"Inordinate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sudden cloudbursts are common from October to April; they bring inordinate amounts of rain which can damage roads and houses; sandstorms and dust storms occur throughout the year, but are most ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... an old man's shoulders from shivering at every breath of sorrow or ill-fortune. But methinks it were easier for an old man to feel the disadvantages of youth than the advantages of age. Of these latter I reckon one of the chiefest to be this: that we attach a less inordinate value to our own productions, and, distrusting daily more and more our own wisdom (with the conceit whereof at twenty we wrap ourselves away from knowledge as with a garment), do reconcile ourselves with the wisdom of God. I could have wished, indeed, that room might have ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... a day they sat together. Even mutual interests were largely obscured, much of the time, by personal ones, barring only the subject of sickness. All forms of illness were themes commanding instant and absorbing attention. Inordinate anxiety was felt by all for the ills of the one; and for days the "I" would be forgotten if any member of the home-circle was "sick." And the concerns of the patient, whether suffering from a cold, sore eyes, a sprained ankle, or "had her tonsils out," were ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... but it did not sound as welcome to me from his lips as I had expected. Either my nature is narrow, or my inordinate jealousy lays me open to the most astonishing inconsistencies; for no sooner had he spoken these words than I experienced a sudden revulsion against my own theory and the suspicions which it threw upon the man whom an hour before I was eager to ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... personal motives for cultivating cordial relations with the country of his birth. From the Austrian Government he expected to be saved from the necessity of abdicating and expiating his unwisdom. It was his inordinate ambition and vanity which had brought the Bulgarian nation to the very brink of ruin. He it was who had insisted on breaking off negotiations with Turkey during the London Conference and recommencing hostilities. In vain the Chief of the General Staff, Fitcheff,[59] besought him to ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... as if he were not quite sure what to do with it. One boy proceeded to turn in an inordinate quantity of sugar, another to pour in the brown coffee that sent out a refreshing steam enough to make any one hungry. George Grant spread the butter, cut the sausage in half, put it on the bread, and thrust it ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... many respects, from his father and brother, holding in supreme dislike courts and courtiers, party warfare, political intrigue, and all the subtleties of Jesuitical diplomacy, neither having any inordinate relish for camps or campaigns, Sir Piers Rookwood yet displayed in early life one family propensity, viz., unremitting devotion to the sex. Among his other mistresses was the unfortunate Susan Bradley, in whom by some he was supposed to have been clandestinely united. In early youth, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... not good for metre. Even when an actress speaks her lines as lines, and does not drop into prose by slipping here and there a syllable, she spoils the tempo by inordinate length of pronunciation. Verse cannot keep upon the wing without a certain measure in the movement of the pinion. Verse is ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... cloudbursts are common from October to April, they bring inordinate amounts of rain which can damage roads and houses; sandstorms and dust storms occur throughout the year, but are most common between March ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... little gust have I to write of these things; moreover I began to fear that my narrative grow to inordinate length, so will I incontinent pass on to that time when came the quartermaster Diccon with Resolution Day to deliver me from my ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... truth, Kory-Kory's mother was the only industrious person in all the valley of Typee; and she could not have employed herself more actively had she been left an exceedingly muscular and destitute widow, with an inordinate ate supply of young children, in the bleakest part of the civilized world. There was not the slightest necessity for the greater portion of the labour performed by the old lady: but she seemed to work from some irresistible impulse; ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... but knowledge, as Herillus, Alcidamus, and many of Socrates' followers affirm; why paupertas omnes perdocet artes, poverty instructs a man in all arts; it makes a man hardy and venturous, and therefore is it called of the poets paupertas audax, valiant poverty. It is not so much subject to inordinate desires as wealth or prosperity. Non habet, unde suum paupertas pascat amorem;[35] poverty hath not wherewithal to feed lust. All the poets were beggars; all alchemists and all philosophers are beggars. Omnia mea mecum porto, quoth Bias, when ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... Uncle Ben drew from his desk a rude portfolio made from the two covers of a dilapidated atlas, and took from between them a piece of blotting-paper, which through inordinate application had acquired the color and consistency of a slate, and a few pages of copy-book paper, that to the casual glance looked like sheets of exceedingly difficult music. Surveying them with a blending of chirographic pride, orthographic doubt, and the bashful ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... himself. His faults of character—inordinate ambition, inflexible obstinacy, reckless daring—were such as in the end to negative his military genius and lead to the destruction of the great power he had so rapidly built up. The other was Czar Peter ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... these to be read every Sunday of the year, as infallibly as the blood circulates the body; and then as certainly begun again, and continued the year following: and that this being done, it might probably abate the inordinate desires of knowing what we need not, and practising what we know and ought to do." This was the earnest desire of this prudent man. And Oh that Dr. Sanderson had undertaken it! for then in all probability it ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... The inordinate pride of State importance has suggested to some minds an objection to the principle of a guaranty in the federal government, as involving an officious interference in the domestic concerns of the members. ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... boy of 16, precociously mature and fairly bright. He was, however, indifferent to the opposite sex, though he had ample opportunity for gratifying normal passions. His parents lived in the city, but the youth had an inordinate desire for the country and was therefore sent to school in a village. On the second day after his arrival at school a farmer missed a sow which was found secreted in an outhouse on the school grounds. This was the first of many similar incidents in which a ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... inordinate affection, and love of money; from evil. speaking; false witness; not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing, or striking for striking, or ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... high time they were planted. A boy arrived from the back country who had lived at the farm the summer before,—a willing, thick-headed young person in process of growth,—and Israel Haydon took great exception to his laziness and inordinate appetite, and threatened so often to send him back where he came from that only William's insistence that they had entered into an engagement with poor Thomas, and the women's efforts ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... her daughter-in-law a cold, keen glance in which she allowed her hatred, repressed for the last six months, to overflow; "you, to whose inordinate love we owe this death, you will now go to reign in your Scotland, and you will start to-morrow. I am regent de facto." The three physicians having made her a sign, "Messieurs," she added, addressing ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... to my ball to-night," said she. Mr. Prohack had never heard of any ball. In an instant she told him that she had remarked two most charming ladies with him in the box—(inordinate faculty of observation, mused Mr. Prohack)—and in another instant she was selling him three two guinea tickets for a grand ball and rout in aid of the West End Chorus Girls' Aid Association. Could he refuse, perceiving so clearly as he did that within the public monument ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... you forget that you have entered your fifteenth year, and as you grow older you will gradually lose your inordinate fondness for pets. Your childish tastes will ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Miss Todd were two young men who came to be widely known. These were Douglas and Shields. With the latter only we are concerned now. He was a red-headed little Irishman, with a peppery temper, the whole being set off with an inordinate vanity. He must have had genuine ability in some directions, or else he was wonderfully lucky, for he was an officeholder of some kind or other, in different states of the Union, nearly all his life. It is doubtful if another person can be named who held as many ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... order to hold on to the hair of the mother when she is using her arms for the purposes of locomotion. This inference appears to me justifiable, inasmuch as no other explanation can be given of the comparatively inordinate muscular force of an infant's grip. For experiments showed that very young babies are able to support their own weight, by holding on to a horizontal bar, for a period varying from one half to more than two minutes[7]. ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... party, like every one which promises to effect a great political change, was embraced by many equally careless of the one motive or the other; but who hoped to indulge their licentious passions, repair their broken fortunes, or gratify their inordinate ambition ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... the neighing of horses, now the voice of a woman. With this "all their body is agitated by histrionic movements"; their lips, their shoulders, their fingers are twisted, shrugged, or spread out as they think best to suit their delivery. The audience, filled with wonder and admiration at those inordinate gesticulations, at length bursts into laughter: "It seems to them they are at the play and not at church, and that they have only to look ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... against each other once more. Everybody, of course, still remembers the sudden rivalry between these two American citizens, which sprang up in June of that year, for the gem's possession. The complexity of causes which simultaneously inspired them with an inordinate desire for the Paternoster ruby—a desire which seemingly could be appeased only by possession, regardless of cost—was much of a mystery, and afforded the energetic correspondents a fruitful text for many a day. Both, as is well known, had unlimited means with which to indulge their sudden whim; ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... ornaments, and so resting satisfied in a somewhat indolent feeling of goodness, and not troubling ourselves with too much effort of reason. A love of the beautiful undoubtedly tends to elevate and refine the mind, but the follies of the false love and the dangers of an inordinate love are numerous and deadly. It is absurd that a man should either be or pretend to be absolutely absorbed in the worship of a dado or a China tea cup so as to care for nothing else, and to be unable to ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... have been to give me so much of your time! Your letter is of real use, and has been and shall be well considered. I am much pleased to find that we do not differ as much as I feared. I begin my book with saying that my chief object is to show the inordinate scale of variation; I have especially studied all sorts of variations of the individual. On crossing I cannot change; the more I think, the more reason I have to believe that my conclusion would be agreed to by all practised breeders. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... with a very large margin, an Historisches Trauerspiel in five acts, entitled "Cleopatra." There were a great many marginal corrections and annotations, apparently from the author's hand; the speeches were very long, and there was an inordinate number of soliloquies by the heroine. One of them, I remember, towards the end of the play, began in ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... the ancient architecture of Germany is altogether dungeon-like, yet they can make pretty imitations. The summer palace of the duke at Biberach might be adopted in lieu of the enormous fabrics which have cost such inordinate sums in our island. "The circular room in the centre of the building is ornamented with magnificent marble pillars. The floor is also of marble. The galleries are stuccoed, with gold ornaments encrusted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... not hitherto seen. In the highest story, a window of the ordinary height extends along the whole breadth of the house, ten, fifteen, perhaps twenty feet, just like any other window of a commonplace house, except for this inordinate width. One does not easily see what the inhabitants want of so much window-light; but the fashion is very general, and in modern houses, or houses that have been modernized, this style of window is retained. Thus young people who grow up ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... animal. In the pursuit of vengeance and the commission of murder he is self-reliant, coolly calculating, fierce and fatal as a tiger. Yet his religious fervour is sincere; his impulses are generous; and his heart on the whole is good. His vanity is inordinate; and his unmistakable courage is impaired, to Northern apprehension, by ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... churchman; he loved a lord in the abstract, and yet he asserted a sturdy independence against any lord in particular. He was deeply religious, but had an abiding fear of death. He was burly in person, and slovenly in dress, his shirt-frill always covered with snuff. He was a great diner out, an inordinate tea-drinker, and a voracious and untidy feeder. An inherited scrofula, which often took the form of hypochondria and threatened to affect his brain, deprived him of control over the muscles of his face. Boswell describes how his features worked, how he snorted, grunted, whistled, and rolled about ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... suite. For a small suite, such as would be required for a single person, or a small family of two or three persons, the saving at once mounts to a very much larger figure; so much so, indeed, as to render the use of the isolated house in such cases a most inordinate extravagance, except for the very rich. Thus a single person, or a family of two or three, could be very comfortably provided for with three or four rooms, and a bath-room in an apartment-house having a good cafe. ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... saddle the people with another Civil War debt. It was well for the State, he hinted, that those committees were composed of stanch men who would do their duty in all weathers, regardless of demagogues who sought to gratify inordinate ambitions. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the turbulent Irish. He had been in Ireland for a few weeks, and had visited some cabins and spoken to some laborers, and had settled the matter to his own satisfaction. "The ills of Ireland arise from the inordinate love of the soil in the Irish, and their lower civilization. For instance, an English farmer in renting a farm would consider how much would support his family first, and if the landlord would not accept as rent what ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... behaviour." He was consecrated on May 26, 1553, but only to be deposed in March, 1554. Soon after Mary came to the throne, she appointed a commission of bishops to deprive the bishops appointed during the reign of her brother. On various charges, and especially on that of "inordinate life" (meaning marriage), the bishopric of Harley was declared void. He is said to have spent the remainder of his life wandering about in woods "instructing his flock, and administering the sacrament according to the order of the English book, until he died, shortly after his deposition, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... exploit of Hanuman is related with inordinate prolixity in the Bengal recension (Gortesio's text). Among other adventures he narrowly escapes being shot by Bharat as he passes over Nandigrama near Ayodhya. Hanuman stays Bharat in time, and gives him an account of what has befallen Rama ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... prescribed to it a line, wide enough to embrace the gratification of his views, and within the boundaries of that line it stopped. But this discovery carried no consolation to my mind. I knew not what portion of calamity I was fated to endure, before his jealousy of dishonour, and inordinate thirst of ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... error. Doubtless Demosthenes was honest, but he was mistaken in his views of what was best for Greece and even for Athens. Philip and Alexander, however selfish, were neither in purpose nor in fact so hostile to Greek freedom as the mighty orator makes out. Inordinate ambition possessed both. In this they are to be ranked with Napoleon and Julius Caesar rather than with Washington. They, however, clearly saw the vanity of the old Greek regime, the total uselessness of trying ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... the case of a man of 32, a big, stalwart fellow, who came to me about two years ago with a very severe case of combined stammering and stuttering. He made his plans to place himself under my care but before getting back, fell a victim to his inordinate appetite for drink and was laid up for a week. His wife wrote me the circumstances, told me it had been going on for nine years and that all efforts to eradicate the appetite had failed. I immediately ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... Now the money put into this new venture is very nearly exhausted. It will hold out for one more pay-day, but that is all. And as yet only barren rock has come up from that yawning shaft that seems to gulp down money with an appetite at once inordinate ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... bitterly reviled the heartless world, whose hollow meed of applause it had formerly been the sole aim of his existence to secure. Wealth became to his disordered imagination the desideratum of existence, and he attached inordinate value to it, in proportion as he felt the bitter stings of comparative penury. To guard his only child—whom he certainly loved better than anything else in the world, save himself—from this dreaded evil, the misguided man, during his latter ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... hours dragged on the hopelessness of their position grew upon the minds of all. Their ammunition was almost gone—each man had but a few rounds remaining—and it was evident that Pesita, through an inordinate desire for revenge, would persist until he had reduced their fortress and claimed the last of them as ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of Christian perfection is the guidance of the soul by the indwelling Holy Spirit. This is attained, ordinarily, first by bringing whatever is inordinate in our animal propensities under the control of the dictates of reason by the practice of mortification and self-denial; for it is a self-evident principle that a rational being ought to be master of his animal ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... polish off three dozen at a sitting, and unblushingly call for more. These are details of more interest to teetotalers than to the general public. Yet, not to let the subject pass without a word of caution to afflicted future travellers in the Soudan, the inordinate use of undiluted mineral waters of native manufacture is most ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... and night, Ishmael awoke early, in full possession of his faculties. He remembered all the incidents of that trying day and night; reflected upon their effects; and prayed to God to deliver him from the burden and guilt of inordinate and sinful affections. ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... are the advantages of old age, if we contemplate it in another point of view; if we consider it as delivering us from the tyranny of lust and ambition; from the angry and contentious passions; from every inordinate and irrational desire; in a word, as teaching us to retire within ourselves, and look for happiness in our own bosoms. If to these moral benefits naturally resulting from length of days be added that sweet food of the mind which is gathered in the fields of science, I know not any ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... works of Browning, only Pippa Passes can be recommended with any confidence that it will give pleasure to the reader. Other works, such as The Ring and the Book, [Footnote: The Ring and the Book is remarkable for other things than its inordinate length. In it Browning tells how he found an old book containing the record of a murder trial in Rome,—a horrible story of a certain Count Guido, who in a jealous rage killed his beautiful young wife. That is the only story element of the poem, and it is told, with many irritating digressions, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... speed, let me say a little. All important it is, indeed, in this age of fast progress. When I first sailed for Australia, in 1840, we were, I think, 141 days on the way. Nor was that a very inordinate passage then. This time I expect, within that interval, to go and return, besides having nearly two and a half months to spare—a space of time which now, with rails and fast steamers everywhere, will enable ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... of objection on the ground of inordinate expense is doubtless better taken, and can be met only by substantial proof that the enormous outlay is a wise one. Tobacco may be "the anodyne of poverty," as somebody has said, but it certainly promotes poverty. This narcotic lulls to sleep all pecuniary economy. Every ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... And could the Spanish armie the last yeere (who had all prouisions that could be thought on for an Armie, and tooke the fittest season, in the yeere for our Climate) auoyd sicknes among their souldiers? May it then be thought that ours could escape there, where they found inordinate heat of weather, and hot ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... Godfrey knew it, and this vexed him the more. He had an inordinate opinion of himself and his own consequence, and felt humiliated at being disobeyed by a servant, without being able to punish him for his audacity. This feeling was increased by the presence of a third party, who was ...
— Only An Irish Boy - Andy Burke's Fortunes • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... punish her if she had done wrong in His sight. Surely, if she lived henceforth in fear of Him, He would let her keep this priceless love which had come to her! And it was impossible that He should regard it as an inordinate and sinful affection—since it had filled her life with light. As the wife of Hugh Chiltern she sought a blessing. Would God withhold it? He would not, she was sure, if they lived a sober and a righteous life. He would take that into ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... "Guy takes inordinate pride in his parterre, arranges and overlooks all the flowers himself. I often tell him I am jealous of my beautiful rivals; they monopolize his leisure ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... labour having gone, and mental industry not having taken its place, she bedecked and scented her person, or had it bedecked and scented for her, she lay upon her sofa, or drove or was carried out in her vehicle, and, loaded with jewels, she sought by dissipations and amusements to fill up the inordinate blank left by the lack of productive activity. And as the hand whitened and frame softened, till, at last, the very duties of motherhood, which were all the constitution of her life left her, became distasteful, and, from the ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... lay overpowered with wine. Elated with victory, they had drunk largely, the royal pavilion setting them the example; for though Edward was temperate, yet, to flatter his recovered friends, the inordinate Buchan and Soulis, he had allowed a greater excess that night than he was accustomed to sanction. The banquet over, every knight retired to his tent; every soldier to his pallet; and a deep sleep lay upon every man. The king himself, whose many thoughts had long kept him waking, now fell ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... and his host endeavored to maintain the sceptical buoyancy with which they had set forth upon their adventure. But the chilliness of the room (they had no fire, and it was a misty night with a moaning wind), the inordinate quantity of odd-looking shadows, and the profound silence, were immediately destructive to buoyancy ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... fashion amongst the Mexican women of painting and powdering to an inordinate degree perhaps accounts for their love of this hour between the lights, when they imagine the falseness of their complexion ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... that his alchemists abandon their unfruitful furnaces, Gilles begins a course of systematic gluttony, and his flesh, set on fire by the essences of inordinate potations and spiced dishes, seethes ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... Doome, out of my Blood, Hee'le breede Reuengement, and a Scourge for me: But thou do'st in thy passages of Life, Make me beleeue, that thou art onely mark'd For the hot vengeance, and the Rod of heauen To punish my Mistreadings. Tell me else, Could such inordinate and low desires, Such poore, such bare, such lewd, such meane attempts, Such barren pleasures, rude societie, As thou art matcht withall, and grafted too, Accompanie the greatnesse of thy blood, And hold their leuell with thy Princely heart? Prince. So please your Maiesty, I would I could ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... The creature is unable to make use of them, not only in the liquid honey upon which it lives, but even on a solid surface. If we take the larva from the cell and place it on a hard substance, to observe it more readily, we see that the inordinate protuberance of the abdomen, by lifting the thorax from the ground, prevents the legs from finding a support. Lying on its side, the only possible position because of its conformation, the larva remains motionless or only makes a few lazy, ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... this severe school through which it has passed, and we must also take into consideration the spirit which has been for centuries predominant in the Eastern Church—I mean the strong tendency both in the clergy and in the laity to attribute an inordinate importance to the ceremonial element of religion. Primitive mankind is everywhere and always disposed to regard religion as simply a mass of mysterious rites which have a secret magical power of averting evil in this world and securing felicity in the next. To this general rule the Russian ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... of Chicago, and the last, is of an unfinished monstrosity. It might be a vast railway station, built for men and women twenty feet high. The sky-scrapers, in which it cherishes an inordinate pride, shut out the few rays of sunlight which penetrate its dusky atmosphere. They have not the excuse of narrow space which their rivals in New York may plead. They are built in mere wantonness, for within the City Limits, whose distance from the centre is the ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... that period of his education it would have been impossible, without harsher measures than his tutor wished to adopt, to prevent him from cross-readings, which would greatly have blemished his scholarship. Some minor offences, such, for instance, as inordinate efforts to begin upon a second line before he had regularly perused the first, were punished by switching him on the nose, turning the double desk round—in which case it presented him with a mirror, that frightened him dreadfully—or ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... excuse any inordinate or extreme attachment by labouring to show in their highest colours the ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... 'The inordinate power of these island princes was gradually broken down by the Scottish monarchs in the course of the fifteenth and early part of the sixteenth century. On the death of John, Lord of the Isles and Earl of Ross, grandson of Donald, Hugh of Sleat, John's nearest ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... discovered by practise that wood has a grain which sets bounds to the possibilities of technique. You have yet to learn that it has also an inordinate capacity for swallowing light. Now, as it is by the aid of light that we see the results of our labor, it follows that we should do everything in our power to take full advantage of that helpful agency. It is obvious that work which can ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... used wine, and a little good brandy too, and am as free from any inordinate appetite as your most confirmed abstainer; but then I take especial care to ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... it is turned. This defect in character is more generally the result of vicious or improper habits of mind, than any constitutional idiosyncrasy. It is the result of the indulgence of gloomy thoughts, morbid fancies, inordinate ambition, habitual melancholy, a complaining, fault-finding disposition. It is generally early acquired, not in childhood, but in youth. Childhood is too buoyant, fresh, and free for such indulgences. Early youth—when its passions are developing, ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... sensation under that lonely far-off gaze. "Your eyes look awful big at night, Minty," he said. He would have added "and pretty," but she was his sister, and he had the lofty fraternal conviction of his duty in repressing the inordinate vanity of the sex. "Ye're ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... the whole history to Forrester who had been in his confidence about the marriage from the beginning. We had no suspicion of the inordinate love, suppressed, chafed, galled, and tortured into madness, he had borne to Astraea all through those years of malediction, during which he had exhausted every form of threat and appeal to enforce his rights. He had hoped on wildly to the last. He had watched the progress of my attachment ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... There was, however, a persistent rumour that Valens himself had been bought with a heavy bribe. He had long been in mean circumstances and ill concealed his sudden accession of wealth. Prolonged poverty had whetted his inordinate desires, and the needy youth grew into an ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... si whistled like the wind in the chimneys, and the hands of testimony were as the aspen leaves when storms are in. Some took one side, some another; but when, in due season, it was seen what inordinate pride Baldassare had in the black-eyed bambino there was no question of sides. He had ranked himself with the unforgivable party: the old man was an old fool, a gull whose power of swallow stirred disgust. Vanna had the ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... the dusky old stable, where four other ponies began rattling their halters in the gloom, by way of greeting. A bundle of purple tares lay ready in a corner for Mary to feed her favourites; and for the next ten minutes or so she was happily employed going from stall to stall, and gratifying that inordinate appetite for green meat which ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... We would buy, and behold, we must pay. Then the lights go out, the voices stop, and only the dark tumultuous streets surround us, and the grime of life is ours again. Whereupon we go heavily to hard beds of despair, having eaten the cake we bought, and now must pay for unto Penalty, the dark inordinate creditor. And anon the morning comes, and then, at last, the evening when the triste bazaars open again, and the strong of heart and nerve move not from their doorways, but sit still in the dusk to watch the grim world go by. But mostly they hurry ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... which is being played, not so much by as through you, there can be no exteriorities, nothing can be trivial, in a record of life so conceived. And this point of view also helps the writer to keep all his details in proportion; the autobiographer's usual fault, artistically at least, being an inordinate valuation of small concerns, because they happened to him. To St. Augustine, while not the smallest human event is without significance, in its relation to eternity, not the greatest human event is of importance, in its relation to time; and his own share in it would but ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... to tell me that this is the little girl who used to take me for walks, and who had such an inordinate appetite for stories! ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... pierce their hides and occasion them painful sores. These "dassel" flies—which have no sting—closely resemble another kind of gadfly which has a sting. Nevertheless, this last kind is little feared by cattle, while the first is so to an inordinate extent. The laying of the eggs upon the skin is at the time quite painless, and no ill consequences follow until long afterwards, so that we cannot suppose the cattle to draw a conscious inference concerning the connection ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... employment by which to support himself and her. As for the old man, he had managed, in the wreck of affairs, to retain a large proportion of his wines, and other choice liquors; and these, which no pressure of want in his family could drive him to sell, afforded the means of gratifying his inordinate love of drink. His clothes gradually became old and rusty—but this seemed to give him no concern. He wandered listlessly in his old business haunts, or lounged about the house in a state of half stupor, drinking regularly all through the day, at frequent ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... verdict on this chap we must keep in mind that his inordinate desire to waste his substance was no less than a vice if for no other reason than its example upon others; it is just as bad to be a "receiver" as it is to be a spendthrift. If we cannot build up a reputation for generosity ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... was so complete that I could not tell whether it was midnight or midnoon, so far as perception of light was concerned, and the case seemed hopeless. It was, however, among the "all things" that God causes to work together for good, while Satan eagerly seeks to use them for evil. It checked my inordinate desire for mere acquirements, which I believe to be a bad tendency, particularly in a female, while it threw me more upon my own resources, such as they were, and gave me a keen relish for the highly intellectual conversation that always prevailed ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... of the milk of human kindness, to do a contrived murder. She knew him to be ambitious, but withal to be scrupulous, and not yet prepared for that height of crime which commonly in the end accompanies inordinate ambition. She had won him to consent to the murder, but she doubted his resolution; and she feared that the natural tenderness of his disposition (more humane than her own) would come between, and defeat the purpose. So with her own hands armed with a dagger, she approached ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... congregation, for it is not permitted to them to speake, but to be subiect as the lawe sayeth. These two testimonies of the holy ghost, be sufficient to proue what soeuer we haue affirmed before, and to represse the inordinate pride of women, as also to correct the foolishnes of those that haue studied to exalt women in authoritie aboue man, against God, and against his sentence pronounced. But that the same two places of the apostle ...
— The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment - of Women • John Knox
... should do in case of a reverse of fortune. I mention this as a fact of which I have often been a witness, and leave to his brothers in arms to decide whether his calculations were always correct. He had it in his power to do much, for he risked everything and spared nothing. His inordinate ambition goaded him on to the attainment of power; and power when possessed served only to augment his ambition. Bonaparte was thoroughly convinced of the truth that trifles often decide the greatest events; therefore he watched rather than provoked ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... was exalted above its station by being called The Day Nursery and another room equally dingy and uninviting was known as The Night Nursery. The slice of a house was inhabited by the very pretty Mrs. Gareth-Lawless, its inordinate rent being reluctantly paid by her—apparently with the assistance of those "ravens" who are expected to supply the truly deserving. The rent was inordinate only from the standpoint of one regarding it soberly in connection with the character of the house ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Great Carbuncle smote with a peculiar madness and became the passionate dream of their existence. All who visited that region knew him as "the Seeker," and by no other name. As none could remember when he first took up the search, there went a fable in the valley of the Saco that for his inordinate lust after the Great Carbuncle he had been condemned to wander among the mountains till the end of time, still with the same feverish hopes at sunrise, the same despair at eve. Near this miserable Seeker sat a little elderly personage wearing a high-crowned hat shaped ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I stood together, in the sunny street outside, posing for the photographer. And I swelled with inordinate pride. Though I knew I was bigger than both of them put together, yet, in the eyes of the world, these men were big men—and having my photograph taken with them was an indication to me, that I was beginning to ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... day, I am considerably worse than I was before. A feeling of utter prostration accompanied by an inordinate thirst comes over me. This is followed by a sensation as of sea-sickness and overpowering lassitude. I am parched with thirst, but I have neither strength to express my want in words nor to indicate it by suitable gestures. Some refreshing draught ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... exuberant, superabundant, disproportionate; outrageous, unreasonable, exorbitant inordinate, extravagant, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... lips. He had as little guessed the height of Angelique's ambition as she the depths of his craft and wickedness, and yet there was a wonderful similarity between the characters of both,—the same bold, defiant spirit, the same inordinate ambition, the same void of principle in selecting means to ends,—only the one fascinated with the lures of love, the other by the charms of wit, the temptations of money, or effected his purposes by the rough ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the works of Ramesses are of a different description, and are indicative of that inordinate vanity which is the leading feature of his character. They are colossal images of himself. Four of these, each seventy feet in height, form the facade of the marvellous rock-temple of Ipsambul—"the finest of its class known to exist ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... spiritual circumcision. These texts, at the same time that they set forth its necessity, describe it as consisting in a readiness and willing disposition to conform to the will of God, and submit to it when known, in every particular. They in consequence require a retrenchment of all inordinate and superfluous desires of the soul, the keeping a strict guard and government over ourselves, a total abstinence from criminal, and a prudent reserve even in the lawful gratifications of sense and appetite. If such instances of spiritual circumcision were required ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... them, as they had done many before, in discoursing on their mother's inordinate desires, and deploring their misfortunes. But, said they, since Heaven has so visibly declared itself in our favour, we ought to bear them with patience, and comfort ourselves with hopes that we shall soon see ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... at this p'int to take all resks an' go down an' look-out the play for the girl. But I never gets a chance, an' it's as well I don't; for towards the last the shootin' of the remainin' Wells-Fargo person is reckless an' inordinate. It's plumb reedundant; that shootin' is. But as I remarks, I never has no occasion to go to the girl; for as I feels the impulse I hears the ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Corwin upon a mind thus gravely constituted may be easily imagined. Besides Ezekiel's inordinate capacity for useless or indiscreet information, it was undeniable that his patent medicines had effected a certain peaceful revolutionary movement in San Buenaventura. A simple and superstitious community that had steadily resisted the practical domestic and agricultural American ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... inordinate appetite for dogma lies in the probability of making too severe a drain upon the gastric juices, and so becoming dyspeptic for the rest of ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... speedy realization hopeless, thus affording a superfluous illustration of the truth that the one deadly evil to be shunned by those who would remain philanthropists is a practical knowledge of men, and of the truism that the statesman's bane is an inordinate fondness ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... people have no captains, neither do they march in order, but each one is his own master. The cause of their wars is not a love of conquest, or of enlarging their boundaries, neither are they incited to engage in them by inordinate covetousness [unlike the Spaniards], but from ancient enmity which has existed among them in times past; and having been asked why they made war, they could give us no other reason than that they did it to avenge the deaths of their ancestors. Neither ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... harnesses of deerskin were in good condition; perfect reliance could be placed on the equipment, which the Greenlanders at Upernavik had sold in conscience. These six animals alone could draw a weight of two thousand pounds without inordinate fatigue. ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... that she was really such a "dear" at heart that people all loved her when they came to know her well. "My dear," she wrote, "Aunt Hannah has surpassed herself lately. You know what vigorous likes and dislikes she takes, all of a sudden? Well, now Auntie has conceived an inordinate aversion for poor Mrs. Stapleton, and seems inclined not only to give her the cold shoulder, but to hound her down by saying the nastiest things about her, just as the other people in the county did when she first came to live among us. I rather believe that she had this feeling all along, more ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... electric waves across the Atlantic. He found, however, that waves in order to traverse three thousand miles and retain sufficient energy on their arrival to affect a telephonic wave-detecting device must be generated by no inordinate power. ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... reminiscence of the natural proportions of his first forest-dwelling, the Greek would be restrained from all inordinate exaggeration of size—the Egyptian was from the first left without hint of any system of proportion, whether constructive, or of visible parts. The cavern—its level roof supported by amorphous piers—might be extended indefinitely ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... woman who belonged to the latter class of individuals. She had qualities which were perhaps good because not bad; but the mainspring of her being was an inordinate vanity; and it was in this characteristic that she was most deeply wounded, as she found herself gradually abandoned by Giovanni Saracinesca. She had been in the habit of thinking of him as a probable husband; the popular talk had ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... other excesses. The progressive steps to it are cheerful, animating, and seducing; the melancholy are relieved, the grave enlivened, the witty and gay inspired—which is the very reverse of excess in eating: for, Nature satisfied, every additional morsel carries dulness and stupidity with it. "Every inordinate cup is unbless'd, and the ingredient is a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... organism, and will finally tear it to pieces. Nothing is to be gained by it, but everything to be lost. Long-continued grief at any loss will do the same. Each brings its own peculiar type of ailment. An inordinate love of gain, a close-fisted, hoarding disposition will have kindred effects. Anger, jealousy, malice, continual fault-finding, lust, has each its own peculiar corroding, weakening, ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... in the House was appointed. The creation of this committee, which had been pending since 1913, was now finally granted in September, 1917. To be sure this was accomplished only after an inordinate amount of time, money and effort had been spent on a sustained and relentless campaign of pressure. But ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... the rest of the human family, but on the whole were, to put the case mildly, as bad as most, in respect of giving short weight in their shops, and not speaking the truth, - I say, before this knowledge became forced upon me, their prolix addresses, their inordinate conceit, their daring ignorance, their investment of the Supreme Ruler of heaven and earth with their own miserable meannesses and littlenesses, greatly shocked me. Still, as their term for the frame of mind that could not perceive them to ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... was the Kangaroo as now we do behold him, but a Different Animal with four short legs. He was gray and he was woolly, and his pride was inordinate: he danced on an outcrop in the middle of Australia, and he went to the Little God Nqa at six before breakfast, saying, "Make me different from all other animals by five ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... rhapsodies of Burke, with some smartness of fancy, but no sound sense, was proud, disdainful of restraint, indignant at all obstacles to her will, eager in the pursuit of pleasure, and firm enough to hold to her desires, or perish in their wreck. Her inordinate gambling and dissipations, with those of the Count d'Artois, and others of her clique, had been a sensible item in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the reforming hand of the nation; and her opposition to it, her inflexible perverseness, and dauntless spirit, led herself ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... example, than Addison's reflections at the close of his essay on the tombs of Westminster Abbey: "When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow. When I see kings lying ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... has an "out"; at the "Cawthorne" it was an "in." The "in" was Mr. Lorenzo Cass, the clerk and general factotum. His besetting sin was inordinate curiosity, but it was this oftentime disagreeable quality which particularly commended him to the ex-Rev. Arthur Borrowscale, the owner ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... an affliction, for your greatest good, and most essential advantage. And suffer me to tell you, that in all my observations on life, I have always found that those connections which were formed from inordinate passion, or what some would call pure affection, have been ever the most unhappy. Examine the varied circles of society, you will there see this axiom demonstrated; you will there see how few among the sentimentally refined are even apparently at ease; while those, insusceptible of what you ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... highest aristocracy, of opium-eating and kindred indulgences, it went on to particularize the sad case of an esteemed lady, of great wealth and high connections, widow of a scion of one of our oldest families, who, having unwisely yielded herself, during many years past, to an inordinate use of morphine, as an antidote to nervous disorder, had, on the previous evening, in a temporary paroxysm of madness, succeeded in taking her own life. "No other cause can be assigned for the rash act," pursued the paragraph, ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... Alcoholic drinks, it prostrates the | | system to such an extent that nature calls for aid by stimulants, | | hence the craving for drinks, peppers, mustards, &c., &c. | | | | 14. It creates an inordinate desire for excitement such as Noose and | | Novel reading, and a loathing of Science and Philosophy. | | | | 15. The smoke has a wonderful tendency to weaken and impair the | | eye-sight. | | | | 16. Its use is an evil example ...
— Vanity, All Is Vanity - A Lecture on Tobacco and its effects • Anonymous
... did not want telling twice, and avenged himself for the abuse he had received by the inordinate ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... not remember that I was born with an inordinate fondness for cats; or that I cried for them as an infant. I do not know, even, that my childhood was marked by an overweening pride in them; this, perhaps, was because my cruel parents established a decree, rigid and unbending as the laws of the Medes and Persians, that we must never have ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... Instruction as this give to the subduing the corrupt Affections, and the bridling betimes the inordinate Desires and Appetites of Humane Nature, whereby Men are inabled to live like rational Creatures, and to acquit themselves well in all the Relations they shall be hereafter plac'd in, in the World? When it does not so much as perswade them, or even allow them to ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... Another writer will almost invariably disconnect the capitals from the rest of the word, while a third as regularly connects them. Some writers affect the more simple form, approximating to the printed character. Others again indulge in inordinate flourishes, particularly in their signatures. Such writers prove easy ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... is the coming of the day when we shall slough the ragged skin of empire and become again a small, hardy, fishing and pastoral people. The profiteers will leave us, like rats and their parasites. We shall be able to feed ourselves by our industry. We shall be contented, and as happy as men with inordinate desires and subordinate capacities can ever hope to be. There is no reason to suppose that we need cease to be a nursery of heroes, that our old men will not see visions or our young men dream dreams. Neither vision nor dream will be the worse for ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... mollifier of the temper and nature of man than a constant flowing in of success and prosperity. From the time that I had been dean of guild, I was sensible of a considerable increase of my worldly means and substance; and although Bailie M'Lucre played me a soople trick at the election, by the inordinate sale and roup of his potatoe-rig, the which tried me, as I do confess, and nettled me with disappointment; yet things, in other respects, went so well with me that, about the eighty-eight, I began to put forth my ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... yoke of the mother country did not in the least alter their colonial and perfectly natural habit of regarding with enormous respect Englishmen and Frenchmen, and indeed anybody who had had the good fortune to be born in Europe. The result was that they distributed commissions and gave inordinate rank to the many volunteers who came over the ocean, actuated by various motives, but all filled with a profound sense of their own merits. It is only fair to Congress to say that the American agents abroad were even more ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... fingers to dexterity at quaint penmanship. He had much leisure too; for it is recorded that his master's business seldom occupied him more than two hours a-day. He was left to devote the rest of his time unquestioned to all the devices of an inordinate imagination. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... the sweet child's influence was bound, slowly but surely, to permeate the entire household. Her mother would cease to care only for "the world and its fine things," and would even endeavour to curb her inordinate love of dress. Her father would practically abandon betting, and, should he have been fortunate enough to have backed a winner, would at once rush on conscience-stricken feet to pour the whole of his gains into the nearest ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... of Finland's aspirations toward independence, of her inordinate demands in the matter of military legislation, of her turning her population into an armed nation; in a word, all the apprehensions felt that Finland may break loose from Russia are, down to the present moment, devoid ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... the man was never sane; it is indisputable that the mainspring of his least action was an inordinate pride. Here he had stumbled upon something which made of Demetrios of Anatolia a temporary discomfort, and which bedwarfed the utmost reach of his ill-doing into equality with the molestations of a house-fly; ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... no longer seek for public office; avarice will no longer scheme to gain possession of the world's wealth for the satisfaction of inordinate desires; inhumanity will no longer vaunt itself in our mills, our mines, our fields, for to-day the edict has been sent to the world that death awaits those who shall again seek to enslave labor. There will be forty martyrs ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... Denmark, and Paul of Russia. In all three we find the same ghastly pallor, the same sleeplessness which compelled them to rise, and pace their rooms at night, the same incessant suspicion; the same inordinate thirst for cruelty and torture. He took a very early opportunity to disembarrass himself of his benefactors, Macro and Ennia, and of his rival, the young Tiberius. The rest of his reign was a series of brutal extravagances. We have lost the portion of those matchless Annals of Tacitus ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... opportunity was denied him. He could not venture on a statement, he was scarce allowed to finish a phrase, before Hadden swept him from the field with a volley of protest and correction. That projector, his face blazing with inspiration, first laid before him at inordinate length a question, and as soon as he attempted to reply, leaped at his throat, called his facts in question, derided his policy, and at times thundered on him from the ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... language in which to chronicle the event in her diary. Such expressions as "Arabian Nights entertainment," "Green sward," and "Princely Splendour," figured largely in the description, which ran to an inordinate length, and still seemed to have ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... when he heard that Keats had died at Rome, the victim of his inordinate self-love, and unable to be consoled for the criticism directed against his poetry, he wrote the following heartfelt, and, as it were, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... as it could be done. It was arranged in such a fashion as to produce plenty in some places and dearth in others. It was done so that wealthy men made fortunes and poor men were made still poorer. The inordinate greed and lack of real patriotism on the part of influential parties in both Germany and Austria-Hungary have added to the bad state of affairs. As if to make matters worse, the whole vast machine of rationing by ticket ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... ancestors. The trunk explains the branches, and these explain the leaves. In your father Saccard and your Uncle Eugene Rougon, so different in their temperaments and their lives, it is the same impulse which made the inordinate appetites of the one and the towering ambition of the other. Angelique, that pure lily, is born from the disreputable Sidonie, in the rapture which makes mystics or lovers, according to the environment. The three ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... that for the creature should be measured by that for God, and not by the measure of one's own consolations, either spiritual or temporal. So do, then, that thou lovest everything in God, and correct every inordinate affection. ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... Manorwater, and the two Miss Afflints sought diligently for a camping-ground, which they finally found by a clear spring of water on the skirts of a great grey rock. Meanwhile, Alice Wishart and Lewis, having an inordinate love of high places, set out for the ridge summit, and reached it to find a wind blowing from the far Gled valley ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... mighty things have been accomplished, at the same time that the perishable quality of its individual monuments, and the temporary character and inconstancy of that fame which in many instances has filled the whole earth with its renown, may reasonably quell the fumes of an inordinate vanity, and keep alive in us the sentiment of a wholsome ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... . . the chance to overflow into my favorite occupation of rewriting as I read, such fiction as—I can read. I took this liberty in an inordinate degree with Eleanor—and I always feel it the highest tribute I can pay. I recomposed and reconstructed her from head to foot—which I give you for the real measure of what I think of her. I think her, less ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Palinurus at Makullah) that great insecurity to navigation prevailed on both the African and Indian shores, at the entrance of the Red Sea; and one particular instance was adduced, in which the crew of a Muscat vessel, wrecked on the coast near Aden, were subjected to such inordinate extortion by Sultan Mahassan, that "the master, in anger or despair, burned his vessel. The Bombay government could only give general instructions, that in case of any outrage being offered to a vessel under British colours, redress should be peremptorily demanded. But long before ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... [4:2]For you know what commandments we gave you by the Lord Jesus. [4:3]For this is the will of God, your purity, that you should abstain from fornication, [4:4]that each one should know how to have his wife in purity and honor, [4:5]not with inordinate desires like the gentiles who know not God, [4:6]that he should not go beyond and defraud his brother in the matter, because the Lord is a punisher of all these, as we also told you before and fully testified. [4:7]For ...
— The New Testament • Various
... youth chose to gossip while he shaved me. I checked him, but he babbled on, and I could not choose but learn something about the disposition of the Caerlaverock household below stairs. I learned—what I knew before—that his lordship had an inordinate love for curries, a taste acquired during some troubled years as Indian Viceroy. I had often eaten that admirable dish at his table, and had heard him boast of the skill of the Indian cook who prepared it. James, it appeared, did not ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... wholly inadequate. So it was they happened to be taking a walk while other guests of the hotel were just beginning to wake up, talking over the events of the day before and beginning to feel a most inordinate ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... comprehension. And he could never hope to convince them! Even if he were to write great plays, they would still hold as obstinately by their assumption that the writing of plays did not matter—that what really mattered was to create and then to satisfy an inordinate appetite for tobacco. This was authentic success, and by no illegitimate triumph of genius could he persuade an industrial country that he was as great a man as his uncle. The smiling incredulity in Mrs. Peachey's face ceased to be individual ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... making use of them. Immoderate self-love does very ill consult its own interest: and, how much soever a paradox it may appear, it is certainly true that even from self-love we should endeavour to get over all inordinate regard to and consideration of ourselves. Every one of our passions and affections hath its natural stint and bound, which may easily be exceeded; whereas our enjoyments can possibly be but in a determinate measure and degree. Therefore such excess of the affection, since it cannot ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... Curiosity.—While curiosity is needful for the welfare of the individual, an inordinate development of this instinct is both intellectually and morally undesirable. Since curiosity directs attention to the novel in our surroundings, over-curiosity is likely to keep the mind wandering from one novelty ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... came surreptitiously round. Luke also was looking at Agatha. And a queer little smile hovered across Mrs. Harrington's lips. The dream was assuming more tangible proportions. Mrs. Harrington began to see her way; already her inordinate love of power was at work. She could not admit even to herself that Luke FitzHenry had escaped her. Women never know when ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... in fury, in impatience, in wildness, but last night we awoke the radical in one another. We condemned the system. We placed ourselves outside the regime, refusing aught at its hands, registering our protest, hating the inordinate scheme of things only as hotly as we loved the juster ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... essentially in your estimate of his performances, I so much abhor all unnecessary pain, that I would rather he had been seated on the highest peak of Parnassus than have perished in such a manner. Poor fellow! though with such inordinate self-love he would probably have not been very happy. I read the review of 'Endymion' in the Quarterly. It was severe,—but surely not so severe as many reviews in that ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... 5. This serving, in [Greek: douleuein], St. Ignatius calls "inordinate attachment," the modern form of idolatry. ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... which I am accused, it seems easily justified by the constant necessity I was under of satisfying the inordinate cupidity of the Ottoman ministry, which incessantly made me pay dearly for tranquillity. This was a personal affair, I acknowledge, and so also is the accumulation of treasure made in order to support the war, which the Divan ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... was spent entirely in Italy and Sicily, he contributed three articles on M. Rio's book, "L'Art Chretien," to the Bibliotheque Universelle de Geneve. We see in them the young student conscientiously writing his first review—writing it at inordinate length, as young reviewers are apt to do, and treating the subject ab ovo in a grave, pontifical way, which is a little naive and inexperienced indeed, but still promising, as all seriousness of work and purpose is promising. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not for this variability, it would be difficult to conceive the inordinate variety of human nature. But when you consider that all the important tendencies of the creature, his appetites, his loves, his hates, his curiosity, his sexual cravings, his fears, and pugnacity, are freely attachable to all sorts of objects as stimulus, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann |
