"Splenetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... people of this country, (who were and are light, but who were not and are not effeminate,) that we had found the causes of our misfortunes in our vices. Pythagoras could not be more pleased with his leading discovery. But whilst, in that splenetic mood, we amused ourselves in a sour, critical speculation, of which we were ourselves the objects, and in which every man lost his particular sense of the public disgrace in the epidemic nature of the distemper,—whilst, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... this misfortune told by the old splenetic and malicious fairy, caused immediately his royal proclamation to be issued forth, whereby every person was forbidden, upon pain of death, to spin with a distaff or spindle; nay, even so much as to have a spindle ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... in the midst of enjoyment even than that of a man condemned to death, was one for which many a splenetic Englishman would certainly pay a high price. The Baron lay there, horizontal still, and literally bathed in cold sweat. He tried to doubt the fact; but this murderous eye had a voice. A sound of whispering was heard through ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... sanguine, imaginative, optimistic and sympathetic; he from a temperament dramatic, melancholy, observing, cynical, and satirical. She insists upon natural goodness; he, upon innate depravity. She urges her faith in social regeneration; he vents his splenetic contempt for the mob. Through all the successive shocks of disillusioning experience, she expects the renovation of humanity by some religious, some semi-mystical, amelioration of its heart; he grimly ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... list of the dead; These 'craven Southerners' hold out; Ay, ay, they'll give you many a bout" "We'll beat in the end, sir" Firmly said one in staid rebuke, A solid merchant, square and stout. "And do you think it? that way tend, sir" Asked the lean Cooperhead, with a look Of splenetic pity. "Yes, I do" His yellow death's head the croaker shook: "The country's ruined, that I know" A shower of broken ice and snow, In lieu of words, confuted him; They saw him hustled round the corner go, And each by-stander said—Well ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... and oppressed heart. In truth, Apaecides himself was softened much beyond his ordinary mood, which to outward seeming was usually either sullen or impetuous. For the noblest desires are of a jealous nature—they engross, they absorb the soul, and often leave the splenetic humors stagnant and unheeded at the surface. Unheeding the petty things around us, we are deemed morose; impatient at earthly interruption to the diviner dreams, we are thought irritable and churlish. For ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... 11, Monday evening.—. . . . The Duke of Q(ueensberry) dined here to-day, and, by an accident, the Duke of Dorset. I had also Mr. Selwin who was a banker in Paris, a worthy man, but a more splenetic one I never knew, with an extreme good understanding. We are of the same family, by his account, although I do not know the degree of affinity in which we stand to ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... contemptuous boon, which had removed, at one stroke, the bogey of compulsory military service from the troubled imaginings of the British people, and fastened on them the cruel distinction of being in actual fact what an enemy had called them in splenetic scorn long years ago—a nation of shopkeepers. Aye, something even below that level, a race of shopkeepers who were no longer ...
— When William Came • Saki
... a miserable day in November—the sort of day when, according to the French, splenetic Englishmen flock in such crowds to the Thames, in order to drown themselves, that there is not standing room on the bridges. I was sitting over the fire in our dingy dining-room; for personally I find that element more cheering than water under ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... have hardly been behind this celebrated splenetic in illiberality. They perhaps were not favorites of the fair, and in revenge vented all their envy and spleen against them. But a more modern and accomplished writer who by his rank in life, by his natural ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... MOROSE to be a Man naturally splenetic, and melancholy; is there any thing more offensive to one of such a DISPOSITION (where he uses the Word instead of Humour) than Noise and Clamour? Let any Man that has the Spleen (and there are enough in England) be Judge. We see common Examples ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... two Goncourts, and in particular their great work on "L'Art du XVIIIe Siecle," which began to be published in 1859, although not completed until 1882. All this while, moreover, they were secretly composing their splenetic "Journal." On the 20th of June, 1870, the fair companionship was broken by the death of Jules de Goncourt, and for some years Edmond did no more than complete and publish certain artistic works which had been ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt |
