"Temperament" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "out of myself," I will say that for them. My spirits took an upward bound and, wonderful to relate, retained their altitude in spite of all I could do to lower them. I did not want to be happy; I figured that I owed it to my recently aroused temperament to be permanently unhappy. But the wind blew another way and I drifted amiably with it, as a derelict drifts with the currents of the ocean but preferably with the warm ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... and mercurial temperament, he had, with a kind of passionate curiosity, adopted the role of a Platonic lover, and the libertine in his character had been subdued by the love of the eccentric. He had converted this love into a kind of adoration. He placed Elise upon the altar, and worshipped her as a saint to whom ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... than there are Englishmen who live rightly from the fear of God or for the sake of their own self-respect. The conclusion of most observers has been that the American people is more religious than the English, that the temperament, more nervous and more emotional, is more susceptible to religious influence. It may be so. It is a subject on which the evidence is necessarily so intangible—on which an individual judgment is likely to be so entirely dependent on ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... very air from the South seemed to us redolent with death. That palsying thought, indeed, took entire possession of my soul. I could neither speak, think, nor dream of any thing else. My host was of a less excitable temperament, and, although greatly depressed in spirits, exerted himself to sustain my own. His richly philosophical intellect was not at any time affected by unrealities. To the substances of terror he was sufficiently alive, but of its ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Madame, my suspicions could fall on none but the one in question, whom I will not name, because her brother has always treated me with great kindness. Madame de Pompadour had a lively imagination and great sensibility, but nothing could exceed the coldness of her temperament. It would, besides, have been extremely difficult for her, surrounded as she was, to keep up an intercourse of that kind with any man. It is true that this difficulty would have been diminished in the case of an all-powerful Minister, who had constant pretexts for seeing her in private. But ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... hoped for a different decision. Mr. Dexter took me at unawares. In a certain sense, I was mesmerized by the stronger action of his mind, quickened by an ardent temperament. Self-consciousness was for a time lost, and I moved and acted by the power of his will. There was no consentation in the right meaning of the word, Aunt Phoebe, and I cannot think I ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... his genius, his temperament and his poverty had combined to keep him in a half-savage virgin solitude. Men had penetrated it, among them one or two distinguished in his own profession. But as for their women, the wives and daughters of the distinguished, he had shrunk perceptibly from their ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... doing, she found herself the heroine of a divorce suit, founded really upon nothing but a general dissatisfaction with married life and a wish to be free from it. Something there was about incompatibility of temperament and uncongeniality, and all that kind of thing which wicked men and women parade before the world when weary of the tie which God has distinctly said shall not ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... gave the population of the island as less than nine hundred thousand, the latest official estimate places it at about three millions. The actual number of inhabitants is probably midway between these figures. But, to tell the truth, the temperament of the savages who inhabit the interior is not conducive to an accurate enumeration, the Dutch census-takers being greeted with about the same degree of cordiality that the moonshiners of the Kentucky mountains extend to ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... While such feelings preyed on a bosom naturally proud and severe, they had a corresponding effect on her countenance, where, with the remains of great beauty, were mingled traits of inward discontent and peevish melancholy. It perhaps contributed to increase this habitual temperament, that the Lady Lochleven had adopted uncommonly rigid and severe views of religion, imitating in her ideas of reformed faith the very worst errors of the Catholics, in limiting the benefit of the gospel to those who profess their own ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... expectation of the arrival of Del Ferice, she entirely acted out in her imagination the circumstances of the approaching crisis, the blood beat hotly in her temples, and she lost all sense of prudence in the delicious anticipation of violent words. Del Ferice had cruelly calculated upon her temperament, and he had hoped that in the excitement of the moment she would lose her head, and irrevocably commit herself to him by the betrayal of the secret. This was precisely what occurred. On being told that he was ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... under the sun and that we are but "fair creatures of an hour" in an ever-changing world, are equally sad reflections. Interesting is the application of the difference between permanence and change to extreme types of temperament. We may speak loosely of the "static" and the "dynamic" temperaments, the former clinging to everything that is traditional, conservative, and abiding in art, religion, philosophy, politics, and life; the latter everywhere pointing to, and delighting in, the fluent, the novel, the evanescent. These ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... possession of his better estate. His soul is gone, whither? Who saw it come in, or who saw it go out? Nobody; yet everybody is sure he had one, and hath none. If I will ask mere philosophers what the soul is, I shall find amongst them that will tell me, it is nothing but the temperament and harmony, and just and equal composition of the elements in the body, which produces all those faculties which we ascribe to the soul; and so in itself is nothing, no separable substance that overlives ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... the most irksome circumstance of his lot was turned to good account. This was the soldier by whom he was watched. To a man of Paul's eager temperament and restlessness of mood this must often have been an intolerable annoyance; and, indeed, in the letters written during this imprisonment he is constantly referring to his chain, as if it were never ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... be no battalion drill, in which event he would venture on throwing off his uniform and spreading himself out on his bed with a pipe and a novel,—two things he dearly loved. Ten minutes would have decided the question legitimately for him, but, being of impatient temperament, he could not wait, and, catching sight of the adjutant and the senior captain coming from the guard-house, Mr. McKay sung out in tones familiar to every man ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... a temperament so artistic as Constable's was as permanent as it was quickly apparent. In less than a year we find his father reluctantly converted to his son's views in the choice of a career, and consenting to his sojourn ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... think much about such days, aunt. It was all very well, but I fear I have not the temperament fitted for enjoying the fun. I envied Ophelia Walker because she made ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... is the prose for Browning. The temperament of the two in their works is almost identical, having first allowed for the delicate femineity proper to every poet; and the richness that Browning lavishes till it strikes the world no more than the lavish gold of the sun, the lavish blue of the sky, Reade, taking warning, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... not a man of an excitable temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I cannot help thinking that, when he heard his Roman Catholic countrymen (for we are his countrymen) designated by a phrase as offensive as the abundant vocabulary ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... persecution or obloquy. Elsewhere, especially in France, we find a different condition of things. A French sceptic no more hesitates to call himself an Atheist than to call himself a Republican. May it not be, therefore, that the difference between Agnosticism and Atheism is one of temperament? We might illustrate this theory by appealing to examples. Darwin was an Agnostic, Professor Clifford an Atheist. Or, if we turn to pure literature, we may instance Matthew Arnold and Algernon Swinburne. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... continue yet, but with serious doubts as to the objectivity of the scenes exhibited. I have noticed that people who have remarkable and minute answers to prayer, such as Stilling, Franke, Lavater, are for the most part of this peculiar temperament. Is it absurd to suppose that some peculiarity in the nervous system, in the connecting link between soul and body, may bring some, more than others, into an almost abnormal contact with the spirit-world (for example, Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg), and that, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... the declaration of war had the traditional "Latin temperament" shown itself to be surprisingly calm and self-possessed, but various other traits were revealed that militated against the conventional view. When hostilities began on the Austro-Italian frontier the stroke of the fateful hour found Italy prepared ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... sentimentality or of bitterness. But Heine was too keenly intellectual to be indulgent of sentimentality, and too caustic to restrain bitterness. Hence the bitter-sweet of many of his pieces, so agreeably stimulating and so suggestive of an elastic temperament. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... during the interview, which did not last very long after the appearance of Margaret. He was confirmed in all his previous impressions of her beauty, nor did the brevity of the conference prevent him from perceiving her intense self-esteem, which under certain influences of temperament is only another name for vanity. Besides they had exchanged glances which were volumes, rendering unnecessary much future explanation. She had seen that he was secretly laughing at the simple preacher, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... Mrs Lee," said Deering, "don't leave us, and there is nothing to be said that the lad ought not to hear. It will be a lesson to him, as he is of a sanguine inventive temperament like myself, not to be too eager to place ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... buoyant, adaptable French temperament of his mother, the Countess was inclined to be rather severe in her judgment of him. He was so young; so serious. She did not fancy young men except in the pages of romances; even when they had brains they appeared to her always over-weighted ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... and his quickness of intellect, and excellence of memory, supplied the lack of studious application. His wit was prompt and pungent; he expressed himself with vivacity and precision; his imagination was vivid, his temperament sanguine and joyous; his courage daring. His mother, the Duchess of Orleans, expressed his character in a jeu d'esprit. "The fairies," said she, "were invited to be present at his birth, and each one conferring a talent ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... telling people what she wanted them to do, she liked to manage them into it; and this managing involved at most times more or less dissimulation. She dearly loved to conduct her affairs by a series of little secrets. This is a temperament which usually rests on a mixture of affection and want of courage. We cannot bear to grieve those whom we love, and we shrink from calling down their anger on ourselves, or even from risking their disapprobation ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... to me, having as yet no knowledge of the illogical workings of an artistically poetic and musical temperament. But I drew my own conclusions, and it was not surprising that I considered the devout father the true one, and the unbeliever perverted through evil influence. Thus, despite her absence, mother's influence prevailed. My memory had stripped her image of all that was trivial, commonplace and ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... William II, was less than thirty years old, a more or less unknown quantity, with little experience, but possessing a very strongly individual temperament. The break between him and Bismarck came soon, and resulted in the latter's resignation on March 18, 1890. Germany could ill spare the master hand that had guided so successfully its destinies since 1870, and at no time since has Germany's international ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... into a weapon that never failed her in a just cause and was never drawn in an unjust one. Monsignor Saracinesca sometimes thought that Saint Paul must have had the same kind of fiery and fearless temperament. ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... drudgery coincides with a difference between the sexes. The sexes differ, not only in stature and muscular force, but perhaps even more decisively in temperament, and this must early have given rise to a corresponding division of labour. The general range of activities that come under the head of exploit falls to the males as being the stouter, more massive, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... materializing objectively on the physical plane, creating great railroads, buildings, bridges, etc., from the mental pictures, rather than devoting the same time, energy and will to the production of astral though-forms and pictures. There is a great difference in temperament, as well as a difference in the general psychic atmosphere, between East and West, which serves to explain matters of ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... "it's lucky you're of a sanguine temperament. I'm glad to see you're not disheartened ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... take callow writing too seriously, but I reproduce from an oratorical contest the following bit of premature pragmatism, doubtless due much more to temperament than to perception, because I am still ready to subscribe to it, although the grandiloquent style is, I hope, a thing of the past: "Those who believe that Justice is but a poetical longing within us, the enthusiast who thinks it will come in the form of ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... brood of liars. Our hate was provoked, and the German can hate more thoroughly than any one else. A feeling that this is the case is penetrating into England, but the fear of the German hate is as yet hidden. There is a grain of truth in Lord Curzon's statement that the phlegmatic temperament of his countrymen is incapable of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Every day of life drives that conviction further home. And it is possible to maintain that in perhaps quite a great number of ethical, social, and political questions there is no absolute "truth" at all—at least for finite beings. To one intellectual temperament things may have a moral tint and aspect, differing widely from that they present to another; and yet each may be in its own way right. The wide differences in character and quality between one human being ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Secretary of State of Lord Kitchener's temperament, reticence of this kind did not work. Lord K. liked you to say what you thought without hesitation, and, once he knew you, he never resented your giving an opinion even uninvited if you did so tactfully. As for the personnel who constitute War Councils and their like, it is not the habit of ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... The Divine Fire, in fact every reader of any of Miss Sinclair's books, will at once accord her unlimited praise for her character work. The Three Sisters reveals her at her best. It is a story of temperament, made evident not through tiresome analyses but by means of a series of dramatic incidents. The sisters of the title represent three distinct types of womankind. In their reaction under certain conditions Miss Sinclair is not only ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... gratefully regarded by many young men and women who were struggling—as he once had struggled—for what to them was dearer than all else. He always contrived to leave them their independence and self-respect. Naturally all this was gratifying and vital to Lynda. Achievement was dear to her temperament, and the successes of others, especially those nearest to her, were more precious to her than her own. She saw Truedale drop his old hesitating, bewildered manner like a discarded mantle. She grew to rely upon his calm strength that developed with the demands made ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... woman. He went back to France, but again came to England, and died there, at his residence in Millman Street, near the Foundling Hospital, May 22, 1710. He had been a brave and distinguished officer, but his form and a certain coldness of temperament always remarked in him assisted him in his assumption of another sex. There appears to be no truth in the story of his proceedings at the Russian Court, and his appearing in female attire was a surprise to those who must have known of any ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... if the Galatians knew him to be laboring under impaired vision, and perhaps severe pain in his eyes, the words are peculiarly significant, and could not fail to make a touching impression on the quick, impulsive temperament, so vividly alive to anything outward, of the Celtic tribe to which they were addressed. And thus too, we obtain an explanation of what would otherwise be rather unaccountable, how a man of St. Paul's active habits, and whom we have difficulty in conceiving ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... imagination and, like many lads of his time, a romantic temperament and the love of poetry. There were many books in his father's home and the boy had lived his leisure in them. He thought ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... means of their improvement. Christ fitted the ideal, and the way was smoothed for his success by their visions, dreams, and hopes. The beautiful scenery of lake, valley, mountain, and river developed his poetic temperament. Then the Old Testament made a deep impression on him, for he imagined it was full of voices pointing him out as the great future reformer. He was unacquainted with Hellenic culture, and hence it was his misfortune not to know that miracles had been wisely rejected by the schools ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... hour, thrown away in another, savored to Felipe's mind more of brigandage and gambling than of the occupations of gentlemen. He loathed them. Life under the new government grew more and more intolerable to him; both his hereditary instincts and prejudices, and his temperament, revolted. He found himself more and more alone in the country. Even the Spanish tongue was less and less spoken. He was beginning to yearn for Mexico,—for Mexico, which he had never seen, yet yearned for like an exile. There he might yet live among men of his own race ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the dissipation of the time with the restless eagerness common to strong and active natures when the heart is not at ease; and under all the light fascination of his converse; or the dissipation of his life, lurked the melancholic temperament of a man worthy of nobler things. Nor was the courtly vice of the libertine the only drawback to the virtuous character assigned to Hastings by Comines. His experience of men had taught him something of the disdain of the cynic, and he scrupled ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... character of those studies so casually alluded to by the author of "Impressionism and Appreciation," when he enjoins on the appreciative critic not to neglect the literature of aesthetics: "The characteristics of his [the artist's] temperament have been noted with the nicest loyalty; and particularly the play of his special faculty, the imagination, as this faculty through the use of sensations and images and moods and ideas creates a work of art, has been followed out ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... of the Board of Directors, that she was impossible and that we must have you. I have heard you sing, my dear, and I know the singer's face and the singer's throat and eye. You have them all. You have the voice and the temperament and the passion. You'll be great some day, much greater than I, and, with the hope of sharing your glory, I have decided to put ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... and wrote poetry. My father did not encourage my verse-making for he thought it too visionary, and being a visionary himself, he believed he understood the dangers of following the promptings of the poetic temperament. I doubted if anything would come of the verse-writing myself. At this time it is easy to picture my father, a lawyer of ability, regarding me, nonplused, as the worst case he had ever had. He wanted me to do something practical, besides being ambitious for me to follow ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... the army, to a Q. E. D., that the Filipinos are 'capable of self-government,' unless the kind which happens to suit the genius of the American people is the only kind of government on earth that is respectable, and the one panacea for all the ills of government among men without regard to their temperament or historical antecedents. The educated patriotic Filipinos can control the masses of the people in their several districts as completely as a captain ever controlled a company."—Blount, ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... apropos to Hooper, that it was a curious thing that a number of men, knowing that there was nothing they could do, could quietly watch a man fighting for his life, and he did not think that any but the British temperament could do so. I also found out later that he and I had both had a touch of cramp while waiting for our turn to swim out ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... excuse any viciousness of character which led her into her peculiar difficulties. While acknowledged to be a mistress of her business—that of acting—from a purely technical point of view, her lack of sympathy, her abuse of her dramatic temperament in her private affairs, had been such as to make it impossible for her sincerely to impress audiences with real emotional power, and, therefore, despite the influences which she always had at hand, ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... this query was put was mounted on a small horse, of no very fiery temperament, and was riding with his stirrups so short as to bring his knees, while the animal rose a small ascent in the wood-path they were now travelling, into a somewhat hazardous vicinity to his chin. There was no room for gesticulation or grace in the delivery ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... give it up yet, though." Jeffreys had great faith in the caloric of hope, especially for a boy of Percy's temperament. For himself he saw enough to guess that their position was a desperate one. The ledge on which they sat was narrow and slanting, and the wind, shifting gradually to the west, began to get round them menacingly, and cause them now and then to grip at the stones while some ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... meditation, and has no trait in common with the wavering, lean image of hungry speculation, that cannot but fill the mind's eye because of certain famous Hamlets of our stage. Shakespeare himself foreshadowed a symbolic change, that shows a change in the whole temperament of the world, for though he called his Hamlet 'fat, and scant of breath,' he thrust between his fingers agile rapier ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... he come here cheeking us for, then?' cried Master Kidderminster, showing a very irascible temperament. 'If you want to cheek us, pay your ochre at the ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... can she have been so foolish! He is of such a singular temperament that I do not know what the effect may be. I wish you would think better ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... valuable and free to settlers. They comprised about 90,000 acres in Northern Texas, on the clear fork of the Trinity, in the neighborhood of Dallas and Fort Worth. Mr. Toombs had a clear head and keen perception for business. His temperament was restless and fiery. His life had been spent at the bar and in the forum. His gifts of oratory were remarkable. It was a strange combination which added shrewd business sense, but he had it in an eminent degree. He was a princely liver, ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... chronicler informs us, young "a goodly person and well favored." His Hebraic type of manly beauty and mercurial temperament must have contrasted strangely with Mrs. Potiphar's dark and stolid countrymen. Mistress and slave were much together, the master's duties requiring his presence near his prince. Time hung heavily on ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... know. It lacks something—as if—well, if you'll pardon my saying it, as if it didn't reach as far as your temperament could fling it." ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... steep slant, this man-bird, just as game birds do when similarly stricken, and landed without serious damage to his machine. He was found sitting stone dead, strapped up in his seat. Such is the quick generosity of the French temperament that today he is mourned by all Paris, this Lieutenant von Heidssen, who died on his lonely way to keep his fifth punctual appointment with the city of his enemies. Paris actually regrets that he no longer comes at six each evening to throw bombs ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... of other vortices. The desire body exhibits all the colors and shades which we know and a vast number of others which are indescribable in earthly language. Those colors vary in every person according to his characteristics and temperament and they also vary from moment to moment as passing moods, fancies or emotions are experienced by him. There is however in each one a certain basic color dependent upon the ruling star at the moment of his birth. The man ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... while Lugena had mourned and wept over the burning of the church and the scenes of blood and horror, she had exhibited little of that poignant and overwhelming grief or unappeasable anger which she would have expected, under the circumstances, from one of her temperament. She concluded, therefore, that the woman might have some knowledge in regard to the fate of her husband, Eliab, and Berry, which she had not deemed it prudent to reveal. With this thought in mind, she sent for Lugena and asked if she had heard that they were ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... eccentric individual with an enthusiastic temperament and blue binoculars who pays frequent and prolonged visits to the Keeling Islands. It need scarcely be said that his name is Verkimier. There is no accounting for the tastes of human beings. Notwithstanding all his escapes and experiences, that indomitable man ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... show very clearly that the recital of parents and friends may be quite separate in content and manner from that offered by the teaching world. In the former case, almost any subject can be treated, because, knowing the individual temperament of the child, a wise parent or friend knows also what can be presented or not presented to the child; but in dealing with a group of normal children in school much has to be eliminated that could be given fearlessly to the abnormal child; I mean the child who, by circumstances ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... up the receiver his face looks like a strawb'ry shortcake just ready to serve. Somehow Mr. Ellins seems to be enjoyin' the major's rush of temperament to the ears. Anyhow, there's a familiar flicker under them bushy eyebrows of his and I ain't at all surprised when he remarks soothin': "I gather, major, that someone can't seem to get ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... moment and must be taken into account. It is scarcely probable that a people of so different racial heredity from ourselves as the Southern Italians, for example, will develop our institutions and social life exactly as those of the same blood as ourselves. It is impossible to think that the Latin temperament would express itself socially in the same ways as the Teutonic temperament. Certainly the coming to us of the vast numbers of peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe is destined to change our physical type, and it seems also probable that if permitted ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... temperament and religious theory, utterly opposed to the position of those who are horrified at every demonstration of mirth and playfulness in social life, and who seem to think that everything, decent and immortal, ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... B., given command of Army of Potomac, see vol. i.; his record prior to 1861; his organizing ability; promoted to succeed Scott; his arrogance and contempt for civilians; causes discontent by inactivity; considers army unfit to move; unwilling from temperament to take any risks; fails to appreciate political situation; overestimates preparations of Confederates; overestimates Confederate numbers; wishes to end war by a crushing campaign; ignores Lincoln's suggestion to move; falls ill; hearing of conferences, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... 1795 there were conflicts between Jacobins and royalists. In the south the latter party had signally avenged itself for the agonies of the preceding years, and the ardour of the French temperament seemed about to drive that hapless people from the "Red Terror" to a veritable "White Terror," when two disasters checked the course of the reaction. An attempt of a large force of emigrant French nobles, backed up by British money and ships, to rouse Brittany against the Convention ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... taking up one at a time, and duly laying a volume aside when she found herself mistress of its contents. She had no passion for poetry, but it was an elegant leisurely kind of reading which suited her languid temperament. Moreover, her grandmother had told her that an easy familiarity with the great poets is of all knowledge that which best qualifies a woman to shine in conversation, without offending the superior sex ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... to answer these questions, we ought, first, to consider fairly his native environment, temperament, training, and ability in his own lines, before he resigned himself to the inevitable and made up his mind to enter fully into membership in this great and composite nation. If we can see him as he was, we shall be the better able to see him as he is, and ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... But I was never a successful digger. I had little luck and less patience, and I have no doubt that many a good haul has been taken out of claims previously abandoned by me; for of one or two I had the mortification of hearing while still in the Colony. I suppose I had not the temperament for the work. Dust would not do for me—I must have nuggets. So from Bendigo I drifted to the Ovens, and from the Ovens to Ballarat. But I did no more good on one field than on another, and eventually, early in 1853, I cast up in Melbourne again with the intention of shipping ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... succeeded by the time they reached the brownstone house of sitters, bedrooms and baths, gas stoves, cubby-holes, the persistent reek of onions, cigarettes and hot cheese. The hysteria of the artistic temperament, or the natural exaggeration of an artificial life, had worn itself out for the time being. Rather pathetic little sobs had taken its place, it was with a face streaked with the black stuff from her eyelashes ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... a rather dreamy and indolent temperament, he was not accustomed to getting over the ground with the rapidity ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... of a clear and strong understanding. She manifested when but on the threshold of womanhood that sound common sense and keen insight into character and the true bearing of affairs which distinguished her so pre-eminently in mature and late life. She was serious by temperament, and when at the age of nine years she happened to meet the funeral cortege of a child the same age as herself, she was attracted to the burial, and used afterwards to trace her first abiding sense of the eternal world to the profound impressions ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... was a description of him away from his home. Those who knew him more intimately, socially, and in his family, received a warmer, more tender, and loving impression of him. His disposition was so sweet,—no other word will express it as well,—his temperament so equable, that the perplexities of business and the trials of life, of both which he had a full share, neither disheartened nor soured him in the least. He bore misfortunes and suffering without a murmur. A mistake affecting him, ...
— Fifty years with the Revere Copper Co. - A Paper Read at the Stockholders' Meeting held on Monday 24 March 1890 • S. T. Snow
... dark hair and eyes may make men admire her, but in order to make one of them propose she must blondine her temperament down to the roots. ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... about such things, did not always like walking with her: but she was so interesting and true; she sympathized with him so warmly; he found her so unfailingly and unvaryingly good to him through all the little humors and pettishnesses that almost always accompany a large brain, a nervous temperament, and delicate health. Her quietness soothed him, her strength of character supported him; he at once leaned on ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... of the three sons was Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, of whom it was said "that in the wideness of his sympathies, the broadness of his toleration, and the generosity of his temperament the brilliant Dean of Westminster was a true son of his father, ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... at home in the Fleet as in Pall Mall, and quite as happy in the one place as in the other. "That's the way I take things," would this philosopher say. "If I've money, I spend; if I've credit, I borrow; if I'm dunned, I whitewash; and so you can't beat me down." Happy elasticity of temperament! I do believe that, in spite of his misfortunes and precarious position, there was no man in England whose conscience was more calm, and whose slumbers were more tranquil, than ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the secret explanation of much that had alarmed her in her cousin's manner: and if Lois had been a physician of modern times, she might have traced somewhat of the same temperament in his sisters as well—in Prudence's lack of natural feeling and impish delight in mischief, in Faith's vehemence of unrequited love. But as yet Lois did not know, any more than Faith, that the attachment of the latter to Mr. Nolan ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... arbitrarily and (I think) with a trace of the proverbial Gallic way of looking at the relations of the sexes, has attributed the admitted moral purity of the atmosphere of American society to the coldness of the American temperament and the sera juvenum Venus. It seems to me, however, that there is no call to disparage American virtue by the suggestion of a constitutional want of liability to temptation, and that Mark Twain, in ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Even a virtuous woman could not stand the strain, and Laura was not virtuous. Of neurotic temperament, inherently weak, if not actually vicious in character, with the spirit of the courtesan strong within her from an early age, fond of luxury and personal adornment she could not legitimately afford, it was not surprising that she listened to the flatterers and ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... Pimpernel! Chauvelin now could see it all. Tragedies such as that which had placed an aristo's child in the power of a cunning demon like Marat were not rare these days, and Chauvelin had been fitted by nature and by temperament to understand and appreciate an execrable monster of the type ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... stranger entered deliberately; a tall, fair, handsome man of eight-and-thirty or forty, with one of those cold, intellectual, statuesque faces in which there is a chill harmony, and which are types of a calm temperament, or an extinct volcano. Perhaps it was that cast of countenance which recommended him to the Bowers; yet Leslie was ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... meaning to a passage by too steady pondering over it, just as in twilight an inanimate thing will seem to move, if we look at it long, though the wavering be truly in our own overstrained vision; sometimes our personal temperament will insensibly warp our judgment;—but Mr. White has generally shown so just a discrimination, that there are few instances where we dissent, and in these a pencil will enable every one to edit for himself. Any criticism of an edition of Shakspeare must necessarily concern itself ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... cases of ulcers and injuries. Enlarged prostate nearly always necessitates an operation before relief can be expected. It is impossible here to say much concerning the chances for recovery in each individual case, since they are decided by the strength and temperament of the patient, the care and skill of the surgeon and nurses, and whether the patient has submitted to the operation soon enough in the course of the disease. Let it suffice here to say that the majority of the above-mentioned operations are ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... inclined to believe that my few hours' acquaintance with our captain has given me considerable insight into his charac- ter. That he is a good seaman and thoroughly understands his duties I could not for a moment venture to deny; but that he is a man of resolute temperament, or that he pos- sesses the amount of courage that would render him, phy- sically or morally, capable of coping with any great emer- gency, I confess I cannot believe. I observed a certain heaviness and dejection about ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... grunted again, and her colour rose. For nearly a fortnight she had not spoken to any other man—at least, to the boatswain's knowledge—and she fully realized the cloying effect of security upon a man of his temperament. ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... connatural to this individual man, on account of there being some corruption of nature in him. And this corruption may be either on the part of the body—from some ailment; thus to a man suffering from fever, sweet things seem bitter, and vice versa—or from an evil temperament; thus some take pleasure in eating earth and coals and the like; or on the part of the soul; thus from custom some take pleasure in cannibalism or in the unnatural intercourse of man and beast, or other such things, which are not in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... the writer of these speculations says to himself: "Let me, at all events, try to eliminate any bias, and see the whole thing as should an umpire—one of those pure beings in white coats, purged of all the prejudices, passions, and predilections of mankind. Let me have no temperament for the time being, for I have to set down—not what would be the effect on me if I were in their place, or what would happen to the future if I could have my way, but what would happen all the same if I were not alive. Only ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... in all this there is no touch of ecstasy; no spark of the inspiration which in a St. Francis, a St. Teresa, or a Charles Wesley, scales the heights of hymnody. And, as the unimaginative Roman temperament lacked the instinct of adoration, so was it deficient in that other constituent of supernatural faith, the belief in immortality. There might be a shadowy world—the poets said so—Odysseus visited ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... motherhood, which develops the whole of a woman's nature, would give full scope to her overflowing sentiments. She has never cared for any one, however. Yet her impressionable nature is a danger to her. She knows this herself, and when she saw that I recognized it, she admitted the excitability of her temperament to me. She belongs to the small minority of women whom the slightest contact with others causes to vibrate perilously; so that she must be made to value herself on her discretion and her womanly pride. She is as wild and shy as a swallow! Ah! what a wealth ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... if to bring an experimental proof of this assertion, Lasigue published a report on catalepsy in persons of hysterical tendencies, which be afterward incorporated into his larger work. Among his patients, those who were of a quiet and lethargic temperament, by simply pressing down the eyelids, were made to enter into a peculiar state of languor, in which cataleptic contractions were easily produced, and which forcibly recalled hypnotic phenomena. "One can scarcely imagine," says ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... exaggerated vituperation of Webster in the anti-slavery press; and the extremes of approval and disapproval both concur in recognizing the widespread effect of the speech. "No speech ever delivered in Congress produced... so beneficial a change of opinion. The change of, feeling and temperament wrought in Congress by this speech is ...
— Webster's Seventh of March Speech, and the Secession Movement • Herbert Darling Foster
... after day, for months and years, they live a strange, incredible life in their public harems, outcast by society, accursed by the family, victims of the social temperament, cloacas for the excess of the city's sensuality, the guardians of the honour of the family—four hundred foolish, lazy, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... care for Rita, you should remain away from Sukey," remarked Billy. "She may be comprehensive in her affections, and she may have been—to state it mildly—overtender at times; but when a girl of her ardent temperament falls in love, she becomes dangerous, because she is really very ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... doctors do not concern me. I have worked out a classification of my own which holds good for the entire profession. All doctors, I believe, may be divided into those who go clean-shaven and those who wear beards. The difference is more than one of appearance. It is a difference of temperament and conduct. The smooth-faced physician represents the buoyant, the romantic, what one might almost call the impressionistic strain in the medical profession. The other is the conservative, the classicist. My personal likings are all for the newer type, ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... leave Paris he died suddenly on the 8th of December, in the sixtieth year of his age. There seems to have been no suspicion at the time of other than natural causes of death, he being exceedingly stout and of apoplectic temperament; but many years after a story, apparently well-founded, became current that he was killed in a duel arising out of his official action in India. His old antagonist on the battlefield, Sir Edward Hughes, died at a ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... bed-room, in which she daily held deep debate with Griffiths, her factotum, respecting household affairs, knitting-needles, and her own little ailments and cossetings. Griffiths, luckily, was a woman of much the same tastes as her ladyship, only somewhat of a more active temperament; and they were most stedfast friends. It was such a comfort to Lady Cashel to have some one to whom ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... not lend money to Stanislas? He is apt, when the world goes ill with him, to seek distraction, to behave unconventionally. It is not a question of drowning his cares, for the least little drop acting upon his artistic temperament—" ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Charlie's temperament was pessimistic at best. When the wanigan was to be moved, he rose fairly to the heights of what might ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... Revolution,—that a "love of the antique" knit in bonds of life-long friendship Winckelmann and Cardinal Albani,— that among the most salient of childhood's memories should be Memnon's image and the Colossus of Rhodes,—that an imaginative girl of exalted temperament died of love for the Apollo Belvidere,—and that Carrara should win many a pilgrimage because its quarries have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... nice and discriminating judgment, and it was plain that this long-legged, unpretentious young man was deeply in her good graces. Evidently, then, this chap must be more than a bit unusual. Going to be an artist, was he? Well, thank God, he didn't look as if he were afflicted with the artistic temperament; he looked as if he were capable of hard work, ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... the difference between the devotion requisite to private affairs and to affairs of state is merely one of quantity. For the rest the parallel holds strictly, and in this respect pre-eminently, that both are concerned with human instruments: which human beings, moreover, are of one type and temperament, whether we speak of devotion to public affairs or of the administration of private property. To fare well in either case is given to those who know the secret of dealing with humanity, whereas the absence of that knowledge will as certainly ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... even say that the light which is said to have proceeded from some human bodies, of a particular temperament, and especially on some extraordinary occasions, may not have been of the electrical kind, that is, produced independently of friction, or with less friction than would have produced it in other persons; as in those cases related by Bartholin in his ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... before the details connected with the sheriff were completed. By this time Chamberlain's heavy but sound temperament had lifted itself to its task, gaining momentum as the hours went by. His next step was to search out the Frenchman. The meager information obtained the day before was to the effect that the marooned yacht-owner ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... force. Writing of him after his death, Dr. Bellows said: "He had rare administrative qualities and a statesmanlike mind. He would have been a leader anywhere. He had the ambition, the faculties, and the impulsive temperament of an actor in affairs. He had the fervor, the concentration of will, the passionate enthusiasm of conviction, the love of martyrdom, which make men great in action."[9] Throughout his life Gannett labored assiduously ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... had for me an indescribable charm, no less than her beauty; and I resolved, if possible, to make her my mistress, for I doubted not that when she should become nourished and strengthened by proper food and rest, she would make a very desirable companion for a man of my amorous temperament. However, I did not broach the subject at that time, but contented myself with seeing that she was comfortably provided for that night, under the charge of one of the females of the house, to whom I gave money with which to ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... broke out in all its wild passion the Irish temperament. Let us pass it over; why try to earn a little credit by depicting the agony and the weakness of ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... more direct. Even on such a question as the problem of poverty he frankly prefers imagination to study. In art he demands instinctiveness, and has a profound suspicion of anybody who is conscious of possessing the artistic temperament. As a guide to truth he always would follow poetry in preference to logic. He is never tired of attacking rationality, and for him anything which is rationalised is ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... and the terrible gift of curse possessed by his brother Henry; and once more her heart would sink to the uttermost depths of distress and terror. The supernatural, however, in the course of a little time, prevailed, as it was only reasonable to suppose it would in such a temperament as hers; and as her mind proceeded to struggle with the two impressions, she felt that her dread of Woodward was gradually gaining upon and absorbing the other. Her fear of him, consequently, was deadly; that terrible and malignant eye—notwithstanding its dark brilliancy ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... which goes to making up the tone of France: the quality of courage. It is not unintentionally that it comes last on my list. French courage is courage rationalized, courage thought out, and found necessary to some special end; it is, as much as any other quality of the French temperament, the result ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... emphasis of a man's spirit with or without money. Whether a man should be rich or get out of being rich and earn the right to be poor (which some very true and big men, artists and inventors in this world will always prefer) turns on a man's temperament. If a man has a money genius and can so handle money that he can make money, and if he can, at the same time, and all in one bargain, express his own spirit, if he can free the spirits of other men with money and express his religion in it, he should be ostracized by all thoughtful, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... After they have endured, as the consequence of any actions, this species of punishment, they will long remember their sufferings, and will carefully avoid incurring, in future, similar penalties. Sudden and transient pain appears to be most effectual with persons of an opposite temperament. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... of a sanguine temperament, the Unemployed cheered his drooping spirits by murmuring, "Better luck to-morrow!" Then he retired to his rather damp quarters in the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... spirit of greatness, I should be exultantly silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do, and my songs are as ephemeral." It is for this bird-like quality of song, it seems to me, that they are to be valued. They hint, in a sort of delicately evasive way, at a rare temperament, the temperament of a woman of the East, finding expression through a Western language and under partly Western influences. They do not express the whole of that temperament; but they express, I think, its essence; and there is an Eastern ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... man of this temperament, his prospects had become less assured. There was perturbation in the sugar world; income from St. Kitts and from Whitechapel had sensibly diminished, and it seemed but too likely, would continue to do so. For some ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... counter-philosophy of condonance and individualism, and I'm alternately an ethical egoist, a Fabian socialist and a cynic. Moreover, I'm a creature of whims and inconsistencies and there are black nights in my temperament when John Barleycorn lightens the gloom; and there are other nights when he treacherously deepens it—but I'm peculiarly balanced and subject to irresistible fits of moral atrophy. All of which has nothing at all to do with the soundness of my impersonal philosophy. Wherefore," with ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... the Queen's confidante in her youth, gave me such a history of her early days as I cannot omit giving you, though I should have done it sooner. She told me that the Queen was neither in body nor mind truly Spanish; that she had neither the temperament nor the vivacity of her nation, but only the coquetry of it, which she retained in perfection; that M. Bellegarde, a gallant old gentleman, after the fashion of the Court of Henri III., pleased her till he was going to ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... much weight and prominence against his calmer reason! I can easily understand how, with his tastes and leanings, the clericals should have managed to get a hold over him. The clericals are such insinuating cunning fellows. A very impressionable boy Artie was, always; the poetical temperament and the artistic temperament always is impressionable, I suppose; but shoemaking certainly does develop the logical faculties. Seems as though the logical faculties were situated in the fore-part of the brain, as they ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... heart was full of a passionate love to her mother that made the thought of having grieved her a far bitterer punishment than the enforced solitude, though that was at any time irksome enough to one of Vi's social, fun-loving temperament. ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... he, too, had been won away, by the desire of rule and reference, from the humble quiet of his native fireside; and if, in after life, he did not bitterly repent of the folly, it was because of that light-hearted and sanguine temperament which never deserted him quite, and supported him in all events and through every vicissitude. He had wandered much after leaving his parental home, and was now engaged in an occupation and pursuit which our future pages must develop. Having narrated, in his desultory way to his ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... was left alone, Lena soon ceased weeping. She was not of a particularly sensitive temperament, and had little pride beyond that of vanity. After the first bitter anger wore itself out, she felt nothing more than a healthy sense of humiliation and defeat. She had no inclination to run away, for she was married now, and in her eyes ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... matters," said Carson Tinker. "Talky-talk writing: 'the drama'—'temperament'—'people of cultivation'—quotes Latin or Italian or something. 'Technique' is his star word; he plays 'technique' for a hand every other line. Doesn't do any harm; in fact, I think he does us a good deal of good. Lots of people read that talky-talk writing nowadays. ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... the Grammar School life are meagre, but we can readily understand that to a lad of Borrow's temperament the routine of a well-ordered school was naturally distasteful, though he loved to gain knowledge from any unconventional source open to him. So we find him studying French and Italian with "one banished ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... active part in all important transactions, the controversy with England being then in effect the business of his life, facts, dates and particulars, made an impression which was never effaced. He was prepared, therefore, by education and discipline, as well as by natural talent and natural temperament, for the part which ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... leaders from Massachusetts, Messrs. Caleb Cushing and Benjamin F. Butler, of whom the former was chosen President of the Convention, warmly supported the candidacy of Mr. Jefferson Davis. New York, under the direction of Mr. Dean Richmond, gave its influence to Mr. Douglas. Of a combative temperament, Mr. Richmond was impressed with a belief that "secession" was but a bugbear to frighten the northern wing of the party. Thus he failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation, and impaired the value of unusual common sense and unselfish patriotism, qualities ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... Nikolay had been in the devout stage, the period of fasts and monks and church services, when he was seeking in religion a support and a curb for his passionate temperament, everyone, far from encouraging him, had jeered at him, and he, too, with the others. They had teased him, called him Noah and Monk; and, when he had broken out, no one had helped him, but everyone had turned away from ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... possessed of an imagination or of a fervid temperament; if, as will sometimes happen to the most complete cashier, he loves his wife, and that wife grows tired of her lot, has ambitions, or merely some vanity in her composition, the cashier is undone. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... the atmosphere grew not only unfriendly, but owing to the sudden cool change their development was intensely slow. The animal originally migrated from New York and thus anything slow would naturally unnerve its intuitively high strung temperament. ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... life quite as devastatingly as Martin's death. Though for more than three years her sister had been away at school, with an ever-widening gulf of temperament between herself and the farm, and though since her return she had been little better at times than a rebellious and sulky stranger, nevertheless she was a part of Ansdore, a part of Joanna's life there, and the elder sister found it difficult ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... A youth of such heroic And gentle temperament! The Duke himself, 'Twas easily seen, how near it ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... nor the children knew that whenever they left the house they were followed by a detective, and every movement was closely watched. But Felicita was conscious of it by some delicate sensitiveness of her imaginative temperament. She refused to quit the house except in the evening, when she rambled about the garden, and felt the fresh air from the river breathing against her often aching temples. Even then she fancied an eye upon her—an unsleeping, unblinking eye; the unwearying vigilance of justice on the watch for ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... Inscription, which in some respects forms a singular parallel to the celebrated Christian Inscription of Si-ngan fu, though it is of far more modern date (1511). It exhibits, as that inscription does, the effect of Chinese temperament or language, in modifying or diluting doctrinal statements. Here is a passage: "With respect to the Israelitish religion, we find on inquiry that its first ancestor, Adam, came originally from India, and that during the (period ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... record of the doings of his section, and I have read nothing that gives anything near so convincing an impression of the truth, at once splendid and bitter. It is a privilege to be shown, through the medium of an imaginative temperament, the fine comradeship of the trenches, the heroism that shines through the haunting fear of death, mostly conquered with a laugh, but sometimes frankly expressed in the pathetic desire for a "blighty" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... faults grew out of virtues pushed to extremes. In our times such a man would not be selected as a travelling companion, or a man at whose house we would wish to keep the Christmas holidays. His unattractive austerity perhaps has been made too much of by his enemies, and grew out of his unimpulsive temperament,—call it cold if we must,—and also out of his stern theology, which marked the ascetics of the Middle Ages. Few would now approve of his severity of discipline any more than they would feel inclined to accept some ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... understood the bond that had been growing so rapidly between them. His was the temperament that immediately translates feeling into action. He reached into his breast pocket. There was the blue-black glint of a cold steel automatic. A moment he balanced it in his hand. Then with a rapid and decisive motion of the arm he flung it far from him. As it struck the water with a sound horribly ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... not quite saintly; his greatness was cast in a mortal mould; he was a little severe, almost a little hard; he was vehement and somewhat oppugnant. Himself the most indefatigable of workers, I know not whether he could have understood, or made allowance for, a temperament that required more rest; yet not to one man in twenty thousand is given his giant faculty of labour; by virtue of it he seems to me the greatest of working men. Exacting he might have been, then, on this point; and granting that he were so, and ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the n-th power of attracting attention to anything he likes, as the world's greatest News Man—the world's greatest living energy to-day in advertising what is good and what is had in our American temperament. ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... who were living in A.P. wished her to break up her home and come and live with them. They had room in their hearts and homes for her, but not for Annette. There was something in Annette's temperament with which other members of the family could not harmonize. They were not considerate enough to take into account her antenatal history, and to pity where they were so ready to condemn. Had Annette been born deficient in any of her bodily organs, they could ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... approximate expression for her feelings in the old Benedicite that she had lisped from infancy; and it was enough. Such high contentment with such a slight initial performance as that of having started towards a means of independent living was a part of the Durbeyfield temperament. Tess really wished to walk uprightly, while her father did nothing of the kind; but she resembled him in being content with immediate and small achievements, and in having no mind for laborious effort towards ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy |
