Word: loftiest
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Mystics & Samurais. By the end of the 14th century Japanese sculpture had declined, while drawing rose to new heights under the inspiration of the Zen Buddhist sect. Zen Buddhists stressed solitary contemplation as the loftiest activity, and Zen artists tried to put the fruit of such contemplation-the feeling that God exists, veiled, throughout nature-on to paper. Confining themselves chiefly to ink and water, they drew flowers, priests, birds, and deep, misty landscapes, with only a few strokes of the brush...
...first glance, the mass dismissal seemed a severe, regrettable but eminently clear-cut and righteous act of disciplinary surgery, performed in the interests of the Army's loftiest ideals. The facts, as announced, were few and terse. The Academy's honor code-by which every cadet is not only duty-bound to shun lying, cheating and stealing, but to report his own transgressions and those of his fellows -had been broken. Academy officials had learned, from one cadet's report, of wholesale cribbing for examinations. Concerned for the Academy's integrity, the Army then arranged...
...models. Plump, pretty Eloise McElhone employs the standard feminine TV equipment of an indefatigable smile, a capacity for continual astonishment ("Is that so?" "You don't say!"), and the ability to talk endlessly about nothing. Willowy, fashion-plated Maggi McNellis, with Leave It to the Girls, represents the loftiest intellectual flights previously achieved by TV women; Maggi's show features a panel of four intimidating ladies in low bodices, who alternate between badgering a male guest and solving such deep questions as "Can a romance that is dead be revived?" Newcomer Palmer, in crediting her audience with enough...
John Donne, the 17th Century cleric who wrote these words, was a great enough poet to rise to the loftiest challenge any Christian artist can face: the translation of faith into the medium of art. Before Donne's day, such painters as Giotto, Raphael, Bellini and Leonardo met the same challenge on the same high plane. Bach and Handel, a little later, met it with their music...
...public employment? Certainly they will not be the courageous, plain-spoken and intelligent men & women whom the urgency of our times demands. They are more likely to be weak mediocrities whose concern, like that of the minor functionary in far-off Russia, is to keep out of trouble . . . whose loftiest ambition is to make no mistakes...