"Temperamental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by the blusterous gallantries of this prosperous swain. She was very subdued in her acceptance of his heavy attentions;—"more so than I should—well, than I should have expected," as he himself observed. Really, she was too young for so much poise, too "temperamental," by every indication of her physiognomy, for such ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... the unsafe territory. That fly was 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, not physical. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... never conventional. Gyp had been herself a 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. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... since the war. There is hauteur in my omission of it, and it is a fact that we can express ourselves with far more vigour without g's or r's than you of the North can with them. For expression with us is not scholastic, but temperamental! Where ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... of genius, Paul, violently anti-Christian, enters on the scene, holding the clothes of the men who are stoning Stephen. He persecutes the Christians with great vigor, a sport which he combines with the business of a tentmaker. This temperamental hatred of Jesus, whom he has never seen, is a pathological symptom of that particular sort of conscience and nervous constitution which brings its victims under the tyranny of two delirious terrors: the terror of sin and the ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... It is this sentiment for place as well as for people that 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 part ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... 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 the victory ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... 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 ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... handling this perfected instrument of analysis, stolen from the enemies of the Church, represented only one of the temperamental phases of this man. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... of the past weighed with her not at all. She guessed that long ago he had been guilty of some mad, boyish escapade which, with his exaggerated sense of honour and the delicate idealism that she had learned to know as an intrinsic part of his temperamental make-up, he had magnified into a cardinal sin. And she was content to leave it at that and to accept the present, gathering up with both hands the happiness ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... of a stone. Yet this lovely cantilena extorted anger from the young pianist. It was true that he played badly, but not so badly as his mother imagined. His very hatred of music reverberated in his playing and produced an odd, inverted, temperamental spark. The transposition of an emotion into a lower or higher key may change its external expression; its intensity is not thereby altered. Racah hated the piano, hated Chopin, hated music; yet potentially Racah ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... said; and with an overpowering feeling of relief Mr Pickering recognized it as Lord Wetherby's. A moment later the temperamental peer's dapper figure became visible in silhouette against a background of ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... what a woman she was! It struck Miss Carmichael, as she watched Judith hold these warring elements in the hollow of her hand, that her interest might be due to a certain temperamental fusion; that there might lie, at the essence of her being, a subtle combination of saint and devil. One could fancy her leading an army on a crusade or provoking a bar-room brawl. The challenging quality of her beauty, the vividness of color, the suggestion of endurance and ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... and out of which it springs. The region in which the mind acts is, necessarily, circumscribed by the constant pressure of a never-absent egotism; and when this mental constitution happens to be united to timidity, distrust, and temperamental coldness, greatness ceases to be a possible achievement. Moreover, he wanted principle, which is the natural foundation of public virtue; and he had no higher an idea of morality than its conveniency. His sense of propriety, which, in some cases was high, was ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... compared with the producer of a show, and theatrical performers didn't come any more temperamental than scientists. He'd be hearing about how much of their time he'd wasted for months to come. Every time any administrator asked why they hadn't produced whatever it was they were working on, it would be because Chief Hayes had interrupted them ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... nature not inclined her to spring rather than autumn, had she not inherited joyousness and the temperamental gayety of the well-born, she must long ago have failed, broken down. Behind her were generations of fathers and mothers who had laughed heartily all their days. The simple gift of wholesome laughter, often the best as often ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... 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 ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... goes on in distributing and producing property is the Crowd's most unremitting, most normal, temperamental way of determining and selecting its most efficient and valuable leaders—its men who can express it, and who ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... replied Sanders, with a little grimace, "and I was being requested to restore a husband to a temperamental lady who has a passion for shying cook-pots at her husband when she ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... 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 his ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... The temperamental talker is one of the greatest of nerve-destroyers. He deals in superlatives. He views everything emotionally. He talks feelingly of trifles, and ecstatically of friends. He gushes. He flatters. To him everything is "wonderful," "prodigious," "superb," "gorgeous," ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... this fact that habit in the minds of so many people refers to some physical activity. Of course this is a misconception. Wherever the nervous system is employed, habits are formed. There are intellectual, moral, emotional, temperamental habits, just as truly as physical habits. In the intellectual field every operation that involves association or memory also involves habits. Good temper, or the reverse, truthfulness, patriotism, thoughtfulness for others, open-mindedness, ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... very large in Paris," replied Miss Lancaster, as if she were reciting a verse out of a catalogue. She had, as she sometimes found occasion to remark, been "born tired," and this temperamental weariness showed now in her handsome face, so wrinkled and dark around her bravely smiling eyes. Where she came from, or how she spent her time between the hour she left the shop and the hour she returned to it, the two women knew as little as they knew the intimate ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... living exactly as you liked, if you did not like it? Oh, Michael! Michael! Michael! He forgot that he had often been nearly as miserable as this when Michael had been free and happy. Not quite, but nearly. Now he attributed the whole of his recurrent wretchedness, which was largely temperamental, to his distress about his ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... 