United States or Greece ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Yet it was an enthusiasm well tempered to practical ends, purged of resplendent visions and vague idealisms. The plantations, regarded as incidents in the life of commerce, were thought to be important when they were found to be prosperous.
He would not allow us to acquiesce idly in our vague disillusionment, our impatience of foreigners, our suspicion of the idealisms of the Wilson brand. He would trace our discontent ruthlessly to its sources and hold up to our eyes the strange compound of sorrow and fatigue, impatience and disappointment, aspiration and helplessness which makes us what we are.
It is going on with new spiritual fervors, new moral idealisms, new poetry, new music, new painting, new sculpture. The faker, the charlatan is everywhere using the mental and moral and artistic forces of life as a means of delivering himself from economic servitude.
That did not mean, of course, that he intended to live a virtuous life; such was the custom among young men of his class, not had it probably ever occurred to his father that it was possible for a young man to do such a thing. The French have a phrase, "l'homme moyen sensuel" the average sensual man. And George was such a man. He had no noble idealisms, no particular reverence for women.
Conroy's appearance, not merely his expression but his actual features seemed to change. Instead of the shrewd face of a successful American financier Bob Power saw the face of an Irish peasant. He was perfectly familiar with the type. It was one which he had known all his life. He knew it at its best, expressive of lofty idealisms and fantastic dreams of things beyond this world's experience.
For all things strong and pure and helpful to the world may be possible of those young fellows who must, in any event, very soon possess the earth. So let not the frost of the world's unconcern fall upon young manhood's unfolding powers. Let us beware how we extinguish the feeblest of youth's idealisms. Let us check not the onset of his knight-errantry.
Latterly, however, he had been drawn toward the moderns and had found in the expression of the modern spirit-with all its idealisms, its heights and depths and mysteries of feeling a higher artistic goal than antiquity had ever imagined.
The photographer was a man of whims and idealisms; his wife had a strong vein of worldly ambition. They made few friends, and it was Mrs Reardon's frequently expressed desire to go and live in London, where fortune, she thought, might be kinder to them.
For we have had them, in the sober day-light of our occidental learning, in the actualities of history, and not in the mists of a poetic past only monstrous idealisms, outstretched shadows of man's divinity, demi-gods and heroes, impersonations of ages and peoples, stalking through the twilight of the ante-historic dawn, or in the twilight of a national popular ignorance, embalmed in the traditions of those who are always 'beginners. We have had them; we need not look to a foreign and younger race for them; we have them, fruit of our own stock; we have had them, not cloaked with falseness, but exposed in the searching noonday glare of our western science.
His dreams and idealisms are none the less noble things, and if the gods do thus make mock of mortal joy and pain let us be grateful that we were born mere men. Moreover, he has one great answer to the universe the answer of courage. He is still Prometheus, and there is no limit to what he can bear.
Word Of The Day