Ideal excellence, or one's conception of perfection in anything. [ French ]
The influence of custom is incalculable; dress a boy as a man and he will at once change his own conception of himself. [ Bayle St. John ]
Chance is but a mere name, and really nothing in itself; a conception of our minds, and only a compendious way of speaking. [ Bentley ]
With the offspring of genius, the law of parturition reversed; the throes are in the conception, the pleasure in the birth. [ Colton ]
Intuition is the clear conception of the whole at once. It seldom belongs to man to say without presumption, I came, I saw, I conquered.
[ Lavater ]
The scholars of Ireland seem not to have the least conception of style, but run on in a flat phraseology, often mingled with barbarous terms. [ Swift ]
The painter is, as to the execution of his work, a mechanic; but as to his conception, his spirit, and design, he is hardly below even the poet in liberal art. [ Steele ]
Men of dissolute lives have little incentive to look forward to the hopes and glories of immortality. A due conception of these would be incompatible with such a life. [ Beecher ]
Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives the two ends of an idea almost at the same moment. [ Amiel ]
When God thought of mother, He must have laughed with satisfaction, and framed it quickly - so rich, so deep, so divine, so full of soul, power, and beauty, was the conception. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
There are brains so large that they unconsciously swamp all individualities which come in contact or too near, and brains so small that they cannot take in the conception of any other individuality as a whole, only in part or parts. [ Mrs. Jameson ]
What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting. [ Schlegel ]
Humor implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic, and the true, by whose light it surveys and shapes their opposites. It is an humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequalities of existence, prompting tolerant views of life, bridging over the spaces which separate the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble. [ E. P. Whipple ]
The clear conception, outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the eye, informing every feature, and urging the whole man onward, right onward, to his object - this is eloquence, or rather it is something greater and higher than all eloquence - it is action, noble, sublime, godlike action. [ Webster ]