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 "temperamental" and Picasso "theorist," I come, on examination, ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... for the various types of reviewers who, however interesting they may be critically, cannot be called good. The good reviewers, let an uncharitable world say what it will, are, thank heaven! more numerous. Their divisions, temperamental and intellectual, present a curious picture of the difficulties and the rewards of this profession. Yet I cannot enter upon them ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... solemnly (with bowed heads) and 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 Latin and ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... 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 ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... 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 ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... to me half the evils of life lie in anticipation. When the time of danger actually arrives, those evils seem to take to themselves wings and fly away. Take the case of a great actress on her first night, an emotional and temperamental woman, besieged by fears until the curtain rises, and then carried away by her genius even unto the heights. Our curtain has risen, Miss Beverley. All we can do is to pray that the gods may look ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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
... bell; sick, indeed, when that jangle failed to hold her to the work. Something very strange and sorrowful about these mighty creatures. If they can but muzzle the flanks of the bell-mare once in twenty-four hours, often stopping a jolt from the heels of this temperamental monster—the mules appear morally refreshed ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... of my subjects and to observe their social relations and varied expressions 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 ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... strong daylight, she was vaguely disappointed. On the evening previous, the superintendent had lighted it brilliantly, but now it was gloomy, and there was dust and disorder everywhere. The previous occupant had undoubtedly been a temperamental housekeeper; the tragic awakening of love's young dream showed in the hasty nature of her departure for the ice-box was lamentably odorous of forgotten food, the kitchenette needed scrubbing with hot water ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... in a world through which the artist is bound to go on a wholly 'secret errand,' as bad form, which shocked him as much in persons as bad style did in books. He hated every form of extravagance, noise, mental or physical, with a temperamental hatred: he suffered from it, in his nerves and in his mind. And he had no less dislike of whatever seemed to him either morbid or sordid, two words which he often used to express his distaste for things and people. He never would have appreciated writers like Verlaine, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... is not in any way dependent on the character of the materials upon which it plays; it is not an irresponsible temperamental quality which seeks the joyful or comic facts of life and ignores its sad and tragic aspects. The zest of spirit which one finds in Shakespeare, for instance, is not a blind optimism thoughtlessly escaping from the shadows into the sunshine. On the contrary, it is drawn ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... to do what Nancy is going to do, just out of sheer temperamental weakness, and—and tendency to follow the line ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... unconscious domination of Sophia. The death of Mrs. Scales had put an end to all the strain, and Constance had been once again mistress in Constance's house. Constance would never have admitted these facts, even to herself; and no one would ever have dared to suggest them to her. For with all her temperamental mildness she had her ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... fancy, hitting off a foible or "celebrating truth and justice" in one of the unconscious epigrams which it is sought herein to preserve, even when having occasionally to hammer them into shape, for, while Daddy was almost unerring in rhyme, his rhythm, never at fault in delivery, was strictly a temperamental matter, not adequately renderable ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... he decided 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 ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... 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, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... it will be penetrating. The skin is firm to the touch, though the grain may be either fine or coarse. The entire organization is built upon the principle of strength, but the direction in which this strength will be applied will depend upon the temperamental conditions. With the mental temperament well developed, a strong mind will be manifested; with the vital and motive temperaments, strong physical and muscular functions. The relative absence of this quality ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... often of months. If every scene took place in a studio, where artificial lights could be used, the filming could go on every day the actors were on hand, or whenever the director felt like working them and the camera men. Often in a studio, even, the director will be notional—"temperamental," he might call it—and let a day go by, and again the glare of the powerful lights may so affect the eyes of the players that they have to rest, and so time is ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... the future. The despairing youth seemed to have no other purpose than to rid his father of his vexatious presence. There were friends in London, on one of whom Francis was directed to call for a weekly allowance from home. But a temperamental reluctance kept the young man away from those who could help him, and even the weekly allowance after a while came to be unclaimed. The rough, cyclonic forces of the huge city caught this helpless child of a man's ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... 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 ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... 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 ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... and Spain have always been peculiarly irritating, owing to temperamental differences between the two peoples. McKinley, however, had in mind a program for which there was some hope of success. He was willing to agree to some form of words which would leave Spain in titular ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... 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
... 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 other ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... he answers himself, after the 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 is universal; ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... a merciless sun, and the 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 with an aura ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... lad, ready always for a fight or a frolic, impetuous and temperamental; Ted had inherited his father's quiet tastes and philosophical views of life, looking always before he leaped, cautious and conservative. So, when Jack came bouncing in, gasping with excitement, Ted accepted the outburst as "just another ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... dalliance trod by the people of Boccaccio's tales. It differentiated itself from the secular song of the northern musicians as clearly as the architecture of Venice distinguished itself from all other Gothic art. Even in that era those characteristics which subsequently defined the racial and temperamental differences between the musical art of northern Europe and that of Italy were fully perceptible. The north moved steadily toward instrumental polyphony, Italy toward the individual utterance of the solo voice. That her first experiments ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... who learn to fly—numbering as they do thousands nowadays—cannot be endowed specially by nature for their task. There is indeed a wide latitude for temperamental differences—always provided that nothing more is required of a man than a certain average of skill. But if a man is to become a first-class pilot, one distinctly above the average, then the question of his temperament, as it influences his ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... this work are mongrels. By far the finest lion dog I ever saw was a cross between a shepherd and an airedale. He had the intelligence of the former and the courage of the latter. The airedale himself is not a good trailer, he is too temperamental. He will start on a lion track, jump off and chase a deer and wind up by digging out a ground squirrel. After a good hound finds a lion, ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... "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, and general ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... in no case know what we mean. Thus a man who is a mystic by nature may very well become one by reflection also. Not knowing what he wants nor what he is, he may believe that every shift carries him nearer to perfection. A temperamental and quasi-religious thirst for inconclusiveness and room to move on lent a certain triumphant note to Hegel's satire; he was sure it all culminated in something, and was not sure it did not culminate in himself. The system, however, as it might strike a less egotistical reader, is a long ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... am by no means a rabid New Englander. I love the New England scene and I have the feeling for it that we all have for the place in which we played as children. Most New Englanders have a kind of temperamental shyness. They are still like the English from whom they are descended. It is difficult for them to talk about the things on which they feel most deeply. The typical New Englander would discuss his ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... and you will discern, under all conflicts, that unity of memory, of will, of material interest, of temperamental atmosphere which knits men into a nation. You will notice the presence of these characteristics, but it is an absence, a void that will most impress you. You will see not a body that has lost its shadow, but something more sinister—a soul that ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... 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 ...
— Life of Abraham Lincoln - Little Blue Book Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 324 • John Hugh Bowers
... Lute's 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, he protested ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... of his soul; in the catholicity of his sympathy; in the perfect poise and self-control and imperturbability of his kindness. His biographers agree as to his never-failing good nature. He was without any of those fits of unrest and temperamental eccentricities which are supposed to be the "sign manual" of the child ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... this to be not only the set policy of England, but to be based on the temperamental foundations of the English character itself, from which that people could not, even if they would, depart. The lists are set. The English mind, the English consciousness are such, that to oppose German influence in the world is to this people a necessity. They oppose by instinct, ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... not a disease in itself. It cannot be lessened or abolished unless we are willing to state that a man and a woman should live together as husband and wife, hating, despising, or fearing one another. We cannot countenance brutality, unfaithfulness, or temperamental mismating. It is true that divorces are often obtained for trivial reasons, but usually the partners are not adapted to one another, according to modern ways of thinking and feeling. What is commonplace in one age is cruelty ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... remain himself at Fort Henry. This action of Halleck was the consequence partly of accidents which had prevented communication between them and caused Halleck to think him insubordinate, partly of false reports to Halleck that Grant was drinking to excess, partly of Halleck's dislike of Grant,—a temperamental incapacity of appreciation. After Donelson he issued a general order of congratulation of Grant and Foote for the victory, but he sent no personal congratulations, and reported to Washington that the victory was due to General Smith, ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... before him. As any common catalogue of troubles will not provoke Solon from a happy unconcern which is temperamental, I spared no details in my recital, and I observed at length that my listener was truly aroused to the bad way in which Miss Caroline found herself. He sat forward in his chair, rested one elbow upon his ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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
... completeness of his understanding of the meaning of the poem, and his revelation of its meanings, as well as upon the absence of stiffness or self-consciousness in suggesting the moods or characteristics displayed, will depend the impression of temperamental force upon ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... temporary separation has had excellent results in a great many historical cases. Where the married couple seem to be lacking in some one or other of the emotional or temperamental qualifications, it is advisable to suggest a temporary separation. When this period has expired and they resume marital relationship the element of novelty, acting as a stimulus, quite frequently reestablishes a fertility that was seemingly suspended, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... in a correct method of voice-production, for it is based upon study and knowledge of the organs concerned therein. But if the method were a hard-and-fast one, it would not be correct. For there are so many individual differences, physical and temperamental, between pupils, that there must be elasticity and adaptability in a method that claims to ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... was 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 was quite ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... on the strength of insignificant differences. He drew them with a certain complacency, because the instinct of conventional respectability was strong within him, being only overcome by his dislike of all kinds of recognised labour—a temperamental defect which he shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social state. For obviously one does not revolt against the advantages and opportunities of that state, but against ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... keep up the brilliance of his 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 ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... 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
... girl since he ushered her into the world. If there were any one with whom she had shown the slightest sign of intimacy, it was with him. Like all doctors whose associations are so largely with women, and who are moderately intelligent and temperamental, he knew a great deal about the dangers of the imagination. No one ever heard just what passed between the two. One thing is pretty sure, he made no secrets regarding the affair, and at the end of ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... On the other hand, temperamental pliability and lovableness were the directing traits of the man who, in his way, made contributions quite as solid to the extension of the Pittsburgh steel industry. Schwab worked with the human material quite as successfully as other ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... achievement. They are, almost without exception, entirely objective. Contemporary poetry is, on the other hand, very largely subjective; and even when it deals with events or incidents it invests them to such a degree with personal emotion and imagination, it so modifies and colours them with temperamental effects, that the resulting poem is much more a study of subjective conditions than a picture or drama of objective realities. This projection of the inward upon the outward world, in such a degree that the dividing line between the two is lost, is strikingly ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... is a race of the colder regions and there evolved those qualities, physical, mental and temperamental, which constitute its greatness. A large section of the race has left the habitat and environments in which and because of which it grew to greatness, and in the southern part of the United States finds itself confronted with the problem of maintaining in warmer climes those elements of a ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... daytimes and keeps us restless all night 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 ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... know what you are going to say!" Helen continued quickly. "You'll tell me, won't you, that I am not temperamental. I think in your heart you rather despise my absolute fidelity to Richard. You would call it cowlike, or something of that sort. There is a difference between us, Philippa, and that is why I am afraid to ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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, ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... 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 she ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... "But what I say is, too much cuddling and mollycoddling isn't good for that boy of yours, or anybody else's boy." And he proceeded to explain that my Dinkie was an ordinary, every-day, normal child and should be accepted and treated as such or we'd have a temperamental little bounder on ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... at that time, she could not find the slightest physical trace of likeness, and she brought old photographs to her aid. While, on the other hand, the mental and temperamental characteristics of both little girls were such as were common to ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... quite integrated into wholeness of structure, into harmony with itself. His writing, at its best, is noble and delightful, full of human charm, but it is difficult for him to master a certain waywardness and to sustain any note steadily. This temperamental flaw does not affect the winsomeness of his letters, unless to add to it. It is lost to view, often, in the sincerity and pathos of his lyrics, but it is felt in most of his longer efforts in prose, and accounts for a certain dissatisfaction which many grateful and loyal readers nevertheless ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... he'd 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 were just ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... is a bit of gossip in the hot weather, when your neighbour's looks, wardrobe, and morals have been threshed bare; when the mail has not arrived; and the hill news has only served to upset your temperamental digestion; in fact there were little whirlpools of excitement in the Saturday Club's stifling atmosphere, serving to add a passing zest to the heat-stricken evening hours and pegs which no amount of ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... forth of the popular mind to decide between programs presented to it by circumstances, receives a brilliant refutation in the course of the powerful minority that was concentrating around the three great "Jacobins." The subjective side of politics, also the temperamental side, here found expression. Statecraft is an art; creative statesmen are like other artists. Just as the painter or the poet, seizing upon old subjects, uses them as outlets for his particular temper, his particular emotion, and as the temper, ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... of the average unmarried mother is known to every social worker. The difficulty is dwelt upon in the reports of rescue homes and police-workers. I have read many separate articles which refer to it. "Temperamental instability," as it is fittingly called, inevitably makes capable motherhood impossible. True, these unmarried mothers may, and frequently do, "pour out a wealth of pent-up affection on the child," but often she will ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... speakers do not say "appreciate very much." A humor (compare humid) was once a "moisture"; then one of the four moistures or liquids that entered into the human constitution and by the proportions of their admixture determined human temperament; next a man's outstanding temperamental quality (the thing itself rather than the cause of it); then oddity which people may laugh at; then the spirit of laughter and good nature in general. Normally we do not connect the idea of moisture with the word. We may ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Ruth. "Pick up the bits, and don't let the water spoil the carpet. Use your handkerchief. I should say that that would cost you about six dollars, dear. Why will you let yourself be so temperamental? Now let me try and think what it was I said to Clarence. As far as I can remember it was the mere A B C ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... courtier could be more polished in what was at once its weighty and its winning dignity. Such was his charm for the elect; but here again comes the question of temperament. Between Ruskin and Jowett there was a temperamental antipathy. An antipathy of this kind is a very different thing from any reasoned dislike, and of this general fact Ruskin and Jowett were types. I was myself another. Just as Jowett repelled so Ruskin attracted me. During my later days at Oxford I grew to know ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... there was 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
... of more or less temperamental people, suddenly transplanted from a rigorous climate to sunshine and the beauty and abundance of life in Southern California, perhaps give a too highly colored picture, so please make allowance for the bounce of the ball. ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... heart out of most gangs. I don't know of anything that can beat a lumber-jack on a squeeze job, once you get him to realize that he's up against long odds. It's this ten-hour-a-day thing and too much ready money every pay-day; it's a town too temptingly close that makes them a—a trifle temperamental, Mr. Elliott. Is that what ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... is 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 ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... 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 knees, passed through ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... hope and his moods of broken disappointment, his ever-springing faith in men, and in the possibility of just institutions, were more temperamental than logical. Moods of astonished grief, when men showed greed and instability, gave place to humorous and tolerant analysis of characters and events. Even his loyalty to his friends was subject to the slight ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... 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 less, the homely woman meant nothing to him. And the passionate woman meant ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... impenitent profiteer from Lancashire, Anthony's brother-in-law, was better suited than I have seen him for some time, and provided the very necessary relief. The precocious children infuriated me, but that is purely temperamental. The actors who played the parts of those who had "crossed" were wrapped in such an atmosphere of gloom, to the strains of such meretricious music that (on the evidence) I can only advise people to defer their crossing as long as possible; a thing they will doubtless do, even if they have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... there appears to be a connection between the temperamental peculiarities of the two classes of clairvoyants and the kind of vision developed in them. Thus the direct vision is more generally found in association with the passive temperament. The direct vision is neither so regular nor so constant as the symbolic vision ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... shall 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
... about it," remarked Captain Link. "These Moros always get very much worked up in their war-dances, and occasionally they forget that it is all make-believe and send a spear into a spectator. It's safer to leave them alone. They're very temperamental." ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... 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 ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... into debates between speakers and audience, often lasting until 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 ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... or politics or pensions for fame and a livelihood; but Pope was independent, and had no profession but literature. And fourth, by the sheer force of his ambition he won his place, and held it, in spite of religious prejudice, and in the face of physical and temperamental obstacles that would have discouraged a stronger man. For Pope was deformed and sickly, dwarfish in soul and body. He knew little of the world of nature or of the world of the human heart. He was lacking, apparently, in noble feeling, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... 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 in all ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... also for Italy, 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, ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... 