly different from that of the Brunanburh ballad or the other fierce war-songs. Moreover, it contains one or two rimes, preserved ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen

... ever, vainly dreaming, Life to the last, pursues its flight; Day hath its visions fairly beaming, But false as those of night. The one illusion, the other real, But both the same brief dreams at last; And when we grasp the bliss ideal, Soon as it ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... pageants, and in Venetian and Ferrarese pictures; that Circe of Dosso's, in the Borghese gallery of Rome, seated in her stately wine-lees and gold half-heraldically and half-cabalistically patterned brocade, before the rose-bushes of the little mysterious wood, is the very ideal of the Falerinas and Alcinas, of the enchantresses of Boiardo and Ariosto. Pageant people, these of the Ferrarese poets; they only play at being in forests and deserts, as children play at being on volcanoes or in Green-land by the nursery ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee

... who are Radicals at twenty, Independents at thirty, and Conservatives at forty. He had not yet reached the intermediate stage. He saw in this madcap Radical Member one of the crude but strong expressions of advanced civilisation. He had the noble ideal of Australia as a land trodden only by the Caucasian. The Correspondent, much to our surprise, had by occasional interjections at the beginning of the discussion showed that he was not antipathetic to Mongolian ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... ominous absence of the old thrill of pleasure, when Nugent took her hand on meeting her at the seaside—I heard how bitterly his personal appearance had disappointed her (when she had seen his features in detail) by comparison with the charming ideal picture which she had formed of her lover in the days of her blindness: those happier days, as she had called them, when she was ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins

... and Pitt was to our ancestors of three generations ago. All the force and feeling that made for what we now call liberal principles found its most splendid representative in the son of Lord Holland: all the force and feeling that rallied around the conservative impulse looked for and found its ideal in the son of Lord Chatham. The two men were as much contrasted as the opinions that they professed. To the misgoverned, misguided, splendidly reckless boyhood and early manhood of Fox Pitt opposed the ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... which had prompted Magda to leave Storran before he uttered words that he might regret, but which no power on earth could ever recall. Still beneath the resentment and wounded pride which Michael's going had caused her flickered the spark of an ideal utterly at variance with the whole tenor of the teaching of poor Diane's last embittered days—the ideal of womanhood which had been Michael's. And the impulse which had bade her leave Storran so abruptly was born of the one-time resolution she had made to become the sort of woman Michael ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... knowledge of the spiritual realities of life prohibits asceticism, repression, the same as it prohibits license and perverted use. To err on the one side is just as contrary to the ideal life as to err on the other. All things are for a purpose, all should be used and enjoyed; but all should be rightly used, that they may ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine

... recognise that peculiar ideal of sanctity which we identify not so much with Christianity as with medival Christianity. The bright samples of Christian virtues are too like those types which have afforded material to caricature. For example, quitius, the good abbot, whose virtues adorn ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... dream—not an airy form haunting the unreal walks of night, to vanish when cockcrow recalls us to the cares of household life, the fields of labor, the paths of effort. No, but an enduring, very real, very practical embodiment of the poet's ideal, with new powers and relations illustrating its harmony in and fitness for the world that is purified and sanctified by its presence. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... pictures seem to be an ideal amusement for children. I do not suppose they can understand all the dramas and love stories, but the pictures entertain them, whatever the ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne

... was unquestionable. In the morning, it was their grace, their elegance, their distinction that attracted universal admiration; in the afternoon, it was declared that their walk had the freedom and ease of two young goddesses; in the evening, there was but one cry of rapture at the ideal perfection of their shoulders. From that moment, all Paris had for the two sisters the eyes of the little pastry-cook of the Rue d'Amsterdam; all Paris repeated his 'Mazette', though naturally with the variations and developments imposed by ...
— L'Abbe Constantin, Complete • Ludovic Halevy

... now Terrestrial territory. We're fortifying it against the Martians. War was declared three weeks ago, and we made rocket-tracks for this little crumb. It's an ideal base ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman

... unwavering affection gave her a great sense of peace; it was something to have inspired such devotion, she could never be quite desperate while she had him. She must try to make him understand how possible an ideal friendship was between them, how utterly impossible anything else. She would like to have seen Charley happily married to some nice girl—"I wonder whom!" thought Betty, gazing deep into the night through her drooping lashes. She considered ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... as possible to the familiar realities of actual life and employment, in which the primary affections and passions had their play. A fantastic basis, varying according to the conventions of the fashion, was held essential for the representation of the ideal. Masquerade and hyperbole were the stage and scenery on which the poet's sweetness, or tenderness, or strength was to be put forth. The masquerade, when his subject belonged to peace, was one of shepherds: when it was one of war and adventure, it was a masquerade of knight ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... Alexander by the pyre of the dead Hephaistus. He had the youth splendidly buried in Besa. This most extraordinary intermezzo of all Nile journeys supplied dying heathendom with a new god, and art with its last ideal form. Probably, also, during the burial, far-sighted courtiers already saw the star of Antinous shining in Egypt's midnight sky, and then ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... accustomed to contemplate this picture, and say to himself, "Would my father wish to see me in the place to which I am going?" and thus was he saved from many a temptation. In like manner the Christian, who has always by his side the beautiful ideal of his Savior, finds it a holy charm, by which he is gently restrained from all that is unsuitable to his profession. He has but to inquire of any scene or employment, "Should I be well pleased to meet my Savior there? Would the trains of thought I should there ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... the same fault is alleged in general terms against all the poetry "of the school of Pope," well-nigh the whole of which is iambic. The defect is probably in either case, at least half imaginary; and, as for the inherent joyousness of anapestics, that is perhaps not less ideal. Father Humphrey says, "Anapaestic and amphibrachic verse, being similar in measure and movement, are pleasing to the ear, and well adapted to cheerful and humourous compositions; and sometimes to elegiac compositions, and ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... must be discussed from the standpoint of efficiency, but efficiency needs to be interpreted. We may as well admit at the start that the efficiency ideal is not entirely in good repute at this moment.[1] If I may import an expression from England, we have been somewhat "fed up" with efficiency during the recent past and the ration has been rather ...
— Higher Education and Business Standards • Willard Eugene Hotchkiss

... however, had not long experience advised me not to trust, with too implicit a reliance, the enthusiastic descriptions of my friend, the artist, when indulging in comments upon the loveliness of woman. When beauty was the theme, I well knew with what facility he soared into the regions of the purely ideal. ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie

... plan, Coadjutors of God. To Milton's trump The high groves of the renovated Earth 365 Unbosom their glad echoes: inly hushed, Adoring Newton his serener eye Raises to heaven: and he of mortal kind Wisest, he[123:1] first who marked the ideal tribes Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain. 370 Lo! Priestley there, patriot, and saint, and sage, Him, full of years, from his loved native land Statesmen blood-stained and priests idolatrous By dark lies maddening ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... text before us: Lady Macbeth having proposed the object to herself, and arrayed it with an ideal glory, fixes her eye steadily upon it, soars far above all womanish feelings and scruples to attain it, and stoops upon her victim with the strength and velocity of a vulture; but having committed unflinchingly the crime necessary for the attainment of her ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... he first of all buried his face in snow, then fell on his side, deep snow not being, he discovered, an ideal medium in which to get about on one leg. During that performance his rivals could have abolished him five times over if they had had the heart to unite. But they seemed to think otherwise, and had not the heart for anything. They sat still, with that helpless abandon ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... effective methods of diminishing that unreasonable hysteria and misunderstanding which are the most potent means of fomenting war. This policy represents a new departure in the world. It is a thought, an ideal, which has led to an entirely new line of action. It will not be easy to maintain. Some never moved from their old positions, some are constantly slipping back to the old ways of thought and the old action of seizing a musket and relying ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... Milor B—— and epouse, travelling with a very handsome companion, in the shape of a 'French Count' (to use Farquhar's phrase in the Beaux Stratagem), who has all the air of a Cupidon dechaine, and is one of the few specimens I have seen of our ideal of a Frenchman before the Revolution—an old friend with a new face, upon whose like I never thought that we should look again. Miladi seems highly literary,—to which, and your honour's acquaintance with the family, I attribute the pleasure of having seen them. She is also very ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... Thea, she'll hang on to you for the cold weather; and ensure you a pied a terre if you want to prowl round Rajputana and give the bee in your bonnet an airing! You'll be in clover. The Residency's a sort of palace. Not precisely Thea's ideal of bliss. She's a Piffer at heart; and her social talents don't get much scope down there. Only half a dozen whites; and old Vinx buried fathoms deep in ethnology, writing a book. But, being Thea, she has pitched herself ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... Christian woman, Bunyan has here given us, as well as in his First Dream, the model of steadfast excellence in a Christian man. The delineation, in both Christiana and Mercy, is eminently beautiful. We have, in these characters, his own ideal of the domestic virtues, and his own conception of a well-ordered Christian family's domestic happiness. Wherever he may have formed his notions of female loveliness and excellence, he has, in the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... and not too warm—an ideal auction-day. Long before nine o'clock the yard was full of teams and the house of people. Among them all, however, there was no sign of the bent old man and the erect little old woman, the owners of the property to be sold. ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter

... his station on Mount Cook at an elevation of 1,000 feet upon a well protected plateau, which was described to him by a Mr. Ashton who had extensive acquaintance and some five years' experience in New Zealand. We found this position ideal, and in the perfection of all the conditions necessary for our experiments possessed by it, made the realization at that time utterly unsuspected by either of us, of our final designs, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... education are in several respects remarkable; like the rest of the Republic they are partly Greek and partly ideal, beginning with the ordinary curriculum of the Greek youth, and extending to after-life. Plato is the first writer who distinctly says that education is to comprehend the whole of life, and to be a preparation for ...
— The Republic • Plato

... primitive trees, that interlaced their branches, making the forest almost impenetrable. The soul of the Indian was entranced, as he gazed on this scene, so wild and silent in its beauty. It was his beau-ideal of the Spirit-Land; and, as he gazed, he drew his hand across his eyes to see if he, indeed, was waking. Still, there lay the landscape before him, with the melody above. At that moment the spell was broken by a herd of deer, leisurely crossing the dell. Drawing his bow, he was on the point ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle

... use of bothering your heads about them here! Have you not enough to trouble you otherwise? A nice pair of scientists you are? 'Stanislow' scientists, probably. Do real scientists lose their tempers for a trifle? Am I ever to see my ideal of a true scientific man in the flesh? Barbican came very near realizing my idea perfectly; but I see that Science just has as little effect as Culture in driving the Old Adam out of us! The idea of the only ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne



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