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More "Irritability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the judgment of the general reader is wayward, and his attitude undecided, with a leaning toward hypocrisy. The story of the domestic tribulations and the conjugal bickerings of a great writer, of the irritability that belongs to highly nervous temperaments, and which has always made genius, like the finest animals, hard to domesticate, has lost none of its savour with the public. But if all letters that record such scenes and sayings are faithfully reproduced in preparing the votive tablet upon which the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... self-revelations. So also with all the mental qualities we shall find, I believe, the same connection between the special characters of woman and those of genius. Woman's mental mobility, her tendency towards nervous outbursts, with a corresponding irritability and greater susceptibility to fatigue, except under the support of excitement, as also in the resulting qualities of her power of ready adaptation to changes of habits and response to new influences, ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... of sensitiveness] Excitability — N. excitability, impetuosity, vehemence; boisterousness &c adj.; turbulence; impatience, intolerance, nonendurance^; irritability &c (irascibility) 901; itching &c (desire) 865; wincing; disquiet, disquietude; restlessness; fidgets, fidgetiness; agitation &c (irregular motion) 315. trepidation, perturbation, ruffle, hurry, fuss, flurry; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... babies. It never occurs in babies who are fed moderately on natural, clean food, not to exceed three or four times a day. The child is cross. The mother thinks that it is cross because it is hungry and accordingly feeds. The real cause of the irritability is the overfeeding that has already taken place. The baby has had so much milk that it is unable to digest all of it. A part of the milk spoils in the digestive tract. This fermented material is partly absorbed and irritates the whole system. A part of it remains ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... periods came at irregular intervals; but, all in all, the intervals were shortening and the revels were increasing. Beatrix learned their symptoms far too quickly; she learned to know the depression and irritability which greeted her every effort to rouse and to please him. It was at such times that Lorimer made bitter revolt against what he termed her narrowness and prejudice, or burst into occasional angry petulance, if she tried to urge him ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... of an acute nervous sensibility, amounting at times to an almost neurotic irritability, such as peeps out from his confession that the shape of Earl Grey's head, when he was a Parliamentary reporter in the Gallery, "was misery to me and weighed down my youth". This peculiarity of temperament had established ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... conquer the Behemoth, Magog Mowbray himself. His own fears of being vanquished and the advice of his friends had indeed, for years, prevented him from proceeding to an open rupture with his parish, and the Squire at its head: but his irritability had been gradually increasing ever since the departure of my uncle Elford. The progress of his avarice at first was slow; but it gained strength as it proceeded, and there was now no one whose opinion had sufficient ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... strength of passion to endure indefinitely household tempests, much less to perpetuate them upon himself by lasting bonds. In all this Emma Hart showed herself fully equal to the task. Tenderly affectionate to him, except when carried away by the fits of irritability which both he and Greville had occasion to observe, she complied readily with all his wishes, and followed out with extraordinary assiduity his plans for her improvement in education and in accomplishments. ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... rattling noise, as if money was being shaken up in a box. A loud crashing bang, as if someone had banged the box down on a table. A rap, as if a knife had been dropped. Then somebody, in a petulant voice full of vexation and irritability, ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... those that loosen the links of most such marriages," and writes several pages on the trite theme that great genius is incompatible with domestic happiness. Negative instances abound to modify this sweeping generalization; but there is a kind of genius, closely associated with intense irritability, which it is difficult to subject to the most reasonable yoke; and of this sort was Byron's. His valet, Fletcher, is reported to have said that "Any woman could manage my lord, except my lady;" and Madame ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... medical terms," said the Minister for Health. "The condition begins with a period of great irritability or depression. The depression is so great that suicide is not infrequent. If that doesn't happen, there's a period of suspiciousness and secretiveness—strongly suggestive of paranoia. Then there's a craving for—unusual food. When it becomes ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... very much in looking over those days of suffering, is, that during that day a frightful irritability is the emotion that I most remember—an irritability of feeling, not of expression: for I lay quite still upon the bed all day, and only answered, briefly and simply, the questions ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... desert island, and a disposition to quarrel with fairy-tales, go to show that while she was decidedly more like herself than in the last chapter, her recovery was not yet complete. In fact Margaret Elizabeth was suffering from the irritability that so often accompanies convalescence. Cantankerousness was Uncle Bob's word for it, and he defended it with all the eloquence of which he was master, his finger on the page in the dictionary where it was to be found ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... English language. All this might be as nothing to what strove for delivery now. And this he was desperately engaged in stifling to death; and not the beauty of his mind alone but of his nature, for beyond all doubt his gentleness and sweetness and refinement were as much a part of his genius as irritability and violence were fellows to the genius of ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... from the care and apprehensions of her mother. The joint was stiff, and there was considerable deformity. The pain always increased when she was tired or unhappy. Again, a girl had some slight cystitis with frequent micturition, and this passed by slow degrees into a purely functional irritability of the bladder, which called for micturition at frequent intervals both by day and night. In such cases treatment must endeavour to control both factors—the local organic disturbance must if possible be removed, and the ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... true-hearted man all the worrying little acerbities of to-day; and he had no small merit in doing so; for in him, as in his mother, the reaction after intense excitement had produced its usual effect in increased irritability of ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... between my father and me," said this reasonable young lady, now in an ungovernable state of feminine irritability. ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... asserted roundly that the Duke had taken advantage of an ambiguity in Mr. Huskisson's letters, in order to have a pretext for inflicting this injury on the government. And, unhappily, Mr. Canning himself, carried out of parliamentary decorum by an irritability of temper, springing from the difficulties of his position and from his advancing illness, went so far as publicly to declare that the Duke of Wellington, great man as he was, had been but in instrument in the hands of others. History, he said, afforded parallel the ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... in hundreds of cases that these belt and spring trusses press against the femoral artery so severely that heart disorders result. Causing dizziness, headaches, irritability, etc. Yet the patient seldom associates his truss with these troubles, seldom ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... upon great occasions, he had little of that small irritability that goes with an egotistical mind and feminine fiber, so he merely hung his head, blamed nobody, and was sad in a manly way. While he leaned against the portico in this dejected mood, a little hand pulled his coat-tail. ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... much to counteract the destroying influences of spasmodic labor at unseasonable hours, and to ward off premature decay. But if they apply excitement of one kind to repair the ravages of excitement of another kind, they must be content to live a life of nervous irritability, and to grow ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... with the difficulties of flying,—his schemes grew more and more expansive and hazardous, and his spending wilder and laxer. I believe that a haunting sense of the intensifying unsoundness of his position accounts largely for his increasing irritability and his increasing secretiveness with my aunt and myself during these crowning years. He dreaded, I think, having to explain, he feared our jests might pierce unwittingly to the truth. Even in the privacy of his mind he would not face the truth. He was accumulating ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... full of sketches and drawing-material: these attracted visitors, and visitors were a trouble. Perhaps there was impertinence in their curiosity, very likely their presence hindered him; but, nevertheless, it was by no means like the sweet-tempered Clarian to show irritability and petulance, and finally, closing his door obstinately against all comers, to elect for solitude and silence at his work. No,—the boy was changed, grown morbid, a pervert, ripe for whatever Devil's sickle might be put forth to gather ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... for the irritability which was a symptom of his disease, an easy guest. He had a lecture at nine in the morning, so did not see Cronshaw till the night. Once or twice Philip persuaded him to share the scrappy meal he prepared for himself in the evening, but Cronshaw was too restless to stay ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... child and that they have failed, but the fault largely lies in the parents undertaking the task with every expectation of failure, and the chief characteristics noticed by the child have been the parental irritability, impatience and incompetence. Having estimated these the child then knows exactly how to gain its own ends and has sufficient determination to persevere until it does. A certain amount of harsh treatment will suffice, until the child is old enough ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... or solace. She foresaw for her child only a future of degradation. Having a strong, clear mind, without any imagination, she believed that she beheld an inevitable doom. The tart remark and the contemptuous comment on her part, elicited, on the other, all the irritability of the poetic idiosyncrasy. After frantic ebullitions, for which, when the circumstances were analysed by an ordinary mind, there seemed no sufficient cause, my grandfather always interfered to soothe with good-tempered commonplaces, and promote peace. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... indeed there is perhaps no one thing that so equally contributes to the three graces of health, beauty, and good temper; to health, in putting the body into its best state; to beauty, in clearing and tinting the skin; and to good temper, in rescuing the spirits from the irritability occasioned by those formidable personages, "the nerves," which nothing else allays in so quick and entire a manner. See a lovely passage on the subject of bathing in Sir Philip Sydney's "Arcadia," where "Philoclea, blushing, and withal smiling, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... same way, furnish the diagnosis where the mental variation is only a distant effect of a bodily ailment. The changes in the emotions, for instance, may lead to the recognition of a heart disease; lack of attention may be a hint of the overgrowth of the adenoids; irritability or apathy or delirious character of the mental behavior may indicate whether uraemic acid is in the system or an infectious disease: anaemia and undernutrition may be diagnosed and the psychology of fever demands too a much closer analysis with the means of the ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... to trouble me as to the robe?" at length she replied with an irritability of manner to which she too often yielded. "Why do I entertain two lazy hussies, but to see after my robings, and save me the trouble of thinking ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... Have to?" he repeated, with a new note of irritability sounding in his voice. "He hasn't been doing anything foolish, has he? Nothing ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... retorted Fanny with great irritability; 'yes, indeed! And then what happens? I no sooner recover, in a visiting point of view, the shock of poor dear papa's death, and my poor uncle's—though I do not disguise from myself that the last was a happy release, for, if you are not ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... of the British empire showed indications of intense irritability against the English, and, indeed, everywhere amongst Mohammedans, animosity to Europeans appeared ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... busy years at Palgrave, during which, in spite of her cheerful energy, Mrs. Barbauld had been much harassed by the nervous irritability of her invalid husband, the Barbaulds gave up their school and treated themselves to a year of Continental travel. On their return they settled at Hampstead, where Mr. Barbauld became pastor of a small Unitarian congregation. The nearness to London was a great advantage to Mrs. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... nectar may be stored in variously shaped receptacles, with the stamens and pistils modified in many ways, sometimes forming trap-like contrivances, and sometimes capable of neatly adapted movements through irritability or elasticity. From such structures we may advance till we come to such a case of extraordinary adaptation as that lately described by Dr. Cruger in the Coryanthes. This orchid has part of its labellum or lower lip hollowed ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... downstairs. There Colonel Churchill met him heartily enough, but presently business with his overseer had taken the Colonel away. Rand found himself cornered by Major Edward and drawn into a discussion of the impeachment of Judge Chase. Rand could be moved to the blackest rage, but he had no surface irritability of temper. To his antagonists his self-command was often maddening. Major Churchill was as disputatious as Arthur Lee, and an adept at a quarrel, but the talk of the impeachment went tamely on. The Republican would not fight at Fontenoy, and at last the Major in a cold rage went away to the library—first, ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... be the most beautiful pie," cried Mr. King, a hearty enthusiasm succeeding his irritability, "that ever was baked. I wish you'd make me one ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... touched by the spur; though his original good-nature from time to time shone through it all. When the line had been brought to a successful completion, a very marked change in him became visible. The irritability passed away, and when difficulties and vexations arose they were treated by him as matters of course, and ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... impartial critic must admit that it is much worse, at any rate for Emperors. Undeterred by the fate of his predecessors Wu-Tsung began to take the elixir of immortality. He suffered first from nervous irritability, then from internal pains, which were explained as due to the gradual transformation of his bones, and at the beginning of 846 he became dumb. No further explanation of his symptoms was then given him and his uncle Hsuan Tsung was raised to the throne. His first act was to revoke the anti-Buddhist ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... leber-wurst. They were putting through the job—with a fierce and terrifying gaiety; they exulted in their toughness, they called themselves "grizzlies" and "mountain cats" and what not; they sang wild songs about their irritability, their motto was "Treat 'em rough!" It was a scary atmosphere for a dreamer and utopian; Jimmie Higgins shrank into himself, afraid even to reach about for some fellow-Socialist with whom he might exchange opinions about the events ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... enormous result of her few minutes' irritability. Such outbursts were not common with her. There was a catch in her voice as ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... mind of Sobieski much of this anticipating irritability; and it was with a very haughty step that he turned back to hear what the printseller meant ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... or point the moral of the following sketch from the last number of Blackwood's Magazine. The parents of the writer were of "a serious cast," and attached to evangelical tenets, which he soon imbibed, together with an occasional tendency to gloom and nervous irritability.] ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... the list of promotive causes is considerably augmented by maltreatment and the employment of injudicious remedies. We should therefore suggest to all prudent persons the wisdom and importance of consulting competent authority only. Self-enervation in the first instance brings about that irritability which evinces itself in nocturnal discharges, afterwards in inappreciable but exhaustive diurnal discharges, and subsequently in complete debility of the whole generative system. This seminal fluid, such indeed as it is—weak, effete and devoid of all generative power—is undoubtedly ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... the highest order—with which he has discharged his portion of the duty of conducting these proceedings, unprecedented in their harassing complexity and their overwhelming magnitude. He has manifested throughout—'bating a little irritability and strictness in petty details at starting—a self-possession; a resolute determination; a capability of coping with unexpected difficulty; a familiarity with constitutional law; a mastery over the details of legal proceedings; in short, a degree of forensic ability, which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... the buffeted earth, which seemed panting for a repose it had no strength to gain. Ding dong! Ding dong! The wild and far-away light grew to flame and faded to darkness. In the darkness the bells seemed clearer, for light deafens the imagination. Uniacke felt a strange irritability coming upon him. He moved uneasily in his chair, watching the motionless, stretched figure of ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... for those who in any capacity serve you, is always an evidence of ill-breeding, as well as of inexcusable selfishness. Occasionally a so-called "lady" who has nothing whatever to do but drive uptown or down in her comfortable limousine, vents her irritability upon a saleswoman at a crowded counter in a store, because she does not leave other customers and wait immediately upon her. Then, perhaps, when the article she asked for is not to be had, she complains to the floor-walker about the saleswoman's stupidity! Or having ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... be examined by a physician; a child who is always quarreling equally needs the physician. In the first there is a lack of sufficient energy so to move as to meet and realize some of life's oppositions; in the other there is probably some underlying cause for nervous irritability. ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... this book that he said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman. But he must have approved of the picture of the Petersburg group, who under a thin veneer of polished manners are utterly inane and cynically vicious. One of them had "an expression of constant irritability on his face, as though he could not forgive himself ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... and distressing them all by his extraordinary conduct—at one time in the highest spirits, at another, in the deepest depression—accusing himself of blackest guilt and treachery, without specifying what they were; and altogether evincing an irritability of disposition ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... effects of his constitutional irritability and impatience upon his social intercourse and his domestic relations, and that his bodily infirmities did not allow him a free expression of the tenderness and love of his heart. Who does not feel the pathos and inconsolable regret which dictated ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... days I have had very little real communion with God, and have therefore been very weak spiritually, and have several times felt irritability ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... of his constant irritability, her husband had become more affectionate than customary since ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... graces, this and many another story prove that she had a rare gift of diplomacy. She had, moreover, an unfailing cheerfulness and goodness of heart which quickly endeared her to the moody and capricious Peter. In his frequent fits of nervous irritability which verged on madness, she alone had the power to soothe him and restore him to sanity. Her very voice had a magic to arrest him in his worst rages, and when the fit of madness (for such it undoubtedly was) was passing away she would ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... of impatience and irritability during Mr. Forbes's address, and he now said, with his peculiar snarl for which he was famous, "Once upon a time there was a great redistribution of land in Egypt, and the fifth part of the increase was given to Pharaoh, and the other four parts were left to be food to the ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... their return was a dark one for everybody. Max and Wally had to meet the enemy at eleven, in the lawyer's office. The air was electric with Mrs. Bryce's irritability. She left the two culprits in ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... be excluded; his irritability Is so terrible on that theme that it gives immediately to his face the expression of a man who is going to defend himself from murderers. I can give you only a few little detached traits of what passed, as ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... want of success, jealous of the success of others, his natural irritability of temper increased by habits of intemperance, he at length abandoned himself to the practice of reviewing, and became one of the Ishmaelites of the press. In this his malignant bitterness soon gave him a notoriety which his talents had never been able to attain. We shall ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... will add to the gloom of his grave and brooding nature, render his restless scheming and wandering still more capricious, and increase his suspiciousness and irritability." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... internally in an infusion (4-8 grams to 1 liter of water) as an emollient in irritability of the bladder and urethra and has been recommended for such a purpose by Mooden Sheriff. It is a diuretic which frequently acts as a purgative, a fact that is not surprising in view of the above-mentioned ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... that, being in the vicinity, I would call and see if you've recovered from your—well, your silly fit of irritability," he said, with a grim smile on his grey face as he ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... the last fragments of sleep out of his system, and became filled with a restless irritability. There was only one instrument in the house which could create this infernal din—the orchestrion in the drawing-room, immediately above which, he recalled, his ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... manifested a certain moodiness and irritability very unlike her usual facile sweetness of disposition, and Sara was somewhat nonplussed to account for it. Finally, she approached the matter by way ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... epistle, which is addressed to 'My brothers Carl and Johann Beethoven,' and which they are admonished to 'read and execute after my demise,' Beethoven pleads for consideration both on account of his irritability and his apparent lack of affection. To his misfortunes, not to his faults, must be attributed the obstinacy, the hostility, or the misanthropic attitude which he has shown towards those whom he loves, and by whom he is loved in return. 'My heart and my mind,' he says, as if in extenuation ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... where the letter is, or what has become of Masters?" continued Mulrady, with a matter-of-fact gravity, that seemed to increase Slinn's vagueness and excite his irritability. ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... cross laid upon her for her sins. Her suffering body itself was to preach Jesus crucified. It was difficult indeed to be an enigma to all persons, an object of suspicion to the greatest number, and of respect mingled with fear to some few, without yielding to sentiments of impatience, irritability, or pride. Willingly would she have lived in entire seclusion from the world, but obedience soon compelled her to allow herself to be examined and to have judgment passed upon her by a vast number of curious ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... the most satisfied, and certainly the most astonished by their greatness, wore an anxious, almost a grieved look. They alone appeared discontented with their master. Their pride knew no bounds; their irritability was extreme. Nothing seemed good enough, for them. In the way of honors privileges, and when we recall their father's modest at Ajaccio, it is hard to keep from smiling at the vanity of these new Princes of the blood. Of Napoleon's four brothers, two were absent and on ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... be available, and ere long the two were discussing an excellent dinner. Gray lost much of his irritability and began to talk coherently upon topics of general interest. Presently, following an interval during which he had been ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... I to accuse Olivia? What did these angry emotions of my soul forebode? Perhaps that my habitual irritability, were she mine, would make ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... go on to the second mistake—enforced silence. Moderate reading aloud is good: but where there is any tendency to irritability of throat or lungs, too much moderation cannot be used. You may as well try to cure a diseased lung by working it, as to cure a lame horse by galloping him. But where the breathing organs are of average health, let it be said once and for all, that ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future reality than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles." ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... very intellectual and lofty, a look of remarkable sagacity and depth of thought, and a smile of extreme goodness. His naturally harmonious voice became full of kindness when he spoke to the lunatics; thus the suavity of his tone and the benevolence of his words seemed oft to calm the natural irritability of these unfortunate people. He was among the first to substitute, in his treatment for madness, commiseration and benevolence for the terrible coercive means employed formerly; no more chains, no more blows, no more shower-baths; above all (save in some few cases), no more ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... of nature draw me vehemently to your side. I was thought in the days of my childhood much to resemble my mother; and in my natural temper, of which at the age of fifty-eight I must be supposed to be a competent judge, can trace both her, and my late uncle, your father. Somewhat of his irritability; and a little, I would hope, both of his and of her—I know not what to call it, without seeming to praise myself, which is not my intention, but speaking to you, I will even speak out, and say good nature. Add to all this, I deal much in poetry, as did our venerable ancestor, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... was grasped as if by reflex action. Some observers have stated that reflex movements of the face were quite noticeable. These movements continued sometimes for upward of an hour, occurring mostly in muscular subjects who died very suddenly, and in whom the muscular irritability or nervous stimulus or both had not become exhausted at the moment of dissolution. Richardson doubts the existence of postmortem ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... disorder, statistics showing a death rate of from thirty to fifty per cent. Even when the patient lives, bad after effects are common. Peculiar sensibility to moderate heat is a frequent complaint. Loss of memory, weakened mental capacity, headache, irritability, fits, other mental disturbances, and impairment of sight and hearing are among the more usual sequels, occurring in those who do not subsequently avoid the direct rays of the sun, as well as an elevated ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... movement he makes. There are many kinds of nods. The quick, sharp tipping of the head indicates unhesitating, clean-cut decisions. Such judgments on the spur of the moment are not always right, but they are apt to be pretty conclusive. Irregular, jerky nods are signs of irritability, of rash or very impulsive decisions, and often of unreasoning prejudice. The nod made directly forward signifies frankness, dignity, and straight thinking. The tilting of the head a little to one side suggests a habit of indirectness and ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... hired that carriage by the hour, and so am in no hurry. Your excuse for your irritability will be, I suppose, that it is constitutional, and not to be controlled. A selfish, paltry, miserable excuse! I have turned down a leaf in Dr. Johnson's works, and will read what he says in regard to ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... taken fresh forms. After the failure of his attempt to restore Bartja, (transformed as he fancied into a bow) to his original shape, his irritability increased so frightfully that a single word, or even a look, was sufficient to make him furious. Still his true friend and counsellor, Croesus, never left him, though the king had more than once given him over to the guards for execution. But the guards knew their master; they took good care not ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... out his hands, as though acknowledging a check. "Still, the voice described as metallic seems to have been Mr. Saffron's; at a certain moment at least. As a merely medical question of some interest, I wonder if such a symptom or sign of—er—irritability could be intermittent, coming and going with the—er—fits! Irechester didn't say anything on that point. ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... very fond of the doctor, but who had an exceedingly irascible temper. He was the victim of some obscure malady which medicine apparently failed at times to relieve. This seemed to increase his irritability a great deal, so much so that the doctor had at last discovered that if he could get Mr. Pegram angry enough the malady would occasionally disappear. This seemed at times as good a remedy as any, and in consequence he was ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... way Noble was being improved by the experience. His two previous attacks of love (one at twelve, and the other at eighteen) had been incomparably lighter, and the changes in him, noted at home, merely a slight general irritability and a lack of domestic punctuality due to too much punctuality elsewhere. But, when his Julia Atwater trouble came, the very first symptom he manifested was a strange new effort to become beautiful; his mother even discovered that he sometimes worked with pumice stone upon ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... penetrating rostellum. I can, if you like, lend you these Reviews; but they must be returned. R. Brown, I remember, says pollen-tubes separate from grains before the lower ends of tubes reach ovules. I saw, and was interested by, abstract of your Drosera paper (637/2. A short note on the irritability of Drosera in the "Trans. Bot. Soc. Edin." Volume VII.); we have been at ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... found it unbearable. He wasn't used to keeping the curb on himself like this, and he hadn't the least intention of learning how to do it. A fierce, physical irritability overcame him, and he stopped short in the hall, just because he could not stand the silly chatter that was always flowing from these silly people about their foolish affairs. If they only knew what ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... every changing emotion shone through it as through a window into his soul, told of secret harassment. So also did his tense nerves, which seemed wrought up almost to the snapping point. They vented themselves in frequent bursts of irritability and snarling anger. His secretary noticed that he started at every sudden sound, and sometimes also when she had heard nothing, and that then he would look round him in an alarmed, furtive way, as if he expected to see some menace take form out of the air. To her relief he did not return to the ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... worn-out frame of the child. His father, for a little while, spoke hopefully of a change of air, and the sea-side; but he could not long so cheat himself with false hopes. The restlessness and irritability, which they had said to one another were hopeful signs, passed away. His smiles were more languid and constrained, and he soon failed to recognise the anxious, loving friends who ministered to ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... other incentives to irritability was that the voters for Mr. Dease had to be escorted by ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... his memoranda, where Lord Byron accuses himself of irritability of temperament in his early youth, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... animals and mankind develop and mature more rapidly, and diseases run their courses more swiftly; while on the other hand these conditions are more favorable to the simpler forms of life, for the reason that in them the orgasm and irritability are entirely dependent on external influences, and all plants are in the same case, because heat, moisture, and light complete the conditions ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... to make of Margaret, and I wish you would come down and see her. The good-humour which I have noticed in her of late has given way to a curious irritability. She is so restless that she cannot keep still for a moment. Even when she is sitting down her body moves in a manner that is almost convulsive. I am beginning to think that the strain from which she suffered is bringing on some nervous disease, ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... dead food particle has been transformed into living protoplasm, the continually repeated miracle of life. But it does not remain long in this condition. In contact with the oxygen from the air it is soon oxidized, burned up to furnish the energy necessary for the motion and irritability of the body. We are all of us low-temperature engines. The digestive function exists in all animals merely to bring the food into a soluble, diffusible form, so that it can pass to all parts of the body and be used for fuel or growth. In our body a circulatory system is necessary ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... state of the coalition of which William was the head. There were moments when he felt himself overwhelmed, when his spirits sank, when his patience was wearied out, and when his constitutional irritability broke forth. "I cannot," he wrote, "offer a suggestion without being met by a demand for a subsidy." [292] "I have refused point blank," he wrote on another occasion, when he had been importuned for ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... clearer, the spirits much better, the temper more even, and "less irritability pervades the system." The mind can continue a laborious investigation longer than when she subsisted on a ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... who has so clearly distinguished between instinct and intelligence in animals, 'instinct is a natural and inherent faculty, like feeling, irritability, or intelligence. The wolf and the fox who recognize the traps in which they have been caught, and who avoid them; the dog and the horse, who understand the meaning of several of our words, and who obey us,—thereby show intelligence. The dog who hides the remains of his ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... brown study, and began wondering at Mr Preddle's curious ways, and thinking what a pity it was that a gentleman like Mr Denning, who was on a voyage for the sake of his health, should take such a dislike to Mr Frewen and Mr Preddle too. It hardly seemed to be like irritability, for after all he was as merry and friendly with the officers as he was with me. I never went near him without his beckoning to me to come to his side, and both he and his sister were quite affectionate to me, ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... exquisite symmetry and beauty.[1]" The simplest amoeba however, has no definite form; but the little mass moves about, expands and contracts, throws out projections on one side and draws them in on the other. It exhibits irritability when touched. It may be seen surrounding a tiny particle of food, extracting nutriment from it and growing in size. Ultimately the little body separates or splits up into two, each part ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... Bessie having cooked some eggs, which Bessie ate alone, since Thaddeus and Liscomb were compelled to take the eight-o'clock train to town, hungry and forlorn. Liscomb was very good-natured about it to Thaddeus, but his book-keeper had a woful tale to tell of his employer's irritability when he returned home that night. As for Thaddeus, he spoke his mind very plainly—to Liscomb. Bessie never knew what he said, nor did any of the servants; but he said it to Liscomb, and, as Liscomb remarked later, he seemed ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... you take notice of your irritability as you did not use to do, and because you have constantly before your eyes that great pattern ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... tenderness over his partner in the scene and murmuring some notably good things to her bowed head. How could any man murmur in a pandemonium like this. From tenderness Bruce Carmyle descended with a sharp swoop to irritability. ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... tenderness and pride; width of mind and feebleness of will; the two men of St. Paul; a seething chaos of contrasts, antinomies, and contradictions; humility and pride; childish simplicity and boundless mistrust; analysis and intuition; patience and irritability; kindness and dryness of heart; carelessness and anxiety; enthusiasm and languor; indifference and passion; altogether a being incomprehensible and intolerable ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a curious, nervous irritability was taking possession of him. He knew by this time that many arrests had been made in both Leghorn and Pisa; and, though still ignorant of the extent of the calamity, he had already heard enough to put him into a fever of anxiety for the ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... trust, be colder than this place, where I have tarried in the expectation of obtaining rest. Sligo has very kindly proposed a union of our forces for the occasion, which will be perhaps as uncomfortable to him as to myself, judging from previous experience, which, however, may be explained by my own irritability and hurry. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... friends, generous even to extravagance towards any one who had ever been connected with his fortunes or his travels; playful, light-hearted, witty, and humorous, but not without those occasional fits of black depression and nervous irritability to which such temperaments ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... the sway of any passion more difficult of gratification, for they have no means of communicating with the busy world except through European travellers; and these, in consequence I suppose of that restlessness and irritability that generally haunt their wanderings, seem to have always avoided the bore of giving any information to their hosts. As for me, I am more patient and good-natured, and when I found that the kind monks who gathered round me at ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... as were the expectations he had built on his justice and magnanimity, the chance of this unfortunate prince's reinstatement in his kingdom was as distant as ever. The inactivity and contradictory policies of the English court had abated the zeal of Gustavus Adolphus, and an irritability which he could not always repress made him on this occasion forget the glorious vocation of protector of the oppressed, in which, on his invasion of Germany, he had ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... religious instruction, but Dr Howe was intent upon not inculcating dogma before she had grasped the essential moral truths of Christianity and the story of the Bible. She grew up a gay, cheerful girl, loving, optimistic, but with a nervous system inclining to irritability, and requiring careful education in self-control. In 1860 her eldest sister Mary's death helped to bring on a religious crisis, and through the influence of some of her family she was received into the Baptist church; she became for some years after this more self-conscious and rather ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... physical zeal ran an exaggerated nervous irritability very hard to bear. Beneath the lash of her aunt's cruel tongue Lucy often writhed, quivered, and sometimes wept; but she struggled to keep her hold on her patience. Ellen was old, she told herself, and the self-centered life she had ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... anger, shame, pride and fear—fear for the future, fear of her father, for she had never before seen him look as he had since he had met her on the piazza the evening before. He had manifested none of his usual traits of irritability alternating with a coldness corresponding to her own. He seemed to have passed beyond these surface indications of trouble to the condition of one who sees evils that he cannot avert and who rallies sufficient manhood to meet them with a dignity ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... may invade our little movement . . . our main business is to talk." One sees the point, of course; yet I cannot help feeling that it would have been better if the majority of Leaguers had done some bit of constructive work towards a Distributist world and sweated out of their system the irritability that found vent in some of their quarrels. After all the fight for freedom as far as it concerned attacking government was carried on week by week by the small group running the paper. "The main body of Distributists would ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... suddenly recalled her state of dependence, and she rose and dressed in a mood of irritability that she was usually too prudent to indulge. She knew that such emotions leave lines on the face as well as in the character, and she had meant to take warning by the little creases which her midnight ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... nail, you see that which is irregular in your life, and you avoid it. Then the pain stops, without any necessity of stifling it. Our pain arose from the irregularity of our life, and also my jealousy, my irritability, and the necessity of keeping myself in a state of perpetual semi-intoxication by hunting, card-playing, and, above all, the use of wine and tobacco. It was because of this irregularity that my wife so passionately ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... alone, with no one to help me, no money to buy books or to pay the expenses of my medical training; I had not a friend; my irascible, touchy, restless temper was against me. No one understood that this irritability was the distress and toil of a man who, at the bottom of the social scale, is struggling to reach the surface. Still, I had, as I may say to you, before whom I need wear no draperies, I had that ground-bed of good feeling and keen sensitiveness which must always ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... Dick Varley never once betrayed the slightest feeling of irritability or impatience. He did not expect success at first; he was not, therefore, ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... good husbands are wont to unload their irritability on their wives, so Jean was inclined to favor Mlle. Fouchette. And as doting wives who voluntarily constitute themselves drudges soon become fixed in that lowly position, so Mlle. Fouchette naturally became the servant of the somewhat ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... days the cretin will get warmer, and require much less wrapping and bed-clothing. With the improvement in circulation, the color becomes better and the extremities lose their coldness. In a week or so, irritability and resentment at disturbance appear. He will begin to recognize and know his parents, smile and play. There is a gradual return to the normal of the facial appearance, and a resumption of growth. All kinds of marvelous growth effects ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... people to quarrel with you. The irritability which crowded conditions aggravate makes it necessary to adhere, from principle, to the rule ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... that Court all the qualities in him which needed control received daily stimulus, and his ardour and high-aiming temper turned into impatience and restless irritability. He had a mistress who was at one time in the humour to be treated as a tender woman, at another as an outrageous flirt, at another as the haughtiest and most imperious of queens; her mood varied, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... much contempt that the man turned away shamefaced. Still, the justice of his capture appealed to the German, trained in the soldier's school, for it was true that he had transgressed the law, and knowingly. That he should have yielded to the weakness aroused his irritability. ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... excoriation. Diarrhoea is a simple flux of the bowels, without either the sanguinolent discharges or the intestinal excoriation. Lientery is a flux of the bowels with the discharge of undigested food, occasioned by irritability (levitas) of the stomach or intestines. Colical passion and iliac passion derive their names from the supposed origin of the pain in the colon or ileum, a remark which furnishes occasion for the statement ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... Wandering in method. Indifference to need for help. Too close holding to the text. Distant attitude—aloofness. Partiality. Excitability. Irritability. Pessimism—"in the dumps." Indifferent assignments. Hazy explanations. Failure to cover assignments. Distracting facial expressions. Attitude of "lording it over." Sarcasm. Poor taste in dress. Bluffing—"the tables turned." Discipline for ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... contracted a bleak hue from the general bleakness around. The water of the pits obtained in the neighbourhood had an execrable flavor, and two donkeys sickened and died in less than an hour from its effects. Man suffered nausea and a general irritability of the system, and accordingly revenged himself by cursing the country and its imbecile ruler most heartily. The climax came, however, when Bombay reported, after an attempt to settle the Muhongo, that the chief's head had grown ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... became bent with extreme slowness. It is much more difficult to understand how gently moving a particle from one part of a valve to another causes it suddenly to open. To ascertain whether the valves were endowed with irritability, the surfaces of several were scratched with a needle or brushed with a fine camel-hair brush, so as to imitate the crawling movement of small crustaceans, but the valve did not open. Some bladders, before being brushed, were left for a time in water at temperatures between 80o and 130o ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... first petty tradesmen who encountered an incidental grievance or by such summary remedies as were to be suggested off-hand by anonymous correspondents. The levity, the ignorance, the hasty and superficial irritability of these reformers, their enormous conceit and imperturbable self-complacency revolted him. English life he declared in the 'Edinburgh Review' is 'too active, English spheres of action too wide, English freedom too deeply rooted, to be endangered by a set ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... poor Hepzibah, in a moral sense, with a kind of pale, dim rainbow. Towards Phoebe, as we have said, she was affectionate,—far tenderer than ever before, in their brief acquaintance, except for that one kiss on the preceding night,—yet with a continually recurring pettishness and irritability. She would speak sharply to her; then, throwing aside all the starched reserve of her ordinary manner, ask pardon, and the next instant renew the ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Mowbray himself. His own fears of being vanquished and the advice of his friends had indeed, for years, prevented him from proceeding to an open rupture with his parish, and the Squire at its head: but his irritability had been gradually increasing ever since the departure of my uncle Elford. The progress of his avarice at first was slow; but it gained strength as it proceeded, and there was now no one whose opinion had sufficient ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... symptoms may of course, in the same way, furnish the diagnosis where the mental variation is only a distant effect of a bodily ailment. The changes in the emotions, for instance, may lead to the recognition of a heart disease; lack of attention may be a hint of the overgrowth of the adenoids; irritability or apathy or delirious character of the mental behavior may indicate whether uraemic acid is in the system or an infectious disease: anaemia and undernutrition may be diagnosed and the psychology of fever demands too a much ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... was exalted when he was exhorted to pronounce more distinctly,—all added fresh subject for mirth to the torn cloak and shattered shoe, which have afforded legitimate subjects of raillery against the poor scholar from Juvenal's time downward. It was never known that Sampson either exhibited irritability at this ill usage, or made the least attempt to retort upon his tormentors. He slunk from college by the most secret paths he could discover, and plunged himself into his miserable lodging, where, for eighteenpence a week, he ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Lady Harman as a good wife and he disliked the spectacle extremely. The conversation hovered chiefly about Marienbad, drifted away and came back again. Mrs. Harman made several confidences that provoked the betrayal of a strain of irritability in Sir Isaac's condition. "We're all looking forward to this Marienbad expedition," she said. "I do hope it will turn out well. Neither of them have ever been abroad before—and there's the difficulty of ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... and Mohl, who have discussed the spiral twining of plants, maintain that such plants have a natural tendency to grow spirally. Mohl believes (p. 112) that twining stems have a dull kind of irritability, so that they bend towards any object which they touch; but this is denied by Palm. Even before reading Mohl's interesting treatise, this view seemed to me so probable that I tested it in every way that I could, but always with a negative result. I rubbed many shoots much ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... had made a characteristic fight against the combined forces of the doctor and her husband. She had declared she would give up this and that, if only she could be left at home. She showed to the doctor an irritability quite new to his experience of her and which he accepted as added evidence of need of change. Her bodily condition and her want of common sense in a matter so clear to him troubled the Squire and ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... When, therefore, his wife entered, he greeted her with his heaviest frown, and a certain twitching of his hands as he fumbled among his papers, which showed that the man who at times seemed composed of equal parts of iron and lead had at last reached a condition of nervous irritability which might result in an explosion of wrath; and yet he made a desperate effort at self-control, for he saw that his wife was in one of those moods which he had learned to regard with ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... me to a true sense of the situation. If, Monsieur, you happen to have gone through a similar day of violent effusion and general expansion, you will agree with me that during no other moment of your life were you more inclined to irritability. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... only affect his fortune or his temper—the former, such as it is, has been long fixed beyond shot of these sort of fowlers; and for my temper, I considered always, that by subjecting myself to the irritability which much greater authors have felt on occasions of literary dispute, I should be laying in a plentiful stock of unhappiness for the rest of my life. I therefore make it a rule never to read the attacks made upon me. I remember being capable of something like this sort of self-denial at a ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... as before, and drew lines on the carpet with the ivory end of her parasol. Miss Tox, who had experience of her fair friend, and knew that under the pressure of any slight fatigue or vexation she was prone to a discursive kind of irritability, availed herself of the pause, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the Pioneer to return. Ammunition needed. The arrangement of the men for scouting and picketing. Leaving security harbor. A plant which devours insects. Venus's fly-trap. How plants absorb food. Irritability. How the leaf digests the fly. Food absorbed by leaves as well as by roots. A cache of human skulls. Head hunters. The vele. A hoodoo. The rattle. The vele and the bamboo box. How it is worked to produce the charm. Evidences ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... notice of your irritability as you did not use to do, and because you have constantly before your eyes that great pattern in whom was ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... not-living; for no movement can be detected in quiescent seeds, which may lie dormant for thousands of years; and on the other hand inorganic foams when brought into contact with liquids of different composition display movements that very closely simulate those of the living matter. Lastly, irritability, though so notably characteristic of living matter, is scarcely peculiar to it, for many inorganic substances seem almost as definitely responsive to external stimulation. But in the matter of their origin there is a real and a most fundamental difference. All living substance arises only ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... in the delivery of this sentence, a satirical acrimony, which his irritability as an author could ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... remembered that singular sensation in the roots of the hair, when he came on the traces of the girl's presence, reminding him of a line in a certain poem which he had read lately with a new and peculiar interest. He even recalled a curious evidence of exalted sensibility and irritability, in the twitching of the minute muscles of the internal ear at every unexpected sound, producing an odd little snap in the middle of the head, which proved to him that he ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... expectoration. His countenance was florid; his pulse very irregular, though not quite intermittent. The occasional variations in the state of the disease were remarkable. Some periods were marked with uncommon mental irritability. Pain in the region of the liver, oedema of the inferior extremities, paucity and turbidness of the urine, yellowness of the skin, and great emaciation attended the latter stages of the disease. A degree of stupor occurred. ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... Europe, I have been long quite familiar, and I know several others who are equally so, with cholera, in which a perfect similarity to the symptoms of the Indian or Russian cholera has existed: the collapse—the deadly coldness with a clammy skin—the irritability of the stomach, and prodigious discharge from the bowels of an opaque serous fluid (untinged with bile in the slightest degree)—with a corresponding shrinking of flesh and integuments—the pulseless and livid extremities—the ghastly aspect of countenance and sinking of the eyes—the ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... seized it, and turned over the pages with a trembling hand. Dora flushed, and the tears rose into her eyes. She realised perfectly that this performance was levelled at her at least as much as at David. Daddy's mad irritability had grown ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nervous irritability that frequently occurs, especially in females, Aconite is the best remedy. It should be given, one drop of the tincture to a gill of water, in teaspoonful doses, once in one or two hours, and the ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... family, in these ambiguous circumstances, is everything that could be desired. My original feeling of irritability has passed away. I should have supposed it to be what Pallas calls "fatigue," a confusion or discord of the nerve-centres, which she tells me is incident to mortality. What Pallas can possibly know about it is more than I can guess, especially, as there were not ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... distinguished. His hair is grayer than his years may account for and his manner betrays a nervous system overtaxed and barely under control. At the moment that he enters he is evidently laboring under some especial, and only half-concealed, nervous strain. In spite of his irritability at times with his wife, there is an undercurrent of tenderness which reveals his real ...
— The Climbers - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... Despite his natural irritability, to which no one appeared to pay much attention, Mr. Loring grew almost cordial under the geniality and hopefulness emanating from Judge Clarkson, whom he was really very glad to see, and of whom he had numberless queries to ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... personal hostility to Lord Durham, to whose instrumentality he attributed his being overlooked by Lord Melbourne in his cabinet arrangements. Lord Lyndhurst did the excellent qualities of Lord Durham justice, and displayed a calmness in debate which contrasted strikingly with the irritability and personalities of Lord Brougham. The debate brought forcibly to light the disposition of Lord Durham to carry matters with a high hand in his new government, and his deficiency in that wariness and prudence so essential to a chief governor. After a few remarks from Lord Brougham, the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... ugly to-night, seems to me; better keep yer eyes peeled!" said Andy Hansen, the assistant trainer, the big, yellow-haired Swede who knew not fear. Neither did he know impatience or irritability; and so all the animals, as a rule, were on their good behavior under his calm, masterful, blue eye. Yet he was tactful with the beasts, and given to humoring their moods as far as convenient without ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... chance of this unfortunate prince's reinstatement in his kingdom was as distant as ever. The inactivity and contradictory politics of the English court had abated the zeal of Gustavus Adolphus, and an irritability which he could not always repress, made him on this occasion forget the glorious vocation of protector of the oppressed, in which, on his invasion of Germany, he had so loudly ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... and mask this piece of startled irritability with a vague platitude did not deceive his audience in the smallest degree. Doubt became conviction in Mrs. Barraclough's mind. She did not know in what way this man was connected with her son's ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... reading the Bible through by course—five or ten chapters every day in the Old Testament, and two or so in the New, besides on my knees, I read all the Psalms through every month. But what does this amount to? Nothing, so long as I am not saved from pride, irritability, selfishness, etc., within; the workings of which, more or less, I daily feel. This greatly troubles and distresses me; besides the remembrance of my sins of unfaithfulness, wanderings, backslidings, is grievous ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... the Pyrenees in a more gloomy and ill-natured frame of mind than ever; a sickly distrust, a repulsive irritability, had taken possession of his whole being, and his young wife no longer had the good-will to bear with his caprices, and excuse his irritable disposition. They were totally different in their views, ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... a shock from thirty square inches of glass. Van Marum found that eels are irrecoverably deprived of life when a shock is sent through their whole body; but when only a part of the body is included in the circuit, the destruction of irritability is confined to that individual part, while the rest retains the power of motion. Different persons are affected in very different degrees by electricity, according to their peculiar constitutional susceptibility. Dr. Young remarks, that a very minute tremor, communicated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... destined for acclimatation, you will cease to suffer from these special conditions; but ere this can be, a long period of nervous irritability must be endured; and fevers must thin the blood, soften the muscles, transform the Northern tint of health to a dead brown. You will have to learn that intellectual pursuits can be persisted in only at risk of life;— that in this part of the world there is nothing to do but to plant cane and cocoa, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... herself. Percy's complacency over small achievements was proverbial. But she had higher ambitions, and the cloud of depression soon settled down again. Her temper, not always her strong point, displayed a degree of irritability that drove her family ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... their arms small statues and pictures in mosaic. Of their number, some were painters and poets, some orators and philosophers, and some statuaries and musicians. Among such a motley assemblage of professions, remarkable in all ages of the world for fostering in their votaries the vice of irritability, it may seem strange that so quiet and orderly a behaviour should exist as that just described. But it is to be observed that in attending at the palace, these men of genius made sure at least of outward unanimity among their ranks, by coming equally prepared with ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... never occurs in babies who are fed moderately on natural, clean food, not to exceed three or four times a day. The child is cross. The mother thinks that it is cross because it is hungry and accordingly feeds. The real cause of the irritability is the overfeeding that has already taken place. The baby has had so much milk that it is unable to digest all of it. A part of the milk spoils in the digestive tract. This fermented material is partly ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... amongst us, and we immediately saw that he was not happy. His pallid countenance, drawn features contracted by a perpetual irritability, the violent manners degenerated into a nervous rage, the hollow sound of his once fine ringing laugh, all showed that he was an altered man. Too proud to admit that he had made a mistake, he would, not complain, but the old friends who gathered round him were soon convinced ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... blinked the last fragments of sleep out of his system, and became filled with a restless irritability. There was only one instrument in the house which could create this infernal din—the orchestrion in the drawing-room, immediately above which, he recalled, ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the uninstructed mind of Thomas that when three men want to get to the bottom of a mountain, their business is to walk down it; and he put this view of the case, not only with emphasis, but even with some irritability. He was answered from the scientific eminence of the compass on which his companions were mounted, that there was a frightful chasm somewhere near the foot of Carrock, called The Black Arches, into which ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... the first class, a point of elevation which "flattered his pride not a little." At this time he appeared in the eye of the world most amiable and commendable, outwardly moral, unwearied in application, and exhibited marks of no ordinary talent. One exception to this statement is to be found in an irritability of temper arising perhaps from the treatment he had received at school. On one occasion in sudden anger, he threw a knife at the head of another boy, which providentially missed him and was left trembling in the wall; ...
— Life of Henry Martyn, Missionary to India and Persia, 1781 to 1812 • Sarah J. Rhea
... the coming week no doubt; but Sally and Mrs. Peel engaged her attention, and she postponed the reading until after they were gone. She observed, however, in Gerald's demeanour during the meal, a curious irritability and preoccupation. He ate next to nothing, drank his cup of coffee with an air of unconsciousness, and got up and strolled away at the first opportunity, not reappearing until Mrs. Peel and Sally were making their ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... familiar, coming to me always on wet nights to share my blanket. It is a most restless creature, but is not playful like most of the American monkeys; the restlessness of its disposition seeming to arise from great nervous irritability and discontent. The anxious, painful, and changeable expression of its countenance, and the want of purpose in its movements, betray this. Its actions are like those of a wayward child; it does ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... bordering on fastidiousness—a trifle of hauteur, not in manners, but disposition—and, perhaps, a tincture of affectation. These foibles are, however, in a great degree, constitutional: she is more an invalid than myself; and ill health naturally increases irritability, and renders the mind less disposed to bear with inconveniencies; we avoid company at first, through a sense of our infirmities, till this timidity becomes habitual, and settles almost into aversion.—The valetudinarian, who is obliged to ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... to officers, in lieu of the half-pay for life which was first voted. The army, in consequence, became very unpopular. A great clamor was raised against the Cincinnati Society, and factious patriots pretended to see in it the foundation of an hereditary aristocracy. The public irritability, excited by pretexts like these, broke out into violence. In Connecticut, mobs collected to prevent the army officers from receiving the certificates for the five years' pay, and a convention was assembled to elect men pledged to non-payment. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... that morning, and something of his own irritability seemed to have passed into her; so that he turned to ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... electricity I never tried. It has no odour, and my dog, who had a fine sense of smell, paid no heed when it was laid under his nose.* [As far as my observations go, this phenomenon of light is confined to the lower orders of vegetable life, to the fungi alone, and is not dependent on irritability. I have never seen luminous flowers or roots, nor do I know of any authenticated instance of such, which may not be explained by the presence of mycelium or of animal life. In the animal kingdom, luminosity is confined, I believe, to the Invertebrata, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... possessor the more unfavourable, generally, has been the effect of genius on his life. That this has not been the case with Clare may, perhaps, be imputed to the absolute depression of his fortune. When we hear the consciousness of possessing talent, and the natural irritability of the poetic temperament, pleaded in extenuation of the follies and vices of men in high life, let it be accounted no mean praise to such a man as Clare that with all the excitements of their sensibility to his station he has preserved a fair character amid dangers ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... there are few things in the world that can compete with the final rehearsals of an amateur theatrical performance at a country house. Every day the atmosphere becomes more and more heavily charged with restlessness and irritability. The producer of the piece, especially if he is also the author of it, develops a sort of intermittent insanity. He plucks at his mustache, if he has one; at his hair, if he has not. He mutters to himself. He gives vent to occasional ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... with his increased height he seemed leaner than ever. Also, he was more nervous. With the nervousness increased his peevishness and irritability. The children had learned by many bitter lessons to fight shy of him. His mother respected him for his earning power, but somehow her respect ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... contain as many instances as the life and the works of any member of Johnson's club. The fact is, that Walpole had the faults of Grub Street, with a large addition from St. James's Street, the vanity, the jealousy, and the irritability of a man of letters, the affected superciliousness and apathy of a man ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... her 'two men and a dog'; that will take her mind off your father." It must be confessed that Dr. Lavendar was out of temper—a sad fault in one of his age, as Mrs. Drayton often said; but his irritability was so marked that Cyrus finally slunk off, uncomforted, and afraid to meet Gussie's eye, even under its bandage of a ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland
... never produced without it. But oxidation is always going on in the body by means of respiration and the circulation of the blood. We shall afterwards find reason to believe, that the oxygen, received from the atmosphere by the lungs, is the cause of animal heat, and probably of animal irritability; and it is perhaps not unreasonable to suppose, that the nervous influence or electricity may be separated by the brain, and sent along the nerves, which seem the most powerful conductors of it, to ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... be very different from what it is. There is no doubt that the regrettable parts of the careers of both Byron and Shelley are due to lack of discipline and loving-kindness in their early years. Byron's irritability and bad temper were aggravated by a physical defect, which hindered him from excelling in athletic sports of which he was fond, and embittered all his life. Either at birth or by an accident one of his feet was malformed or twisted so as to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... that he had been unjust, in giving so scornful a hearing to any one who had waited, with humble patience, for five hours, to speak to him. That the man had spoken saucily to him when he had the opportunity, was nothing to Mr. Thornton. He rather liked him for it; and he was conscious of his own irritability of temper at the time, which probably made them both quits. It was the five hours of waiting that struck Mr. Thornton. He had not five hours to spare himself; but one hour—two hours, of his hard penetrating intellectual, as well as bodily labour, did he give ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... mysterious union and secret influence of the faculties of the soul over those of the body, are visible, yet still incomprehensible; they frequently produce a perturbation in the faculties, a state of acute irritability, and many sorrows and infirmities, which are not likely to create much sympathy from those around the author, who, at a glance, could have discovered where the pugilist or the racer became meagre or monstrous: the intellectual malady eludes even the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... operation Dick Varley never once betrayed the slightest feeling of irritability or impatience. He did not expect success at first; he was not, therefore, disappointed ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... upon the house matches. It seemed probable that with four members of the School Eleven in the team, the ancient house must prove invincible. But to John's surprise, as this delightful probability ripened into conviction, Warde betrayed unwonted anxiety and even irritability. Miss Iris confided to Desmond, who paid her much court, that she couldn't imagine what was the matter with papa. And mamma, it transpired (from the same source), really feared that the strain at Lord's had been too much, that her indefatigable husband was about to break down. Finally, John ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... well formed, well led, went through without trouble—indeed, with real pleasure. Nevertheless the overwhelming testimony is on the other side. Probably this was due in large part to the irritability that always seizes the mind of the tenderfoot when he is confronted by wilderness conditions. A man who is a perfectly normal and agreeable citizen in his own environment becomes a suspicious half-lunatic when placed in circumstances uncomfortable and unaccustomed. It often happened that ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... him, except for the irritability which was a symptom of his disease, an easy guest. He had a lecture at nine in the morning, so did not see Cronshaw till the night. Once or twice Philip persuaded him to share the scrappy meal he prepared for himself in the evening, but Cronshaw was too restless to stay in, and preferred ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... scream is given with almost every repetition, it will scream in the same way when even a weak stimulus is applied. If, for instance, after a two-volt stimulus has been given a few times, the animal be merely touched with a stick, it will scream. It thus appears as if the strong stimulus increases the irritability of the center for the scream-reflex to such an extent that even weak stimuli are sufficient to cause the reaction. Are we to say that the weak stimulus is painful because of the increased irritability, or may it be concluded that the reflex is in this case, like winking or leg-jerk or ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... terrible potentialities and he could not shake off the conviction that they were destined to prove his undoing. This feeling he had allowed to grow until now a fatalistic apathy had settled upon him and his usual cheerfulness was replaced by a senseless irritability. He suffered explosions of temper quite as surprising to the Kirbys, father and daughter, as to himself. On the day of his arrival he was particularly ugly, wherefore Rouletta was impelled to remonstrate ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... days affected Dicky adversely. He seemed a bit distrait, displayed a trifle of his earlier irritability, and complained a great deal about ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... a vaulting pole. He walked less than he leaped. This was no work for the half light of an obscured moon. Sometimes he halted for light; but delay annoyed him. A pause of ten minutes—he squatted for rest meantime—threw him into a state of incautious irritability. At this rate it would be past dawn before he made the cottages of Ragged ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... too strong to lie helpless under disappointed longings. Two days she sat stupefied with the heartache; after that she bustled about her work in a fervour of half-crazy restlessness, and ungovernable irritability, quenched at times by fits of weeping. As she wept apart, but raged and tyrannised in public, she soon made Silverton House Silverton Oven, especially to those who had the luck to be of her sex. Then Baker timidly remonstrated; at the first word she snapped him up and said a change would be ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... in domestic life, gentle, generous, serene, and playful, grew absolutely ferocious about politics, as his articles in the "Quarterly Review" showed all the world. Wordsworth, who had some of the irritability and pettishness, mildly described by himself as "gentle stirrings of the mind," which occasionally render great men ludicrously like children, and who was, moreover, highly conservative after his early democratic fever had passed off, grew more and more liberal with advancing years. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... and Chateaubriand became more absorbing and complete, and was destined to endure with their lives. "It was," Madame Lenormant says, "the one aim of her life to appease the irritability, soothe the susceptibilities, and remove the annoyances of this noble, generous, but selfish nature, spoiled by too much adulation." Her steady moderation, moral wisdom, beautiful repose, and sweet oblivion of self, were an admirable antidote to his extreme moods, uneasy ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... later I must know it, and I am not so new, nor so raw, nor so inexperienced, as not to be able to bear, not the mere paltry, petty disappointments of authorship, but things more serious,—at least I hope so, and that what you may think irritability is merely mechanical, and only acts like galvanism on a dead body, or the muscular motion which ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... marvelous sermon could be preached, which, if understood, would sink deeply into every heart, inspiring some while alarming others, but greatly cheering the brave. And it is this. There are millions of people who suffer from irritability, want of self-control, loquacity, evil in many forms, or nerves, who would fain control themselves and stop it all. Moralists think that for this it is enough to convince their reason. But this rarely avails. A man may know that he is wrong, ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... degrees getting wonted to her fiery charger and letting him display his fine paces and increase his speed, Eleanor found the sensation very inspiriting. Even Black Maggie was not an animal like this; every motion was instinct with life and power, and not a little indication of headstrongness and irritability gave a great additional interest and excitement to the pleasure of managing him. Mr. Carlisle watched her carefully, Eleanor knew; he praised her handling. He himself was mounted on a quiet, powerful creature that did ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... for the person at the other end of the wire, the Doctor himself answered the ring. It had been a hard day, following other hard days, and he was feeling intense fatigue, devastating depression, and that unreasoning irritability which is born of physical weariness and ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... little worn-out frame of the child. His father, for a little while, spoke hopefully of a change of air, and the sea-side; but he could not long so cheat himself with false hopes. The restlessness and irritability, which they had said to one another were hopeful signs, passed away. His smiles were more languid and constrained, and he soon failed to recognise the anxious, loving friends ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... and we now see that they were the outbreak of inherited passions long repressed by fixed custom, but starting into life as soon as that repression was catastrophically removed and when sudden choice was given. The irritability of mankind, too, is only part of their imperfect, transitory civilisation and of their original savage nature. They could not look steadily to a given end for an hour in their pre-historic state; and ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... workman, but his nervous irritability, his self assertion, and impatience of orders had lost him so many places that he had finally determined to become his own master, and, coming into a few pounds at the death of his father, had wandered away from the great towns, until ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... with the rapid development of the nervous system is the fact of the increasing irritability of temper. This will show itself every day in a hundred ways. Of course, it is unreasonable, and, of course, the boy or girl is not to be allowed to become rude and impatient and domineering. But with this increasing irritability comes increasing sensitiveness, and it is very ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... till he was at the summit of poetical reputation—till he was at ease in his fortune, and without a rival in his fame, and found no diminution of his respect or tenderness. Whatever was his pride, to them he was obedient; and whatever was his irritability, to them he was gentle. Life has, amongst its soothing and quiet comforts, few things better to give than such ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... these, Ronsard was easily the master. He had that power which our anaemic age can hardly comprehend, of writing, writing, writing, without fear of exhaustion, without irritability or self-criticism, without danger of comparing the better with the worse. Five great volumes of small print, all good—men of that facility never write the really paltry things—all good, and most ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... he was right, and could not but feel ashamed of my irritability, for both he and Tepi had been watching the boat most carefully, and I there and then decided what to do, my ill-temper vanishing when I saw Mrs. Krause and Niabon bailing out the water which had come over the hatch ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... of pleasure, quick excitability, and consequent irritability, are the marked ingredients in every strong character; its strength must be employed against itself to ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... confide into the willing ears of the sympathetic woman the details of her gradual awakening from Dalton's spell as his irritability, cowardice, and selfishness became more and more apparent. Nor yet of her growing anxiety as their resources declined; an anxiety which had so weighed upon her mind that she could neither sleep nor rest, despite his continued promises of daily remittances that never ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... biscuits were cold (which was not Jim's fault), and because the coffee was hot (which was according to his orders). Trivial annoyances, most of them of his own making or imagining, multiplied on all sides, fomenting his irritability until, by the time he strode out of the cottage, his temper was at white heat. What might have happened to the patient, devoted men about the stable and corrals is not difficult of conjecture, but they were saved by Sunnysides. Almost ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... instead of standing at the apex. In other respects they do not differ essentially from the oval ones, and in one specimen I found every possible transition between the two states. In another specimen there were no long-headed glands. These marginal tentacles lose their irritability earlier than the others; and when a stimulus is applied to the centre of the leaf, they are excited into action after the others. When cut-off leaves are immersed in water, they alone ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... fondness, but not constrained by strength of passion to endure indefinitely household tempests, much less to perpetuate them upon himself by lasting bonds. In all this Emma Hart showed herself fully equal to the task. Tenderly affectionate to him, except when carried away by the fits of irritability which both he and Greville had occasion to observe, she complied readily with all his wishes, and followed out with extraordinary assiduity his plans for her improvement in education and in accomplishments. The society which gathered round ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... the M'Aulays had been placed in feud, was a small sept of banditti, called, from their houseless state, and their incessantly wandering among the mountains and glens, the Children of the Mist. They are a fierce and hardy people, with all the irritability, and wild and vengeful passions, proper to men who have never known the restraint of civilized society. A party of them lay in wait for the unfortunate Warden of the Forest, surprised him while hunting alone and unattended, and slew him with every circumstance of inventive cruelty. They cut ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... creditors gratify their passion for interviews at my office, if perchance they happen to find me there. But on this occasion—I could not at the moment tell why—its clanging seemed the very essence of discord. It jangled with my nervous system, and as it ceased I was conscious of a feeling of irritability which is utterly at variance with my nature outside of business hours. In the office, for the sake of discipline, I frequently adopt a querulous manner, finding it necessary in dealing with office-boys, but the moment I leave shop behind me I become a different ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... constant practice of her art, soon loses that roundness of contour which is one of the most beautiful peculiarities of her sex, the muscles of the legs becoming unnaturally developed at the expense of the rest of the figure, so does the man of genius, by the undue exercise of this gift, acquire an irritability that soon impairs the temper, and renders his excess of sensibility a torment to himself and ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... He had seen her laughing gaily, whilst Squire Boatfield used profane language, and smile with contemptuous merriment at the two young men at her feet; he had also seen the change in her manner, the sudden wistful look, the quick sigh, the irritability and ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... the bodily organs concerned, from 'the contractility of those organs, and from the regulation of that contractility by an automatically acting nervous apparatus;' that muscular contractility and the automatic activity or irritability of the nerves are 'purely the results of molecular mechanism;' and that 'the modes of motion which constitute the physical bases of light, sound, and heat are transmuted by the sensory organs into affections of nervous matter,' which affections become 'a kind of physical ideas ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... the outcome of an acute nervous sensibility, amounting at times to an almost neurotic irritability, such as peeps out from his confession that the shape of Earl Grey's head, when he was a Parliamentary reporter in the Gallery, "was misery to me and weighed down my youth". This peculiarity of temperament had established itself when, a little delicate and highly strung ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... contracting or dilating at will is so completely paralysed that the stimulus of a needle is unable to provoke it, though the integuments have retained all their flexibility and though no perceptible change has occurred in the organization. The irritability, therefore, which in the pseudochrysalis is suspended for a whole year, reawakens for a moment, to relapse instantly into the deepest torpor. This torpor will be partly dispelled only at the moment of the passing into the nymphal stage, to return immediately afterwards ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... source of joy, or sympathy, or solace. She foresaw for her child only a future of degradation. Having a strong, clear mind, without any imagination, she believed that she beheld an inevitable doom. The tart remark and the contemptuous comment on her part, elicited, on the other, all the irritability of the poetic idiosyncrasy. After frantic ebullitions, for which, when the circumstances were analysed by an ordinary mind, there seemed no sufficient cause, my grandfather always interfered to soothe with good-tempered commonplaces, and promote peace. He was a man who thought that the only ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... make her cross and capricious, nor did it cause her any of that nervous irritability so common to invalids, and which makes those who are nursing them share their suffering morally. She gave herself entirely up to her fate. Her life was ebbing away without any apparent effort on her part to hold it back or to stop it in ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... conclave in Belgrave Square, the Right Honourable Mervin Brown received two extremely distinguished visitors in Downing Street. It was doubtful whether the Prime Minister was altogether at his best. There was a certain amount of irritability rankling beneath his customary air of bonhommie. He motioned his callers to take chairs, however, and listened attentively to the few words of introduction which ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... quite at one with effort; evidently the greatest bliss in life, for Roderick, would have been to have a plastic idea. And then, it was impossible not to feel tenderly to a despair which had so ceased to be aggressive—not to forgive a great deal of apathy to a temper which had so unlearned its irritability. Roderick said frankly that Switzerland made him less miserable than Italy, and the Alps seemed less to mock at his enforced leisure than the Apennines. He indulged in long rambles, generally alone, and was very fond of climbing into dizzy places, where no sound could overtake him, and ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... of intensely feeling a situation, of intimately associating himself with a character; not from his gift of expression, which rather even leads him astray, degenerating sometimes into a fondness for curiosity of expression, into an irritability of fancy, which seems to make it impossible for him to say a thing plainly, even when the press of the action demands the very directest language, or its level character the very simplest. Mr. Hallam, than whom it is impossible ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... labouring beneath full pack, arduous to a degree under the easiest of conditions. Before mid-day the constant vigilance and care necessary if a hard fall was to be avoided began to tell on the nerves, irritability forced its grip, and they glared savagely at one another at every sideslip—inevitable in a long trek over ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... air is so abundant that every object becomes charged with the fluid, and it cannot escape fast enough or find "a way out" by any adequate conductor. The effects of such an excess of electricity is decidedly unpleasant on the nerves, and causes annoying irritability and nervousness. ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... all Vraibleusia. The most celebrated practitioner listened with great attention to every particular that his patient had to state, but never condescended to open his own mouth. Popanilla was delighted, and revenged himself for the irritability of the eminent physician. After two more visits, the most celebrated practitioner told Popanilla that his disorder was 'unquestionably nervous;' that he had over-excited himself by talking too much; that in future he must count five between each word he uttered, never ask any questions, and avoid ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... continually repeated miracle of life. But it does not remain long in this condition. In contact with the oxygen from the air it is soon oxidized, burned up to furnish the energy necessary for the motion and irritability of the body. We are all of us low-temperature engines. The digestive function exists in all animals merely to bring the food into a soluble, diffusible form, so that it can pass to all parts of the body and ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... fresh forms. After the failure of his attempt to restore Bartja, (transformed as he fancied into a bow) to his original shape, his irritability increased so frightfully that a single word, or even a look, was sufficient to make him furious. Still his true friend and counsellor, Croesus, never left him, though the king had more than once given him over to the guards for execution. But the guards knew their ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... from her own hand, from that hand the clasp of which was as frank as a man's and yet conveyed a unique sensation. The very memory of it would go through me like a wave of heat. It was over that hand that we first got into the habit of quarrelling, with the irritability of sufferers from some obscure pain and yet half unconscious of their disease. Rita's own spirit hovered over the troubled waters of Legitimity. But as to the sound of the four magic letters of her name I was not very likely to hear it fall sweetly on ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... difficult for any average man to express irritability while discussing the appetizing dishes which Miss Lacey and Jenny had placed on that supper table, but the judge was displeased by his niece's non-appearance, and made ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... nervous system of these individuals is characterized by the variability of the dynamic cortical functions; that is to say, by the fact that the nervous segments of their cerebral cortex present a melange of greater or lesser irritability...."[18] ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... night. Her cough suddenly ceased almost, and, strange to say, she immediately became aware of her hopeless state; to which she resigned herself, after an hour's unrest and struggle, with extraordinary sweetness and constancy. The irritability passed, and all hope faded away; though only two nights before, she had been planning for 'after Christmas.' She is greatly changed. I had a long interview with her to-day, alone; and when she had expressed some wishes ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... he found it the more surprised he was at the unusual patience exhibited by the Commander of the Faithful, who uttered no impatient exclamations, but whose countenance bore an expression of satisfaction and interest far enough removed from any kind of irritability ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... contumelious to a good man, when they are puffed up with prosperity and success. But the contrary often happens; afflictions and public calamities naturally embittering and souring the minds and tempers of men, and disposing them to such peevishness and irritability, that hardly any word or sentiment of common vigor can be addressed to them, but they will be apt to take offense. He that remonstrates with them on their errors, is presumed to be insulting over their misfortunes, and any free spoken expostulation is ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... quiet and unobtrusive attention in her power; and she would have tried to sooth and tranquilize her still more, had not Marianne entreated her, with all the eagerness of the most nervous irritability, not to speak to her for the world. In such circumstances, it was better for both that they should not be long together; and the restless state of Marianne's mind not only prevented her from remaining in the room a moment after she was dressed, but requiring ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... the Holy One, by which we understood him to mean the Motombo. When we politely begged him not to trouble, being in an irritable mood, or assuming it, he told us rudely to mind our own business. Indeed, I think this irritability was real enough, which, in the circumstances known to the reader, was not strange. At any rate, an hour or so later it declared itself in an act of great cruelty which showed us how absolute was this man's power ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... sudden irritability. Uplifted by the possession of a half crown, he became contemptuous of the present, jealous of the past when such coin was ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... no hurry with the night-refuge," he went on, speaking with vexation and irritability, and addressing the doctor, who looked at him, as it were, blankly and in perplexity, evidently unable to understand what induced him to raise the question of medicine and hygiene. "And most likely it will be a long time, too, before I make use ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... came out of his subterranean hole, and it was during a little altercation between the now placable and gentle voice, sorry for its previous irritability, and the growling porter, that with all the power of an awakened recollection I recognised my old friend of student-days, David Holst, with whom I had lived three of the ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... flow of his spirits which seemed incapable of ebb. Besides, Perdita was with him in his retirement; she saw the moodiness that succeeded to this forced hilarity; she marked his disturbed sleep, his painful irritability—once she had seen his tears—hers had scarce ceased to flow, since she had beheld the big drops which disappointed pride had caused to gather in his eye, but which pride was unable to dispel. What wonder then, that her ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... following and leaning upon other people. To look at, sitting so withdrawn, her eyes watching something unseen of human gaze, she was perfect; even in intercourse she would have been more nearly so than ever before had it not been for the fits of irritability gave unwonted bitterness to her tongue. There were days when nothing would please her, when she showed all her common strain in the taunts she found to fling at Ishmael and the rest of her little world. Only Archelaus was immune, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... of life, covers all those of the lower creatures. The lowest plant, or animalcule, feeds, grows, and reproduces its kind. In addition, all animals manifest those transitory changes of form which we class under irritability and contractility; and, it is more than probable, that when the vegetable world is thoroughly explored, we shall find all plants in possession of the same powers, at one time or ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... sharply retorted the much annoyed lady. "You can go at the gloves right away," she added; "then I shall want you to help me pack, for we are to leave on the first boat to-morrow morning. And," she concluded, thus explaining to Mona her unusual irritability, "we've got to make the trip alone, after all, for my friend is worse this morning, and so the whole family have ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... or the lexicon,—then to bed, to be vexed by troubled dreams, instead of being wrapt in the sunny slumber of childhood,—waking unrefreshed, to be reproached by parents and friends with the nervous irritability which this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... the sun this day in a cloudless sky was so great, that Mr. Rae and I were glad to take shelter in the water while the crews were engaged on the portages. The irritability of the human frame is either greater in these Northern latitudes, or the sun, notwithstanding its obliquity, acts more powerfully upon it than near the Equator; for I have never felt its direct rays so oppressive within the Tropics as I have experienced them to be on some occasions in ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... loud rattling noise, as if money was being shaken up in a box. A loud crashing bang, as if someone had banged the box down on a table. A rap, as if a knife had been dropped. Then somebody, in a petulant voice full of vexation and irritability, roared out: ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... Oliver, whose deadly faintness was giving way to irritability, caused by the sharp pain. "I only, as I said before, wish I knew who shot me. How could a man be ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... about, as he sat by David's bedside, was David's attitude toward that threatened return of his. For David had opposed it, offering a dozen trivial, almost puerile reasons. Had shown indeed, a dogged obstinacy and an irritability that were somehow oddly like fear. David afraid! David, whose life and heart were open books! David, whose eyes ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... it than in Emile's mood, his mind, when he had written it. She realized now, on this calm of the sea, how absurd had been the thought that a man so subtle as Emile would flagrantly reveal a passing phase of his nature, a secret irritability, a jealousy, perhaps, or a sudden hatred in a sentence written for any eyes that chose to see. But he might covertly reveal himself to one who ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Feverish irritability, a constant absorption in thought, made Calyste almost doltish. Often he would sit for hours with his eyes fixed on some figure in the tapestry. One morning his mother implored him to give up Les Touches, and ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Calvary and learn afresh the power of the Blood of Jesus to cleanse moment by moment from the beginnings of sin, then we have learnt the secret of cups constantly cleansed and constantly overflowing. The moment you are conscious of that touch of envy, criticism, irritability, whatever it is—ask Jesus to cover it with His precious Blood and cleanse it away and you will find the reaction gone, your joy and peace restored and your cup running over. And the more you trust the Blood of Jesus in this ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... observers. There are cases in which objects formerly taken for living animalcules turn out to be products of the decomposition of matter once animated, and it is admitted that neither spontaneous motion nor even apparent irritability are sure ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... her name has ever been mentioned between us. I agree with you that I think he is in earnest about her, but my conclusion is certainly not formed on anything he has ever said himself. I have often thought that a good deal of his irritability arises from his annoyance at her fun and easy way with us all. He never comes to any of our little meetings. If he is really in earnest about her, I can understand that it would be a terrible annoyance to him to see her taking a lead in such meetings and associating ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... properly applied, will do much to counteract the destroying influences of spasmodic labor at unseasonable hours, and to ward off premature decay. But if they apply excitement of one kind to repair the ravages of excitement of another kind, they must be content to live a life of nervous irritability, and to grow old ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... to her mind as the paramount fact, that it was the mention of this man—this Michael Field, so-called—that had been the direct cause of Pia's odd irritability, and not the indirect cause, as she most erroneously had imagined. Somehow, in some way, he had caused her such pain that the mere mention of his name had been like laying a hand roughly on a wound. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... members of the Imperial family alone, who should have been the most satisfied, and certainly the most astonished by their greatness, wore an anxious, almost a grieved look. They alone appeared discontented with their master. Their pride knew no bounds; their irritability was extreme. Nothing seemed good enough, for them. In the way of honors privileges, and when we recall their father's modest at Ajaccio, it is hard to keep from smiling at the vanity of these new Princes ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... on a nail; if you see the nail, you see that which is irregular in your life, and you avoid it. Then the pain stops, without any necessity of stifling it. Our pain arose from the irregularity of our life, and also my jealousy, my irritability, and the necessity of keeping myself in a state of perpetual semi-intoxication by hunting, card-playing, and, above all, the use of wine and tobacco. It was because of this irregularity that my wife so passionately pursued her occupations. The sudden changes of her disposition, from ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... the threshold. He held a palette on the thumb of one hand, and clutched a sheaf of brushes, while another brush was in his mouth, and luckily impeded a rather rough welcome. The look in a pair of keen blue eyes certainly seemed to resent the intrusion, but at the sight of Miss Greeby this irritability changed to a glance of suspicion. Lambert, from old associations, liked his visitor very well on the whole, but that feminine intuition, which all creative natures possess, warned him that it was wise to keep her at arm's length. She had never plainly told her love; but ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... months past, she had watched the prince growing more and more unhappy. He was less nervous than he used to be, less excitable; and for that he had told her the credit was due to herself. "You soothe me," he had once said to her, in words she would always treasure; and yet as his irritability decreased his unhappiness seemed to grow. She could only infer that he was mourning over the girl to whom he was engaged, and on whom he had inflicted a great wrong. For the last few weeks Letty's mind had occupied itself with her almost more than ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... Grayson's irritability he had just lost his bookkeeper, and if there was one thing more than any other that Grayson hated it was pen and ink. The youth had been a "lunger" from Iowa, a fairly nice little chap, and entirely suited to his duties under any ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... pointedly when Marcus's visit had been paid, and now and then he would ask Dr. Luttrell to have a chat with him after dinner. Once when Olivia had ventured to hint her disapproval of this he had answered with unwonted irritability. ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... distraction she retired to her room, the old room, as far away from Diavolo's as possible, which she had always occupied at the castle. She dismissed her maid, and sat down to think; but she was suffering from nervous irritability by this time, and could not rest. She drew up a blind and looked out of the open window. The night was calm, the air was freshly caressing, a crescent moon hung in the indigo sky, and there were stars, bright stars. Up from the pine woods which clothed the castle hill balsamic airs were wafted, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... myths of plant life may be noticed that curious species of exotic plants, commonly known as "sensitive plants," and which have generally attracted considerable interest from their irritability when touched. Shelley has immortalised this curious freak of plant life in his charming poem, wherein he ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... it is probable that the action of caffein in diminishing fatigue is mainly central. Caffein accelerates the pulse and slightly raises blood pressure. It has no action in any way resembling digitalis; by increasing the irritability of the cardiac muscle, its prolonged use rather tends to fatigue ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... stood in need of further development or no. My father gathered this from the writing that was pasted on to the try-your-strength, but he had no time to go inside the shop and test either the machine or his own temper. Other temptations to irritability required the agency of living people, or at any rate living beings. Crying children, screaming parrots, a spiteful monkey, might be hired on ridiculously easy terms. He saw one advertisement, nicely framed, ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... matters the judgment of the general reader is wayward, and his attitude undecided, with a leaning toward hypocrisy. The story of the domestic tribulations and the conjugal bickerings of a great writer, of the irritability that belongs to highly nervous temperaments, and which has always made genius, like the finest animals, hard to domesticate, has lost none of its savour with the public. But if all letters that record such scenes and ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... qualities of character which make a happy home. Beyond a loving nature, on which all the others rest, I know of nothing more essential than a serene temper. Let a woman be "mistress of herself, though china fall." The daily temptations to irritation are incessant, and irritability will destroy the comfort of any home, even if it is well warmed and lighted and furnished with easy-chairs and sofas, even if everybody is high minded and ready to take part in refined pleasures, and even if room is made in the family circle for ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... from pain as from injured feelings—and he had apologized in quite a gentlemanly fashion, and picked up the music that in his burst of temper he had flung upon the floor. In spite of his acknowledged irritability, all the girls who learned from him gave themselves airs of slight superiority over those who only learned from Mademoiselle. Though strict, he was an inspiring teacher, and when, as occasionally happened, he would push his pupil from the stool, and seat himself ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... him with a sense of growing irritability, and her heart beat with uncomfortable quickness. Why did he seem to hesitate so long? Presently he stopped in his slow movement to and fro, and stood looking down upon her with a fixed intensity which ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... positions and awkward attitudes, as by some mysterious sympathy these are impressed on the child she carries. Let her cultivate grace and beauty in herself at such a time, and she will endow her child with them. As anger and irritability leave imprints on the features, she should maintain ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... draw me vehemently to your side. I was thought in the days of my childhood much to resemble my mother; and in my natural temper, of which at the age of fifty-eight I must be supposed to be a competent judge, can trace both her, and my late uncle, your father. Somewhat of his irritability; and a little, I would hope, both of his and of her—I know not what to call it, without seeming to praise myself, which is not my intention, but speaking to you, I will even speak out, and say good nature. Add to all this, I deal much in poetry, as did our venerable ancestor, the Dean of ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... a person of more than a surface sweetness; she loved harmony and serenity, and there was almost no inclination to irritability or ugliness in her nature. Her voice was always soothing and soft, and her patience in the unravelling of other people's problems was inexhaustible. Alice was, as all the world conceded, ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... not quite agree with you," answered the American Minister; "but, I still think, that the irritability of human nature will overcome reason, and so, in anger, men seize the sabre while they throw down the pen; but that is only ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... few causes of barrenness that cannot be removed when the patient is perfectly developed. Sterility, in a female, most frequently depends upon a weakness or irritability either in the ovaries or the womb, and anything having a strengthening effect upon either organ will remove ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... appellation—my own disease, then, grew rapidly upon me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form—hourly and momently gaining vigor—and at length obtaining over me the most incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... cap upon the table, turned up my coat to hide the absence of collar, and started for the door. My last sight of Smith showed him standing looking after me, tugging at the lobe of his ear and clicking his teeth together with suppressed irritability. I stumbled down the dark stairs, along the hall, and opened the front door. Vaguely visible in the light of a street lamp which stood at no great distance away, I saw a slender man of medium height confronting me. From the shadowed face two large and luminous eyes looked out ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... conceal his wrath at interruption by the best, if their conversation do not fit his impertinency,—here is he to afflict us with his personalities. 'Tis incident to scholars, that each of them fancies he is pointedly odious in his community. Draw him out of this limbo of irritability. Cleanse with healthy blood his parchment skin. You restore to him his eyes which he left in pledge at Mimir's spring. If you are the victim of your doing, who cares what you do? We can spare your opera, your gazetteer, your chemic analysis, your history, your ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... and vituperation of his spouse were, therefore, lost upon Nicholas Forster; and the impossibility of disturbing the equanimity of his temper increased the irritability of her own. Still Mr Nicholas Forster, when he did reflect upon the subject, which was but during momentary fits of recollection, could not help acknowledging that he should be much more quiet and ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... a laxative, allays irritability of the stomach; it is consequently useful during dentition, at which period there is both much irritability and a prevailing acescency of the stomach. The dose is from five grains to ten for an infant, increasing the quantity to ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
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