"Moroseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of a passionate nature, but his temper usually struck inward, and his friend Kashkin said that he "never began a quarrel or defended himself when attacked." That is not, I believe, a type to fascinate women for long, and Tschaikovski's moroseness, which bordered on morbidness and always hovered on the brink of insanity, made it perhaps fortunate for at least two women that his negotiations with them ended as they did. And so he drifted—not such a bachelor ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... pride, twisted the one idea of his life into a new shape, and made some gratification of his wrath, the object into which his whole intellectual existence resolved itself. All the stubbornness and implacability of his nature, all its hard impenetrable quality, all its gloom and moroseness, all its exaggerated sense of personal importance, all its jealous disposition to resent the least flaw in the ample recognition of his importance by others, set this way like many streams united into one, and bore him on upon their tide. The most impetuously ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... day he had heard that Harlan had appeared at the Star and had been taken into the outlaw band by Haydon, Deveny had exhibited fits of a sullen moroseness that had kept his closest friends from seeking his companionship. Those friends were few, for Deveny's attitude toward his men had always been that of the ruthless tyrant; he had treated them with an aloofness that had in it a contempt which they could not ignore. More—he was merciless, ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... stable-man. I kept him in my service, and still keep him, as a phenomenon of moroseness not to be ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... mankind acquainted, and, by an extension of their uses, are every day promoting some new friendship. Through them distant nations became capable of conversation, and losing by degrees the awkwardness of strangers, and the moroseness of suspicion, they learn to know and understand each other. Science, the partizan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for higher ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... the house, under pretence of important business, which, I believe, consisted in their emptying together a mutchkin stoup of usquebaugh. While the worthy host and his guest were thus employed, the discarded steward, with a double portion of moroseness in his gesture and look, walked discontentedly into the kitchen of the place, which was occupied but by one guest. The stranger was a slight figure, scarce above the age of boyhood, and in the dress of a page, but bearing an air of haughty ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... seen that in society I am like a fish on the sand, which writhes and writhes, but cannot get away till some benevolent Galatea casts it back into the mighty ocean. I was indeed fairly stranded, dearest friend, when surprised by you at a moment in which moroseness had entirely mastered me; but how quickly it vanished at your aspect! I was at once conscious that you came from another sphere than this absurd world, where, with the best inclinations, I cannot open my ears. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... again, opening the basket between them, and set up the spirit stove and lighted it for her to boil the minute kettle upon it. While she did this, it was his turn to watch her; and presently from his moroseness he said in ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... 46. Surliness or moroseness is incompatible also with politeness. Such as, should any one say "he was desired to present Mr. such-a-one's respects to you," to reply, "What the devil have I to do with his respects?"—"My Lord enquired after you lately, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... from the very evidences of his carelessness, as they seemed to others, I gathered, after a time, the blissful conviction that Claude Bainrothe was not indifferent to me. His reserve, his moroseness almost, the despairing way in which he spoke sometimes of his future life, his want of purpose, of interest in what was passing around him, his entire self-possession with Evelyn, so different from his embarrassment with me; his manner of pursuing me with his eyes, and ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... brother of the King, yet Clarendon found in him a perpetual obstacle to his plans, an intriguer whose selfish aims and jealous temper ever engendered fresh dissensions at Court, and a sullen bigot whose moroseness was redeemed by none of his brother's easy suavity of manner. The Duke's pride did not permit him openly to desert the interests of his father-in-law or to range himself with Clarendon's enemies. But his blundering tactlessness, his easily wounded vanity, and ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... thinking should be necessary to show the absurdity of the belief that the body is the man. Two bodies may be alike, as in the case of twins, but the souls, the real men, may be absolutely unlike. The real man is superphysical. His intelligence or his stupidity, his genial disposition or his moroseness, his generosity or his selfishness, are but the manifestations of himself through the body by which they are expressed. The body itself is a mere aggregation of physical atoms, as a planet is, so organized that they constitute an instrument for a purpose. The mass of matter ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... should be at this time a prey to care so carking as to border on forthright melancholia. Never a particularly cheerful person, at Red Hoss' soft knock upon his outer door he raised a countenance completely clothed in moroseness where not clothed in whiskers and grunted briefly—a sound which might or might not be taken as an invitation to enter. Nor was his greeting, following upon the caller's soft-footed entrance, ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... will not down. The next three days were miserable ones for Hugh. The green-eyed monster again cast the cloak of moroseness over him—swathed him in the inevitable wet blanket, as it were. During the first two days Veath had performed a hundred little acts of gallantry which fall to the lot of a lover but hardly to that of a brother—a score of things that would not have been observed by the latter, ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... wife. They came to this country, among strangers, to an humble home, where she suffered many privations, which she bore with woman's fortitude. But when her husband became an inebriate, and treated her with moroseness and brutality, reason forsook its throne, and she became a maniac. Hannah Pease was an intimate friend of hers, who seems to be ever in her mind, perhaps because she used her influence to prevent the ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... exercise, or sleep, are important factors in the production of insanity and crime. Over fatigue means a weakening of the power of attention, and hence of will, a paralyzing of the highest brain centers, a lowered resistance to the more primitive instincts and passions. Chronic irritability, moroseness, pathological impulses of all sorts, generally betokens eyestrain, dyspepsia, constipation, or some other bodily derangement. With the regaining of normal health the unruly impulses usually become quieter, sympathy flows more freely, the man becomes kinder, more tolerant, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Captain Maconochie confirms, from his own experience, the opinion already expressed by many others upon the policy of solitary confinement. For a short period the effect is good; but, if prolonged, it leads either to stupid indifference or moroseness of temper, if it does not conduct even to insanity. It is, manifestly, an expedient to be cautiously used. We should, before any appeal to experience, and judging only from the nature of the human mind, have confidently predicted this result. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... of Sinope in Pontus, who was born B.C. 412, was one of his few disciples; he came at an early age to Athens, and became notorious for the most frantic excesses of moroseness and self-denial. On a voyage to AEgina he was taken by pirates and sold as a slave to Xeniades, a Corinthian, over whom he acquired great influence, and was made tutor to his children. His system consisted ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... and their silence in the presence of strangers is not due to moroseness or the absence of active thought. They have learned in the woods, if they are to be successful in their hunts, to be personally as unobtrusive as possible, often to remain motionless, and all the while to watch and listen alertly. Whenever they can be of real assistance, no ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... changes in Charlie's appearance, they nevertheless possessed a strangely brutalizing effect upon the refinement of his handsome face. And, added to them was an air of moroseness, of cold reserve, that suggested nothing so much as impotent resentment at the conditions under which he ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... leads to moroseness.—Like milk which is allowed to stand, the spirit of man or woman, if left unoccupied, turns sour. One secret of sourness and moroseness is the sense that some side of our nature has been repressed; and this inward indignation at our own wrongs we vent ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... old smile; and that smile revealed a gentle, noble spirit, still retaining its freshness unchafed by the carking cares and vexatious trials to which he had been daily subject. While to some men association with so peculiar and trying a nature as Rusha Thornton's might have brought moroseness and all unloveliness, Duncan Lisle, like the philosopher of hemlock fame, had turned his wife's shrewishness into a coat of armor, within which he preserved his soul serene, contemplative, and peaceful. This is saying ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... once more through the cracks of the shutters and the words died on her lips, while the maid, almost as frightened as the youngest child, howled and screamed out, "The good God is angry!" When it was dark again in the room she added with pedagogical moroseness, "You're all of you good for nothing, anyhow!" These words, no matter how odious the mouth from which they fell, made a deep impression on me; they forced me to look upward, above myself and above everything which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... which at first would seem beyond our powers of endurance. Mr. and Mrs. B., and, indeed, all the other B.'s, male and female, had got so used to the tyranny of this ill-tempered animal, that they put up with his moroseness almost without a growl; but there is a limit to sufferance, beyond which neither men nor bears can travel, and that boundary was at last attained with the B.'s. As what I am now about to relate is, however, rather an important ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... I go on," said Stryver, shaking his head in his bullying way, "I'll have this out with you. You've been at Doctor Manette's house as much as I have, or more than I have. Why, I have been ashamed of your moroseness there! Your manners have been of that silent and sullen and hangdog kind, that, upon my life and soul, I have been ashamed of ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... stupid that I saw not that even which was glaring to everybody. My stupidity did not, however, prevent me from finding in the baron a more jovial and satisfied appearance than ordinary. Instead of looking upon me with his usual moroseness, he said to me a hundred jocose things without my knowing what he meant. Surprise was painted in my countenance, but I answered not a word: Madam d'Epinay shook her sides with laughing; I knew not what possessed them. As nothing yet passed ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... should not touch wine at all, since it is not right to heap fire on fire. He adds that older men like ourselves may indulge therein as an ally against the austerity of their years—agreeing, therefore, with Theophrastus who likewise recommends it for the "natural moroseness" ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... night on account of fright or sorrow, the cause and cure of diseases through emotional disturbances, and death, usually directly by apoplexy, caused by anger, grief, or joy, have been current and generally accepted. On the other hand, irritability and moroseness caused by disordered organs of digestion, change of acumen or morals due to injury of the brain or nervous system, and insanity produced by bodily diseases, are also accepted proofs of the effect of the ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... irrepressible gurglings in its throat, and to indulge in short vocal snorts, which it checked in the bud, as if it hadn't quite made up its mind yet, to be good company. Now it was, that after two or three such vain attempts to stifle its convivial sentiments, it threw off all moroseness, all reserve, and burst into a stream of song so cosy and hilarious, as never maudlin nightingale yet ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... the citizens of a refined community that penal laws, which are in the hands of the rich, are laid upon the poor. Government, while it grows older, seems to acquire the moroseness of age; and as if our property were become dearer in proportion as it increased, as if the more enormous our wealth, the more extensive our fears, all our possessions are paled up with new edicts every day, and hung round with gibbets ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... and in The Task, there are sweeping denunciations of amusements which we now justly deem innocent, and without which or something equivalent to them, the wrinkles on the brow of care could not be smoothed, nor life preserved from dulness and moroseness. There is fanaticism in this no doubt: but in justice to the Methodist as well as to the Puritan, let it be remembered that the stage, card parties, and even dancing once had in them something from which even the most liberal ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... being benefited and that of the other injured. Whoever has marked the effects of success and failure upon the mind and the power of the mind over the body, will see that in the one case both temper and health are favourably affected, while in the other there is danger of permanent moroseness, of permanent timidity, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... before this doom was passed upon her that Michael made her acquaintance. Their first meeting, she sprang suddenly at him, a screaming, chattering little demon, threatening him with nails and teeth. And Michael, already deep-sunk in habitual moroseness merely looked at her calmly, not a ripple to his neck-hair nor a prick to his ears. The next moment, her fuss and fury quite ignored, she saw him turn his head away. This gave her pause. Had he sprung at her, or snarled, or shown any anger or resentment such ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... deeply set in a high-cheeked-boned, bronzed face, with a long upper-lipped, grimly-humorous mouth. Its expression in repose gave subtle warning that its owner possessed in a marked degree the strongly melancholic, emotional, and choleric temperament of his race. There was no moroseness—no hardness in it, but rather the taciturnity that invariably settles upon the face of those dwellers of the range who, perforce, live much alone with their thoughts. Sheathed in mail and armed, that face and bulky figure ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... my best interests, you feel that it will not hurt you (weary you in any way) to see me—but I fear that on Saturday I must be otherwhere—I enclose the letter from my old foe. Which could not but melt me for all my moroseness and I can hardly go and return for my sister in time. Will you ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... Swift seems to have led an uncomfortable life, ranking somewhere between the family and the upper servants. Sir William Temple was disposed to be kind, but found it difficult to converse with him on account of his moroseness and other peculiarities. At Shene he met King William III., who talked with him, and offered him a captaincy in the army. This Swift declined, knowing his unfitness for the post, and doubtless feeling the promptings of a higher ambition. It was also ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... experience that, "it is more blessed to give than to receive," and that, "it is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting." Dear young reader, do not imagine that we plead in favour of moroseness or gloom. Laugh if you will, and feast if you will, and remember, too, that, "a merry heart is a continual feast;" but we pray you not to forget that God himself has said that a visit to the house of mourning is better ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... limitless power waxed into lawlessness, and suspicion and dread into moroseness and cruelty, and on this rank soil the red weeds of lust and hate and bitter pride sprang up and choked all that was sweet and gracious and lovable in the ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... Booth's behaviour that day, from what was usual with him, was remarkable enough. None of his former vivacity appeared in his conversation; and his countenance was altered from being the picture of sweetness and good humour, not indeed to sourness or moroseness, but ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... eminent. This first interchange of thought upon a topic of literature did not tend to slacken my previous disposition to retreat into solitude; a solitude, however, which at no time was tainted with either the moroseness or ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Professor, on whom he kept his eyes constantly. It was evident that more than the usual interest was displayed in watching his movements. From the first there was no sulkiness in the chief, nor did he exhibit any moroseness, or anything which indicated ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... town; I don't know where he came from. I had only heard that he had written some sort of article in a progressive Petersburg magazine. Virginsky had introduced me casually to him in the street. I had never in my life seen in a man's face so much despondency, gloom, and moroseness. He looked as though he were expecting the destruction of the world, and not at some indefinite time in accordance with prophecies, which might never be fulfilled, but quite definitely, as though it were to be the day after to-morrow at twenty-five minutes past ten. We hardly ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... heart—the promotion of learning, which, it cannot be denied, was at that time in danger of being overthrown by bigotry and fanaticism: for this reason it was that he opportunely interposed to shelter Oxford from the moroseness of Owen and Godwin. Well might his eye look dreamy. How could that of the author of a "Discovery of a New World" look otherwise? He openly maintained that, not only was the moon habitable, but that it was possible for a man to go there. His reply to the Duchess of ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... branded and galled, the servant of the sweep-head that made mastery of the sea. I know him now. He can never again offend me. I forgive him everything—the whiskey raw on his breath the day I came aboard at Baltimore, his moroseness when sea and wind do not favour, his savagery to the men, his snarl and ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... resolute, for you will suffer more to watch from day to day the slow workings of death and ruin in your husband. Would you stay with me, to see every vestige of what you once loved passing away—to endure the caprice, the moroseness, the delirious anger of one no longer master of himself? Would you make your children victims and fellow-sufferers with you? No! dark and dreadful is my path! I will walk it alone: no one ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of fairness which she has been loath to follow, but which it would have been folly totally to disregard. Yet it has been apparent that the British ministers have borne us no good-will. Whatever justice has been done us has been done grudgingly,—with the moroseness of an enemy who is compelled to yield. While Lord Russell has been cautious how he offended our Government in acts, his repeated sneers in Parliament, at dinners, and on the hustings have exhibited the rancor of a jealous mind. There has been no hearty will to do justice, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... is literally a word of affirmation or assent, meaning for truth, but it is now almost always used ironically: as, "In these gentlemen whom the world forsooth calls wise and solid, there is generally either a moroseness that persecutes, or a dullness that tires you."—Home's Art of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... persons, specially the young, there opened the doubtful, because ever- varying, question of the kind and the quantity to be promoted or sanctioned, lest restraint should lead to reaction, and lest abstinence should change from purity and spirituality to moroseness or hypocrisy. And if Julius found one end of the scale represented by his wife and his junior curate, his sister-in-law and his senior curate were at the other. Yet the old recluse was far more inclined ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in it for me," she complained with pouting-lipped moroseness. Her venality, he began to see, was merely the instinctive acquisitiveness of the savage, the greed of the ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... hesitate; then I would hear him stop beside the window, where I knew the ice bowl and the decanter were placed upon a table which had stood beside the head of his bed so burdened since my early childhood. I had always dreaded his moroseness and instinctively felt the cause of it. I had never really loved him until just the last few days, and now I felt my love rise in a tide that ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... tartness, asperity, malignity, sharpness, unkindness, bitterness, moroseness, sourness, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... to find no interest left behind by the steamer. Wilson merely glanced at him, but soon looked back, his interest excited by something or other in the man's appearance. He was no ordinary looking man—a certain heavy, brooding air relieved of moroseness by twinkling black eyes marked him as a man with a personality. He was short and thick set, with shaggy, iron-gray eyebrows, a smooth-shaven face speckled on one side as by a powder scar. Beneath a thin-lipped mouth a stubborn chin protruded. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and corduroy ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... and in the broader fields of the Land of the Teens are harvested in the uplands of Maturity, and the harvest is always greater than the seed sown. The petulance and pouting of the child hardens into the gruffness, bad-temper, and moroseness of the man; the idleness and shirking of the youth becomes the shiftlessness and unreliability of the adult; the boy's neglect of duty and unwearied search for pleasure may be harvested in dissipation and ruin in mature life. ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen
... a fault it was a certain moroseness and fierceness of temper, a readiness and even an apparent pleasure in taking offense, that made him somewhat of a solitary in our midst and threw him more than ever on the companionship of his own Kanakas; so that at night, when one had occasion to seek him out, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... grumpy recluse cannot worry his subordinates: whereas the man in whom the sense of duty is strong (or, perhaps, only the sense of self-importance), and who persists in airing on deck his moroseness all day—and perhaps half the night—becomes a grievous infliction. He walks the poop darting gloomy glances, as though he wished to poison the sea, and snaps your head off savagely whenever you happen to blunder within earshot. And these vagaries are the harder to bear patiently, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... never make her crotchety old uncle love her. As time passed, the loss of his cash-box seemed to prey upon the miller's mind more and more. He never spoke of it in the house again; it is doubtful if he spoke of it elsewhere. But the loss of the money increased (were that possible) his moroseness. He often spoke to neither the girl nor Aunt Alvirah ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... rebellion by a public execution. I had determined to murder the younger prince likewise; but postponed it. His youth procured for him the safety, which neither my justice nor humanity would have granted him. Having once imbued my hands in innocent blood, my cruelty and moroseness knew no bounds. I doomed to death several whole families, whose loyalty I merely suspected. Not a day passed without bloodshed. I defiled my soul with the blood of innocence, virtue and nobleness. All these things hastened a rebellion, excited by the nobles, ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... His moroseness might have alienated me if I had regarded myself as a nobody. But ah! hadn't both John Lane and Aubrey Beardsley suggested that I should write an essay for the great new venture that was afoot—"The Yellow Book"? And hadn't ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... the fireside. He began to poke the fire in protest, but a smile gave the lie to the moroseness and solemnity ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... he was amiable, generous, and munificent. But his temper was spoiled by self-indulgence and incessant flattery. The moroseness he exhibited in his latter days was partly the effect of physical disease, brought about, indeed, by intemperance and gluttony. He was faithful to his wives, so long as he lived with them; and, while he doted on them, listened to their advice. But few of his advisers dared ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... flash brightness came back to Frieda's face. Good cheer was much more natural to her than moroseness. From the face in the picture she turned her gaze to the tousled reflection in the mirror. "The Fatherland is not much honored by such a representative!" she said, and began taking down her hair with a ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... smoothly, exquisitely polished: urbanely, beautifully French. But within a week or two Kashkine noted that Ivan was turning inward again towards himself and his habitual solitude. And he knew that presently these complacent fellows would be sticking themselves on the spikes of a chestnut-burr of moroseness, brusquerie, and blunt refusals to have anything to do with ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... his will, impaired though it was, still existed, and what was wanting in the sad second half of his career was not resolution, but conscience, pride, an ideal, anything which might beget the desire of reform. The curious mixture of brow-beating moroseness with a brazen readiness to accept and even extort favours, he would appear, as he ceased to be young, to have gradually inherited from his father; he was ready to live on the alms of the French Court, while never losing an opportunity of declaiming ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... feel that he really is glad that you have come to his house. This is not so with all great writers. Carlyle, if he liked to see a person, did not say so; Tennyson did not always trouble to be polite; Swift would receive his guests with a gloomy moroseness; Dickens was a man of moods; conversation with Browning was not always easy. Great men do not always trouble to be ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... "No one will now marry her, and she will marry no one." The prisoner was taken into the inn, and Werther left the place. The mind of Werther was fearfully excited by this shocking occurrence. He ceased, however, to be oppressed by his usual feeling of melancholy, moroseness, and indifference to everything that passed around him. He entertained a strong degree of pity for the prisoner, and was seized with an indescribable anxiety to save him from his impending fate. He considered ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... humanity: such a being has no name, because he is nowhere met with." This is true, because where there is question of a virtue, such as Temperance, resident in the concupiscible appetite, we are not concerned with any sullenness or moroseness of will, nor with any scrupulosity or imbecility of judgment, refusing to gratify the reasonable cravings of appetite, but with the habitual leaning and lie of the appetite itself. Now the concupiscible appetite in every man, of its own nature, leans to its proper ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... that the Ship Inn had a breath of youth and cheerfulness infused into it. But for her, the absence and indifference of the host, and the moroseness of the disappointed hostess, would have ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... the unusual moroseness to London in vile weather. At the best of times Jaffery grew impatient of the narrow conditions of town; yet there he was week after week, staying in a poky set of furnished chambers in Victoria Street, and doing nothing in particular, as ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... pedestrian, no doubt, has the advantage of us in the matter of climate; for, notwithstanding the traditional gloom and moroseness of English skies, they have in that country none of those relaxing, sinking, enervating days, of which we have so many here, and which seem especially trying to the female constitution,—days which withdraw all support from the back and loins, and render walking of all things burdensome. Theirs ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... packer was a taciturn inhabitant of the wilds who seldom indulged in an unnecessary remark. There was, however, no moroseness about him; the man was good-humored in his quiet way, and his usual ruminative calm was no deterrent from apparently tireless action. For the most part, he lived alone in the impressive stillness of the bush, where he had a few acres of partly cleared land which ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... spoke to Miss Blake; in fact he appeared to avoid her. His usual taciturnity was unchanged, but it did not convey the idea of moroseness. His general demeanour was as that of one in a dream, but in Miss Blake's presence he became alert, with almost an expectant look; and he gave, generally, the idea of being under the influence of ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... should be in the best condition; since, even where you might imagine the claims upon the body to be slightest—in the act of reasoning—who does not know the terrible stumbles which are made through being out of health? It suffices to say that forgetfulness, and despondency, and moroseness, and madness take occasion often of ill-health to visit the intellectual faculties so severely as to expel all knowledge (8) from the brain. But he who is in good bodily plight has large security. He runs no risk of incurring any such catastrophe through ill-health ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... believed it to be the root of the latter,—a faith which those who have watched the course of politics in a democracy, as he had, will be inclined to share. His gentleness is all the more striking by contrast, like that silken compensation which blooms out of the thorny stem of the cactus. His moroseness,[80] his party spirit, and his personal vindictiveness are all predicated upon the Inferno, and upon a misapprehension or careless reading even of that. Dante's zeal was not of that sentimental kind, quickly kindled ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... of his life, Tiberius seems to have conducted himself with a uniform repugnance to nature. Affable on a few occasions, but in general averse to society, he indulged, from his earliest years, a moroseness of disposition, which counterfeited the appearance of austere virtue; and in the decline of life, when it is common to reform from juvenile indiscretions, he launched forth into excesses, of a kind the most unnatural and most detestable. Considering the vicious passions which had ever ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... devoted himself with his old ardor to the preparation of an edition of Bishop Butler's works, resumed his multifarious reading, and filled up the interstices of his working- time with studies on Homer which he had been previously unable to complete. No trace of the moroseness of old age appeared in his manners or his conversation, nor did he, though profoundly grieved at some of the events which he witnessed, and owning himself disappointed at the slow advance made by some ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... had done other than revile him—since one's own mood will reflect itself like an image in clear water upon the minds of those around one—that Nicanor was surprised into smiling back, uncertainly, it is true, but still smiling. Then it was as though a bit of that outer crust of moroseness melted, and left something of his old boyish shyness in its place. Without stopping in the least to think why he did it, he broke the bread and meat into two portions, and held out one, in silence, awkwardly, ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... Tavernake was, in his way, good enough to look upon. He was well-built, his shoulders and physique all spoke of strength. His features were firmly cut, although his general expression was gloomy. But for a certain moroseness, an uncouthness which he seemed to cultivate, he might ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... much zeal but sport; and his time was otherwise trifled away without benefit from books or anything else. He had, however, excellent spirits, which never seemed much affected by his wife's occasional moroseness; and he bore with her unreasonableness sometimes to Anne's admiration. As for the Miss Musgroves, Henrietta and Louisa, young ladies of nineteen and twenty, they were living to be fashionable, happy and merry. Their dress had every advantage, their ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... for moroseness. If we have one disease we may at least congratulate ourselves that we are escaping all the rest. Sydney Smith, ever ready to look on the bright side of things, once, when borne down by suffering, wrote to a friend that he had gout, asthma, and seven other maladies, ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... him whilst still Harrisson—although it must be admitted she had not kissed him—and the one next in importance, the cabman. The pawnbroker made a very bad third—in fact, scarcely counted, owing to his own moroseness or reserve. But the cabman! Why, Fenwick had it all now at his fingers' ends. He could recall the start from New York, the wish to keep the secret of his gold-mining success to himself on the ship, and his satisfaction when he found his name printed with ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... exist: having broken my rural vegetation by one month in London, where I saw all the old faces—some only in passing, however—saw as few sights as possible, leaving London two days before the Exhibition opened. This is not out of moroseness or love of singularity: but I really supposed there could be nothing new: and therefore the best way would [be] to come new to it oneself after three or four years absence. I see in Punch a humorous catalogue of supposed pictures; Prince Albert's favourite ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... was one, at least, of the party, who was watching Lucia with most deep and painful interest. Lord Scoutbush was too busy with his own comforts, especially with his fishing, to think much of this moroseness of Elsley's. "If he suited Lucia, very well. His taste and hers differed: but it was her concern, not his"—was a very easy way of freeing himself from all anxiety on the matter: but not so with Major Campbell. He saw all this; and knew enough of human nature ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... which case the order was to shoot them) was not merely incomprehensible but revolting. And the escort, as if afraid, in the grievous condition they themselves were in, of giving way to the pity they felt for the prisoners and so rendering their own plight still worse, treated them with particular moroseness and severity. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... reflect without consternation that I should have been so given up by God to my own intemperance as to shut my eyes on all these benefits; that, instead of modest and respectful gratitude, I should indulge for three weeks in continual moroseness towards all your family, in headlong passion and the utmost insolence towards yourself, who possess so many claims on my veneration, from your noble family, your extraordinary learning, and distinguished reputation. Whatever I have said or written against ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... for your tail-coat, if that's what you mean," answered Mr Philp with sudden moroseness, pulling out his watch. ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... ferocious and uncontrollable caudillo's character. But it was soon eclipsed by the reckless deeds that followed each other in quick succession between his fifteenth and twentieth years. He speedily became notorious in the little town for his wild moroseness, for his savage ferocity when excited, for his inordinate love of cards. Gaming, a passion with many, was a necessary of life to him; it was the only pursuit to which he was ever constant; it gave rise to the quarrel in which, while yet a schoolboy, he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... bestow immense benefits spoil them by their silence or slowness of speech, which gives them an air of moroseness, as they say "yes" with a face which seems to say "no." How much better is it to join kind words to kind actions, and to enhance the value of our gifts by a civil and gracious commendation of them! To cure ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... to a deed from whence he derived the principal advantage. He enjoyed, at least, before his elevation, an acknowledged character of virtue and abilities; [65] but his austere temper insensibly degenerated into moroseness and cruelty; and the imperfect writers of his life almost hesitate whether they shall not rank him in the number of Roman tyrants. [66] When Carus assumed the purple, he was about sixty years of age, and his two sons, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... are few nations, however, who have so largely the gift of bantering fun and joke: or who on the occasion of a festival, can so entirely forget themselves and everything else but the enjoyments of the moment; but the very sight of a stranger is odious to the priests, and the moroseness which thou observest is intended as retaliation on me for my alliance with the strangers. Those very boys, of whom thou spakest, are the greatest torment of my life. They perform for me the service of slaves, and obey my slightest nod. One might imagine that the parents who ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... he answered, very gravely for him, for Ephraim is not at all given to moroseness and long faces. "God grant ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... had to be destroyed. In a fit of exceptional moroseness it had killed the Bickelbys' German governess. It was an irony of its fate that it should achieve popularity in the last moments of its career; at any rate, it established, the record of being the only living thing that had ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... Christian, at least for certain, though he was seen to keep clear of the established religion. It was not that he hid, so much as that the world did not care to know, what he believed. In that day there were many rites and worships which kept to themselves—many forms of moroseness or misanthropy, as they were considered, which withdrew their votaries from the public ceremonial. The Catholic faith seemed to the multitude to be one of these; it was only in critical times, when some idolatrous act was insisted on by the magistrate, that the specific nature of Christianity was ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... chosen in all countries pure hearts for its depositaries; and I would rather take it from a friend and neighbour, intelligent and righteous, and rejecting lucre, than from some foreigner educated in the pride of cities or in the moroseness of monasteries, who sells me what Christ gave ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... weak graybeard suddenly and out of the fullness of his manly strength. The change is so great, the difference so significant and painful, that the consequence must be a series of unpleasant properties,—egoism, excitability, moroseness, cruelty, etc. It is significant that the very old man assumes all those unpleasant characteristics we note in eunuchs—they result from the consciousness of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... and never smile; well might she wish to avoid excitement, to gain and retain composure! Caroline, when she knew all, acknowledged that Miss Mann was rather to be admired for fortitude than blamed for moroseness. Reader! when you behold an aspect for whose constant gloom and frown you cannot account, whose unvarying cloud exasperates you by its apparent causelessness, be sure that there is a canker somewhere, and a canker not the less deeply corroding ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... of the coroner's jury, was the cause of Lord George Bentinck's death. If this story is true, much that has been so long mysterious becomes clear. Lord George's sudden and tragic death is explained; as also the fact that it was from this period that the Duke of Portland's moroseness and shunning of the world became so marked as to be scarcely distinguishable from insanity. If the death of a brother, however provoked and accidental, had been on his conscience, what could be more natural than that the ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... the cold; her toes were all bent in as if she were having a convulsion. "Yes," she said with marked moroseness, "that is what ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... existence of sympathy between you and your grim and cross master, Jane; for it was astonishing to see how quickly a certain pleasant ease tranquillised your manner: snarl as I would, you showed no surprise, fear, annoyance, or displeasure at my moroseness; you watched me, and now and then smiled at me with a simple yet sagacious grace I cannot describe. I was at once content and stimulated with what I saw: I liked what I had seen, and wished to see more. Yet, for a long ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... faint intervals between anguish while Marc'antonio bound me with rude splints of his own manufacture. Yet he said little and did his surgery, though not ungently, with a taciturn frown which I set down to moroseness, having learnt somehow that the bandits had broken up their camp on the mountain and marched off, leaving ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... one asks what test there is that this kind of sudden conversion is not from God, as instability and frequent change are the test, on the other hand, in disproof of the divinity of the conversions just now mentioned, I answer,—its moroseness, inhumanity, and unfitness for this world. Men who change through strong passion and anguish become as hard and as rigid as stone or iron; they are not fit for life; they are only fit for the solitudes in ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... wouldst thou write thou mightst be soon known, even by the butterwomen, and fly through the world in bandboxes. If thou art of the dissembling tribe, it is thy office to rail at those books which thou huggest in a corner. If thou art one of those eavesdroppers, who would have their moroseness be counted gravity, thou wilt condemn a mirth which thou art past relishing; and I know no other way to quit the score than by writing (as like enough I may) something as dull, or duller than thyself, if possible. If thou art one of those critics in dressing, those extempores of fortune, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... to take a kind of melancholy pleasure in returning to what he considered his own failure, and Chris began to wonder whether the thought of it was not the secret of that slight indication to moroseness that he ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... baignoire and gave her conductor the best pretext he could have desired for asking Basil Dashwood to be so good as to escort her back. When the young actor, of whose personal preference Peter was quite aware, had led Mrs. Rooth away with an absence of moroseness which showed that his striking resemblance to a gentleman was not kept for the footlights, the two others sat on a divan in the part of the room furthest from the entrance, so that it gave them a degree of privacy, and Miriam ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... on, and there I remained. In a great degree, however, the habit of grieving was conquered by my application to work. My moroseness of ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... kept going. There would be two days of gaiety, two days of moroseness—an endless, almost invariable round. The sharp pull-ups, when they occurred, resulted usually in a spurt of work for Anthony, while Gloria, nervous and bored, remained in bed or else chewed abstractedly at her ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... six years of age he sent him to school at Kilkenny, and about eight years afterward he entered him a student of Trinity College in Dublin, where Swift lived in perfect regularity and in an entire obedience to the statutes; but the moroseness of his temper often rendered him unacceptable to his companions, so that he was little regarded and less beloved; nor were the academical exercises agreeable ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... into her favour by all those little flattering artifices which are so becoming in persons of his tender years, and which never fail to make an impression on a gentle and affable disposition; but finding his services not only rejected, but also rejected with scorn and moroseness, his spirit was too great to continue them for any long time; and all the assiduity he had shewn to gain her good-will, was on a sudden converted into a behaviour altogether the reverse: he was sure to turn the deaf ear to all the commands she laid upon him, and so far from doing any ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... 'Lishy, noticing his brother's moroseness, attributed it to his strong feeling for a certain damsel, Silas turned on him in a fury. Ambition had even driven out all other feelings, and Dely Manly seemed poor and commonplace to the dark swain, who a month before would have gone any length to gain ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... points of interest," Johnny reminded her. He had lost all his moroseness in the interest of the conversation. He had forgotten what a tonic his word-battles with Mary V could furnish. "You better stick to it, because it will sure pan out that way. You'll hate to admit, five years from now, that you once took me for a donkey. ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... he behaved much as usual, but fits of moroseness would seize on him, during which he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... later in the evening. She was touched by the figure, the shabby black frock, the white tired face. She had been honestly disappointed in her niece, disappointed in her plainness, in her apparent want of heart, in her silence and moroseness. Mathew had told her of the girl's outburst to him against her father, and this had seemed to her shocking upon the very day after that father's death. Now when she saw the photograph clenched in Maggie's hand tears came into her eyes. She said, "Maggie! dear Maggie!" and woke her. Maggie, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... severity amidst all this affliction,—in short, it was impossible for them to be witnesses, and this for successive voyages, to the complicated mass of misery passing in a slave-ship, without losing their finer feelings, or without contracting those habits of moroseness and cruelty which would brutalize their nature. Now, if we consider that persons could not easily become captains (and to these the barbarities were generally chargeable by actual perpetration, or by consent) till they had been two or three voyages in this employ, we shall see the ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... better success than previously; and brought the dray from its miry adherence to a position on the bank. It was then reladen with the goods; while the men, barely recovered from the chagrin caused by the misadventure, performed their work with a sullen moroseness, enlivening their gloom by animadversions on the river, the country, and everybody connected with ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... much respected and beloved in his family as were Mr. Hamilton and the Marquis of Malvern in theirs; but now neither respect nor affection was extended towards him, except, perhaps, by Lilla, and unconsciously by Lady Helen. Severity constantly indulged, was degenerating into moroseness; and feelings continually controlled, giving place to coldness and distrust. It was fortunate for Lilla's happiness and, as it afterwards proved, for her father's, that she was now under the kindly care of Mrs. Douglas, for constantly irritated with his ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... everything which comes under the appearance of formal instruction, will be disconcerted at the spirited, yet modest rebuke of a pious young woman: But there is as much efficacy in the manner of reproving profaneness, as in the words. If she corrects it with moroseness, she defeats the effect of her remedy by her unskilful manner of administering it. If, on the other hand, she affects to defend the insulted cause of God in a faint tone of voice, and studied ambiguity of phrase, or with ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... melancholy and disgust, Huerlin would have grasped as for dear life at the first comer, if only to get rid now and then of the wretched feeling of loneliness and emptiness. The manager, who was displeased by the manufacturer's silent moroseness, did what he could also to bring his two charges together. But finally a sort of salvation, if a dubious one, came to all three. During the month of September there came to the house at short intervals two new inmates—two very ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... not from hence imagine that Castor was a coward, or was in the least afraid of the strength of his brother; for he had lately given sufficient proof of his courage and resolution, in a battle he had been drawn into by Pollux, whose intolerable moroseness had brought on him the vengeance of a neighbouring dog. Pollux, after engaging his antagonist only a few minutes, though he had provoked the dog to try his strength, ran away like a coward; but Castor, in order to cover the retreat of his brother, and without any one to take his part, ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... to moroseness, though sore against my heart, unto poor babes, in tearing from them the half-eaten apple, which they privily munched at church. But verily it pitied me, for I remembered the days of ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... I'll make a stagger at it!" cried Blake. His eyes shone bright with the joy of work,—and as suddenly clouded with renewed moroseness. ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... should be considering such intimately personal things in the very act of carrying on an impersonal triangular conversation; as if there were two of him present, one being occupied in the approved teacup manner while the other sat by speculating with a touch of moroseness upon distressingly important potentialities. This duality persisted in functioning even when Betty looked at her watch and said, ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... being benefited and that of the other injured. Whoever has marked the effects of success and failure upon the mind, and the power of the mind over the body, will see that in the one case both temper and health are favourably affected, while in the other there is danger of permanent moroseness, or permanent timidity, and even of permanent constitutional depression. There remains yet another indirect result of no small moment. The relationship between teachers and their pupils is, other things equal, rendered friendly ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... The moroseness of his tone and manner surprised her. For once her quick intuition failed to divine the source ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... emotion. This may be true of many. No doubt that the strength of that outward life, that acuteness of the mere perceptive organization, and that tendency to social exhilaration, which prevail, will incline to such a fault in many cases. An English reserve inclines to moroseness, and Scotch perseverance to obstinacy; so this aerial French nature may become levity and insincerity; but then it is neither the sullen Englishman, the dogged Scotchman, nor the shallow Frenchman that we are to ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... convinced that the blacks were in possession of essential information, he urged the policy of chastising the sullenness out of a couple of incommunicative boys. His attitude, and mine, hitherto, towards the blacks had been of cheery good-nature tempered with considerate authority. Present moroseness was novel, and he was eager to sweep it away with a sturdy stick, and thus to demonstrate that when a friendly white man visited a camp blacks should be deferential and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield |
