"Impractical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sat down, Phineas made one allusion to that former scuttling of the ship,—an accusation as to which had been made against him so injuriously by Mr. Bonteen. He himself, he said, had been called impractical, and perhaps he might allude to a vote which he had given in that House when last he had the honour of sitting there, and on giving which he resigned the office which he had then held. He had the gratification ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... English-speakers—the American people. In this they do not follow Cecil Rhodes, a chief propagandist of their main design. It is true that the idea of getting Americans to participate in any formal union with all the rest of their brethren by race and tongue seems now impractical. But time works wonders. Mr. Gladstone foresaw the United States a people of six hundred comfortable millions, living in union before the end of the next century. The hegemony of the English-speaking ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... reduced to a small amount by steaming instead of boiling the vegetable, or any drained off can be used in gravy, soup, sauce, or some similar fashion. The strong flavor of some vegetables, however, makes such economy rather impractical. ...
— Everyday Foods in War Time • Mary Swartz Rose
... only a poet-naturalist, but also a philosopher, who shows the influence of the transcendental school, particularly of Emerson. Some of Thoreau's philosophy is impractical and too unsocial, but it aims to discover the underlying basis of enchantment. He thus sums up the philosophy which his life at Walden ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... first chance proved we shall see later. The second was impractical, for the current carried the ice through the strait so fast, that any party trying to cross the floe, would have been carried south to where the strait widened out into Baffin's Bay before they could possibly pass the twenty-five miles which separated ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... poses two critical implementation problems * Layered approach represents the way to deal with users' capabilities * Problems in platform design; file size and its implications for networking * Transmission of megabyte size images impractical * Compression and decompression at the user's end * Promising trends for compression * A disadvantage of using X-Windows * A project at the Smithsonian that mounts images on several ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... their own rank diseases, or cut out other animals' organs, or kill and dissect them, hoping thus to learn how to offset their neglect of themselves. Conditions among them will be such that this will really be necessary. Few besides impractical sentimentalists will therefore oppose it. But the idea will be to gain health by legerdemain, by a trick, instead of by taking the trouble to live ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... save the unique gun his famous brother had made for him. Why he should wish for a flint-lock rifle was an unanswerable question, but someone wanted that sort of a gun or it would not have been made, and my father's letters showed him to be a man of sentiment, and impractical, just the sort of fellow to use a flint-lock when he might just as well have had a modern ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... hooves and horns from compressed hair? The meal is similar in nutrient composition to blood meal, leather dust, feather meal, or meat meal (tankage). It is a powerful source of nitrogen with significant amounts of phosphorus. Like other slaughterhouse byproducts its high cost may make it impractical to use to adjust the C/N of compost piles. Seed meals or chicken manure (chickens are mainly fed seeds) have somewhat lower nitrogen contents than animal byproducts but their price per pound of actual nutrition is more reasonable. ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... in the heat of the greatest of all battles. Woman asks for the suffrage. The world answers, "impractical." We are told that this movement is quite different from all others because there is an organized opposition of women themselves against it, but the "remonstrant" is not new. This century has witnessed ten generations of remonstrants. In 1800 the remonstrant was horrified at the study ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... have been said of Lockwin that he was impractical; that he was a dreamer. He had done singular things. He had not studied the ways ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... Secretary of War, speaks of a reconnaissance made by Thomas, Smith and Brannan on the north side of the river to a point opposite the mouth of Citico Creek, near the head of Missionary Ridge, which he thought at that time "proved Smith's plan of attack impractical." But further investigation proved that a passage could he made higher up the river, and when Sherman was taken to the place that had been selected, examining both the place for the bridge and its approaches, on both sides of the river, with his usual care, he closed his field glasses ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... was received in courteous silence. There were men there who had spent their summers reaping the harvest of salty, brown kelp from the rocks at low tide, and they knew how impractical the scheme was. Although the island exported yearly fifteen thousand dollars' worth of the strange stuff, it was plain that should all the men devote themselves to it the return would by no means measure up to ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... this war are new in the world. In every other war, soldiers have dreamed high dreams of their rewards. But they have not taken them—chiefly because their dreams were impractical, somewhat because the dreams that were practical were not held by a majority; or to some extent because if they were held by a majority the majority had no power. Now—even Henry admitted this is ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... It was impractical to issue Purney's Enquiry in facsimile because of the blurred condition of the photostats. This reprint follows the original text faithfully, with the following exceptions: the long "s" and the double "v" are ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... with former policies! Surely practical demonstration of these experiments in other parts of the country will have a tendency to reduce criminality. If not, pray tell me what will? Time and again have I heard prisoners and others comment upon the impractical Christianity portrayed, with seldom any exception. They weary of being only preached to. The actions of such men as Warden Hoyle and of such women as Matron Smith will probably have more to do with helping these convicted ones to lead ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... the first to introduce rifles into Ceylon, which were then regarded by the highest authorities in the island as impractical innovations, too difficult to sight, whereas an ordinary gun could be used with ball more quickly in ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... legitimate interest in protecting the public from unwilling exposure to speech that is not obscene. This interest has justified restrictions on speech "when the speaker intrudes on the privacy of the home, or the degree of captivity makes it impractical for the unwilling viewer or auditor to avoid exposure." Erznoznik, 422 U.S. at 209 (citations omitted). Thus, in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978), the Court relied on the state's interest in shielding viewers' sensibilities ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... there's anything the matter with the standard. What's needed isn't to upset everything in a heap, but to call people's attention to the fact that things could be a lot better than they are. And that's hard to do. And who ever called more people's attention to that fact than an impractical, unbalanced nobleman who took to cobbling shoes for the peace of his soul? There wasn't a particle of sense to what Tolstoi did, but—" He stopped, hesitating in an uncertainty that Lydia ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... the reader appear an impractical ideal, I would propose here to attempt to reach it by explaining the logical method which I have set ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... care in those delicious days that followed, I wandered down Sixth Avenue to New York's then most correct shops, buying clothes and clothes and clothes. I bought practical and impractical gifts for the twins back in Wisconsin and for all the family and those good friends who ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... know much. After all, he pointed out, it was impossible to check everyone in an office building of that size, or at least impractical. Furthermore, it was a cover operation, and any kind of a careful check on people in the building would warn them that something was going on. Tom agreed, however, that it was better to be safe than sorry. JANIG would run a check on the barber, ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... can do now. You could have shown me my mistake. How much better to have learned it then, from you, than later, by my own experience! You could have swept me off my feet, just as Frank did. You did nothing. If I had sought evidence to prove how impractical you are, as compared with my super-practical husband, I would have found it in the way you handled, or rather failed ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... him a small position as a tax-collector, but with such good-natured carelessness did he handle this uncongenial employ that he had repeatedly to make good from his own pocket the losses he entailed upon the government. Even this unsatisfactory labor failed the impractical author about the period of the death of King Philip II (1598). He was imprisoned for debt, and sank into such abject poverty that he depended on his friends for bread. How much the gloomy Philip II is satirized in Cervantes' masterpiece has always ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... in talking about it," he told the grateful members who sought to press his hands. "Go home and organize. I've got your name. Get your neighbours into line, and keep me informed. I'll pay for the postage-stamps. I'm no impractical reformer, and if we're going to do this thing, we'll have to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... too much emphasize the fact that the leaders of this period were by no means impractical theorists but men who were scientifically approaching the social problem of their people. They not only anticipated such ideas as those of industrial education and of the National Urban League of the present day, but they also endeavored ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... the most impractical men that ever lived, but in the exuberance of his nature and in his rare unselfishness he started a dozen social reforms in England, any one of which should have given fame to its founder. He gave away a great fortune in gifts to the public and ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... exacting form of charitable work. Nursing, even as a rich woman's diversion, must be anything but agreeable. O'Reilly pictured this Evans person in his mind—a large, plain, elderly creature, obsessed with impractical ideas of uplifting the masses! She would undoubtedly bore him stiff with stories of her work: she would reproach him with neglect of his duties to the suffering. Johnnie was too poor to be charitable and too deeply engrossed at the moment with his own troubles to care anything whatever ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... the rise of Tasawwuf or Sufyism[FN248] a revival of classic Platonism and Christian Gnosticism, with a mingling of modern Hylozoism; which, quickened by the glowing imagination of the East, speedily formed itself into a creed the most poetical and impractical, the most spiritual and the most transcendental ever invented; satisfying all man's hunger for "belief" which, if placed upon a solid basis of fact and proof, would forthright ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... could be, and sometimes was, disregarded altogether. Not that the colonial officials ever defied the King or his ministers, or ever failed to profess their intent to follow the royal instructions loyally and to the letter. They had a much safer plan. When the provisions of a royal decree seemed impractical or unwise, it was easy enough to let them stand unenforced. Such decrees were duly registered in the records of the Sovereign Council at Quebec and were then promptly pigeonholed so that no one outside the little circle of officials at the ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... other night so heartily that it drove me to sit down when I reached home and put my reflections into verse; into a form of verse, moreover, which (I was scornfully aware) Mr. Blank would understand as little as the matter of it. He would think them both impractical. Heaven ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the cause of colonization received from the press, it was an impractical, impossible, wild, and visionary scheme that could not be carried to the extent its projectors designed. It lost strength yearly, until all were convinced that the Negro would be emancipated here and remain here; that it was as impossible to colonize a race of people as ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... to be a nursery for ideas, into it flocked every variety of dreamer. There were those who dreamed epoch-making dreams and eventually made them come true; and there were those who merely saw visions too impractical ever to become realities. To work amid this mecca of minds must have been not only an education in science but in human nature as well. Every sort of crank who had gathered a wild notion out of the blue ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... my intellect, my education and experience prompt me to reason from the same standpoint," was the grave response. "My professional pride also cries out 'Absurd! Impossible! Impractical!' But I dearly love that little girl in there," and the man's voice grew gentle as a woman's and trembled in spite of his manhood, as he glanced towards the adjoining room. "I love my sister, whose life is a mental and physical martyrdom, and ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... preferable for adults. However, having dinner at noon is often very inconvenient and sometimes impossible, because frequently one or more members of the family are at business some distance from home and their coming home at noon for dinner is impractical. In such an event, the evening meal should be the heavy one, but it should not be made too hearty and overeating ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... Furthermore, great care should be taken to avoid hiatus between words, as when the first word ends and the word following begins with a vowel. But the glory of style to the classical rhetorician lay in its use of figures. Here rhetoric vindicated its practicality by a preoccupation with the impractical; and here, as in analysis, rhetoric bore the seeds of its own decay. Although Aristotle devoted relatively little space to the rhetorical figures, later treatises emphasized them more and more until in post-classical and in mediaeval rhetoric ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... steps to the laboratory. Swell mess he'd gotten himself into! His car was gone: probably wrapped around a tree by this time. And here was a situation that spelled real danger, a thing with which Shelton was utterly unable to cope. As a matter of fact, he was so impractical—such a visionary cuss, after the fashion of all geniuses—that he'd never be convinced of the seriousness of the matter until it was too late. What to do? The girl was a corker, though, and game as they made 'em. Just the sort a fellow could ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... then, such a purely poetic, spiritual, impractical passion is perhaps the cause of Mr. Belloc's note and career. It is the passion of a poet. Assuredly actuated by such a feeling, he has developed his practical and political opinions: the ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... All sorts of impractical schemes tormented her feverish brain. She would appeal to the manager of the place. She was a woman. She would understand. She would do any work, anything, for her bare keep. Take care of the rooms, wait on table, anything. Then the thought came to her of how Gertie would ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... to be expecting "a mule and forty acres of land" from the government; for it stood in the way of real effort in practical directions. So, while a nobler ideal is of incalculable benefit to a people, it is a real evil for them to be indulging in impractical dreams. They waste effort and divert power from practical ends, and result in that kind of disappointment that discourages the heart and unnerves the arm. Those, then, who talk of nationalism as a solution ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... confusing but if you had it you were a High-class Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker, and a fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you to handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn't imply that you were to be impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn't jew you down ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... all very well," she said, "and sounds very poetic, but it would be rather impractical for us all to do, ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... those defenders of property who look upon the Church as impractical; who consider the Golden Rule as something all right for the minister to talk about on Sundays, but something useless to try to follow during the week. Those men criticize the Church for preaching love, for talking the Sermon on the Mount, and for being ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... not go far that first morning. The half-track was driven to the edge of the Dumps. Within the Dumps one walks—or does not go. Phobos is an airless world, and yet so small that rockets are impractical. The terrain is broken and littered with the refuse of half a dozen worlds, but the Dumps themselves—that ...
— B-12's Moon Glow • Charles A. Stearns
... of the —— Congress was not unlike the closing of the several preceding Congresses. There was the same unbusiness-like, impractical haste; the same hurried, unjust, and utterly inadequate adjustment of unfinished, ill-digested business, that would not have been tolerated for a moment by the sovereign people in any private interest they controlled. There were frauds rushed through; there ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... difference between the mixture of colored light and of colored pigments, not with the idea of explaining it here, but to emphasize their difference; for in the next chapter we shall describe the practical making of a color sphere with pigments, which would be quite impractical, could we have only the colors of the spectrum to work with. See ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... that Fanny Foster was to have, sometime or other, a silk petticoat, made up to her for this day's work and self-sacrifice. For Grandma was one of those rare practical people who yet believed in respecting the foolish dreams of impractical humans. ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... was impractical. Parasight was worthless beyond the borders of the null. No surrogate could penetrate it and no weapon would operate within it. It would be most unsafe for any true man to enter. There, one would be subject to ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... endurance. For the next two or three days the newspapers printed caustic contributions from fellow architects and builders, in each of which the luckless Medcroft was taken to task for advocating an impractical and fatuous New York hobby in the way of construction,—something that staid old London would not even tolerate or discuss. The social chroniclings of the Medcrofts in Vienna, as despatched by the correspondents, offset this unhappy ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... accumulating stores of Greek erudition, while his mind had a tendency, in the midst of a variety of inconsistent doctrines, to leave the conclusion undetermined. He brought everything to a practical standard; he admired the exalted purity of stoical morality, but he feared that it was impractical. He believed in the existence of one supreme creator, in his spiritual nature, and the immortality of the soul; but his belief was rather the result of instinctive conviction, than ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Comanche was there on the white plain to serve the present, and temporary, purpose of housing and feeding the thousands who had collected there at the lure of chance with practical, impractical, speculative, romantic, honest, and dishonest ideas and intentions. Whether it should survive to become a colorless post-office and shipping-station for wool, hides, and sheep remained for the future to decide. As the town appeared under the burning sun of that August afternoon one might have ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... from the Arquebus to Our Rifle 3. Progressive Introduction of Fire-Arms Into the Armament of the Infantryman 4. The Classes of Fire Employed with Each Weapon 5. Methods of Fire Used in the Presence of the Enemy; Methods Recommended or Ordered but Impractical 6. Fire at Will—Its Efficacy 7. Fire by Rank Is a Fire to Occupy the Men in Ranks 8. The Deadly Fire Is the Fire of Skirmishers 9. The Absolute ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... promptly sends a vigorous though respectful reply, which is intended to convey that they are to have done with such impractical foolery. It is a world-shaking fight he has on hand. The honour and military glory of France are at stake. It is not for mere theoretic upholders of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity to meddle with such ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... am particularly interested in Pete's opinion of your abilities," Addington rejoined coldly. "My dear little girl," he went on, palpably striving for patience and gentleness, "there's nothing you could do to help me. Women are too impractical. This is a man's work, besides. By the way, after we've had our little outing, I'll leave you with Lulu. Honey and Pete and I are going to meet at the Clubhouse to work ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... language or a scale to evaluate the loss to them inherent in a wrecked landscape, a spoiled stream, and such things, or the positive worth of an unspoiled section of countryside. But it is becoming obvious enough that objections to environmental destruction are not necessarily sentimental, naive, or impractical. A bit late, realization is growing that the world has a certain longstanding wholeness with which people interfere massively at their own peril. Landscape in the widest sense—the sense of the integrity of a place to ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... first place, the get-rich-quick swindles, the out-and-out impostures, which have deceived the credulous into investments that never could pay. Bonanza mines, impractical inventions, town lots laid out on the prairie, orange groves that existed only on paper-such bogus hopes have enticed many an honest man and woman, who could ill afford to lose, into turning over their small earnings to the brazen exploiters.[Footnote: For ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... except those already subscribed can be received! The Christian Scientists have a faith of the mustard-seed variety. What a pity some of our practical Christian folk have not a faith approximate to that of these "impractical" Christian Scientists. ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... strain in him which had made his maternal ancestors gentlemen-adventurers in Tudor times, and cavaliers in the days of Charles the First, and Jacobites with James the Second, and roysterers with George the Fourth—loyal, swashbuckling, and impractical, daring, dashing, lovable, absurd, bound to come to grief one day or another, as they had come—that strain lying dormant, Ashley was free to wake in the spirit of the manufacturer of brushes. In other words he woke in alarm. It was very real alarm. It was alarm not unlike that ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... hoping against reason, the victim of illogical constancy to a mere young man. Sweet and gracious Ellen Berstoun, so slender and pretty and charming, wasting her fragrance in the old garden and the dark pine-woods for the sake of certain passionate memories and the most impractical of day-dreams, was a sight to ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... is that an artist who demands appreciation from the public on his own terms, and on none but his own terms, is either a god or a conceited and impractical fool. And he is somewhat more likely to be the latter than the former. He wants too much. There are two sides to every bargain, including the artistic. The most fertile and the most powerful artists are the readiest to recognise this, because their sense of proportion, which ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... carbohydrates. Chestnuts, however, contain much of the latter foodstuff. Because they contain protein, nuts may be used as substitutes for meat. But most nuts are expensive. For this reason in many households they are impractical as ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... think of everyone but me," she said hotly. "You promised so that your father would die easy, and that's the end of it. If you are going to be bound by such a thing as that you're nothing more than an impractical idealist." ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... you do see him you'll understand. Nice old chap as ever lived. Only impractical, dreamy. Gentle as a sheep—and no more capable of running that big, expensive plant than a motherly old ewe. That's where the trouble is. When father's closed down on him and edged him out—quietly, you understand—it'll ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... to resettle the country with colonies of town unemployed, but these proposals are opposed by some as impractical. "To imagine that any such colony could be self-supporting, that the land which no capitalist will now till with expert farm labourers at ten shillings a week would yield trade-union rates of wages to a mixed crowd of unemployed townsmen, that such a heterogeneous collection of waifs and strays, ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... be cases, however, where only a few, or possibly only one, of the fingers has sufficient ridge detail for identification. In such instances a search through the FBI files would be impractical. This, however, does not preclude the possibility of making a positive identification by the use of the one finger. Though a search through the file is not possible, a comparison can be made with the fingerprints of individuals who it is thought the deceased may be ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... mighty keen bird, was one of the first voyagers, and he didn't come back—he stayed there, living in a space-suit for three or four years, and got a brand-new education. Martian science always was hot, you know, but they were impractical. They were desperately hard up for water and air, and while they had a lot of wonderful ideas and theories, they couldn't overcome the practical technical difficulties in the way of making their ideas work. Now putting other peoples' ideas to ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... arrangement to operate the ships, and we again turned to our competitor, Mr. Mather, in the hope that he would add this to his cares. Unfortunately, because of his obligations to others, he felt that this was impractical. I asked Mr. Gates one day soon ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... rig allowed more adjustment of sail area and thus would give better handling of the boat under all weather conditions. This was important because oyster dredging could be carried on in rough weather when tonging would be impractical. Like the Maryland terrapin smack, the Carolina sharpie schooner adhered closely to New Haven principles of design and construction. However, Carolina sharpie schooners were larger than terrapin smacks, having an over-all length of ...
— The Migrations of an American Boat Type • Howard I. Chapelle
... lofty air of patronization with which the dominant commercial classes looked down upon the writer, the painter, the musician, the philosopher or the sculptor. Regarding these "sentimentalists" as easy, legitimate and defenseless objects of prey, and as incidental and impractical hangers-on in a world where trade was all in all, the commercial classes at all times affected a certain air of encouragement of the fine arts, which encouragement, however, never attempted to put a stop to piracies of publication or reproduction. How sordidly commercial ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... the price of justifying yourself in the terms of Aristotelian arithmetic. The college president who abandoned his college in order to run a cotton mill was free to make his own choice of a calling; but he was never pardoned for bankrupting the mill. If one is bound to be a low man rather than an impractical idealist, he should at least make ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... these magazines which are used for various purposes. Those which are in danger of spoiling shall be distributed by his order; and what shall not be thus disposed of shall not be passed over, at the time, to the royal officials. That ordinance is impractical, for, besides the continual occupations of the governor in affairs of greater importance and his inability to personally supervise things so minute, your Majesty had issued the necessary ordinance before the visit, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... occur to you and the others seem absurd. Grim knew that, of course, but when you're dealing with a woman there's just one chance in a hundred that she may think of something vital that hasn't occurred to anybody else. Most women aren't practical; but it's the impractical ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... the second son—heavily enough punished—did not prevent her from loving the elder, though their characters (hers and his) were not made to comprehend each other; and her lack of enthusiasm in the days of his literary apprenticeship was natural enough in a parent who understood only too well the impractical, improvident mind he possessed, and feared its consequences. The fact was that Balzac ill supported remonstrances from his own family, and especially from his mother, and, when irritated by them, forgot every benefit ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... and the number of teachers employed in the department of physical training, or in those departments from which physical training draws its science and its philosophy, is small, so that it is impractical to plan to give this instruction to small groups of students covering ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... guest-room, but I doubt it. Most women find it more satisfactory and less expensive to send their guests to a nearby hotel than to keep an extra room for a guest. The guest room is impractical in a small apartment, but you can arrange to take care of an over-night guest ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... side of the tunnel to the other, and that the traveler should be moved backward or forward, as might be required, and thus deliver the concrete from the end of the belt directly over the place in which it was to be deposited in the bench-walls. As a matter of fact, it was found impractical in operation to move the gantry readily, owing to its great weight, which was supported on only four ordinary car wheels and their bearings, and it was found more convenient to leave the arm in one position near the ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Bergen Hill Tunnels. Paper No. 1154 • F. Lavis
... the moment to urge upon the needlewoman the study of design, but to urge upon the designer the study of stitches. Nothing is more impractical than to make a design without realising the labour involved in its execution. Any one not in sympathy with stitching may possibly design a beautiful piece of needlework, but no one will get all that is to be got out of the needle without knowing all about it. One must ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... after an energetic September, succeeded in putting all the furniture to rights and in evoking curtains and linen. Anybody, even the impractical Father, can fill a house with furniture, but it takes two women and at least four weeks to make the furniture look as though it had grown there. She had roamed the fields, and brought home golden-rod and Michaelmas ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... war is a scar on the nation's industry, it is likewise a blot on her ideals. Though this element of idealism at first seems visionary and impractical, it is one of the foundation stones of progress. The fixed gulf between what man is and what he knows he might be is the decisive factor in his advance. Ideals are the pulleys of the unseen, round which man throws his hopes and aims, by which he pulls himself across the chasm and into the ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... most impractical man. He would sit in his office as foreman, read the New York Herald, and suck at an unlit cigar, telling anyone who listened how he would be quite happy to retire and run a little chicken farm somewhere the rest ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... name in this book I promise to take good care of all the books I read in the Library and of those I take home and to obey the rules of the Library." Such a method of registration is not impractical, even in a large library provided the work is carefully planned ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... P. G. S. of M. would ask me what I meant by reading down through, but he didn't. He was still at large, worrying about the world. "I have no patience with it—your idea," he broke out. "It's all in the air. It's impractical enough, anyway, just as an idea, and it's all the more impractical when it's carried out. So far as I can see, at the rate you're carrying on," said The P. G. S. of M., "what with improving the world and all with your book, there isn't going to be anything but You and ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... are to be feared get late-blooming varieties, the leading ones established in Oregon being the Mayette and the Franquette. Other varieties will undoubtedly be introduced in the next few years that will withstand frost in regions where walnut planting now seems impractical. Mr. Henry Hewitt's one tree that blooms the fourth of July, at an elevation of 1,000 feet, is evidence of the possibilities in this direction. Air ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... day—a mystic, a follower of Oriental philosophy, a non-resistant, an advocate of woman suffrage, an abolitionist, a vegetarian, and heaven knows what besides. So in the end, he was sold out, and removed with his family to Concord, where he developed into a sort of impractical idealist, holding Orphic conversations and writing scraps of speculation and criticism, and ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... we have to deal with had something excessive about him; he was headstrong, tactless, impractical, enormously energetic, a prodigious worker, a conceiver of grandiose projects, and a relentless hunter of patrons. He was at home with his social superiors and had some pretentions to literary culture, he had a coarse gift for the vivid phrase in writing, ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... this idea abandoned at the very moment of its birth. It's a good idea, and in no way impractical, in my opinion. So permit me to make another proposition. I will build the twenty theatres myself, and furnish the films for them, provided the young ladies will agree to assume the entire management of them when they ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... sat down at the far side of the hut awaiting she knew not what impending fate. She could not sleep so filled was her mind with wild schemes of escape though each new one must always be discarded as impractical. Half an hour after the warrior had returned her to her prison he rose and entered the hut, where he tried to engage in conversation with her. Groping across the interior he leaned his short spear against the wall and sat down beside her, and as he talked he edged closer and ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... believe that they merit all the blessings of health, distinction and wealth that may come to them, and they condemn their less fortunate brother as one deserving his fate. The poor, the weak and the impractical did not themselves bring about their condition. Who knows how large a part the mystery of birth and heredity play in one's life and what environment and opportunity, or lack of it, means to us? Health, ability, energy, favorable environment ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... the stupid faces of your fellow passengers. How can people be so clownish? Of course, there is always the chance that the elevator will fall and that you will all be terribly hurt. But that is too much to expect. You dismiss it from your thoughts as too impractical, too visionary. Things don't work out as happily as ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... last pitcher under the sun calculated to be effective with the "rabbit." He never relied on speed; in fact, Merritt often scornfully accused him of being unable to break a pane of glass; he used principally what we called floaters and a change of pace. Both styles were absolutely impractical with the "rabbit." ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... would flow through a tunnel out onto the valley. And this level, too, must be at a point where construction work was possible. The river was incredibly rough and treacherous. From the first they packed everything in waterproof bags. The canvas canoes were impractical. The river was full of hidden rock and by the third day the second canoe was torn to pieces and they were depending on rafts ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... were his theories, and impractical as were many of his ideas, to an age tired of absurdities and pretensions and injustice, and suffering deeply from the abuses of both Church and State, his attractively written book seemed almost inspired. The Social Contract virtually became the Bible of the French Revolutionists. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... German word for 'thought'. A thought experiment is one you carry out in your head. In physics, the term 'gedanken experiment' is used to refer to an experiment that is impractical to carry out, but useful to consider because it can be reasoned about theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment of relativity theory involves thinking about a man in an elevator accelerating through space.) Gedanken experiments ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... tonight to outline a scheme of self-education, which if consistently followed out I am sure will help you, though I am aware that to a certain order of mind it will seem highly mystical and impractical. If it commends itself to your ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... that their friendship was to be of a purely platonic nature. It was a severe trial to him, he confessed, to be forced to put aside certain dreams he had had of the future—mad dreams, perhaps, but such as had seemed very dear and very plausible to his impractical artistic temperament. ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... Liebknecht, and others might demolish, once and for all, the reactionary proposals of Bakounin. To Marx, much of the program of the Alliance seemed a remnant of eighteenth-century philosophy, while the rest was pure utopianism, consisting of unsound and impractical reforms, mixed with atheism and schoolboy declamation. Altogether, the policies and projects of Bakounin seemed so vulnerable that the General Council evidently felt that little preparation was necessary in order to defeat them. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... poultry and pig clubs he proposed to have in operation the next summer, seemed highly practical; but to Jennie's mind, the fact that they introduced dissension in the neighborhood and promised to make her official life vexatious, seemed ample proof that Jim's work was visionary and impractical. Poor Jennie was not aware of the fact that new truth always comes bringing, not peace to ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... land and longs to attain the unfulfilled ambitions of the soul, even when these in full measure are not possible. Sometimes these ambitions are so unrelated to the possible that the romantic has in certain usage become synonymous with the impractical or the absurd; but this is not its meaning in literature. The romantic may not always be "of imagination all compact," but it has a tendency in that direction. To the romanticists a reality of the imagination is as satisfying as a reality of the prosaic reason; hence, unlike the classicists, the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... equal with other people, and we aren't equal with the English. We aren't equal with anybody but subject people. And they look down on us, the English do. We're lazy and dirty and ignorant and superstitious and priest-ridden and impractical and ... and comic!... My God, comic! Whenever I see an Englishman in Ireland, running round and feeling superior, I want to wring his damned neck ... and I should hate ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... Embassy were making impractical requests, as for instance that the American Ambassador demand that the French Government accept the passports or identification papers issued by the American Embassy here in lieu of permis de sjour. If the French Government accorded this favor to the ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... came upon me, the madness of venturing single-handed into the den of the Wood King. What had I to hope for? What chance, however remote, was there of successfully wresting that blooming prize from the arms of her captor? Force was out of the question; stealth was utterly impractical; as for cajolery, apparently the sole remaining means of winning back the Princess—why, one might as well try the persuasion of a penny flute upon a hungry eagle as seek to rouse Ar-hap's sympathies for bereaved Hath ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... the head of the engine, while the compression stroke only moved the piston far enough to sufficiently compress the mixture. The unusual linkage necessary to create these unequal strokes in the Atkinson engine made it seem impractical for a carriage engine, where compactness ...
— The 1893 Duryea Automobile In the Museum of History and Technology • Don H. Berkebile |