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 a beast." "My ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... As the result of that drivelling scheme of yours. What did you expect a sensitive, temperamental French cook to do, if you went about urging everybody to refuse all food? I hear that when the first two courses came back to the kitchen practically untouched, his feelings were so hurt that he cried like a child. And when the rest of the dinner followed, he came to the conclusion ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... stimulant, except under medical advice. As to my experience, it is very limited; and, in my judgment, it is quite unsafe in this matter to make one man's experience another man's guide: too much depends upon temperamental and constitutional peculiarities, and upon special conditions of ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... 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" ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... Temperamental Optimism and Pessimism, 33. How reconcile with life one bent on suicide? 38. Religious melancholy and its cure, 39. Decay of Natural Theology, 43. Instinctive antidotes to pessimism, 46. Religion involves belief in ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... night there was to be a dinner, the first since the move. Beside the household Mark 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 ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... 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 memories, and the ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... the study of religion not only a somewhat fresher mind than the European, but a temperamental earnestness about serious things which is the world's best hope of creative action. Moreover there is something Greek about the American. He is always young, as Greece was young in the time of Themistocles and AEschylus. He is conscious of "exhilaration in the air, a ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... 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 sensibly stolid, ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... involved; and to so apply the principles to the questions as to clarify and illuminate them. There is little difficulty in accounting for the lucidity, simplicity, flexibility, and compass of Mr. Lincoln's style; it is not until we turn to its temperamental and spiritual qualities, to the soul of it, that we find ourselves ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... first among American Presidents to possess a telephone. An exhibition instrument was placed in his house, without cost, in 1878, while he was still a member of Congress. Neither Cleveland nor Harrison, for temperamental reasons, used the magic wire very often. Under their regime, there was one lonely idle telephone in the White House, used by the servants several times a week. But with McKinley came a new order of things. To him a telephone was more than a necessity. ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... little funny quirks in your brain? Any little temperamental crotchets in which you differ from the run of people round you? ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... cherishing a smoldering resentment that might burst into flame at an awkward moment. Two of the girls were limping about in high heeled shoes and these must be shielded from the critical eye and caustic tongue of the cooking teacher, lest they become temperamental and refuse to "wait" at all. Assuredly Rosemary had ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... 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 the capacity to arrange ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... there had been a deal of unpleasantness of late because President Wilson had been protesting the sinking of vessels without warning—and the Narcissus was a United States steamer. Consequently if he torpedoed her without warning the temperamental Kaiser might make of Captain Emil Bechtel what is colloquially known as the goat; whereas, on the other hand, should he conform to international law and place her crew in safety before sinking her, there was a chance that her wireless might summon a patrol boat to the vicinity—Bechtel had sighted ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... was utterly incomprehensible—a study of violently opposing contrasts. Diana felt bruised and shaken by the fierce contradictions of his moods, the temperamental heat and ice which he had meted out to her. It seemed as if he were fighting against the attraction she had for him, prepared to contest every inch of ground—discounting each look and word wrung from him in some moment of emotion by the mocking raillery with ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... thing," said Hugh, lightly. He shoved the papers into the drawers and swung it shut. His heart was beating quite ridiculously. He would know at last—What wouldn't he know? "Uncle Hugh's girl, Uncle Hugh's girl," he told himself, and his temperamental responsiveness to the interest and the mystery of life expanded like a sea-anemone in ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... lines, I should not then have ventured into the philosophic 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 spite of the fact that there is some truth also in the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... endowed 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
... vessel," retorted the Captain. "In the first place, the needle does not point to the North Pole at all, but to the magnetic pole. Furthermore, it has to be adjusted by magnets to counteract deviation. Mr. Gissing, you may be a sincere student of theology, but you have not allowed for your own temperamental deviation. Why, even the gyro compass has to be adjusted for latitude error. You landsmen think that a ship is simply a floating hotel. I should like to have the Bishop you spoke of study a little ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... are all more or less under this spell of the Past, some natures are more particularly enthralled by it, even in the very zenith of life, showing it to be of temperamental origin rather than the outcome of the passing years. Of such a temperament is John Burroughs. Now, when the snows of five-and-seventy winters have whitened his head, we do not wonder when we hear him say, "Ah! the Past! the ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... little cross,' Franklin answered. 'My friend, James Otis of Massachusetts, complained of the fish one day at dinner when there was company at the table. Mrs. Otis frankly expressed her opinion of his bad manners. He was temperamental and himself a bit overworked. He made no answer, but in the grace which followed ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... 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. ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... me, Adam," 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
... 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, more spiritual, and more consistently philosophic. Indeed, Blake was the ultimate ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... word and act, the 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 |
