|
|
|
More "Perverse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had desisted from this practice. For these reasons, I the more thought it necessary to investigate the real truth, by putting to the torture two maidens who were called deaconesses; but I discovered nothing, but a perverse and excessive superstition. I have, therefore, deferred taking cognizance of the matter until I had consulted you; for it seemed to me a case requiring advice, especially on account of the number of those in peril. For many of every age, sex, and ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Kashima till Mrs. Vansuythen arrived. She was a charming woman, every one said so everywhere; and she charmed every one. In spite of this, or, perhaps, because of this, since Fate is so perverse, she cared only for one man, and he was Major Vansuythen. Had she been plain or stupid, this matter would have been intelligible to Kashima. But she was a fair woman, with very still gray eyes, the colour of a lake just before the light ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... was of course hard to write when one is being harassed by creditors. But if he had had it in him, it would have come out. The critic had very probably told him the truth. He could not hope to make a living out of literature. He had not the strength to write the masterpiece which the perverse cruelty of nature had permitted him only to see, and he was hopelessly unfit for journalism. But in his simple, wholesome mind there was no bent towards suicide; and he scanned every horizon. Once ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... at once. I had been there. I felt again the remorseless swash of the water over neat boots and immaculate hose; I saw the perverse intricacies of its meanderings over the carpet, upon which the "foolish" pitcher had been confidingly deposited; I knew, beyond the necessity of ocular demonstration, that, as sure as there were "pipe-hole" or crack ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... nothing. Pilate often declared that this office of ruling the Jewish people for the Emperor had been his evil star. He would rather have remained in cultured Rome, whose gods were much more amiable than the perverse Jehovah, about whom all kinds of sects disputed. And then came this Nazarene. When Pilate learnt the reason why he was disturbed from his sleep he cursed. "This stupid business again about the Nazarene who, accompanied ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... plea meets with a deaf ear. "You are stupid, indeed, if not perverse," the god answers Loge, when he delivers their appeal. "You find me in straits myself, how should ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... what the councils conclude and the Pope establishes in the Spiritless papal Church. The fact is, however, the doings of Pope and councils are mere outward matters; they relate to external commands and government. The above theory is, therefore, wholly inconsistent and perverse. Of the work of the Holy Spirit, the Papists make a dead, written law, when it is really a living, spiritual law. Thus they render the Holy Spirit a Moses, and his words mere human prattle. It is all ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... Some evenings, they march straight into their apartment with the directness and precision of soldiers filing into barracks; on others the very Prince of Darkness, backed by the three Fates and the three Furies, apparently takes possession of the perverse, shallow-pated birds. They wander backward and forward, with an air of vacancy as though they knew not what to do; they pass and repass the yawning portal of the turkey house, with heads erect and eyes fixed on futurity, ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... it merely that he must always be able to look Eve in the face? In sending the car for his idle use, Eve had performed a master-stroke which laid him low by its kindliness, its wifeliness, its touches of perverse self-sacrifice and of vague, delicate malice. Lady Massulam hung in the vast hollow of his mind, a brilliant and intensely seductive figure; but Eve hung there too, and Mr. Prohack was obliged to admit that the simple Eve was ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... you ought not to belittle yourself like that. I'm ashamed of you. But I'll tell you one thing: Patty is sometimes a little perverse. She can't seem to help it. She's a perfect dear, but she is a coquette. If you ask me, I think the more glad she is to see you, the more likely she is to be cool ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... exclaim, "How can Bonaparte employ, how dares he confide, in such a man?" Fouche is as able as unprincipled, and, with the most unfeeling and perverse heart, possesses great talents. There is no infamy he will not stoop to, and no crime, however execrable, that he will hesitate to commit, if his Sovereign orders it. He is, therefore, a most useful instrument in the hand of a despot who, notwithstanding what is said to ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... directly back again to Italy.' JOHNSON. 'I should not have wished to be dead to disappoint Campbell, had he been so foolish as you represent him; but I should have wished to have been a hundred miles off.' This was apparently perverse; and I do believe it was not his real way of thinking: he could not but like a man who came so far to see him. He laughed with some complacency, when I told him Campbell's odd expression to me concerning him: 'That having seen such a man, was a thing to talk of a century hence,'—as if he ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse blindness. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Paul Henry, has been translated from the German by the Rev. Dr. Henry Stebbing, of London, and we have the first of the two octavos of which it consists, from the press of Robert Carter & Brothers. So much inexcusable ignorance, so much perverse misrepresentation, so much insolent lying, may be found scattered through modern literature, respecting the great Genevan, that Dr. Henry deserves well the thanks of the christian world for exhibiting the chief facts ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... love thee past a change to hate, That word had been thy ruin; but no more, I charge thee, on thy life, perverse ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... cried a man who found An adder coil'd upon the ground, 'To do a very grateful deed For all the world, I shall proceed.' On this the animal perverse (I mean the snake; Pray don't mistake The human for the worse) Was caught and bagg'd, and, worst of all, His blood was by his captor to be spilt Without regard to innocence or guilt. Howe'er, to show the why, these words let fall His judge and jailor, proud and ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... perverse Turk bought for himself, Out of grief for the recent death Of plump Fatme, his favorite wife, From his white-slaver, two former mannequins, in quite good condition— You could almost say: brand new— Just imported from France. When he had them, he ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... Friend Sir ROGER, who I dare say never read this Passage in Plato, told me some time since, that upon his courting the Perverse Widow (of whom I have given an Account in former Papers) he had disposed of an hundred Acres in a Diamond-Ring, which he would have presented her with, had she thought fit to accept it; and that upon her Wedding-Day she should have carried on her Head fifty of the tallest Oaks ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Records. In anticipation of any possible charge of unfairness in judging from isolated instances, we disclaim simply all desire to judge—all wish to do anything beyond relating certain ascertained stories. Let it remain, to those who are perverse enough to insist upon it, an open question whether the monasteries were more corrupt under Henry VIII. than they had been four hundred years earlier. The dissolution would have been equally a necessity; for no reasonable ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... difficulty. My mother was thoroughly mortified by my conduct, and did not hesitate to lecture me soundly on my folly; and my aunt Alice emphatically declared I was the most consummate fool that she had ever seen! I knew it was true; but—so perverse is man—I did not feel at all obliged to her ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... 'T is a strangely perverse thing, the human mind. As there dimly dawned upon me a conception of her meaning,—a knowledge that this seemingly heart-free girl cared enough for me to exhibit such jealousy of another,—I would not undeceive her by a ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... which she bored perseveringly with a needle, that in her fingers seemed almost a skewer, pricking herself ever and anon, marking the cambric with a track of minute red dots; occasionally starting when the perverse weapon—swerving from her control—inflicted a deeper stab than usual; but still silent, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... time of occurrence, which has nevertheless turned and altered his whole career. 'Tis with almost all of us, as in M. Massillon's magnificent image regarding King William, a grain de sable that perverts or perhaps overthrows us; and so it was but a light word flung in the air, a mere freak of perverse child's temper, that brought down a whole heap of crushing woes upon that family whereof Harry ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... brave, true, magnanimous nature that was leaning so tenderly upon Mr. Belcher's arm! And he felt that no woman who was not either shabbily perverse, or a fool, could misinterpret her. He knew that his wife had been annoyed at finding Mrs. Dillingham in the house. He dimly comprehended, too, that her presence was an indelicate intrusion, but her ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... by their selfishness and malignity those great measures by which this country is destined to become great. The war is doing us the glorious service of bringing the 'copperheads' before the people in their true light—the light of foes to equality, to the rights of the many, and as perverse friends of all that is anti-American. Who and what, indeed, are their leaders! Review them all, from FERNANDO WOOD down to the wretched SAULSBURY, including W. B. REED, in whose veins hereditary traitorous blood seems, with every descent, to have acquired a fresh ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the land on fire, between King George and his foes: What call has a man of your kind—much less, a woman—to interpose? Yet you needs must be meddling, folk like you, not foes—so much the worse! The many and loyal should keep themselves unmixed with the few perverse. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... sheep and all the foodstuffs for the journey were bought from Jabez at his own price, for which he thanked me much, and on the third day we started. At the last moment the Prince, whose mood seemed to be perverse that evening, refused to travel with the host upon the morrow because of the noise and dust. In vain did the Count Amenmeses reason with him, and Nehesi and the great officers implore him almost on their knees, saying that they ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... as to say, perverse and thieving knave that you are, that you permit yourself to be lacking in respect towards the Auditor of the Chatelet, to the magistrate committed to the popular police of Paris, charged with searching out crimes, delinquencies, and evil conduct; with controlling all trades, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... been a great deal of discussion lately as to the exact nature of the bond which united Great Britain and the United States. Some one says blood is thicker than water, whereupon another with perverse ingenuity begins at once to analyze the blood and discovers that the elements are not, when resolved, precisely the same. That, it is said, is the bond of the Anglo-Saxon race; whereupon a Scotchman insists, or a Welshman insists, that it ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... rejection of the British overtures for peace. But in every encounter Pitt won more than a personal triumph. He proved that the war was forced upon us; that on our side it was a defensive effort; and that despite the perverse conduct of Prussia and Spain, England had won notable gains oversea and might expect an advantageous peace, provided only that the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... suffers greatly. For he often falls into the fire, and often into the water. [17:16]And I brought him to your disciples and they could not cure him. [17:17] Jesus answered and said, O unbelieving and perverse generation! How long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Bring him here to me. [17:18]And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon went out of him, and the child was cured from that hour. ...
— The New Testament • Various
... more or less Christian with a curious mingling of pagan superstition with the new faith. The Indian voyageurs may laugh but they all do it—make offerings of tobacco to the Granny Goddess of the River before setting out. In vain we threw biscuit and orange peel and nuts to the perverse-tempered deity supposed to preside at the bottom of those amber waters. The winds were contrary, the waters slack, sluggish, dead, no responsive gurgle and flap of laughter and life to the ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... grants that the Pope may appoint an observance; he simply enquires, whether this were the intention of the Pope, to bind all equally to abstinence from meats, so that one who should partake would be liable to hell-fire, even although no perverse contempt should be committed. And he who says this in the Colloquies, adds that he hates fishes not otherwise than he does a serpent. Now, there are some so affected that fish is poison to them, ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... "That is the Perverse Daughter, sole disobedient Child of Night, whose stubborn, contrary ways are justly punished by her mother. For she must draw a veil across her brilliant face for a brief period during every ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... its net of crime;—Devouring insects, who weary and confuse men's minds, Ignorant, oppressive, negligent, Breeders of confusion, utterly perverse:—These ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... revelation, might be laid upon him. And it appeared that God had laid his command upon many to go among the unregenerate bearing testimony, and with sharp-tongued reproach and reviling to prick as with thorns the seared conscience of a perverse and stiff-necked generation. Persecution they welcomed as the martyr's portion, the sure evidence of well-doing. "Where they are most of all suffered to declare themselves, there they least of all desire to ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... at last they were to part. And, remembering what he owed to her, the Jester suddenly found himself regretting that here their paths separated forever. Swiftly his mind flew back to their first meeting; when she had flouted him in Fools' hall. A perverse, capricious maid. How she had ever crossed him, and ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... in particular, for the most exquisite specimen of pig-headedness that the world can furnish, his perverse evidence on the once famous case at the Warwick assizes, of Captain Donelan for poisoning his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... indeed was fatal. I had made myself a little specialty of seeing nothing in certain celebrities, of seeing overmuch in an occasional nobody, and of judging from a point of view that, say what I would for it (and I had a monstrous deal to say) remained perverse and obscure. Mine was in short the love that killed, for my subtlety, unlike Mrs. Highmore's, produced no tremor of the public tail. She had not forgotten how, toward the end, when his case was worst, Limbert would absolutely come to me with a funny, ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... Gibbs must be perversely exaggerating the horrors of modern war; that Mr. Hobson certainly views the industrial crisis with unjustifiable pessimism; that "business as usual" cannot be that socially perverse and incredibly inexpedient thing Mr. Veblen shows it to be; that Mr. Robin's picture of Lenin can only be explained by a disguised ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... the verge of the temptation and the opportunity; that there existed a subtle something in this man, in herself, that tempted to conventional relaxation. In all her repressed, regulated, and self-suppressed career, all that had ever been in her of latent daring, of feminine audacity, of caprice, of perverse provocation, stirred in her now, quickening with the ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... pronounce the word "Mated!" he regarded it as a fatal omen, more especially as Mr. Frank came to her side at that very moment; and when the young lady laughed, and said, "What a goose I am! whatever could I have been thinking of?" he thought within himself (persisting in his illogical and perverse conclusions), "It is very plain what she is thinking about! I was afraid that she loved him, and now I know it." So he put up the chess-men, while she went to the piano with her cousin; and he even wished that Mr. Bouncer had interrupted their apple-tree conversation at its commencement; but was ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... not by origin but by BELIEF, if he should dream of the future of music, must also dream of it being freed from the influence of the North; and must have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier, and perhaps more perverse and mysterious music, a super-German music, which does not fade, pale, and die away, as all German music does, at the sight of the blue, wanton sea and the Mediterranean clearness of sky—a super-European music, which holds its own even in presence ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... incurs envy in matters of the highest importance."[672] But we, thinking it difficult to escape envy, and seeing that it is altogether impossible not to incur blame or give offence to those we live with, shall be well advised if we prefer the hatred of the perverse to that of those who might justly find fault with us for having iniquitously served their turn. And indeed we ought to be on our guard against praise from those who importune us, which is sure to be altogether ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Thou may'st prove false; at lover's perjuries, They say, Jove laughs. Oh, gentle Romeo, If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully! Or, if thou think'st I am too quickly won, I'll frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay, So thou wilt woo! but else, not for the world. In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond: And therefore thou may'st think my 'haviour light! But trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true Than those that have more cunning to be strange. I should have been more strange, I must ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... was hard for him. Though she had been five-and-twenty years a wife, she was still very handsome: but he was not going to be melted, and when the perverse old fellow obeyed her, it was with an aspect of resolute disgust that would have made any other woman indignant. Lady ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Mr. Colfax had evident reference to the perverse action of the Southern rebels, and were so entirely in harmony with the feeling of the House that at different stages of the brief address the Republican side of the chamber broke forth into loud applause. As soon as the election of Speaker and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... found it engraved on the moral constitution of man by our beneficent Creator. They found it also transcribed on the pages of objective revelation,—the Bible. But, like other moral and scriptural principles, it has been perverted and misapplied by the perverse ingenuity of wicked men.—This "voice from heaven" is indeed the people's voice: and it is legitimate, as coming from the people, because it is first the voice of God. The "heaven" here mentioned is the seat of civil power,—"the ordinance ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... whose notice he contrived to bring the point while consulting him regularly on some other business. But the Baron would not listen to such a proposal for an instant. On the contrary, he used to have a perverse pleasure in boasting that the barony of Bradwardine was a male fief, the first charter having been given at that early period when women were not deemed capable to hold a feudal grant; because, according to Les coustusmes de Normandie, c'est l'homme ki se bast ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... felt so secure of her that morning, and now she had placed this immeasurable distance between them. He had never felt the full power of her beauty till then, as she stood there with that haughty pose of the head and the calm contempt in her eyes; he had seen her in most moods—playfully perverse, coldly civil, and unaffectedly gracious and gentle—and in none of them had she made his heart ache with the mad ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... the Cattle Trail, that most unique and stupendous of all modern migrations, and its founders must have been inspired with a malicious desire to perpetrate a crime against geography, or else they reveled in a perverse cussedness, for within a mile on every side lay broad prairies, and two miles to the east flowed the indolent waters of the Rio Pecos itself. The distance separating the town from the river was excusable, for at certain ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... that so men may not rashly and in the heat of discourse engage themselves too soon, which might bias them so much that, instead of consulting the good of the public, they might rather study to support their first opinions, and by a perverse and preposterous sort of shame hazard their country rather than endanger their own reputation, or venture the being suspected to have wanted foresight in the expedients that they at first proposed; and therefore, to prevent this, they take care that they ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... first region of departed spirits," said the chief. "We have power to compel answer to our interrogatories. Listen, perverse mortal. We are well assured that a vast treasure is concealed hereabouts, hidden by the Knights of St John. 'Tis beyond our unassisted power to discover. We have asked counsel of one whom we dare not disobey, and she it is hath commanded that we ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... too much polemic stress upon the doctrine of future retribution as the vindication of present impunity. For though, indeed, to the right-minded that doctrine was true, and of sufficient solace, yet with the perverse the polemic mention of it might but provoke the shallow, though mischievous conceit, that such a doctrine was but tantamount to the one which should affirm that Providence was not now, but was going to be. In short, with all sorts of cavilers, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... lighter; her conversation, toned by the ideas of pride and self-love reflected from the society she moved in, was profane and irreligious; and soon the roses of Christian virtue that bloom in the cheek of innocent maidenhood became sick and withered in the heated, feverish air of perverse influences ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... now we love one another like sisters, or indeed better, for I often see such quarrel. Beside, they have taught us that we are generally in fault ourselves; and we find now that we take care not to be perverse, our neighbours are seldom in the wrong, and when they are, we bear with it in hopes they will bear with us when we are as much to blame, which we may be sure enough will happen, let us try ever so much to the contrary. Then the ladies ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... hath been desirous of taking back unto himself the energy that existeth in this Sisupala. O Chief of all intelligent men, O son of Kunti, the intelligence of this wicked-minded king of the Chedis, as also of all these monarchs, hath become perverse. Indeed, the intelligence of all those whom this tiger among men desireth to take unto himself, becometh perverse even like that of this king of the Chedis. O Yudhishthira, Madhava is the progenitor as also the destroyer of all created ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... itself. "Darkness" is the enemy of souls, the primary cause of death, the adversary of virtue. The words of the prophet, they say in their error, show that it exists and that it does not proceed from God. From this what perverse and impious dogmas have been imagined! What grievous wolves, tearing the flock of the Lord, have sprung from these words to cast themselves upon souls! Is it not from hence that have come forth Marcions and Valentinuses and the detestable heresy of the Manicheans which you may, without ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... troop of vivid memories—a pair of bright, dark-lashed gray eyes, the sound of a low, clear laugh, the turn of a rosy cheek, an opinion which had interested him, a pretty thought, a way she had of smiling appealingly after she had said something whimsical or perverse. And underlying and overlying and penetrating through all these was an irritated consciousness of the fact that it would be a long time until the ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... advocates, and the high and cultivated spirit of their illustrious martyrs. As scholars, citizens, gentlemen, and, in more than one instance, authors of real genius, these Liberals stand alone, and are not to be confounded with the perverse Radicals of a subsequent epoch. Moreover, their aspirations were, as we have seen, more reactionary than experimental; for the rights for which they conspired had been in a great measure enjoyed under Europe's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... nymph, may be, perhaps, detected in at least six places of his own sonnets. The love of Petrarch was neither platonic nor poetical; and if in one passage of his works he calls it "amore veementeissimo ma unico ed onesto," he confesses, in a letter to a friend, that it was guilty and perverse, that it absorbed him ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... and with panting heart, Perceived the danger, but with subtle art, (Lest he should see the place) spurs on the foe, 539 Confounds his thoughts, and blames his being slow. For shame! move on; would you for ever stay? What sloth is this, what strange perverse delay? — How could you e'er my little pausing blame? — What! you would wait till night shall end the game? Phoebus, thus nettled, with imprudence slew 545 A vulgar Pawn, but lost his nobler view. Young Hermes leap'd, with sudden joy elate; And then, to save the monarch from his fate, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... of colder air sighing up through narrow defiles and dark crevices touched my face as with airy fingers. A certain feeling of anxiety and insecurity began to take possession of me, though there was no definable cause for it, unless that I might be belated in getting home. With the perverse instinct of those who are lost I hastened my steps, but was impelled now and then to glance back over my shoulder, with a sensation of being pursued. But no living creature was in sight. The moon, however, had now risen higher, and the clouds that were drifting slowly ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... a radically and essentially vicious measure should promote the delusion that it is amendable. And any success in debate would be dearly purchased if it led the electors to suppose that the Government of Ireland Bill, which in fact embodies a policy, so fundamentally perverse that no alteration of details can render it tolerable, is a measure which, though faulty in its execution, is sound in principle. The Unionists leaders, however, whom we can absolutely trust, have decided that abstention from debate would be an error. As far as the matter is to ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... power was in three years broken down, by what perverse and frantic misgovernment the tyrant revived the spirit of the vanquished Whigs, turned to fixed hostility the neutrality of the trimmers, and drove from him the landed gentry, the Church, the army, his own creatures, his own children, is well known to our ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and willed Faustus to take a copy of it. With that the perverse Faustus being resolute in his damnation, wrote a copy thereof, and gave the devil the one, and kept in store the other. Thus the spirit and Faustus were agreed, and dwelt together; no doubt there ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... in unnecessary talk. To begin with, he has to control his staff, the men and boys who walk in line with you through the root-fields, or beat the coverts for pheasants. That might seem at first sight to be an easy business, but it is actually one of the most difficult in the world. For thorough perverse stupidity, you will not easily match the autochthonous beater. Watch him as he trudges along, slow, expressionless, clod-resembling, lethargic, and say how you would like to be the chief of such an army. He is always getting out of line, pressing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... peculiar: at the most perilous moment of all, which is the moment before she is actually overtaken by the breaking crest of the wave, she is apt to refuse to answer her helm, and he who is steering her loses all control over her; she seems to be seized with a perverse determination to take a broad sheer one way or the other, with disastrous results, despite a hard-over helm, and then the only thing to be done to retrieve the situation is to effect a lightning shift of helm against all your past experience and your better judgment. But notwithstanding this, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... acquaintance. This soon ripened into friendship, for there was much in the recluse to excite interest and esteem. I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy. He had with him many books, but rarely employed them. His chief amusements were gunning and fishing, or sauntering along the beach and through the myrtles, in quest of shells or entomological specimens—his collection of ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... and holy communion this inclination became also aroused in the soul; if you felt it increase in proportion as you gave yourself to God, you may safely conclude that it is the indicator of God's will in your regard, and that its vascillating or enfeebled condition was the work of your own perverse will. Hence, in order to ascertain whether the natural inclination or aptitude you feel for any state of life is from God or the effect of a deluded fancy, you need but compare your natural aptitude with those you have received through divine ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... the world a cursed race, Of nature so perverse and base, If from the gallows you should save, ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... dared to raise his voice against the "abjured and detested thraldom of kingship"; declaring that he would not be silent though he should but speak "to trees and stones: and had none to cry to, but {72} with the prophet 'O Earth, Earth, Earth!' to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to,"—a passage, if interpreted by its original context, of awful imprecation upon Charles I. A man so famous, so utterly unrepentant, so defiant to the very end, seemed to challenge to himself the gallows. That his challenge would ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... the issue was dubious. Wright writhed about in his saddle, and swore and lashed like a madman; but who can count on a team of half-broken mules? At the most critical point, when all should have been harmony and combined effort, the perverse brutes fell into lamentable disorder, and huddled together in confusion on the farther bank. There was the wagon up to the hub in mud, and visibly settling every instant. There was nothing for it but to ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... believes in the sincerity of Russian promises to Poland, and claims that the Poles share his belief, but he does not pretend that this most unfortunate of nations has no grievances against its suzerain. I wonder whether our perverse Intelligences are capable of making the deduction that, if the progressives in Russia can forget their quarrel with reaction for sake of our great common cause, they themselves might mitigate some of the severity of their anti-tsarism. Mr. REYNOLDS has much ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully. Or if thou think'st I'm too quickly won, I'll frown and be perverse, and say thee nay, So thou wilt woo; but else not ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... philosophy, as it is fairer in appearance, and more capable of alliance with our natural feelings of enthusiasm and delight. Its dangerous tendency is this, that it perverts those very minds, whose office it was to resist the perverse impulses of society, and to proclaim truth under the dominion of falsehood. However precipitate may be at any time the current of public opinion, bearing along the mass of men to the grosser agitations of life, and to such schemes ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... they be ours still with a vast enrichment and a rare spiritual beauty; but if they remain selfish, insist on absorbing all attention and energy, then they must be broken. The love of father and mother and children is an holy thing wherever we find it, but it is capable of becoming a selfish and perverse thing, insistent upon its own ends and declining wider responsibilities. In that case it must be regarded from the standpoint of a higher good: if it stand in the path of the Kingdom it must be swept aside. So our Lord declared in one of the ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... and means well. If that be true, as perhaps it may, I only wish him a better place, where only honesty and well-meaning are required, and where his other qualities can do no harm.... I hope, however, that our affairs will not much longer be perplexed and embarrassed by his perverse and senseless management." But for the present Franklin was of opinion that it would be well "to leave this omniscient, infallible minister to his own devices, and be no longer at the expense of sending any agent, whom he can displace by a repeal of ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... of Luther's "ungovernable transports, riotous proceedings, angry conflicts, and intemperate controversies," of Luther's "contempt of all the accepted forms of human right and all authority, human and divine," of "his unscrupulous mendacity," "his perverse principles," "his wild pronouncements." He calls Luther "a lawless one," "one of the most intolerant of men," "a revolutionist, not a reformer." He says that Luther "attempted reformation and ended in deformation." He charges Luther with having written ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... beautified herself in the interests of the firm. This coquetry on his mistress's part drove Fromont Jeune to despair. Day after day he came unexpectedly to take her by surprise, uneasy, suspicious, afraid to leave that perverse and deceitful character to its own ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Egypt, by what perverse fate, has poison brought with knowledge, given us this— not days of trance, shadow, fore-doom of death, but passionate grave thought, belief enhanced, ritual returned ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... draught from an open window. Many are the reasons for love, but I confess I only love woman or book, when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a voice I am at once endearingly intimate with. This announces feminine depravities in my affections. I am feminine, morbid, perverse. But above all perverse, almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me. Wordsworth is the only simple-minded man I ever loved, if that great austere mind, chill even as the Cumberland year, can be called simple. But Hugo is not perverse, nor even personal. Reading him was like ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... from the curse of too much ability. He has both genius and talent, but the talent, instead of acting as a counterpoise to the genius, blows it yet more windily about the air. He has almost all the qualities of a great writer, but some perverse spirit in his blood has mixed them to their mutual undoing. When he writes prose, the prose seems always about to burst into poetry; when he writes verse, the verse seems always about to sink into ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... justice; you have been taken from your dungeon and brought to this jail. Legally summoned in the usual forms, formaliis verbis pressus; not regarding to lectures and communications which have been made, and which will now be repeated, to you; inspired by a bad and perverse spirit of tenacity, you have preserved silence, and refused to answer the judge. This is a detestable licence, which constitutes, among deeds punishable by cashlit, the crime and ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... more he told himself "impossible", the more positive grew a certain perverse inner asseveration that it was quite possible. And what if the person in the park had known it? He reviewed the circumstances of their different meetings; details that had not impressed themselves upon him at the time—that ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... loving darkness rather than light, and darkening himself in the delusions of his darkness, stubbornly persevered in his malice, and still contentiously affirmed that his wicked and perverse opinions excelled the doctrines of the saint. And the king feared that the works of the magician would be overturned, and he proposed a certain trial to be made between them: "Let your books be plunged into the water, and he whose writings ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... as yesterday should only be chronicled now and then to give an added halo to happy to-morrows,—disagreeables are remembered quite long enough by perverse human nature. ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... other Western powers, our relations with Japan have been brought into serious jeopardy through the perverse opposition of the hereditary aristocracy of the Empire to the enlightened and liberal policy of the Tycoon, designed to bring the country into the society of nations. It is hoped, although not with entire confidence, that these difficulties ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... fair example of these political and controversial Interludes is New Custom, printed in 1573, and possibly written only a year or two before that date. Here, for instance, are a few of the players' names and descriptions as given at the beginning: Perverse Doctrine, an old Popish Priest; Ignorance, another, but elder; New Custom, a Minister; Light of the Gospel, a Minister; Hypocrisy, an old Woman. Then, as to the matter, here is an extract from Perverse Doctrine's opening speech, the writer's intention ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... and his country the nuisances of Europe. Books have been made from English journals to show how extraordinarily they berated this country during the Secession war, because Americans were so brutally perverse and so selfishly silly as not to submit their country's throat to the Southern sabre for the benefit of Britain, which condescends to think that our national existence is something not altogether compatible with her safety. But a collection ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... direction, discerned the tall black figure of the father of Nesibeh in the road, looking out for him. The idea of evil in connection with the jolly priest suddenly struck him as perverse and ludicrous. He laughed in the ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... the life of this scared and enervated lady—whose existence might have been developed to so much higher purpose but for the ignoble ambition of her parents and the conventions of the time—was one of obsequious amativeness towards a perverse and cruel man. Little personal events came to her in quick succession—half a dozen, eight, nine, ten such events,—in brief; she bore him no less than eleven children in the eight following years, but half of them came prematurely into the world, or died a few days old; only ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... cultivation and commerce, in agriculture and in manufactures with the same rapidity in the same period. Her progress is now retarded, and it is a heart-breaking spectacle to every man who loves the country to see it arrested only by the perverse and factious folly of the people, stimulated and encouraged ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... that there may be such perfect synonyms, words, that is, with this absolute coincidence of the one with the other, yet these could not be the objects of any such discrimination; since, where no real difference exists, it would be lost labour and the exercise of a perverse ingenuity to attempt to ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... elements belonging to the system of slavery would under no circumstances be permitted, a much larger number would have launched their energies into the new channel, and, seeing that they could do "no better," faithfully co-operated with the government. It is hope which fixes them in their perverse notions. That hope nourished or fully gratified, they will persevere in the same direction. That hope destroyed, a great many will, by the force of necessity, at once accommodate themselves to the logic of the change. ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... appeared to be extraordinarily perverse. It was almost as if, knowing this was Celia's child, that Celia whose hatred it had felt from the first, it took pleasure in punctuating his attempt to sleep with shrieks and wailings, with piercing and ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... westwards 'towards the Beauce, intending to reach his own estates in Brittany for winter quarters. But his young captains got out of control. Led by a Gloucestershire knight, Sir John Minsterworth, "ready in hand but deceitful and perverse in mind," a considerable section of the troops refused to follow the old "tomb-robber" to Brittany, and determined to spend the winter where they were, under Minsterworth's leadership. Knowles would not give place to his subordinate, ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... questions of religious belief, should call up an army of assailants and defenders. Nor have the supporters of the theory much reason, in many cases, to blame the more or less unskilful and hasty attacks of adversaries, seeing that those attacks have been in great part due to the unskilful and perverse advocacy of the cause on the part of some of its adherents. If the odium theologicum has inspired some of its opponents, it is undeniable that the odium antitheologicum has possessed not a few of its supporters. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... The perverse bird had heard Giles often dictate this avowal, but had entirely refused to repeat it, till, stimulated by the new surroundings, it had for the first ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... was a horrible fascination in it—human bodies and lives subjected in slavery to that symmetric monster of the colliery. There was a swooning, perverse satisfaction in it. For a ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Christianity, reducing it to cosmology and ethics, and that it served only as a bridge whereby the learned might pass over to Catholicism—that is to say, from reason to faith. To this same learned historian of dogmas it appears to be an indication of a perverse state of things that the man Athanasius, who saved Christianity as the religion of a living communion with God, should have obliterated the Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus, whom neither Paul nor Athanasius knew personally, nor yet Harnack himself. Among Protestants, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... history will concern us by and by. Preussen was to be incorporated with the Electorate,—were possession of it once had. But that is a ticklish point; still ticklish in spite of rights, and liable to perverse accidents that ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... varied in character as the speakers. They broke up into groups. It might have been a fashionable drawing-room where ladies and young girls offer after dinner the assistance that coffee, liqueurs, and sugar afford to diners who are struggling in the toils of a perverse digestion. But in a little while laughter broke out, the murmur grew, and voices were raised. The saturnalia, subdued for a moment, threatened at times to renew itself. The alternations of sound and silence bore a distant resemblance to a ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the ways between the major and minor contingents of poets comes when certain writers maintain, not merely their freedom from conventional moral standards, but a perverse inclination to seek what even they regard as evil. This is, presumably, a logical, if unconscious, outgrowth of the romantic conception of art as "strangeness added to beauty." For the decadents conceive that the loveliness of virtue is an age-worn theme which has grown ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... not, however, whilst re-establishing facts in their purity, dream the practical impossibility of confounding and disarming the ignorance of men unfortunately so ill educated and unread, and with intellect so incapable, apparently, of appreciating instruction, if not wilfully perverse, as the Cobdens, or of restraining the less coarse but more fluent flippancy and equally unscrupulous assurance of friend Bright, from resort to that stock and stale weapon of vulgar minds which is so readily drawn from the armoury of falsehood. To the end of the chapter they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... nights and look after the watchman. It's just the right place for me. There's nothing to do but to drink, when you have got the liquor; and to sleep, when you haven't. The Dead who come our way, my little friend, have one great merit. We are supposed to help them, if they're perverse enough to come to life again before they're buried. There they lie in our house, with one end of the line tied to their fingers, and the other end at the spring of the alarm-bell. And they have never rung ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... to find a common measure for these names, but it is clear that what is most distasteful to the writer, in theory at any rate, is variety. Epic is the most solemn, stately, and frigid of all kinds of composition. This was the result attained by the perverse following of precepts supposed to be classical. The critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were generally right in distinguishing between Epic and Romance, and generally wrong in separating the one kind from the other as opposite and mutually exclusive forms, instead ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... I've had some wonderful times . . . people who play in orchestra and make chamber-music are the real thing. But the music you make yourself . . . the music we make up here . . . well, perhaps my taste for it is like one's liking (some people call it perverse) for French Primitive painting, or the something so awfully touching and heart-felt that was lost when the Renaissance came up over the Alps with ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... and daughter, who, it appears, gave the commissioners no little trouble by their perverse conduct, returned to Savannah and were engaged to labor at the filature, at three shillings per day, at which Mr. Habersham exclaims, "monstrous wages!" The reelers now advanced with much proficiency, and five of them, on the 10th of May, wound off eleven pounds of cocoons each. The ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... the early morning, before visitors began to arrive who might be alarmed at seeing an elephant at large. He was addicted to minding his own business, and never paid the slightest attention to any occupants of cage or enclosure. He was quite unaware of the hostility which he had aroused in the perverse and ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... of their skaldic quality. Another he killed with his own hand, I know not for what reason. In brief, after about a year, Thangbrand returned to Norway and king Olaf; declaring the Icelanders to be a perverse, satirical, and inconvertible people, having himself, the record says, "been the death of three men there." King Olaf was in high rage at this result; but was persuaded by the Icelanders about him to try farther, and by a wilder ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... without giving him any interview, she had persistently kept away, yet though she was doing what she could, by fits and starts, to forget him, that perverse imagination of hers always pictured him as waiting, constant, ready. There was a particular tree in the glen behind which she had so frequently represented him to herself as standing patiently while she approached with furtive steps, ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... that the biggest and highest-placed Ajax among us may some day find himself prostrate before the pattens of his kitchen-maid; as that there is no poverty or shame or crime, which will not be supported, hugged even with delight, and cherished more closely than virtue would be, by the perverse fidelity and admirable constant ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... about the tendency of this race to laugh at the wrong time, and to persist in being disconsolate when every one can see that they ought to dance. Generation after generation of these perverse creatures in the good old days of slavery would insist on going in search of the North Pole under the most discouraging circumstances. On foot and alone, without money or script or food or clothing; without guide ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... seeing all beautiful around you—pleasant woods, winding white paths, green lawns, and blue sunshiny sky—and not having a free moment or a free thought left to enjoy them in. The children are constantly with me, and more riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs never grew. As for correcting them, I soon quickly found that was entirely out of the question: they are to do as they like. A complaint to Mrs. Sidgwick brings only black looks upon oneself, and unjust, partial excuses to screen the children. I have tried that plan once. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... To deal seriously were to yield too much respect to such a baffler, and too much weight to his fancies; to raise the man too high in his courage and conceit; to make his pretences seem worthy the considering and canvassing. Briefly, perverse obstinacy is more easily quelled, petulant impudence is sooner dashed, sophistical captiousness is more safely eluded, sceptical wantonness is more surely confounded in this than in ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... and unwearied labour have been so successfully united. It is to Pope's credit, that, with everything against him in the race of life, he attained the goal for which he started in his youth. The means he employed to reach it were frequently perverse and discreditable, but the courage with which he overcame the obstacles in his path ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... friends with infamy. Hence the solemn caution, "Look not thou on the wine, when it giveth its color in the cup: at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder: thine eyes shall behold strange women, and thy heart utter perverse things." Those who, by gaming or intrigue, rob others of their property, and those who allure "the simple" to ruin, it is said, fully understand its perverting influence. "Is it not a little one?" say they; ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... and he placed his two hands(227) on him and made confession, and thus he spake: "I beseech Thee, O Name, Thy people, the house of Israel, have done perversely, have transgressed and sinned before Thee. I beseech Thee, O Name, pardon now their perverse doings, and their transgressions, and their sins, which they have perversely committed, and transgressed, and sinned before thee. Thy people the house of Israel, as is written in the law of Moses Thy servant, saying, 'For on that day shall he make an atonement ...
— Hebrew Literature
... passengerless; for even the mightiest cannot hold indefinitely an ocean liner setting out after a possible record. Almost at the moment that the man of power received a message stating positively that his daughter was not on the Clan Macgregor that perverse little person was saying to her preserver, who—foolish youth—had ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... nor is there any here so young, but she is of years to understand how women are minded towards one another, when they are alone together, and how ill they are able to rule themselves without the guidance of some man. We are sensitive, perverse, suspicious, pusillanimous and timid; wherefore I much misdoubt, that, if we find no other guidance than our own, this company is like to break up sooner, and with less credit to us, than it should. ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Baron's perverse attachment to his lately-acquired charger—an attachment which seemed to attain new strength from every fresh example of the animal's ferocious and demon-like propensities—at length became, in the eyes of all reasonable men, a hideous and unnatural fervor. In the glare of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Now it is done, (walking up and down pleased.) Now it is right, and—(stops suddenly,) but that perverse old-fashioned fellow, with his pious lamentations—Pshaw! my intended son-in-law must manage him, and that quickly too, or he shall not have the girl. He is in love with her and the money,—a twofold inducement! He is in my hand, because his conscience is ...
— The Lawyers, A Drama in Five Acts • Augustus William Iffland
... right. Paula deserved to own the stronger spell. Paula's emotional channels were open and deep. No choking snags and sandbars, no perverse eddies in them. Look at her with Rush to-day! There was a situation that fairly bristled with opportunities for blundering. She might, with this grown-up son of her husband's whom she had hardly seen, have shown herself shy, embarrassed, at a loss how to take him. She might ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... His was a perverse nature, endowed with rare gifts which he persistently abused. Pure physical sensation supplied a large part of the material for his poetry, and among the senses it was especially the one that has the remotest association with ideas that he drew upon most constantly—the ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... any, it will not, I hope, seem more strange than convincing to backsliders. This much I should have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to but with the prophet, 'O earth, earth, earth!' to tell the very soil itself what its perverse inhabitants are deaf to; nay, though what I have spoken should prove (which Thou suffer not, who didst make mankind free; nor Thou next, who didst redeem us from being servants of sin) to be the last words of our ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of injury. Of late she had seemed absolutely changed towards him; and from being his good friend, with established intimacies, she had turned before his very eyes into an alien, almost an enemy, more beautiful than ever, to be true, but perverse, mocking, impish. She flouted him for his youth, his bluntness, his guileless transparency. But hardest of all to bear was the delicate derision with which she treated his awkward attempts to express his passion for her, ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... weaknesses, humoured his corrupted and blase ways; to please him he affected malicious raillery and atheism, in his company criticised persons before whom in other places he would slavishly grovel. When at supper they talked of love and women, he pretended to be a subtle and perverse voluptuary. As a rule, one may say, Petersburg rakes are fond of talking of their abnormal tastes. Some young actual civil councillor is perfectly satisfied with the embraces of his cook or of some unhappy street-walker on the Nevsky Prospect, but to listen to him ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... will see that I am capable of sharing your literary glory on the sly, and without compunction. Indeed, the false role created in me a perverse mood. And I entered into a literary discussion with M—— that outraged his pedantic soul. It was my way of perjuring his judgment, in return for his unwitting approval of my reviews. Besides, the assumption of infallibility by dull, scholarly ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... she not capricious, teasing, tyrannical, obstinate, perverse, absurd? ay, a wilderness of faults and follies; her looks are scorn, and her very smiles—'Sdeath! I wish I hadn't mentioned her smiles; for she does smile such beaming loveliness, such fascinating brightness—Oh, death and madness! I shall die if ...
— The Duenna • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... haffen o' it. Cold winter nights, when the snow sifted in through the cracks, an' the wind blew in the rotten old door, 'Fambly' liked ter hev friz ter death. They hed the pneumonia, an' whoopin'-cough, an' croup; an' in summer, bein' a perverse set o' brats, 'Fambly' hed fever an' ager, an' similar ailments common ter the young o' the human race, the same ez ef 'Fambly' war folks! 'T war 'stonishin', kem ter think of it, how 'Fambly' hed the insurance ter grow up ter look like folks, let alone settin' out ter run fur ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... didn't look for this from you. I thought God had set his mark on you if he ever had on any man. And it is for things like this that you set your soul back a thousand years from God. O foolish and perverse generation!" ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... and have no further desire to kill you; and fleas are often encountered who die from pleasure at being thus converted to our holy religion. You will do the same to all you catch; and the others perceiving it, after staring at the convert, will go away, so perverse are they, and so terrified at the idea ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... the best and happiest results may be expected to follow. The perverse and headstrong passions of the human heart are so many, that numerous instructions may seem to be useless, and a mother may have often to sigh over her child as she sees him allowing evil habits to obtain ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... subdued; so long as the new Christian, in the retirement of his house, became again a Jew or a Moslem, he was as little secured to the throne as to the Romish See. It was no longer deemed sufficient to compel a perverse people to adopt the exterior forms of a new faith, or to wed it to the victorious church by the weak bands of ceremonials; the object now was to extirpate the roots of an old religion, and to subdue an obstinate bias which, by the slow operation ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the nun's well-meant kindness and efforts to console her, which somehow were not what she wanted—not that, but something so different, poor child!—she was cross, peevish, fractious without intending it, scarcely knowing why; the nuns set her down as a perverse unamiable child: and so it happened, that she had not been many weeks in the convent before she came to be regarded with general disfavour and indifference instead of with the kindly feeling that had at first been shown to ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... for me. There's nothing to do but to drink, when you have got the liquor; and to sleep, when you haven't. The Dead who come our way, my little friend, have one great merit. We are supposed to help them, if they're perverse enough to come to life again before they're buried. There they lie in our house, with one end of the line tied to their fingers, and the other end at the spring of the alarm-bell. And they have never rung the bell yet—never once, bless their hearts, since ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... and care for nothing but themselves. It may, therefore, be assumed, that any view current on certain tangible interests which concern man very nearly, and which has been shared by great parties and even by whole peoples for generations, is not based only on ignorance or a perverse love of wrong. The error consists more frequently in applying measures wholesome and even absolutely necessary under certain circumstances, to circumstances entirely different. And here, a thorough insight into ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... 200 Call fire and sword and desolation, A godly thorough reformation, Which always must be carried on, And still be doing, never done; As if religion were intended 205 For nothing else but to be mended. A sect, whose chief devotion lies In odd perverse antipathies; In falling out with that or this, And finding somewhat still amiss; 210 More peevish, cross, and splenetick, Than dog distract, or monkey sick. That with more care keep holy-day The wrong, than others the right way; Compound for sins they are inclin'd ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... is never old enough to listen to improper subjects. Faithless, she is, ungrateful, perverse, but her innocence at least I will respect. Maria, leave ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... my best for your sake, Tom, but she is a perverse creature, and don't mind a word I say, even about things much more ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... twilight, still ruddy with tints of sunset. He was in a very contradictory frame of mind, so that though his heart jumped to see Mrs. Dennistoun awaiting him on the platform, there mingled in his satisfaction in seeing her and hearing what she had to tell so much sooner, a perverse conviction of cold and discomfort in the long drive up in the pony carriage which he felt sure was before him. He was mistaken, however, on this point, for the first thing she said was, "I have secured the fly, John. Old Pearson will ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... irritable temper. The manner in which the earlier years of his manhood had been passed had given to his demeanour, and even to his moral character, some peculiarities appalling to the civilised beings who were the companions of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion, interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence, and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence contrasted ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... quite untouched by these changes of mood, she will leave off attributing an exaggerated importance to them. So will you, Stewart. You will see them in their right proportion; you will see the great evil and danger of giving way to imagination, of accepting perverse psychological hypotheses as guides in life. Reason and Religion are ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... transform him into a rampant Idealist of the conventional kind. He belongs neither to the Aesthetics nor to the Idealists. He belongs to every individual soul whose taste is sufficiently purged, sufficiently perverse and sufficiently passionate, to enter the enchanted circle of ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... make their enemy lose one. He may do it for sake of the grief beyond imagination which the parents suffer from the murder of their children; but what is still more important to him is to accustom us to the repeated commission of such a cruel and perverse sin. And all this God allows by reason of our sinfulness; for without his permission, as I know by experience, the devil has not the power to hurt a pismire; and so true is this, that one day when I requested ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... you, my dear, dear brother, for showing me the way to heaven, and for all your goodness to me and Minette—(my poor Minette, I must leave her, but you will all take care of her better than I have done). Thank you, I am very sorry that I was such a wilful, perverse sister, when you tried ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... that lunatic Franck is going to behave," said Willy in his peculiar voice, in which there was a blending of the guttural and nasal tones of American English with the Austrian German accent of his friends. "He snaps like a mad dog. He's enough to make you split your sides laughing—that is, if the perverse creature comes at all and doesn't have dinner served ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... brought about by mere slackness, or, as religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul. Sometimes; too, sin is deliberately indulged in because of the perverse satisfaction which this yielding to old craving gives us. The violent-tempered man becomes once more a primitive, when he yields to wrath. A starved and repressed side of his nature—the old Adam, in fact—leaps ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... had forbidden the existence of clubs. On this account I believed it the more necessary to find out from two maid-servants, who were called deaconesses [ministrae], and that by torture, what was the truth. I found nothing else than a perverse and excessive superstition. I therefore adjourned the examination and hastened to consult you. The matter seemed to me to be worth deliberation, especially on account of the number of those in danger. For many of every age, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... much I should perhaps have said, though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to, but with the Prophet, Oh earth! earth! earth! to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay, though what I have spoken should happen [which Thou suffer not, who didst create free, nor Thou next who didst redeem us from being servants of men] to be the last ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... great consolation from the promise of Jesus Christ, that the gates of hell shall never prevail against the Church, our soul cannot but feel excruciating pain, upon considering how daring outrages against divine and sacred things daily flow from the unbridled licentiousness, the perverse effrontery and impiety of the press. Now in this pestilence of corrupt books which invades us on all sides, the work entitled Institutes of Ecclesiastical Law, by John Nepomue Nuytz, Professor in the Royal University ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... as if one in the present perverse times should say: We teach and make ample effort to summon the world back to sobriety and godliness, but we are derided, persecuted, killed, and all men, in the end, rush to destruction with blind eyes and deaf ears; therefore we are constrained to desist. These are the words of a ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... his own distresses and misfortunes. The contempt into which he has fallen and the disgrace which, through him, is reflected upon the empire, is derived from his own indolence and his obstinacy in following perverse counsels. He might have escaped all these calamities if, instead of resigning himself to corrupt and interested ministers, he had followed the ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... him,' she said kindly, 'for I think he would send you home at once if he knew how perverse you have been. You ought to remember that he never will forgive ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... in a perverse humour," the queen said in a tone of much vexation to Sir Thomas Tresham, when Gervaise had left the room. "However, I know he will bear himself well when the hour of ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... frequently to his house as a friend, when other friends were to meet him there, besides requesting me to come and see him and his family whenever I could make it convenient. He said that his servant John was very perverse, and would be sure to drive me by like all others, if he possibly could; so he gave me a watchword, which he thought John, perverse as he was, would not venture to resist. I thus became possessed of a privilege of which I did not fail to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... tradition which represents this high-souled and gentle-hearted poet as one morbidly fascinated by a fantastic attraction toward the "violent delights" of horror and the nervous or sensational excitements of criminal detail; nor can there be conceived a more perverse or futile misapprehension than that which represents John Webster as one whose instinct led him by some obscure and oblique propensity to darken the darkness of southern crime or vice by an infusion of northern seriousness, of introspective cynicism and reflective intensity in ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... this more terribly felt than by men facing a great fire; for here not only have they to deal with a power out of all proportion to humanity, but they confront a power perverse, saturnine, malignant, diabolic. A conflagration is wantonly cruel; not content with the simple panoply of its might, it summons to its aid the evil whims of an enraged elephant. It plays, like a ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... intensely nervous, but through it all she felt a perverse pleasure in irritating Miss Tasker, so she performed some grotesquely uncouth steps which raised a smile on ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... replied, 'No, I won't.' 'Then', said I, 'here goes!' and I struck my lash through her hooped petticoat; for which, no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was properly punished. But, possibly from some want of judgment in punishments inflicted, I had become perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather proud of it ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... sweet flow'r: near whom behold the seer, That, ere he died, saw all the grievous times Of the fair bride, who with the lance and nails Was won. And, near unto the other, rests The leader, under whom on manna fed Th' ungrateful nation, fickle and perverse. On th' other part, facing to Peter, lo! Where Anna sits, so well content to look On her lov'd daughter, that with moveless eye She chants the loud hosanna: while, oppos'd To the first father of your mortal kind, Is Lucia, at whose hest ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... marrying a shining sinful Frenchman who believes a woman must do one or the other of those things. The lightest of US have a ballast that they can't imagine, and the poorest a moral imagination that they don't require. She was romantic and perverse—she thought the world she had been brought up in too vulgar or at least too prosaic. To have a decent home-life isn't perhaps the greatest of adventures; but I think she wishes nowadays she hadn't gone in quite so desperately for thrills. M. de Mauves cared of course for nothing but her ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... from the side of thy father's friend, like a thief in the night, and to leave him exposed to the bloody death from which he rescued thy father, or to expose thine uncle's wordly goods to such peril, as, in this perverse generation, attends those who give a morsel of bread or a draught of cold water to a Christian man, when perishing for lack ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of those who resist, and who wish to oppose themselves as a dyke against the torrent of the progress of higher humanity among the German people. Why should vast whole masses bow beneath the yoke of a perverse minority? And why, scarcely healed, should we fall back into a worse disease than that which ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Music framed for infants' glee, Whistle never tuned for thee; Though thou want'st not, thou shalt have them, Loving hearts were they which gave them. Let not one be missing; nurse, See them laid upon the hearse Of infant slain by doom perverse. Why should kings and nobles have Pictured trophies to their grave, And we, churls, to thee deny Thy pretty toys with thee to lie— A more ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... light, fell, and proved that all money is perverse, by rolling under the davenport upon which they were sitting. An amusing hunt followed. They ran their hands over the floor, turned the rug, pulled out the davenport and looked behind, burnt innumerable matches, ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... were also with my friends and kindred, and with those whom I instructed. Still, for all this, I have a strict account to give unto God for the bad example I gave in other respects. May it please His Majesty to forgive me, for I have been the cause of much evil; though not with intentions as perverse as were the ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... the people, and other enormities horrible to be heard, daily do perpetrate and commit. The diocesans cannot by their jurisdiction spiritual, without aid of the King's Majesty, sufficiently correct these said false and perverse people, nor refrain their malice, because they do go from diocese to diocese, and will not appear before the said diocesans; but the jurisdiction spiritual, the keys of the church, and the censures ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... recollections which I shall have to pluck out of my heart. I will try, but I am not very confident of my power. Late in life have I known thee, O perfect Beauty. I shall be beset with hesitations and temptation to fall away. A philosophy, perverse no doubt in its teachings, has led me to believe that good and evil, pleasure and pain, the beautiful and the ungainly, reason and folly, fade into one another by shades as impalpable as those in a dove's neck. To feel neither absolute love nor absolute hate ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... "Fate is perverse about these things. And now, my fair pupil, you understand somewhat more that no true artist is possible without sorrow and suffering and renunciation. And you will think sometimes of your ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... the laws that underlie and govern these forces we know little or nothing. On the one hand we see how man has always and everywhere shown what the advocates of so-called racial purity have called "a perverse predisposition to mismate" which has made it exceedingly difficult to classify existing human varieties. On the other hand we see throughout nature how a pronounced disparity between varieties of the same species engenders an aversion from one another ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... he said, with a hard laugh. "You had better find him in church to-morrow morning, and tell him that you have been wilful and perverse and disobedient. He'll give you absolution, no doubt. So now you'd better go back to your dancing. Your many friends ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... ought to be constituted in such a manner that those who compose it should be disposed to love and to venerate those whom they are bound to obey. A purposed neglect, or, what is worse, a literal, but perverse and malignant obedience, must be the ruin of the wisest counsels. In vain will the law attempt to anticipate or to follow such studied neglects and fraudulent attentions. To make them act zealously is not in the competence of law. Kings, even such as are truly kings, may and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... you this way, sir," he said, "because the door from the vestry to the church is bolted on the vestry side. We might have got in through the church otherwise. This is a perverse lock, if ever there was one yet. It's big enough for a prison-door—it's been hampered over and over again, and it ought to be changed for a new one. I've mentioned that to the churchwarden fifty times over at least—he's always ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... that the life of his cur was demanded by one, and, as he was aware, sought for by many, Vanslyperken put a value upon him that was extraordinary. Snarleyyow had become a precious jewel in the eyes of his master, and what he suffered in anxiety and disappointment from the perverse disposition of the animal, only endeared him the more. "Yes, my poor dog," apostrophised the lieutenant, "they would seek your life, nay, that hardhearted woman demands that you should be laid dead at her porch. All conspire ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... said. "You're perverse. It's no use, I see, telling you not to worry; but please try to ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... I touch on the religiousness of the other's reign, I mean the body of her sister's {38} Council of State, which she retained entirely, neither removing nor discontenting any, although she knew them averse to her religion, and, in her sister's time, perverse to her person, and privy to all ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... she decided; here she had been looking forward to a delightful visit from George Leicester, probably a whole evening spent in his society, and now this pestilent cousin of hers must needs take it into his perverse head to walk over from Gosport—to be found later on by "dear George" making fierce love to her, the unfortunate Lucy;—which would be quite sufficient, she felt sure, to choke the said George off for at least another voyage. But that should never be, ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... ship, and in the column for "wind" scrawled the word "calm" from top to bottom of the eight hours since noon. He was exasperated by the continuous, monotonous rolling of the ship. The heavy inkstand would slide away in a manner that suggested perverse intelligence in dodging the pen. Having written in the large space under the head of "Remarks" "Heat very oppressive," he stuck the end of the penholder in his teeth, pipe fashion, and ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... everyone can make a mistake. It seems to me as if there are a lot of channels, some short, ending abruptly, some long, going almost to the center of things. And genius is like a liquid poured into them. I only want you to pour yours into a long channel. Is it very stupid, or perverse, of me?" ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... a building such as she had not dreamed of in her wildest fantasies, and having very sweetly thanked the Arab, had clapped her hands, and being of perverse mood, had indifferently bidden him good night, and entered the rose pink sleeping-room where the couch had been designed by love, and the colouring reflected by the great mirrors by passion; to slip from out her perfumed raiment, ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... him at the moment, rejoicing to be free from the strange, perverse attraction he held for her. But, viewed through the softening mists of memory, a certain romance and charm seemed to cling about those days when she had hovered on the border-line of love for him, and her heart beat a little faster at the thought of ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... low, pleading, trembling tones, "I do not, indeed, I do not want to be perverse and disobedient, but I cannot break the Sabbath-day. Please, papa, let ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... persons may each one of them be possessed of good and noble traits; there may be a common basis of affection, of generosity, of good principle, of religion; and yet, through the influence of some of these perverse, nibbling, insignificant little foxes, half the clusters of happiness on these so promising vines may fail to come to maturity. A little community of people, all of whom would be willing to die for each other, may not be able to live ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... the way, distinctly audible, utters the cabalistic words, "Two forty." Another voice, as audible, asks, "Which'll you bet on?" It was not soothing. It did seem as if the imp of the perverse had taken possession of that terrible nag to go and make such a display at such a moment. But as his will rose, so did mine, and my will went up, my whip went with it; but before it came down, Halicarnassus made shift to drone out, "Wouldn't ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... in their synods, as before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. I am conscious that this discipline disposes men to republicanism: but it is still a discipline, and it is a cure (such as it is) for the perverse and undisciplined habits which for some time have prevailed. Republicanism repressed may have its use in the composition of a state. Inspection may be practicable, and responsibility in the teachers and elders ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to add revenge, hath given me wine of the same grape, a sip of the same sauce, and firing me with the like passion, hath crossed me with as ill a penance; for I am in love with a shepherd's swain, as coy to me as I am cruel to Montanus, as peremptory in disdain as I was perverse in desire; and that is," quoth she, ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... the place for our tete-a-tete. Had we been fairly quiet about it none need have complained, but my young friend was so surcharged with high spirits that at the least provocation they would burst forth as laughter. In all countries girls have a perverse degree of application to their studies, and I feel repentant as I recall the multitude of reproachful blue eyes which vainly showered disapprobation on our unrestrained merriment. But in those days I felt not ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... considerations it may infallibly be concluded, that children are born with inclinations to such things as their parents were inclined to. But it is of the divine providence, lest thought and act should follow inclination, that perverse inclinations may be corrected; and also that a faculty has been implanted for this purpose, by virtue whereof parents and masters have the power of amending the morals of children, and children may afterwards, when they come to years of discretion, amend ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... energetic forms of thieving. He had gained his spurs in that sphere, and naturally enough had kept for it, after his promotion to another department, a feeling not very far removed from affection. Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... that it is necessary to demonstrate that this poetic allusiveness is the characteristic of true slang. Such an expression as 'Keep your hair on' is positively Meredithian in its perverse and mysterious manner of expressing an idea. The Americans have a well-known expression about 'swelled-head' as a description of self-approval, and the other day I heard a remarkable fantasia upon this air. An American said that after the Chinese ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... wife, draw up and add in her favour a codicil to your testament; and your duties being thus fulfilled, with a clean heart, backed by forty-eight clean shirts, go and try; and if you 'fall not' of my advice before you again embrace your mother country, curse Fortune for a perverse wench, and set your humble ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... ejaculation of impatience. The savage was incorrigible—quite! Him, and his everlasting Plutina! Perverse curiosity overcame discretion. Perhaps, too, after all, he only needed guidance. She tried to believe, though vainly, that only shyness prevented him from improving an opportunity any ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... Raven, a sharp light now on her, bringing out the curves and angles of her positive mind, "you have done some perverse thing to send him off, and you won't move a finger ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... did to death because of their skaldic quality. Another he killed with his own hand, I know not for what reason. In brief, after about a year, Thangbrand returned to Norway and king Olaf; declaring the Icelanders to be a perverse, satirical, and inconvertible people, having himself, the record says, "been the death of three men there." King Olaf was in high rage at this result; but was persuaded by the Icelanders about him to try farther, ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... has been a great deal of discussion lately as to the exact nature of the bond which united Great Britain and the United States. Some one says blood is thicker than water, whereupon another with perverse ingenuity begins at once to analyze the blood and discovers that the elements are not, when resolved, precisely the same. That, it is said, is the bond of the Anglo-Saxon race; whereupon a Scotchman insists, or a Welshman ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... people! Whose every Alpine gap yawns with tradition, and is stocked with noble story; yet, the perverse and scornful one will none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... conclusive proof that there was nothing in telepathy. The dreams, he felt sure, were merely a continuation of that persistent idea—and the persistent idea, he was beginning to believe, was but a perverse twist given to his own ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... the boy's cap? Yes; that's the same woman. I wonder whether you could guess who she was. A singular being, is she not? The most marvellous creature, quite, that I have ever met: a wonderful elegance, exotic, far-fetched, poignant; an artificial perverse sort of grace and research in every outline and movement and arrangement of head and neck, and hands and fingers. Here are a lot of pencil sketches I made while I was preparing to paint her portrait. Yes; there's nothing but her in the whole sketchbook. Mere scratches, but they may give ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... intercepted, and conveyed to Alexander. He wrote also to the Pope and warned him of his purpose. The termination of that epistle is noteworthy: 'I can thus have no longer any hope in your Holiness, but must turn to Christ alone, who chooses the weak of this world to confound the strong lions among the perverse generations. He will assist me to prove and sustain, in the face of the world, the holiness of the work for the sake of which I so greatly suffer: and He will inflict a just punishment on those who persecute me and would impede its progress. As for myself, I seek no earthly glory, but ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... re-occupy and to barter for Bavaria or some other territory. "The Emperor," he wrote, "cannot turn a deaf ear to the appeal of his subjects. He cannot consent that the Netherlands shall be disposed of without his own concurrence." [77] The effect of this perverse and mischievous resolution was that the Archduke Charles received orders to send the greater part of his army from Switzerland to the Lower Rhine, and to leave only 25,000 men to support the new Russian division which, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... the established church. Johnson, himself, was a zealous, uncompromising churchman. None but a marplot like Boswell would have thought, on such an occasion, and in such company, to broach the subject of religious toleration; but, as has been well observed, "it was his perverse inclination to introduce subjects that he hoped would produce difference and debate." In the present instance he gamed his point. An animated dispute immediately arose in which, according to Boswell's report, Johnson monopolized the greater part of ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... grinned From the black mouth of Thlus bared In laughter at some monstrous jest. No creature moved there, weed nor wind. Huge arms, half-torn from savage breast, Hung wide, and tangled limbs and faces Lay, as if giants blind and stark With violent, with perverse embraces Groped for each other in the dark. A moaning rose—not of the wind, —There was no wind, but hollowly From its dim bed of mud each tree Gave forth a sound, till trees and mud Seemed but a single, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... the man was murderous, and he knew it. More; he irritated it, with a kind of perverse pleasure akin to that which a sick man sometimes has in irritating a wound upon his body. Tied up all day with his disciplined show upon him, subdued to the performance of his routine of educational tricks, encircled by a gabbling crowd, he broke loose at night ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... more of glory to Napoleon or of useless bloodshed to France? Those who look on the world as an arena for the exploits of heroes at the cost of ordinary mortals may applaud the scheme. But could men who were responsible to France regard it as anything but a final proof of Napoleon's perverse optimism, or a flash of his unquenchable ambition, or a last mad bid for power? He showed signs of anger on hearing of their refusal, but set out for Rochefort at 6 p.m.; and thus the Prussians were cheated of their prey ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... witnessed just before my father's death would secure you from ever thinking again of Philip Wakem as a lover. But I don't feel certain of it with you; I never feel certain about anything with you. At one time you take pleasure in a sort of perverse self-denial, and at another you have not resolution to resist a thing that you ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... offence, but the consecrated ground threw forth his body when they attempted to bury it; nor could it be made to rest until consecrated bread was laid upon it. Two garrulous nuns, who had been excommunicated by St. Benedict for their perverse prating, chanced to be buried in the church. On the next administration of the sacrament, when the deacon commanded all those who did not communicate to depart, the corpses rose out of their graves and walked forth ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... seemed preposterous that it had been or should be, and I stated as much to my new colleagues. They offered objection which to me appeared perverse if not childish. They did not like Reid, to begin with. He was not a principal like the rest of us, but a subordinate. Greeley was this, that and the other. He could never be relied upon in any coherent practical plan of campaign. To talk about him ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Apostle says, are "proud, (just as they are now,) knowing nothing," (that is, on this subject,) but "doating about questions, and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself."—1 ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... and perverse Mr. Donaldson will join another church that allows dancing judiciously administered, and may yet get to heaven ahead of the Presbyterian synod, and he may be elected to some high position there, as Arthur was here, after the synod of Hayes and Sherman had bounced him from the Custom House for ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... as I have said, all I have to do in my present uncertainty, is, to brighten up my faculties, by filing off the rust they have contracted by the town smoke, a long imprisonment in my close attendance to so little purpose on my fair perverse; and to brace up, if I can, the relaxed fibres of my mind, which have been twitched and convulsed like the nerves of some tottering paralytic, by means of the tumults she has excited in it; that so I may be able ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... This would be simply civil war, and civil war must be resorted to only as the last remedy for the worst of evils. Whatever might tend to provoke it should be most carefully avoided. A faithful and conscientious magistrate will concede very much to honest error, and something even to perverse malice, before he will endanger the public peace; and he will not adopt forcible measures, or such as might lead to force, as long as those which are peaceable remain open to him or to his constituents. It is true that cases may occur in which the Executive would be compelled to stand on its rights, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... shown the system of slavery in the South to the world in some new and striking aspects, and had removed much of that cloud of prejudice, defamation, falsehood, romance and perverse sentimentalism through which our peculiar institution had been formerly known to Europe. It had given a better vindication of our system of slavery than all the books that could be written in a generation. It had shown that slavery was an element of strength to us; that it had assisted us in our ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... opposition to the laws of nature, to offend the ethical sense of the people that surround him, and to brave the blows of destiny; but such a one is a sublime reformer or martyr, and we are not now speaking of such, but of the perverse, the ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... eyes; and Jacqueline made the reflection that women who are thirty-five should never weep. She knew that her face had not been made ugly by her tears, and this gave her a perverse satisfaction in the midst of her misery. Of Marien she thought: "He sits there as if he had been put 'en penitence'." No doubt he could not endure scenes, and the one he had just passed through ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... all to me," replied her mother. "I will manage him into it. Never tell a man anything, my dove, if thou wouldst have him do it. Men are such obstinate, perverse creatures, that as often as not they will just go the other way out of sheer wilfulness. Thou must always contrive to manage them ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... book is, however, melancholy and monotonous. So many young and generous hearts beating themselves forever against the sharp stones of the baldest utilitarianism; so many bright minds drifting into despair in the surrounding chaos of obstinate, stolid, and perverse ignorance! It is a sadder book than 'The Mill on the Floss,' of which it reminds us. How the aspiring and imaginative must suffer in an atmosphere so ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... SHATOV WAS NOT PERVERSE but acted on my note, and called at midday on Lizaveta Nikolaevna. We went in almost together; I was also going to make my first call. They were all, that is Liza, her mother, and Mavriky Nikolaevitch, sitting in the big drawing-room, ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... critics past and present combine to indicate an unmistakable difference of touch or an unmistakable diversity of date between this and that portion of the same play, or where the internal evidence of interpolation perceptible to the most careless and undeniable by the most perverse of readers is supported by the public judgment of men qualified to express and competent to defend an opinion, have I thought it allowable to adopt this facile method of explanation. No scholar, for example, believes ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... dwell upon. I am certain that a persistent application of goose-grease and electricity to the chin of a woman would at last enable her to become as bearded and virtuous as her husband, besides entitling her to the political franchise. They are perverse creatures, however, and it is possible that this deprivation is responsible for many of their ill-humours and crankinesses. Their scarcity of beard is the more remarkable when we observe that the female cat is as magnificently ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... gross visual stimulants. That is because they have not enjoyed our advantages; they are not civilized. Among other things, they have not gone through a "reformation." Take a northern stock, sound in mind and body; infuse into it a perverse disrespect for the human frame and other anti-rational whimsies; muddle the whole, once more, by a condiment of Hellenistic renaissance and add, as crowning flavour, puritan "conscience" and "sinfulness"—mix up, in a general way, good nourishment ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... fellow you are, Mac!" said Errington, suddenly seeing his raw Scotch friend with the perverse accent, in quite a ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... some of us who abuse memory just as much by picking out, with perverse ingenuity, every black bit that lies in the distance behind us, all the disappointments, all the losses, all the pains, all the sorrows. Some men look back and say, with Jacob in one of his moods, 'Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life!' Yes! ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the road, it is plump in the gap. Steady, Dobbin! Don't halt for this hullaballoo— Gee up! and go steady, now there's a good chap. What, the same plaguy Pig! Nay, by Jove, there are two! And they're fighting each other, these porkers perverse, In the gap we must pass! Oh! this grows ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... the better of themselves merely upon that account; ay, and think the people of God ought to think so too, not understanding that it is ordinary for an Eli to have a Hophni and a Phinehas, both sons of Belial; also a good Samuel to have a perverse offspring; likewise David an Absalom. I say, their being ignorant of, or else negligent in regarding this, they do think that because they do spring from such and such, as the Jews in their generation did, that therefore they have a privilege with ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... pleasures—squires and parsons, and farmers and labouring folk, all alike. They oughted to ha' knowed better—and we oughted too. Many's the Sunday I spent in skittle-playing and cock-fighting, and the pound I spent in beer, as might ha' been keeping me now. We was an evil and perverse generation—and so one o' my sons went for a sodger, and was shot at Waterloo, and the other fell into evil ways, and got sent across seas—and I be left alone for my sins. But the Lord was very ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... church-builder, and the patriot in all those generations, and the kingdom of God is not with us yet, seems, indeed, to be as far off as ever. When the world has been at peace for a while and the millennium seems imminent, all of a sudden a perverse, stiff-necked, wall-eyed generation supervenes, and ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... easy-going and polite, the rhinoceros, which came next, was very much the reverse. That savage individual displayed a degree of perverse obstinacy and bad feeling which would have been deemed altogether inexcusable even in ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... called perverse and obstinate by many of her Readers; James Harlowe called her so before them. Some say she was romantic; so said Bella; disobedient; all the Harlowes agree in that; a Prude; so said Salley Martin; had a Mind incapable ...
— Remarks on Clarissa (1749) • Sarah Fielding
... I have been perverse, and it seemed to serve me right for willfulness when no Betsy Bowen could be discovered either at the place which we tried first, or that to which we were sent thence. Major Hockin looked at me till I could have cried, as much ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... 'I don't know about that. People sometimes hold opinions they have no business to hold, and that they would not hold, if they were not perverse-minded.' ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... once possessed, Yea, loveliest, Like a ray refulgent streaming Filled with light. 66 And by my ill-omened fate, My atrocious devilries, Sins treasonous, More dead than death is now my state Bowed with this weight That nought can lighten, vanities Most poisonous. 67 I am a sinner obstinate, Perverse, that know no remedy For this my plight, Oppressed by guilt most obdurate, And profligate, Inclined to evil constantly And all delight. 68 And I banished from my lore All my perfect ornaments And natural graces, By prudence I set no store But evermore Rejoiced in ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... Mrs. Berrington showed her sister a note she had received from 'your dear friend,' as she called him, Mr. Wendover. This was the manner in which she usually designated him, but she had naturally, in the present phase of her relations with Laura, never indulged in any renewal of the eminently perverse insinuations by means of which she had attempted, after the incident at the Soane Museum, to throw dust in her eyes. Mr. Wendover proposed to Mrs. Berrington that she and her sister should honour with their presence a box he had obtained for the opera three nights later—an occasion of high ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... (1794), Washington issued a proclamation describing in terms of great energy the obstinate and perverse spirit with which the lenient propositions of the government had been received, and declaring his fixed determination, in obedience to the high and irresistible duty consigned to him by the constitution, "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed," to reduce ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... on his last visit to Paris, seeing a portrait by the new painter, Carolus Duran, whose pictures were the sensation of the Salon, in which the lady wore one of these bold sheath-like robes with her chin nestling in fur. There was something perverse and provocative in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawing-room, and in the combination of a muffled throat and bare arms; but the effect ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... George II died and George III began to reign, with a very different set of men to help him, the bad general reappeared as an equally bad politician. Haughty, cantankerous, and self-opinionated to the last degree, Germain, who had many perverse abilities fitting him for the meaner side of party politics, was appointed to the post for which he was least qualified just when Canada and the Thirteen Colonies most needed a master mind. Worse still, he cherished a contemptible grudge against Carleton for having refused ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... would happen after death, inclining to think that nothing would happen. He resembled one of his own gilt-edged securities, and to knock the gilt off by seeing anything he could avoid seeing would be, he felt instinctively, perverse and retrogressive. Those two crumpled rose-leaves, Fleur's caprice and Monsieur Profond's snout, would level away if he lay on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... seemed absolutely changed towards him; and from being his good friend, with established intimacies, she had turned before his very eyes into an alien, almost an enemy, more beautiful than ever, to be true, but perverse, mocking, impish. She flouted him for his youth, his bluntness, his guileless transparency. But hardest of all to bear was the delicate derision with which she treated his awkward attempts to express his passion for her, ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... special interest to us for the account they give of the treatment of the early Christians and their manner of worship, as also of the misjudgment on the part of the Roman world at the time of their religion, as in their eyes, according to him, "a perverse ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... dubious. Wright writhed about in his saddle, and swore and lashed like a madman; but who can count on a team of half-broken mules? At the most critical point, when all should have been harmony and combined effort, the perverse brutes fell into lamentable disorder, and huddled together in confusion on the farther bank. There was the wagon up to the hub in mud, and visibly settling every instant. There was nothing for it but to unload; then to dig away the mud from before the wheels with ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... had always been acquitted because the tribunals had never been able to get any evidence. Today he lives I don't know how, but at ease, and he travels a good deal with a woman who serves as voyant. To all the world he is a scoundrel, but he is learned and perverse, and then ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... I'm not of theirs!" The form of this rejoinder was childishly perverse, and it made Mr. Probert stare again; but it belonged to one of the reasons for which his children regarded him as an old darling that Gaston could suppose him after an instant to embrace it. The old man ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... especially Corn, are hilled up, sugar-loaf fashion, until the height of each hill is about equal to its breadth at the base, so that two days' hot sun dries the hill completely through, while there is no soil a foot from each stalk for its roots to run in. From such perverse cultivation, a good yield is impossible. There has been no rain of consequence here for some weeks, whence Wheat and Barley are ripening too rapidly, while Corn, Potatoes and Vegetables suffer severely from drouth, when with deeper plowing and rational culture everything would ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... But the perverse pony, veering about among those approaching on either side to seize, or head her, with sundry monitory kicks thrown out sidewise towards them as she went, the next moment reached, and, with a tremendous leap, cleared the barricade, and landed safely with ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... not mankind right in hating and dreading infidelity, and in loving and honoring religion? There is a tremendous mistake somewhere. Either infidelity is wrong, or mankind and the universe are fearfully perverse." ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... leaders of the blind? will ye never amend? will ye never see the truth of God's word? will neither God's threats nor promises enter into your hearts? will the blood of the martyrs nothing mollify your stony stomachs? O obdurate, hard-hearted, perverse, and crooked generation! to whom ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... depraved does strangely stir mean affections, and provoke for the most part to laughter. And therefore it was clear that all insolent and obscene speeches, jests upon the best men, injuries to particular persons, perverse and sinister sayings (and the rather unexpected) in the old comedy did move laughter, especially where it did imitate any dishonesty, and scurrility came forth in the place of wit, which, who understands the nature and genius of laughter cannot ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... elephant at large. He was addicted to minding his own business, and never paid the slightest attention to any occupants of cage or enclosure. He was quite unaware of the hostility which he had aroused in the perverse and brooding ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... but were not sufficiently acquainted with the peculiarities of his character to discern that he wanted simply to scare his audience, and that he did not mean one single word of the ferocious things he said in those moments when he happened to be in a particularly perverse mood, and when it pleased him to give a totally false impression of himself and the nature of his convictions in political and ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... gigantic in its dimensions that I almost laughed. I was perfectly aware that after the way I had treated her she must hate me, but I should not have thought she would have carried her perverse hatred so far. She had communicated to me an infectious disease, though I did not so far feel any symptoms; however, they would no doubt appear, and I sadly thought I should have to go away to be cured, to avoid ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
