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More "Eccentricity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lapse of years. In other words, they are sterile only during a certain period of their lives, and then, a change occurring in their temperament with age, they become fruitful. History affords a striking example of this eccentricity of generation, in the birth of Louis XIV., whom Anne of Austria, Queen of France brought into the world after a sterility of twenty-two years. Catherine de Medicis, wife of Henry II., became the mother of ten children after a sterility of ten years. Dr. Tilt, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... officiated as his grand carver—on the other, Le Glorieux, his jester, without whom he seldom stirred for, like most men of his hasty and coarse character, Charles carried to extremity the general taste of that age for court fools and jesters—experiencing that pleasure in their display of eccentricity and mental infirmity which his more acute but not more benevolent rival loved better to extract from marking the imperfections of humanity in its nobler specimens, and finding subject for mirth in the "fears of the brave and follies of the wise." ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... the abstract, this conception might be treated as a harmless eccentricity or speculative aberration, and is likely to be so treated by the ordinary "practical" man, with his contempt for "theories," and his pathetic conviction that speculation does not matter; let us, however, see what is implied in this particular speculative theory. From the primary assumption ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... pedigree. A person does not lose caste by using the pen, or even by taking the not-needed pay for using it. To publish a book or to have an article accepted by a magazine may give a sort of social distinction, either as an exhibition of a certain unexpected capacity or a social eccentricity. It is hardly too much to say that it has become the fashion to write, as it used to be to dance the minuet well, or to use the broadsword, or to stand a gentlemanly mill with a renowned bruiser. Of course one ought not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different times; and, in all respects, appears as a good husband with no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good-natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in the theater, not in any striking manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit the importance of this information. It is ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... axis of revolution of the earth will never deviate much from its present position. He also gave a mathematical proof that this stability is not accidental, but the result of design, of an arrangement by which the planets all move in the same direction, in orbits of small eccentricity and slightly inclined to each other. Reasoning from analogy, as the author of the Vestiges is prone to do—extending our views from our solar system to other systems—other suns and revolving planets—it is fair to conclude that they are not less perfect in arrangement—subject to ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... Irish of "Henry V.," and Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade the humour: into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later, "The Humourous Lieutenant," and Jonson, besides "Every Man Out of His Humour," returned to the title in closing ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... thousand yards upon a counter! Mine host, here, seems a little bewildered;—but he has been anxious, I find, for poor Mary, and 'tis national in him to blend eccentricity with kindness. John Bull exhibits a plain, undecorated dish of solid benevolence; but Pat has a gay garnish of whim around his good nature; and if, now and then, 'tis sprinkled in a little confusion, they must have vitiated stomachs, who ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... the sailor in port, when paid off and with full pockets—making every effort to deplete them—so is the trapper during his stay at a fort, or settlement. He does things that seem odd, are odd, to the extreme of eccentricity. Among such the late guests of the Choctaw Chief would not, and did not, attract particular attention. Not much was said or thought of them, till after they were gone; and then but by those who had been victimised, resignedly abandoning claims ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... my discourse somewhat abruptly, as is his wont; for we grant him a license, in virtue of his eccentricity, which we should hardly expect to be claimed by a perfectly ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... perilously near the prizefighter's line, and never went into society, except for money. He was a model business man; the impresarios worshipped him. Such business ability, such frugality, such absence of eccentricity, such temperance, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... day was sultry, and the heat, even in the dense shade of the jungle, oppressive. Slowly she retraced her steps, her eyes upon the ground, her mind absorbed in sad consideration of her father's increasing moodiness and eccentricity. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Shelley was not quite sane; and certainly he was not quite sane, if we place sanity in justness of external perception, adaptation to matter, and docility to the facts; but his lack of sanity was not due to any internal corruption; it was not even an internal eccentricity. He was like a child, like a Platonic soul just fallen from the Empyrean; and the child may be dazed, credulous, and fanciful; but he is not mad. On the contrary, his earnest playfulness, the constant distraction of his attention from observation to daydreams, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... a character is only the heroic way of understanding it. When we love, by some noble method of our own or some nobility of mien or nature in the other, we apprehend the loved one by what is noblest in ourselves. When we are merely studying an eccentricity, the method of our study is but a series of allowances. To begin to understand is to begin to sympathise; for comprehension comes only when we have stated another's faults and virtues in terms of our own. Hence the proverbial ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... house, however, he had convinced himself, that the priest was not perfectly sane, and that some fancied resemblance had touched the chords of memory, and revived the fading images of early, and perhaps unhappy days. This appeared to him, the only rational way to account for his eccentricity; and under this impression, as well as from the priest's injunction, he resolved not to mention the interview and conversation to any person. He was particularly anxious to conceal it from Lucie, whose apprehensions might be increased by the account; and, in a ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... comrades. Those who require nothing from a man save health, wealth, strength, and beauty, will of course consider him fit and proper to make a woman happy. Yet having regard to the following facts (1) that the aforesaid baron is not merely unstable in love affairs but capricious to the verge of eccentricity, and a winebibber and gourmand to boot; (2) that he is as vain as an Indian prince who takes unto him a wife for the mere pomp and show of the thing; (3) that he is violent and brutal, sparing nobody in his sudden fits of passion and, as the documents testify, has frequently inflicted ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... tavern, or ordinary, of unusual interest spent its brief career of less than a year under the Piazza of Covent Garden. It was the experiment of Charles Macklin, an eighteenth century actor of undoubted talent and just as undoubted conceit and eccentricity. He had reached rather more than the midway of his long life—he was certainly ninety-seven when he died and may have been a hundred—when he resolved to leave the stage and carry out an idea over which he had ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... have quite accounted, as I believe, by the peculiarity both of my disposition and circumstances, for unusual wanderings under conditions when most people consider themselves fortunate within doors, I must return to Catherine Weir, the eccentricity of whose late behaviour, being in the particulars discussed identical with that of mine, led to the necessity for the explanation of my ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... rage. In many of the deities both male and female principles were represented in one,—an Androgyne deity—which was an ideal frequently attempted. The idea that these grotesque deities were merely the expression of eccentricity or caprice on the part of their originator is not to be entertained. Richard Payne Knight has pointed out that they occur almost entirely on national coins and emblems, and so were the ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... to their costume and think only of the audience; a few act as those who have mastered the secrets of a serious art, with deliberate subordination of themselves to the great end and motive of the play, spending themselves like good servants, indulging no wilfulness, obtruding no eccentricity, lending heart and tone and gesture to the perfect progress of the action. These have "found themselves," and have all the ease of ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson
... interlinear description, although it might be played during a reading on account of the general agreement of the color and spirit of the music. But there is the sense and feeling of the story, das Maerchen, and the romance of adventure. The brilliancy of harmony, the eccentricity and gaiety of rhythm seem symbolic and, in a subtle way, descriptive. As in the subject, the stories themselves, there is a luxuriant imagery, but no sign of the element of reflection ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... Dudley (or "Deadly") Smooth of Money. Faint traces of the practice survive in T.W. Robertson, as in his master, Thackeray. But it was in his earliest play of any note that he called a journalist Stylus. In his later comedies the names are admirably chosen: they are characteristic without eccentricity or punning. One feels that Eccles in Caste could not possibly have borne any other name. How much less living would he be had he been called ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... of Pheidias and Ictinus, is still the wise mother to whom we must return. The lesson of the Parthenon is the lesson of a steadfast vision of beauty, held high above individual effort and failure, realizing itself not in complex detail or calculated eccentricity, but in a serene and exquisite simplicity of form. It teaches us that in the arts there are no short cuts, and that anarchy, the destruction of what has been won for us in the past, is not advance but the straight road to the bottomless ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... therefore maintain, in spite of Morcerf, that not only is the count the object of interest at this present moment, but also that he will continue to be so for a month longer if he pleases to exhibit an eccentricity of conduct which, after all, may be his ordinary ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to "my own, my native land!" that is nothing to the transports of joy that now infect our colonists. They laugh, they sing, they dance about the decks, they chatter "sixteen to the dozen," and display every eccentricity ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... population of New Canaan the Doc was considered the most blasphemous man in America, but there seemed to be a sort of general impression in the village that his profanity was, in some way, an eccentricity of genius. ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... Upon his return, his love of knowledge and active habits induced him to glean as much as he could of his father's profession, and he could repair most articles that were sent in. Although Newton amused himself with the peculiarities and eccentricity of his father, he still had a high respect for him, as he knew him to be a worthy, honest man. For his mother he certainly had none: he was indignant at her treatment of his father, and could find no redeeming quality to make amends for her ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... Babylon or anywhere else the elements of a cosmogony, whether of a more or less abstruse scientific nature or a personal mythological narrative, it must have been subsequently forgotten or at least has not survived in China. But for Ko Hung's eccentricity and his wish to experiment with cinnabar from Cochin-China in order to find the elixir of life, P'an Ku would probably never have been invented, and the Chinese mind would have been content to go on ignoring the problem or would have quietly acquiesced in the abstract philosophical explanations ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... recorded that the next minute Angela was steeped in regret—- not for the lost verse, but because of her ingratitude and rudeness to Wee, by which it will be seen that she had all the eccentricity of genius, combined with rare kindness of heart, a combination that endeared her to teachers ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... was not interpreted by the cadet, of course, as the Sep meant it should be, but in the sense we use it when we speak of the eccentricity ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... Edgar's head at that moment. He pulled his red night-cap well down over his eyes, and sat down with a crash, while another hearty laugh greeted his supposed eccentricity. ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... repellent, but, on the contrary, measurably enhanced his attractiveness; making him "different" and lending him a distinction which, without it, he might have lacked. And yet, patent as this singularity must have been to the dullest, it was something quite apart from any eccentricity of manner, though, heaven knows, I was soon to think him ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... man of fifty, with fine aquiline features deeply grooved and cut, a delicate nostril, and a domed forehead over which fell thick locks of black hair. He looked what he was—a man of wealth and family, spoilt by long years of wandering and irresponsible living, during which an inherited eccentricity and impatience of restraint had developed into traits and manners which seemed as natural to himself as they were monstrous in the sight of others. He had so far treated the agent with the scantest civility during their progress through the house; and ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... identical with that which would be employed by modern astronomers. They ascertained the position of the stars by right ascension and declination. They knew the obliquity of the ecliptic, and determined the place of the sun's apogee as well as its mean motion. Their calculations on the eccentricity of the moon prove that they had a rectilinear trigonometry and tables of chords. They had an approximate knowledge of parallax. [Footnote: Delambre, Hist. d'Astr. Anc., tom. 1, p. 184.] They could calculate eclipses ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the professor assumes, the lady would like to match the hair. Too much eccentricity the professor does not agree with. Nature, after all, is the best guide; neatness combined with taste, that is the ideal to be aimed at. The eyebrows should be almost straight, the professor thinks; the eyelashes long and silky, with just the suspicion ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... locks unconsciously, so that it was singularly wild and rough. In times when it was the mode to imitate stage-coachmen as closely as possible in costume, and when the hair was invariably cropped, like that of our soldiers, this eccentricity was very striking. His features were not symmetrical (the mouth, perhaps, excepted), yet was the effect of the whole extremely powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... to Neufchatel, through the towns of Granson, St. Aubin, and Boudri. The banks of the lake present a continued succession of vineyards, which afford the best red wine in Switzerland. The conductor of our voiture amused us a good deal by his eccentricity. He seemed thoroughly happy and contented; and when an old gentleman of the party wished for a bag of crowns that were put into the carriage, to be conveyed to Berne, the conductor declared, he was not like Napoleon, and wished for nothing he had not. ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... went to search for him, face downward in a little green-scummed pool, which lay at the foot of the garden. There was no sign of any violence, and the water was but two feet deep, so that the jury, having regard to his known eccentricity, brought in a verdict of 'suicide.' But I, who knew how he winced from the very thought of death, had much ado to persuade myself that he had gone out of his way to meet it. The matter passed, however, and my father entered into possession of the estate, and of some 14,000 pounds, ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... at the Proclamation of Emancipation. The dogmatist has called the great Emancipator a compromiser. The scholar, with the eccentricity peculiar to genius, has solemnly declared that the slaves were freed purely as a war necessity and not because of any consideration for the slave. The undergraduate, in imitation of his erudite tutors, has asserted that the freedmen owe more to the pride of the haughty Southerner ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... mind when they met. This story, and the fact that, by the North Sea, he had stood before breakers twenty feet high, were the only particulars Maurice bore away from their interview. His previous impatience with such eccentricity returned, but none the less, he looked grudgingly after ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Bezobiedoff declined the invitation, and departed. Having seen him off, Dimitri returned, and, smiling a faintly complacent smile as he did so, and rubbing his hands together (in all probability partly because he had sustained his character for eccentricity, and partly because he had got rid of a bore), started to pace the room, with an occasional glance at myself. I felt more offended with him than ever. "How can he go on walking about the room and grinning like that?" was my ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or churlish austerity. But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... gastronomic ending displays Armstrong's interest, as a physician, in the relation of diet to literary taste. If Armstrong's boast that "I'm a shrewd observer, and will guess What books you doat on from your fav'rite mess," is a personal eccentricity, his attack on false criticism and his exhortation to judge for oneself are typical harbingers of late eighteenth-century individualism and ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... and temperament set apart for eternal celibacy, or even that he had ceased to be agitated by matrimonial aspirations. I dimly felt that there was a sort of refined cruelty in thus excluding a man from the common lot of the race; men often have pity but seldom love for those who either from eccentricity or peculiar excellence separate themselves from the broad, warm current of human life, having no part in the errors, ideals, and aspirations of their more commonplace brethren. Even a slight deviation from the physical type of common manhood and womanhood, as for instance, the possession ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... my whimsical disposition; for I kept my purpose a secret from every one, because I wished to contemplate the treasures of art there quite after my own way, and, as I thought, to allow no one to perplex me. Besides this, so simple a matter became more complicated by still another eccentricity. ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... wanting to enlarge on his mother's eccentricity. "She said good-bye and went out and shut the door. Then in a minute or two I looked up and saw her face against the glass.... I offered to open the door, but she shook her ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... This eccentricity was the source of much worry to Breed. Shady could see no good reason why she should not revisit Collins when the mood so moved her. One night she turned abruptly from her course and headed for the twinkling lights of the wolfer's cabin. Breed turned with her. ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... seen staggering about the raft, or crawling over its planks, as if unconscious of what they were doing. It seemed a wonder that some of them—semi-somnambulists in a double sense—did not fall overboard into the water. But they did not. Notwithstanding the eccentricity of their movements, they all succeeded in maintaining their position on the raft. To tumble over the edge would have been tantamount to toppling into the jaws of an expectant shark, and getting "scrunched" between no ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... to puzzle the expert, gladden the heart of the prospector, and madden the shareholder, but the eccentricity of gold is further exemplified by the way in which it has been been deposited ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... able to meet him from any illuminating viewpoint of his own. This was mid-winter, two years after the end of the War, where Dick and his uncle had worked in the Ambulance Corps to the limit of their capacities—Dick, no soldier, because of what seemed to him a diabolic eccentricity of imperfect sight, and Raven, blocked by what he felt to be the negligible disability of age. John Raven had, with the beginning of the War—which, as early as 1914 he had decided to be his war—made up his mind that although he was over forty and of a business training with ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... unknown to me, I had apparently roused his suspicions. He opened the portfolio, and counted the loose leaves of writing in it carefully. While he was absorbed in this occupation, old Toller's eccentricity assumed a new form. His little restless black eyes followed the movements of his lodger's fingers, as they turned over leaf after leaf of the manuscript, with such eager curiosity and interest that I looked ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... solitude is that one can read aloud or speak to oneself without risk of being thought demented. The fact is, the inhabitants of the little village on the outskirts of which we are camping regard us as so hopelessly and utterly mad already that no further display of eccentricity on our part could make ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... which at such a moment the grave dignity of Kilmarnock, contrasted with the lofty indifference of Balmerino, might excite, there was some diversion among the Peers, owing to the eccentricity of several of their body. Of these, one, Lord Windsor, affectedly said when asked for his vote, "I am sorry I must say, guilty upon my honour." Another nobleman, Lord Stamford, refused to answer to the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... his present post of tutor to the heir, which post he will retain only during Mrs Ingleton's pleasure. It is also provided that, in the event of any difference of opinion among the trustees, Mrs Ingleton (as is most proper) shall be permitted to decide; and lastly—a curious eccentricity on our dear friend's part, which was perhaps hardly necessary to insert—in the event of Roger Ingleton, previous to his attaining his majority, becoming a felon, a lunatic, or marrying, he is to be regarded as dead, and the property thereby passes to the next heir, Captain Oliphant. I think ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... character, of mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common centre round which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an eccentricity. And yet, society cannot intervene at this stage by material repression, since it is not affected in a material fashion. It is confronted with something that makes it uneasy, but only as a symptom—scarcely a threat, at the very most a gesture. A gesture, therefore, ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... Chatterton's career came to such a miserable close in London, and when Gilbert was dying in a hospital at Paris—it happened that a worthy physician, well known in the town of Southampton for his benevolence and eccentricity, was on a professional visit to the child of a poor journeyman trunk-maker, in the same place. A supply of old paper had just been brought in for the purpose of lining trunks, according to the practice of the day. A workman was busy sorting these, rejecting some as refuse, and preserving others, ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... coat and long, sharp teeth, a half-savage beast, bearing the name of Ortog (Satan), were Marsa's companions in her walks; and their submission to their young mistress, whom they could have knocked down with one pat of their paws, gave the Tzigana reputation for eccentricity; which, however, neither pleased nor displeased her, as she was perfectly indifferent to the opinion of the public ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... creamy curves of shoulder and limbs, he sought diversion in the treetops. She spoke, and at the sound of the clear little voice he looked at her, and in looking forgot the eccentricity of her frank costume. Her dark eyes held him: he knew that he was gazing at the only wholly ingenuous being he had ever seen. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... shabby, and the carpets and curtains were faded; but the master paid little heed to such matters. Indeed, Don Pedro Quinones showed an indifference, bordering upon eccentricity, on the point. Neither the entreaties of his wife, nor the remarks which some bolder spirit, like Paco Gomez, who was always ready to be facetious, dared to make, ever induced him to call in the ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... know its whims and moods as one comes to know those of a petulant woman one lives with. It was a bizarre and preposterous intimacy, in which Leavitt seemed to find a wholly acceptable substitute for human society, and there was something repellant about the man's eccentricity. He had various names for the smoking cone that towered a mile or more above his head: "Old Flame-eater," or "Lava-spitter," he would at times familiarly and irreverently call it; or, again, "The Maiden Who Never Sleeps," or "The ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... up into obscurity, masquerading as profundity, or pure silliness without reason or a smile. The whimsies of one language become amazing contortions in another. The humor of Shandy, though deep-dyed in Sterne's own eccentricity, is still essentially British and demands for its appreciation a more extensive knowledge of British life in its narrowest, most individual phases, amore intensive sympathy with British attitudes of mind than the German of the eighteenth ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... club, strode down the room and addressed me abruptly with the words: "The sooner you go away again the better; there's nothing to see, nothing to do, and nothing to learn," I was naturally much interested. He has a dash of acquired eccentricity of tone and manner, is very proud, but, unlike some proud people, appreciates the co-humanity of his inferiors, is a brilliant talker, dashing over art, literature, politics, society, tells stories brilliantly, never flags, is totally regardless of "the equities ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That's the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself—often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... subject of continual interest to local landladies, among whom were several lifelong residents, on friendly terms of old time with the Jordan family. To them it seemed an astonishing thing that a man in such circumstances had not yet married; granting this eccentricity, they could not imagine what made him change his abode so often. Not a landlady in Islington but would welcome Mr. Jordan in her rooms, and, having got him, do her utmost to prolong the connection. He had been known to quit a house on the paltriest excuse, removing ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... was sparsely and sketchily clad. At first. his tanned face seemed to be of several different colors and to have been modeled by some bungling caricaturist. Yet, despite this eccentricity of aspect, something about the obsequiously hurrying man struck Brice as familiar. And, all at once, he ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... as a person to know and observe, to the genius of the two Mozleys, to the brilliant social charm of Frederic Faber, to the keen, refined intelligence of Mark Pattison, to the originality and clever eccentricity of William Palmer of Magdalen. And he was nothing as a man of practical power for organising and carrying out successful schemes: such power was not much found at Oxford in those days. But his faith in his cause, as the cause of goodness ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... age. All these Masterman had eminently displayed, and here he was, ab agendo, at seventy-three; while Joseph, barely two years younger, and in the most excellent preservation, had disgraced himself through life by idleness and eccentricity. Embarked in the leather trade, he had early wearied of business, for which he was supposed to have small parts. A taste for general information, not promptly checked, had soon begun to sap his manhood. There is no passion more debilitating to the mind, unless, perhaps, it be that itch ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... the latter entered his study. At the moment when that name, which he had buried beneath so many layers, was so strangely articulated, he was struck with stupor, and as though intoxicated with the sinister eccentricity of his destiny; and through this stupor he felt that shudder which precedes great shocks. He bent like an oak at the approach of a storm, like a soldier at the approach of an assault. He felt shadows filled with thunders and lightnings descending upon his head. As he listened to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Cristo, "and it was very unnecessary to disturb me at the opera for such a trifle. In France people fight with the sword or pistol, in the colonies with the carbine, in Arabia with the dagger. Tell your client that, although I am the insulted party, in order to carry out my eccentricity, I leave him the choice of arms, and will accept without discussion, without dispute, anything, even combat by drawing lots, which is always stupid, but with me different from other people, as I am ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... are not business men, of whom but few are to be found in the Socialist ranks, but pushing writers in search of self-advertisement, whose special domain is the highly spiced and the sensational, writers who, knowing that many people mistake eccentricity for genius and paradoxical absurdity for brilliancy, have discarded common-sense, let their imaginations run riot, and outbid one another ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... champagne to freedom. And they are consistent in their choice; for, to them, every exertion of the mind which does not serve the aims of the will is folly. Intellectual effort for its own sake, they call eccentricity. Therefore, persistence in the aims of the will and the belly will be concentricity; and, to be sure, the will is the centre, the kernel of ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... rendered the cause great service by this mission. This writer says that "in bearing what he believed to be his testimony against this system of oppression, he adopted sometimes a singularity of manner, by which, as conveying demonstration of a certain eccentricity of character, he diminished in some degree his usefulness to the cause which he had undertaken; as far indeed as this eccentricity might have the effect of preventing others from joining him in ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... been a reporter, Anne. Why are n't you more careful! There may come a time when your efforts to uphold your reputation for eccentricity and for doing the cleverly unexpected ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... and the difficulty of expressing what was true without hurting anyone, or acquiring character without becoming a character part. The difference between originality and eccentricity; kindness and tenderness; sympathy and understanding; and the delicate grades by which your attempts at goodness may either help or ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her by this time to be, beneath the service of her eccentricity, one of those unselfish creatures—found only among women—who will, for pure love and admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, to youth when they have lost it, to beauty that they never had, to accomplishments that they were never ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... Gusher, again bowing and pressing his hand to his heart, "wiz so good a lady for his wife, I am sure he shall be so happy and so proud." Detecting the small vein of eccentricity in the little woman's character, Mr. Gusher was evidently inclined to encourage it, hoping that it would still further ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... to describe one of them accurately. It will then be obvious that his memory has been playing him tricks, and that he has remembered only those parts of it which tell somewhat to his credit—a common eccentricity of memories. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... valve rod. The straps are semicircular and held together by strong bolts, B B, passing through lugs, or thickenings at the ends of the semicircles. The sheave has a deep groove all round the edges, in which the straps ride. The "eccentricity" or "throw" of an eccentric is the distance between C^2, the centre of the shaft, and C^1, the centre of the sheave. The throw must equal half of the distance which the slide-valve has to travel over the steam ports. A tapering steel wedge or key, K, sunk half in the eccentric and half in a slot ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... no doubt," said Mrs. Nickleby, "that he is a gentleman, and has the manners of a gentleman, and the appearance of a gentleman, although he does wear smalls, and gray worsted stockings. That may be eccentricity, or he may be proud of his legs. I don't see why he shouldn't be. The Prince Regent was proud of his legs, and so was Daniel Lambert, who was also a fat man; he was proud of his legs. So was Miss Biffin: she was—no, "added Mrs. Nickleby, correcting herself, "I think ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... varied courses. Wordsworth's letters are the product of cultivated taste, a fine eye for rural scenery, and lofty moral sentiment. Southey is the high-class litterateur, with a strong dash of Toryism in Church and State; in both there is a total absence of eccentricity, but in neither case is the attention forcibly arrested or any striking passage retained. When Coleridge is served up the flavour of unique expression and a sort of divine simplicity is unmistakable; he is alternately indignant and remorseful; he ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... forgot the importance of what he had been told as he watched the graceful beauty of the movement that revealed not only some eccentricity but personal vanity of a harmless kind and wholesome tastes ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... am not! I am a mere wanderer—a literary loafer—a student of men and manners. I read books, and I write them too,—this will perhaps explain the eccentricity of my behaviour in trying to read under the lamplight in ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... the worldly wise, but was long before it took to the nobler end of raising the poor, and then, as he would have added, under the influence of the Clapham Sect. The Church presented itself to him mainly as the religious department of the State, in which more care was taken to suppress eccentricity than to arouse enthusiasm; it was eminently respectable, but at the very antipodes of the heroic. Could he then lean to Rome? He could not do so without damning the men he most loved, even could his keen and in some ways sceptical intellect have consented to commit suicide. Or ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... short hair was criticized in my presence, but the young minister was right in his disapproval and I was wrong, as I subsequently realized. A few years later I let my hair grow long, for I had learned that no woman in public life can afford to make herself conspicuous by any eccentricity of dress or appearance. If she does so she suffers for it herself, which may not disturb her, and to a greater or less degree she injures the cause she represents, which should ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... government; yet the Quakers have caused no political convulsion. I confess, to me it seems, that if Paul, and John, and Peter, and James, had done as these Quakers, the imperial administration would have looked on it as a harmless eccentricity of the sect, and not as an incentive[16] to sedition. But be this as it may, I did not say what else the apostles might have succeeded to enforce; I merely pointed out what it was that they actually taught, and that, as a fact, they did not declare ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... the passages which, by corridors at the right and left, gave access to these seats, at either end of the oval arena, were also the entrances for the combatants. Strong palings at these passages prevented any unwelcome eccentricity in the movements of the beasts, and confined them to their appointed prey. Around the parapet which was raised above the arena, and from which the seats gradually rose, were gladiatorial inscriptions, and paintings wrought in fresco, typical of the entertainments for which ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... sun of an Eastern mid-day you can sit with your feet figuratively or literally on the table, if it pleases you; it will but be accounted as one more eccentricity unto you; but in the shadows, an' you would retain the position of teacher to the world at large, keep the heels on the rail of your chair; for there are ears and eyes a-many in the shadows and behind the ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... eccentricity of the flood may be gathered from the fact that houses that were situated at Woodvale and points above Johnstown are piled at the lower end of the town, while some massive houses have been lifted and carried from the lower end as far as the cemetery at the extreme upper portion ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... made too much of the savanna sparrow's innocent eccentricity. He fills his place, and fills it well; and who knows but that he may yet outshine the skylark? There is a promise, I believe, for those who humble themselves. But what shall be said of species which do not even try to sing, and that, notwithstanding they have all the structural ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... of this singer and of that. The young American is instinctively loyal to the long tradition of English literature. He is content to undergo the influence of the great masters, and does not seek for premature originality on the by-paths of eccentricity. But while he is the disciple of many, he is the vassal of none. His matter is always his own, the fruit of personal vision, experience, imagination, even if he may now and then unconsciously pour it into a mould provided by another. He is no mere echo of the rhythms ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... and that it was still within the bounds of possibility that I might hear the cry of the trapped victim, my historic attitude entirely failed, and I was sensible of some repugnance for the natives. But here, too, the priests maintained their jocular attitude: rallying the cannibals as upon an eccentricity rather absurd than horrible; seeking, I should say, to shame them from the practice by good-natured ridicule, as we shame a child from stealing sugar. We may here recognise the temperate and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of control over her motions in requital. The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled, were none the less inclined to pronounce the child a demon offspring, from the indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity that shone through her little figure, and sparkled with its activity. She ran and looked the wild Indian in the face; and he grew conscious of a nature wilder than his own. Thence, with native audacity, but still with a reserve as characteristic, she flew into the midst of a group of mariners, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... few words on the second sight, a few calm, quiet words, in which there is not the slightest wish to display either eccentricity or book-learning. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... female wants?" he exclaimed, at last. "You'd better stop, perhaps" he added, to the flyman. "It is an age of eccentricity, an abnormal era of the world's history. She may want me. Very likely I left my pocket-handkerchief behind me, and Mr. Talboys has sent this person with it. Perhaps I'd better get out and go and meet her. It's civil to ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... belongings under the care of Veraci the poet, telling him I would call for them some day; but I never came, and after a lapse of thirty-one years Veraci keeps them still. He was one of the strangest poets I have ever met. He affected eccentricity to make himself notorious, and opposed the great Metastasio in everything, writing unwieldy verses which he said gave more scope for the person who set them to music. He had got this extravagant notion ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... really. Everyone who got to know him said that he improved on acquaintance. His eccentricity increased as he grew older, but particularly after he had lost ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... read those Greek and Latin books which John only knew at second hand, but from whose beautiful fanciful stories of gods and heroes he derived all the subjects for his works of statuary. His other brother, Solomon, a strange, wild, odd man, in whom the family genius had degenerated into mere eccentricity, never did anything for his own livelihood, but lived always upon John Gibson's generous bounty. In John's wealthy days, he and Mr. Ben used to escape every summer from the heat and dust of Rome—which is unendurable in July and August—to the delightfully cool air and ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... not, because they had morbidly bad manners. Still of course manners are very small change and count for very little; the violet, being an artist, is entitled to any manners it likes, while the daisy has no temperament whatever, and no excuse for eccentricity. Grasshoppers tatted industriously and impartially among ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... Sergeant-at-Arms from the House." It was a strange beginning for one of the greatest parliamentarians of our epoch—and one of the greatest conservatives. The whole bent of his mind was towards moderation in all things. Temperamentally, he hated all forms of extravagant eccentricity; he loved the old if only because it was old; he had the keenest sense not only of decorum but of the essential dignity which is the best guardian of order. Yet here he was committed to a policy which aimed deliberately at outraging ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... the current, and watched at a little distance by a man in a canoe. Sometimes the ducks would swim tail first, contrary to the practice of all live ducks; but the fish, I supposed, did not observe the eccentricity, for they bit just as readily at the bait below. As soon as the fisherman perceived that a duck began to bob and dive, he paddled forward and secured the living prize beneath. I soon grew expert at ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... gaiety and courage which is the appanage of an ancient Gallic race. The old troopers, who pretend to govern us by the sword, do not approve of this joyous mode of regarding death; and all the writers whose pens are dipped in the ink of reaction and Jesuitism are eager to discover any eccentricity in which soldiers who are going under fire for the first time permit themselves to indulge. The Intendance, with that intelligence which characterises our military administrations, had put off the departure of the battalion for several hours. What were ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... there were certain moments when, in spite of all, I still thought of it. In the midst of my madness, eccentricity, and stupidity, there were within me certain impulses that at times brought me to myself. It was a breath of air which struck my face as I came from my dungeon; it was a page of a book I read when, in my bitter days, I happened to read something besides ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... cranky and diffident. I am beginning to get nervous about people's opinion and sensitive to my own eccentricity. It is a sad case for a man who never used to care a straw ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... could only give vent by incessant laughing, whistling, and telling stories. When other resources failed, we used to amuse ourselves by tormenting him; a fair compensation for the trouble he cost us. Tete Rouge rather enjoyed being laughed at, for he was an odd compound of weakness, eccentricity, and good-nature. He made a figure worthy of a painter as he paced along before us, perched on the back of his mule, and enveloped in a huge buffalo-robe coat, which some charitable person had given him at the fort. This extraordinary garment, which would have contained two men of his size, he ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... went to the writing-table, snatched up the music sheets which lay scattered upon it, tore them across and across. There should be an end to it, an end to austere futilities which led, which could lead, to nothing. In that moment of unnatural excitement he saw all his past as a pale eccentricity. He was bitterly ashamed of it. He regretted it with his whole soul, and he resolved to have ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... possesses you. The eccentricity of the going constantly hides it, and each reappearance brings again the joy of discovery. And at last you reach it, dismount beside the small clear stream which flows beneath it, approach reverently, overwhelmed with a strange mingling of awe and great elation. You ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... frightened other vessels away; their commanders preferring going on to Port Jackson, where they half ruin themselves by the unavoidable expenses they incur. Even when their vessels have anchored here, the thoughtlessness and eccentricity of this class of men, when they are under no restraint or control, has sometimes not only led to disputes with the natives, but with each other, which eventually have proved equally detrimental. In short, New Zealand is a ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... and Lewis, English binding, like French, became purely imitative in its designs; but while in our own decade the French artists have endeavoured to shake themselves free from old traditions by mere eccentricity, in England we have several living binders, such as Mr. Cobden Sanderson and Mr. Douglas Cockerell, who work with notable originality and yet with the strictest observance of the canons of ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... Association in 1881 Sir John Lubbock called attention to the fact that these animals appear to indicate both a hot and a cold climate, and he referred to the fact (known to astronomers) that the earth passes through periods of slow change in the eccentricity of its orbit, and in the obliquity of the ecliptic. The result of the latter condition is, to produce periods of about 21,000 years each, during one-half of which the Northern hemisphere will be hotter, ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... sitting with Marya Dmitrievna at the window was her father's sister, the same aunt with whom she had once spent some solitary years in Pokrovskoe. Her name was Marfa Timofyevna Pestov. She had a reputation for eccentricity as she was a woman of an independent character, told every one the truth to his face, and even in the most straitened circumstances behaved just as if she had a fortune at her disposal. She could not endure Kalitin, and directly her niece ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... her father spoke repeatedly of longing to embrace his Fredi, of the joy her last letter had given him, of his intention to send an immediate answer: and he showed Dudley a pile of manuscript ready for the post. He talked of public affairs, was humorous over any extravagance or eccentricity in the views he took; notably when he alluded to his envy of little Skepsey. He said he really did envy; and his daughter believed it and saw ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... way, we refer our sensations to the peripheral endings of the nerves concerned, according to what physiologists have called "the law of eccentricity." Thus I am said to feel the pain caused by a bruise in the foot in the member itself. This applies also to some of the sensations of the special senses. Thus, impressions of taste are clearly localized in the corresponding ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... not hurry to the Gardens, so sure was he of the success of his undertaking. The frowsy black coat, in which he made his bow to the millionaire, had not seen the light for many years—his hat was a wide-brimmed eccentricity in soft felt which greatly delighted the nursemaids who passed him by. Gessner would never have recognized, in the hollow-cheeked, pale-faced, humble creature the sturdy young Pole who had come to him nearly a generation ago and had said, "Our fortunes are made; this ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... Winesburg grotesques, to unpack their hearts, to release emotions buried and festering. Wash Williams tries to explain his eccentricity but hardly can; Louise Bentley "tried to talk but could say nothing"; Enoch Robinson retreats to a fantasy world, inventing "his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he explained the things he had been unable to ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... anxiety or incompatibility, "if admitted to participation in the act of impregnation will each, in turn or in combination, often set the seal of their presence in the shape of idiocy, imbecility, eccentricity, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... she talked so little and her attention was so concentrated upon the lesson which she appeared to be studying, that her school companions left her entirely alone. Polly's passion for studying had always been regarded as an eccentricity. But now since she had announced on that afternoon that she had her own living to make there was possibly some excuse for her industry. Nevertheless the girls felt more convinced than ever that she was not in the least like any of the rest of them and, although ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... ornamental women, women who are exclusively wives, or mothers, or sweethearts, women purely spiritual or purely material; just as there are soldiers, artists, artisans, mathematicians, poets, merchants, men who understand money, or agriculture, or government, and nothing else. Besides all this, the eccentricity of events leads to endless cross-purposes; many are called and few are chosen is the law of earth as of heaven. Madame Rabourdin conceived herself fully capable of directing a statesman, inspiring an artist, helping an inventor ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... the cleverest member, and he was well calculated to fill the situation in which fortune had placed him. His talents were certainly of a superior description, but their efficacy was counteracted by the eccentricity of his habits, the indolence of his mind, and his vacillating and uncertain disposition. He was, however, occasionally capable of intense application, and competent to make himself master of any subject he thought ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... artist from the hand of Nature, when, vanquished by Art in the person of Michelangelo, she deigned to be subjugated in that of Raphael, not by art only but by goodness also. And of a truth, since the greater number of artists had up to that period derived from nature a certain rudeness and eccentricity, which not only rendered them uncouth and fantastic, but often caused the shadows and darkness of vice to be more conspicuous in their lives than the light and splendor of those virtues by which man is rendered immortal—so was there good cause wherefore she should, on ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... people came to church the next Sunday in crowds— twice as many as the usual assembly—some who went seldom, some who went nowhere, some who belonged to other congregations and communities—mostly bent on witnessing whatever eccentricity the very peculiar young man might be guilty of next, but having a few among them who were sympathetically interested in seeing how far his call, if call it ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... came. Some smiled indulgently and called it an artistic eccentricity, others looked upon it as a wise provision, in view of the many events which were crowding thick and fast in Paris just then, but to all, the real motive of that climax remained a puzzle and a mystery. Anyway, Marguerite St. Just married Sir Percy Blakeney one fine day, ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... An inequality in the moon's march, arising from the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, whereby the diurnal motion is sometimes quicker and at other times slower ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... CAVALIER VERSE. The numerous minor poets of this period are often arranged in groups, but any true classification is impossible since there was no unity among them. Each was a law unto himself, and the result was to emphasize personal oddity or eccentricity. It would seem that in writing of love, the common theme of poets, Puritan and Cavalier must alike speak the common language of the heart; but that is precisely what they did not do. With them love was no longer a passion, or even a fashion, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... life, the Gnostics generally went to extremes. It was due to Gnosticism that art and science found an entrance into the Church. It preserved the Church from becoming stereotyped in form; but, built up entirely on ideas and not on historical facts, it died from its own hollowness and eccentricity. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... he has seen something of the world. He has not outgrown the age which mistakes eccentricity for genius and bad temper for boldness. We shall see,—we shall see very soon. They will both hate Cutter, with his professorial wisdom and his immense experience of things they have never seen. How do ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... even American people, are so placed that they take from the situation a color of eccentricity, if they impart none to it, and the old, old story, which we all wish to have end well, zigzags to a fortunate close past juts and angles of individuality which the heroes and heroines have not willingly or wittingly thrown out. They would have chosen to arrive ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... What an eccentricity of wickedness was it to appoint any place where a murderer should get shelter—a church too! but such were, and are (abroad) called sanctuaries. Lancaster Church was reserved by Henry VIII. as a sanctuary, after the abolition of that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... structure of the organ. And thus it is that the cerebral affection which fell upon the parent is represented in one child by insanity, in another by idiocy, in another by epilepsy, in another by gross eccentricity, in another by moral perversities, in another by ill-balanced intellect,—each and all implying a brain more or less vitiated by the parental infirmity. There is nothing strange in all this diversity of result. In the healthy state, organic action proceeds with wonderful regularity and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... scene, after Hamlet's interview with the Ghost, has been charged with an improbable eccentricity. But the truth is, that after the mind has been stretched beyond its usual pitch and tone, it must either sink into exhaustion and inanity, or seek relief by change. It is thus well known, that persons conversant in deeds of cruelty contrive to escape from conscience by connecting something ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... energetic man of the world, shrewd, sagacious, and long sighted in business, honored on change, respected by his friends, and a pattern of prudence and morality. And then, perhaps, he was only carrying on a joke, a kind of Jew d'esprit, conceived in a moment of amiable eccentricity, and never to be executed. If not a joke, however, the judgment of Judge Portia should be set aside, and a new trial, with costs, should, in my opinion, have ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... you the idea is at first sight startling, but surely he might trust to me; and he knows Amyas Belamour, poor man, to be the very soul of honour; yes, and with all his eccentricity to have made no small impression on our fair Aurelia. Depend upon it, my dear Betty, romance carried the day; and the damsel is more enamoured of the mysterious voice in the dark, than she would be of any lusty swain in ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... behold, Whether Malay or Greek or Abyssinian, Italian I have oftentimes been told: Malay I think expressionless and cold, Tho' some admire its sweet simplicity, But I'll observe, if I may be so bold, It must be far-fetched eccentricity; At least I can't discover ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... Those Sections, whatever convenience they may possess apart from the Canons, nevertheless are discovered to presuppose the Canons throughout: to be manifestly subsequent to them in order of time: to depend upon them for their very existence: in some places to be even unaccountable in the eccentricity of their arrangement, except when explained by the requirements of the EUSEBIAN Canons. I say—That particular sectional subdivision, in other words, to which the epithet "AMMONIAN" is popularly applied,—(applied however without authority, and in fact by the merest license,)—proves ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... slight vein of eccentricity running through the Morris family, with its occasional outcroppings accentuated in the presence of death. The grandfather, distinguished as chief justice of New York and governor of New Jersey, forbade in his will the payment of any one for preaching his funeral ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... activities of the characters? Less the actions than the moods of these novels have the epic air. Narrow as Miss Cather's scene may be, she fills it with a spaciousness and candor of personality that quite transcends the gnarled eccentricity and timid inhibitions of the local colorists. Passion blows through her chosen characters like a free, wholesome, if often devastating wind; it does not, as with Miss Jewett and her contemporaries, lurk in furtive corners or hide itself altogether. And as these passions ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... little eccentricity revolved in his humble orbit among the castor-oil bushes and in the dust; always fashioning magnificent palaces from stale flowers thrown away by the bearer, smooth water-worn pebbles, bits of broken glass, and feathers pulled, I fancy, from my fowls—always alone, and always crooning ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... and fishing-line. Stories grew in terms of prodigious achievement as they passed from tongue to tongue, and the scant regard for anything approaching the truth in these matters became a national eccentricity. The habitant was boastful in all that concerned himself or his race; never did a people feel more firmly assured that it was the salt of the earth. He was proud of his ancestry, and proud of his allegiance; and so are ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... retirement. He had the strange notions of those who have lived much alone and in the wilderness. An unkind critic would have dismissed him brusquely with the belief that his troubles had unbalanced his mind. But Parker saw beneath all his eccentricity, and as the hermit wistfully discoursed of the peace that the woods had given him the young man conceived both respect and affection for this strange character. His knowledge of Joshua's life tragedy pre-disposed him to pity. He was ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... Munster. It was not at all true that he thought it very natural of her to have made this pious pilgrimage. It might have been said of him in advance that he was too good a Bostonian to regard in the light of an eccentricity the desire of even the remotest alien to visit the New England metropolis. This was an impulse for which, surely, no apology was needed; and Madame Munster was the fortunate possessor of several New England cousins. In ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... John is coming up the drive; it is he— look!' 'John!' said Mrs. Norton, seeking for her glasses nervously; 'yes, so it is; let's run and meet him. But no; let's take him rather coolly. I believe half his eccentricity is only put on because he wishes to astonish us. We won't ask him any questions—we'll just wait and let him ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... have driven persons more moon-struck even than you. Human eccentricity has long since ceased ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... whose heroes are all dainty and all perfect. She wrote the opening chapter, and introduced a lovely blonde simpleton who talked nothing but pearls and poetry and who was virtuous to the verge of eccentricity. She also introduced a young French Duke of aggravated refinement, in love with the blonde. Mr. F. followed next week, with a brilliant lawyer who set about getting the Duke's estates into trouble, and a sparkling young lady of high society who fell to fascinating the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was one of the most acute and learned bibliographers I have known. He was a man of marked individuality and independent views; with a spice of eccentricity and humor, which crept into all his catalogues, and made his notes highly entertaining reading. Besides his services to the British Museum Library, in building up its noble collection of Americana, and in whose rooms he labored for many years, with the aid of Panizzi and his successors, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... for a moment forgot the importance of what he had been told as he watched the graceful beauty of the movement that revealed not only some eccentricity but personal vanity of a harmless kind and wholesome tastes ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... contrast between the genial personality so loved by his friends and the waspishness so often shown by Cecil and his staff in the columns of the paper. "His extraordinary personality," writes E. S. P. Haynes, "wonderfully penetrated the eccentricity of his appearance. His features were slightly fantastic and his voice was as loudly discordant as his laughter; but the real charm and generosity of his character were so transparent that one never seemed to be ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... whose lectures he occasionally attended although not a member of his class; and, himself not without his amiable eccentricities, he could not fail to have a soft spot in his heart for the quaint humour and the pleasant eccentricity which endeared Professor Blackie to his class and to the public. He was a poor attender at the Greek Class, however, and when he presented himself for his certificate the keen blue eyes of the Professor looked at him critically, and the Professor's remark ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... would have taken his umbrella, but the captain pleaded hard for its society, declaring that from early boyhood he had never been able to sleep without an umbrella under his pillow. The Spaniards had heard much of the eccentricity of Englishmen, and not being inclined to refuse the request of a doomed man, they left ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... "show." To appreciate it properly we must realize that it is nothing else. We must compare it with pageants and ballets; and if, so comparing it, we like it less than some that we have seen at the Empire and the Alhambra, the generous will attribute our eccentricity to an overdeveloped moral sense. To be frank, we do not believe that Prof. Reinhardt or M. Bakst has more to say than the creators of our best musical ballets. But, while the latter modestly pretend to nothing more than the flattery of ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... think that he must have a peculiar sense of humour, which it gives him great gratification to indulge, as others do good, by stealth. He makes questionable jests for himself only, and enjoys them alone. But apart from this eccentricity, he is a kind and generous man, always ready to help with time and money when there is any good ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... satellites of Saturn are revolved about this planet with motions nearly circular and equable, scarcely disturbed by any eccentricity hitherto observed. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... Oswyn, with a cadence in his voice which struck Rainham as the signal of something surpassing his wonted eccentricity. "Don't go yet. I said just now, Rainham, that I wouldn't tell you why I had painted out that picture, the picture which I had been fool enough to talk about so much, which I had intended to make a masterpiece. Well, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Lear, whom the foul fiend has possessed for many a day, it will run through ditches, through quagmires, and through bogs, to see a man stand on his head for the exact space of half an hour. Ask the reason of this raging appetite for eccentricity, the answer is, such a thing is out of the beaten track of ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... in most common use for manuscripts is what is known as letter. The sheets in any case should be of uniform size. Avoid all eccentricity and affectation in the preparation of your manuscript, or "copy," as printers call it. The more matter-of-fact and businesslike ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... interest which at such a moment the grave dignity of Kilmarnock, contrasted with the lofty indifference of Balmerino, might excite, there was some diversion among the Peers, owing to the eccentricity of several of their body. Of these, one, Lord Windsor, affectedly said when asked for his vote, "I am sorry I must say, guilty upon my honour." Another nobleman, Lord Stamford, refused to answer to the name of Henry, having been christened Harry. ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... pure philanthropy? Polly and I were clinging to that hypothesis as the most lenient way of accounting for your eccentricity." ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... by imparting to them a more meretricious gloss, a higher relief, a greater loftiness of tone, and a characteristic inveteracy of purpose. Even in those collateral ornaments of modern style, slovenliness, abruptness, and eccentricity (as well as in terseness and significance), Lord Byron, when he pleases, defies competition and surpasses all his contemporaries. Whatever he does, he must do in a more decided and daring manner than any one else—he lounges with extravagance, and yawns so as to alarm the reader! Self-will, passion, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... a life of Schiller which almost anyone might have written, Carlyle retired for some years to Craigenputtoch, and then brought forth Sartor Resartus, which was personal and soul-revealing to the verge of eccentricity. In the same way Wagner was a mere continuator of Weber in Lohengrin and Tannhaeuser, and first came to his own in the Meistersinger and Tristan, after years ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... very remarkable person—quick, animated, and observant: nothing escapes him, and his remarks are indicative of a mind of great power. I enjoy listening to his conversation, which is at once full of originality, yet free from the slightest shade of eccentricity. ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... went off well, for the ladies, evidently suspecting the "eccentricity" of their host, had come provided not only with cups and saucers, but with spoons, cake, bread, butter, ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Golightly and William had already summed up the old fellow as "balmy on the bean," while their part was to humor him. Plain as a bursting shell seemed to William Miss Gravely's position in the household, and Steptoe's chivalry toward her an eccentricity which a sense of humor could enjoy. Otherwise they justified his reading of the fundamental non-morality of men, in bringing no condemnation to bear on anyone concerned. Being themselves two almost ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... the universities does for coaching, you will see that such a man, while his youth and luck last, may have plenty of money, and may even, by aping the manners of the gentlemen whom he teaches, deceive careless people—especially those who admire eccentricity—as to ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... "fallen" woman. She fully realized that in England no woman has fallen who is self-supporting, whose income meets her expenses and who pays her way. Given those guarantees, all else that she does which is not actually criminal is eventually put down to mere eccentricity. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... Bunting was aware that eccentricity has always been a perquisite, as it were the special luxury, of the well-born and of the well-educated. Scholars, as she well knew, are never quite like other people, and her new lodger was undoubtedly a scholar. ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... eccentric rod, which engages at its other end with the valve rod. The straps are semicircular and held together by strong bolts, B B, passing through lugs, or thickenings at the ends of the semicircles. The sheave has a deep groove all round the edges, in which the straps ride. The "eccentricity" or "throw" of an eccentric is the distance between C^2, the centre of the shaft, and C^1, the centre of the sheave. The throw must equal half of the distance which the slide-valve has to travel ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... friends interesting as men. He was nothing, as a person to know and observe, to the genius of the two Mozleys, to the brilliant social charm of Frederic Faber, to the keen, refined intelligence of Mark Pattison, to the originality and clever eccentricity of William Palmer of Magdalen. And he was nothing as a man of practical power for organising and carrying out successful schemes: such power was not much found at Oxford in those days. But his faith in his cause, as the cause of goodness and truth, was proof against mockery ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... beside this general cause of divergence, the staid and unenthusiastic character of Mrs. Otis rather chilled the ardor of the husband, and he, for his part, by his vehemence and eccentricity, did not strongly conciliate her favor. There were times of active disagreement in the family, and in later years the marriage was rather a fact than ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... children, as almost every writer on him, from Grellmann down to the present day, has observed, are more thoroughly indulged and spoiled than any non-gipsy can conceive; and despite all the apparent contradictions caused by the selfishness born of poverty, irritable Eastern blood, and the eccentricity of semi-civilisation, I doubt if any man, on the whole, in the world, is more attached to ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... allegation of the Yankee had deprived him of speech; and for some moments he sat gazing at the latter, evidently in doubt whether to give credence to the story, or reject it as a little bit of a "sell" upon the part of his comrade—with whose eccentricity of character he was well acquainted. Equally ludicrous was the look of gravity on the countenance of the other—which he continued to preserve under the continued gaze of his comrade, with all the solemnity of a judge upon the bench. It was as much as my companion and I could do to restrain our ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... never employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade the humour: into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later, "The Humourous Lieutenant," and Jonson, besides "Every Man Out of His Humour," returned to the ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... vessels away; their commanders preferring going on to Port Jackson, where they half ruin themselves by the unavoidable expenses they incur. Even when their vessels have anchored here, the thoughtlessness and eccentricity of this class of men, when they are under no restraint or control, has sometimes not only led to disputes with the natives, but with each other, which eventually have proved equally detrimental. In short, New Zealand is a place of such vast importance to so many lucrative branches of British trade, ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... Isaiah, Elijah, Obadiah, Esther, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Elisha, Nehemiah, and Ruth. In his spare moments he read the Psalms of David for pleasure in their rolling cadences and the Proverbs of Solomon for profit in their wisdom, which habit alone was sufficient to earn for him a reputation for eccentricity. ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... probably had Jewish blood in his veins, can only be described as an impertinence—not to Browning but to the Jewish race. As if to feel the spiritual genius of Hebraism and to be moved by the pathos of Hebraic fate were an eccentricity only to be accounted for by the bias of kin! It is significant that his demonstrable share of German blood left him rather conspicuously impervious to the literary—and more especially to the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... qualities which do not deserve praise. The reckless literary admirer of Shelley or Byron goes into ecstasies and cries, "Perish the slave who would think of these great men's vices!"—whereupon raw and conceited youngsters say, "Vice and eccentricity are signs of genius. We will be vicious and eccentric;" and then they go and convert ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... of life of a man of genius, often tinctured by eccentricity and enthusiasm, maintain an eternal conflict with the monotonous and imitative habits of society, as society is carried on in a great metropolis, where men are necessarily alike, and where, in perpetual intercourse, they shape ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... head. He does not eat me up on that account, but treats me with indulgence, knowing that it is precisely at such times that I am working hard to serve him. As for solitary habits, the world is right in condemning a man who, out of pure affectation or eccentricity, shuts himself up alone, loses his friends, and sets society against him. Those, however, who act in this way naturally, because their profession obliges them to lead a recluse life, or because their character rebels against feigned politenesses ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... was occasionally subject to hours of deep silence and introspection that approached a condition of trance. In manner he was simple, direct, void of the least affectation, and entirely free from awkwardness, oddity, or eccentricity. His mental qualities were a quick analytic perception, strong logical powers, a tenacious memory, a liberal estimate and tolerance of the opinions of others, ready intuition of human nature; and perhaps his ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... business-manager in my reorganized company," said Rushcroft. "With your acumen and my eccentricity united in a common cause ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... in one quick glance; and admiring the tall brown eccentricity as she might have admired a fine bronze statue out of place, in the wrong surroundings, she wondered from what sort of niche the statue had transplanted itself. In her mind there was no room whatever for the little man with the pointed moustache, so ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... prejudice to imagine regularity or diligence incompatible with high genius. Genius is neither above law, nor opposed to it; but as many have a poetic taste and temperament without the inspiration, the world is apt to mistake the eccentricity of the pretender for the outward and visible sign of genius. Whether or not the poet of the Porch-house of Chertsey had the actual poetic fire we do not venture to determine. Abraham Cowley takes a prominent position, amongst the poets of our land, and the eventful times in which ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Binks," said Lady Penelope, "spare my poor favourite! You, surely, of all others, should forgive the excesses of an amiable eccentricity of temper.—Forgive me, my love, but I must defend an absent friend—My Lady Binks, I am very sure, is too ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... whatever to us. There was no room for them on deck or at the schooner's davits, and I could hardly imagine that a man like Renouf would seriously contemplate the idea of attempting to tow them across the Atlantic. It was while I was marvelling at this extraordinary eccentricity, as I considered it, that I happened to allow my gaze to rest abstractedly on the Spaniard that still remained hove-to, and as I gazed it dawned upon me that a subtle change was taking place in the appearance of the vessel. At first I could ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... simple population of New Canaan the Doc was considered the most blasphemous man in America, but there seemed to be a sort of general impression in the village that his profanity was, in some way, an eccentricity of genius. ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... on the grass, tailor fashion, and every one helped himself to what appetite prompted, in a fashion that suggested brilliant gymnastic powers. To pass a dish to any one, the governess discovered, was construed as an evidence of mental weakness and eccentricity. The family satisfied its appetite without assistance or amenities, but with the skill of ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... an argument growing warm with Rusper he would say: "Boil it some more, O' Man; boil it harder!" or "Six minutes at least," allusions Rusper could never make head or tail of, and got at last to disregard as a part of Mr. Polly's general eccentricity. For a long time that little tendency threw no shadow over their intercourse, but it contained within it the seeds of ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... heliotrope nailed to the wall outside her window. She had but to open her shutters and walk into the sun. She dressed, took her sunshade, stealthily slipped the shutters back, and stole forth. Shunning the hotel garden, where the eccentricity of her early wandering might betray the condition of her spirit, she passed through into the road toward the Casino. Without perhaps knowing it, she was making for where she had sat with him yesterday afternoon, listening ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... blight of unbelief abroad—a nebulous, pestilential rationalism. Acquaint him with these facts; they may serve to re-establish one whose temperament must be regarded as abnormal in the light of his great eccentricity of action. Now farewell, and God ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... thoughts were thus confided to silence and darkness, there was, in other parts of his conduct more open to observation, a degree of eccentricity and indecorum which, with superficial observers, might well bring the sensibility of his nature into question. On the morning of the funeral, having declined following the remains himself, he stood looking, from the abbey door, at the procession, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... hundred pounds. I am sorry to trouble you, but 'necessity has no law,' as the old proverb says. I shall call to-night at the window for the cheque. You will find pen and ink in the desk. Pardon my little bit of eccentricity in bringing you here. When I have got the cheque you will soon be at liberty again, and none the worse, I trust, for your short captivity. I don't wish to proceed to extremities with a relation, but the money I must have. Only let me get the cheque, and then, as the poet says, 'My native land, ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... that I should; and the young fellow walked off with the good hat. Then, with the relic in my hand, a waiter and myself began a systematic search. My hat was nowhere to be found. How the deuce was I to get up town to the club? I couldn't wear the old plug; I wasn't rich enough for such an eccentricity. I had nothing but a silk hat at the apartment, and I hated it because it was always in the way when ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... wrong," said the lawyer, blandly. "He was eccentric, my dear sir, very eccentric; but eccentricity is not insanity, and you will find that the ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... to exceed or fall short of the object considerably, the sight-bar must be readjusted accordingly. It thus becomes, under ordinary circumstances, the best instrument for approximating distances. In correcting the elevation, however, the variation of range to the first graze, attributable to eccentricity, differences of windage, and other causes, must be taken into consideration, as, under the most favorable circumstances, at the Experimental Battery of the Ordnance Yard, this variation is found to equal ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... her Eastern modes of thought. The failure of her several attempts to catch Sparrows in the high-walled back yard was new proof of the royal impotency of her bringing up; while her frequent wallowings in the garbage-can were understood to be the manifestation of a little pardonable high-born eccentricity. She was fed and pampered, shown and praised; but she was not happy. Kitty was homesick! She clawed at that blue ribbon round her neck till she got it off; she jumped against the plate-glass because that seemed the road to outside; ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... sought the confidence of the poor girl, with the view of soothing her sorrows and helping her out of her difficulties; but Miss Day, candid upon all other topics, was strangely reserved upon this subject, and Capitola, with all her eccentricity, was too delicate to seek to intrude upon the ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... and which, by marching round and round the paper forest in the background, would make six men pass muster very well for sixty, did not the fatally regular recurrence of the hero whose cotton armor bunches at the knees, and the other whose legs insist on the un-Grecian eccentricity of being straight in profile and crooked in a front view, bring us back ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... too, we came suddenly upon an eccentricity of out-building that wrought upon our souls with wonder. For, penetrating to the rear through what might have been a cloak-closet or butler's pantry, we found a supplementary wing, or rather tail of rooms, loosely knocked together, to proceed ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... importance to him; my father, though himself of a very sweet disposition, was most unhappy. His parents looked upon him as moonstruck, while he himself, whatever his aspirations, was conscious that he had done nothing to justify the eccentricity of his course, or the violation of all prudential considerations in which he daily indulged. In these perplexities, the usual alternative was again had recourse to—absence; he was sent abroad, to travel in France, which the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... little fists and looked round for the means of vengeance. David went down on his knees. La Bazalgette glared through the crack, and wondered what on earth he was at now. Oh! he was praying. "He loves her: he is eccentricity itself; so he is praying for her, and on my doorsteps" (the householder wounded as well as the flirt). It was lucky she had not "a thunderbolt in her eye"—Shakespeare, or a celestial messenger of the wrong sort would have descended on the devout mariner. It was more than Mrs. Bazalgette could ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... make acquaintances, yet he did not refuse the invitations that were pressed upon him, lest he should be accused of eccentricity and rudeness; and so he found himself soon entangled in all sorts of engagements with the neighboring gentry and nobility. If these so-called gayeties gave him no particular pleasure, at least for the time they diverted his thoughts; and, with this view, he accepted ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Villon, of Heine—and of all those who were not only great artists but great humanists. As a purely descriptive poet, he can take his place with the masters of sea and landscape. As an imaginative realist, he showed those who were stumbling from one wild eccentricity to another to thrill them, that they themselves were wilder, stranger, far more thrilling than anything in the world—or out of it. Few things in contemporary poetry are as powerful as the regeneration of Saul Kane (in The Everlasting Mercy) or the story of Dauber, the tale of a tragic sea-voyage ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... day may be taken as a sample of most others, and a month passed rapidly away. Each day, however, was marked with some peculiar eccentricity on her part, but these diverted me. I was often requested to do strange things in my position as a model, but with all her oddities Lady R—was a gentlewoman in manner and in feeling, and what I should certainly have refused to anyone else, I did for her without reluctance. ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... of her return. To have the title role—as it were—snatched from her in the moment of triumph was annoying. But whatever her faults, Mrs. Millard was a lady, and as such she accepted the situation. She said little, but what she said was graceful and to the point. The eccentricity of the whole thing was, it seemed to her, sufficient excuse for her attitude, which, ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... Claridge, mother to the pupil, approved of the new tutor. True, he talked much and wildishly; but literary men had a name for eccentricity, and, besides, Lady Claridge always dealt with the opinions of other people as matters of illimitable unimportance. This baronet's lady, in short, was in these days vouchsafing to the universe at large a fine and new benevolence, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... of the former is that it may work too easily and get out of control. Where the central control does not suffice to keep a strong hand upon this easy-running mental machinery, it may quickly merge into eccentricity and possibly into madness. The insane show this same tendency to rapid, but irrelevant, association which lands them in incoherency: they make, or indulge in, associations which no normal person would allow. A genius is only a genius while the necessary selection ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... the frontiers of caprice and desire. They had neither nationality nor national ambition, and would sell their spears for a bunch of fish, as the saying goes. Their one consuming passion and one great wish was that they should not be overlooked, and, so long as the tribes respected this eccentricity, the ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... years of age, the possessor of a comfortable fortune, something of a connoisseur in art matters, a collector of old furniture, a little eccentric—though now that I have written the word, I find that I must qualify it, for his only eccentricity was that he persisted, in spite of many temptations, in remaining a bachelor. Marriageable women had long since ceased to consider him; mothers with maturing daughters dismissed him with a significant shake of the head. It was from them that he got the reputation of being an eccentric. But ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... Rose was. He sat a long time in the hall of the house with the band-box on his knees. He did not mind waiting. People went in and out of the hall and looked at him; and he did not care. He gloried in the society of the sacred band-box. He enjoyed the spectacle of his own eccentricity. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... she conscious of strangeness and eccentricity in the man she had married. It often seemed to that keen and practical sense which in her mingled so oddly with the capacity for passion that, as they grew older, and her mind recovered tone and balance, she would probably love the world disastrously more and he disastrously ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that I have knitted my brows till I had the headache, in order to acquire the reputation of a grave, solid, and well-judging youth. Your father always has discovered, or thought that he discovered, a hare-brained eccentricity lying folded among the wrinkles of my forehead, which rendered me a perilous associate for the future counsellor and ultimate judge. Well, Corporal Nym's philosophy must be my comfort—'Things must be ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... with a charming unconsciousness that their school system is without a rival in Europe; the young lady to one's right wonders why such nice people should be republicans; the Cambridge man across the table exposes the eccentricity of a friend who wished to know in what canton he was travelling; the squire with the pink and white daughters is amazed at the absence of police. In the very heart of the noblest home of liberty which Europe has seen our astonishing nation lives and moves with as contented and self-satisfied ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... imagine, that he beholds a solid, compacted, uniform system of monarchy; in which all inferior jurisdictions are but as rays diverging from one centre. But on examining it more nearly, you find much eccentricity and confusion. It is not a monarchy in strictness. But, as in the Saxon times this country was an heptarchy, it is now a strange sort of PENTARCHY. It is divided into five several distinct principalities, besides the supreme. There is indeed this difference from the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... man save health, wealth, strength, and beauty, will of course consider him fit and proper to make a woman happy. Yet having regard to the following facts (1) that the aforesaid baron is not merely unstable in love affairs but capricious to the verge of eccentricity, and a winebibber and gourmand to boot; (2) that he is as vain as an Indian prince who takes unto him a wife for the mere pomp and show of the thing; (3) that he is violent and brutal, sparing nobody in his sudden fits of passion and, as the documents testify, has frequently inflicted mortal ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... clerical; and Carmichael had considered how he should bear himself at the Presbytery. His intention had been to meet the Rabbi with public cordiality and escort him to a seat, so that all men should see that he was too magnanimous to be offended by this latest eccentricity of their friend. This calculated plan was upset by the Rabbi coming in late and taking the first seat that offered, and when he would have gone afterwards to thank him for his generosity the Rabbi had disappeared. It was evident that the old man's love was as deep as ever, but ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... road where none has walked before, to do easily what it is impossible for others to do at all, to create new forms of thought and expression, are the only recipes for genius; and in trying to escape on all sides from every resemblance to his predecessors, he adopts at once an air of eccentricity and pretentiousness. This continues to be the accepted view of originality; but, in spite of this conventional opinion, I hold that the healthy sign of an activity of mind in early youth is not to be striving after unheard-of ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... or colored, is transmitted through ether in waves of measurable length: each atom of the medium, when disturbed, moves around its place of rest in an orbit of variable dimension and eccentricity. On the character of the orbit depends the character of the light; and on the velocity of orbit motion, its intensity. Like the gentle pulsations which circle from the point where fell the pebble in the purple lake, come the grateful twilight waves, red with the last kiss ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 'snapped instead of folded'; faces bloated into apoplexy, or extenuated into skeletons; colour borrowed from the jars in a druggist's shop, and expression forced into caricature.... That morbid infatuation which sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity deserves no quarter at ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... intermediate stage), presenting themselves, for the most part, in a highly-agitated condition of mind, with the result that officials acquire the methods of those who deal with the mentally unhinged; show themselves prepared for any display of eccentricity. Ever, as in life, you remark the people who arrive too soon, or too late; a few lucky ones come in the very nick of time. The last named are favourites, selected with no obvious reason by Fortune, and ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... and can open and shut their eyes and, at a pinch, say 'mamma' and 'papa.' We must blame the Antiguan, I fear, for their existence. It was he—the rascal—who first spread that scenae sacra fames. Some say that he was a schemer and impostor, feigning eccentricity for his private ends. They are quite wrong; Mr. Coates was a very good man. He never made a penny out of his performances; he even lost many hundred pounds. Moreover, as his speeches before the curtain and his letters to the papers show, he took himself quite seriously. ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... respectable station. But surely, Squire, you will never so far forget the respect that is due to so high an officer as a Secretary of State, or, indeed, so far forget yourself as to adopt a course, which from its eccentricity, violence, and impropriety, must leave the impression that your intellects are disordered. Surely you will never be tempted ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... a true one; but Swift's was a many-sided character. He was a misanthrope, with deep, though very limited affections, a man frugal to eccentricity, with a benevolence at once active and extensive. His powerful intellect compels our admiration, if not our sympathy. His irony, his genius for satire and humour, his argumentative skill, his language, which is never wanting in strength, and is ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... was water on the floe. It was a wild night for boat service; and I felt some alarm mingle with my curiosity as I reflected on the danger of the landing. My old acquaintance, it was true, was the most eccentric of men; but the present eccentricity was both disquieting and lugubrious to consider. A variety of feelings thus led me towards the beach, where I lay flat on my face in a hollow within six feet of the track that led to the pavilion. Thence, ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lace, and there was a large bunch of violets in her waistband. The horses were beautiful in the sunshine, and their red hides glistened in the long, slanting rays. She put up her parasol and tried to understand, but she could only see the angles of houses, and the eccentricity of every passer-by. She saw very clearly the thin, facial line, and her eyes rested on the touch of purple at the throat to mark his Roman dignity. Father Daly sat opposite, rubbing his thumbs like one in the presence of a superior. He ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... all, there was some wisdom in his eccentricity, for, when riding the camel, mounted on the rough saddle of the country, I often wished that I had my friend's forethought, and I should have been glad to have supplemented mine with his odd number. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... To the people at large whiskey "straight" seemed the natural drink of man, and whiskey toddy was not distasteful to woman. To refuse to drink was to subject one's self to abuse and suspicion;[29] Lincoln's notorious lack of liking for it passed for an eccentricity, or a physical peculiarity. The customary social gatherings were at horse-racings, at corn-shuckings, at political speech-makings, at weddings, whereat the coarse proceedings would not nowadays bear recital; at log-rollings, where the neighbors gathered to collect the logs ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... sigh of satisfaction, "HE'S got only two toes on his left foot—showed 'em to me. And he was born so." Need it be said that in these few words I read the dismal sequel of Warts' unfortunate attachment? His accidental eccentricity was no longer attractive. What were his evanescent accretions, subject to improvement or removal, beside the hereditary and settled malformations of ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... the midst of bearded men, vegetarians, and other eccentric persons, and the contact was very grievous to him. "As if we shall not be abused enough," he used to say, "for what we must say and do without being saddled with mischievous nonsense of this kind." To less sensitive men the effect of eccentricity upon him was almost comic, as when on one occasion he was quite upset and silenced by the appearance of a bearded member of Council at an important deputation in a straw hat and blue plush gloves. He did not recover from the depression produced by those gloves for days. Many of the workmen, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... mind, effects which we shall presently find him attributing solely to the influences of surrounding nature, may find for some a more sufficient explanation in the fact that this letter was but one of a series, and that in the rover of doubted identity and incredible eccentricity Pere ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... newspaper, which had so prodigious an effect in France, felt no particular animosity against the "Debats," for instance; his particular Catholic enthusiasm recognized itself as exceptional, and was content to accept the humble or, at any rate, inferior position, which admitted eccentricity connotes. "Later," these founders of the Free Press seemed to say, "we may convert the mass to our views, but, for the moment, we are admittedly a clique: an exceptional body with the penalties attaching to such." They said this although the whole life of France is at least as Catholic as the ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... committed to the flowing river more and more sweetly than before, though it was not really the lieutenant's fault, for Dick kept on throwing out a few clear notes—additional to his part—when some of his companion's threatened to die away, and these grace notes came in with such delicious, florid eccentricity that a hearer would have taken them for intentional variations cleverly composed by a ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
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