"Temperamental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intercourse between the Russian and the German Courts, and that close intercourse extended to the army, to the bureaucracy, to the Universities, to the industrial and commercial classes. On the other hand, the Russian and the German people are mutually repelled. There is a temperamental antagonism between the two nations, between the dour disciplined Prussian and the easygoing disciplined Russian. In the province of ideas, of art and literature, French influence is dominant amongst the intellectual and in the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... without waiting for her to answer, "to the fact that neither of us is in the least romantic about the other. That may be partly, no doubt, because we've known each other so long; but I'm inclined to think there's more in it than that. There's something temperamental. I think you're a trifle cold, and I suspect I'm a trifle self-absorbed. If that were so it goes a long way to explaining our odd lack of illusion about each other. I'm not saying that the most satisfactory marriages aren't founded upon this sort of understanding. But certainly it struck me ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... clear, and immediate action is imperative. But action is delayed by misunderstanding arising out of temperamental differences between the Governing Class and the People. Curiously enough the respective responsive characteristics of the Anglo Saxon and the Indians are paralleled by the two types of responses seen in all living matter. In the ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... like Lois, was a trifle temperamental, had fallen before the charms of one Lawrence Hastings. The manner of Hastings's advent in Montgomery is perhaps worthy of a few words, inasmuch as he came to stay. Hastings was an actor, who visited Montgomery one winter as a member of a company that had trustfully ventured into the provinces with ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... touch of gray at his temples only added to the eager, almost fierce vitality of the dark face. Paul Harley was notable because of that intellectual strength which does not strike one immediately, since it is purely temperamental, but which, nevertheless, invests its possessor ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... colouring, the light curl of his coal-black hair and the lustre of his eyes, which asserted themselves roundly in an open, manly face. Between two such organisms one would not have expected to find the slightest temperamental accord. But I have observed that profane men living in ships like the holy men gathered together in monasteries develop traits of profound resemblance. This must be because the service of the sea and the service of a temple are both detached from the vanities and errors of a world which follows ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... has a fascinating personality. He is not socialistic and faithful, like the ant, for example: he is anarchistic, wild, temperamental, and fond of adventure. He is also contemplative by nature, like other philosophers. How many an evening, at midnight, when I have wanted a sandwich, I have found him and his friends standing still, lost in thought, by the sink. When ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... to question whether it is right to call such things as self-consciousness, reserve and fear, sins. "Call them infirmities, disabilities, temperamental weaknesses, if you will," some have said, "but not sins. To do so would be to get us into bondage." The reverse, however, is true. If these things are not sins, then we must put up with them for the rest of our lives, there is no deliverance. But if these and ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... glaziers, decorators, and so forth. There is but a tiny residue of persons who do not swell and sparkle. And of these glum bystanders at the carnival I am one. Our aloofness is mainly irrational, I suppose. It is due mainly to temperamental Toryism. We say 'The old is better.' This we say to ourselves, every one of us feeling himself thereby justified in his attitude. But we are quite aware that such a postulate would not be accepted by time majority. For the majority, then, let us make some show ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... the causes of American romance, the circumstances and qualities that have produced the romantic element in American life and character? Precisely as with the individual artist or man of letters, we touch first of all upon certain temperamental inclinations. It is a question again of the national mind, of the differentiation of the race under new climatic and physical conditions. We have to reckon with the headiness and excitability of youth. It was young men who emigrated hither, just as in the eighteen-sixties ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... temperamental enmity to Nostromo went out of Dr. Monygham's eyes. He stepped back submissively. He did not believe Mrs. Gould. But her word was law. He accepted her denial like an inexplicable fatality affirming ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... his welcome. He ought to have either died naturally or on the scaffold high. Like actresses, always farewell positively last performance then come up smiling again. Generous to a fault of course, temperamental, no economising or any idea of the sort, always snapping at the bone for the shadow. So similarly he had a very shrewd suspicion that Mr Johnny Lever got rid of some l s d. in the course of his perambulations round the docks in the congenial atmosphere of the Old Ireland ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... sometimes gives us in his books a remarkable poetic strain—a strain like music in its caressing revival of old associations. And we really get a very accurate idea of the inward story of the artist when we contrast this temperamental sensitiveness with the kind of work upon which he employed his skill during the chief ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... was one of the few Newport villas bordering on the sea, whose owners and architects had been sufficiently temperamental to take advantage of the natural beauties of its site. Upon huge black rocks, rising twenty-five or thirty feet, the house had been built. Windows on either side looked down upon the waters, ever shattering into white foam on half-hidden ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... suddenly woke up and began to fight. One man beat out a grounder, and one struck out; another error of the temperamental White Mountain Canary put a man on third and one on second. Then Cheyenne, pulling himself together, made ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... appointments of John Adams had so exasperated his successor as that of John Marshall as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Jefferson had an invincible repugnance for Marshall; and the feeling was cordially reciprocated. Between these men there were temperamental differences as wide as the ocean. Moreover, Jefferson entertained the belief that all appointments made by Adams after the results of the election were known were nullities, on the theory that a retiring President might not bind ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... never quite got hold of me. Partly I think that was because I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly because of a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way and have my private dreams, partly because I was a little antagonised by the family traditions that ran through the school. I was made to feel at first that I was a rank outsider, and I never quite forgot it. I suffered very little bullying, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... courage to go down and hear her mother's account of the interview. Adelaide was still in bed, but one long, pointed fingertip, pressed continuously upon the dangling bell, a summons that had long since lost its poignancy for the temperamental Lucie, indicated that she was about to ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... making a new kind of beer and tending his still, and so on. You bet Ma and I, the minute he's through with this piece, are going pronto to get that face of his as naked as the day he was born. Pa's so temperamental—like that time he was playing a Bishop and never touched a drop for five weeks, and in bed every night at nine-thirty. Me? Oh, I'm having a bit of my own in this Acme piece—God's Great Outdoors, I think it is—anyway, I'm to be a little blonde hussy in the bar-room, sitting ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... prayers were said. While the procession was passing from station to station, the girls sang their hymn in French. It was the age old pageantry of the Catholic church, a pageantry that perhaps indicates an age old temperamental difference between the ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... a trifle close, who was losing her income, her estates, and her very chemise at faro. She showed much kindness to Monsieur de Boulingrin, lending herself to an intercourse for which she had no temperamental inclination, but which she thought suitable to her rank, and useful to her interests. Their intrigue was conducted with an art which revealed their good taste, and the elegance of the prevailing morality; the connection was openly avowed, and thereby stripped of all base hypocrisy; ...
