"Dreamer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which she could not explain though she felt that it was wholly pleasurable. Kemper was present to her now in a nobler, almost a glorified, aspect, and she began, though she herself was hardly aware of it, to idealise him with the fatal ardour of a poet and a dreamer. There was a splendour to her in his old heroic deed—a glow that transfigured, like some clear northern light, the storm and the danger and even the ice bound fishermen—and she told herself that it would be impossible ever to atone to ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... is hard fare and scanty; I feel always hungry, and am constantly dreaming of better food when I should be sleeping. Savoury viands of former times come vividly up before the imagination, even in my waking hours; this is rather odd as I am not a dreamer; indeed I scarcely ever dream but when I am going to be ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... every measure designed for the amelioration of the people there may be observed four distinct and clearly marked stages. First, there is the original project, fresh from the brain of the dreamer, glowing with the colours of his imagination, a figure fair and strong as the newly born Athene. By its single-handed power mankind are to be regenerated, and the millennium is to be at once taken in hand. There are no ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... gone out of the sun, when oceans were as if they had never been, a name, a building, living when the story of all the worlds and all the generations would be held written upon a scroll in the lap of God.... The face of the dreamer as he abandoned himself to his thoughts was pallid ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... the negro race; Mitchell commenced his career as a free exile in America, some years after, by the most violent advocacy of the fetter and the whip for the coloured population of that country. The Nation newspaper, week after week, informed its readers that Lamartine was an idle dreamer, a mere theoretical politician; that his mind was only constituted for the regions of romance; and that his opinion on the affairs of Ireland, England, France, or Europe was worthless. A week or two before the same paper held him up as the very Achilles of freedom, and the hope of Ireland—for it ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... would "bite," the era of iron railways and locomotive engines may be said to have fairly commenced. The correction of a single radical error was, in this case, the dawn of a new system of travel, so extensive in its growth and marvelous in its results, that even the wildest dreamer could not, at that time, have imagined the consequences of ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... retreat, or else there should escape him, instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in veracious panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness? He fled in terror, and flung up the chance of pension and patronage. We perceive the born dreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination, seizing nothing in just proportion and true relation, and paralysing the spirit with terror of unrealities; in short, with the most fatal form of moral cowardice, which perhaps it is a little dangerous to try to ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... been given to these men, is apt to mislead. Their writings are not dark or unintelligible, and those who call them so must find Christianity itself unintelligible and dark. There is more broad daylight in Eckhart and Tauler than in the works of all the Thomists and Scotists. Eckhart was not a dreamer. He had been a pupil of Thomas Aquinas, and his own style is sometimes painfully scholastic. But there is a fresh breeze of thought in his works, and in the works of his disciples. They knew that whenever the problems of man's ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... stood upon the brink of a little glassy pool, whose tranquil bosom was the image of a quiet and secluded life, and stretched its parental arms over a rustic bench, that had been constructed beneath it for the accommodation of the foot-traveler, or, perchance, some idle dreamer like myself. It seemed to look round with a lordly air upon its old hereditary domain, whose stillness was no longer broken by the tap of the martial drum, nor the discordant clang of arms; and, as the breeze whispered among its ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... sank into measured prose. The tone of the speaker showed that he took the stuff for glowing verse, and regarded it as embodying his own present consciousness. One might have thought the worm would have a word to say in rejoinder; but no; the worm had vanished, and the buried dreamer had made himself a god—his own god! Donal stole up softly behind him, and peeped at the open book: it ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... consider something of the opposition that confronts a man who tries to fill his life with a brave purpose. He will be told it is an illusion; he is a dreamer, a crank, or a fool. And it may serve a purpose to see if our critics are blinded by no illusion, to contrast our folly with their wisdom. Here is one pushing by who will not be a fool, as he thinks—he's ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... too much of a dreamer. But this you must realise—that I am not going to buy an honoured position at the price of insults to my aunt; that is ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... standing in an attitude of tense, even rapt earnestness, her chin high and her hands clenched. Her voice held the vibrance of a dreamer and her eyes were looking toward the horizon as if they were seeing visions off ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... by the doorway to greet his guests—a tall, dark man of about forty years, with brilliant eyes set near together under his broad brow, and firm lines graven around his fine, thin lips; the brow of a dreamer and the mouth of a soldier, a man of sensitive feeling but inflexible will—one of those who, in whatever age they may live, are born for inward conflict and a life ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... man to be despised? Is he a sickly dreamer, or a too valiant hero? and if any one be shocked at this last utterance, let him consider carefully the words which he may hear on Sunday: "Then we dwell in Christ, and Christ in us; we are one with Christ, and Christ with us." That belief is surely not a false one. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... himself both the war-broken soldier and the little ones that kissed him, in the rapture of this now old-fashioned music, and he woke with pangs of heartbreak in the very person of the dreamer. ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... yet you went about complaining that people were unsympathetic. Here's the difference between us; I may be a scoundrel, but whatever I've done I've played the man and never blamed anyone else for my crimes, while you—! You were always a weak dreamer, depending on others for your strength. You were discontented, but you never raised your littlest finger in an attempt to make men better. All you could think of was yourself, and your own ambition to escape. So though, ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... one to be laughed at for the visions. But great wise thoughts grew out of his mountain dreams, and he was so great a wizard that the old men chose him for Po-Ahtun-ho, which means Ruler of Things from the Beginning. And the dreamer who had been born of the maid and the pinyon tree was the Ruler. He governed even the boiling water from the heart of the hills, and taught the people that the sickness was washed away by it. His wisdom was beyond earth wisdom, and his visions were true. The land ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... and every dreamer has his own subjects of interest. Saint-Aignan, on leaving Guiche, found himself at the extremity of the grove,—at the very spot where the outbuildings of the servants begin, and where, behind the thickets of acacias ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... From the society of phantoms he stepped upon Long Wharf and plumply confronted Captain Cuttle and Dirk Hatteraick. It was no less romance to our author. There is no greater error of those who are called "practical men" than the supposition that life is, or can be, other than a dream to a dreamer. Shut him up in a counting-room, barricade him with bales of merchandise, and limit his library to the ledger and cash-book and his prospect to the neighboring signs; talk "Bills receivable" and "Sundries Dr. to cash" ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... who carried with him through early life the wondering look of a dreamer, the eyes of one who sees things that are not visible to ordinary mortals, and invests the commonplace things of this world with qualities unsuspected by plainer folk—the eyes of a poet or a house agent. He was quietly dressed—that sartorial quietude which frequently ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... thoughtful, there was nothing in the aspect whence to forebode a want of the more masculine qualifications. It was the thoughtfulness of a worker, not of a dreamer—the thoughtfulness which prepares, not unfits a man ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... Here he tells us we find the only high morality, and the men who cling to religious dream-dogmas which they cannot physically verify, can only answer their opponents, says Mr. Stephen, 'by a shriek or a sneer.' 'The sentiment,' he proceeds, 'which the dreamer most thoroughly hates and misunderstands, is the love of truth for its own sake. He cannot conceive why a man should attack a lie simply because it is a lie.' Mr. Stephen is wrong. That is exactly what the dreamer can do, and no one else but ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... really valuable inspiration in sleep. He finds no satisfactory explanation for Tartini's famous "Devil's Sonata" or Coleridge' proverbial "Kubla Khan." He takes refuge in saying that at least the result could not be equal to the dreamer's capabilities when awake; but Kelley's "Macbeth" music was certainly an improvement on what he could invent out ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... man of learning, however, she was equally at home as with the callow youth. With nature in her every mood was she in sympathy. She was fond of poetry and of music; indeed, to sum up her character in as few words as possible, she was everything that so critical a dreamer of the ideal as Mr. Augustus Richards could have wished for, nor was there one weak spot in the armor of her character at which he ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... loud report awakes the dreamer from his reverie. It is the sunset gun from old Fort Niagara; and as stern reality becomes again a presence, the gazer's glance rests on the peaceful beauty of the broad blue Lake Ontario, on which, at this quiet hour, so many eyes, long ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... I am that dreamer to whose mounting dreams No bounds are set, no region which my will May not reach out toward. And I will create— I, and the souls that after me shall come— By passion of desire a pillar of flame Above the wastes of life. If ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... quarter of an hour; and grave philosophers conversed on high and subtle matters, with youth listening reverently; it was a long time ago. And still beneath all this wonderful panorama a sort of suspicion or expectation lurked in the dreamer's mind. "This is a prologue, a flourish, there is something behind; something that means me no good, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... personifying death as a monster with a million mouths devouring all creatures and licking them in his flaming lips as a fire devours the moths or as the sea swallows the torrents,18 to that of the atheistic German dreamer, who converts nature into an immeasurable corpse worked by galvanic forces, and that of the bold French philosopher, Carnot, whose speculations have led to the theory that the sun will finally expend all its heat, and constellated life cease, as the solar system hangs, like a dead ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... profound sleep, and on awaking, several hours afterwards, they have related their journey through the air, their amusement at the festival, and have named the persons whom they saw there. In the instance told by Hoffman, the dreamer was chained to the floor. Common sense would rest satisfied here, but the enthusiasm of demonology has invented more than one theory to get rid of these untoward facts. Dr. Henry More, as was formerly mentioned, believed that the astral spirit only was carried away: other demonologists ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... of 1848. At a time not rich in intellectual or in moral power, the most striking figure among those who are justly honoured as the founders of Italian independence is perhaps that of Mazzini. Exiled during nearly the whole of his mature life, a conspirator in the eyes of all Governments, a dreamer in the eyes of the world, Mazzini was a prophet or an evangelist among those whom his influence led to devote themselves to the one cause of their country's regeneration. No firmer faith, no nobler disinterestedness, ever animated the saint or the patriot; and if in Mazzini there was also something ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... doubtless increased by the strongly practical turn of his mind, which is conspicuous in all his works. He was the reverse of a dreamer and had little patience with theorists. In his professional study he always aimed at bringing into the strongest light the utilitarian aspect of medicine, its ameliorating power on humanity, its real efficacy in preserving or restoring health and limiting human ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... be done to their disadvantage. In reply, still through a third person, Seward sent them the famous message, over the precise meaning of which great debate has raged: "Faith as to Sumter fully kept; wait and see." If this infatuated dreamer still believed he could dominate Lincoln, still hoped at the last moment to arrest the expedition to Charleston, he ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... that all out while I've been here," replied Bob confidently. "Yes, I know I've been unpractical—a dreamer, in fact. But I'm going to alter all that. Now you've told me—that—that you love me, I feel I must become a man of action. You've wakened something in me that I didn't know existed. I haven't been half alive. I've imagined ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... will only "loaf" up and down Broadway on a fine afternoon, you will see some of the neatest feet, some of the prettiest hands, some of the brightest eyes, and some of the sweetest smiles the wildest beauty-dreamer ever beheld in his most rapturous visions; had they but good figures, they would excite envy on the Alamedas of Andalusia; in short, they are the veriest little ducks in the world, and dress with Parisian perfection. No wonder, then, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... extricated from his difficulties. He went there, and when he was in a sorrowful mood and thinking upon what had been told him and promenaded almost the whole day, a common beggar, who was asking alms, pitying his condition, sat down and asked him, "Why so sad?" Thereupon the dreamer explained to him his sad and mournful fate, and why he had come there forsooth, under the impulse of a dream, he had set out thither, and was expecting God as if by a wonder, to unravel this more than Gordian knot. The mendicant answered "Good ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... "Behold, this dreamer cometh!" they said one to another. "Come now, therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, 'Some evil beast hath devoured him!' and we shall see what will ...
— Joseph the Dreamer • Amy Steedman
... over-excited. In this condition he rushes away—away from cool, pure, and lovely feature—burying himself in the hot, spicy, and gorgeous dreams of Art. He would adore Cagliostro, while he mocked Doctor Watts! Infatuated dreamer! Returning at last, by good chance—or, rather, let me say, by the directing hand of Providence—from his evil search of things tabooed, to admiration of the Real, the Tangible, and the True; he will show himself as Doctor Fenwick does in this sequel, a strong, sensible, family-man, with a ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... rather differed from Alastor, of whom otherwise she was the female counterpart. Her talk, and something rather in her voice than her talk, soon revealed her as a curious mixture of youth and age, of dreamer and desillusionee. ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... but it is not worth while to try to construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be, of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a human ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... young dreamer, who has forgotten the outside world over his books and studies. But the merry songs wake him suddenly to life and sunshine. He gives up his whole house to the uproarious band, beginning himself to tear down the battered shutters. The children set to work to ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... de dreamer: "If on de ice it shlip, Denn led id dake ids shanses, Rip Sam, und let 'er rip! Dou say'st id vill pe sturmy: Vot sturmy ish, ish crand, Crates heroes ish de ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... And—O Dreamer of the Days, Murmurer of roundelays All unsung of words or books, Sing green fields and ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... into excellent gold: the iron becomes white, and is found to be pure silver. Delisle is altogether an illiterate person. M. de St. Auban endeavoured to teach him to read and write, but he profited very little by his lessons. He is unpolite, fantastic, and a dreamer, and acts by fits ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Canada; Jamaica, Barbadoes, and other West Indian islands were in England's ownership. The great East Indian Empire was only in its very earliest germ; its full development was not yet foreseen by statesman, thinker, or dreamer. The English flag had only begun to float from the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... afterwards, in the case of the Matabele soldier, he had proved himself a prophet of awful power. Also—she knew not how, she knew not why—now, as before, her inmost heart seemed to bear witness that this old dreamer's words were true, and that for her, in some strange manner unforeseen, there still remained ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... over," he said, "but I think policy will prevail. If only Vane will cease his juridical chatter.... Oliver is still at the cross-roads, but he inclines to the right one.... I must see to it that Hugh Peters and his crew manufacture no false providences. Thank God, if our great man is one-third dreamer, he is two-thirds doer, and can weigh ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... vanity, but Joseph won no compliments. Philippe sparkled with the clever sayings and lively answers that lead parents to believe their boys will turn out remarkable men; Joseph was taciturn, and a dreamer. The mother hoped great things of Philippe, and ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... in the whole effect calculated to absorb the mind of an absent dreamer, intent on the future, and for the first time for many weeks putting aside all foreign considerations, in favor of self too long merged ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... whose enthusiasm for his art knew no bounds—craved to produce a masterpiece. This dreamer could be seen daily ferreting around the Quarter for a studio always bigger than the one he had. At last he found one that exactly fitted the requirements of his vivid imagination—a studio with a ceiling thirty feet high, with windows like the scenic ones ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... tears for they were such as I could shed only when my heart was right; I do not speak merely of Salsdorf, and do not care for that particular instance. I am sure, however, that I did not suspect any one that day. Poor dreamer! Ought I to remember that I have been other than I am? What good will it do me as I stretch out my arms in anguish to heaven and wait for the shell that will deliver me forever. Alas! that was only a gleam that flashed across the night of ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... old stone structure that has stood there for nearly a century. For years I have tried in vain to rent or sell it. I have left no stone unturned, Quinby. I know I am regarded as a visionary, a dreamer, but I ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... I vaguely understood his mood. He was glad to see us but he was absorbed in something else, something of more importance, at the moment, than the chatter of the family. My uncles who came in a few moments later drew my attention and the white-haired dreamer ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... has stood for the doer as opposed to the dreamer—the doer, who lists not to idle songs of empty days, but who goes forth and does things, with bended back and sweated brow and work-hardened hands. The most characteristic thing about Kipling is his ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... the diabolical visitations to which Father Vianney was frequently exposed, reached his colleagues, they laughed aloud. They declared that he was a dreamer, ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... every lucky silver pieces of money. I believe in lucky pieces of silver. I is a dreamer, always been dat way. I have seen my bright days ahead of me, in dreams and visions. If I hears a woman's voice calling me, a calling me in my sleep I is bound to move outa dat house. I dont keer wher I goes, I is ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... distinctive volume; it is the only national museum of the fascinating geology of the east, and I can think of no other place in the east where classes can find so varied and so significant an exhibit. To the artist, the poet, and the dreamer it presents vistas of ocean, inlet, fiord, shore, wave-lashed promontory, bog, meadow, forest, and mountain—an answer ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... His son, Frederick William III., overthrown by Napoleon who called him a "corporal," did good soldierly work in the "War of Liberation" and fought his way to Paris in 1814. His eldest son, Frederick William IV., the vague, benevolent dreamer whom Punch used to call "King Clicquot" and who died of softening of the brain, even he, too, as a lad had distinguished himself in the "War of Liberation" and in the fighting during the subsequent advance on Paris. As for grand old William I., the real maker of the German Empire on the quid ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... in life—before his nature had been spoiled by the calculating cynicism of middle-age, or his heart corroded by the shallow, fashionable egotism of our day, and he felt no hesitation about doing his duty. Fortunately also, for him, he was no mere dreamer, or idle dilettante. Had he been so, he would have hesitated, like Hamlet, and let irresolution mar his purpose. But he was essentially practical. Life to him meant action, rather than thought. He had that rarest ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... twitched and wreathed and wrinkled under the stress of the flow. Another thing plain enough was that the old man had lied when he said his master was abed, for he was fully and carefully dressed and his wig had not in it a single displaced or unravelled curl. This was no half-awakened dreamer, but a man with the issues of his ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... them; no storm nor disease assailed them. Yet for Endymion the things of earth no longer held any value. He lived only for his dear dream's sake. Had he been permitted to grow old and worn and tired, and still a dreamer, who knows how his story might have ended? But to Diana there came the fear that with age his beauty might wane, and from her father, Zeus, she obtained for the one she loved the gifts of unending youth and ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... had wonderful eyes—large, dark, and full of mute eloquence—and if her mouth was too large, her nose too irregular, and her cheeks too much tanned by rude health, and by exposure to the sun as the village gossips said, I, Henry Kinnish, poetic dreamer, and amateur sculptor, thought she had a symmetry of form and a grace of movement which wrought her whole being into harmony and made her a perfect example of beauty with a plain face; and every one knew that Andrew, the young village ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... the term, be called a creative lower. Let a man dream dreams as gorgeous as De Quincey's, it does not at all follow that he can write like De Quincey; as related to literature, the grandeur of dreams depends absolutely upon the dreamer's mastery of the narrative art, which the dreaming faculty itself does not either presuppose or bestow. But, over and above all this, universal experience has declared that the use of opium is fatally hostile to any very protracted mental power. It ravages the mind no less fearfully than it ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... school, excelled in arithmetic and I will show you a useful citizen, a boss in his own business, a leader of men; show me the boy that preferred grammar, that read expressively, that wrote a beautiful hand and curled his capital S's till their tails looked like mainsprings, and I will show you a dreamer and a sentimentalist—a man that works for other people. While I have breath in me, I will maintain the supereminence of arithmetic. There is no room for disputation in arithmetic, no exceptions to the rule. Twice two is four, and that's all there is about it: but whether there ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... those days. There had been a time when Jim Doyle was the honest advocate of labor, a flaming partizan of those who worked with their hands. But he had traveled a long road since then, from dreamer to conspirator. Once he had planned to build up; now ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a man like Principal Fairbanks of Oxford—a man who sits in an even higher place than you, Judge Blount—has said that Spencer will be dismissed by posterity as a poet and dreamer rather than a thinker. Yappers and blatherskites, the whole brood of them! '"First Principles" is not wholly destitute of a certain literary power,' said one of them. And others of them have said that he was an industrious plodder rather than an original thinker. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... noteworthy that women dream more frequently and vividly than men. When a dreamer has few worries, he usually dreams but forgets his dream on waking; when greatly worried, he often carries his problems to bed with him, and recent "representative dreams" are merely unprofitable overtime work done by the brain. Occasionally, dreams have a purely physical basis as when palpitation ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... subtle achievements, and seldom undertook any great exploit without first soundly sleeping upon it; and the same may be said of Oloffe Van Kortlandt, who was thence aptly denominated Oloffe the Dreamer. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... which the play in its entirety is the first tangible expression. The elements entering into this current are not only mystical, but occult. They are derived in part from Swedenborg, and in part from that picturesque French dreamer who signs himself "Sar Peladan"; but mostly they have sprung out of Strindberg's own experiences in moments ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... man of the world, in the large-hearted philanthropist, in the honest patriot, appear the new and beneficent tendencies which were at work. Like all men who have been in advance of their time, More was looked upon as a dreamer. A dreamer he might naturally seem, who, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, looked for peace, for religious toleration, for justice to the lower classes. But these dreams were destined to be realized long after More's headless body had crumbled to dust, by that learning which he himself ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... to corresponding dreams. As Radestock observes, these lower sensations do not commonly make known their quality to the sleeper's mind. They become transformed at once into visual, instead of into olfactory or gustatory percepts. That is to say, the dreamer does not imagine himself smelling or tasting, but ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... vain, was no dreamer or sluggard. He set to work, joyfully, cheerfully, scenting battle afar off, like Job's war-horse, and pawing for the battle. He sent back Alftruda's messenger, ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... named a realist, an idealist, a magician, a wizard, a dreamer, and finally a scientist, by different writers, yet he was none of these things while being all of them—a full-rounded, universal man, learned in many departments and excelling in whatever he ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... many portraits. Her picture "Under the Apple-Tree" is in the Museum at Lausanne; the "Little Girls" or "The Sisters" and the "Child Dreamer"—exhibited at Salon, 1902—are in the Gallery of the Luxembourg; the "Gamins," in the Museum at Carpentras; the "Tea Party," at the ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... was never so much a dreamer, as a man of action, and the necessity of active service forced me to cast aside such thoughts almost instantly. There was work, and danger, ahead, and I welcomed both eagerly. This was the way to forget. Aye! and the way to serve. I felt the revolver in my pocket, ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... Childish faith in the beneficence of the unseen Powers who feed us Dead Britons are all Britons, but live Britons are not quite brothers He had no recollection of having ever dined without drinking wine He tried to gather his ideas, but the effort was like that of a light dreamer Land and beasts! They sound like blessed things My first girl—she's brought disgrace on this house Then, if you will not tell me To be a really popular hero anywhere in Britain (must be a drinker) You're a rank, right-down widow, and ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... of ideal predilections needed was a man like Schumann, a dreamer of dreams, yet one who pinned illuminative tags to his visions to give them symbolical meanings, dragged in poetry by the hair, and called the composite, art. Schumann, born mentally sick, a man with ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... glance resting admiringly on the beautiful picture. Now as in months before an inexplicable feeling of sweet sadness came over the dreamer. ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... separately from the Soul. The co-existence of those twelve with the Soul that is referred to in common speech is only a common form of speech with the vulgar for ordinary purposes of the world. The dreamer, in consequence of the appearance of past sensual impressions, becomes conscious of his senses in their subtile forms, and endued as he already is with the three attributes (of goodness, passion, and darkness), he regards his senses as existing with their respective objects and, therefore, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... you the mysterious objects which have acquired for me the name of magician," said the old man, "I will briefly give you my history. I was, in youth, they termed an idle dreamer—ever on the alert for new discoveries—and was more laughed at than encouraged in my pursuit of rare inventions. More than fifty years ago I ascertained that steam might be made to propel machinery. I attempted ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... build, in four months, an entire village for the stricken sufferers, including a hotel, a hospital, three schoolhouses, and a church. The too frequent scorn of the "practical man of affairs" for the artist and dreamer, the world's sneaking tolerance for the temperament which creates in forms of ideal beauty rather than in bridges or factories or banks, finds in the life and work of such a man as John Elliott such complete, if unconscious, refutation, that his story should have its place in the history ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... When a gray-haired dreamer wanders down the lanes of memory And forgets the living present for the time of "used-to-be," He takes off his shoes and stockings, and he throws his coat away, And he's free from all restrictions, save the rules of manly play. He may ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... course, he is really quite out of place in diplomacy. Since he can't exist on a marble pedestal or some Old Master's canvas, he ought at least to be a poet or an artist—and so he is at heart; not one, but both; and a dreamer of beautiful dreams, as beautiful and noble as his own clear-cut face, which might be cold if it were not ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... the same day; the bells that tolled their knell rang out the order for which they stood. But the utter failure of their hopes roused no emotion save that of bitter contempt in Froude. He saw no merit in the "hysterical dreamer" who had sacrificed his all for his religion; he saw no pathos in the life of that lone woman who was condemned, almost from her cradle, to a loveless existence and a forlorn death. His final epitaph ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... perhaps a touch of white somewhere, and a white frill about her neck. Let her be a widow whose husband died six months after marriage, six months ago. Let her have come from some distant part of the world, from America—Baltimore will do as well as any other, perhaps better, for the dreamer by the fire has no faintest notion whether Baltimore lies in the middle of a plain or surrounded by mountains, whether it be built of marble or brick or stone. Let her come from Baltimore, from some prettily named street—Cathedral ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... who would be trusted by the class which he wished to attract. The person whom he called to his counsels was John Robert Godley, a man of acute intellect and wide knowledge, of aristocratic connection and of real religious conviction. He was something of a dreamer, but his dreams were always noble ones. By his enthusiasm he was able to enlist the sympathies of several influential men among his old Christ Church (Oxford) friends. The revolutionary year, 1848, helped the project, ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... have made of him? Maybe a poet, maybe a dreamer of dreams—surely not the hard, grinding, rich man that he became ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... with these words the forest vanished and Tony with it and the dreamer was left alone on a steep and dusty road, lost and aching for the missing ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... mere theorist or dreamer talking, says Burton Roscoe in commenting on Admiral Scott's statements; it is the one man in England most supremely versed in naval tactics, the man to whom all nations owe the present effectiveness of the broadside of eight, twelve ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... the differences that I have pointed out, yet with resemblances which bring Him very near us. He, too; knew what it was to stand amongst those who shrugged their shoulders, and knit their brows at His utterances, and turned away from Him, calling Him sometimes 'dreamer,' sometimes 'revolutionary,' sometimes 'blasphemer,' and now and then a messenger of good tidings and a preacher of the gospel of peace. He knows all our hesitations, all our weaknesses, all our temptations. He was the first of the martyrs, in the narrower sense ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... required. If the atmosphere of the theatre had not almost enwrapt his cradle, and thus become a necessity of his after years, his reflective, brooding temperament and aesthetic sensitiveness might have impelled him to one of the silent professions, or kept him an irresolute dreamer through an unsuccessful life. But while his youth was passed in the green-room, a stern discipline early made him self-reliant, matured his powers, taught him executive action, and gave him insight of the passions and manners of our kind. As for black-letter knowledge, such a nature as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... of hill, Around thee, are lonely, lovely, and still, Lonely—save when, by thy rippling tides, From thicket to thicket the angler glides; Or the simpler comes, with basket and book, For herbs of power on thy banks to look; Or haply, some idle dreamer, like me, To wander, and muse, and gaze on thee, Still—save the chirp of birds that feed On the river cherry and seedy reed, And thy own wild music gushing out With mellow murmur of fairy shout, From dawn to the blush of another day, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... force behind them, as can be judged from the absorption of the dreamer in his dream, and also from an examination of the end-results of this kind of imagination. Daydreams usually have a hero and that hero is usually the dreamer's self. Sometimes one is the conquering ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... been so ill, Olof—it is my heart. Perhaps I am too sensitive; they called me a dreamer when I was a child. And even now that I am older they have said the same. But how could I ever forget you, and the hours that were the confession and communion of my whole life? How could I forget those evenings when I sat at your feet and looked into your eyes? Olof, I can feel it all still, and ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... this tremendous report was not the creation of a troubled dreamer, but something real, which had worked itself into the texture of my dreams, I lifted heavy eyelids, and learned that a stray night-shell from the Turkish lines had burst very close to my dug-out, and the debris was tumbling on the roof.... ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... is in his favor: he listens to me," said Ledwith. "He is one of the few men to whom I am not a crazy dreamer, crazy with love of Erin and hate of her ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... of general social relaxation usually known as the Dark Ages was superceded by the multiple innovations of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific-technical developments of the 1750-1970 Revolution, man the dreamer, inventor, designer, planner, architect and engineer has modified many aspects of nature and transformed ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... and leap! Do not let the dreamer weep; Sing him all the songs of summer till he sink in softest sleep; And then sing soft and low Through his dreams of long ago— Sing back to him the rest he ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... could hardly get over it: it nearly broke our friendship. But I suppose he was very like her, except that, in my opinion, his nature was sweeter. He was a fatalist—saw leadings of Providence in every little thing. And such a dreamer! When he came to live up here just before his death, and all his active life was taken off him, I believe half his time he was seeing visions. He used to wander over the fells and meet you with a start, as though you belonged ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at the moon. With that dreamer's part of her that she had inherited from her dead and gone father, she was quietly worshiping the night. But her busy brain was working, too,—the practical brain that she had got from her ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... ardor of her love to regard Wilbur as flawless—as in some respects superior to herself; but it was a gratification to her to detect this failing, and to perceive her opportunity for usefulness. Surely it was important for her husband to be progressive and not merely a dreamer. ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... that any dream may be remembered if the dreamer, after awakening, forbear to scratch his head in the effort to recall it. But should he forget this precaution, never can the dream be brought back to memory: as well try to re-form the curlings of a smoke- ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... indeed the blessed Mary's land, Virgin and Mother of our dear Redeemer! All hearts are touched and softened at her name; Alike the bandit, with the bloody hand, The priest, the prince, the scholar, and the peasant, The man of deeds, the visionary dreamer, Pay homage to her as one ever present! And even as children, who have much offended A too indulgent father, in great shame, Penitent, and yet not daring unattended To go into his presence, at the gate Speak with their sister, and confiding wait Till she goes in before and intercedes; ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... with us once and ours, but we despised it, for it was only the old common happiness which Nature gives to all her children, and we went away from it in search of another grander kind of happiness which some dreamer—Bacon or another—assured us we should find. We had only to conquer Nature, find out her secrets, make her our obedient slave, then the Earth would be Eden, and every man Adam and every woman Eve. We are still marching bravely on, conquering Nature, but how ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... ascended. We struggled up, obedient to the Law around us and we still struggle. That is the Past, or part of it. What is the Future, as yet no man knows. We do more than know—we feel and dream, and struggle on to our dreaming. And Life itself to the dreamer is as nothing only the ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... labor was finished, with eager feet would the dreamer Follow the pathway that ran through the woods to the house of Priscilla, Led by illusions romantic and subtile deceptions of fancy, Pleasure disguised as duty, and love in the semblance of friendship. Ever of her he thought, when he fashioned the walls of his ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... came Benedict and eleven men, filled with a holy zeal to erect on this very spot an edifice worthy of the living God. Here the practical builder and the religious dreamer combined. If you are going to build a building, why not build upon the walls already laid and with ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... poet, no rapt dreamer like the down-trodden Havelaar, who did his duty with the courage of a lion, and endured starvation with the patience of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... unobserved. The torment that he gave himself, planning how he might see her to whom the ring belonged, not daring to believe that if he asked for Donkey-skin she would be allowed to come, and not daring to speak of what he had seen through the keyhole for fear that he would be laughed at for a dreamer, brought back the fever with great violence. The doctors, not knowing what more to do, declared to the Queen that the Prince's malady was love, whereupon the Queen and the disconsolate ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... Sometimes between the whirl of dream and dream, All in a doubtful middle-world, a gleam Went shivering past him through the chill grey space, And lo he knew it for his mother's face, And wept; and all the silence where he stood Wept with him. And at times the dreamer would Dream himself back beneath his father's roof At eventide, and there would hold aloof In silence, clothed upon with shadows dim, To hear if any spake concerning him; But the hours came and went ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... ground in medieval belief—sincere and partly reasonable, though adulterating with mendacity, blundering, credulity, and intense superstition. But the dream-horror which I speak of is far more frightful. The dreamer finds housed within himself—occupying, as it were, some separate chamber in his brain—holding, perhaps, from that station a secret and detestable commerce with his own heart—some horrid alien nature. What if it were his own nature repeated,—still, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... knocked me down with a feather when I found that out," went on the man from the dispatcher's office, "although I didn't find it out until later. Yes, the train had been rented and paid for by our old extra wiper here, that dreamer, kicker and would-be detective, Dallas. A pretty penny it must have cost. Where did he get the money? Skylarking around the country like a millionaire, and what did he pick out that antiquated curiosity of a relic car for? Well, it was the 'Dallas ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman |
