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More "Combative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intently; the perspiration was trickling down his nose; and around him, in silent expectation and suspense, were grouped Gogo and Mimsey and my three cousins, and a good-humored freckled Irish boy I had quite forgotten, and I suddenly remembered that his name was Johnstone, that he was very combative, and that he lived in the Rue ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... a combative disposition take just the opposite course from this, and adopt opinions merely because they are opposed to some particular person or to some class of persons. Such persons fancy themselves very independent, and announce their opinions with a movement of ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... the Bureau of Police. Government so gets something like a list of the men who aspire; who wish to mount. It must be very useful. There are our water tournaments at St. Cloud and at Boulogne-sur-Seine; where they who have informed the police of their combative propensities, may thrust at each other with long-padded poles from boats which are being rowed forcibly into collision. We are not much of water-birds, but when we do undertake boating, we engage in the work like Algerine pirates. We must have a red sash round the waist or not ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... profession holds that which would appeal to a great many different ideas as to what a complete life consists of. Engineering as a profession is scientific, idealistic, constructive, profitable. It is combative—in the sense that it shapes nature's forces—and it calls for a sense of artistry in its practitioners. Added to these, it embraces a certain kind of profound knowledge the possession of which is always a source of pride to ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... day's journey, he was moody and silent,—wilfully assuming the airs of a much-injured person. He spoke hardly at all, and would notice nothing that was said to him by his wife. He declared once that he regarded Stanbury as his keeper, and endeavoured to be disagreeable and sullenly combative; but on the second day, he was too weak for this, and accepted, without remonstrance, the attentions that were paid to him. At Bologna they rested a day, and from thence both Stanbury and Mrs. Trevelyan wrote to Nora. They did not know where she ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... the Academy, who believed that Erasmus ended his days at Rotterdam, unable to choose between Rome and Wittemberg, and that the Irish obtained through O'Connell the right to worship in their own way. He saw more of Dupanloup, without feeling, as deeply as Renan, the rare charm of the combative prelate. To an exacting and reflective scholar, to whom even the large volume of heavy erudition in which Rosmini defended the Cinque Piaghe seemed superficial, there was incongruity in the attention paid to one of whom he heard that he promoted the council, that he took ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... cheerful, communicative, conciliatory, nobody's remarks upset him, nothing seemed worth getting angry about. Fray Diego, on the contrary, who, in his normal condition, was always a jovial, jocose priest, turned into a very devil for disputing and nagging, and he betrayed a combative disposition that nobody would have suspected under his round, placid ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... and expression of the good dame was combative. She was stout, slovenly, and forty. And the first impression was that she had once been what her pretty daughter was now at seventeen. There is nothing of the beauty of dignified age in the Dutch woman ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... ready to face adventure, eager to fight for an ideal, however impracticable it seemed. This was as true of Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, and all the genus irritabile vatum, as of the politicians and the men of action. They made many mistakes; they were combative, often difficult to deal with. Some of them were deficient in judgement, others in the saving gift of humour; but they were rarely petty or ungenerous, or failed from faint-heartedness or indecision. Vehemence and impatience can do harm to the best causes, and the lives of ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... discussion be less attractive than written? Dr. Johnson used to express unbounded contempt for all talk that was not discussion; and Robert Louis Stevenson has given us frankly his view: "There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once the talkable man. It is not eloquence, nor fairness, nor obstinacy, but a certain proportion of all these that I love ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... theologians and the scientific men has been very slight among us; and, indeed, the waves of the controversy hardly reached this country until the storm had passed away in Europe, so that it is difficult for Americans to appreciate the combative tone of Mr. Huxley's oratory. Of this difficulty the effect of his substitution of Milton for Moses as the historian of the creation, on the night of his first lecture, has furnished an amusing illustration. The audience, or at least that portion of it which was gifted with any sense of humor, saw ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... good speech after two or three failures. All who knew him, his whole party, had been aware of his failure; and his one good speech had been regarded by many as no very wonderful effort. But he was a man who was pleasant to other men,—not combative, not self-asserting beyond the point at which self-assertion ceases to be a necessity of manliness. Nature had been very good to him, making him comely inside and out,—and with this comeliness he had crept ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... observer who now chanced at a week-end to see him board the Manchester express at Euston would have been able to predict from his appearance that he would leave the train at Knype. He was an undersized man, with a combative and suspicious face. He regarded the world with crafty pugnacity from beneath frowning eyebrows. His expression said: "Woe betide the being who tries to get the better of me!" His expression said: "Keep off!" His expression said: "I am that I ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... arranged, should suggest the breath of trouble that stirred along the hot summer streets, the anxiety about the strike, the rumors and indignations, the gatherings and meetings, the increasing gravity of the policemen's faces, the combative headlines of the local papers, the knots of picketers who scrutinized any one who passed near the silent, smokeless forges, but in my mind, you must understand, such impressions came and went irregularly; they made a moving background, changing undertones, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... by others. The sky-god worshipped at Thinis in Upper Egypt, at Zarit and at Sebennytos in Lower Egypt, was called Anhuri. When he assumed the attributes of Ra, and took upon himself the solar nature, his name was interpreted as denoting the conqueror of the sky. He was essentially combative. Crowned with a group of upright plumes, his spear raised and ever ready to strike the foe, he advanced along the firmament and triumphantly traversed it day by day.[**] The sun-god who at Medamofc Taud and Erment had preceded Amon as ruler of the Theban plain, was also a warrior, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... clear-sighted, non-combative humour which Americans love and prize, and the absence of which they reckon a heavy loss. Nor do they always ask, "a loss to whom?" Charles Lamb said it was no misfortune for a man to have a sulky temper. It was his friends who were unfortunate. And so with the man who has no sense ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... unpalatable to Dalaber, who was in a less combative mood now than he had been of late. He had been threatened with excommunication, and indeed for a while there was no hope that he would be regarded as a fit person to receive the holy rite. That in itself was terrible to his devout spirit, and when any person spoke gently and ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... trait that one who has affection for Thoreau may find worst is a combative streak, in which he too often takes refuge. "An obstinate elusiveness," almost a "contrary cussedness," as if he would say, which he didn't: "If a truth about something is not as I think it ought to be, I'll make it what ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... The combative pretensions of the governor had received a severe shock. He was beaten, and Drake, like a true sportsman, asked him and his suite to dine with him, and with an air of Spanish dignity he accepted. The occasion was memorable ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... though sometimes careless, has thrown away the knowledge refused to the author, poor devil!" This recalls Turner's comment on Ruskin's eulogies—which Whistler had probably never heard of—and making every allowance for Whistler's fiery, combative nature, and sharp pen, there is much truth, and truth that needed telling, in his contention. "Art," he continues, "that for ages has hewn its own history in marble, and written its own comments on canvas, shall it suddenly stand still, and stammer, and wait for wisdom from the passer-by? ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... together; for no one could tell when Captain La Roche would take it into his head to pounce down upon us and pick up a stray bird, should the frigate be at a distance. He would have had no chance, however, with the Indiamen, whose officers were in a very combative mood. Not long before a very gallant action had been performed by a squadron of them in the Eastern seas—indeed, no country ever possessed a body of officers in her mercantile marine equal to those of ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... was naturally a combative youth, with a fine contempt for rules that would deny him the advantages to be derived from his ability as a swift and vigorous kicker; so a bloodthirsty and rebellious character was quite ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... of Shakespeare's "Seven Ages" the Eskimo plays a very unimportant role. Perhaps in no other race is the combative instinct less predominant; in none is quarrelling, fierceness of disposition, and jealousy more conspicuously absent, and in none does the desire for the factitious renown of war exist in a more rudimentary and undeveloped state. Perhaps the constant fight with cold and ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... which reigned in the room was like the space cleared for a sparring-match. The old combative instinct of the primitive man arises in the most civilized, and makes him delight in a fight. Brady looked amused; Winifred a little apprehensive; Mr. Anstice preserved a dignified neutrality; and Miss Standish fumbled with her cameo brooch, and ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... corresponded with his character. He had the head of a gladiator, round; compact, combative, with something alert and snake-like in its movements. The black, closely-shorn hair was erect and bristling. The forehead was lofty and narrow. The features were, handsome, the nose regularly aquiline, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... daughter now sick, by a slow-consuming hunger; and he did not believe there was a God that ruled in the earth. But he supported his unbelief by no other argument than a hopeless bitter glance at his empty loom. At this moment he sat silent—a rock against which the noisy waves of a combative Bible-reader were breaking in rude foam. His silence and apparent impassiveness angered the irreverent little worthy. To Falconer's humour he looked a vulgar bull-terrier barking at a noble, sad-faced staghound. His foolish arguments against infidelity, drawn from Paley's Natural Theology, and tracts ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... Tai-o-hae, or Tieuhoy, as Porter called it, were annoyed by the combative Hapaa tribe, or collection of tribes, which dwelt in a nearby valley, and these doughty warriors came within half a mile of the American camp, cut down the breadfruit trees, and made hideous gestures of derision at the white men. In response, Porter ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... masses dash and scramble. Here, with heavy toll, they advanced; there, and with costlier sacrifice, they were driven back. Fiery Magyars, mechanical Teutons and stolid muzhiks mixed together in an indescribable hellbroth of combative fury and destructive passion. Screaming shells and spattered shrapnel rent the rocks and tore men in pieces by the thousand. Round the Lupkow Pass the Russians steadily carved their way forward, and at the close ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... shown that the women of to-day were growing beards, were changing as to pelvic bones, were developing bass voices, or that in their new activities they were manifesting the destructive energy, the brutal combative instinct, or the intense sex-vanity of the male, then there would be cause for alarm. But the one thing that has been shown in what study we have been able to make of women in industry is that they are women still, and this seems to be a surprise to many worthy ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... merit—a merit he shared with Huxley alone of His contemporaries—that he imposed his convictions. He fought against resistance. He excited (and still excites) a violent animosity. He exasperated the surface of his time and was yet too strong for that surface to reject him. This combative and aggressive quality in him, which was successful in that it was permanent and never suffered a final defeat should arrest any one who may make a general survey of the ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... combative nature; and coming to himself, and not understanding clearly the cause of his prostration, he presently arose. Of the worshippers in sight, he alone was then standing, and the sonorous music ringing on, he was beginning to doubt the propriety of his action, when a number ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... "A combative instinct, and coolness; not the sort of brute vindictiveness that fights for a rage, for a cool-minded love of conflict. ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... looked on with great interest, for they had seen painted on the walls representations of these fights between boatmen, which were of common occurrence, the Egyptians being a very combative race, and fierce feuds being often carried on for a long time between neighboring villages. The men were armed with poles some ten feet in length, and about an inch and a half in diameter, their favorite weapons on occasions of this kind. The boats had now come in close contact, and a ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... punctually at a quarter past two, and three Treasury clerks and one novelist who lunched at one; accordingly, at half-past one, he presented himself in Berkeley Square, to be informed by a sedately combative butler that luncheon was at two o'clock but that Barbara was believed to be in ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... furze again, being by nature combative. And—stopped short, with a start, a tremor running through him. Something rustled, scuttled away amongst the bushes, and something flapped upward behind him into the thick lowering sky above. A wailing cry—whether human, or of bird or beast, he was uncomfortably ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... him. The case then came on appeal before the judicial committee of the privy council, and here a majority with the two archbishops as assessors reversed the decision of the court below. The bishop, one of the most combative of the human race, flew to Westminster Hall, tried move upon move in queen's bench, exchequer, common pleas; declared that his archbishop had abused his high commission; and even actually renounced communion with ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... firm hand and unwearying care, despite his varied activities as composer, professor, and Kapellmeister; and he is one of the surest and most reliable guides for a young school of French music. And if his mind is rather given to abstractions, and his moods are sometimes rather combative, and certain prejudices (which are not always musical ones) make him lean towards ideals of reason and immovable faith—and if at times his followers unconsciously distort his ideas, and try to dam the stream which flows from life itself, I am convinced it is only the passing evidence ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... in grit, will power, self-assertion, and the ability to deal with men. We were easily crowded to the wall, easily cheated, always ready to take a back seat, timid, complying, undecided, obstinate but not combative, selfish but not self-asserting, always the easy victims of pushing, coarse-grained, designing men. As with Father, the word came easy but the blow was slow to follow. Only a year or two ago a lightning-rod man made my brother Curtis and his son John have his ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... is very combative in his attitude toward others, yet his innate sincerity draws one close to him after becoming acquainted with him. A little incident which will illustrate this trait, occurred in the Senate of the United ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... French and Spanish, and becoming almost everywhere, beyond continental Europe, the spoken and written tongue. Long the Spanish enjoyed the supremacy in Central America; but it has followed the fate of the idle, proud, combative, and good-for-nothing people who carried it across the Atlantic, and is disappearing like snow before the sun of a genial spring. The sooner it is extinct the better. Already the English is the vernacular from the shores of the Atlantic ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... She was a sweetly-pretty child, with that rare combination of dark-lashed brown eyes and golden hair. Here, if anywhere, was Laurence Stanninghame's soft place. His other progeny was represented by two sturdy boys, combative of instinct and firm of tread, and whose gambols, whether pacific or bellicose, were apt to shake the rattletrap old semi-detached and the parental nerves in about equal proportions; constituting, furthermore, a standing ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... the arm and whose sword was ten inches longer than his." Jonson's reach may have made up for the lack of his sword; certainly his prowess lost nothing in the telling. Obviously Jonson was brave, combative, and not averse to talking of ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... Vienna Academy by the Viennese painter, Johann Scheffer von Leonhardshoff; the date must be prior to 1810, and the age somewhere about twenty. The head is remarkable, almost abnormal; the outlook on the world is inquiring, querulous, and combative; the penetrative eyes seem in search after undiscovered truth; the pursed-up mouth is prepared for protest; the attenuated nose and contracted nostril betray austerity and acerbity; the whole aspect is that ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... building that was ugly enough for a conventicle, and to listen to the florid voices of a mixed choir, instead of the orderly array of men and boys in white surplices to which he had been accustomed. If he had been combative by nature,—one who loved to gird his armor about him and to plunge into every sort of melee,—he would have rejoiced after a fashion at the thought of the work cut out for him, of bringing order and beauty out of this chaos; but he was by nature too impatient. He would have ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... piteous smile. "Very, very tired!" she said. "But you needn't be afraid of that. He will not touch me. He will not even see me to-night." Then, as he still looked combative, "Oh, please, leave this matter to my judgment! I know exactly what I am doing. Believe me, ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... according to their respective force, to one or the other form of maritime hostilities against commerce which have been indicated. To this procedure combats on the high seas were merely incidental. Tradition, professional pride, and the combative spirit inherent in both peoples, compelled fighting when armed vessels of nearly equal strength met; but such contests, though wholly laudable from the naval standpoint, which under ordinary circumstances cannot ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... the older boy came the sounds of one who breathes labouredly in deep sleep after a hard day. But the littler boy sat rebelliously up, digging combative fists into eyes that the light tickled. Clytemnestra warmly rebuked him, first simulating the ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... though not upright. In Game fowls the bold and savage disposition of the male has likewise been largely transferred to the female (7/55. Mr. Tegetmeier informs me that Game hens have been found so combative, that it is now generally the practice to exhibit each hen in a separate pen.); and she sometimes even possesses the eminently masculine character of spurs. Many cases are on record of fertile hens being furnished with spurs; and in Germany, according to Bechstein ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... as Heywood of the homely and noble realism, the heartiness and humor, the sturdy sympathy and joyful pride of Shakespeare in his most English mood of patriotic and historic loyalty. Not that these qualities are wanting in the work of Dekker: he was an ardent and a combative patriot, ever ready to take up the cudgels in prose or rhyme for England and her yeomen against Popery and the world: but it is rather the man than the poet who speaks on these occasions: his singing faculty does not apply itself ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... skirts and coat-tails with untiring energy and persistency. To venture out on the streets of San Francisco at such times is really no trifling matter; and to one not accustomed to it, or to one of a non-combative disposition, the performance is not a pleasant one. Still the streets are always full of hurrying passengers; for, whether attributable to the extra amount of vitality and vim that this bracing climate imparts to its children, or to a more direct and obvious cause, the desire to ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... He is fond of countless details; but he so masters and marshals these details that each only serves to throw more light upon the main statement. His prose may be described as pictorial prose. The character of his mind was, like Burke's, combative and oratorical; and he writes with the greatest vigour and animation when he is attacking ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... ill-favored man, with a very long red beard, and very long red hair, might have been seen stepping ashore, with a book and an umbrella under his arm, and wending his way up the lane, followed by Tite, carrying a corpulent carpet-bag. There was a combative air about the little man, who stared with a pair of small, fierce eyes, through a pair of glaring spectacles at every one he met. He was dressed in a shabby black suit, that hung loosely on his ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... when you least expect it, during the darkest trials and in the most pressing danger. The universal sense of humour came as a tonic to Clerambault, and his character, scarcely freed from the conventions in which it had been bound, took on suddenly a vital complexity. Good, tender, combative, irritable, always in extremes—he knew it, and that made him worse—tearful, sarcastic, sceptical, yet believing, he was surprised when he saw himself in the mirror of his writings. All his vitality, hitherto prudently ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... of La Vendee had either not emigrated, or had returned to their homes, after seeing what the emigration came to. As far as their own interests were concerned, they accepted the situation. With all the combative spirit which made their brief career so brilliant, few of them displayed violent or extreme opinions. La Vendee was made illustrious mainly by men who dreaded neither the essentials of the Revolution nor its abiding consequences, but ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... somewhere in us there is something like a bubble, which controls everything, and is everything, and escapes invisible and gaseous to some other place after death. Consequently he never went to church. He was not openly combative, but Eastthorpe knew his heresies, and was taught to shudder at them. His professionally religious neighbours of course put him in hell in the future, but the common people did not go so far as that, although they could not believe him saved. They somehow confounded ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... whose existing government would not be overturned in a month, but for its standing armies, maintained at an enormous and destructive cost to those whom they are destined to overawe—so rampant and combative is the spirit of discontent wherever nominal free labor prevails, with its extensive privileges and its dismal servitude. Nor will it be long before the "free States" of this Union will be compelled to introduce the same expensive machinery, to ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... brought the police to the hotel. Another scandal! And this time her name bandied about in a criminal court! But she, a fugitive from justice, and proud of her exploit, sang in the United States, wildly acclaimed by the American public, which admired the combative Amazon ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... also, had separated himself from the Encyclopedists. Diderot[1] was the leading spirit in the second half of the eighteenth century, as Voltaire in the first half. His lively and many-sided receptivity, active industry, clever and combative eloquence, and enthusiastic disposition qualified him for this role beyond all his contemporaries, who testify that they owe even more to his stimulating conversation than to his writings. He commenced by bringing Shaftesbury's Inquiry into Virtue and Merit to the notice of his countrymen; and ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... footsteps from the threshold of the prison, than even in the procession and spectacle that have been described, where she was made the common infamy, at which all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then, she was supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the scene into a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a separate and insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime, and to meet which, therefore, reckless of economy, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Father Penney took a hasty bite in the buttery, and soon disappeared to rescue his goods from the highway. He was always considered something of a drawback to the matrimonial prospects of his daughters; for, as his nose indicated, he had a firm, not to say combative, disposition, and frequently insisted upon having not only the last but the first word upon every subject, so that Fannie regarded his going in the ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... perfumes had led her towards a dream. She was not combative, and she would be alone in the garden. As they walked towards it in the sun, through narrow ways where idle Arabs lounged with happy aimlessness, Batouch talked of Count Anteoni, the owner of ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... sentiments against social institutions; who, by the precision of their pictures, the depth of their observations, the succession and bitterness of their attacks, have renewed, with other views and in another style, the old combative spirit of Swift ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... most righteous. War is not, and never can be, a mere passionless discharge of a painful duty. It is in its essence, and it is a main condition of its success, to kindle into fierce exercise among great masses of men the destructive and combative passions—passions as fierce and as malevolent as that with which the hound hunts the fox to its death or the tiger springs upon its prey. Destruction is one of its chief ends. Deception is one of its chief means, and one of the great arts of skilful generalship is to deceive in ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... biting his lip with that resolute half-combative air which I now saw in him at times, roused by things which continually met him in his dealings with the world—things repugnant alike to his feelings and his principles, but which he had still to endure, not having ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... eyes, he looked determined and fearless. His courage, however, was not the rashness of an impetuous nature. It was rather the proud self-confidence of a rugged character which obstacles roused to a higher combative energy. He was not eloquent; not even ornate in diction. But his voice, his words, and his delivery were all adequate. Besides, he possessed the incomparable gift of reserved power. During his career of ten years in the State Senate he was unquestionably the strongest ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... and beautiful secrets of the human heart in those days: what the dreams of womanhood are—how wholly different from the dreams of man, in which there is always a combative element. The soul of Cynthia was like a silent cleft among the hills, which waits, in its own still content, until the horn of the shepherd winds the notes of a chord in the valley below; and then the cleft makes answer and returns an airy echo, blending the notes into a harmony of dulcet ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... unsuitable person to receive one. I beheld him not in his armor, but in his peacefulest robes. Nevertheless, drawing my conclusion merely from what I saw, it would have occurred to me that his main deficiency was a lack of grit. Though anything but a timid man, the combative and defensive elements were not prominently developed in his character, and could have been made available only when he put an unnatural force upon his instincts. It was on this account, and also because of the fineness of his nature generally, that the English ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... him to a point he desired to evade. He could almost invert a proposition by a plausible paraphrase. He delighted in enlarging an opponent's assertion to a forced inference ridiculous in form and monstrous in dimensions. In spirit he was alert, combative, aggressive; in manner, patronizing and ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... they would nearly all agree that the devil must be very like a big white man. Mr. McDougall[8] has lately raised the question whether civilised man is less pugnacious than the savage; and he answers it in the negative. The Europeans, he thinks, are among the most combative of the human race. We are not allowed to knock each other on the head during peace; but our civilisation is based on cut-throat competition; our favourite games are mimic battles, which I suppose effect for us a 'purgation of the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... of the world within the sphere of collegiate intrigues. On the advocates' platform in particular—the only field of legal opposition left open by Sulla—even in the regent's lifetime such aspirants waged lively war against the restoration with the weapons of formal jurisprudence and combative oratory: for instance, the adroit speaker Marcus Tullius Cicero (born 3rd January 648), son of a landholder of Arpinum, speedily made himself a name by the mingled caution and boldness of his opposition to the dictator. Such efforts were not of much importance, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... surrounded by young men. She looked hard at the American's pale face, saying to herself, "Is that like me? Is that like me?" Her conversation with Robin Pierce had made her feel excited. She had not shown it. She had seemed, indeed, almost oddly indifferent. But something combative was awake within her. She wondered whether the American was consciously imitating her. What an impertinence! But Miss Schley was impertinence personified. Her impertinence was her raison d'etre. Without it she would almost cease to be. ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... ceased to yield high, or even serious poetry, and Baldinucci's tale of shabby trickery cannot be compared, even for grotesque humour, with the powerful grotesquerie of Holy-Cross Day, while it wholly lacks the great lift of Hebraic sublimity at the close. The Epilogue returns to the combative apologetics of the title poem; but, unlike that, does attempt some reply to the cavils of the discontented. They cannot have the strong and the sweet—body and bouquet—at once, he tells them in effect, and he chooses to be strong, to give the good grape and ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings, Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right way of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He lost his native energy, grew fat and coarse of ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... booming voice of Charles W. Furse was frequently heard, but in it a suspicion of an Academic note unfamiliar in our midst, so that, young as he was, combative, enthusiastic, "a good fellow" as they say in England, still in his Whistler and rebel period, his friends predicted for him the Presidency of the Royal Academy. The first time I ever saw him was the year he was showing at the New English two large upright, full-length portraits ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... mistake; and not many days elapsed before Cavalier made his appearance before the gates of Alais, and sent in a challenge to the governor to come out and fight him. And it is to be observed that by this time a fiercely combative spirit, of fighting for fighting's sake, began to show itself among the Camisards. Thus, Castanet appeared one day before the gates of Meyreuis, where the regiment of Cordes was stationed, and challenged ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... and without question, his father-in-law felt also in a rough, more combative way. Different as the two men were, they were two real Englishmen, and their instincts ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... but very positive and aggressive ones, which the Bible associates with a love of wealth, and we have but to remember history to know that the Bible is right. Luxury may have dulled the combative instincts in man, but it has often nursed the meanly cruel ones. The Romans with the rapid growth of their wealth loved the battlefield less; but the sight of the arena, with its struggling gladiators, and beasts tearing women and children, became more of a necessity to their appetites. ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... kind in question, if left in, to be worked out by the vix medicatrix of Nature, would be fatal, and consequently he prefers the notion of the wound having been inflicted by a weapon which was quickly withdrawn, e.g., the horn of some combative rival of its own kind, rather than the human. Now if it be a difficult matter to say what will, and what will not kill a man in the year '52, much more so is it to speak chirurgically about Irish elks of the Pleiocene period. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... an intellect of great analytic and destructive force, he was almost entirely lacking in imagination, and he was therefore unable to raise his work to a plane in which the mutually combative elements of his nature might have been reconciled. His light moments of envy, anger, and vanity passed into the crucible to come forth unchanged. He lacked the magic wand, and his work never ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... support to the ontological, and I have, therefore, very little to fear from the argumentative fecundity of the dogmatical defenders of a non-sensuous reason. Without looking upon myself as a remarkably combative person, I shall not decline the challenge to detect the fallacy and destroy the pretensions of every attempt of speculative theology. And yet the hope of better fortune never deserts those who are accustomed ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... different class, who are more apt to profit by anthropology is composed of those in whom there is a decided predominance of good. In some cases they are deficient in selfish and combative energy, do not know how to assert their rights, are credulous and confiding. Children of that character if reared by timid and over-fond parents, are deprived of the rough contact with society that is necessary to their development. There are many ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... settled herself deliberately opposite her visitor, and was soon complaining in her shrill voice of the loneliness of the place and the damp of the climate. Melrose never once looked at his wife. He was paler than usual, with an eager combative aspect, quite new to Netta. He seemed for once to be unsure of his ground—both to expect attack, even to provoke it—and to shrink from it. His eyes were fixed upon Lady Tatham, and followed ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... women—pioneers of education and of reform, rescue-workers, organizers, writers, orators, had—the majority of them—lived and died without once coming in contact with the official leader of Jingalese womanhood; for they and their like were outside the official ranks, and stood for things combative and controversial and dangerously alive, and only a few of them had been brought to Court in their venerable old age, to be looked at as curiosities when their fighting days were ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... were facing each other in irreconcilable yet confused antagonism. Both were still excited and combative from their late physical struggle, but with feelings so widely different that it would have been impossible for either to have comprehended the other. In the figure that had apparently risen from the dead to confront him, Demorest only saw the man he had unconsciously ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... present critic is and always has been an ardent prohibitionist, he must protest at this extravagant theory. Vast and far-reaching as are the known evil effects of drink, it is surely transcending fact to accuse it of causing mankind's natural greed, pride, and combative instincts, which lie at the base of all warfare. It may, however, be justly suggested that much of the peculiar bestiality of the Huns is derived from their swinish addiction to beer. Technically, Mr. Harrington's essay ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... really of a most passionate nature. But as we have proved that Lord Byron was not inconsistent, as Moore declares, except in cases where this want of consistency did not interfere with his character as a man, and, on the other hand, that no one had a less combative disposition, we are forced to arrive at the conclusion that if Byron had one dominant passion, it was most decidedly not that of "combativite." It is impossible to deny that if in his early youth signs of resistance may have ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... to the subject of Larry's religion, and the combative fervour of Major Dick's Protestantism ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... In this slightly combative mood he retraced his steps and found himself outside the High Gear Dance Hall, fortified for another possible encounter with the inquiring and obviously sympathetic Montague girl. He entered and saw that she was not on the set. The bar-room dance-hall ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... and Emperors consider it necessary or appropriate, on all state occasions, to appear in the garb of one of the fighting branches of their service, is a significant indication of the apotheosis reached by the combative qualities in man! The custom doubtless comes down from a time when the King was the warrior-chief, and when his kingship was acknowledged solely in virtue of his being the chief warrior. But now that the Fifth Root Race is in ascendency, whose chief characteristic and function is the development ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... unattached and terribly alone in the world. Now, I can see things more clearly. I know that mood of mine was not the mere child of caprice. Looking back, I can see how Theobald had been more critical, more silently combative, from the moment I stepped off the Baltic. I realized, all at once, that he had secretly been putting me to a strain. I won't say it was because my dot had gone with The Nitrate Mines, or that he had discovered that Duncan had crossed on the same steamer with me, or that he knew I'd ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... the only exhibitions of the innate ferocity of our dogs are to be seen in their combats with each other, when for a time the creatures return to their primitive state of mind. Even these occasional exhibitions of fury are not found among all breeds of dogs, and among many individuals even of the combative strains of blood the motive of battle appears to have quite ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... Mr. Halloway reached a logical conclusion which convinced even the combative and unwilling that the present depends largely upon the past, while the future will be determined, for the most part, by the conditions of the present. "The future," he cried, leaning forward with an expression of solemn warning, "The future is in our own hands, ladies and gentlemen of ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... delineate character. He had the merit of opening up an entirely new field, and giving expression to the spirit of the New World, but his true range was limited, and he sometimes showed a lack of judgment in choosing subjects with which he was not fitted to deal. He was a proud and combative ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... that if a body of gentlemen possessing their full phrenological share of the combative and antagonistic organs, could only be induced to form themselves into a society for Declaiming about Peace, with a very considerable war-whoop against all non-declaimers; and if they could only be prevailed upon to sum up eloquently the many unspeakable miseries and horrors of War, and ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the most harmless and yet one of the most striking of these illusions in a private asylum which has specialized, if I may so express myself, upon men of letters. The case was harmless and even benign, for the poor fellow was not of a combative disposition to begin with, was of too careful and dignified a temperament to show more than slight irritation if his delusion were contradicted. This misfortune, however, very rarely overtook him, for those who came to visit him were warned to ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... Still the same poetical, combative, impulsive creature, with the deep soft voice! She pleased his senses; she stirred his mind; and he would have thrown himself into one of the old Rapallo arguments with her then and there but for the gad-fly at ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... elder, who was at this time still under forty years of age, would have been a very handsome woman had not troubles, suffering, and the contests of a rugged life, in which she had both endured and dared much, given to her face a look of hard combative resolution which was not feminine. She was rather below than above the average height,—or at any rate looked to be so, as she was strongly made, with broad shoulders, and a waist that was perhaps not now as slender as when she first met Captain O'Hara. But her hair was still black,—as ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... swelling into vehemence, marks also Roosevelt's political essays, and yet he had time for reflection, and if you examine closely even some of his combative passages, you will see that they do not spring from sudden anger or scorn, but from a conviction which has matured slowly in him. He had not the philosophic calm which formed the background of Burke's political masterpieces, but he had the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... warlike move. It was well known that the Countess was much averse to war, notwithstanding the fact that she was indebted to war for her stalwart husband, and her peaceful nature was held to excuse the non-combative life lived by the Count, although there were others who gave it as their opinion that the Count was really afraid of the Baron, who daily became more and more obnoxious as there seemed to be less and less to fear. Such boldness did the Baron achieve ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... be no mistake about one thing. Here prayer is a power. Here God can indeed work miracles. A man with the light of God in his heart can defeat vicious habits, rise again combative and undaunted after a hundred falls, escape from the grip of lusts and revenges, make head against despair, thrust back the very onset of madness. He is still the same man he was before he came to God, still with his libidinous, vindictive, boastful, or ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... misunderstood—was perhaps the result of a reaction from the experience of New York, in which democracy had presented itself in an unlovely aspect. Contact with Toronto Toryism of that day would naturally stiffen the Liberalism of a combative man. ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... most extraordinary outburst, Mr. Grewgious, quite beside himself, plunged about the room, to all appearance undecided whether he was in a fit of loyal enthusiasm, or combative denunciation. ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... though it may seem absurd to say so. It may, therefore, be called a rest cure for aspirations and higher ambitions and anxieties and all the nobler discontents. To Molly it was youth and fun and brightness and forgetfulness. There was no leisure to be morbid, no occasion to be bitter or combative. The game of life was too bright and smooth, above all too incessant ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... with figures; problems which could be worked out by practical methods were to them difficulties to be mastered by hard work, and hard work was pleasure to the Lamptons; it was their form of enjoyment. They were not imaginative; they were combative; they enjoyed a fight ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... both the educated and uneducated in the composer's art. We have a vision of close pages embodying the most unequivocal and drastic of musical "realism." The full audacity and mastery of a certain sort of genius are represented in his vast works. They bespeak, too, the combative musician and reformer. Berlioz took the kingdom ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the strength of a giant, and did not abstain from using it in a combative sense on a fit occasion. When his eldest daughter was living in a house not far from his own, with her first child in her arms, he became aware that she was in danger from a stout, unprincipled tramp who had called on ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... world treaty. Let me state the broad outlines of this pacification. The outlines depend one upon the other; each is a condition of the other. It is upon these lines that the thoughtful, as distinguished from the merely the combative people, seem to be ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... protection, and for the acquisition of food and shelter; sympathy, which leads all in turn to assist each other; the sense of right, which checks depredations upon our fellows; the smaller development of the combative and destructive propensities; self-restraint in present appetites; and that intelligent foresight which prepares for the future, are all qualities, that from their earliest appearance must have been for the benefit ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... in his early manhood was quick tempered and combative, but he soon learned self-control and, as all know, became as patient as he was forceful and sympathetic. "I got into the habit of controlling my temper in the Black Hawk war," he said to Colonel Forney, "and the good habit stuck to me as bad ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... his stately figure as he drew himself up to his full height, and greeted Leigh with a suavely condescending bow and smile, while Aubrey in turn glanced him up and down with a pleasurable consciousness of his intellectual appearance, and evident combative temperament. ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... attractiveness. Yet there is all the difference in the world between Hazlitt and Addison, or Lamb and Steele. The Tatler and the Spectator leave you with a sense of artifice; Hazlitt and Lamb leave you with a grip of a real personality—in the one case very vigorous and combative, in the other set about with a rare plaintiveness and gentleness, but in both absolutely sincere. Addison is gay and witty and delightful but he only plays at being human; Lamb's essays—the translation into print of a heap of idiosyncrasies ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... we had signally defeated our two guards, and the camp was ours. But what about the pirates who were still in the cave and would shortly be returning from it? They were three armed and sturdy ruffians, not to include Mr. Tubbs, whose habits were strictly non-combative. It would mean a battle ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... map of Gall, occupying a region of intellectual, inventive and literary capacity. This is the most outre and absurd of all Gall's locations. Placing this selfish and grasping propensity in the front lobe which belongs to intellect, when it really belongs to the selfish, adhesive, and combative elements of the occiput, is an error of so extravagant a character as to show that Gall had no correct psychology in his mind, and no capacity or desire to construct a harmonious system. Spurzheim's location, much farther back, is somewhat less erroneous, but both ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... volunteer who didn't care how obsolete the pattern of his rifle was: Too much skill in shooting or drill was a perilous thing, and he did not mean to acquire it, For fear of alarming peace-loving Emperors and such-like by display of a combative spirit; Regular armies tended to that: and in view of the state of international conditions he Meant to cut down our own to the minimum consistent with Guaranteed Efficiency,— Being convinced as he was that an army recruited and trained ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... subtle and combative as Napoleon's was, of course, strained to the utmost to break or cheat the British blockades, and the story of the one crafty ruse after another which he employed to beguile the British leaders is very remarkable. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the manner in which these plain-minded, ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... together with an absolute refusal to make any kind of terms with any sort of "Modernisms," so far at least as they affected the high Anglican ideal of faith and practice—in relation to these facts of Newbury's temperament and life she was still standing bewildered, half yielding and half combative. That she was loved, she knew—knew it through every vein and pulse. Newbury's delight in her, his tender worship of her, seemed to enwrap and encompass her. Now as she sat hidden amid the June trees, trembling under the stress of recollection, she felt herself enskied, exalted ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... surly after the ladies had floated away from the scene, and he drank his liquor doggedly. It was his fancy, I suppose, to revive certain sentimental relations which had, it may be, once existed between him and Miss Lake; and he was a person of that combative temperament that magnifies an object in proportion as ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... is the usual method by which the human mind estimates values. We would measure the strength of two men by pitting them against each other in physical encounter; in the same way, we are prone to measure the combative effect of weapons by pitting them in conflict against other weapons. But modern warfare is of so complex a nature that direct comparisons fail, and only a careful analysis of military experience determines ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... reached a logical conclusion which convinced even the combative and unwilling that the present depends largely upon the past, while the future will be determined, for the most part, by the conditions of the present. "The future," he cried, leaning forward with an expression of solemn warning, "The future is ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... of its own attractiveness. Yet there is all the difference in the world between Hazlitt and Addison, or Lamb and Steele. The Tatler and the Spectator leave you with a sense of artifice; Hazlitt and Lamb leave you with a grip of a real personality—in the one case very vigorous and combative, in the other set about with a rare plaintiveness and gentleness, but in both absolutely sincere. Addison is gay and witty and delightful but he only plays at being human; Lamb's essays—the translation into print of a heap of idiosyncrasies and oddities, and likes and dislikes, and ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... responsible to Garcia for all the money the Grand Master of Avarice had made out of it. Mr. District Attorney was apparently distressed, but resigned. Messrs. Biggs and Thatcher were really distressed and combative. ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... did, for, Heaven knows, his reason was of a very peculiar kind, and could have fitted the foot of no other man. However, though he was less skilled in argument than in cobbling, he was always insisting that other minds should be shod to his own measure. The stationer was more indolent and less combative, and never worried about proving his faith. A man only tries to prove what he doubts himself. He had no doubt. His unfailing optimism always made him see things as he wanted to see them, and not see things or forget them immediately when ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... first with no objections, and seemed to be going to oust all the others, thanks, perhaps, to the combative and restive character of its promulgator, who bore criticism badly, and whom no one cared to incense, his sword being even more redoubtable ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... where it must be amended, if it was to produce any real influence upon European cultivated opinion, the old priest was at first awkward or speechless. Then slowly he rose to the bait. He began to talk; he became by degrees combative, critical, argumentative. His intelligence took the field; his character receded. ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... signs of coming hostilities between his host and St. Cloud, for Drysdale seemed to prick up his ears and get combative whenever the other spoke, and lost no chance in roughing him in his replies. And, indeed, he was not far wrong; the fact being, that during Drysdale's first term, the other had lived on him-drinking his wine, smoking his cigars, driving his dog-cart, and winning his ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... invariably the victor, and it must be admitted that he loved fighting as well as he liked playing ball or fishing. He gave and received hard knocks, and even at that early age showed evidence of the combative, aggressive courage that became so marked a feature of ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... delicacy of feature was the outward expression of a character so compact of subtleties and refinements, of high prejudice and jealous sensibility, of spiritual egoism and all-pervading fastidiousness, that it was impossible for him not to regard with repugnance a man who represented the combative principle, even the triumph, of the uncultured classes. He was no hidebound aristocrat; the liberal tendencies of his intellect led him to scorn the pageantry of long-descended fools as strongly as he did the blind image-breaking of the mob; but in a case ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... the way of an irritating program failed to rouse Mrs. Robson's dignified ire, her neighbor fell back upon the fact that Stillman was a married man. Mrs. Finnegan really worshiped Mrs. Robson to distraction, but she had a natural combative tendency that was at odds with even ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... counted upon them to be serviceable in His Kingdom. There is surely no need to deny our manhood, or become ashamed of this being that is "I" when He chose it for employment in ambassadorship. It was for what Peter was as Peter, dashing, impetuous, impatient, full of driving power and combative energy, that Jesus called him from the fishing of Galilee into the ministry of the word. It was for what John was as John, intense, clear-eyed and trustful that he, too, was called. Thomas was also called—that Thomas who found it ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... glorious tones of that beautiful voice; and, as he watched the sweet face of the singer, and listened to the words of the song, a sudden fierce determination rose in his mind. He would devote all his energies to winning Mary Grant for his wife; combative and self-confident as he was by nature, he felt no dismay at the difficulties in his way. He had been on a borderline long enough. Here was his chance to rise at a bound, and he determined to succeed if ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... strong combative force there is no tonic like the presence of a secret and powerful enemy, and the stealthy glances of Father Johannes's serpent eye did more towards restoring Father Francesco to self-mastery than the most conscientious struggles could have done. He grew calm, resolved, determined. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... time Fleda had no more trouble with her uncle and Barby. Each seemed to have a wholesome appreciation of the other's combative qualities and to shun them. With Mrs. Rossitur Barby was soon all-powerful. It was enough that she wanted a thing, if Mrs Rossitur's own resources could compass it. For Fleda, to say that Barby had presently a perfect understanding with her and joined to that a most affectionate careful regard, ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... tenderfeet—lacking in grit, will power, self-assertion, and the ability to deal with men. We were easily crowded to the wall, easily cheated, always ready to take a back seat, timid, complying, undecided, obstinate but not combative, selfish but not self-asserting, always the easy victims of pushing, coarse-grained, designing men. As with Father, the word came easy but the blow was slow to follow. Only a year or two ago a lightning-rod man made my brother Curtis and his son John have his ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... drew himself up to his full height, and greeted Leigh with a suavely condescending bow and smile, while Aubrey in turn glanced him up and down with a pleasurable consciousness of his intellectual appearance, and evident combative temperament. ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... great evil; but evil is admitted by Providence into the agency of creation, physical and moral. The existence of evil has puzzled wiser heads than ours, Squills. But, no doubt, there is One above who has his reasons for it. The combative bump seems as common to the human skull as the philoprogenitive,—if it is in our organization, be sure it is not there without cause. Neither is it just to man, nor wisely submissive to the Disposer of all events, to suppose that war is wholly and wantonly produced ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... promptness of a pistol-shot. Even when sympathy with another rouses feelings on first sight, a struggle always takes place, whose duration discounts the total sum of conjugal infidelities. It would be an insult to French modesty not to admit the duration of this struggle in a country so naturally combative, without referring to at least a twentieth in the total of married women; but then we will suppose that there are certain sickly women who preserve their lovers while they are using soothing draughts, and that there are certain wives ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... not many days elapsed before Cavalier made his appearance before the gates of Alais, and sent in a challenge to the governor to come out and fight him. And it is to be observed that by this time a fiercely combative spirit, of fighting for fighting's sake, began to show itself among the Camisards. Thus, Castanet appeared one day before the gates of Meyreuis, where the regiment of Cordes was stationed, and challenged ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... race with; outvie[obs3], emulate, rival; run a race; contend &c. for, stipulate for, stickle for; insist upon, make a point of. Adj. contending &c. v.; together by the ears, at loggerheads at war at issue. competitive, rival; belligerent; contentious, combative, bellicose, unpeaceful[obs3]; warlike &c. 722; quarrelsome &c. 901; pugnacious; pugilistic, gladiatorial; palestric[obs3], palestrical[obs3]. Phr. a verbis ad verbera[Lat]; a word and a blow; "a very pretty quarrel as it stands" [Sheridan]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Academy by the Viennese painter, Johann Scheffer von Leonhardshoff; the date must be prior to 1810, and the age somewhere about twenty. The head is remarkable, almost abnormal; the outlook on the world is inquiring, querulous, and combative; the penetrative eyes seem in search after undiscovered truth; the pursed-up mouth is prepared for protest; the attenuated nose and contracted nostril betray austerity and acerbity; the whole aspect is that of nervous irritability. The spirit is still in unrest, having ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... it made me feel blue and unattached and terribly alone in the world. Now, I can see things more clearly. I know that mood of mine was not the mere child of caprice. Looking back, I can see how Theobald had been more critical, more silently combative, from the moment I stepped off the Baltic. I realized, all at once, that he had secretly been putting me to a strain. I won't say it was because my dot had gone with The Nitrate Mines, or that he had discovered that Duncan had crossed on the same steamer with me, ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... that the young man was not misunderstood—was perhaps the result of a reaction from the experience of New York, in which democracy had presented itself in an unlovely aspect. Contact with Toronto Toryism of that day would naturally stiffen the Liberalism of a combative man. ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... the proper moment before the jurors got drunk enough to be obstinate and combative, Shang made his appeal. "Fellers," he said, "I allows you all knows that Jim's my friend, an' I reckon you cain't say but what he 's been a mighty good friend to more'n one o' you. Course, I know he got terrible out ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... He was naturally a combative youth, with a fine contempt for rules that would deny him the advantages to be derived from his ability as a swift and vigorous kicker; so a bloodthirsty and rebellious character was ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... the same cause, moralists in comedy and drama, defenders of natural sentiments against social institutions; who, by the precision of their pictures, the depth of their observations, the succession and bitterness of their attacks, have renewed, with other views and in another style, the old combative spirit of Swift ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... differ on public questions, must attend primary meetings and caucuses, will inevitably hold public office and strive for it; in short, women must enter the political arena. This result will be repulsive to a large portion of the sex, and would tend to make women unfeminine and combative, which would be ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... have often observed the likeness of certain men to certain animals, and of certain dogs to men. Now, I never looked at Rab without thinking of the great Baptist preacher, Andrew Fuller. The same large, heavy, menacing, combative, sombre, honest countenance, the same deep inevitable eye, the same look—as of thunder asleep, but ready—neither a dog nor a man ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... explain why he placed himself in opposition to the spirit of the age. He was extremely combative. It was almost a necessity for him to quarrel with some person or with some opinion. He killed two men in duels, and he would probably have been hanged, if he had not pleaded benefit of clergy. For the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... against Meleager and Menippus and Theodorus of Gadara, that the Gerasenes concerned themselves. They were busy now with the controversies about Homoiousia and Homoousia, with the rivalry of the Eutychians and the Nestorians, with the conflicting, not to say combative, claims of such saints as Dioscurus of Alexandria and Theodoret of Cyrus. But trade continued brisk, and the city was as rich and as proud as ever. In the seventh century an Arabian chronicler named it among the great towns of Palestine, ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... what it was. He talked to poor Catholics, rich Catholics, middle-class Catholics, and elusive, wellborn, penniless, neatly dressed, successful Catholics; also to pompous, vain Catholics; humble, uncertain Catholics; sneaking, pad-footed Catholics; healthy, howling, combative Catholics; doubtful, shoulder-shrugging, but devout Catholics; fixed, crabbed, and dangerous Catholics; easy, jovial, and shone-upon-by-the-heavenly-light Catholics; subtle Catholics; strange Catholics, and (quod tibi manifeste absurdum videtur) ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the abeyance of monarchical power at once gave rise to permanent English parties; and it was natural that those parties should begin by fighting a civil war, for party is in the main an organ for the expression of combative instincts, and the metaphors of party warfare are still of a military character. Englishmen's combative instincts were formerly curbed by the crown; but since the decline of monarchy they have either been vented against other nations, or expressed ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... whom Annixter had never quarrelled. The two men were diametrically opposed in temperament. Presley was easy-going; Annixter, alert. Presley was a confirmed dreamer, irresolute, inactive, with a strong tendency to melancholy; the young farmer was a man of affairs, decisive, combative, whose only reflection upon his interior economy was a morbid concern in the vagaries of his stomach. Yet the two never met without a mutual pleasure, taking a genuine interest in each other's affairs, and often putting themselves to great ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... reestablishment of peace and the restoration of the Union as it had existed prior to the war. Strange to say, it fell to the lot of the kind-hearted humanitarian, who loved peace and his fellow-man, to wage the bloody conflict of civil war, and the more aggressive, combative character directed the affairs of the Government while the land took upon itself the conditions of peace. Yet who can say that each was not best suited for his particular sphere of action? A greater lover of his kind has not filled the office of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... Robust, alert, florid, with square forehead, heavy brows, and keen blue eyes, he looked determined and fearless. His courage, however, was not the rashness of an impetuous nature. It was rather the proud self-confidence of a rugged character which obstacles roused to a higher combative energy. He was not eloquent; not even ornate in diction. But his voice, his words, and his delivery were all adequate. Besides, he possessed the incomparable gift of reserved power. During his career of ten years in the State ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... previous career, though political rather than military, indicates to have been cautious, and lacking in the aggressive quality that has given President Kruger, in civic contests, a continuous triumph over his more cultivated and progressive, but less combative, rival. ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... Thinis in Upper Egypt, at Zarit and at Sebennytos in Lower Egypt, was called Anhuri. When he assumed the attributes of Ra, and took upon himself the solar nature, his name was interpreted as denoting the conqueror of the sky. He was essentially combative. Crowned with a group of upright plumes, his spear raised and ever ready to strike the foe, he advanced along the firmament and triumphantly traversed it day by day.[**] The sun-god who at Medamofc Taud and Erment had preceded ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... bloody work, but we were fighting for life and for the Revolution, and we had to fight the enemy with its own weapons. Yet we were fair. No agent of the Iron Heel was executed without a trial. We may have made mistakes, but if so, very rarely. The bravest, and the most combative and self-sacrificing of our comrades went into the Fighting Groups. Once, after ten years had passed, Ernest made a calculation from figures furnished by the chiefs of the Fighting Groups, and his conclusion was that the average ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... often swelling into vehemence, marks also Roosevelt's political essays, and yet he had time for reflection, and if you examine closely even some of his combative passages, you will see that they do not spring from sudden anger or scorn, but from a conviction which has matured slowly in him. He had not the philosophic calm which formed the background of Burke's political masterpieces, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... from the necessity of contending against outside aggression, the inhabitants of the United States have expended their combative energies against the weaker peoples with whom they ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... The Knights were combative, as their noble predecessors with the same title always were, and it was necessary to come to a voie de fait. My straight blow from the shoulder did for Sir Michael. Hiram treated Sir Hans to what is technically ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... corroding luxury has caused in them any physical or moral deterioration which interferes with their fighting capacity. The soldiers of these civilized peoples are just as ready for hand-to-hand encounters with cold steel as any barbarians or savages have ever been. The primitive combative instincts remain in full force and can be brought into play by all the belligerents with facility. The progress of the war should have removed any delusions on this subject which Germany, Austria-Hungary, or any one of the Allies may have entertained. The Belgians, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... his acquaintance. But about the mouth and chin of this man there was a something of softness, perhaps in the play of the lips, perhaps in the dimple, which in some degree lessened the feeling of hardness which was produced by the square brow and bold, unflinching, combative eyes. They who knew him and liked him were reconciled by the lower face. The greater number who knew him and did not like him felt and resented,—even though in nine cases out of ten they might express no resentment even to themselves,—the pugnacity ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... and cranks, as well as by more serious onslaughts, about which I am very pachydermatous, albeit there are pasted down in my archive-books all the paragraphs that have reached me. But, even as in hydraulics, the harder you screw the greater the force, so with my combative nature, the more I am attacked the more obstinately I resist. Hence the multitude and variety of my polemical lucubrations,—mostly of a fragmentary character as Sibylline leaves: some, however, appear in my "Ballads and ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Chandler is very combative in his attitude toward others, yet his innate sincerity draws one close to him after becoming acquainted with him. A little incident which will illustrate this trait, occurred in the Senate of the United States some years ago. Mr. Chandler was induced to believe ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... time still under forty years of age, would have been a very handsome woman had not troubles, suffering, and the contests of a rugged life, in which she had both endured and dared much, given to her face a look of hard combative resolution which was not feminine. She was rather below than above the average height,—or at any rate looked to be so, as she was strongly made, with broad shoulders, and a waist that was perhaps not ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... how to act as I was. As I shouted he roared, and again lashed his tail, but did not advance a step. This gave me courage; but, although the monarch of the forest did not appear in a combative mood, I felt very sure that, should I wound him, his rage would be excited. I dared not for a moment withdraw my eye from him, and thus we stood regarding each other. To me it seemed a prodigiously long time. At last he seemed to lose patience, for his roars became more frequent and louder ...
— Adventures in Africa - By an African Trader • W.H.G. Kingston
... closer together; for no one could tell when Captain La Roche would take it into his head to pounce down upon us and pick up a stray bird, should the frigate be at a distance. He would have had no chance, however, with the Indiamen, whose officers were in a very combative mood. Not long before a very gallant action had been performed by a squadron of them in the Eastern seas—indeed, no country ever possessed a body of officers in her mercantile marine equal to those of the ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... places himself on the lowest level on which a moralist or patriot can stand and shows as great a want of refined feeling as of right reason. For the glories of war are all blood-stained, delirious, and infected with crime; the combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil. The existence of such a contradiction in the moral world is the original sin of nature, whence flows every other wrong. He is a willing accomplice of that ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... time after this matter had been so satisfactorily arranged that Smith met one morning at the office door the gloomy face of the once optimistic and combative Cuyler. The mind of the young Vice-President had been so cheerfully inclined by the events of the last fortnight that he had almost forgotten there still ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... and Spanish, and becoming almost everywhere, beyond continental Europe, the spoken and written tongue. Long the Spanish enjoyed the supremacy in Central America; but it has followed the fate of the idle, proud, combative, and good-for-nothing people who carried it across the Atlantic, and is disappearing like snow before the sun of a genial spring. The sooner it is extinct the better. Already the English is the vernacular from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific, wherever ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... deepest of the reactions or revolts of which I have spoken is the quarrel which (very tragically as I think) has for some hundred years cloven the Christian from the Liberal ideal. It would ill become me, in whose country there is neither such clear doctrine nor such combative democracy, to suppose it can be easy for any of you to close up such sacred wounds. There must still be Catholics who feel they can never forgive a Jacobin. There must still be old Republicans who feel that they could never ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... beheld him not in his armor, but in his peacefulest robes. Nevertheless, drawing my conclusion merely from what I saw, it would have occurred to me that his main deficiency was a lack of grit. Though anything but a timid man, the combative and defensive elements were not prominently developed in his character, and could have been made available only when he put an unnatural force upon his instincts. It was on this account, and also because of the fineness of his nature generally, that the English appreciated him no ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... indigenous than a native. Any experienced observer who now chanced at a week-end to see him board the Manchester express at Euston would have been able to predict from his appearance that he would leave the train at Knype. He was an undersized man, with a combative and suspicious face. He regarded the world with crafty pugnacity from beneath frowning eyebrows. His expression said: "Woe betide the being who tries to get the better of me!" His expression said: "Keep off!" His expression ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... at Santa Inez, where half the county gathered to pay their last respects to their former fellow-citizen and neighbor, whose legal and combative victories they had admired, and whom death had lifted into a public character. The family were returning to the house the same afternoon, Mrs. Peyton and the girls in one carriage, the female house-servants ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... delight. Still the same poetical, combative, impulsive creature, with the deep soft voice! She pleased his senses; she stirred his mind; and he would have thrown himself into one of the old Rapallo arguments with her then and there but for the gad-fly at ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gentle, yielding, and submissive, or had her father, Tom Bays,—husband to the Chief Justice,—been more combative and less amenable to the corroding influences of henpeck, I doubt if Madam Bays would ever have attained a dignity beyond that of "Associate Justice." That strong sense of domineering virtue which belongs to the truly just must be fed, and it waxes fat on an easy-going husband and ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... honour and distinction, after encountering much opposition in his upward career. He or she born on the nineteenth day will require to pray for grace to subdue the natural disposition. The individual born that day will be churlish, perverse, and combative; and the infant who first draws the breath of life on the following day will ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... alcohol lasted. He was cheerful, communicative, conciliatory, nobody's remarks upset him, nothing seemed worth getting angry about. Fray Diego, on the contrary, who, in his normal condition, was always a jovial, jocose priest, turned into a very devil for disputing and nagging, and he betrayed a combative disposition that nobody would have suspected under his round, ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... was not yet predominant, priests married as a matter of course, and there was no difficulty in accepting the marriage order established in the secular world; it was even possible to add to it a new vitality and freedom. But the Germans, with all the primitively acquisitive and combative instincts of untamed savages, went far beyond even the early Romans in the subjection of their wives; they allowed indeed to their unmarried girls a large measure of indulgence and even sexual freedom,—just ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... intellect of great analytic and destructive force, he was almost entirely lacking in imagination, and he was therefore unable to raise his work to a plane in which the mutually combative elements of his nature might have been reconciled. His light moments of envy, anger, and vanity passed into the crucible to come forth unchanged. He lacked the magic wand, and his work never ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... their relations had somehow altered and deepened. The little barrier of age, for one thing, which he had sometimes felt, seemed obliterated. There had been in Howard's mind a sense that he had known a number of hard facts and ugly features about life, had been aware of mean, combative, fierce, cruel elements which were hidden from Maud. Now this all seemed to be purged away; if these things were there, they were not worth knowing, except to be disregarded. They were base material knowledge which one must not even ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... inclined to be profane, but when anyone pretended to be what they were not, it aroused his combative spirit, and it was the "blank humbuggery of the thing" that mightily displeased him. But the time came when the laugh was against him. He had been in bed and slept some hours one summer night; it was the time of the full moon, when its transcendent ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... mistake about one thing. Here prayer is a power. Here God can indeed work miracles. A man with the light of God in his heart can defeat vicious habits, rise again combative and undaunted after a hundred falls, escape from the grip of lusts and revenges, make head against despair, thrust back the very onset of madness. He is still the same man he was before he came to God, still with his libidinous, vindictive, boastful, or indolent vein; ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... a Celia as this impressed itself even upon the step-mother. Mrs. Madden had looked forward with a certain grim tightening of her combative jaws to the home-coming of the "red-head." She felt herself much more the fine lady now than she had been when the girl went away. She had her carriage now, and the magnificent new house was nearly finished, and she had a ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... transition has proven challenging as successive governments have tried to deal with high unemployment, widespread corruption, a dilapidated physical infrastructure, powerful organized crime networks, and combative political opponents. Albania has made progress in its democratic development since first holding multiparty elections in 1991, but deficiencies remain. International observers judged elections to be largely free and fair since the restoration ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... Government so gets something like a list of the men who aspire; who wish to mount. It must be very useful. There are our water tournaments at St. Cloud and at Boulogne-sur-Seine; where they who have informed the police of their combative propensities, may thrust at each other with long-padded poles from boats which are being rowed forcibly into collision. We are not much of water-birds, but when we do undertake boating, we engage in the work like Algerine pirates. We must have a red ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... and in the most pressing danger. The universal sense of humour came as a tonic to Clerambault, and his character, scarcely freed from the conventions in which it had been bound, took on suddenly a vital complexity. Good, tender, combative, irritable, always in extremes—he knew it, and that made him worse—tearful, sarcastic, sceptical, yet believing, he was surprised when he saw himself in the mirror of his writings. All his vitality, hitherto prudently shut into his bourgeois life, now burst forth, ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... troubled her of late, Alexander was very combative. She was not willing to surrender her code—not willing yet to ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... His contemporaries—that he imposed his convictions. He fought against resistance. He excited (and still excites) a violent animosity. He exasperated the surface of his time and was yet too strong for that surface to reject him. This combative and aggressive quality in him, which was successful in that it was permanent and never suffered a final defeat should arrest any one who may make a general survey of the last ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... succession as they passed and followed me. Mr. Jarndyce gave him good day. "Good day!" he said abruptly and fiercely. He was a tall, sallow man with a careworn head on which but little hair remained, a deeply lined face, and prominent eyes. He had a combative look and a chafing, irritable manner which, associated with his figure—still large and powerful, though evidently in its decline—rather alarmed me. He had a pen in his hand, and in the glimpse I caught of his room in passing, I saw that it was covered with ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... energy is combative: the Warrior is the primitive hero. There are natures to whom mere combat is a joy. Strife is the atmosphere in which they find their finest physical and spiritual development. In the early times, there must have been those who stood apart from ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... me! Phrenology is bosh—absolute bosh!) "Destructiveness small; this is not a gentleman who will do very much damage." (Sighs of mock relief from Blazers.) "Nor is he, we should find, particularly combative." ... ("You 'aven't seen 'im of a Saturday night," interrupts some vulgar brute.) Psha!—I won't listen; regard the audience with calm reproach. What a face that is on the second bench! what a pair of brown eyes!—kind of eyes Juliet must have had. ETHEL'S are light grey—what ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... poetry, and Baldinucci's tale of shabby trickery cannot be compared, even for grotesque humour, with the powerful grotesquerie of Holy-Cross Day, while it wholly lacks the great lift of Hebraic sublimity at the close. The Epilogue returns to the combative apologetics of the title poem; but, unlike that, does attempt some reply to the cavils of the discontented. They cannot have the strong and the sweet—body and bouquet—at once, he tells them in effect, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... who also knows, though the feeling is the same, the nature of the combative adult male is less shy, and not merely negatively contemptuous, but aggressive. It is difficult for him to endure hearing the home folk speak with the confidence of special revelation of the war they ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... one thing—very much the nature of the Briton to look on life as a game with victory or defeat at the end of it, and to feel it impossible that he can be defeated. He is not so much concerned to "live" as to win this life match. He is combative from one minute to the next, reacts instantly against any attempt to down him. The war for him is a round in this great personal match of his with Fate, and he is completely caught up in the idea of winning it. He is ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... had opposed the war, on principle, from the start, not because, any more than Wilderton, he approved of Prussianism, but because, as an essentially combative personality, he opposed everything that was supported by a majority; the greater the majority, the more bitterly he opposed it; and no one would have been more astonished than he at hearing that this was his principle. He preferred ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... curiosity, and with youth's pleasure in mere novelty. And what clever fellows, what dash, what camaraderie! That old imaginative drawing towards France and the French was becoming something eagerly personal, combative almost,—and in the background of his mind throughout was the vibrating memory of the day just past—the passionate sense of a ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the same time deeply poetical, and tender almost to weakness. We find in him a union of the intensest sympathy with the weak and helpless, and a comprehension of the flaws and defects which make up their character, which seems at times merciless and almost heartless. We find in him remarkable combative power, united to a desire to use that power purely and simply for the defence and protection of those who are unable to protect and help themselves. We find a man who can deal heaviest blows, who loves the excitement ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... seem to think very highly of the appearance of Benham," said Selma. The remark was slightly interrogative, but was combative withal. She wished to know if everything, from the Flagg mansion down, was open to criticism, but she would fain question the authority of the censor—this glib, graceful woman whose white, starched cuffs seemed to make light of her own sober, ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... and political writer, he had entered the field of literature with such an eagerness for combat that a rumbling noise arose about him wherever he appeared. Like his own Thorbjoern in 'Synnoeve Solbakken,' he displayed in early youth the combative tendency of the athlete; but like his Sigurd in 'Sigurd Slembe,' he fought not merely to practice his strength, but from genuine though often mistaken love of truth and justice. At all events, he understood thoroughly who to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... had had to put aside the free expression of his thoughts; you couldn't hit out all round if the other person wouldn't hit back and started whining. Every member of the Staines family had been brought up on the tradition of combative speech, the bleakest of personalities found its nest there. Sometimes, of course, you got too much of it. Sir Peter and Charles were noisy and James and Dolores were apt to be brutally rough. They were all vehement but there were different shades in their ability. Winn got through ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... in another connection, to Armitstead from Milan, 'you say you think my later letters have been far too aggressive and positive. I, too, am astonished at myself. I do not know my own mood, it is so clear, so sharp, so combative. Is it the spectacle of Italy, I wonder—of a country practically without religion—the spectacle in fact of Latin Europe as a whole, and the practical Atheism in which it is ingulfed? My dear friend, the problem of the world at this moment ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... too, will be said to be obvious; but I have the greatest fear that, when the time comes, it will be cast aside as timid and cowardly. So strong are the combative propensities of man that he would rather fight a losing battle than not fight at all. It is most difficult to persuade people that by fighting they may strengthen the enemy, yet that would be so here; since a losing battle—especially a long and well-fought one—would have ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... the airs of a much-injured person. He spoke hardly at all, and would notice nothing that was said to him by his wife. He declared once that he regarded Stanbury as his keeper, and endeavoured to be disagreeable and sullenly combative; but on the second day, he was too weak for this, and accepted, without remonstrance, the attentions that were paid to him. At Bologna they rested a day, and from thence both Stanbury and Mrs. Trevelyan wrote to Nora. They did ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... THE STRANGE COMBATIVE TEMPERAMENT OF THE GUANACO. In appearance the guanaco is the personification of gentleness. Its placid countenance indicates no guile, nor means of offense. Its lustrous gazelle-like eyes, and its soft, woolly fleece suggest softness of disposition. But in ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... great force of moral stability, in the midst of all violence and excess of passion and performance, which makes a nation noble. "Opposed to this band of tragic figures," which M. Taine arrays from the dramas, "with their contorted features, brazen fronts, combative attitudes, is a troop (he says) of timid figures, tender before everything, the most graceful and love-worthy whom it has been given to man to depict. In Shakespeare you will meet them in Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona, Virginia, Ophelia, Cordelia, Imogen; but they abound ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a generation ago wrote: "We love Poland, not in the same way that we love Germany or France or England, but as we love liberty. For what is to love Poland but to love liberty, to feel a deep sympathy with misfortune and to admire courage and combative enthusiasm? Poland is the symbol of all that which the supreme among mankind have loved and for which ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... a most un-Christian satisfaction in the belief that he had given as good as he had got. He was not ashamed of having fought. He would fight again, any time, anywhere, for Sophie Carr. He did not ask himself whether the combative instinct once aroused might not function ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... dash and scramble. Here, with heavy toll, they advanced; there, and with costlier sacrifice, they were driven back. Fiery Magyars, mechanical Teutons and stolid muzhiks mixed together in an indescribable hellbroth of combative fury and destructive passion. Screaming shells and spattered shrapnel rent the rocks and tore men in pieces by the thousand. Round the Lupkow Pass the Russians steadily carved their way forward, and at the close of the day, March 29, 1915, they had taken 76 officers, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... talk to me in a way I don't like"; and Mr. Tescheron glared as he became more combative than he had ever been in his dealings with this prosperous leech. "I don't care to have you threaten me in this underhanded manner. Perhaps I have been a fool to have placed so much confidence in ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
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