— The Story Of The Duchess Of Cicogne And Of Monsieur De Boulingrin - 1920 • Anatole France
... doesn't my uncle? My uncle is a temperamental conservative, a devotee to his traditions—the sort of man who will never do anything that hasn't been the constant habit of his forebears. He would no more dream of healing a well-established family feud than of selling the family plate. ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... was more than a student, however scholarly, of Greek. She had a temperamental affinity for the Greek poets, and such translations as hers of "Prometheus Bound" and Bion's "Lament for Adonis," identify her with the very life itself of Aeschylus and Bion. In her essay on "The Greek Christian Poets" we find her saying: "We want the touch of Christ's ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... for faces, musical imagination, abilities in mathematics or the languages, artistic talent. In these ways and many others children resemble their parents. The same general law holds of likes and dislikes, of temperamental qualities such as quick temper, vivacity, lovableness, moodiness. In all traits, characteristics, features, powers both physical and mental and to some extent moral also, children's original nature, their stock in trade, is determined by their ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... unreasoning pleasure, yet her movement had been neither temperamental nor sentimental; it was instinctive—one of those honest impulses that knows no sex. Did she realize, by some divine insight, that this frankness, this absence of finical conventions, this whole-hearted camaraderie, ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... was coming, and Crowder was expected on a later train with Pancha Lopez and her father—eight people, quite an affair. Fong had been marketing half the morning, and was now in the kitchen in a state of temperamental irritation, having even swept Lorry from his presence with a commanding, "Go away, Miss Lolly. I get clazy if you wolly ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... thought you'd be glad to see me. I've never rowed with you, have I? I've tried not to be temperamental with you. That's why I wired you, when there are ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... unduly praise the virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark of either laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the reason that should the ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... showered each other to such an extent as to arouse Lowell's protest. [Footnote: See A Fable for Critics.] Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the temperamental jealousy that the philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brother-artists are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and Swinburne's ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... a most difficult malady to treat even in an institution for that purpose, and it is impossible to treat it anywhere else. An epileptic in a family is an almost intolerable burden to its other members, as well as to himself. The temperamental effect of the disease takes the form in the patient of making frequent and unjust complaints, and epileptics invariably charge some one with having injured them while they have been unconscious during ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... however, are the temperamental differences in men which make some desirous of giving themselves to the cultivation of a small area of irrigated land under intensive conditions and others to dry-farming under extensive conditions. In fact, it is being observed in the arid region that men, because ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... that you had gained a triumph of happiness in your love, for you are not of those who cheat themselves. You choose rigorously, straining for the heart of the end as do all rigorists who are also hedonists. Because we are in possession of this bit of data as to your temperamental cosmos we can congratulate you with the more abandon. Oh, Herbert, do you know that this is a rampant spring, and that on leaving Barbara I tramped out of the confines into the green, happier, it almost seems, than I have ever been? Do you know that because you ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... his chest in pride, for fear the movement would disturb those temperamental studs. He would fain have lingered indefinitely in the warmth of Barney's admiring smile, but the signal for the first dance was already given, and he moved nervously ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... it," growled one of the men. He happened to own a hotel. He knew how temperamental was the pleasure-seeking stranger. Singularly, that advice was the only brand given by the rest of the Committee. They seemed strangely unable to offer any remedy except to keep on paying and in every way possible bar ...
— The Rat Racket • David Henry Keller
... on choosing her words, "that I cannot personally understand your emancipation, that mine is different. I can only see the preponderance of evil, of deception, of injustice—it is that which shuts out everything else. And it's temperamental, I suppose. By looking at you, as I told you, I can see that your emancipation is positive, while mine remains negative. You have somehow regained a conviction that the good is predominant, that there is some ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... her orphaned, it had been with warm gratitude in his heart, and with the expectation of being loved. As he grew older, that policy of life had become accentuated. He was expectant in all that he did. His temperamental friendliness had carried him through college, winning for him a warm group of friends and the genuine regard of his professors. It was helping him to make his way in the place he had chosen for his field of action. He had not gone into the more fashionable part of town, but far over on the West ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... of the dramatic, his love for posing, with his linguistic ability to adopt the vernacular of the moment so impressed the temperamental Murphy that he disregarded a portion of his friend Corliss's note, and the morning following his lean guest's arrival at the ranch the jovial Irishman himself saddled and bridled the swiftest and ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... It was a temperamental impossibility for Dumont to believe that Scarborough could really be sincere in a course which was obviously unprofitable. Therefore he attached even more importance to Arabella's cordiality than did Gladys herself. And, when the Legislature adjourned and Scarborough returned to Saint X ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... subtler form of flattery, than to call individuals by name who believe themselves to be forgotten pawns in a great game; and he may well have cultivated the profitable habit. Still, the fact remains, that it was an innate temperamental quality which made him frank and ingenuous in his intercourse with all sorts and ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... both his courage and his organisation. In his plans he allows for most possibilities, but he is nonplussed when the situation does not turn out exactly as it should on paper. Again, man for man, he loses "guts" in tight corners, because of this same lack of initiative. It is perhaps a temperamental failing. There have been moments in this War when only his incapacity to deal with a suddenly-developed situation has stood between him and stupendous success. He has assumed, let us say, that by all the rules of War the enemy must have reserves available, and has therefore ceased ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... did enjoy it. I did it—I suppose because it seemed sporting. It never made me feel peaceful—only nervous. I don't believe tobacco is a temperamental need with women as it is with some men—otherwise it wouldn't have taken so many centuries to establish the custom. It would only—seem silly, ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... temperamental and some of them are full of cussedness but the only ones who could sass Paul Bunyan and get away with it were the stars like Big Joe and Sourdough Sam. The lunch sled, - most popular institution in the lumber industry! ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead
... themselves in individuals that vary from the prevailing predatory style of temperament, the ante-predatory variant seems to have a greater stability and greater symmetry in the distribution or relative force of its temperamental elements. ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... nature fought many a hard fight, and the besieging forces from without—ill-health, poverty, and at one time family dissensions—were by no means without allies in the inner citadel of his soul. His spirit was courageous in the truest sense of the word: by effort and conviction, not by temperamental insensibility to fear. It is clear that there was a period in his life (and that before the worst of his bodily ills came upon him) when he was often within measurable distance of Carlylean gloom. He was ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... will always be patient with me when I get like that. Sometimes I fairly rave. But I won't do it often. I don't know why I should feel that way now. I have never been so happy. Yet that feeling came over me like a suffocating wave. I am afraid your wife is rather a temperamental ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... disagreeable episode of the afternoon had completely evacuated that cell which in one second can raise us through the bluest ether to the heaven as understood by the prayer-book, or send us diving to the mud flats of the ocean bed to co-habit for a time with wingless and non-temperamental oddities. ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... get rebellious," was the reply. "No, you mustn't yell at Tommy. He's a little temperamental about some things and he will not be treated as if he ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... her I was hopeful of the boy chiefly because he had thus shown the splendid courage that more than redeems folly. But I refrained. I had never been able to make Carlotta understand me or my ideas, and I had long been weary of the resentful silences or angry tirades which mental and temperamental misunderstandings produce. ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... or it may not be necessary. And here we enter upon the most difficult of all our problems. The whole spirit of the Great State is against any avoidable subjugation; but the whole spirit of that science which will animate the Great State forbids us to ignore woman's functional and temperamental differences. A new status has still to be invented for women, a Feminine Citizenship differing in certain respects from the normal masculine citizenship. Its conditions remain to be worked out. We have indeed to work out an entire new system of relations ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... plain to crowds. It does not seem to us that it is wicked to employ success as well as failure, to state our religion to people. It seems to us that it goes naturally with the scientific and technical temperament of the people that we should do this. It is not superior and it is not inferior. It is temperamental and it is based upon the study of the psychology of attention, on a knowledge of what impresses a certain kind of man and of what really is conclusive with crowds and with average men and women. It is the distinctive point of view of the pragmatic ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... questions, being unwilling to tempt him to break confidence with Kent. But she was thinking of all the desperate things a determined man with temperamental unbalancings might do when the touring car rolled noiselessly down the final hill into ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... are overborne by their own undirected and misguided energies. A mere temperamental outbreak in a brief period of obstreperousness exposes a promising boy to arrest and imprisonment, an accidental combination of circumstances too complicated and overwhelming to be coped with by an immature mind, condemns a growing lad to a criminal ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... princes. But the more I consider the period the more this strange and restless alliance of doctrine with temperament appears to be of its essence; wherefore, I shall not hesitate to make of it a light wherewith to take a hasty look about me. Here are two labels ready to hand—"temperamental" and "doctrinaire." I am under no illusion as to the inadequacy and fallibility of both; neither shall I imagine that, once applied, they are bound to stick. On the contrary, you will see, in a later chapter, how, having dubbed Matisse ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... field. Perhaps, indeed, if those conditions now obtained I should not be bringing forward similar arguments again, and if any one feels tempted to maintain