Quixotic

The cultural quixotics attribute the change to inscrutable "cultural factors," which is tantamount to abandoning altogether the search for explanation.

Don Quixote undertook to redress the bodily wrongs of the world, but the redressment of mental vagaries would be an enterprise more than Quixotic.

When we see a man dramatically lamenting in a publication intended to be believed, that “The age of chivalry is gone;” that “the glory of Europe is extinguished forever!” that “the unbought grace of life (if any one knows what it is,) the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone!” And all this because the Quixotic [1791: Quixote] age of chivalric nonsense is gone, what opinion can we form of his judgment, or what regard can we pay to his facts?

But I never met with very warm support in carrying on this object, but was often exposed to some sarcastical insinuations or sardonic smiles from those who thought the attempt to ameliorate the condition of the Gipsies, only Quixotic.

The Queen-mother had a right to daily rations from the palace for her household. She complained once that her rations were not sent, whereupon she was told with Quixotic humour, that her servants might come and take their dues daily; for the King’s cupboards were all open—and all empty.

That the whole conception is instinct with Quixotic humour need excite no surprise, when we consider that the mind which planned it was engaged at the very time in calling into being that unique character, the Governor of Barataria!

He was one of the few, very few, translators that have shown any apprehension of the unsmiling gravity which is the essence of Quixotic humour; […]

This very sagacious Quixotic soul also remembers that about a million of years ago the placental mammals of Australia sprang from an undifferentiated prototype, which had been gradually developed into the kangaroo, but having arrived at this extreme point the transmutative energy of the race was exhausted by their long-continued metamorphoses; […]

Like errants Quixotic, / Our armor, you see, we have on.

With more than Quixotic courage and boisterous energy, he not only arrays himself against every belief or institution which wears the aspect of stability or general acceptance, but he continually mistakes the phantasies of his own imagination for actual oppugnable realities.

Vane, you’re either a Quixotic fool, or a humbug—and I suspect you’re the latter.

The cynic philosopher is portrayed as a sharp and humorous critic of mundane follies, and, as in the Quixotic romances, artistic effect is given to the view that perhaps it is the world that is mad, and not the philosopher.

There was the school of simplicity, socialism, and universal love, the head of which was a Quixotic Diogenes called Mêh-tsz or Meccius (fifth century b.c.); […]

I remember once when lecturing in Sweden I happened to call the Swedish people “Quixotic,” because they had made such wonderful sacrifices in the cause of their country’s art, and after the lecture one man catechized me severely for having used the word “Quixotic” in connection with the Swedish people, for, he said, “Quixotic meant ridiculous.” In interpreting the word in this sense he was following all the little scholars, barbers, and canons, who are mounting guard night and day over our Knight.

This vision is the great power of the free Quixotic soul.

Torrenueva was what I hoped to find at this time, an isolated Manchegan village with a life of its own, untouched by tourism or Quixotic associations.

The dinner served at the inn had a most Quixotic flavor. Bean soup, Oeufs Maritornes, shoestring potatoes and the hard and tasty cheese of La Mancha.

It is thanks to the Quixotic spirit of Columbus that America was discovered; and thanks to the Quixotic spirit of Cortés, Pizarro, Quesada, and the rest, that it became European.

You don’t have to be an ace guerrilla fighter to see that this Quixotic expedition is going to come to a sticky end.

Do we not know very well, for example, that the earnest Quixotic stock response that explains our culture’s chronic militarism as a mere function of its devotion to peaceful living is a façade?

And there exists a Quixotic philosophy and even a Quixotic metaphysics, and also a Quixotic logic and a Quixotic sense of religion. This philosophy, this logic, this ethics, this religious sense is what I have tried to outline, to suggest rather than to develop, in the present work; not to develop rationally, of course, for Quixotic madness does not admit of scientific logic.[…]And shall not we, his fond admirers, also travel alone as we forge a Quixotic Spain from out of our imagination?

Uncritical reading and inappropriate intellectual endeavor were frequently satirized in the form of a naive or Quixotic lady.

Some of the categorizations about the Quixotic and Hamletic character traits which Turgenev cites in his essay are already apparent in his "Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District."

Insarov's and Elena's idealism is not unnaturally coloured with Quixotic elements which the realists of the sixties themselves would have disowned.

Once Bazarov has awakened to an awareness of his individuality, he begins to question his worth as a unique person, to contemplate his insignificance in the face of eternity, and to doubt the meaning of his actions—that is, he begins the transformation from a Quixotic to a Hamlet-type that has been described in critical literature.

Freeborn writes that Bazarov is Turgenev’s attempt at a Quixotic character and that Bazarov’s death shows Turgenev’s inability to reconcile Hamlet and Don Quixote.

In Tristram’s attempts to impose his imaginative will upon the intractable realities of subject matter, time, language, and the reader’s mind, we have a paradigm for the Quixotic endeavors of any writer. And if writing is an inherently Quixotic process, so is reading.

There has been a continuous succession of Quixotic figures ready to “redress all manner of grievances” in all walks of Ukrainian national life to the present day, including political and military leaders […]

His mission gone, Chaliapin forfeits his existence as well, singing his grief as he expires during the lengthy, expressionistic bookburning scene, the beauty of the flames and the slowly transfigured volumes signifying the death of chivalry, the passing of the Quixotic age.

Here we encounter a portrait of The Rebel as Quixotic idealist. Before his death, Orwell’s acquaintances had often remarked on his ascetic temper, eccentric habits, deep nostalgia, and raw-boned, even cadaverous frame.

The notable influence of Don Quixote on the American novel is perhaps explained by the fact that certain well-known American myths are easily adaptable to a Quixotic mould.

Tat’iana in many ways is a Quixote figure, but her Quixotic faith ultimately causes her to accept the conventions of marriage and society, and not reject them as does Don Quixote.

DON QUIXOTE DE LA JOLLA is, then, a headlong, hectic, hilarious rush, a frantic comic phantasmagoria on Quixotic themes, that needs no scholar annotations; it is great good fun.

Taken together, the Quixotic utterances expose the mind’s nonrational activity.

We cannot know the object of Don Quixote’s quest unless we ourselves are Quixotic (note the capital Q).

In an essay published decades ago, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga posits what he determines to be a radical contrast in point of view, and, in a major comparative study of narrative, Walter Reed addresses “the Quixotic versus the picaresque,” and the list goes on.

Whereas the eighteenth-century novels of evidently Quixotic derivation came mainly from England, France and Germany, and moreover, were predominantly comic, the range in the nineteenth century extends to Russia, North America, Spain and beyond, and acquires a much more grandiose, sombre and occasionally tragic character.

If Quixote (Quixotic reading or the enthralled imagination) is one name for the force of myth, the Quixote deploys that dynamic in order to critique and collapse it.

Are Pax Romana, Pax Hispanica, and Pax Americana aspects of the same Quixotic venture and the “impossible dream?”