"Irritability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the vicinity, I would call and see if you've recovered from your—well, your silly fit of irritability," he said, with a grim smile on his grey face as he looked towards ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... adjoining this one was where Montesquieu's secretary worked. He was the drudge of a literary man, who was probably not exempt from the constitutional irritability of those who carry a whirling grindstone within their brains for the sharpening and polishing of thought. The unremembered scribe may have done good service to literature while undergoing his ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... not at once grasp the situation in so far as he himself was concerned. But he divined the cause of the lawyer's irritability, and refrained from pushing the argument further. The discussion could, indeed, serve no purpose, save to embitter the quarrel. He ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... The irritability of genius is forcibly characterised by this circumstance in his literary life. When a close friendship had united him to Jurieu, he lavished on him the most flattering eulogiums: he is the hero of his "Republic of Letters." Enmity succeeded to friendship; Jurieu is then ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the hair, when he came on the traces of the girl's presence, reminding him of a line in a certain poem which he had read lately with a new and peculiar interest. He even recalled a curious evidence of exalted sensibility and irritability, in the twitching of the minute muscles of the internal ear at every unexpected sound, producing an odd little snap in the middle of the head, which proved to him that he was getting ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... patient man. His Celtic nature still retained all its native irritability, and his foreman, Jim Thorpe, had ample demonstration of it. He had spent several uncomfortable half hours that day with his employer. He was responsible for the working of the ranch. It was his to see that everything ran ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... or of part, of our system is perpetually changing; these vicissitudes of irritability and of inirritability are believed to depend on the accumulation or exhaustion of the sensorial power, as their proximate cause; and on the difference of the present stimulus, and of that which we had previously been accustomed to, as their remote cause. Thus a smaller degree of heat produces ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... 113 Fahr. The water of this spring possesses marked anodyne properties, which render it very valuable whenever the weakened state of the constitution or its irritability requires to be moderately excited. Of all the Vichy waters it contains the least carbonic acid without being more difficult of digestion, and as, on the other hand, it is the most mineralised, it can in many cases profitably replace the ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... became aware, through some subtle channel of sensation, that somebody was standing in the door-way. He was lying in such a position that he could not see the door, so, after waiting a few moments, he exclaimed, with an invalid's irritability: ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... and loveless! Yes, and as such may be classed the drops of life known as unicellular organisms. Such a creature is a tiny cell, capable of performing in itself all the functions of life. That one pulsating morsel of matter is invested with an irritability which, as Herbert Spencer says, enables it "to adjust the inner relations with outer relations," to correspond to its environment—in short, to live. That single cell contracts and recoils from the things in its environment uncongenial to its ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... that the ire which was cooling shot forth flame in another direction. Brother and sister arrived at Geneva in something less than perfect amity. Their real affection for each other was quite capable of bearing not infrequently the strain of irritability on both sides. A day of mutual causticities had well prepared the ground for the return of good temper, when the arrival of Wilfrid, by astonishing both, hastened their complete reconciliation. Wilfrid was mysterious; ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... his power of intensely feeling a situation, of intimately associating himself with a character; not from his gift of expression, which rather even leads him astray, degenerating sometimes into a fondness for curiosity of expression, into an irritability of fancy, which seems to make it impossible for him to say a thing plainly, even when the press of the action demands the very directest language, or its level character the very simplest. Mr. Hallam, than whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... no irritability this afternoon; but a gentle radiance that diffused itself on all around, and made the whole household happy,—especially Griffith, whose pipe she filled, for once, with her own white hand, and talked dogs, horses, calves, hinds, cows, politics, markets, hay, to please him: and seemed interested ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... rather angry with Lord Y——, for not introducing me, as he had promised, to this fair lady; and yet the repetition of my name would have increased my vexation. In short, I was unjust, and felt an impatience and irritability quite unusual to my temper. Lady Y—— addressed some conversation to me, in an obliging manner, and I did my best to support my part till she left me: but my attention was soon distracted, by a conversation that commenced at another ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... have been long quite familiar, and I know several others who are equally so, with cholera, in which a perfect similarity to the symptoms of the Indian or Russian cholera has existed: the collapse—the deadly coldness with a clammy skin—the irritability of the stomach, and prodigious discharge from the bowels of an opaque serous fluid (untinged with bile in the slightest degree)—with a corresponding shrinking of flesh and integuments—the pulseless and livid extremities—the ghastly ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... trying operation Dick Varley never once betrayed the slightest feeling of irritability or impatience. He did not expect success at first; he was not therefore disappointed ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... had wanted to write. Without doubt he had helped her, comforted her loneliness; had given her a charming friendship, a delightful comradeship. Much of his work had been written for her, to her. It was fine work. She had been proud of her share in it. Even allowing there were faults—irritability, shortness of temper, a tendency to bossiness!—underneath it all was a man. The gallant struggle, the difficulties overcome, the long suffering, the high courage—all that she, reading between the lines, had divined of his life's battle! ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... Elliot back, all his debts paid, to live at home and be a comfort, or some friend was to give Walter a great living, or Clara was to come out, and to be presented in the summer. At the same time the fretful irritability of nerve and temper continued, and any unusual excitement, the talking a little longer in her room, a letter, or a little disappointment, would keep her awake all night. One thing, however, seemed certain, that Lionel's presence had some of the same power over her as her husband's; she ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... changed, as he has been in the last two years, I have never seen," replied Lionel. "None can have failed to remark it. From entire calmness of mind, he has exhibited anxious restlessness; I may say irritability. Mrs. Verner is ill," Lionel added, as they were ascending the stairs. "She has not been out ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... go on to the second mistake—enforced silence. Moderate reading aloud is good: but where there is any tendency to irritability of throat or lungs, too much moderation cannot be used. You may as well try to cure a diseased lung by working it, as to cure a lame horse by galloping him. But where the breathing organs are of average health, let it be said once and for all, that children and young people cannot make ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... not restored in the palace of Meneptah. The unrest that precedes a national crisis had developed into irritability and pugnacity. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... function. It shows, in Macbeth's furious irritability and purposeless savagery, the internal reaction which accompanies the outward decline of his fortunes. And in other plays also the exhibition of such inner changes forms a means by which interest is sustained in this difficult section of a tragedy. There is no point in Hamlet where we feel ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... irritated, he did not know at what, but he was. He hurried Elizabeth away without ceremony. As soon as they were beyond earshot he began to voice his grievances. The point he discussed had nothing whatever to do with the real ground for his irritability, but served as an outlet for his ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... manifested a certain moodiness and irritability very unlike her usual facile sweetness of disposition, and Sara was somewhat nonplussed to account for it. Finally, she approached the matter by way of ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... Hill. He expressed all his nervous dread, his vexation, his irritability by one tremendous whack of his fist on ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... superiority in Margaret—interfered in no degree with the reverence she entertained for Hester, a reverence rather enhanced than impaired by the tender compassion, with which she regarded her mental conflicts and sufferings. Every movement of irritability in herself (and she was conscious of many) alarmed and humbled her, but, at the same time, enabled her better to make allowance for her sister; and every harsh word and unreasonable mood of Hester's, by restoring ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... restless, although he was tired out and half-starved. The irritability of Africa was upon him—had hold over him—gripped him remorselessly. No one knows what it is, but it is there, and sometimes it is responsible for murder. It makes honourable European gentlemen commit crimes of which they blush to think in after ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... Despite his natural irritability, to which no one appeared to pay much attention, Mr. Loring grew almost cordial under the geniality and hopefulness emanating from Judge Clarkson, whom he was really very glad to see, and of whom he had numberless queries to ask regarding ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... fortress, in an atmosphere of quiet domestic usefulness. One becomes known to fame, and her friends, as being above all others, "such a comfort to her mother." She interviews the cook, she arranges the dinners, she devises light and favourite dishes to blunt the edge of paternal irritability by tickling the paternal palate, she writes out invitations, presides at the afternoon tea-table, and, in short, takes upon herself many of those smaller duties which are as last straws to the maternal back. Another becomes the sworn friend and ally of her brothers, whom she assists in their ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 6, 1890 • Various
... to use to the utmost. I determined always strictly to fulfil the threats and promises I made; and, to that end, I must be cautious to threaten and promise nothing that I could not perform. Then, I would carefully refrain from all useless irritability and indulgence of my own ill-temper: when they behaved tolerably, I would be as kind and obliging as it was in my power to be, in order to make the widest possible distinction between good and bad conduct; I would reason with them, ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... years she became more intensely fashionable, more bigoted, more fond of admiration, more difficult to please. She had refused so many offers, while she had coquetted so much, that young men began to avoid her. This greatly increased her natural irritability; made her jealous of the success of every rising belle, censorious, ill natured in remark, and generally disagreeable. When Hiram Meeker first saw Miss Arabella Thorne in her pew at St. Jude's, the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... freedom of portly and slovenly middle age. Civilization had restricted his potations or limited them to certain festivals known as "sprees," and his face was less puffy and sodden. But with the accession of sobriety he had lost his good humor, and had the irritability and intolerance of ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... when in the prime of youth—rich, courted, respected, run after—that Ernest Maltravers fell seriously ill. It was no active or visible disease, but a general irritability of the nerves, and a languid sinking of the whole frame. His labours began, perhaps, to tell against him. In earlier life he had been as active as a hunter of the chamois, and the hardy exercise of his frame counteracted the effects of a restless and ardent mind. The change ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... days the cretin will get warmer, and require much less wrapping and bed-clothing. With the improvement in circulation, the color becomes better and the extremities lose their coldness. In a week or so, irritability and resentment at disturbance appear. He will begin to recognize and know his parents, smile and play. There is a gradual return to the normal of the facial appearance, and a resumption of growth. All kinds of marvelous growth effects occur. Twenty teeth may be cut in six months. Coarse, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... many beautiful trees, and loved many more outside of my own leafy harem. Those who write verses have no special claim to be lovers of trees, but so far as one is of the poetical temperament he is likely to be a tree-lover. Poets have, as a rule, more than the average nervous sensibility and irritability. Trees have no nerves. They live and die without suffering, without self-questioning or self-reproach. They have the divine gift of silence. They cannot obtrude upon the solitary moments when one is to himself the most agreeable of companions. The whole vegetable ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the Navy was spent upon the Malabar Coast, where the disease is endemic. There can be do doubt that it has been latent in his system ever since, and that the irritability of temper and indecision of character, of which his family have so often had to complain, were really among the symptoms ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... tarried in the expectation of obtaining rest. Sligo has very kindly proposed a union of our forces for the occasion, which will be perhaps as uncomfortable to him as to myself, judging from previous experience, which, however, may be explained by my own irritability and hurry. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... shell of its former self. People walked its streets and went through the motions of life. But they were not really alive. The vital criteria were as necessary for a race as for an individual. Growth, reproduction, irritability, metabolism—Mary smiled wryly. Whoever had authored that hackneyed mnemonic that life was a "grim" proposition never knew how right he was, particularly when one of ...
— Pandemic • Jesse Franklin Bone
... was written, sealed, and fairly despatched. The die was cast, and I walked into the air a regenerated and an elastic being! Let what might happen, I was sure of Anna. Her gentleness would calm my irritability; her prudence temper my energies; her bland but enduring affections soothe my soul. I felt at peace with all around me, myself included, and I found a sweet assurance of the wisdom of the step I had just taken in the expanding ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... requisition. The fact that he was entirely dependent on Luke's care, and was obliged to be tended like an infant, instead of inspiring any gratitude or compassion towards his poor slave, seemed only to increase his irritability and cruelty. As he lay there on his bed, a mere degraded wreck of manhood, he took into his head the strangest freaks of despotism; and if Luke hesitated to submit to his orders, the constable was immediately sent ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... Nassau, where his brother was established. At bottom, however, he was an excellent fellow, warm hearted, honourable, and upright. As for little Wagtail—oh, he was a delight!—a small round man, with all the Jamaica Creole irritability of temper, but also all the Jamaica warmth of heart about him straightforward, and scrupulously conscientious in his dealings, but devoted to good cheer in every shape. He had also been ailing, and had adventured ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... understood the reason for the fellow's morbid irritability, his suicidal recklessness; but when he privately remonstrated he was gruffly told to mind his own business. Branch flatly refused to modify his conduct; he seemed really bent upon cheating the disease that ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... had to bear in consequence the burden of an increased irritability in her aunt's addresses to her. But she was greatly cheered when the colonel took an opportunity of seeing her alone, and assuring her that, spite of appearances to the contrary, the clouds were beginning to break, and that light ...
— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson
... Feverish irritability, a constant absorption in thought, made Calyste almost doltish. Often he would sit for hours with his eyes fixed on some figure in the tapestry. One morning his mother implored him to give up Les Touches, and leave ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... organs—the liver, kidneys, stomach, and heart—predisposing them to derangement, and aiding the progress of organic mischief in them, should that arise from other causes. It affects the nerves, causing irritability and debility in them. Nervous power becomes impaired, reacting with evil effect upon the ganglionic centres and the brain. Hence the mind must become insidiously affected also. I am quite sure that the character ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... in him. The irritability approaching to violence, which had attended every speech and infused itself into every movement since he came into the room, had left him. He spoke quietly, and with a touch of irony in his tone. He seemed more the man, but not a whit more prepossessing, and, if anything, less calculated to inspire ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... there's other of your virtues you can be more sure of,' said she, rising, 'for if I was asked your worst failing, I'd say it was your irritability.' And with a stern frown, as though to confirm the judicial severity of her words, she nodded her head to ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... so impressive in all this history as the difference between Moses when called upon to take responsibility as a military commander, and Moses when, not to mince matters, he acted as a quack. On the one hand, he was all vacillation, timidity, and irritability. On the ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... injuriandi, is not worth inquiring, if no injuria can be proved. But the truth is, there was no animus injuriandi. It was only an animus irritandi[419], which, happening to be exercised upon a genus irritabile, produced unexpected violence of resentment. Their irritability arose only from an opinion of their own importance, and their delight in their new exaltation. What might have been borne by a Procurator could not be borne by a Solicitor. Your Lordships well know, that honores mutant mores. Titles and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... other, of solitude, silence—and the whole world rocking with battles—and not a sound up here—not a whisper! I tell you we're four sick men! We've got a grip on ourselves yet, but it's slipping. We're still fairly civil to each other, but the strain is killing. Sullen silences smother irritability, but—" he added in a peculiarly pleasant voice, "I expect we are likely to start killing each other if somebody doesn't get us out ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... the "traitor" Pitt, and the whole brood of hoary power. I was too feeble to turn him out of the room, and too contemptuous to reply. But his overthrow was not the further off. The old nurse, who, old as she was, still retained some of the sinews and all the irritability of a stout Champenoise peasant, roused by his insults to the aristocracy, one of whom she probably regarded herself, from having lived so long under their roof, watched her opportunity, made a spring at him like ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... be as nothing to what strove for delivery now. And this he was desperately engaged in stifling to death; and not the beauty of his mind alone but of his nature, for beyond all doubt his gentleness and sweetness and refinement were as much a part of his genius as irritability and violence were fellows to the ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... Decker betrayed some slight and apparently uncalled for irritability on reaching the Plaza, and presently desired her husband to wheel her back home. Moreover, she was very much astonished at meeting Mr. Oakhurst just as they were returning, and even doubted if it were he, and questioned her husband as to his identity with the stranger of yesterday ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... situation. If, Monsieur, you happen to have gone through a similar day of violent effusion and general expansion, you will agree with me that during no other moment of your life were you more inclined to irritability. ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... method. Indifference to need for help. Too close holding to the text. Distant attitude—aloofness. Partiality. Excitability. Irritability. Pessimism—"in the dumps." Indifferent assignments. Hazy explanations. Failure to cover assignments. Distracting facial expressions. Attitude of "lording it over." Sarcasm. Poor taste in dress. Bluffing—"the tables turned." ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... a mujerado, a very powerful man is chosen, and he is made to masturbate excessively and ride constantly. Gradually such irritable weakness of the genital organs is engendered that, in riding, great loss of semen is induced. This condition of irritability passes into paralytic impotence. Then the testicles and penis atrophy, the hair of the beard falls out, the voice loses its depth and compass, and physical strength and energy decrease. Inclinations ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... pinched or flushing suddenly, a feeling of great heat or excessive perspiration, are all danger signals showing that the exercise has already been carried too far and should cease at once. Continued over-exertion carried to a point of exhaustion leads to an obstinate irritability of the heart as ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... and saw how he suffered, all other thoughts were once more drowned and swept away. She forgot how he often rendered her life miserable, wellnigh unbearable, by small vices, faults that defy definition, unending selfishness and unceasing irritability. But now all dissatisfaction and bitternesses were again merged into a sentiment that was akin to love; and in this time of physical degradation he possessed her perhaps more truly, more perfectly, than even in his best moments ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... over, an irritability grew upon Grantline's men. And perhaps since the human mind is so wonderful, elusive a thing, there lay upon these men an indefinable sense of disaster. Johnny Grantline felt it. He thought about it now as he sat in the ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... which, rightly passed, bring pleasures that raise the tide of life and renew the powers of work, cannot be utilized: there is not vigor enough for enjoyments involving action, and lack of spirits prevents passive enjoyments from being entered upon with zest. In brief, life becomes a burden. The irritability resulting now from ailments, now from failures caused from feebleness, his family has daily to bear. Lacking adequate energy for joining in them, he has at best but a tepid interest in the amusements of his children; and ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... rebuff. But he was not surprised, on leaving, to find Conscience waylaying him at the front door with an envelope in her hand, which she asked him to post without fail in the morning when after his invariable custom he drove to the village post office. Within the last few days the invalid's irritability had taken the form of intense dislike for the jingle of the telephone and in deference to his whim it had been disconnected. Consequently the family friend had of late both mailed and delivered notes between the lovers and ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... elapsed, without the occurrence of anything worth relating; but in which I was much struck with two entirely new features in Henry's character, which were gloom and irritability. At times he was still as agreeable as ever, but the least coldness on my part, or the commonest kind of attention paid me by others, seemed to exasperate him beyond any attempt at self-government. He was once on the verge of insulting Sir Edmund ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... so often levelled at my friend the poet, would now and then rouse him into rage; and at such times the haughty scorn he would hurl on his foes, was proof positive of his possession of that one attribute, irritability, almost universally ascribed to the votaries ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... some incipient forms of insanity; so the development of new psychic faculties is frequently attended by temporary loss of control over the normal brain functions. Loss of memory, hysteria, absent-mindedness, unconscious utterance of thought, illusions, irritability, indifference, misanthropy and similar perversions are not infrequent products of the preliminary stages of psychic development. These, however, will pass away as the new faculty pushes through into full existence. Nature is jealous of ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... presumption for knowledge. From the scanty field of what is known, he launches into the boundless region of what is unknown. He establishes for his guide some fanciful theory of corpuscular attraction, of chemical agency, of mechanical powers, of stimuli, of irritability accumulated or exhausted, of depletion by the lancet, and repletion by mercury, or some other ingenious dream, which lets him into all nature's secrets at short hand. On the principle which he thus assumes, he forms his table of nosology, arrays his diseases into ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... whose instrumentality he attributed his being overlooked by Lord Melbourne in his cabinet arrangements. Lord Lyndhurst did the excellent qualities of Lord Durham justice, and displayed a calmness in debate which contrasted strikingly with the irritability and personalities of Lord Brougham. The debate brought forcibly to light the disposition of Lord Durham to carry matters with a high hand in his new government, and his deficiency in that wariness and prudence so essential to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... also, should fail them. Yet they went through the second winter in good health and unshaken morale, though one can not read such portions of Greely's diary as he has published, without seeing that the irritability and jealousy that seem to be the inevitable accompaniments of long imprisonment in an Arctic station, began to make their appearance. With the advent of spring the commander began to make his preparations ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... her—that his presence of mind completely failed him: he didn't himself know what he was saying at the time. He lost his head; and she lost her patience. Think of his nervous confusion in collision with her nervous irritability—and the result explains itself: nothing could come of it but misapprehension and mistake. I turned the thing over in my mind, after you had left us; and the one course to take that I could see was to accept the position patiently, ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... I know best, sir. If you were in robust health there would be none of that display of irritability of temper that you evince. You as his messmate must have noticed this irritability, ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... was easily the master. He had that power which our anaemic age can hardly comprehend, of writing, writing, writing, without fear of exhaustion, without irritability or self-criticism, without danger of comparing the better with the worse. Five great volumes of small print, all good—men of that facility never write the really paltry things—all good, and most of ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... making him occasionally impatient and irritable, like a spirited horse touched by the spur; though his original good-nature from time to time shone through it all. When the line had been brought to a successful completion, a very marked change in him became visible. The irritability passed away, and when difficulties and vexations arose they were treated by him as matters of course, and ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... had a bottle of ether in the pocket of his coat, and he rightly judged that a very little of that would put an end to the life that was hanging in the balance. Nearly half an hour passed before either spoke again. Then Keyork looked up. This time his voice was smooth and persuasive. His irritability had all disappeared. ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... Somersetshire when he was summoned to court by a letter written by the royal hand. He instantly hastened to London. The irritability of his mind and body were increased by the rapidity with which he travelled; and when he reached his journey's end he was suffering from fever. Ill as he was, he saw the King at Richmond, and undertook ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his manner betrays a nervous system overtaxed and barely under control. At the moment that he enters he is evidently laboring under some especial, and only half-concealed, nervous strain. In spite of his irritability at times with his wife, there is an undercurrent of tenderness which reveals his real ...
— The Climbers - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... these Mr. Fessenden was one. He regained the vigor that carried him through those critical years of senatorial work on which his fame chiefly rests; yet he always felt that he had been irreparably injured by the insidious attack. The irritability and impatience which he occasionally displayed in public and in private came undoubtedly from suffering which he bore with heroic endurance through the years when his public ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... whose instructive conversation so far blinded me to the miserable state in which I was, that I actually forgot it. This was Langer, afterwards librarian at Wolfenbuettel. Eminently learned and instructed, he was delighted at my voracious hunger after knowledge, which, with the irritability of sickness, now broke out into a perfect fever. He tried to calm me by perspicuous summaries; and I have been very much indebted to his acquaintance, short as it was, since he understood how to guide me in various ways, and made me attentive whither I had to direct myself at the present ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... readers with any reply ... we shall merely observe that if we viewed with astonishment the immeasurable fury with which the minor poet received the innocent pleasantry and moderate castigation of our remarks on his first publication, we now feel nothing but pity for the strange irritability of temperament which can still cherish a private resentment for such a cause, or wish to perpetuate memory of personalities as outrageous as to have been injurious only to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... air about the Countess Isabel, which suggested to bystanders the idea of a tired, worn-out woman. It was not discontent, not irritability, not exactly even sadness; it was the tone of one who had never fitted rightly into the place assigned to her, and who never felt at home. Though it disappeared when she spoke, yet as soon as her features ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... exhibited in a stroll for exercise up and down the aisle. Yet no one would call her a beauty. Her eyes were of a somewhat fishy and uncertain blue; the lids were tinged with an unornamental pink that told of irritation of the adjacent interior surface and of possible irritability of temper. Her complexion was of that mottled type which is so sore a trial to its possessor and yet so inestimable a comfort to social rivals; but her features were handsome, her teeth fine, her dress, bearing, and demeanor those of a woman of birth ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... constant irritability, her husband had become more affectionate than customary since ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... want of food nearly always injures the child. She should avoid ungraceful positions and awkward attitudes, as by some mysterious sympathy these are impressed on the child she carries. Let her cultivate grace and beauty in herself at such a time, and she will endow her child with them. As anger and irritability leave imprints on the features, she should maintain ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... Victoria, in the light of a new discovery, that in the past her father's irritability had not extended to her. And this discovery, she knew, ought to have some significance, but she felt unaccountably indifferent to it. Mr. Flint walked to a window at the far end of the room and flung apart the tightly ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... with the environment in which they occurred, and were wholly influenced by the same. The pathologic, degenerative soil which permitted of the development of the psychosis in these individuals consisted of irritability, lability, autochthonous fluctuations of mood, fantastic day-dreaming, a heightened subjectivity to the environment, inability to form correct critical judgment concerning unpleasant occurrences about them and a strong tendency to suggestibility. On the physical side these patients were subject ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... surprises me very much in looking over those days of suffering, is, that during that day a frightful irritability is the emotion that I most remember—an irritability of feeling, not of expression: for I lay quite still upon the bed all day, and only answered, briefly and simply, the questions of Sophie and ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... with this pure air and in contemplation of this peaceful and silent night: thus she awoke next day calmer and more resigned. Unfortunately, the sight of Lady Lochleven, who presented herself at breakfast-time, to fulfil her duties as taster, brought back her irritability. Perhaps, however, things would have gone on smoothly if Lady Lochleven, instead of remaining standing by the sideboard, had withdrawn after having tasted the various dishes of the courses; but this insisting on remaining throughout the meal, which was at bottom a mark ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... it for some time. Days passed, and it was almost forgotten, only I became decidedly ill-tempered. A captious irritability possessed me, alternating with fits of unaccountable fatigue. At that time I was always either tired or cross, and sometimes both. I must have made Nurse Bundle very uncomfortable. I was so little happy, for my own share, that when after a day's headache ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... know it in our experience, goes back in the history of the race to the primitive sensitivity (or irritability) of living matter, seen in the protozoa. These minute unicellular creatures, though having no sense organs—any more than they have muscles or digestive organs—respond to a variety of stimuli. They react to mechanical stimuli, as a touch or jar, to chemical stimuli of certain ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... been Appin's one successful pupil, and he was destined to have no successor. A few weeks later an elephant in the Dresden Zoological Garden, which had shown no previous signs of irritability, broke loose and killed an Englishman who had apparently been teasing it. The victim's name was variously reported in the papers as Oppin and Eppelin, but his front ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... repeated, with a new note of irritability sounding in his voice. "He hasn't been doing anything foolish, has he? Nothing as ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... sketches and drawing-material: these attracted visitors, and visitors were a trouble. Perhaps there was impertinence in their curiosity, very likely their presence hindered him; but, nevertheless, it was by no means like the sweet-tempered Clarian to show irritability and petulance, and finally, closing his door obstinately against all comers, to elect for solitude and silence at his work. No,—the boy was changed, grown morbid, a pervert, ripe for whatever Devil's sickle might be put forth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... blame, as well as more praise, than I have deserved. It is the lot of every public man, and I leave one account to balance the other." So serene was the aged philosopher, a real philosopher, not one who, having played a part in life, was to be betrayed in the weakness and irritability of old age. He felt none of the mental weariness which years so often bring. He was by no means tired of life and affairs in this world, yet he wrote in a characteristic vein to the Bishop of St. Asaph: ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... consideration, it is only reasonable to admit that agriculture is a profession in which a man may, above all others, be excused if he manifests a certain amount of irritability at the prospect of change. The slow round of uneventful years, the long continuance of manual labour, the perpetual iteration of a few ideas, in time produce in the mind of the most powerfully intellectual men a species of unconscious creed; and ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... my dear Mme. Cibot," said the doctor as they stood in the gateway, "one of the principal symptoms of his complaint is great irritability; and as it is hardly to be supposed that he can afford a nurse, the task of nursing him will fall ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... curious, nervous irritability was taking possession of him. He knew by this time that many arrests had been made in both Leghorn and Pisa; and, though still ignorant of the extent of the calamity, he had already heard enough to put him into a fever ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... before, and drew lines on the carpet with the ivory end of her parasol. Miss Tox, who had experience of her fair friend, and knew that under the pressure of any slight fatigue or vexation she was prone to a discursive kind of irritability, availed herself of the pause, to ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... equally incessant people to tea and dinner, he had little intimate speech of her in the daytime; and in the long hours of wakefulness as he lay beside her listening to her even breathing, he faced the fact that his growing irritability was due to jealousy;—not the jealousy that doubts or suspects,—of that he was incapable; but the primitive man's demand for exclusive possession of his own. Probably Desmond, in such a case, would have lost his temper and cleared the air ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... alone I too went into a brown study, and began wondering at Mr Preddle's curious ways, and thinking what a pity it was that a gentleman like Mr Denning, who was on a voyage for the sake of his health, should take such a dislike to Mr Frewen and Mr Preddle too. It hardly seemed to be like irritability, for after all he was as merry and friendly with the officers as he was with me. I never went near him without his beckoning to me to come to his side, and both he and his sister were quite affectionate ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... extremely delicate and about two-thirds the length of the body. Schewiakoff thinks this bristle has a sensory function. I could not make this out, for although other protozoa ran against this bristle, often bending it well over to one side, the animal showed no sign of irritability but lay quiescent. A spherical macronucleus with attached micronucleus lies in the center of the body. The contractile vacuole is posterior in front of the bristle. The macronucleus was found to be double, as though just divided, in a large percentage of cases. ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... tell her 'two men and a dog'; that will take her mind off your father." It must be confessed that Dr. Lavendar was out of temper—a sad fault in one of his age, as Mrs. Drayton often said; but his irritability was so marked that Cyrus finally slunk off, uncomforted, and afraid to meet Gussie's eye, even under its bandage ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland
... relating smutty stories, repeating foul jokes and making indecent allusions destroys respect for virtue. In addition there are such direct physical causes of undue adolescent sexual excitement as constipation and alcoholism, and such mental ones as nervous irritability. ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... quick excitability, and consequent irritability, are the marked ingredients in every strong character; its strength must be employed against itself to produce any high ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... of mind, and a noticeable improvement in trade work. Where the obstructions of nose and throat still remain there is loss in weight and diminished chest expansion and a generally weakened condition. The extraction of decayed teeth and the providing of well-fitting glasses have diminished nervous irritability and the frequency of headaches. Three cases of tuberculosis were sent to camps. Seven cases of organic heart trouble were treated by specialists; nineteen girls were given corrective exercises at Teachers College; two were fitted with shoes and braces; ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman
... to trouble me as to the robe?" at length she replied with an irritability of manner to which she too often yielded. "Why do I entertain two lazy hussies, but to see after my robings, and save me the trouble of thinking ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... himself. His own fears of being vanquished and the advice of his friends had indeed, for years, prevented him from proceeding to an open rupture with his parish, and the Squire at its head: but his irritability had been gradually increasing ever since the departure of my uncle Elford. The progress of his avarice at first was slow; but it gained strength as it proceeded, and there was now no one whose opinion ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... whose dramas are mere plagiarisms from "the refuse of obscure volumes." He pretends to be rather pleased with criticism, but is sorely irritated thereby. Richard Cumberland (1732-1811), noted for his vanity and irritability, was the model of this character.—Sheridan, The ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... for those who in any capacity serve you, is always an evidence of ill-breeding, as well as of inexcusable selfishness. Occasionally a so-called "lady" who has nothing whatever to do but drive uptown or down in her comfortable limousine, vents her irritability upon a saleswoman at a crowded counter in a store, because she does not leave other customers and wait immediately upon her. Then, perhaps, when the article she asked for is not to be had, she complains to the floor-walker ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... did actually burst forth, with explosions more or less Vesuvian, in the inner man of Herr Diogenes; as indeed how could it fail? A nature, which, in his own figurative style, we might say, had now not a little carbonized tinder, of Irritability; with so much nitre of latent Passion, and sulphurous Humor enough; the whole lying in such hot neighborhood, close by "a reverberating furnace of Fantasy:" have we not here the components of driest Gunpowder, ready, on occasion of the smallest spark, to blaze up? Neither, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... excess of moisture from which a drier atmosphere would relieve them; and that living bodies, so circumstanced, are threatened with typhus and typhoid fever. It is highly probable, therefore, that narcotics, in such cases, may allay a morbid irritability of the nerves, or effect a salutary diminution of healthful sensibility; under such circumstances, the desiccating and sedative effects of tobacco-smoking may prove beneficial; while, in all ordinary states of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... for the diagnosis of your disease. I pride myself on diagnostics. Your wrist, madam, if you please," said the doctor, proceeding to feel the pulse of his patient, with an air intended for a very professional one. "Tense—frequent—this pulse of yours, madam; showing great irritability. Your tongue, now. Ay—rubric—dry and streaked; usual prognostics of neuralgy. Pretty much made up my mind about your complaint coming along, madam, having learned from your lad here something of your troubles and fright on losing your ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... its natural gentleness and docility, the temper of an elephant is seldom to be implicitly relied on in a state of captivity and coercion. The most amenable are subject to occasional fits of stubbornness; and even after years of submission, irritability and resentment will unaccountably manifest themselves. It may be that the restraints and severer discipline of training have not been entirely forgotten; or that incidents which in ordinary health would be ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... florets, which constitute the disk of the flowers in this class, contain in each five males surrounding one female, which are connected at top, whence the name of the class. An Italian writer, in a discourse on the irritability of flowers, asserts, that if the top of the floret be touched, all the filaments which support the cylindrical anther will contrast themselves, and that by thus raising or depressing the anther the whole of the prolific dust is collected on ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... marriage survived Miss Ladd's boarding house, for a time. At first it went smoothly enough because Maurice couldn't blame Eleanor's cook, and Eleanor couldn't say that "nothing she did pleased Maurice"; so two reasons for irritability were eliminated; but a new reason appeared: Maurice's eager interest in everything and everybody—especially everybody!—and his endless good nature, overflowed around the boarding-house table. Everyone liked him, which Eleanor entirely understood; ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... false story, indorsed as it is by the doctor-proprietor, for granted. And just so long as I persist in telling my true story, they will consider me a monomaniac, and so often as the thought of my many wrongs and sorrows combines with the nervous irritability to which every woman is occasionally subject, and makes me rave with impatience and excitement, they will report me a dangerous lunatic, subject to periodical attacks of violent frenzy; but, young man, even at my worst, I am no more mad than any ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... perceived in the grass through which he walked. He had seen her laughing gaily, whilst Squire Boatfield used profane language, and smile with contemptuous merriment at the two young men at her feet; he had also seen the change in her manner, the sudden wistful look, the quick sigh, the irritability ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... there are few things in the world that can compete with the final rehearsals of an amateur theatrical performance at a country house. Every day the atmosphere becomes more and more heavily charged with restlessness and irritability. The producer of the piece, especially if he is also the author of it, develops a sort of intermittent insanity. He plucks at his mustache, if he has one; at his hair, if he has not. He mutters to himself. He gives vent to occasional despairing ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... before the performance, which would show clearly enough what is alone of importance to me. In addition to this, I will undertake to avoid in my writings, even of a purely artistic nature, such combative expressions open to misapprehension as may have escaped me formerly in my irritability. Considering all these declarations, the future need be dealt with no longer, only the past. And over that it would be well, in the case of an artist, to throw the veil of forgetfulness, not to make it a cause for revenge. All this you might in conversation explain ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... days affected Dicky adversely. He seemed a bit distrait, displayed a trifle of his earlier irritability, and complained a great deal about the ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... causes of barrenness that cannot be removed when the patient is perfectly developed. Sterility, in a female, most frequently depends upon a weakness or irritability either in the ovaries or the womb, and anything having a strengthening effect upon either organ will remove the ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... of a numerous class of nervous aliments, in a greater measure, unknown to our ancestors, but which now prevail universally, and are complicated with almost every other distemper. The bodies of men are enfeebled and enervated; and it is not uncommon to observe very high degrees of irritability under the external appearance of great strength and robustness. The hypochondriac, palsies, cachexies, dropsies, and all those diseases which arise from laxity and debility, are, in our days, endemic every where; and the hysterics, which used to be peculiar ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... towards him, her face grave, her sweet eyes full of pitying concern. She placed a hand upon his sleeve. "My poor Richard..." she began, but he shook off her kindly touch, laughing angrily—a mere cackle of irritability. ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... torture of acute hearing, or an inability to suppress attention; the hater of clocks and crowing cocks is a neurasthenic." The disease is especially common in the women players of the social game, and its unhappy victims too often seek relief from the nervous irritability which is a common early symptom in still greater nervous excitement. It is a sad commentary on our civilization that one of the means of treatment for these persons which has been found efficacious is to supply them with some restful household ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... hand the clasp of which was as frank as a man's and yet conveyed a unique sensation. The very memory of it would go through me like a wave of heat. It was over that hand that we first got into the habit of quarrelling, with the irritability of sufferers from some obscure pain and yet half unconscious of their disease. Rita's own spirit hovered over the troubled waters of Legitimity. But as to the sound of the four magic letters of her name I was not very likely to hear it fall sweetly on my ear. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... is irritability.—We perhaps know what it is to have a tooth where the nerve is exposed. Everything that touches it sends a thrill of pain through us. Some people get into a moral state corresponding to that. The least thing puts them out, ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... Even the faces of the Wagogo seemed to have contracted a bleak hue from the general bleakness around. The water of the pits obtained in the neighbourhood had an execrable flavor, and two donkeys sickened and died in less than an hour from its effects. Man suffered nausea and a general irritability of the system, and accordingly revenged himself by cursing the country and its imbecile ruler most heartily. The climax came, however, when Bombay reported, after an attempt to settle the Muhongo, that the chief's head had grown big since he heard that the Musungu had come, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... and depression be hurtful to the unborn progeny, surely thoughtless dissipation and late hours, dancing and waltzing, together with irritability of temper and peevishness of disposition, can not be less injurious. Every female that is about to become a mother should treasure up the remark of that sensible lady, the Margravine of Anspach, who says, "when a female is likely to become a mother, she ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... undergraduate be of his womenfolk, at Oxford they keep him in a painful state of tension: at any moment they may somehow disgrace him. And if throughout the long day he shall have had the added strain of guarding them from the knowledge that he is about to commit suicide, a certain measure of irritability must be condoned. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... and when he had once been set thinking about the relation between Will and Dorothea his conjectures had gone beyond the fact. He imagined that there was a passionate attachment on both sides, and this struck him as much too serious to gossip about. He remembered Will's irritability when he had mentioned Mrs. Casaubon, and was the more circumspect. On the whole his surmises, in addition to what he knew of the fact, increased his friendliness and tolerance towards Ladislaw, and ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... useless for her to say that he had not told her he was ill. He was in no condition to face the truth. He was completely shattered—the victim of a country physician's practice and of an unrestrained irritability. Her commiseration had been all that was needed to have him yield himself unreservedly ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... power of the sun this day in a cloudless sky was so great, that Mr. Rae and I were glad to take shelter in the water while the crews were engaged on the portages. The irritability of the human frame is either greater in these Northern latitudes, or the sun, notwithstanding its obliquity, acts more powerfully upon it than near the Equator; for I have never felt its direct rays so oppressive within the Tropics as I have experienced them to be on some occasions in the high ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... nothing about the character of your boarders, Mr. Jacobus," I replied, conscious of some irritability. "If I choose to associate with any ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... conditions: Constitutional excitement. Case 22. Girl, age 14 years. Developmental conditions: Defective pregnancy. Early impaction of teeth. Poor general physical conditions. Home conditions: Poverty. Irritability of father and mother. Delinquencies: Mentality: Running away. Ability good; Stealing. Constitutional ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... shall be hot in the mouth too."[56] As for the consequences to the author, they can only affect his fortune or his temper—the former, such as it is, has been long fixed beyond shot of these sort of fowlers; and for my temper, I considered always, that by subjecting myself to the irritability which much greater authors have felt on occasions of literary dispute, I should be laying in a plentiful stock of unhappiness for the rest of my life. I therefore make it a rule never to read the attacks made upon me. I remember being capable of something like this sort of self-denial at a very ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... sea air fanning their faces as they headed out to sea, Dickie's irritability vanished. Desirous of starting conversation after a protracted silence, she began: "Who do you think I saw down-town the ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... motionless, against the stable door. Unconsciously he had passed just behind the heels of the stranger's horse, which being by no means in good humour with the clumsy manoeuvres of his shampooer, the hostler, had taken advantage of the opportunity presented to him of working off his irritability, and had consequently inflicted a severe kick upon the right ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sound, which grew louder every moment, Rose, who had all the irritability of a sensitive temperament, clung to her father's arm, saying, in a terrified whisper, "It is like the sound of the sea the night before ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... harass me. My mind is of a very peculiar cast. I began to think too early; and the indulgence of certain trains of thought, and too free an exercise of the imagination, have superinduced a morbid kind of sensibility; which is to the mind what excessive irritability is to the body. Some circumstances occurred on my arrival at Nottingham, which gave me just cause for inquietude and anxiety; the consequences were insomnia, and a relapse into causeless dejections. ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... tend to produce innumerable bad results. People who eat bread made from fine white flour naturally crave the food elements which have been eliminated from the wheat, and are thus led to an excessive consumption of meat, and the nerve-starvation and consequent irritability thus induced may also lead to the use of alcoholic drinks. We believe that one of the strongest barriers women could erect against the inroads of intemperance would be to supply the tables of the land with good bread made from flour ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... must feel this, in proportion to the length of time and violence of their crying, far more than grown people. Who has not often seen a poor child receive, within an hour or two of the first whipping, a second one, for some small ebullition of nervous irritability, which was simply inevitable from ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... returned amongst us, and we immediately saw that he was not happy. His pallid countenance, drawn features contracted by a perpetual irritability, the violent manners degenerated into a nervous rage, the hollow sound of his once fine ringing laugh, all showed that he was an altered man. Too proud to admit that he had made a mistake, he would, not complain, but the old friends who gathered round him were soon ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... cereal and chops and wheat cakes and coffee he had laid in to stay him until lunch time, would together have given pause to any but such a physical organization as his. The only evidence of it was a certain slight irritability—but this may have been due to ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... of the house as Lewisham came home, a dim, black, nervous, untidy little figure. She came because Ethel, in spite of her expressed belief that love was "all in all," found married life a little dull and lonely while Lewisham was away. And she went hastily when he came, because of a certain irritability that the struggle against the world was developing. He told no one at Kensington about his marriage, at first because it was such a delicious secret, and then for quite other reasons. So there was no overlapping. The two worlds began and ended sharply at ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... husband's enormous confidence in his artistic powers, she had not the stimulus of his faith in his ultimate success to sustain her. Moreover a heart trouble with which she was afflicted resulted, through the strain to which their uncertain material condition subjected her, in a growing irritability which was accentuated by jealousy of women who entered the growing circle of Wagner's admirers as his genius ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... continued Carrington, "that Sir Reginald displayed a curious and unaccountable irritability before his death. I hear, for instance, that a letter from you had ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... as he had ever done in college days; his finicky dress, his foreign ways in eating, his tendency to boast about his music, his country, and his forebears, on his good days, balanced by a brooding irritability on his bad days. And he was conscious that his own ways and customs were no less teasing to Radowitz; his Tory habits of thought, his British contempt for vague sentimentalisms and heroics, for all that panache means to the Frenchman, or ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... features, and hair thickly sprinkled with gray. His fingers, white and taper as a woman's, were covered with rings. His dress was careless, but that of a gentleman. Glancing at him even thus furtively, I could not help observing the worn lines about his temples, the mingled languor and irritability of his every gesture; the restless suspicion of his eye; the hard curves ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... future of degradation. Having a strong, clear mind, without any imagination, she believed that she beheld an inevitable doom. The tart remark and the contemptuous comment on her part, elicited, on the other, all the irritability of the poetic idiosyncrasy. After frantic ebullitions, for which, when the circumstances were analysed by an ordinary mind, there seemed no sufficient cause, my grandfather always interfered to soothe with good-tempered commonplaces, and promote peace. He was a man who thought ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the pressure on the brain, the simple expedient of withdrawing the fluid by lumbar puncture brings about normal mental life. As the fluid again collects, the mental life becomes cloudy, and the character alters (irritability, depressed mood, changed purpose, lowered will); another lumbar puncture and presto!—the individual is for a time made over more completely than conversion ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Lamarckism were very strong, and I think quite conclusive. There is one, however, which seems to me weak—that about the claws of lobsters and the tails of lizards moving and acting when detached from the body. It may be argued, fairly, that this is only an incidental result of the extreme muscular irritability and contractibility of the organs, which might have been caused on Lamarckian as well as on the Darwinian hypothesis. The running of a fowl after its head is chopped off is an example of the same kind of thing, and this is certainly not useful. The detachment ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... negligible may invade our little movement . . . our main business is to talk." One sees the point, of course; yet I cannot help feeling that it would have been better if the majority of Leaguers had done some bit of constructive work towards a Distributist world and sweated out of their system the irritability that found vent in some of their quarrels. After all the fight for freedom as far as it concerned attacking government was carried on week by week by the small group running the paper. "The main ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... much fun and merriment over their cooking operations next day, and when all were completed, both girls came to the conclusion that working for the good and happiness of others, was in itself an excellent cure for irritability, and all forms of ...
— Hollowmell - or, A Schoolgirl's Mission • E.R. Burden
... experiments upon vegetable poisons are no less interesting, and still more wonderful, as indicating a degree of irritability in plants somewhat similar to that which depends on the nervous system in animals. After having ascertained that the bean plants could exist in a healthy state for five or six days, if immersed in the same quantity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... different persons confirms the reasonable expectation that it would on the whole be highest among the intellectually ablest. At first, owing to my confusing the quality of which I am speaking with that of nervous irritability, I fancied that women of delicate nerves who are distressed by noise, sunshine, etc., would have acute powers of discrimination. But this I found not to be the case. In morbidly sensitive persons both pain and sensation are induced by lower stimuli than in the healthy, ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... only did those letters evince a zeal for decisive measure which made the writer an object of suspicion to the more conservative of his fellow-members of Congress, but his reference in one of them to 'the whims, the caprice, the vanity, the superstition, and the irritability of some of his colleagues,' and particularly to John Dickinson as 'a certain great fortune but trifling genius,' made him personal enemies by whom ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... of an acute nervous sensibility, amounting at times to an almost neurotic irritability, such as peeps out from his confession that the shape of Earl Grey's head, when he was a Parliamentary reporter in the Gallery, "was misery to me and weighed down my youth". This peculiarity of temperament had established ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin |
