Crossword clues for quixotic
quixotic
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Quixotic \Quix*ot"ic\ (kw[i^]ks*[o^]t"[i^]k), a.
Like Don Quixote; romantic to extravagance; prone to pursue unrealizable goals; absurdly chivalric; apt to be deluded. See also quixotism. ``Feats of quixotic gallantry.''
--Prescott.-
Like the deeds of Don Quixote; ridiculously impractical; unachievable; extravagantly romantic; doomed to failure; as, a quixotic quest.
The word ``quixotic'' . . . has entered the common language, with the meaning ``hopelessly naive and idealistic,'' ``ridiculously impractical,'' ``doomed to fail.'' That this epithet can be used now in an exclusively pejorative sense not only shows that we have ceased to read Cervantes and to understand his character, but more fundamentally it reveals that our culture has drifted away from its spiritual roots.
--Simon Leys (N. Y. Review of Books, June 11, 1998, p. 35)
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"extravagantly chivalrous," 1791, from Don Quixote, romantic, impractical hero of Cervantes' satirical novel "Don Quixote de la Mancha" (1605; English translation by 1620). His name literally means "thigh," also "a cuisse" (a piece of armor for the thigh), in Modern Spanish quijote, from Latin coxa "hip." Related: Quixotical; quixotically.
Wiktionary
a. 1 Possessing or acting with the desire to do noble and romantic deeds, without thought of realism and practicality; exceedingly idealistic. 2 impulsive. 3 Like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%20Quixote; romantic to extravagance; absurdly chivalric; apt to be deluded.
WordNet
Wikipedia
Quixotic may refer to:
- Quixotism, deriving from the novel Don Quixote
- Quixotic (album), an album by Martina Topley-Bird
- Quix*o*tic, a Washington D.C.–based rock band
- DJ Quixotic, a Los Angeles–based record producer
Quixotic is the debut album by English singer-songwriter Martina Topley-Bird. The album spans several musical styles including trip-hop, electronic and rock. It was co-written and produced by Topley-Bird and received positive reviews from music critics upon its release and was shortlisted for the 2003 Mercury Music Prize. Quixotic also includes a collaboration with musician Tricky, with whom Topley-Bird collaborated prior to her solo work.
Quixotic was released in the United States one year later, in 2004. Licensed to the Palm Pictures label, the album was retitled Anything and the track list was altered — including the omission of three tracks originally found on Quixotic. Additionally, the "Intro" track was moved to the end of the album and retitled "Outro".
Usage examples of "quixotic".
This quixotic quest isolated Einstein from the mainstream of physics, which, understandably, was far more excited about delving into the newly emerging framework of quantum mechanics.
Billy, but now that they were at the crunch point, that desire seemed sourceless and quixotic.
And this pity finds expression in wistful sympathy when we think of the quixotic strain in this wrestling with an overwhelming foe, when we see the childlike faith with which the people have grasped at every unplausible hope of rescue from its anguish of death and still grasps at it, as a drowning man grasps at a wisp of straw.
At first light, December 15, Adams, his sons, Francis Dana, John Thaxter, servants, Spanish guides and muleteers, and two additional Americans who had been aboard the Sensible, set off mounted on scrawny mules and looking, as John Thaxter noted, very like a scene from Don Quixote, and quixotic the whole undertaking turned out to be.
Sticking the ice wagon in the leadoff slot had been another quixotic front office ploy.
Murray has the quixotic ability to disregard the banal surface of television and, with all the innocence of a formalist semiotician, to discover a cornucopia of aesthetic information in its organization.
American lack of policy keeps the Islands, no native can be expected to show the almost quixotic courage that such work commonly demands.
For a little time it seemed to Mainwaring that he should give it all up, but this was at once so impracticable and so quixotic that he presently abandoned it, and in time his qualms and misdoubts faded away and he settled himself down to enjoy that which had come to him through his marriage.
This was the quixotic beginning of Starfleet’s reach out into deep space, the Federation’s first great manifestation of farsight, and this ship its first deep-space anticipator.
Under his blusters, it has a strange tenderness, an enormous hope and a quixotic optimism to which the disagreeable reality clings although orders to try to destroy it.
Take a man of naturally quixotic temperament, a man of chivalrous instincts and a feeling for romance, and cut him off for five years from the exercise of those qualities, and you get an accumulated store of foolishness only comparable to an escape of gas in a sealed room or a cellarful of dynamite.
He was lost, anyway, and it was the kind of quixotic gesture a man noble by fits would make.
Fire-lizards were quixotic creatures and although there was no doubt that they became genuinely attached at Hatching, they were subject to sudden fits and frights and would disappear, often for long periods of time.
The Germans were gone too, all except one quixotic young man who elected to stay with Frijoles and the miners.
And even sacrificing their lives to run a moving screen between Zhirrzh firepower and a lone Corvine on a quixotic rescue mission.