"Robustness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the world to-day is for men and women who are good animals. To endure the strain of our concentrated civilization, the coming man and woman must have an excess of animal spirits. They must have a robustness of health. Mere absence of disease is not health. It is the overflowing fountain, not the one half full, that gives life and beauty to the valley below. Only he is healthy who exults in mere animal existence; whose very life is a luxury; who feels a bounding pulse ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... weapons of the poultry and game which they brought him in acknowledgment of his services, assailing them with blows and harder words, till they fled, amused or angry. Maurice, his first pupil, was a delicate and indolent child, and showed little robustness of character till his early manhood, when the necessity of a career forced him into the ranks of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... crudities. We feel the worse side of the eighteenth century when Burke tells us that a thirst for Variety in architecture is sure to leave very little true taste; or that an air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty; or that sad fuscous colours are indispensable for sublimity. Many of the sections, again, are little more than expanded definitions from the dictionary. Any tyro may now be shocked at such a proposition as that beauty acts by relaxing ...
— Burke • John Morley
... claim a greater longevity than ours. There is a hint of a typical difference in the American and the Englishman which I have long recognized in the two elms as compared to each other. It may be fanciful, but I have thought that the compactness and robustness about the English elm, which are replaced by the long, tapering limbs and willowy grace and far-spreading reach of our own, might find a certain parallelism in the people, especially the females of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of this easier mood. He had always taken pride in a certain robustness of fibre that enabled him to harden himself against the inevitable, to convert his failures into the building materials of success. Though it did not even now occur to him that what he called the inevitable had hitherto been the alternative he happened to prefer, he was ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... soaked into his mind; convention was indeed for him like a suit of bright polished armour, in which he moved about like a youthful knight. He left school curiously immature in many ways. He had savoir faire enough and mild literary interests, but of hard intellectual robustness he had nothing. The studies of the place were indeed not of a nature to encourage it. The most successful boys were graceful triflers with ancient literatures; to write a polished and vapid poem of Latin verse was Hugh's highest accomplishment, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the sky, she has a spiral beauty, and the grace of one posed in the midst of a dance. The work of Sherry Edmundsen Fry, who made all the sculpture on Festival Hall, is, generally characterized by a classic correctness combined with a modern robustness. It lends itself well to this French Renaissance building - a type that depends upon its ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... Finsbury, examined—Had known the deceased for some years. Had the highest notion of the robustness of his constitution. Would have taken any odds upon it. Deceased, however, within these last three or four weeks had flighty intervals. Talked very much about the fine phrenological development of Sir Robert Peel's skull. Had suspicions of the deceased ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... forsaken comparatively all for knowledge, and the busy world meets him with a blank stare, and surmises shrewdly that he is but an idler, with an odd taste for wasting his time over books. It says much for Gibbon's robustness of spirit that he did not break down in these trying years, that he did not weakly take fright at his prospect, and make hasty and violent efforts to mend it. On the contrary, he remained steadfast ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... slave-rearing business in Virginia and Maryland—has all along been exhibiting a steady, sturdy, and rapid growth. By the alliance, accidentally as it were, resulting from the prohibition of the slave trade, between the Southern and the Northern slaveholding States, a robustness and consistency were given to the whole slaveholding interest which possibly it might never have had under a different policy. If the foreign importation of slaves had continued, that species of population would gradually have ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Titian's art here is, it reveals, not for the last time, the influence of Giorgione with which its beginnings were saturated. The beautiful head of St. John shows the Giorgionesque type and the Giorgionesque feeling at its highest. The Joseph of Arimathea has the robustness and the passion of the Apostles in the Assunta, the crimson coat of Nicodemus, with its high yellowish lights, is such as we meet with in the Bacchanal. The Magdalen, with her features distorted by grief, resembles—allowing for the necessary ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... shelves; every night his plays are produced at the theatres; every conversation turns on him, and his is the name the pigmies quarrel over daily; the cry is heard that he has become hysterical, sentimental, out of his mind, but the next one knows, he is robustness itself, and enduring beyond belief, despite great need, enmity, sorrow. One hour one is angry over some extravagance which he has allowed himself, the next captivated by one of his plays, stirred, melted, strengthened and uplifted by ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... Devonshire, and Aunt Raby toiled, as perhaps no woman had ever toiled before, to put bread into their mouths. Katie had a fever, which made her pale and thin and took away that look of robustness which had characterized the little Yorkshire maiden. Nobody thought about the children's education, and they might have grown up without any were it not for Priscilla, who taught them what she knew herself. Nobody thought Priscilla ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... with knees still unsteady, the sinews being supported by some assistance. Then he becomes strong and swift, and passes over the hours of youth; and the years of middle age, too, now past, he glides adown the steep path of declining age. This undermines and destroys the robustness of former years; and Milo,[13] {now} grown old, weeps when he sees the arms, which equalled those of Hercules in the massiveness of the solid muscles, hang weak and exhausted. The daughter of Tyndarus weeps, too, as ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... must have left a shadow on the assemblage, for, though faint sounds came through the closed doors, they were somewhat lacking in the robustness of youth. Ray did not deign an effort to remember. More than that, he hoped that it never would come back, for it might be disturbing to his solitudes. Of his attempts to remember the attack on the boy ten years ago, there had ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... ancestors, but which now prevail universally, and are complicated with almost every other distemper. The bodies of men are enfeebled and enervated; and it is not uncommon to observe very high degrees of irritability under the external appearance of great strength and robustness. The hypochondriac, palsies, cachexies, dropsies, and all those diseases which arise from laxity and debility, are, in our days, endemic every where; and the hysterics, which used to be peculiar to the women, as the name itself indicates, now attacks both sexes indiscriminately. ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... origin and trafficking with the College of Heralds, can intercept some of the homage paid to high birth. And (though the rich nobleman who is an invalid can make no tangible gain by pretending to be robust, since robustness is an advantage only from within) the rich, robust nobleman can, by employing a clever private secretary to write public speeches and magazine articles for him, intercept some of the homage ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... designs prove an intellect neither servile nor sterile. Certain other compositions are marred by affectation and sentimentality, traits of morbid moods increasing with years, and which contrast strangely with the healthiness and robustness of the great old masters. Fitly have been chosen to illustrate these pages The Naming of St. John (1843), Christ Healing the Sick (1843), Christ's Entry into Jerusalem (1849), The Entombment (1844), and The Resurrection (1848). ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... Annie; she annexed some irrelevancies about the weather, which Mrs. Munger swept away with business-like robustness. ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... passed for eighteen or twenty. Agreeably to this estimate, she had her place in society as a full-grown lady. When I recall her personal appearance as she was then, and for ten or twelve years subsequent, I have the idea of a blooming girl of florid complexion and vigorous health, with a tendency to robustness of which she was painfully conscious, and which, with little regard to hygienic principles, she endeavored to suppress and conceal, thereby preparing for herself much future suffering." She had, he says, "no pretensions ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... obviously declining towards the grave. A man of vast physique—'your immense', an Irish servant used respectfully to call him—of sanguine temperament, of genial disposition, of versatile capacity, he seemed to have engrafted upon the robustness of his English nature the facile, child-like, and expansive qualities of the South. So far from being a Bishop Blougram (as the rumour went) he was, in fact, the very antithesis of that subtle and worldly-wise ecclesiastic. He had innocently ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... all. Fancy old Hank and you playing a foursome with Aunt Mary and me for the cider and apples. Why, it would add years of robustness ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... their good points, I asserted—though, I fear, but lamely; for the robustness of his attitude impressed me, he being a man, presumably, of wide experience, and, what is more, a clergyman—the kind of man I had been taught to treat ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... his new suit now, and was standing before her showing his broad chest, which the unbuttoned shirt had left exposed, his strong legs, from which the stockings had slipped down, and all his big-boned, only half-clothed robustness. She averted her glance—what a big fellow he was already!—but then she looked at him again almost immediately: why should a mother feel shy at looking ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... mistaken, aunt," I said, "if he be not the strongest minded man I ever saw. Be assured he stands high among the aristocracy of nature, whatever may be thought of him in Kirkoswald. There is a robustness of intellect, joined to an overmastering force of character, about him, which I have never yet seen equalled, though I have been intimate with at least one very superior mind, and with hundreds of the class who pass for men of talent. I have been thinking ever since I met with him, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... ill concealed by the most studied artifice of countenance, and even of posture, characterizes Lord Hervey. He would have abhorred robustness; for he belonged to the clique then called Maccaronis; a set of fine gentlemen, of whom the present world would not be worthy, tricked out for show, fitted only to drive out fading majesty in a stage coach; exquisite in every personal appendage, too ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... literature—perhaps a little too noble to be entirely true to life—and various simple, strong seamen. His Chingachgook and Uncas and Long Tom Coffin justly brought him added fame. In these narrative gifts, as well as in the robustness of his own character, Cooper was not unlike Sir Walter Scott. He once modestly referred to himself as "a chip from Scott's block" and has frequently ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... less terrifying than their brothers. They had their father's fierce, hawklike profile, softened by youth, and the appalling height and robustness due to the freedom and fresh air of a nomadic existence. Their costumes might, Mary thought, have been fashioned out of gunny-sacks by the simple expedient of cutting holes for the head and arms. The description of the dress worn by the charcoal-burner's daughter in any ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... as were the struggles he made for the assumption of his art, his musical powers were not always able to cope with the tasks he set himself. The unflagging inventive power of a Bach or a Haydn, the robustness of a Haendel or a Beethoven, the harmonious personality of a Mozart, were things he could not rival. He is even inferior, in the matter of style, to men like Weber and Debussy. There are many moments, one finds, when his scores show that there was nothing in his mind, and that he simply ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... had grown gray with fear. When he spoke it was in a changed tone. He had lost his confidence, his defiant robustness. He almost seemed to be begging for mercy, ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... drawing. Sometimes, in fact, Signorelli gains his end by the very crudeness and heaviness for which he is generally condemned, the sharp contrasts giving a rugged strength to his painting, and the copper colour of the flesh adding robustness to the figures. ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... water—"best when clearest, most simple, and without taste"—yet genius in a man will always cover many defects of manner, and much will be excused to the strong and the original. Without genuineness and individuality, human life would lose much of its interest and variety, as well as its manliness and robustness ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... another side. Suppose it to be a man's ambition to aid his city as a trooper mounted on a charger of his own: why not combine the rearing of horses with other stock? it is the farmer's chance. [7] Or would your citizen serve on foot? It is husbandry that shall give him robustness of body. Or if we turn to the toil-loving fascination of the chase, [8] here once more earth adds incitement, as well as furnishing facility of sustenance for the dogs as by nurturing a foster brood of wild animals. And ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... all day while the daylight lasted they much preferred an evening of complete solitude. Rossiter's new robustness of taste included love of a gramophone. Money being no consideration with them, they acquired a tip-top one with superlative records; not so much the baaing, bellowing and shrieking of fashionable singers, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... changed immensely in mere physical appearance, and the full brown cheeks, the brighter eyes of absolute health, and the general air of vigour and robustness that had come to replace his customary lassitude and timidity, had worked such an improvement that I hardly knew him for the same man. His voice, too, was deeper and his manner bespoke for the first time a greater measure of confidence in himself. He now had some claims ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the face and form to take captive his poet's fancy, and she possessed a character as lovely as her person; a courage and strength of will far out of proportion to her dainty shape, and an intellect of masculine robustness. Often the editor brought his work to the table of his library that he might avail himself of his wife's judgment, and labor with the faces around him that he loved, for their union was a very congenial one, and when two daughters came to bless it, as ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... feelings," said Lydia, laughing. "But I was serious, Lucian. Alice is energetic, ambitious, and stubbornly upright in questions of principle. I believe she would assist you steadily at every step of your career. Besides, she has physical robustness. Our student-stock needs an infusion ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... remembered the way she had looked at him, how she had laughed when he narrated Mickey Dolan's mistake in staking the fraction on Skookum Gulch. Her laughter had been lightly joyous, while at the same time it had lacked its oldtime robustness. Not that she had been grave or subdued. On the contrary, she had been so patently content, so filled ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... her slow brain in the thought of how pleasant it was not to be obliged to work, and occasionally in reviewing the chances that she might eventually have plenty of money and no Joseph Snowdon as a restraint upon her; or else, her physical robustness demanding exercise, she walked considerable distances about the localities she knew, calling now ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... classes of the English has had a great and salutary effect upon national character. I do not know a finer race of men than the English gentlemen. Instead of the softness and effeminacy which characterizes the men of rank of most countries, they exhibit a union of elegance and strength, of robustness of frame and freshness of complexion, which I am inclined to attribute to their living so much in the open air, pursuing so eagerly the ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... these winters, little or no provision seems to be made against the cold. There are no carpets, curtains, and generally no fire-places in the bedrooms, all is cold, cool, and bare as in Egypt, and many are approached from without. The people must enjoy a wonderful vigour of health and robustness of constitution, or they could not resist such hardships as these, and what a Jura winter is, makes one shudder to think of. Snow lies often twelve feet deep on the road, and journeys are performed by ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... hearty-looking young Yorkshireman, but the other two attracted his attention far more. They were evidently brothers, one perhaps just above, the other just below, thirty; both of the most perfect mould of symmetry, activity, and strength, though perhaps more inclining to agility than robustness. Both were fair-complexioned, and wore no beard; but John was the paler, graver, and more sedate, and his aquiline profile had an older look than that borne by Hal's perfectly regular features. It would have been hard to define what ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... matter of water," the Colonel approved. "We are not cursed by the humidity of New York State, grand old State that she is. Foh those who require water, there is the Platte only three miles distant. The nearer proximity of water we consider a detriment to the robustness of a community. Our rainy weather is toler'bly infrequent. The last spell we had—lemme see. There was a brief shower, scurcely enough to sanction a parasol by a lady, last May, warn't it, Bill? When we was camped at Rawlins' Springs, ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... of Lieutenant-Colonel. It is good to meet a person like Colonel Peard,—to see a man between fifty and sixty years of age, with noble head and gray hair and a beard that any patriarch might envy surmounting a figure of fine proportions endowed with all the robustness of healthy maturity,—to see intelligence and years and fine appearance allied to great amiability and a youthful enthusiasm for noble deeds, an enthusiasm which was ready to give blood and treasure to the cause it espoused from love. Such a reality is most exhilarating ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... and magic-square above; The grave and solid infant perched beside, With open winglets that might bear a dove, Intent upon its tablets, heavy-eyed; 25 Her folded wings as of a mighty eagle, But all too impotent to lift the regal Robustness of ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson |
