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More "Proneness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... check my proneness to dilate upon this favorite theme; I may recur to it hereafter. Suffice it to say, the intimacy thus formed, continued for a considerable time; and in company with the worthy Diedrich, I visited many of the places celebrated by his pen. The currents of our lives at length diverged. He ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... become grossly unequal. Berlin, with more than two million people, is still entitled to but six seats; and the disproportion in other great cities and densely inhabited regions is almost as flagrant.[328] There has long been demand for a redistribution of seats; but, by reason of the proneness of urban constituencies to return to the Reichstag socialists or other radicals, the Government has never been willing to meet the (p. 224) demand. By states, the 397 seats are distributed as follows: Prussia, 236; Bavaria, 48; Saxony, 23; Wuerttemberg, 17; Alsace-Lorraine ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... use. Its author meant it to be, as, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to all those who, in after times, might seek to turn a free people back into the paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant, when such should reappear in this fair land, and commence their vocation, they should find left for them at least one hard nut to ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... authorship the perusal of such masses of poetry could not fail to produce their effect. Of a youth whose mind, like mine at that period, possessed some general capability, without perhaps a single prominent and marked talent, a proneness to imitation is sure to be the besetting sin. I consequently, for a large portion of my earlier life, never read a work which struck my fancy, without planning a better one upon its model; for my ambition, like my vanity, knew no bounds. ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... ii., n. 1, p. 69),—we may say of him, that his "foot is set in the right way," that is, his will is actually right, and the obstacle to happiness is removed. The evil habit in him is not an actual adhesion of his will to evil, but a proneness to relapse into that state. It is only remotely and potentially evil. It is a seed of evil, which however will not germinate in the good and blissful surroundings to which the soul has been transplanted, but remain for ever sterile, or rather, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... generally is, of shreds and patches—bits of gold and bits of tinsel—things written in a hurry, to be read in a hurry, and never thought of afterward—suggestive rather than reflective, at the best: and we must plead guilty to a too great proneness to underrate what our fathers ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... Ramchandra. 8. Krishna, or according to some Balarama. 9. Buddha. In this avatar Vishnu descended in the form of a sage for the purpose of making some reform in the religion of the Brahmins, and especially to reclaim them from their proneness to animal sacrifice. Many of the Hindus will not allow this to have been an incarnation of their favourite god. 10. Kalki, or White Horse. This is yet to come. Vishnu mounted on a white horse, with a drawn scimitar, blazing ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... too, doubtless, as he faced a nation's Representatives in arms, how he had "kept the word of promise to the ear," and how "he had broken it to the hope;" how while his reviews had revealed a mighty army of undoubted ability and eagerness for the fight, his indecision or proneness to delay had made its campaigns the laughing-stock of the world. His brilliant Staff clattered at his heels; but glittering surroundings were powerless to avert the memories of a winter's inactivity ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... fog, and moonshine. Though he could confine himself to facts with modest brevity when speaking of his achievements to white people—as we have already noticed—the Fighting Nigger, it must be owned, was something of a long-winded boaster, with a proneness to slide off into the fabulous, when blowing his own trumpet for the entertainment of his colored admirers, who bolted whatever monstrosity he might choose to toss into their greedy chops. But let us be just. It was with no direct intention of hoaxing or deceiving his hearers that he played the ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... hideous noise within me. It showed me, also, that Jesus Christ had yet a word of grace and mercy for me, that he had not, as I had feared, quite forsaken and cast off my soul; yea, this was a kind of a chide for my proneness to desperation; a kind of a threatening me if I did not, notwithstanding my sins and the heinousness of them, venture my salvation upon the Son of God. But as to my determining about this strange dispensation, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... be unmindful of the gratitude they owe the God of Nations for His watchful care, which has shielded them from dire disaster and pointed out to them the way of peace and happiness. Nor should they ever refuse to acknowledge with contrite hearts their proneness to turn away from God's teachings and to follow with sinful pride ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... is the historical poet most frequently chosen to illustrate the world's proneness to take advantage of the poet's innocence. In the most famous of the poems about Marlowe, The Death of Marlowe, R. H. Horne takes a hopeful view of the world's depravity, for he makes Marlowe's innocence of evil so touching that it moves a prostitute to reform. Other poets, however, have painted ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Two things have to be considered in sin, namely, the proneness to sin, and the motive for sinning. If, then, in the angels we consider the proneness to sin, it seems that the higher angels were less likely to sin than the lower. On this account Damascene says (De Fide Orth. ii), that the highest of those ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... neither it is. There is no neglect in the matter. The Scotch take a profound view of the subject. They institute a rigorous comparison between shutting and not shutting. True, they are not taught to do so, any more than Frenchmen are taught to make gestures. It is in them. They are born with a natural proneness to consider, as if it were a question of algebraic quantities, whether the satisfaction they might impart by shutting the door would not be more than counterbalanced by the dissatisfaction that might accrue from distinctly and unmistakably shutting it. Still, it seems strange how any displeasure ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... and plan of engine are already so well established, that it is not easy to fall into error; that which is most to be guarded against is the popular demand, the prevailing mania for high speed,—for which single advantage there is such a proneness to sacrifice every other warlike quality. That measure of speed or power which will enable a ship to stem the currents of rivers, to enter or leave a port in the face of a moderate gale, or to meet the dangers of a lee-shore, should, it is conceived by many, be sufficient; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... us as an inheritance these germs of misery and sin. We are all in a greater or lesser degree prone to excess and to desire unlawful pleasures. Yet, for all that, we do not of necessity sin. We sin when we yield to these tendencies and do what they suggest. The simple proneness to evil, devoid of all wilful yielding is therefore not wrong. Why? Because we cannot help it; that is a good and ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... of causes, of the proneness to seek the solution of phenomena out of and beyond nature, and of the consequent natural but unreasoning dread of the Unknown and Invisible (ignorantly termed the supernatural), is at once universal in the extent, and various in the ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... day with Sheriff Court processes. There is something sickening in seeing poor devils drawn into great expense about trifles by interested attorneys. But too cheap access to litigation has its evils on the other hand, for the proneness of the lower class to gratify spite and revenge in this way would be a dreadful evil were they able to endure the expense. Very few cases come before the Sheriff-court of Selkirkshire that ought to come anywhere. Wretched wranglings about a few pounds, begun in ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... at home. He was very uncomfortable. His heart was failing him for the things that were coming to pass. One of his maniacal tempers, which had often before thrown him, as it were, 'off the rails,' was at the bottom of his immediate troubles. This proneness to sudden accesses of violence and fury was the compensation which abated the effect of ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... nervous territories and modified spontaneously or by esthesiogenic agents (Grasset), alphalgesia (sensation of pain at contact with painless bodies), a deficiency of urea in the urine, out of proportion to the general state of nourishment, and a proneness of the symptoms to return after trauma, poisoning, ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... Wodrow, Gillies, and a host of others, should be unaware that the proceedings at Halle were only the counterpart of those done fourteen years before by Blake in their own land, is certainly surprising, and affords another proof of the proneness of Britons to extol everything foreign to the neglect of what is native and at ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... best development under a relatively archaic culture; the term "devout" being of course here used in its anthropological sense simply, and not as implying anything with respect to the spiritual attitude so characterized, beyond the fact of a proneness to devout observances. It appears also that this devout attitude marks a type of human nature which is more in consonance with the predatory mode of life than with the later-developed, more consistently and organically industrial life process of the community. It is in large ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... perils both of body and soul; His care of me by means of His Angels; and His other individual benefits. Under the second head come all my faults and the punishments due to me, whether in the past or now in the present; my proneness to sin; my misuse of my own powers by habituating my thoughts and desires—as well as the inclinations of my other various faculties—to evil; my sojourning in a region far away from His Friendship and from His Divine conversation[90]; ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... persons caught giving way in public or private to an inspiration. The bill only failed to become a law by the expiration of the session before it had reached its final reading. It may be readily imagined, therefore, why until this I have never acknowledged my own proneness to expressing myself in verse. Only two or three of my most intimate friends have been aware of the tendency, and they have been so ashamed of it that as my friends they have sought rather to suppress than to spread ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... wilderness among wild beasts. Here he sees a bear, there a lion, yonder a leopard, a wolf, a dragon. Devils of all sorts, doubts of all sorts, fears of all sorts haunt and molest his soul. This man feeleth the infirmity of his flesh; he findeth a proneness in himself to be desperate. Now he chides with God, flings and tumbles like a wild bull in a net, and still the guilt of all returns upon himself to the crushing of him to pieces. Yet he feeleth his heart so hard that he can find, as he thinks, no kindness under any of his ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... deal at the leash, and had displayed a strong desire to return to its former master, as well as a powerful objection to follow its new one. It had also, with that perversity of spirit not uncommon in youth, exhibited a proneness to advance on the other side of bushes and trees from its companion, thus necessitating frequent halts and numerous disentanglements. On all of these occasions Bladud had remonstrated in tones so soft, and had rectified the error so gently, that the ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... position, amongst the dark-eyed donnas of Peru. The men don't seem exactly to like it. Judging by their appearance, we found but little difficulty in believing the character which report had given them—namely, their proneness to assassination, especially in love affairs, either personally, or, more frequently, by deputy. If the brilliant creole and half-caste women of this warm, tropical country, are some of the most beautiful and lovable of the sex, their sallow, sinister-looking, ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... the most singular affections of the human mind is a proneness to excessive speculation; and it may here be noticed that the disease for (such it may be termed) is peculiarly English and American. Men, in their race for gain, appear, like horses that have run away, to have been blinded by the rapidity of their own motion. It almost ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... make a hideous noise within me. It shewed me also that Jesus Christ had yet a word of grace and mercy for me that he had not, as I feared, quite forsaken and cast off my soul: Yea, this was a kind of check for my proneness to desperation; a kind of threatening of me if I did not, notwithstanding my sins and the heinousness of them, venture my salvation upon the Son of God. But as to my determining about this strange dispensation, what it was, I know not. I have not yet in twenty ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... every thing to judge. Their genius was artificially forced, and in each of its capacities. They had no need of formal education. Their whole life was one school. The very faults of their assembly, in its proneness to be seduced by extraordinary eloquence, aroused the emulation of the orator, and kept constantly awake the imagination of the audience. An Athenian was, by the necessity of birth, what Milton dreamed that man could only become ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the wonderful assimilating powers of its stomach can digest; and to that capability, there seems no limit in the whole range of animal or vegetable nature. The consequence of this perfect and singularly rapid digestion is an unprecedented proneness to obesity, a process of fattening that, once commenced, goes on with such rapid development, that, in a short time, it loses all form, depositing such an amount of fat, that it in fact ceases to have any refuse part or offal, and, beyond the hair ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Christmas is equally hilarious. Now that the Flowerpot is no longer on his mind, the proneness of the masculine nature to court misfortune causes him to think seriously of Miss PENDRAGON, and wonder whether she would make a wife to ruin a man? It will be rather awkward, he thinks, to be in Bumsteadville for a week or two after the ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... bitter things about Mr. Lopez, which Emily could now have repeated, to that lady's discomfiture, had such a mode of revenge suited her disposition. With Mrs. Leslie there was Lady Eustace, pretty as ever, and sharp and witty, with the old passion for some excitement, the old proneness to pretend to trust everybody, and the old incapacity for trusting anybody. Ferdinand Lopez had lately been at her feet, and had fired her imagination with stories of the grand things to be done in trade. Ladies do it? Yes; why not ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... murmurs of the populace against me. He said that as one of his most trusted counselors, and as a high priest of Osiris, he knew that the charges against me were baseless; but that in view of the proneness of the people of Thebes to excitement and tumult, he should be glad to order a company of soldiers to keep guard over my house. I refused. I said that I was conscious of no evil, that none could say that I was ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... here to recall the truism that first-class art never reproduces its surroundings; but such banality is often justified by our human proneness to shuffle over the fact that many truisms are true. And this one is pre-eminently indisputable: that what mankind has generally agreed to accept as first-class art in any of the varied forms of fictitious narrative has never ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... fisherman released from the copper vessel, until they blotted everything bright from our vision. Insensibly, we yielded to the occult force that swayed us, and indulged in gloomy speculation. We had talked some time upon the proneness of the human mind to mysticism, and the almost universal love of the terrible, when Hammond suddenly said to me, "What do you consider to be the greatest ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... licentiousness. This forms a distinct characteristic from those other popular customs and pastimes which the learned have also traced to the Roman, and even more ancient nations. Our present inquiry is, to illustrate that proneness in man, of delighting to reverse the order of society, and ridiculing ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... forgot none of them. Benevolence was natural to her, but she was not always prudent in its exercise. Hence her protection was often extended to persons who did not deserve it. Her taste for splendour and expense was excessive. This proneness to luxury became a habit which seemed constantly indulged without any motive. What scenes have I not witnessed when the moment for paying the tradesmen's bills arrived! She always kept back one-half of ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... barbe; car c'est ce qui me fait estimes beau des Sauvages."—Lettres de Garnier, MSS. ] His constitution, bodily or mental, was by no means robust. From boyhood, he had shown a delicate and sensitive nature, a tender conscience, and a proneness to religious emotion. He had never gone with his schoolmates to inns and other places of amusement, but kept his pocket-money to give to beggars. One of his brothers relates of him, that, seeing an obscene book, he bought and destroyed it, lest ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... off from all action, and becomes the most helpless, pusillanimous, and unweaponed creature in the world, the most unfit and unable to do that which all mortals most aspire to—either to be useful to his friends or to offend his enemies? Or, if it be to be thought a natural proneness, there is against that a much more potent inclination inbred, which about this time of a man's life solicits most—the desire of house and family of his own; to which nothing is esteemed more helpful than the early entering ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... and without effort; and it is only when you oppose it, that you find how powerful it has become. What is done once and again, soon gives facility and proneness. The habit at first may seem to have no more strength than a spider's web; but, once formed, it binds us with a chain of iron. The small events of life, taken singly, may seem exceedingly unimportant, like snow that falls silently, ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... classics as leaves room to doubt whether the original Asae, or Asiatics, the founders of the Scandinavian system, had, before their migration from Asia, derived them from some common source with those of the Greeks and Romans; or whether, on the other hand, the same proneness of the human mind to superstition has caused that similar ideas are adopted in different regions, as the same plants are found in distant countries without the one, as far as can be discovered, having obtained the ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... is an expanse of shingle which makes the transit an arduous undertaking, and one not to be accomplished easily without the aid of "backstays" (pronounced "backster"), a simple contrivance somewhat upon the principle of snowshoes. When the proneness to slip off the unaccustomed foot has been overcome, backstays are not so awkward as they look. A couple of flat pieces of inch-thick wood, four inches wide by six long, with a loop of leather defectively fastened ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... judgment of their fellow-men, they begin to regard it with comparative indifference. And so, if a dweller in a small village desires to leave the beaten track, he can summon courage to do so with greater readiness than the man of the town. If he has occasionally that proneness to make a fool of himself which seizes every man now and then, he may indulge in the perilous luxury without great carefulness of the consequences. Smith's ordinary conduct is the admiration of Jones as a regular thing; but when Smith ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... idea of universal human brotherhood seems to be fading from the hearts of men, when they manifest a proneness to forget the share which, despite hatred and persecution, the Jew of every generation has had in German literature, in its romances of chivalry and its national epics, and in all the spiritual achievements of German genius, we may with ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... spheres, avoiding, in the exercise of the powers of one department, to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments into one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power and proneness to abuse it which predominate in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories, and constituting ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... negotiation? Sad, indeed, will be the condition of the world if we are never to make peace with an adverse party whose sincerity we have reason to suspect. Even just grounds for such suspicions will but too often occur, and when such fail, the proneness of man to impute evil qualities, as well as evil designs, to his enemies, will suggest false ones. In the present case the suspicion of insincerity was, it is true, so just, as to amount to a moral certainty. The example of the petition of right was a satisfactory proof that the ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... from the stem of the midship boat, in endeavouring to seize fowls or meat that was hung on the mainstay, always alighting on the point she sprang from. At other times she would attempt to crawl up it like a cat, in order to steal what was there. Her proneness to thieving was very great; I have frequently seen her eating stolen things when she would refuse what was offered her; it was never safe to ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... a lack of sympathy of motive, which caused a disinclination on the one part to ask for what on the other there would be more than a disinclination to give. This tended to crystallise the national proneness to defer until the emergency arose the measures necessary to meet it. It followed, then, that while attention was given to the needs of the moment, practically all provision for the requirements of the future was relegated to the background. A further ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... forth that Mrs. Roy could throw some light upon the obscurity; and, as it turned out, she had thrown none. The greater part of those present gave credence to what she said. All believed the "ghost" to have been pure imagination; knowing the woman's proneness to the marvellous, and her timid temperament. But, upon one or two there remained a strong conviction that Mrs. Roy had not told the whole truth; that she could have said a great deal more about the night's work, had she chosen to ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... vain. Much sin, weakness, and uselessness; much delight in the word also, while opening it up at family prayer. May God make the word fire. Opened I Thessalonians, the whole; enriching to my own mind. How true is Psalm 1! yet observed in my heart a strange proneness to be entangled with the affairs of this life; not strange because I am good, but because I have been so often taught that bitterness is ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... (De Gener. Animal. i). But occasionally it is with sin, as when it is due to excess of food or drink. And this also can be either venial or mortal sin; although more frequently the sin is mortal in the case of evil thoughts on account of the proneness to consent, rather than in the case of consumption of food and drink. Hence Gregory, writing to Augustine, Bishop of the English (Regist. xi), says that one ought to refrain from Communion when this arises from evil thoughts, but not when it arises from ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... of incantations, which were only idle dreams of ignorance and superstition. He accordingly pronounced a very learned discourse upon the nature of ideas, the power and independence of the mind, the properties of stimulating medicines, the difference between a proneness to venery, which many simples would create, and a passion limited to one object, which can only be the result of sense and reflection; and concluded with a pathetic remonstrance, setting forth his unhappiness ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... one taint of envy in his nature, conscious of his own extraordinary powers, he was quick to recognize genius in others; and his hearty praise of the powers of his rivals shows how sound and generous the heart was under his irritability. His proneness to satire and power of epigram made him enemies, but even these yielded to the suavity and fascination which alternated with his bitter moods. His sympathies were peculiarly open for young musicians. Mendelssohn and Liszt were stimulated by his warm ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... profoundest questions of church doctrine, on which Melanchthon was writing all his life!" (Conservative Ref., 291; Schmauk, 748.) This indefinite and wavering attitude towards divine truth, the natural consequence of the humanistic bent of his mind, produced in Melanchthon a general tendency and proneness to surrender or compromise doctrinal matters in the interest of policy, and to barter away eternal truth for temporal peace. It made him an indifferentist and a unionist, always ready to strike a bargain also in matters pertaining to Christian faith, and to cover doctrinal differences with ambiguous ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... and cry out and sweat as if they were bringing poultices to sores, he is slave to a weak querulous and discontented mode of life, and, like one who has a continual cough or various ailments, whether he is aware of it or not, he is in an ulcerous and catarrh-like condition as regards his proneness to anger. We must therefore train the body to contentment by plain living, that it may be easily satisfied: for they that require little do not miss much; and it is no great hardship to begin with our food, and take it silently whatever it is, and not ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... his temper and obstinacy can bring upon him is proved by his wistful, wounded eyes, by a plaintive note in his voice, a painful want of confidence in his welcome, and a constant but indifferently successful effort to correct his natural incivility of manner and proneness to take offence. By his keen brows and forehead he is clearly a shrewd man; and there is no sign of straitened means or commercial diffidence about him: he is well dressed, and would be classed at a guess as a prosperous master manufacturer in a business inherited from ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... Olivier. She said that this was good enough for Arabs or for a chit like Nell, who could not be jolted any more than a fly which should alight upon a camel's hump, but not for persons dignified, and not too light, and having at the same time a certain proneness to unbearable sea-sickness. ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... reason to think that Shere Ali, with the proneness of orientals to refer all actions to the most elemental motives, attributed the change of front at Calcutta solely to fear. That was the time when the Russian capture of Samarcand cowed the Khan of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... among whom we labour, we have been almost invariably at once of one mind. (Lord, to Thee is the praise due for this!!!) We are as much, or more than ever united in spirit; and if the Lord permit, we desire to labour together till He come. Who that knows the proneness in man to seek his own, and to get glory to himself; who that knows that the heart naturally is full of envy; who that is acquainted with the position which we both hold in the church, and the occasions thereby occurring ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... This proneness to require the appearance of some necessary and natural connection between the cause and its effect, i.e. some reason per se why the one should produce the other, has infected most theories of causation. ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... the deer family. In their management, as with apes, monkeys and bears, it is necessary to take into account the temperament not only of the species, but also of each animal; and there are times when this necessity bears hard upon human nerves. The proneness of captive deer to maim and to kill themselves and each other calls for the utmost vigilance, and for heroic endurance on the part of ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... the nine tribes and a half, which were carried off by Shalmanezer, king of Assyria, and which settled in Media, remained there long, they would, by intermarrying with the nations of that country, from a natural fickleness and proneness to idolatry, and from the force of example, have adopted and bowed before the Gods of the Medes and Assyrians; and have carried them along with them. But he affirms that there is not the least trace of this idolatry to be discovered among the Indians: and ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... Justice, one after the other, and said: "Master, my motto;" whereupon the Justice addressed to each one a proverbial phrase or a biblical passage. Thus to the first man, a red-haired fellow, he said: "Proneness to dispute lights a fire, and proneness to fight sheds blood;" to the second, a slow, fat man: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise;" to the third, a small, black-eyed, bold-looking ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... it was highly diverting to watch the influence of the palm wine on their looks, language, and ideas. The flushed countenance is invisible in a black lady, but then she has the liquid and unsettled eye, the proneness to talk with irresistible garrulity, the gentle simper, or the bursting laugh at any trifle, or at nothing at all; and to wind up the list of symptoms, she has that complaisant idea of her own good points, and superior qualifications, which elicit her own approbation, without ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... canonise the forms and practices along with which any great truth has been bequeathed to them—their liability to prostrate their intellects before the prophet, and swear by his every word—their proneness to mistake the clothing of the idea for the idea itself; renders it needful to insist strongly upon the distinction between the fundamental principle of the Pestalozzian system, and the set of expedients devised for its practice; and to suggest that while the one ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... overthrown with a touch the frail bulwark it had cost me such trouble and toil to construct. I was so fearful of this at first, that I humbled myself to intimate to him, in private, my apprehensions of Arthur's proneness to these excesses, and to express a hope that he would not encourage it. He was pleased with this mark of confidence, and certainly did not betray it. On that and every subsequent occasion his presence served rather as a check ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... severe punishment is inflicted for an habitual sin (as stated above, I-II, Q. 105, A. 2, ad 9), because punishments are medicines intended to keep man away from sin: so that where there is greater proneness to sin, a more severe punishment ought to be inflicted. As regards the ten tribes, they were punished not only for the sin of schism, but also for that of idolatry as stated ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... illustrious writers of the reign: Swift, the English Rabelais, Pope, Boileau, and Prior, the Regnier of Great Britain. But he was not unjustly reproached for his obstinacy of character, the changeableness of his opinions, his proneness to descend to little means, and an unfortunate passion ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... best remedy for proneness to such musings. How happy poor little Meta had been! The three sisters sat together that long day, and Ethel read to the others, and by and by went to walk in the garden with them, till, as Flora was going in, Meta asked, "Do you think it would be wrong for me ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... this respect as a modified Mahometanism. I could relate many instances, affecting myself, where trustfulness has incurred payment in this coin, but, having no desire to stimulate the Indian's existing proneness to practical joking, I stay my hand at ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... will be readily conceded, he would hardly desire to present himself to his everyday companions in the character of either knave or fool. Whereas he would have appeared to be both, supposing (5) the God-given revelations had but revealed his own proneness to deception. It is plain he would not have ventured on forecast at all, but for his belief that the words he spoke would in fact be verified. Then on whom, or what, was the assurance rooted, if not upon God? And if ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... deservedly popular. Fehling's well-known solution contains sodio-potassic tartrate, which serves the purpose chiefly of retaining the copper in solution. Unfortunately, Fehling's original solution has a tendency to become hyper-sensitive if kept long, a proneness to change that is much increased on dilution. When so altered, the solution will yield a more or less copious precipitate of cuprous oxide on merely boiling, and quite independent of the presence of glucose. This decomposition is obviated by preserving ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... characteristics that belong to the most tiresome natures; he even had the qualities of the man as to whom one wonders whether partial insanity may not be his best excuse—inconstancy expressing itself in hysterical revulsions of feeling, complete lack of balance, proneness to act recklessly to the hurt of others. Yet he was loved and respected by contemporaries of tastes very different from his own, who were good judges and intolerant of bores—by Byron, who was apt to care little ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... God,—into his own inner heart, and ask himself how far, in his personal life, he is prepared to accept arbitration. Is it not so that the reply must be, "In doubtful questions of moment, wherever I possibly can, knowing my necessary, inevitable proneness to one-sided views, I will seek an impartial adviser, that my bias may be corrected; but when that has been done, when I have sought what aid I can, if conscience still commands, it I must obey. From that duty, burdensome though it may be, no man can relieve me. Conscience, diligently ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... judge of human nature, reading the character of every man as it were in a written book, Cataline had long before remarked young Arvina. He had noted several points of his mental constitution, which he considered liable to receive such impressions as he would—his proneness to defer to the thoughts of others, his want of energetic resolution, and not least his generous indignation against every thing that savored of cruelty or oppression. He had resolved to operate on these, whenever he might find ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... and the fact that it was certain to be effective sweetened an otherwise bitter death. The same idea, presented in a more modern and plausible way, occurs in Bertolotti's novel, Le due Sorelle which has been translated into three languages. Walter Scott expresses mankind's proneness to revenge in words as powerful as they are true: "Vengeance is the sweetest morsel to the mouth that ever was cooked in hell!" I shall now attempt a psychological explanation of revenge. All the suffering that nature, chance, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... ideas, and hence employed without stint all the terms in his vocabulary for the commonest thoughts. He believed, too, like most of his brotherhood, that excitement and agitation were necessary to conversion and of the essence of religion; and this, with a proneness to delight in the music and witchery of his own wonderful voice, made Mr. Novus an eccentric preacher, and induced him often to excel at camp-meetings, the very extravagances of his clerical brethren, whom more than once he has ridiculed ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... Magdalena's face turned almost purple; but she had neither her sex's quick instinct of self-protection nor its proneness to dissemble, secretive as she was. She lifted her head haughtily and turned away. For a moment she looked very Spanish, not the unfortunate result of coupled races that she was. Helena, who was in her naughtiest humour, threw back her head and laughed ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... case of the husband, so the caution ought to be greater in making the accusation, or entertaining the suspicion. Men ought to be very slow in entertaining such suspicions: they ought to have clear proof before they can suspect; a proneness to such suspicions is a very unfortunate turn of the mind; and, indeed, few characters are more despicable than that of a jealous-headed husband; rather than be tied to the whims of one of whom, an innocent woman of spirit would earn her ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... intentions. A zemindar is an Indian subject, and as such exposed to the common lot of his fellows. The mean and depraved state of a mere zemindar is therefore this very dependence above mentioned on a despotic government, this very proneness to shake off his allegiance, and this very exposure to continual danger from his sovereign's jealousy, which are consequent on the political state of Hindostanic governments. Bulwant Sing, if he had been, and Cheyt Sing, as long as he was a zemindar, stood exactly in this ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Gramercy, friendship! Such courtesies are real which flow cheerfully Without an expectation of requital. Reach me a staff in this hand. If a proneness ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... fright? His movements might have been planned to gain for him, in getting beyond their reach, twelve hours' advantage? The honest man who had expended the sweat of his brow became uneasy, and began to complain with bitterness of the proneness of mankind to cheat him—him invested ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... she had rolled into a better world three years before, and do the housework. The better to fit her for this, for she was lazy and not strong, he kicked her in the ribs until she fainted, and removed thereby any possibility of her making good the loss for which her proneness to luxurious rolling had ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... bantering tone was dropped entirely. In the rest of Allison's greeting was all that Caleb found most lovable in the man's whole make-up—his proneness to accept men as men, for what they had done or might do, in ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... although perhaps marked by a certain moral hebetude, is soon followed by a stormy period of great agitation, when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for its possession, and when there is peculiar proneness to be either very good or very bad. As the agitation slowly subsides, it is found that there has been a renaissance of either the best or the worst elements of the soul, if not ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... house by a stretch of weedy lawn was a shambling structure built years before by one Azariah Prouse, who believed among other strange matters that the earth is flat and that houses are built higher than one story only at great peril, because of the earth's proneness to tip if overbalanced. Prouse had compromised with this belief, however, and made his house a story and a half high, in what I conceive to have been a dare-devil spirit. The reckless upper rooms were thus cut off untimely ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... were misleading to those who only witnessed one side of the pending conflict. The North had, up to Sumter, been slow to act, and this was not reassuring to the friends of the Union South, or, perhaps, anywhere. The proneness of mankind to be on the successful side has shown itself in all trying times. It is only the virtue of individual obstinacy that enables the few to go against an unjust ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... analytical processes; a characteristic which was illustrated at Cambridge by his uniform partiality for analysis, and comparative distaste for the geometrical method, in his mathematical studies. His early proneness to dwell upon the more recondite departments of each science and branch of inquiry has been alluded to above. It is not to be inferred that, as a consequence of this tendency, he blinded himself, at any period of his life, to ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... had not its earliest discussion in the East; and there is no modern solution of that problem which will not be found anticipated in the East." These words of the Scotch divine are doubtless strong; too strong, I think. And yet they may be serviceable, if they warn us against that proneness to depreciate the intellectual value and serious purpose of the religious books of that land. It is worse than useless to confidently descant upon the errors, inconsistencies, the follies and absurdities of these writings ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... of culture, I insisted on our bondage to machinery, on our proneness to value machinery as an end in itself, without looking beyond it to the end for which alone, in truth, it is valuable. Freedom, I said, was one of those things which we thus worshipped in itself, without enough regarding the ends for which freedom is to be ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... interest—at first as in an acquaintance—and rivets it at last as in a personal friend. The old Chronicle lingers with such loving minuteness over his attaching qualities, his social, generous nature, his gaiety and "frolicsomeness;" even his finical taste in dress, and his evident proneness to fall too hastily in love, have a value in the portrait, as contrasting with the gloomy colours in which the story sinks at last. The warm, impulsive spirit speaks in every action of his life, from the hour when—a young child, in exile—he strikes his axe into ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... body. If the brain of the child is free from defects at birth, and acquires no improper impressions in infancy, it will not easily become diseased in after life. But, if the brain has inherited defects, or has acquired a proneness to disease by mismanagement in early life, it will more easily yield to influences that cause diseased action. The hereditary tendency to disease is one of the most powerful causes that produce nervous and mental affections. Consequently, children have a strong tendency ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... affection originating in their nobility of nature—by this grown to excess, made negligent of instinctive self-defence, and heedless of misconstruction, or overcome by importunate and clinging temptations—to what charges have they not been exposed from that proneness to disparaging judgments so common in little minds! For such judgments are easy indeed to the very lowest understandings, and regard things that are visible to eyes that may seldom have commerced with things that are above. But they who know Burns as we know him, know that by this sometimes unregulated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... complexion had two very important results. It brought into the country a constant stream of cheap labor, polyglot, and lacking in homogeneity, and consequently slow at first to unionize and strike. This characteristic brought another in its train—a lack of stability, and a proneness to transiency. The second result was hardly less important. It meant that though labor was relatively plentiful, much of it was unskilled. This lack of skill put a premium upon quantity production, and led to efforts to develop automatic machinery and labor-saving devices of all kinds. It compelled ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... said the Scottish king; 'of men who have wit enough to lay hold of the weaker side even of a sober youth such as Lord John of Lancaster! Your proneness to believe in sayings and prophecies, in sorceries and magic, is the weakest point ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of autobiography; it sets forth clearly Chopin's proneness to melancholy, which, however, easily gave way to his sportiveness. That low spirits and scantiness of money did not prevent Chopin from thoroughly enjoying himself may be gathered from many indications in his letters; of these I shall select his descriptions of two excursions ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... for society, music and merriment, a fondness for display whether of person, dress, vocabulary or emotion, a not flagrant sensuality, a receptiveness toward any religion whose exercises were exhilarating, a proneness to superstition, a courteous acceptance of subordination, an avidity for praise, a readiness for loyalty of a feudal sort, and last but not least, a healthy human repugnance toward overwork. "It don't do no good to hurry," was a negro saying, "'caze you're liable to run by mo'n ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... she did not lose any of her friends, because she forgot none of them. Benevolence was natural to her, but she was not always prudent in its exercise. Hence her protection was often extended to persons who did not deserve it. Her taste for splendour and expense was excessive. This proneness to luxury became a habit which seemed constantly indulged without any motive. What scenes have I not witnessed when the moment for paying the tradesmen's bills arrived! She always kept back one-half of their claims, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... two considerations, the force of which made man a religious animal. The first is, his proneness to ascribe hostility or benevolent intention to every thing of a memorable sort that occurs to him in the order of nature. The second is that of which I have just treated, the superior dignity of mind over body. This, we persuade ourselves, shall subsist uninjured by ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... satisfaction. But the necessity of overcoming small obstacles becomes wearisome to a self-confident personality as much by the certitude of success as by the monotony of effort. He mistrusted his superior's proneness to fussy action. That old Englishman had no judgment, he said to himself. It was useless to suppose that, acquainted with the true state of the case, he would keep it to himself. He would talk of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... light upon the obscurity; and, as it turned out, she had thrown none. The greater part of those present gave credence to what she said. All believed the "ghost" to have been pure imagination; knowing the woman's proneness to the marvellous, and her timid temperament. But, upon one or two there remained a strong conviction that Mrs. Roy had not told the whole truth; that she could have said a great deal more about the night's work, had she ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... interior faculties under due command. The appetites of the body are only to be reduced by universal temperance, and assiduous mortification and watchfulness over all the senses. The interior powers of the soul must be restrained, as the imagination, memory, and understanding: their proneness to distraction, and the itching curiosity of the mind, must be curbed, and their repugnance to attend to spiritual things corrected by habits of recollection, holy meditation, and prayer. Above all, the will must be ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... early in a mild and beautiful spring when the corn was young. It stood shoulder high, lusty and strong and green. What with the unwonted mildness of the weather and the absence of the usual storms and the proneness of the clouds to deposit themselves about in gentle showers, the crop promised fair to rival any crop that Seth had ever ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... convention of a certain religious body, one sister, who gave in her report as to how the Lord had dealt with the children of men in her part of the vineyard, deeply deplored the hardness of the sinners' hearts, their proneness to err, and the worldliness of even professing Christians, who seemed now to be wholly given over to the love of pleasure. She told also of the niggardly contributions; the small congregations. It was, indeed, a sad and discouraging tale that she unfolded. Only ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... expressed views upon liberty. I could but wonder why her choice had not fallen upon the goose on the table. Mr. BROOKFIELD as Louis the Eleventh, incidentally suggests that that wily monarch was guilty of a crime with which he has not hitherto been credited—a proneness to give imitations of Mr. IRVING in the character of Mephistopheles. For the rest, the piece itself is most interesting, is capitally staged, and in the subordinate characters, fairly acted. In ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... and contagiously diffuses every zealous affection originating in their nobility of nature—by this grown to excess, made negligent of instinctive self-defence, and heedless of misconstruction, or overcome by importunate and clinging temptations—to what charges have they not been exposed from that proneness to disparaging judgments so common in little minds! For such judgments are easy indeed to the very lowest understandings, and regard things that are visible to eyes that may seldom have commerced with things that are above. But they who know Burns as we know him, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... with Sheriff Court processes. There is something sickening in seeing poor devils drawn into great expense about trifles by interested attorneys. But too cheap access to litigation has its evils on the other hand, for the proneness of the lower class to gratify spite and revenge in this way would be a dreadful evil were they able to endure the expense. Very few cases come before the Sheriff-court of Selkirkshire that ought to come anywhere. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... a hideous noise within me. It showed me, also, that Jesus Christ had yet a word of grace and mercy for me, that he had not, as I had feared, quite forsaken and cast off my soul; yea, this was a kind of a chide for my proneness to desperation; a kind of a threatening me if I did not, notwithstanding my sins and the heinousness of them, venture my salvation upon the Son of God. But as to my determining about this strange dispensation, what it was I knew not; or from whence it came I know not. I have not yet, in twenty years' ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... escape from what had become an intolerable nuisance. To Mr. Thomas's letter the reader will thank me for adding one not less interesting with which Dr. Henry Danson has favored me. We have here, with the same fun and animal spirits, a little of the proneness to mischief which his other schoolfellow says he was free from; but the mischief is all of the harmless kind, and might perhaps have been better described as but ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... have been overlooked. But so much is certain: he was conscious of what he called a nervousness of nature which neither father nor grandfather could have bequeathed to him. He imputed to this, or, in other words, to an undue physical sensitiveness to mental causes of irritation, his proneness to deranged liver, and the asthmatic conditions which he believed, rightly or wrongly, to be produced by it. He was perhaps mistaken in some of his inferences, but he was not mistaken in the fact. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... features is their proneness to blood revenge, by which, as among other savages, a succession of retaliatory murders is long kept up. They believe also, when a person dies, that his death is caused by the agency of an evil spirit secured by some enemy; and, having settled who that person is, will follow his steps ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... perusal of such masses of poetry could not fail to produce their effect. Of a youth whose mind, like mine at that period, possessed some general capability, without perhaps a single prominent and marked talent, a proneness to imitation is sure to be the besetting sin. I consequently, for a large portion of my earlier life, never read a work which struck my fancy, without planning a better one upon its model; for my ambition, like my vanity, knew no bounds. It was a matter of course that ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... charged with attempting to instigate the various eastern tribes to rise at once, and by a simultaneous effort to throw off the yoke of their oppressors. It is difficult at this distant period to assign the proper credit due to these early accusations against the Indians. There was a proneness to suspicion and an aptness to acts of violence on the part of the whites that gave weight and importance to every idle tale. Informers abounded where tale-bearing met with countenance and reward, and the sword was readily ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... disciple Machiavel, the only politician of later ages, is of three kinds: the government of one man, or of the better sort, or of the whole people; which, by their more learned names, are called monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. These they hold, through their proneness to degenerate, to be all evil. For whereas they that govern should govern according to reason, if they govern according to passion they do that which they should not do. Wherefore, as reason and passion are two things, so government ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... not unreasonably numerous, nor were they inquisitorial; nevertheless, it proved that not one-half of those who were addressed cared to answer them. It was, of course, desirable to know a great deal more than could have been asked for or published with propriety, such as the proneness of particular families to grave constitutional disease. Indeed, the secret history of a family is quite as important in its eugenic aspect as its public history; but one cannot expect persons to freely unlock their dark closets and drag forth family skeletons into the light of day. It was necessary ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster
... worship is idolatry, and that the image of the cross is as much an image as the image of Him who hung thereon. And in all this the Jew is right, if we are to obey the commandment of God. Yet the Jew forgets that a thousand years of trial were requisite to cure his ancestors of their proneness to idols. After their first mission, accomplished in the birth of Christ, God has preserved them a perpetual witness against paganism. But so subtle is this sin, that we find ourselves setting up sensuous representations, while we point the finger of scorn at the ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... proved by his wistful, wounded eyes, by a plaintive note in his voice, a painful want of confidence in his welcome, and a constant but indifferently successful effort to correct his natural incivility of manner and proneness to take offence. By his keen brows and forehead he is clearly a shrewd man; and there is no sign of straitened means or commercial diffidence about him: he is well dressed, and would be classed at a guess as a prosperous master manufacturer in a business ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power and proneness to abuse it which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories, and constituting each the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... allusion to 'Jack on shore' almost persuaded her that his uncle Everard had inspired the writer of the article. Beauchamp's reply to the question of his loyalty was not quoted: he was, however, complimented on his frankness. At the same time he was assured that his error lay in a too great proneness to make distinctions, and that there was no distinction between sovereign and country in a loyal and contented land, which could thank him for gallant services in war, while taking him for the solitary example to be cited at the present period of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... blamed us for fighting; but had we failed to fight, not one of these censuring mouths but would have hissed at us like an adder with contempt Nay, we ourselves should, as it were, soon have lost the musical speech and high carriage of men, and fallen to a proneness and a hissing, degraded in our own eyes even more than in those of our neighbors. Of course, from this state we should have risen; but it would have been to see the redness of war on our own fields and its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... was the best remedy for proneness to such musings. How happy poor little Meta had been! The three sisters sat together that long day, and Ethel read to the others, and by and by went to walk in the garden with them, till, as Flora was going in, Meta asked, "Do you think ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... stoic requires to be hardened against "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." It is his profession to be indifferent to the "whips and scorns of time." No man was less hardened, or more subject to suffering from scorns and whips. There be those who think proneness to such suffering is unmanly, or that the sufferer should at any rate hide his agony. Cicero did not. Whether of his glory or of his shame, whether of his joy or of his sorrow, whether of his love or of his hatred, whether of his hopes or of his despair, he spoke openly, as he did of ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... States should never be unmindful of the gratitude they owe the God of Nations for His watchful care, which has shielded them from dire disaster and pointed out to them the way of peace and happiness. Nor should they ever refuse to acknowledge with contrite hearts their proneness to turn away from God's teachings and to follow with sinful pride after their ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... the plenipotentiaries was their proneness for what, for want of a better word, may be termed conspirative and circuitous action may be inferred from the record of their official and unofficial conversations and acts. When holding converse with Kolchak's authorized agents in Paris they would lay ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... castle, aroused his attention. He followed them eagerly with his eyes until they were completely lost in the twilight. One of the riders was evidently a woman; but it would be inquiring too minutely into Gilbert's thoughts to determine whether that circumstance, or the proneness of youth to become interested in ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... second hole. The other stopper is connected by glass tubing to a pump, and thus draws warm air laden with moisture through the tube. Papers gummed with the gums or dextrins, etc., to be tested are placed in the tube and the warm moist air passed over them for varying periods, and their proneness to become sticky noted from time to time. By this means the gums can be classified in the order in which they succumbed to the combined influences of heat and moisture. We find that in resisting such influences any natural gum is better than a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... Berlin, with more than two million people, is still entitled to but six seats; and the disproportion in other great cities and densely inhabited regions is almost as flagrant.[328] There has long been demand for a redistribution of seats; but, by reason of the proneness of urban constituencies to return to the Reichstag socialists or other radicals, the Government has never been willing to meet the (p. 224) demand. By states, the 397 seats are distributed as follows: Prussia, 236; Bavaria, 48; Saxony, 23; Wuerttemberg, ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... particularly on being able to anticipate the words or the wants of the various persons who attended his levees, before they uttered a word. This sometimes led him into ridiculous embarrassment; and it was this proneness to lavish promises, which gave ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... is subject to the same general laws as other parts of the body. If the brain of the child is free from defects at birth, and acquires no improper impressions in infancy, it will not easily become diseased in after life. But, if the brain has inherited defects, or has acquired a proneness to disease by mismanagement in early life, it will more easily yield to influences that cause diseased action. The hereditary tendency to disease is one of the most powerful causes that produce nervous and mental affections. Consequently, children have a strong ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... thing—so little that it seemed ridiculous to think of it as among the momentous happenings in a life—but with that extraordinary proneness of the little to usurp the significant places of memory, it had become at last one of the important milestones in her experience. At the end, when she forgot everything else, she would not forget Harry's foolish words, nor the look in his indignant boyish face when he ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... intelligence displayed in its leathery wrinkles. The eyes were light blue, very quick, almost merry—and yet not quite, for if there was humour in them, it was of the kind that takes its pleasures quietly; there was no proneness to laughter ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... the Indians of Guiana, an English missionary, who knew them well, says that the worst feature in their character is their proneness to blood revenge, "by which a succession of retaliatory murders may be kept up for a long time. It is closely connected with their system of sorcery, which we shall presently consider. A person dies,—and it is supposed ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... perpetual horror. I hesitated to ride, or to walk, or to indulge in any exercise that would carry me from home. In fact, I no longer dared trust myself out of the immediate presence of those who were aware of my proneness to catalepsy, lest, falling into one of my usual fits, I should be buried before my real condition could be ascertained. I doubted the care, the fidelity of my dearest friends. I dreaded that, in some trance ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... learned and reflected much during his period of adversity and soldiering, to convert himself into the intelligent, well-informed, and unaffected man he had now become. One thing that struck me in him, however, was an occasional absence of mind and proneness to reverie. If there was a short pause in the conversation, his thoughts seemed to wander far away; and at times an expression of perplexed uneasiness, if not of care, came over his countenance. I had only to address him, however, to dissipate these clouds, ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... 'woman-folk.' It was introduced just at the time the English flocked in such crowds to Paris. The French women, you know, are remarkable for pretty feet and ankles, and can display them in perfect security. The English are remarkable for the contrary. Seeing the proneness of the English women to follow French fashions, they therefore led them into this disastrous one, and sent them home with their petticoats up to their knees, exhibiting such a variety of sturdy little legs as would have afforded ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... ancient Israelites and of the Initiates to ascertain the True Name of the Deity, and its pronunciation, and the loss of the True Word, are an allegory, in which are represented the general ignorance of the true nature and attributes of God, the proneness of the people of Judah and Israel to worship other deities, and the low and erroneous and dishonoring notions of the Grand Architect of the Universe, which all shared except a few favored persons; for even Solomon built altars and sacrificed to Astarat, the goddess of the Tsidunim, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... hour of futile concentration there came to Bryce the old childish impulse to go to his father with his troubles. That sturdy old soul, freed from the hot passions of youth, its impetuosity and its proneness to consider cause rather than effect, had weathered too many storms in his day to permit the present one to benumb his brain as it had ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... abroad, which is, to dress like sane and responsible people. Men are simply absurd; but the women, with their ill-behaved hoops and short petticoats, are positively indecent; but the greatest of all their travelling offences is the proneness ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... Tendency.— N. tendency; aptness, aptitude; proneness, proclivity, bent, turn, tone, bias, set, leaning to, predisposition, inclination, propensity, susceptibility; conatus[Lat], nisus[Lat]; liability &c. 177; quality, nature, temperament; idiocrasy[obs3], idiosyncrasy; cast, vein, grain; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... reply that, what Mr. HENLEY has done for England is to make it as ridiculous as is possible to a man with a limited audience. Mr. HENLEY has a pretty gift of versification, but it is spoiled by a wearisome proneness to smartness, and an assumption of personal superiority that occasionally reaches the heights of the ludicrous. If 'ARRY had been at the University, and had bent what he calls his mind upon verse-making, some of the truculent rhyme in this book is the sort of stuff he would have turned out. It ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 20, 1893 • Various
... that I am disposed to look upon his creed in this respect as a modified Mahometanism. I could relate many instances, affecting myself, where trustfulness has incurred payment in this coin, but, having no desire to stimulate the Indian's existing proneness to practical joking, I stay my hand at further ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... cause:—every thing being referred to the people, the people learned of every thing to judge. Their genius was artificially forced, and in each of its capacities. They had no need of formal education. Their whole life was one school. The very faults of their assembly, in its proneness to be seduced by extraordinary eloquence, aroused the emulation of the orator, and kept constantly awake the imagination of the audience. An Athenian was, by the necessity of birth, what Milton dreamed that man could ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The proneness of his imagination to wander in this forbidden field is unwittingly betrayed by his remarking at Sky, in support of the doctrine that animal substances are less cleanly than vegetable: "I have often thought that, if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns, or ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... which some have imagined, by its quickness and facility, to be an instinct. "Habit," says Reid, "differs from instinct, not in its nature, but in its origin; the last being natural, the first acquired." What we are accustomed to do, gives a facility and proneness to do on like occasions; and there may be even an art, unperceived by themselves, in opening and pursuing a scene of pure invention, and even in the happiest turns of wit. One who had all the experience of such an artist has employed the very terms we have used, of "mechanical" and ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... that they might learn of him with pleasure. Whatever be considered the faulty part of his own character, he freely acknowledged to others, with an admonition to avoid the like. His sensitive nature induced a too great proneness to a self-accusing spirit; yet in this was there no affected humility, though it might unfortunately dispose some to think evil of him where little or none existed, or form an excuse to others for their neglect of ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... of religion on the part of the courtiers reminds me forcibly of a passage in a poetical epistle, written, too, by a sovereign, who, unlike many monarchs, seemed to have had a due appreciation of the proneness of subjects to adopt the ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... instituted as a remedy against the defect caused by sin. For Baptism is intended as a remedy against the absence of spiritual life; Confirmation, against the infirmity of soul found in those of recent birth; the Eucharist, against the soul's proneness to sin; Penance, against actual sin committed after baptism; Extreme Unction, against the remainders of sins—of those sins, namely, which are not sufficiently removed by Penance, whether through negligence or through ignorance; order, against divisions in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... let me remark upon the proneness which all children have to magnify the importance of little things. A strife often arises among them, about just nothing at all, from a mere ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... the corner table of the Kenora dining-room was the birthplace of many future events. Jim talked volubly and he talked often, for despite his nationality and its proverbial proneness to caution, he was bubbling with enthusiasm over the new plan for progress which he had conceived. Truth to tell, for the first time for many a long day, he was the proud possessor of a half interest in ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... Eucharist; His preserving me from so many perils both of body and soul; His care of me by means of His Angels; and His other individual benefits. Under the second head come all my faults and the punishments due to me, whether in the past or now in the present; my proneness to sin; my misuse of my own powers by habituating my thoughts and desires—as well as the inclinations of my other various faculties—to evil; my sojourning in a region far away from His Friendship and from His Divine conversation[90]; my perverted ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... wanted for use, though it may be well kept, in moist sand in the cellar. Care is necessary in saving seed as it shells and blows away like thistle seed, as soon as ripe. It must be sown quite thick, on account of its proneness not to vegetate. It should be ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... to the nervous territories and modified spontaneously or by esthesiogenic agents (Grasset), alphalgesia (sensation of pain at contact with painless bodies), a deficiency of urea in the urine, out of proportion to the general state of nourishment, and a proneness of the symptoms to return after trauma, poisoning, agitation, ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... problem which will not be found anticipated in the East." These words of the Scotch divine are doubtless strong; too strong, I think. And yet they may be serviceable, if they warn us against that proneness to depreciate the intellectual value and serious purpose of the religious books of that land. It is worse than useless to confidently descant upon the errors, inconsistencies, the follies and absurdities of these writings without acknowledging at the same time ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... Ireland. The barbarism of Ireland is evinced by the frequency and ferocity of duels—the hereditary clannish feuds of the common people and the fights to which they give birth—the atrocious cruelties practised in the insurrections of the common people—and their proneness to insurrection. The lower Irish live in a state of greater wretchedness than any other people in Europe inhabiting so fine a soil and climate. It is difficult, often impossible, to execute the processes of law. In cases where gentlemen are concerned, ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... taken possession of by its first proprietor, it was fairly carpeted and festooned all around and about with the wild-rose vine—dwelt one Gabriel Mayo, a gentleman of fortune, taste, and culture. He had a family of fair daughters, of whom old Charles Dubarry, with his national gallantry and proneness to exaggeration, had said, that 'they were all the most beautiful girls in the world, and each one more beautiful than all ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... mineral veins. In short, their natural endowments are fully equal to the general standard, and only require cultivation, as frequently appears from the quickness with which they detect the bearings of any pecuniary transaction, and their proneness to litigation. Many superstitions, however, still linger amongst them, such as the use of charms and incantations, a belief in witchcraft and an evil eye, a resort to "wise men," and even to the minister of the parish as being ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... that he had been informed of the murmurs of the populace against me. He said that as one of his most trusted counselors, and as a high priest of Osiris, he knew that the charges against me were baseless; but that in view of the proneness of the people of Thebes to excitement and tumult, he should be glad to order a company of soldiers to keep guard over my house. I refused. I said that I was conscious of no evil, that none could say that I was slack in ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... shingle which makes the transit an arduous undertaking, and one not to be accomplished easily without the aid of "backstays" (pronounced "backster"), a simple contrivance somewhat upon the principle of snowshoes. When the proneness to slip off the unaccustomed foot has been overcome, backstays are not so awkward as they look. A couple of flat pieces of inch-thick wood, four inches wide by six long, with a loop of leather defectively fastened for the insertion of the ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... When we were in Ionia, I often found her whispering magical words, while she turned the sieve and shears, to ascertain whether her lover were faithful to his vows. I could not find it in my heart to reprove her fond credulity;—for I believe this proneness to wander beyond the narrow limits of the visible world is a glimmering reminiscence of parentage divine; and though in Milza's untutored mind the mysterious impulse takes an inglorious form, I dare not deride what the wisest soul ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... more remarkable for the display of a scholastic enthusiasm than for that of the most amiable dispositions. They are 'severe in youthful virtue unreproved.' There is a passage in his prose-works (the Treatise on Education) which shows, I think, his extreme openness and proneness to pleasing outward impressions in a striking point of view. 'But to return to our own institute,' he says, 'besides these constant exercises at home, there is another opportunity of gaining experience to be won from pleasure itself abroad. In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... I conversed and reasoned with them with the greatest freedom and the utmost confidence. But I found at length that my expectations were vain. I was conversing once with a colleague who belonged to this class, on man's natural proneness to evil. He was one of the best and most enlightened of that school of theologians, and he regarded me at the time with very kindly feelings. And we were agreed as to the fact of man's natural tendency to evil, but he had been ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... complacency over the prospects of a profitable week, when something, I cannot tell what, roused in me a spirit of suspicion, and I began to notice that the elder lady was of a very uneasy disposition, exhibiting a proneness to wander about the house and glide through its passages, especially those on the ground floor, which at first made me question her sanity, and then led me to wonder if through some means unknown to me she had not received a hint as to our secret chamber. I watch, but cannot ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... of the Jews, their restlessness and proneness to wander from their one-principled deity which had been set up by their priests for them to worship, was doubtless an unconscious effort on the part of the people to mitigate the outrage which had been committed against their Creator. It was but a reaching out for that lost or unrecognized element ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... The sturdy Anglo-Saxon nature does not refine itself short of the third generation. The tradesmen, too, and all other classes, have their own proprieties. The only value of my criticisms, therefore, lay in their exemplifying the proneness of a traveller to measure one people by the distinctive characteristics of another,—as English writers invariably measure us, and take upon themselves to be disgusted accordingly, instead of trying to find out some principle of beauty with which we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... of Sary's proneness to gossip and so replied: "We don't consider wealth worth anything unless you know what to do with it. We live as comfortably as we like, and try to use what is left ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... to a strong partiality towards that unpopular class of beings, country boys: I have a large acquaintance amongst them, and I can almost say, that I know good of many and harm of none. In general they are an open, spirited, good-humoured race, with a proneness to embrace the pleasures and eschew the evils of their condition, a capacity for happiness, quite unmatched in man, or woman, or a girl. They are patient, too, and bear their fate as scape-goats (for all sins whatsoever ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... of the second Evangelist is his love of picturesque, or at least of striking details,—his proneness to introduce exceedingly minute particulars, often of the profoundest significancy, and always of considerable interest. Not to look beyond the Twelve Verses (chap. i. 9-20) which were originally proposed for comparison,—We are reminded (a) that ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... treaty than alleged as a pretence for breaking off the negotiation? Sad, indeed, will be the condition of the world if we are never to make peace with an adverse party whose sincerity we have reason to suspect. Even just grounds for such suspicions will but too often occur, and when such fail, the proneness of man to impute evil qualities, as well as evil designs, to his enemies, will suggest false ones. In the present case the suspicion of insincerity was, it is true, so just, as to amount to a moral certainty. The example of the petition of right was a satisfactory proof that ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... of Destiny who had special charge of Jim had listed and measured his failings and had numbered them for drastic treatment. The brawling spirit of his early days, the proneness to drink, the bigoted intolerance of any other mode of thought than his own, the strange mistake of thinking physical courage the only courage, a curious disregard for the things of the understanding—each was the cause ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... "A proneness to take bribes may be generated from the habit of taking fees," said Lord Keeper Williams in his Inaugural Address, making an ungenerous allusion to Francis Bacon, whilst he uttered a statement which was no calumny upon King James's Bench and Bar, though it is signally inapplicable ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... fancy has so largely aided in drawing, will understand the rude nature of the shock that she had received. But Adelheid de Willading, though a woman in the liveliness and fervor of her imagination, as well as in the proneness to conceive her own ingenuous conceptions to be more founded in reality than a sterner view of things might possibly have warranted, was a woman also in the more generous qualities of the heart, and in those enduring principles, which seem to have predisposed ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... habit acts involuntarily and without effort; and it is only when you oppose it, that you find how powerful it has become. What is done once and again, soon gives facility and proneness. The habit at first may seem to have no more strength than a spider's web; but, once formed, it binds us with a chain of iron. The small events of life, taken singly, may seem exceedingly unimportant, ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... though comparatively few, menstruate during nursing; when they do, it may be considered not as the rule, but as the exception. It is said in such instances, that they are more likely to conceive; and no doubt they are, as menstruation is an indication of a proneness to conception. Many persons have an idea that when a woman, during lactation, menstruates, her milk is both sweeter and purer. Such is an error. Menstruation during nursing is more likely to weaken the mother, and consequently ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... class; with both classes the characteristic relation which goes to form the habits of thought of the class is a relation of subservience—that is to say, an economic relation conceived in personal terms; in both classes there is consequently perceptible a special proneness to construe phenomena in terms of personal relation rather than of causal sequence; both classes are so inhibited by the canons of decency from the ceremonially unclean processes of the lucrative or productive occupations as to make participation in the industrial life process of today a moral ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... well, but intolerably old." He complained of "nothing but weakness, and loss of nervous energy." "I look as strong as a cart-horse, but cannot get round the garden without resting once or twice," Soon he was back again at St. Paul's, preaching a sermon on Peace, and rebuking the "excessive proneness to War." "I shall try the same subject again—a subject utterly untouched by the clergy."[143] The summer passed in its usual occupations, and on the 28th of July he preached for the last time in the pulpit of the Cathedral. His subject was the right use of Sunday; ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... assurance; that it consisted in believing that "I am pardoned;" and that works might be left to themselves, to come as they might, as being necessary fruits of faith, without our trouble? Did they know anything of the "apprehensive" power of faith, or of man's proneness to consider his imperfect services, done in and by grace, as adequate to purchase eternal life? There is no proof they did. Let then these three protesters be ever so cogent an argument against the Catholic creed, this does not bring them a whit nearer ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... with which some of our philosophers and gloomy sectarians have branded our nature—the principle of universal selfishness, the proneness to all evil, they have given us; still the detestation in which inhumanity to the distressed, or insolence to the fallen, are held by all mankind, shows that they are not natives of the human heart. Even the unhappy partner of our kind, who is undone, the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Sir Robert Walpole often, when he did not care to enter early into the debate himself, gave Yonge his notes, as the latter came late into the House, from which be could speak admirably and fluently, though he had missed the preceding discussion. Sir William, who had a proneness to poetry, wrote the epilogue to Johnson's tragedy of "Irene." 'When I published the plan for my Dictionary," says the Doctor, "Lord'Chesterfield told me that the word great should be pronounced so as to rhyme to state; and Sir William Yonge sent me word, that ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... accuracy, well, Titian was not the man to be over-scrupulous when his own interests were involved. But even though the statement were not deliberately made to heighten the effect of an appeal, we must in any case make allowances for the natural proneness to exaggerate their age which usually characterises men of advanced years, so that any ex parte statement of this kind must be received with due caution. Where, moreover, as in the present case, we have evidence ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... dominion. 6. Parasurama. 7. Ramchandra. 8. Krishna, or according to some Balarama. 9. Buddha. In this avatar Vishnu descended in the form of a sage for the purpose of making some reform in the religion of the Brahmins, and especially to reclaim them from their proneness to animal sacrifice. Many of the Hindus will not allow this to have been an incarnation of their favourite god. 10. Kalki, or White Horse. This is yet to come. Vishnu mounted on a white horse, with a drawn scimitar, blazing like a comet, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... He mended the fire which didn't need it, and then sat down and filled his pipe. He wasn't smoking so very much but, he thought, with a bored abandonment to the situation, gratefully taking advantage of a pipe's proneness to go out. While he attended to it he could escape the too evidently condemnatory gaze from those young eyes that never wavered, chiefly because they could not be deflected by a doubt of perfectly apprehending ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... she thought of the favorable effect which their guest might have upon the mind of her daughter; for owing to frequent ill-health, Mrs. Santon had not been able to be with her child as much as she would have desired, and she feared lest those early traits in her character of impatience, and a proneness to censure others, might grow upon her, under the influence of her father, who was blind ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... Representatives in arms, how he had "kept the word of promise to the ear," and how "he had broken it to the hope;" how while his reviews had revealed a mighty army of undoubted ability and eagerness for the fight, his indecision or proneness to delay had made its campaigns the laughing-stock of the world. His brilliant Staff clattered at his heels; but glittering surroundings were powerless to avert the memories of a winter's inactivity at Manassas, ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... no stylist. He was a master of facts, as Cicero of words. Studiosum rerum, says Augustine, tantum docet, quantum studiosum verborum Cicero delectat. Hence Cicero, with all his proneness to exaggerate the excellences of his friends, never speaks of him as eloquent. He calls him omnium facile acutissimus, et sine ulla dubitatione doctissimus. [21] The qualities that shone out conspicuously in his works were, besides learning, a genial though somewhat caustic humour, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... when read with a due attention to dates, shows that Wycherley's proneness to take offence has at least been exaggerated. Pope's services to Wycherley were rendered on two separate occasions. The first set of poems were corrected during 1706 and 1707, and Wycherley, in speaking of this revision, far from showing symptoms of annoyance, speaks with gratitude of Pope's kindness, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... pardon, Madam, and thank you. That charming gesture of impatience was the one thing needful to admonish me that lectures are dull, and that the time has come to write finis. The rest of the story? Cornish—Jim—Josie—Antonia? Oh, this proneness of the business man to talk shop! Left to myself, I should have allowed their history to remain to the end of time, unresolved as to entanglements, and them unhealed as to bruises, bodily and sentimental. And, yet, those were the things which ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... city than in the residential quarter, it is to be expected that there will be more mental defectives in groups of juvenile delinquents from the slum quarter, because, in the first place, they constitute a larger proportion of the population, and because, secondly, of their greater proneness to social offenses. Moreover, the prevalence of the feeble-minded in certain localities may affect the attitude of the law-enforcing machinery toward the children ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... thought harbored in the mind is bound to come out. It may not manifest itself at once in overt action, but it affects the motor pathways and either weakens or strengthens connections so that when the opportunity comes, some act will be furthered or hindered. In view of the proneness to permit base thoughts to enter the mind, human beings might sometimes fear even to think. A more optimistic idea, however, is that noble thoughts lead to noble acts. Therefore, keep in your mind the kind of thoughts that you wish to see actualized in your character and the appropriate acts will ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... fiddle. Tom, my second brother, two years older than myself, had just entered the army time enough to be returned in the Gazette as severely wounded in the action of the 18th. I was destined for the church—as much, I believe, from my mother's proneness to Prelacy, (in a very different sense from its usual acceptation,) she being fond of expatiating on her descent from one of the Seven of immortal memory, as from my being a formal, bookish boy, of a reserved and rather contemplative disposition. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... stories of communications with spirits; gave to supernatural tales of witchcraft and demonology a wondering credence, and allowed them to occupy their conversation, speculations, and reveries. They carried a belief of such things, and a proneness to indulge it, into their daily life, their literature, and the proceedings of tribunals, ecclesiastical and civil. The fearful results shrouded their annals in darkness and shame. Let those results for ever stand ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... adversary plainly has the advantage of me. First, we have not the same interests at stake; it is by no means the same thing for me to forfeit your esteem, and for AEschines, an unprovoked volunteer, to fail in his impeachment. My other disadvantage is, the natural proneness of men to lend a pleased attention to invective and accusation, but to give little heed to him whose theme is his own vindication. To my adversary, therefore, falls the part which ministers to your gratification, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... roar and bellow, and make an hideous noise within me. It showed me also that Jesus Christ had yet a word of grace and mercy for me, that He had not, as I had feared, quite forsaken and cast off my soul; yea, this was a kind of chide for my proneness to desperation; a kind of threatening of me, if I did not, notwithstanding my sins, and the heinousness of them, venture my salvation upon the Son of God. But as to my determining about this strange dispensation, what it was, I know not; or from whence it came, I know not; I have not yet in twenty ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... we may now call women's affectability, and considers that it makes them more prone than men to the sexual emotions, as is shown by the fact that, notwithstanding their modesty, they sometimes make sexual advances. This greater proneness of women to the sexual impulse is, he remarks, entirely natural and right, for the work of generation is mainly carried on by women, and love is its basis: "generationis fundamentum est amor." (G.P. Nenter, Theoria Hominis Sani, 1714, cap. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... is it your proneness to domestication, For he dwells in man's barn, and I build in man's thatch, As we say to each other—but, to our vexation, O'er your safety alone ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Shelley, Marlowe is the historical poet most frequently chosen to illustrate the world's proneness to take advantage of the poet's innocence. In the most famous of the poems about Marlowe, The Death of Marlowe, R. H. Horne takes a hopeful view of the world's depravity, for he makes Marlowe's innocence of evil so touching that ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... the bantering tone was dropped entirely. In the rest of Allison's greeting was all that Caleb found most lovable in the man's whole make-up—his proneness to accept men as men, for what they had done or might do, ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... him to a deaconship of our Monastery. His priestly name is Sergius. He was scarcely out of boyhood when I came here; it was not long, however, before I discovered in him the qualities which drew me to thee during thy prison life at the old convent of Irene—a receptive mind, and a native proneness to love God. I made his way easy. I became his teacher, as I had been thine; and as the years flew by he reminded me more and more of thee, not merely with respect to mental capacity, but purity of soul and aspiration as well. Need I say how natural ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... church doctrine, on which Melanchthon was writing all his life!" (Conservative Ref., 291; Schmauk, 748.) This indefinite and wavering attitude towards divine truth, the natural consequence of the humanistic bent of his mind, produced in Melanchthon a general tendency and proneness to surrender or compromise doctrinal matters in the interest of policy, and to barter away eternal truth for temporal peace. It made him an indifferentist and a unionist, always ready to strike a bargain also in matters pertaining to Christian faith, and to cover doctrinal ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... close-seeing feminine eye never misses. To cap the climax he defended the purity of social order with a rarity in those quarters sufficient to single him out. Not that the roughest Westerner was not excessively gallant, but his restrictions in the ladies' presence did not always curb his proneness to "tall talk." ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... Perhaps there was a proneness to inconstancy in her nature—a nature, to those who contemplate it from a standpoint beyond the influence of that inconstancy, the most exquisite of all in its plasticity and ready sympathies. Partly, too, Stephen's ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... white race, should not mislead us, as it is readily accounted for by the peculiar character of that race. The negro exhibits by nature a pliability, a readiness to accommodate himself to circumstances, a proneness to imitate those among whom he lives,—characteristics which are entirely foreign to the Indian, while they facilitate in every way the increase of the negro. I infer, therefore, from all these circumstances that the negro race must be considered as permanently settled upon this ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... survey the outer world, he naturally enough forms a rather high estimate of its value, of its dignity, of its intrinsic worth. This high estimate is useful in so far as it makes his condition pleasant, and it—or rather our proneness to form it—we are accustomed to call vanity. Vanity—which really helps to keep the race alive—has been treated harshly by the moralists and satirists. It does not quite deserve the hard names it has been called. It interpenetrates everything a man says ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... injured by any one. But on the other hand he was a friend to the poor; and seldom sent the beggar empty-handed from his door. He also gave largely to the support of the gospel, as well as to benevolent institutions. One very noticeable and oftentimes laughable peculiarity was his proneness to charge every thing that went wrong to the state of the weather. I think it was more from a habit of speech than from any wish to be unreasonable. I remember one day passing a field when he was trying to catch a horse that to all appearance had no idea of being captured. He tried ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... teaching, by his character and life. But this, the real supernatural, was not obvious as such to his contemporaries. They looked for it in the lower region of physical effects. And here the Church also in its embryonic spiritual life, in its proneness to externalize religion in forms of rite, and creed, and organization, has thought to find it. Jesus' reproof, "Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe," is still pertinent to those who will not have it that the supernatural Revelation—spiritual ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... enthusiastic respect. Without one taint of envy in his nature, conscious of his own extraordinary powers, he was quick to recognize genius in others; and his hearty praise of the powers of his rivals shows how sound and generous the heart was under his irritability. His proneness to satire and power of epigram made him enemies, but even these yielded to the suavity and fascination which alternated with his bitter moods. His sympathies were peculiarly open for young musicians. Mendelssohn and Liszt were stimulated by his warm and encouraging ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... influences were negatived by spells and charms. We who still hang on our walls at Christmas the mystic holly, are unconsciously perpetuating an old-world custom connected with belief in the efficacy of the magical circle to protect us against evil spirits. And in our concern about luck, our proneness to believe in omens, the influence of colours and numbers, in dreams and in prophetic warnings, we retain as much of the spirit as the poetry of the religion of ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... by mankind, to canonise the forms and practices along with which any great truth has been bequeathed to them—their liability to prostrate their intellects before the prophet, and swear by his every word—their proneness to mistake the clothing of the idea for the idea itself; renders it needful to insist strongly upon the distinction between the fundamental principle of the Pestalozzian system, and the set of expedients devised ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... judged important, because it is upon these quarrels chiefly that the erroneous opinion has built itself of Pope's fretfulness and irritability. And this unamiable feature of his nature, together with a proneness to petty manoeuvring, are the main foibles that malice has been able to charge upon Pope's moral character. Yet, with no better foundation for their malignity than these doubtful propensities, of which ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... built years before by one Azariah Prouse, who believed among other strange matters that the earth is flat and that houses are built higher than one story only at great peril, because of the earth's proneness to tip if overbalanced. Prouse had compromised with this belief, however, and made his house a story and a half high, in what I conceive to have been a dare-devil spirit. The reckless upper rooms were thus cut off untimely by ceilings of sudden slope, and might not be walked in uprightly ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... giving remunerative employment to our own people, then emigrating for want of work. "Nothing but Sloth or Envy," he said, "can possibly hinder my labours from being crowned with the wished for success; our habitual fondness for the one hath already brought us to the brink of ruin, and our proneness to the other hath almost discouraged all pious endeavours to promote ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
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