that philosophic speculation is a camp of refuge for those who, in consequence of temperamental limitations and infantile fixations which ought to be overcome, draw back from the more robust study of emotional repressions on scientific lines, I should admit that the allegation contains an element of truth. But in spite of this, and in ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... her breast. It was a recognized gesture with her, a physical holding of herself together in the last minute that preceded her temperamental ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... belonged to a head that had been stuck on the end of a pike and shoved out across the table for Underhill to look at, instead of to one well placed on his broad athletic shoulders. They both knew that Underhill was young and had inherited from his beautiful American mother a nervous and temperamental disposition. They also knew that this was tempered by the crafty cleverness of the blood of the hero of Blenheim. They had come prepared for one of his excitable outbursts, although they knew he would not have been so insistent had there not ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... or the charm of a woman's face and body. His women are the pick of the lovely girls of Wuerzburg and its surroundings. Each one is adorably beautiful. Here is Veit Stoss." He took a portfolio from a shelf filled with portfolios. "Veit Stoss is superior to Riemenschneider in force of temperamental expression; he has capacities in his passions that make him superior, or at least equal, to Rembrandt." Ritter spread before them several reproductions of the master, showing the seriousness and sorrow inspiring ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... of a great genius into long retarded pre-eminence is always attended by certain critical misunderstandings. To a cynical observer, on the lookout for characteristic temperamental lapses, two recent interpretations of El Greco may be especially commended. I mean the Secret of Toledo, by Maurice Barres, and an article in the "Contemporary" of April, 1914, by ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... the Academic Lion. "Besides we expect soon to establish a cranial, neurological, and psychopathic examination which will determine the subliminal, temperamental needs of every applicant. Then we classify the readers in groups, and the books in lists, and the whole thing ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... preserver, whose table adjoined mine. He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. He had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle; of one whom the clenched fist of Fate has smitten beneath the temperamental third waistcoat-button. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Lamia, for La Belle Dame sans Merci. Keats's ecstasies were swooning ecstasies. They lacked joy. It is not only in the Ode to a Nightingale that he seems to praise death more than life. This was temperamental with him. He felt the "cursed spite" of things as melancholily as Hamlet did. He was able to dream a world nearer his happiness than this world of dependence and church bells and "literary jabberers"; and he could come to no terms except with ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... bewildering rise and fall of methods and ideals. We were captivated for a time by the quest of the golden phrase and the accompanying cultivation of exotic emotions; and then, wearying of the pretty and the temperamental, we plunged into the bloodshot brutalities ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... effect was temperamental and sketchy. The boards which formed the floor were never even nailed down; they were fine, wide planks without a knot in them, and they looked so well that we merely fitted them together as closely as we could and light-heartedly let ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... question, without which the inventor would not be likely to find the answer; but he needs a kind of flexibility or playfulness, just because his job is that of seeing things in a new light. We must allow him to toy with his materials a bit, and even to be a bit "temperamental", and not expect him to grind out works of art or other inventions as ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... man to be always searching for and racking his brain about things that either irritate or torment him. The cause of it is an internal morbid depression, combined often with an inward restlessness which is temperamental; when both are developed to their utmost, suicide ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... landscape and blends with it for ever; he owned his nativity, too, by his pictures of the prairie and the fur-trade and by his life of Washington, who had laid his hand upon his head; but he had spent half his life abroad, in the temperamental enjoyment of the romantic suggestion of the old world, and by his writings he gave this expansion of sympathy and sentiment to his countrymen. If his temperament was native-born and his literary taste home-bred, and if his affections gave a legend ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sentimentalism was largely temperamental, unreflective, and concrete. In William Blake, the singularity of whose work long retarded its due appreciation, sentimentalism was likewise temperamental; but, unconfined to actuality, became far broader in scope, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... the first day out, had told him that this stateroom was occupied by an invalid gentleman travelling alone, who preferred to remain there instead of trusting to his crutches on a temperamental deck. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... his precocious sexuality, M.O. had from the very first an extreme disgust for obscene stories, and for any association of sexual things with filthy words and anecdotes. Owing in part to this and in part to his temperamental skepticism, he disbelieved what associates told him regarding sexual emissions, only becoming convinced when he actually experienced them; and the facts of reproduction he denied indignantly until he read them in a medical work. Until he was well over 25 the physical aversion from any thought ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... seeking means by which to study the mental and temperamental traits of wild birds and mammals, the definite and clearly cut manifestations are so few in kind that we are glad to seize upon everything available. Of the visible evidences, pugnacity and the fighting habit are valuable materials, because they are visible. Much ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... Paris had been taken would have been great in moral value to them as in moral loss to the French. Their spirits would have been exalted as much as the French spirits would have drooped, and even in modern war victory is secured as much by temperamental qualities as ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... engaged a private dining room at the "Tourraine" for his young guests. He welcomed them with true Latin enthusiasm, and to see him seated at the head of the table one would never have suspected him to be the moody, temperamental genius whose playing had made him famous in two continents. When the time came to leave the hotel for the train he was escorted to the station by an admiring bodyguard ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... like a hermit with my passion! Beyond the line of the sea horizon the world for me did not exist as assuredly as it does not exist for the mystics who take refuge on the tops of high mountains. I am speaking now of that innermost life, containing the best and the worst that can happen to us in the temperamental depths of our being, where a man indeed must live alone but need not give up all hope of holding converse ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... thus disclosed, lead some to seek shelter in "feeling and inspiration"; but feeling and inspiration are temperamental, and have nothing to do with the simple facts of vision. A measured and unchanging scale is as necessary and valuable in the training of the eye as the musical scale in the discipline of ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... of mind, she had learned to penetrate the veil that hangs behind the actions of humanity, into the secret, temperamental places whence those actions emanate, and had achieved a somewhat rare comprehension and tolerance ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... a sullen, disgruntled creature. As the convicts would say, it had a "grouch" against the world. He never played with the other flies either. He was strong and healthy, too; for I studied him long to find out. His indisposition for play was temperamental, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... teach him aught which your good-will cannot,—were it only what experience will accrue from your ruin. Enemy and welcome, but enemy on high terms. He cannot hate anybody; his time is worth too much. Temperamental antagonisms may be suffered, but like feuds of emperors, who fight ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... natural instincts of woman which has led to the attempt to establish what has been called a "third sex,"[317] a type of woman in whom the sexual differences are obscured or even obliterated—a woman who is, in fact, a temperamental neuter. Economic conditions are compelling women to enter with men into the fierce competition of our disordered social State. Partly due to this reason, though much more, as I think, to the strong stirring in woman of her newly-discovered self, there has ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... "Heydenreich thought of that, too. He got this up for me, about five years ago. The intelligence test is based on the new French Surete test for mentally deficient criminals. Then there's a memory test, and tests for judgment and discrimination, semantic reactions, temperamental and emotional makeup, ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... admit Luther's fault and proceed to apologize for him and find plausible reasons for extenuating his indiscretions in speech and his temperamental faults? We shall do neither. We shall let this "foul-mouthed," coarse Luther stand before the bar of public opinion just as he is. His way cannot be our way, but ultimately none of us will be his final judges. The ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... this letter doesn't contain a word of the kind of news that you like to hear. But it's that beastly twilight hour of a damp November day, and I'm in a beastly uncheerful mood. I'm awfully afraid that I am developing into a temperamental person, and Heaven knows Gordon can supply all the temperament that one family needs! I don't know where we'll land if I don't preserve my ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... studio. Terrible as the Battle of the Street was, it was yet battle. Only the strong and the brave might dare it, and the figure that held her imagination and her sympathy was not the artist, soft of hand and of speech, elaborating graces of sound and color and form, refined, sensitive, and temperamental; but the fighter, unknown and un-knowable to women as he was; hard, rigorous, panoplied in the harness of the warrior, who strove among the trumpets, and who, in the brunt of conflict, conspicuous, formidable, set the battle in a rage around him, and exulted ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... always a most dreadfully sensitive child, and temperamental. She took after me, I'm afraid; the others were more like their father. I remember when she ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... the saloon there runs a code, the only possible code, the final code; and it is observed. If it is not observed, the infraction causes pain, distress. Another marked characteristic is its gigantic temperamental dullness, unresponsiveness to external suggestion, a lack of humour—in short, a heavy and half-honest stupidity: ultimate product of gross prosperity, too much exercise, too much sleep. Then I notice a grim passion for the status quo. This is natural. Let these people exclaim ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... as temperamental as an army tank!" Ripley added more mildly: "I don't say there's no good in the boy, but it needs waking up. He asked me last night about a course in petroleum engineering, like young Thode, and ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... fashion of the wise Emperor of China, Truth hath not an unchanging name. A modern English writer says: I have long been convinced by the experience of my life, as a pioneer of various heterodoxies, which are rapidly becoming orthodoxies, that nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or given in the affections and intuitions; and that discussion and inquiry do little more than feed temperament. Our poet seems to mean that the Perceptions, when they perceive truly, convey objective truth, which ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... Candage seemed to be seeking sociability by bellowing ferociously, thudding his hard fist on the counter. Mayo was not easily surprised by the temperamental vagaries of queer old 'longcoast crabs like Captain Candage, but this sudden conversion did ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... possible only at the center, the crux, of Being. This truth is represented by the algebraical X, the symbol of spiritual sex-union. Therefore sex relationships which do not have for their crux spiritual as well as temperamental affinity, are not final, or eternal, however beautiful they may be; and there are many sex-relationships which are pure and sacred even though they do not fulfil this highest of all relationships, that of ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... follows: "Six hours' sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool." This is somewhat arbitrary, and, moreover, is not in harmony with physiological law. In the first place, no hard and fast rule can be laid down that will cover all cases. Apart from the difference of sex, there are temperamental conditions which vary with every case. We are decidedly of the opinion that eight hours' sleep is necessary for the adult individual. It has been affirmed by some authorities that the more the individual sleeps the longer he will live, which is a perfectly rational ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... a sweet morsel under his tongue. He condones it in its worst form. To him it is genital weakness or an overplus of animal life—an exuberance of the spirit. It is a racial inheritance and not an individual fault. It is temperamental ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... opportunities for testing the fibre of the young man's character under strain; besides, Lewis's confidential position had no doubt made him acquainted with the inner details of the plan, its broader significance, and the political obstacles to be overcome in carrying it into effect. Aside from his temperamental disposition for such an enterprise, his public service had strengthened his grasp of national interests; enthusiasm for adventure had been supplemented by maturity of judgment in affairs of state. Altogether, a better man for the place could ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... lips sought to assume the well-bred curves of conformity to the environment of entertainers who valued him so far as to demand a series of his own lectures; but the cynic of his temperamental revolt from us, or, to be exact, from the thing which he supposed us to be, lurked in every line of his ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... the hole of the pit whence he was digged. With a deep and abiding pride of race, linking him spiritually with the historic past of his people, he was inclined to look askance at the subverting spirit of Puritanism, which was now beginning to give Merrie England food for serious thought. His temperamental bias against Puritanism was accentuated by the openly avowed hostility of the Puritans to his chosen profession. Though born of the people, Shakespeare's social ideals were strongly aristocratic, and, while possessing, in an unusual degree that unerring knowledge of human nature ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... dangerous for the interviewer, since Americans were being murdered rather profusely in Mexico at the time in spite of the astute assurances of Mr. Bryan, and no matter how substantial his references the correspondent was likely to meet some temperamental and touchy soldier with a loaded rifle who would shoot first and afterward carry his papers to some one who could ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... process of writing history which Trench describes as "a moral whitewashing of such things as in men's sight were as blackamoors before." Religious or temperamental prejudice often obscures the vision and warps the judgment of even the most scholarly minds. Conscious of this infirmity in the ablest writers of history it would be absurd to claim complete exemption from the power of personal bias. It is sincerely hoped, however, that the strongest ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... first streak of dawn we prepared to leave the beaten path and follow a trail few tourists attempt. When we reached the Little Colorado, we followed Smolley implicitly as we forded the stream. "Chollo," our pack mule, became temperamental halfway across and bucked the rest of the way. I held my breath, expecting to see our cargo fly to the four winds; but the Chief had not packed notional mules for years in vain. A few pans rattled, and later ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... rate, is my own experience. I am convinced that the books of mine which have had so many friends as this book, 'The Seats of the Mighty', has had in the English-speaking world were written in just such conditions of temperamental isolation or absorption. First the subject, which must of itself have driving power, then the main character, which becomes a law working out its own destiny; and the subject in my own work has always been translatable into a phrase. Nearly every ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... midnight, and were charged with animosity which might flame into violence. All of the speakers lived under a strain, and under emotional pressure. Consequently they were not always easy to handle. Some of them were temperamental, a bit jealous of each other, and not always satisfied with the tours Susan mapped out for them. She expected of her colleagues what she herself could endure, but they often complained and sometimes refused to fulfill ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... unaided and in the face of the tremendous barriers that shut me out. The repeated insistence upon the fact that Sally was a Bland aroused in me, whenever I met it, an irritation which I tried in vain to dispel. To be a Bland meant, after all, simply to be removed as far as possible from any temperamental relation to ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... the subjective, historic and ultimately, perhaps, racial and temperamental factor in the lives of peoples which makes it difficult, though not impossible, perhaps, to transmit political and religious institutions to people of a different racial type and a different social tradition. William James' essay, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," in which he points out ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... two. Kitty—nervous without being sensitive, temperamental without temperament, a woman who seemed to flit and never light—and Roxanne, who was as young as spring night, and summed up in her own ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... and they have made up for such deficiencies as they showed, by their greatness in other directions. Delacroix, for instance, sometimes let his temperament run him into carelessness of form in his hurry to express his temperamental richness of color. These things are superficial to the greater ends he had in view, but we have to distinctly forgive it in accepting the picture. And a great colorist may be so forgiven; he makes up for his fault by other things. But there is no forgiveness for the student ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... moment that Wilson's peculiar temperamental faults asserted themselves. Sorely he needed the sane advice of Colonel House, who would doubtless have found ways of placating the opposition. But that practical statesman was in London and the President lacked ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... heroism of those who faced the last plunge of the Titanic so courageously when all the boats had gone,—if it does, it is the difficulty of expressing an idea in adequate words,—to say that their quiet heroism was largely unconscious, temperamental, not a definite choice between two ways of acting. All that was visible on deck before the boats left tended to this conclusion and the testimony of those who went down with the ship and were afterwards rescued is of the ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... of individuality. As a result of my close acquaintance with this band of primates, I feel more keenly than ever before the necessity of taking into account, in connection with all experimental analyses of behavior, the temperamental characteristics, experience, and affective peculiarities ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... the ancient home of Civilization, the mother of arts and refinement, to accept the standard of the Huns which the Germans embraced and imposed upon their allies. The conflict between the Germans and the Italians was instinctive, temperamental. For a thousand years it took the form of a struggle between the German Emperors and the Italian Popes for mastery. The Germans strove for political domination, for temporal power; the Italians strove, at least in ideal, in order that the spiritual should not be the vassal of the physical. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... he said, "that my greatest drawback is a habit of excitement and temper. Excitable I shall probably be all my life. It's temperamental. But I'm learning to control ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... triumphant—like the noise a baby makes getting what it wants. The eyes closed, and that strangled sound of breathing began again. Soames recoiled to the chair and stonily sat down. The lie he had told, based, as it were, on some deep, temperamental instinct that after death James would not know the truth, had taken away all power of feeling for the moment. His arm brushed against something. It was his father's naked foot. In the struggle to breathe he had pushed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... there among contemporary masters of the violin whose name stands for more at the present time than that of the great Belgian artist, his "extraordinary temperamental power as an interpreter" enhanced by a hundred and one special gifts of tone and technic, gifts often alluded to by his admiring colleagues? For Ysaye is the greatest exponent of that wonderful Belgian school of violin playing which is rooted in his teachers Vieuxtemps ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... a being who said "Yea" to life, accepted it as a glorious gift, and was determined to live it with all his might, it was Alan Seeger. Such a frame of mind is too instinctive and temperamental to be called optimism. It is not the result of a balancing of good and ill, and a reasoned decision that good preponderates. Rather it is a direct perception, an intuition, of the beauty and wonder of the universe—an intuition ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... the self-willed, temperamental daughter of an Italian violin virtuoso, furnished much of the interest of the book. The efforts of Grace and her chums to create in this girl a healthy, wholesome enjoyment for High School life, ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... undoubtedly characteristic of the man, as it often is of minute observers of nature. I am not at all surprised to learn from one who knew him of his "temperamental melancholy." He was austere and aloof; but exactly the type of mind that would give all he had to those who possessed his confidence. It must have been a privilege to know him intimately. I have said that his poems resemble the work of no other poet; ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... first tour occurred another one of the famous Frohman examples of quick retort. He was rehearsing this highly temperamental lady, and made a constructive criticism which nettled her very much. She became indignant, called him ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... Temperamental. That is, he got soused on about three, and, while snooted, would deride Victor Herbert, thus proving that ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... had committed merciless robberies, cruel murders, heartless swindles, abominable depravities. I have felt greater temperamental aversion from many highly respectable persons than I did from them. Their crimes were one thing, they were another. Not that crime does not corrupt a man—stain him of its color. But there is always another side ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... with a good temperamental blend of the imaginative and the active, was just the man, the time being ripe, to encounter and surmount that wall. Fortunately, too, the Virginians were horsemen, man and horse one piece almost, New World centaurs. They would follow the bridle-tracks ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... and temperamental barriers between the Dresden china lady and her daughter; but they loved each other, and never had the girl been so dear to her mother as now. The Grand Duchess thought of the summer day when Virginia had ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... used to the emotions of the geniuses and near-geniuses, whose temperamental outbreaks she had learned by heart, not to understand what was ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... One Thyroid-centered Type has Bright eyes Good clean teeth Symmetrical features Moist flushed skin Temperamental attitude toward life Tendency to heart, intestinal ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... man Jay might have been, given a different temperamental bias. I'd say—the man Jay Allison started out to be. The man he refused to be. Within his subconscious, he built up barriers against a whole series of ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... population-mass possessing very distinct characteristics, which sharply conflict with Northern traits. Fuhkien province is not only as diversified but speaks a dialect which is virtually a foreign language. And so on North and West of the Yangtsze it is the same story, temperamental differences of the highest political importance being everywhere in evidence and leading to perpetual bickerings and jealousies. For although Chinese civilization resembles in one great particular the Mahommedan religion, in that it accepts without question all adherents irrespective ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... subdivided into two families: Serbs and Bulgars. And here it is more difficult to distinguish the dividing line, for although there is a marked difference between the characteristics of the two peoples, both physical and temperamental, so nearly alike are their languages that speech forms no sure guide to distinguishing, especially in Macedonia, where dialects vary with a day's travel. The trend of popular feeling seems the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... here the explanation of Italy's attitude given by Chancellor von Buelow when discussing the conference in Parliament next year. The impression is general, both in and out of Germany, that Italy is only a half-hearted political ally. It is based on the temperamental difference between the Latin and the Teutonic races, on the popular sympathy between the French and Italian peoples, and to the supposedly reluctant support lent by Italy to Germany during the critical time of the conference, the ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... of Virgil. The influence of Horace on Luis de Leon has been often noted. It exists no doubt, but has perhaps been exaggerated: why should we suppose that his love of moderation was learnt from Horace and was not partly, at least, temperamental? May not the references to Horace be a characteristic of humanism? An opinion backed by the weight of classical authority must reach us with irresistible force, must it not? However this may be, the predominant influence in De ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... denominations and Paul put forth the effort of his life to prevent such a breach. Where in all history can you find twelve men more radically different mentally and temperamentally than the Apostles? Yet the Holy Spirit did not establish separate churches to cater to and further develop these temperamental eccentricities. All were united in one church so they could counterbalance and complement each other and thus perfect their own character and give greater symmetry to the church. "And when the day of Pentecost was fully come ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... latest family. Sylvia took Lawrence, yawning and rubbing his eyes, but fighting desperately against his sleepiness, upstairs for his nap. When this task fell to Judith's lot it was despatched with business-like promptness, but Lawrence had early discovered a temperamental difference between his two sisters, and Sylvia was seldom allowed to leave the small bed until she had paid tribute to her ever-present desire to please, in the shape of a story or a song. On that day Buddy was more exacting than usual. Sylvia told the story of Cinderella ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... love-child, and the knowledge of this is shown very clearly in its influence upon their mutual attitude. As for her own affairs, these were, first—to her father's unbounded astonishment—marriage with a temperamental violinist, who ran rapidly down the scale from adoration of his own wife to intrigue with another's; second, clandestine relations with a man of her own race and breed, who loved her to idolatry, and within a few months was found embracing his cousin. Poor Gyp! I jest; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... about operas, reads everything that comes to his hand—particularly novels—and is an inveterate patron of picture shows. "Under no strain trying to hear 'em talk," he confidences. While such occasions really are very rare, once in an age he becomes depressed—a peculiar fact (their rarity) in one so temperamental. After the fifth call within a month to act as pall-bearer at a funeral, he was in the depths. A friend ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... Constance miserably, and hurried to finish her escape. At the door, however, she suddenly turned and came back, walking nonchalantly but hastily out through the windows upon the side porch. A second later Paul Gresham and Billy Wobbles, the latter walking with temperamental ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... sureness and directness of the primitive mind. The very simplicity of his reasoning was its strength, and his materialism was far more compelling than the subtly complex materialism of Charley Furuseth. Not that I—a confirmed and, as Furuseth phrased it, a temperamental idealist—was to be compelled; but that Wolf Larsen stormed the last strongholds of my faith with a vigour that received respect, while ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... carefully reasoned, tends at times to render it less psychologically true. Each version has its own merits and its own faults, and in their appeal they are so radically different that a choice between them must always remain meaningless except on temperamental grounds. At one point, however—and an important one at that—the metrical version seems to ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... word as a cliche) chronicle and commentary of the battles of another, battles which cover the same period and were fought broadly for the same causes. But the French Radical extremist could never see his way to subscribe to the Socialist creed. His stalwart individualism, in part temperamental, was also as a political working faith the result of a distrust of logic divorced from the experience and responsibility of actual administration. Somewhat similarly the English Socialist refused to let logic press him into the premature Internationalism of so many of his associates, nor did he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... women was temperamental rather than intellectual. Engrossed as he was by his desire for wealth, prestige, dominance, he was confused, if not chastened by considerations relating to position, presentability and the like. None ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... that. I was going to remark that, though the temperamental conditions of Posthumus and Troilus are apparently so similar—apparently, mind—and their position as betrayed husbands so identical, we find them acting in directly opposite ways. Troilus entertains no thought of ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... deadlock. For in such matters as teaching, a man may put a strain on himself for a certain length of time; he may even be a success, up to a point. But if he lacks the temperamental gift of holding classes, the results in the long run will not be fair to the children, to say nothing of himself. With reluctance I rose to depart, Mr. F—— adding, by way of letting ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... arises in the mind of one who intends to undertake machine design is, what constitutes natural fitness for it. There seems to be no positive basis on which to determine in advance a natural fitness for this work, but there are certain temperamental characteristics that undoubtedly have much ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... see that young man coming toward us?" said Evelyn, nodding in the direction of a tall, spare young fellow, who, with his shock of black hair, long, aquiline nose, and sensitive, thin-lipped mouth, looked decidedly temperamental, even to the most ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... in suspecting that nobody takes Vashkowska seriously any more, and, besides, I don't think much of all this symbolistic dancing, anyway, and at last I've found out what I really want to do. Oh, Carl, it's so wonderful! I'm studying ceramics with Miss Deitz, she's so wonderful and temperamental and she has the dearest studio on Gramercy Park. Of course I haven't made anything yet, but I know I'm going to like it so much, and Miss Deitz says I have a natural taste ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... His temperamental instability may have been such that the desire for a change—the "wanderlust"—was driving him to distraction. Or perhaps, under the urge of his own subconscious feeling of failure, he may have convinced himself that if he could "shake" the old environment and all in it that hampered ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... them. The sands of Egypt breed scandals as quickly as the climate degenerates the morals of shallow-minded tourists. But this woman Freddy knew to be as dangerous as she was charming; and he also knew the enthusiastic nature of Michael and how it was temperamental with him to place all women on pedestals and worship them as pure, high beings, far above mere men. Fallen idols never shattered his belief; they were ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... art a profound turn was the sheer indolence of his temperamental breed. He had no liking at all for labor; spreading fish on the flakes, keeping the head of his father's punt up to the sea on the grounds, splitting a turn of birch and drawing a bucket of water from the well by the Needle, discouraged the joy of life. He scolded, he begged, ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... There was Reginald Bug, a young Englishman, who loved her passionately for a few years; then the renowned Pierre Dentifrice from the Comedie Francaise; then Angelo Carlini, and Basto Caballero (founder of the Shakespearean Theatre in Barcelona); then Dimitri Chuggski, a very temperamental, highly strung Russian (it is in Volume VIII. of Edgar Sheepmeadow's "Beds and their Inmates" that he relates the story of Chuggski's desertion of Gretchen; he contends that he left her because she always slept with ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... deep despondency. That fall and winter he wandered alone in the woods along the Sangamon, almost distracted with sorrow. When he seemed on the verge of insanity a friend, Bowling Green, took him to his own home and nursed him back to health, and the grief settled into that temperamental melancholy, which, relieved only by his humor, was part of the deep mystic there was in him, part of the prophet, the sadness that so early baptised him in the tragedy of life, and taught him to pity a ...
— Life of Abraham Lincoln - Little Blue Book Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 324 • John Hugh Bowers
... an underlying cause in extenuation for this temperamental shortcoming which in justice to the ostensibly weaker sex should be set forth here. Even though I am taking on the role of Devil's Advocate in the struggle to keep woman from canonizing herself by main force I want to ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... to be wondered that McLean's austere Scotch soul stood in danger of being thawed in the sunshine of Lit-lit's eyes. She was pretty, and slender, and willowy; without the massive face and temperamental stolidity of the average squaw. "Lit-lit," so called from her fashion, even as a child, of being fluttery, of darting about from place to place like a butterfly, of being inconsequent and merry, and of laughing as lightly as ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... that the change was in himself, and was merely the outcropping of the morbid vein which persists, with more or less continuity, in all the temperamental workings of the human mind. When the dinner was over and there was an adjournment to the sitting-room, little Miss Gilman presently found her reading-glasses and a book; and the doctor, in the act of filling two long-stemmed pipes for his guest and himself, was ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... libraries that their peculiarities are due to the temperament of the American librarian. We make a similar assumption when we discuss British libraries. I do not deny that the librarians on both sides have had something to do with it, but the determining factor has been the social and temperamental differences between the two peoples. Americans are fluid, experimental, eclectic, and this finds expression in the character of their institutions and in the way these are administered ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... the fair type of complexion, the rather full habit of body, the temperamental disposition, but in addition that close-cropped head, it is almost as if it were shaved, the plumpness, the glasses—those are things that are made. And the way he carries himself. And the way he thinks. His meticulousness. When ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... you for going," said Latisan. He followed her, and to her profound amazement she discovered that a woodsman could be as temperamental as a prima donna. "I'm going, too, Mr. Flagg," he called over his shoulder. "I'm going for good and all where you're concerned. I'm done with you. I gave you your fair warning. Send another man north ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... do right and to serve her fellow-beings animated her whole life, and it seemed to her rather hard to be found fault with. Indeed, she had not many faults, and the defects of her character were mostly temperamental. ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... temperamental," she said with a shrug. "Sometimes I believe you think more of your work than ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... temperamental men, Beethoven was doubtless the most so, and the anecdotes written of him are many. He was especially irascible. His domestic annoyances are revealed freely in his diary: "Nancy is too uneducated for a housekeeper—indeed, quite ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... and making an impression with free and daring speech. She lived in a gorgeous apartment of her own, and for diversion had adopted a little curly-headed Greek boy, for whom she engaged the services of a French nurse. She was very temperamental. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty |
