"Proclivity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contains a very fair analysis of the elements of the vote in opposition to the prohibitory amendment, except that, perhaps, we ought to add the vote in opposition to a well-intended class of men who have no proclivity for liquor, and who, perhaps, could give no better reason for their vote but that they abhor innovations, and are content to do as their fathers and grandfathers ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... a stronger proclivity towards parody than Thackeray; and we may, I think, confess that there is no form of literary drollery more dangerous. The parody will often mar the gem of which it coarsely reproduces the outward semblance. The word "damaged," used instead of "damask," ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... egg, that Gillian hoped that Fergus would not catch the infection and abandon minerals for eggs, which would be ever so much worse—-only a degree better than butterflies, towards which Wilfred showed a certain proclivity. ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... impassably,—preventing the whole force of Southern connection and influence throughout the North from distracting every city with endless confusion, detaching that force and reducing it to handfuls, and, in the progress of hostilities, disinfecting us of our habitual proclivity, through the affection of trade, and the traditions of the Democratic party, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... For each there is a magic key; and that man holds it who has covered the journey, or part of it, which the soul of a child perceives it must set out upon soon. The presence of a good workman will awaken the potential proclivity of the child's nature, as no other presence can do. Every autobiography tells the same story—of a certain wonder-moment of youth, when the ideal appeared, and all energies were turned thereafter to something concrete which that ideal signified. Mostly ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... whose gems of protest are to be found in the setting of this volume, it is but sportsmanlike to state at the start that admission was offered to none of notable puritanical proclivity. The prohibitionists and censors are not represented. They require, in a levititious literary escapade like this, no spokesman. Their viewpoint already is amply set forth. Moreover, likely they would not be amusing.... Also, the exponents of Nonsenseorship ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... into this reconciling core of life, and talked of it only very rarely and shyly with a few chosen coevals. It wasn't very profitable talk. They had a guilty feeling, they laughed a little uneasily, they displayed a fatal proclivity to stab the swelling gravity of their souls with some forced and silly jest and so tumble back to ground again before ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... tendency; aptness, aptitude; proneness, proclivity, bent, turn, tone, bias, set, leaning to, predisposition, inclination, propensity, susceptibility; conatus[Lat], nisus[Lat]; liability &c. 177; quality, nature, temperament; idiocrasy[obs3], idiosyncrasy; cast, vein, grain; humor, mood; drift &c. (direction) 278; conduciveness, conducement[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... tent in which we dwell here—of a body 'raised in incorruption,' 'clothed with immortality,' and so, as in many another phrase, declared to be exempt from decay, and therefore vigorous with unchanging youth. How that comes we cannot tell. Whether because that body of glory has no proclivity to mutation and decay, or whether the perpetual volition and power of God counteract such tendency and give, as the Book of Revelation says,' to eat of the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise of God'—matters ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... temperament, mood, nature; willingness, readiness, inclination; arrangement, disposal; propensity, inclination, proneness, proclivity, bias, bent. Antonyms: indisposition, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... merit consideration, chief among which is the normal conformation of the coronet joint. This proclivity is constant; the normal interphalangeal articulation is an incomplete ginglymoid joint and while its dorso-volar diameter is great, this in no wise compensates for its disproportionately narrow transverse diameter. The pivotal strain which is sometimes thrown upon this ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... World's Fair size. That we are going to have successive generations of such builders may be reasonably implied from past expositions. Beginning with Philadelphia in 1876, and going on to San Francisco and San Diego in 1915, nothing seems to stop us from the habit. Let us enlarge this proclivity into a national mission in as definite a movement, as thoroughly thought out as the evolution of the public school system, the formation of the Steel Trust, and the like. After duly weighing all the world's fairs, let our architects set ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... off Alcibiades a la Socrates, or entertained Plato with "sthetic tea." But, sad to relate, in spite of all these blessings, the students who resorted to this academy possessed an Adam-and-Eve-like proclivity for exactly what they hadn't got and didn't need; and, not contented with the pleasures provided, must needs play truant with that young scamp Eros, and turn the ancient town topsy-turvy with modern innovations, till scandalized spinsters predicted that the very babies ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... and constructing his answer frankly from his own nature. It was quite in Browning's way to take a humorous delight in imagining grotesque parallels to ideas and processes in which he profoundly believed; a proclivity aided by the curious subtle relation between his grotesquerie and his seriousness, which makes Pacchiarotto, for instance, closely similar in effect to parts of Christmas-Eve. Browning is one of three or four sons of the nineteenth century who dared to fill in the outlines, or to complete ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... patronage of that munificent patron of letters. Warburton thinks "it was from the ferocity of his temper, that Shakspeare chose for him the name which Rabelais gives to his pedant of Thubal Holoferne." Were the matter worth arguing, we should say, it was rather from the proclivity with which (according to Camden's rules) the abbreviated Latin name Johnes Florio or Floreo falls into Holofernes. Rabelais and anagrammatism may divide the slender glory of the product ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... doubtless have me believe thou wouldst not budge an inch! But have I not seen Gravity out of his bed at midnight? and must I, in plain terms, remind thee of certain mad pranks? Thou hadst ever, with the gravest sentiments in thy mouth and the most starched reserve in thy manner, a kind of lumbering proclivity towards mischief, although with more inclination to set it a-going than address to carry it through; and I cannot but chuckle internally, when I think of having seen my most venerable monitor, the future president of some high Scottish court, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... with sufficient plainness in what the material connection is established between the acquired peculiarities of an organism, and the proclivity on the part of the germ in virtue of which it develops the special characteristics ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler |
