WordWealth: quixotic

quix·ot·ic \kwik-SOT-ik\, adj.

1. (sometimes cap.) resembling or befitting Don Quixote. 2. extravagantly chivalrous or romantic; visionary, impractical, or impracticable. 3. impulsive and often rashly unpredictable.

Also, quix·oti·cal. [1805–15; (DON) QUIXOTE + -IC]

—quix·oti·cal·ly, adv.

—Syn. 2. fanciful, fantastic, imaginary.

—Ant. 2. realistic, practical. (Random House Webster's Unabridged). Look at Thesaurus

Some of his plans were quixotic and much too good for this world, but he never wavered in a cause that he considered just and he commanded the respect of all who opposed him.  —— "Dr. John Dewey Dead at 92; Philosopher a Noted Liberal," New York Times, June 2, 1952

He is buying up commercial buildings in his hometown of Archer City and filling them with used books -- hundreds of thousands of used books gathered from all over the country -- as part of a quixotic scheme to turn this sleepy rural community into a mecca for book lovers. —— Mark Horowitz, 'Larry McMurtry's Dream Job'; New York Times, Dec 7, 1997

'It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs, for all my preparation has been in domestic matters,'' Woodrow Wilson remarked as he left his home in Princeton, N.J., for his inauguration as president in 1913. But that was precisely what fate had in store for him. The same might be said for George W. Bush, who has become a war president, determined to imprint democratic values in the Middle East while wiping out terrorism in that region and then worldwide. At best the Americans will be seen as ''democratic imperialists,'' struggling in a quixotic crusade to make the world safe for democracy. —— James Chace; 'The Complex Metamorphosis Of American Foreign Policy'; New York Times; Dec16, 2003

I was amazed to learn that he didn't have much experience climbing mountains and that he wasn't intending to do any intensive training for his quixotic expedition. —— Michael D. Eisner, Work in Progress

Leon Edel, who tells this story well in his five-volume biography of James, fails to mention only one detail: that James's play was preceded in the same program by a one-act comedy written by a certain Julian Field, titled Too Happy By Half. That tells us, in four words, what the mandarin moralist was up against in his quixotic campaign amid the lights of the West End; he had about as much chance with his audience as Don Quixote had with his gang of convicts. Guy Domville was his only original play to make it to the boards. He had loaded it with all his longing for popular success. He was never seriously involved in the theater again.--Few writers have been as reliably amnestied as Henry James. From the 1940s to the 1970s he was steadily enshrined as both the greatest American novelist and the most solid object of academic study. There was something cultish about the way modern American critics talked about "the Master" and his exquisite refinements; it was palpably painful for them to admit that James ever blotted a line. —— James Wood; 'Cult of the Master', describes the later Henry James's master of technique and how good a novelist was he?; the Atlantic; April 2003

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