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Ideal   Listen
adjective
Ideal  adj.  
1.
Existing in idea or thought; conceptional; intellectual; mental; as, ideal knowledge.
2.
Reaching an imaginary standard of excellence; fit for a model; faultless; as, ideal beauty. "There will always be a wide interval between practical and ideal excellence."
3.
Existing in fancy or imagination only; visionary; unreal. "Planning ideal common wealth."
4.
Teaching the doctrine of idealism; as, the ideal theory or philosophy.
5.
(Math.) Imaginary.
Synonyms: Intellectual; mental; visionary; fanciful; imaginary; unreal; impracticable; utopian.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Ideal" Quotes from Famous Books



... about it. "Gentlemen," he said, "you will admit that, when arrived at a certain degree of fortune, the superfluities of life are all that can be desired; and the ladies will allow that, after having risen to a certain eminence of position, the ideal alone can be more exalted. Now, to follow out this reasoning, what is the marvellous?—that which we do not understand. What is it that we really desire?—that which we cannot obtain. Now, to see things which I cannot understand, to procure impossibilities, these are the study of my life. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... aims that all end in selfishness. Find, I say again, on the threshold of your years, the power that can grasp you by your real requirement. Your first need is not wisdom, but grace; it is not education, but regeneration; it is not an ideal even, but a Saviour. Wisdom, education, and moral enthusiasms are but the machinery of our uplifting, the driving-power is Life. You know the Source of this power; you know the way to Him of Whom it is written: "In Him was ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd

... "Republic" of the Greek philosopher; and he frequently quotes from the work or refers to its principles in his correspondence with Grosvenor and Horace W. Bedford between 11th November 1793 and 12th June 1794. Before his meeting with Southey no trace of ideal Republicanism appears in the letters of Coleridge. His leaning notwithstanding this was already towards Republicanism, and the friendship struck up between him and Southey was a natural consequence of flint ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... product and not in any sense atmospheric. He had schooled himself to believe that he liked loneliness—loneliness physical and mental, and that in marrying a pretty, but pleasure-loving girl, he had insured an ideal menage. Furthermore, he honestly believed that he worshiped his wife; and with his present grief at her unaccountable silence was ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer

... little picture of the life they were to lead when Clarissa had found a kindly dealer to give her constant employment: a tiny cottage, somewhere in Kent or Surrey, among green fields and wooded hills, furnished ever so humbly, but with a garden where Lovel might play. Clarissa sketched the ideal cottage one evening—a bower of roses and honeysuckle, with a thatched roof and steep gables. Alas, when she had finished her fortnight's work, and carried half a dozen sketches to a dealer in Rathbone-place, it was only ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... everything else, sir, there is to be found the superlative, the quintessence,—the ideal. Consequently I have roamed East and West, and North and South, ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol

... japonica. In one of them an old woman in a pink sunbonnet was leaning on a stick gossiping with a neighbour, while two or three sunburned children with yellow hair were dabbling in a brook. It was idyllically and typically English, that ideal England of artists which is dreamed of and loved by the sons and daughters of the Colonies, who, thinking of "home" which they have never seen, think of such a scene ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... next. Her slight fingers hurried on as if, like the pretended spirit manifestations, impelled by an invisible agency without the pale of the world. She was intoxicated by the mere joy of inventing ideal images. In her own special art an elaborate artist, here she had no thought of art; if art was in her work, it sprang unconsciously from the harmony between herself and her subject,—as it is, perhaps, with the early ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... The Ideal walking hand in hand. And behind them came Wealth and Vastness singing together. And Infinity was there, and Health, and Wisdom, and Love. And Reflection was mounted on a steed with Joy. And many other shapes followed, delicately arrayed in fine linen. And helmet-wearing Men in Blue marshalled ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various

... temperament from his own and an economical housekeeper. So when he found the age of twenty-five approaching, he began to look about. There was no one in Wallace who satisfied the requirements. He therefore set out afoot to discover his ideal. In those days and regions the professional tramp and mendicant were unknown, and every farmhouse dispensed its hospitality with an Arcadian simplicity little known in our times. Wherever he stopped overnight he made a critical investigation of the housekeeping, perhaps ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb

... poet stronger in the second case than in the first? No; in the first, his ideal is higher and his humility greater, as he relies absolutely on the guidance of the Holy Spirit. In the second, relying only on his own reasoning powers to guide him, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education

... those which La Salle had in mind, and the fabric of a wilderness empire, of which he laid the foundations, grew with the general growth of colonization, and in the next century became truly formidable. It was not until Wolfe climbed the Heights of Abraham that the great ideal of ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... formerly. Children, you know, have little reflection, or rather their reflections run on ideal themes. There are moments now when ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... too, chocolate-coated candies and bonbons must be placed on a smooth surface to which they will not stick. Waxed paper is largely used for this purpose, although candy makers often prefer white oilcloth, because its surface is ideal and it can be cleansed and used repeatedly. Often a candy- or cracker-box lining that has been pressed smooth with a warm iron may be utilized. For such purposes, as when reception wafers are to be dropped, ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences

... MAN.—"In the supremacy of self-control," says Herbert Spencer, "consists one of the perfections of the ideal man. Not to be impulsive, not to be spurred hither and thither by each desire that in turn comes upper-most, but to be self-restrained, self-balanced, governed by the joint decision of the feelings in council assembled, before whom every action shall have been fully debated, and calmly ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... Magdalen's tower still rang the lark-like hymn On May-day morn: high ranged in airy cells, Facing the East, all Sciences, all Arts, Yea, and with these all Virtues, imaged stood, Best imaged stood in no ideal forms, Craft unhistoric of some dreamer's brain, But life-like shapes of plain heroic men Who in their day had fought the fight of Faith, Warriors and sages, poets, saints, and kings, And earned their rest: the long procession paced, Up winding ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... of knowledge of mediaeval architecture, has driven people into spending their money on these buildings, not merely with the purpose of repairing them, of keeping them safe, clean, and wind and water- tight, but also of 'restoring' them to some ideal state of perfection; sweeping away if possible all signs of what has befallen them at least since the Reformation, and often since dates much earlier: this has sometimes been done with much disregard of art and entirely from ecclesiastical zeal, but oftener it has been well meant enough as regards ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris

... to visit some of your old haunts, Serenita?' said Freda. 'By the way that would be a good name for Mr Prothero's ideal general.' ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale

... and glowed with pleasure. It was from the publisher of his paper. The publisher wrote of "loyalty to the newspaper ideal," "unstinting, unremitting effort." The letter spoke effusively about Jimmy's recent achievement on the murder story. The letter concluded with the statement that in view of the fact that that splendid story encroached on his vacation, his vacation ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew

... an ideal manner of dealing with offenders of a less serious type, minors and criminaloids, who have fallen into bad ways, since, instead of punishing them, it seeks to encourage in them habits of integrity and to check the growth of vices by means of a benevolent but strict supervision. The offender is placed ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... Vicomte spoke coldly. Mirande's conduct took him by surprise, for resistance to arrest was rare during the Revolution. Such men as Mirande, courageous, bigoted, devoted to an ideal, made a point—unless they resorted to suicide—of submitting calmly to destiny and ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman

... not think of Cesar Borgia or of any drunken philosophy that elevates him to its escutcheon. He is nothing to me, this Cesar Borgia. I have the poorest possible opinion of him, and I shall never in my life understand how men can revere the extraordinary and the demoniacal as an ideal. No, 'life,' standing as it does in eternal contrast to intellect and art—not as a vision of bloody greatness and barbarous beauty, not as the unusual does it appear to us unusual men; on the contrary, the normal, decorous, and amiable are the realm of our longing, and these are life ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... time when the visit described here took place, the poet's mental state was worse than before, and there seemed less chance than ever of restoring 'the finer organization of such a humanity.' Clare was haunted now, wherever he went, by the vision of his first ideal love, his ever-sought 'Mary.' He fancied that she was his wife, torn from him by evil spirits, and that he was bound to seek her all over the earth. In his wild hallucinations, he confounded his real with his ideal spouse, addressing the latter in language wonderfully sweet, though exhibiting strange ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin

... to accept many scientific results. Reason demands that the world she would create shall be a fact, and declares that the world she would transform is the real world, but until the imagination can find a function for it in reason's ideal realm, every piece of knowledge remains useless, or even an obstacle in the way of our intended advance. This applies to individuals just as truly as it does to mankind. And since man's reason is a natural phenomenon and ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... country; and no better text can be found for a discourse on the subject than the preceding quotation. In saying that there should be a thousand investigators of disease where there is now one, I believe that Professor Lankester would be the first to admit that this statement was that of an ideal to be aimed at, rather than of an end to be practically reached. Every careful thinker will agree that to gather a body of men, young or old, supply them with laboratories and microscopes, and tell them to investigate disease, would be ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... of improving his income by exchanging his little collection of bonds for a "small rental property," if he could find "a good buy"; and he had spent many of his spare hours rambling over the enormously spreading city and its purlieus, looking for the ideal "buy." It remained unattainable, so far as he was concerned; but he found ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington

... ill- intentioned fellow, preferred doing well and acting fairly, and neither at school nor at college had got into any serious scrape. But he had never found it imperative to reach out after his own ideal of duty. He had never been worthy the name of student, or cared much for anything beyond the amusements the universities provide so liberally, except dabbling in literature. Perhaps his only vice was self-satisfaction—which few will admit to ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... to accept inactivity with gracefulness. That "they also serve who only stand and wait," he was willing to accept as true; but that wasn't the kind of serving he hankered for; Pemberton's ideal of usefulness was getting busy and doing things—and ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour

... attention to the fact that in the early ages in Egypt, in Greece, and in Rome, women were of much greater political consequence than later during the republics; but the moral they have drawn has been that of the superiority of the ancient times. Mrs. Dietrick says: "The ideal woman of Greece was Athena, patroness of all household arts and industries, but equally patroness of all political interests. The greatest city of Greece was believed to have been founded by her, and Greek history recorded that, though the men citizens voted solidly ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... ideal hiding place," agreed Roy, "far too ideal to suit us. I don't see how we'd ever get out ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham

... characteristic. Mrs. Campbell is a natural storyteller, and has the gift of making a tale interesting. Even the recipes for pickles and preserves, evaporating fruits, raising poultry, and keeping bees, are made poetic and invested with a certain ideal glamour, and we are thrilled and absorbed by an array of figures of receipts and expenditures, equally with the changeful incidents of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony. Fun and pathos, sense and sentiment, are mingled throughout, and the combination has resulted ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell

... appearances are like angels' visits—in the obvious, as well as in the conventional but remoter sense. I can count no less than three men of this stamp among my ten thousand acquaintances. When the twofold excellence of such ambidexters is not stultified by selfishness, you have in them a realised ideal upon which their Creator might pronounce the judgment that it is very good. Move heaven and earth, then, to multiply that ideal by the number of the population. The thing is, at least, theoretically possible; for it is ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... Virginia, on a big place next to her uncle's, was a girl whom she had decided would make an ideal chaperon. She was as fond of larks as was Madge herself. She could fish, ride, swim and shoot a rifle when necessary. Moreover, she was so beautiful and aristocratic that Madge always called her the "Lady of Quality." It was true she could not cook ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers

... pools, and rippling streams. Daphnis and Mopsus, Corydon, Alexis, and Amyntas, were all to him real personages, who peopled his solitude, inspired his poetic fancy, and fostered in his imagination the elements of an ideal life where the beauty and purity and freshness of untainted Nature reigned supreme. The accident of his lameness, by incapacitating him for violent exercise out of doors, ministered to the development of this spiritual ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour

... The ideal course in history would include (1) a general view of the history of the world, giving the pupil knowledge enough to provide the proper setting for the history of his own country; (2) a more detailed knowledge of the whole ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education

... people, and are such a sacred and venerable legacy that I can only undertake to speak of the future of our educational institutions in the sense of their being a most probable approximation to the ideal spirit which gave them birth. I am, moreover, convinced that the numerous alterations which have been introduced into these institutions within recent years, with the view of bringing them up-to-date, are for the most part but distortions and aberrations of the originally ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... recording our ancestors so generally prevails, that it must depend on the influence of some common principle in the minds of men. We seem to have lived in the persons of our forefathers; it is the labour and reward of vanity to extend the term of this ideal longevity. Our imagination is always active to enlarge the narrow circle in which Nature has confined us. Fifty or an hundred years may be allotted to an individual, but we step forward beyond death ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon

... to say, less of the product of labor in the aggregate is being absorbed by middlemen, or what might be termed non-productive agencies. The production of labor is being more evenly and equitably distributed than ever before. The ideal justice dreamed of by the philosophic socialists is within reach. In short, the wage-worker is better off, has more advantages, greater opportunities, and is yearly becoming a more important factor ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various

... confident that the lady who sent them through me must have been a very charming person. As to Gibson, no criticism could be sounder. I had a considerable liking for Gibson as a man, and admiration for his character, but as regards his ideal productions I think Dickens hits the ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... sight, and started to follow at a leisurely pace. It certainly was an ideal afternoon for a country walk. The sun was just hesitating whether to treat the time as afternoon or evening. Eventually, it decided that it was evening, and moderated its beams. After London, the country was ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse

... in the town of Marseilles, only two years ago, I met a man who looked well fed, and had a stalwart, square French face, and whose politico-economic ideal, though it was not mine, greatly moved me. It was just past midnight, and I was throwing little stones into the old Greek harbour, the stench and the glory of which are nearly three thousand years old; I was to be off at dawn upon a tramp steamer, and I had so determined ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc

... never affected to be anything but a plain man, was very honest according to his lights, and never for an instant failed to have the courage of his convictions. Such a king and such a people would inevitably be attracted to a man of Johnson's fearless sincerity and invincible common sense. The ideal of the nation is {18} still the same. Johnson once praised the third Duke of Devonshire for his "dogged veracity." We have lately seen one of that duke's descendants and successors, a man of no obvious or shining talents, attain to a position of almost unique authority ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey

... vision. Once again I hear the river In the darkness rush and roar, See the pine-boughs wave and quiver, Hear the oak trees, blasted, hoar, Muttering, as their gaunt arms shiver, "Come again, oh! days of yore!" Come, oh times of hope and longing, When the beauteous, pure ideal, Seemed tangible and real— "Love the light ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl

... been too grotesque. She did not want to give Pa and Ma the satisfaction of seeing her unhappily married. Lily armed herself with patience; and she needed it! Trampy was in a frightful temper, said that he would have been the ideal husband, if she had been the little wife he had dreamed of: but to think that she had married ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne

... a story somewhat foreign to the preceding transactions, but which personally concerns myself. On the 20th of July 1801 the First Consul, 'ex proprio motu', named me a Councillor of State extraordinary. Madame Bonaparte kindly condescended to have an elegant but somewhat ideal costume made for me. It pleased the First Consul, however, and he had a similar one made for himself. He wore it a short time and then left it off. Never had Bonaparte since his elevation shown himself so ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... the argand, and seated myself with the young officer to examine and admire the beautiful forms in which the gifted artist has clothed the words rather than the thoughts of the writer,—out of the coarse real, lifting the scenes into the sweet ideal,—and out of the commonest, rudest New-England life, bringing the purest and most charming idyllic song. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... "I shall always envy you, though, Rudolph. No other man I know has ever attained the good old troubadourish ideal of domnei—that love which rather abhors than otherwise the notion of possessing its object. I still believe it was a distinct relief to a certain military officer, whose name we need not mention, when Anne ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... surface it would go on just the same; but the deeps had been stirred. It must not be with her as with poor butterfly Ruby. When she came to the end of one life it must not be to face the next with the shrinking terror of something wholly different—something for which accustomed thought and ideal and aspiration had unfitted her. The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must be ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... at home enjoying themselves. Freddie's torpedoes still held out, and Flossie had a few more "snakes" left. Nan had company on the lawn, and it indeed was an ideal Fourth of July. ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Country • Laura Lee Hope

... them agitated by this idea—that to try to live one's life on earth and to be happy is not only a right but a duty, and even an ideal and a virtue; that the only end of social life is to make easy the inner life of ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... roadside pool backed by willow bushes they set down tar-bucket and pillow, and under a low, vast live-oak bough turned and waited. A gibbous moon had set, and presently a fog rolled down the river, blotting out landscape and stars and making even these willows dim and unreal. Ideal conditions! Now if their guest of honor, with or without his friend, would but stop at this pool to wash the Stock-Landing muck from his horse's shins—but ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... death a Northern critic, writing of the new birth of interest in Timrod's work, said: "Time is the ideal editor." Surely, Editor Time's blue pencil has dealt kindly ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... What an ideal spot for the founding of a city! That is our first impression, as we glance across the broad sunlit enclosure on to the empurpled slopes of Vesuvius rising grandly above the broken columns of the great temple of the Capitoline Jove; behind us, we know, is the azure Bay ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... 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 of the good faith of Christian ...
— Utopia • Thomas More

... her. She felt as though she had fallen by the way, spent and broken in a struggle of which even its object had been unconscious. She had tried to deflect the natural course of events, she had sacrificed her personal happiness to a fantastic ideal of duty, and it was her punishment to be left alone with her failure, outside the normal current of human ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton

... gentlemen," said Bearwarden, placing them on a table; "I hope we shall find them cold." "Do you know," said Deepwaters to Ayrault, while rapidly making his cocktail disappear, "the Callisto's cost with its outfit will be very great, especially if you use glucinum, which, though the ideal metal for the purpose, comes pretty high? I suggest that you apply to Congress for an appropriation. This experiment comes under the 'Promotion of Science Act,' and any bill for it would certainly ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... book seems to have departed from the proper ideal of historic narrative—if it is the history of a Power, and not of a People—it is because the Russian people have had no history yet. There has been no evolution of a Russian nation, but only of a vast governing system; and the words "Russian Empire" stand for a majestic ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been the want of illustrative examples. In a State where there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are all simple-minded ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... ideal father as well as an ideal husband. Always passionately fond of children, he could not resist the temptation to join the games of children upon the streets, and in the neighborhoods where he lived the children soon learned to regard him as their friend. ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo

... had little imagination; a gorgeous selfishness; a tolerantly contemptuous liking for the sex. Naturally, however, his attitude toward them had been somewhat embittered by being obliged to watch their method of driving a car in and out of the Ideal Garage doorway. His own manipulation of the wheel was ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber

... of a Museum—(for a little while I shall speak of Art and Natural History as alike cared for in an ideal one)—is to give example of perfect order and perfect elegance, in the true sense of that test word, to the disorderly and rude populace. Everything in its own place, everything looking its best ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... But"—Lady Susan sighed and smiled in the same breath—"we've got to make allowances for poor human nature. We're all so very far from being ideal in this sinful old world. Be sensible, Ann darling," she coaxed, "and let me assure Eliot you were up at the Hotel de ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler

... village life from every side—above, below, all round. Flowers surround it; it dances to the mountain winds; at night it lies entangled in the starlight. Along a thousand imperceptible channels an ideal simplicity from Nature pours down into it, modifying the human passions, chastening, purifying, uplifting. Don't you see? And these sweet, viewless channels—who keeps them clean and open? Why, God bless you——. The children! ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... from the Canadian casualty clearing station, we built the hut, 40 feet by 20 feet, ourselves, and when I left for England early in October, it was a great satisfaction to feel that we were established in what a Surgeon-General subsequently stated to be "an ideal ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith

... obviate that inconvenience by electing a supreme Pontiff to decide all differences. It has been seriously thought about long ago: and latterly we have been making out an ideal series down to the present day, in order that our successors in the ministry may have stepping-stones up to the fountain-head. At first the disseminators of our doctrines were equal in their commission; we do not approve of this any longer, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... lived under almost servile conditions; and so much of that sad labour was directed to wrong ends, to aggrandisement, to personal luxury, to increasing the comfort of oligarchies. The simple life of the countryside seemed a better ideal, and yet the lot of the rustic day-labourer was both dull and hard. It looked sweet enough on a day of high summer, such as this, when a man need ask for nothing to better than to be taken and kept out of doors; but the thought of the farm-hand rising in a cheerless wintry dawn, putting on ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... Margaret Fletcher more than the other two. Mary Ann Fothergill? She almost laughed at the thought of anybody missing Mary Ann. John Middleton? Hanford Weston? There was not a boy in the school she would miss for an instant, she told herself with conviction. Not one of them realized her ideal. There was much pairing off of boy and girl in school, but Marcia, like the heroine of "Comin' thro' the Rye," was good friends with all the boys and intimate with none. They all counted it an honor to wait upon her, and ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... he seems to me the grandest because he was the kindest. Tecaughretanego was wise and good. He had a thoughtful mind and a serene spirit; he could be just and loving to the white man whom he had taken for his brother, but he had not so noble an ideal of conduct as Logan. This chief grasped the notion of friendship with all the whites; he was more than a tribesman; he imagined what it was to be a citizen. Among the Ohio men of the past there is no nature more beautiful, no memory worthier than his. He was ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... was only in a dim and dreamlike past—the tender, brooding care that was her conception of a mother's love. Mrs. Hohlfelder had been fond of her in a placid way, and had given her every comfort and luxury her means permitted. Clara's ideal of maternal love had been of another and more romantic type; she had thought of a fond, impulsive mother, to whose bosom she could fly when in trouble or distress, and to whom she could communicate her sorrows and trials; who would dry her tears ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... sublimest truth, expressed with unparalleled simplicity, sprang from ignorance; that precepts enjoining the most refined sanctity were inculcated by imposture; that the first injunctions to universal love broke from the lips of bigotry! He must further believe that these men exemplified the ideal perfection of that beautiful system in the most unique, original, and faultless picture of virtue ever conceived—a picture which has extorted the admiration even of those who could not believe it to be ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... and to her family also, to have thrown herself away on a man who had proved himself utterly unworthy any woman's devotion. All my chivalry, too, seemed wasted, and the only result of the experiment was the dissipation of an ideal, the naive expectation of the vicarious penalty to which I had in my sincerity offered myself having passed away. Convinced, that I had cured her, I was indignant at having cured her for him, but I suffered ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James

... an adequate bearing for the barrel to turn on. There is only one very short bearing a long way removed from the point of engagement between the pinion and internal gear, and no adequate support is given the barrel, with the result that it tends to deflect from the ideal or true position and to bind. This condition is aggravated by the fact that the ring gear was made by cutting its teeth on an angle to the axis around which it is to revolve, using only a saw of appropriate width. ...
— The Auburndale Watch Company - First American Attempt Toward the Dollar Watch • Edwin A. Battison

... and she was extremely anxious to repair the error she had committed in giving way to a feeling of which she was now ashamed. What could do this better than hard work? To owe everything to herself, to her talents, to her efforts, to her industry, such was Jacqueline's ideal of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... make no apology, dear Madam, for this egotistic detail; I know you and your sister will be interested in every circumstance of it. What signify the silly, idle gew-gaws of wealth, or the ideal trumpery of greatness! When fellow-partakers of the same nature fear the same God, have the same benevolence of heart, the same nobleness of soul, the same detestation at everything dishonest, and ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... sentiment and feeling, and their manners must be formed according to a fixed and uniform model; and when, in such a case, a pupil comes under their charge whom Providence has designed to be entirely different from the beau ideal adopted as the standard, more time, and pains, and anxious solicitude is wasted in vain attempts to produce the desired conformity than half ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott

... comparatively little by what name a government is called, so long as the intellectual and moral development of mankind, and the maintenance of justice among individuals, are its leading principles. A government, like an individual, may remain far below its ideal; but, without an ideal, governments and individuals are alike contemptible. It is tyranny only—whether individual or popular—that utters its feeble sneers at the ideologists, as if mankind were brutes to whom instincts were all in all and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... perhaps fit himself to teach them. In England it would perhaps be difficult to remain incognito, and he had a pride in wishing to succeed alone and unaided. Only the United States, whose form of government more nearly approached the ideal he had for Russia, could offer him the opportunities to discover whether or not a prince could not ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... little by little, spread over her whole face. Ah! the dear fellow! How simple and trusting he was as he outpoured the prayer of his heart, filled with new longings and love, in bowing before her, as before the highest ideal ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola

... said, following her movements with frank admiration. "Come here and sit down, I want to talk to you. I've discovered the ideal site for my new house, and I want to ask you about it. You know the western crest of this hill overlooking the river; did ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice

... touched the right chord. Doubts, yes, doubts of a broken dreamer. Illusions shattered as bubbles. A dweller in an ideal shadow, believing that subjects needed only lofty phrases, Maximilian was finding himself tragically maladjusted to the modern day in which he lived. But as the words tumbled from his lips in the passionate relief of unburdening, it quickly appeared that his misgivings arose only because ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... riddle and a new solution. The persistence of the ideal of Perfected Man; Has it any basis in history? The superlative faculty of spiritual sight as depicted by artists, painters and sculptors. Symbols of consciousness. The way in which the higher consciousness expresses itself. Certain peculiar traits which ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... sight, he puts on a tragical face, and complains that it is a base and soulless world. At this very moment, I make no doubt, he is requiring that under the masks of a Pantaloon or a Punch there should be a soul glowing with unearthly desires and ideal aspirations, and that Harlequin should outmoralize Hamlet on the nothingness of sublunary things: and if these expectations are disappointed, as they can never fail to be, the dew is sure to rise into his eyes, and he will turn his back on the whole ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... way to the firs, and Ruth was in no hurry. It was an ideal afternoon, verging towards evening; an afternoon of golden lights and broken shadows, of vivid greens in shady places. It must have been on such a day as this, Ruth thought, that the Almighty walked in the garden of Eden ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley

... a very pleasant one, every way, but somehow John did not feel as if David had as much outside help as he needed. The young man was not imaginative; an ideal, however high, was a far less real thing to David than to old John. He pondered during many sleepless hours the advisability of having David sign the pledge. David had always refused to do it hitherto. He had ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... Mount Seward was a college with traditions of plain living and high thinking behind it, and partly because the youngest and best-loved professor was a woman of rare and noble characteristics, a woman who had set her own stamp on her pupils, and furnished them an ideal, dress and fashion were secondary considerations here. There were no ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various

... a bit slower to sense a play, a little later in getting into it, at least when he did start he started hard and tackled hard and always played it safe. In the old days when a guard had only his small territory between centre and tackle to cover, Don would have been an ideal player for the position, but now, when a guard's duties are to free-lance, so to speak, from one end of the line to the other and to get into the play no matter where it comes, Don's qualifications were more limited. A guard in these amazing times is ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour

... sufficed the party to become perfectly acquainted with it; but they were repaid for their trouble by the discovery of a long, shallow, saucer-like depression, with a smooth bottom, that offered perfectly ideal facilities for the deposit of the oysters while undergoing the process of decomposition, which is the preliminary to the finding of such pearls as they may contain. There was no doubt that this would render the island and its immediate vicinity ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... different estimate of woman has had upon Western civilization. And here we have to consider not only woman's own direct contributions to progress, but also the indirect influence of our regard for woman, not as an inferior and a plaything, but as a comrade and helpmeet. How frequently the ideal ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... call a man "a political theorist" is to contemn him. The English have not moved towards democracy with any conscious desire for that particular form of government, and no vision of a perfect State or an ideal commonwealth has sustained them on the march. Our boast has been that we are a "practical" people, and so our politics are, as they ever have been, experimental. Reforms have been accomplished not out of deference to some moral or political ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... disguise which was at first a necessity, has become the instrument of his power. It is that broad I of his, that I myself, with which he still takes all the world; it is that single, many-sided, vivacious, historical impersonation, that ideal impersonation of the individual human nature as it is—not as it should be—with all its 'weaved-up follies ravelled out,' with all its before unconfessed actualities, its infinite absurdities and ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... little wooden boxes smeared with vermilion and called singhora and singhori as if they were male and female. The bridegroom's father brings two little dough images of Mahadeo and Parvati as the ideal married pair, and gives them to the couple. The new husband applies vermilion to his wife's forehead, and covers and uncovers her head seven times, to signify to her that, having become a wife, she should henceforth be veiled when she goes abroad. The ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... obtained, were soon devoured, by one who had no other resource to escape from sorrow, and the feverish dreams of ideal wretchedness or felicity, which equally weaken the intoxicated sensibility. Writing was then the only alternative, and she wrote some rhapsodies descriptive of the state of her mind; but the events of her past ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... between MM. Anatole France and Jules Lemaitre as representatives of the first, and M. Brunetiere as the chief exponent of the second. They have planted their standards; and we see that they stand for tendencies in the critical activity of every nation. The ideal of the impressionist is to bring a new piece of literature into being in some exquisitely happy characterization,— to create a lyric of criticism out of the unique pleasure of an aesthetic hour. The stronghold of the scientist, ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer

... lofty, sublimated power or put a fainter stamp on the talents of the race? German art, music, poetry, language, politics, education, all are distinctively masculine. The Teuton woman merely partakes of the life of man, the ideal. She does not assume to lead him. She would seem so far below par that, as Gard had seen, even flirtation scarcely exists in Deutschland. Flirtation is particularly ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry

... a superficial, thing. It is the golden rule translated into terms of conduct. It is not a white-wash which, if laid on thick enough, will cover every defect. It is a clear varnish which shows the texture and grain of the wood beneath. In the ideal democracy the ideal citizen is the man who is not only incapable of doing an ungallant or an ungracious thing, but is equally incapable of doing an unmanly one. There is no use lamenting the spacious days of long ago. ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney

... contemporaries, who were already on the high road to the coming ideal of universal ugliness, Antinous Lebeau was remarkable for his ugliness, and one might have said that he positively threw zeal, too much zeal, into the matter, though he was not hideous like Mirabeau, who made the people exclaim: ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... not dreamed of meeting her, he had waited about curious to see how Raeburn would get on with the mob; it was with a strange pang of rapture and dismay that he had seen his fair little ideal. That she should be in the midst of that hooting mob made his heart throb with indignation, yet there was something so sweet in her grave, steadfast face that he was, nevertheless, glad to have witnessed the scene. Her color was rather heightened, her eyes ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... we pass from friendship to love, could he really bestow such respect on the loves of a Lady Adeline, or of those who, he said, "embrace you to-day, thinking of the novel they will write to-morrow." His ideal of true love has been noticed; and he became impatient when he saw it confounded with any thing else. At twenty-two years of age he wrote to his young friend, the ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... share in forming that wonderful combination which his mind afterwards exhibited, of the imaginative and the practical—the heroic and the humorous—of the keenest and most dissecting views of real life, with the grandest and most spiritualised conceptions of ideal grandeur. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... opposite her, at lunch, his expression was as calm and untroubled as though she had fashioned for him an ideal existence. He was seeing a vision of Mirabelle as a soap-box orator; he was seeing humorous stories about her in the newspapers; he was shuddering at all the publicity which he knew would be her portion, and yet he could smile across the table at her, and speak in his normal voice. Physically, he ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall

... glory and grandeur—which consists not merely in considering nothing wrong that one does but in priding oneself on every crime one commits, ascribing to it an incomprehensible supernatural significance—that ideal, destined to guide this man and his associates, had scope for its development in Africa. Whatever he does succeeds. The plague does not touch him. The cruelty of murdering prisoners is not imputed to him as a fault. His childishly rash, uncalled-for, and ignoble ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... in of the earth, earthy—wealth in its rawest and rudest form— gold, the one thing for which they bear to live, or dare to die. Although in the comparison the crusades may have the superiority in many points, yet so little have ideal, romantic, and sentimental considerations to do with the current of human affairs, that while the crusades remain a monument of abortive and objectless folly, fatal to those who embarked in them, and leaving as ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne

... Chateaubriand and of Cooper had thrown a poetical illusion over the Indian character; and the red men were presented—almost stereotyped in the popular mind—as the embodiments of grand and tender sentiment—a new style of the beau-ideal—brave, gentle, loving, refined, honourable, romantic personages—nature's nobles, the chivalry of the forest. It may be submitted that such are not the lineaments of the race—that they never were the lineaments ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird

... is the heart-outpouring of an honest youth who reveres in you the paternal friend of Oldendorf and the ideal of a chivalrous hero. I inspired him with the courage to send you the poem. It was well-meant, at any rate. The poet will have to seek another ideal. The address comes from women and girls who constitute the Association for the Education of Orphans. ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... passionate, but cold; powerful, but rendered impotent for firm and lofty deeds by immorality and treason; how many centuries of men like this once wasted Italy and plunged her into servitude! Yet what material is here, under sterner discipline, and with a nobler national ideal, for the formation of heroic armies. Of such stuff, doubtless, were the Roman legionaries. When will the Italians learn to use these men as Fabius or as Caesar, not as the Vitelli and the Trinci used them? In such meditations, deeply stirred by the meeting of my own ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... feudal class-distinctions are fast breaking down. But are we arriving any nearer the democratic ideal of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite? In place of the old distinctions, are we not setting up new distinctions, still more powerful to divide? There is to-day a greater social gulf fixed between the man who takes his morning tub and him who does not, than between the man of wealth or family ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... have seen the attempt of labor at internationalism utterly break down under the pressure of patriotic motive. We are finding that the same concentration on immediate and local interests is an insuperable bar to the realization of an ideal of internationalism which would effectively deal with questions arising between nations and put an end to war. The Church failed to establish a spiritual internationalism; the indications are that ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... 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 business ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... be well-grounded—that he would not live long enough to complete his work, he regarded all joy as a temptation, a corruption, a sin of scarlet. He was a true ascetic. He could sacrifice all things of the present for one thing of the future, all things real for one thing ideal. ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken

... for my thread of discovery: a very small fibre, it is true,—a church-sexton performing the office without any reward of gold,—but I twisted it and twirled it round in all the ideal contortions plausible in idealic regions, and fell asleep, with the tower-key under my pillow, and the rising ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... else he had done. I'm not ashamed of my mother. She was very clever, and sang like an angel, I'm told, though I can't remember her. When she died, Dad went to New Zealand and started farming. Mrs. Barker was hardly an ideal person to bring me up, but she was the only woman we could get to stop in such an out-of-the-way place. I must have been an awful specimen of a child; I don't like to remember what things I did then. When I was about ten, Father went away for a few weeks to the North Island, ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil

... majestic, ponderous furniture of the rooms, and she thought all the arrangements admirable. It is true that she did not understand Dr Merridew's portly jokes, and was rather afraid of his wife, but her approval of their five daughters was unbounded. They were models of correct behaviour—her very ideal of what young people should be in every respect. If only, she secretly sighed, Mary's ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton

... "He thought," said Lockhart, "that to spend some fair portion of every day in any matter-of-fact occupation is good for the higher faculties themselves in the upshot."[18] Whether or not we consider this the ideal theory of life for a poet, we find it reasonable to suppose that a critic will be the better critic if he preserve some balance between matter-of-fact occupation and the exercise of his higher faculties. Sir Walter's maxim applies well to ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball

... feet apart in the case of trees an inch or more in diameter. An abundance of good soil (one to two cubic yards) is essential with each tree where the specimens used are an inch or two in diameter. A rich mellow loam, such as one finds on the surface of a well-tilled farm, is the ideal soil. Manure should never be placed in direct contact with the roots ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison

... coal-mines in Kent, where, they had persuaded themselves, the enemy had stored quantities of war material. What precisely was the nature of the war material they did not know—aircraft as like as not, the aviator finds the bottom of a mine-shaft an ideal place to keep his machine. These catacombs were duly inspected by an expert, but he could find nothing. The worthy people thereupon declared that the penetralia had not been properly examined and desired permission to carry out a searching inspection themselves. They were, ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... to a large chamber which has several smaller but well-lighted rooms opening into it. There was formerly a considerable depth of earth on the rock bottom, but most of it has been taken out for fertilizer. What is left is dry near the entrance, but wet farther in. Although it would make an ideal Indian home, being easy of access and within a few rods of the two streams, there could be found no indications of such habitation; and owing to the small amount of earth remaining, the presence of many large rocks, and the close proximity of a large club house on the public highway immediately ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... for me, and became what it seems now—happiness. For a little time I think I was happy—happy in merely having made the discovery. Then came the reaction. I was as I was, as I am now—a product of my past life, of a civilization essentially artificial. In striving for a false ideal I had unfitted myself for the real when at ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge

... true man to be a fitting companion for a woman of genius, but not a very great one. I am not sure that she will not embroider her ideal better on a plain ground than on one with a brilliant pattern already worked in its texture. But as the very essence of genius is truthfulness, contact with realities, (which are always ideas behind shows of form or language,) nothing is so contemptible ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)



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