"Sociability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sentiments in the crown of the head to control them. Mr. Grady's head, on the other hand, was not remarkable in the development of these propensities. He had enough of amativeness to give him a proper appreciation of women and the delights of sociability, but his love manifested itself more through the intellect than the passions, and his social nature was of that diffusive character which manifests itself in the formation of popular attachment rather than exclusive friendships. There are many men undoubtedly to-day who pride themselves ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... fell into the habit of sociability. Every evening he would come down to our camp, usually bringing his violin, and sit with us for hours at our camp fire. His cats—he had near a dozen of them—came trailing after him, and his two dogs trotted by his side. Two or three of the cats ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... clean, that each day's lessons should be carefully planned, that, in short, every little duty should be well performed, they putter away at such tasks until there is no time left for much larger duties, such as physical exercise, sociability, and general reading. As a result they become habitually tired, unsympathetic, and narrow, and therefore schoolish. It is a strange commentary on education when conscientiousness means particular ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... sympathies to be enlisted by the admirable description of an interior or a character in one of their novels, to find the plot which embodies them an absurd melodrama! Evanescence is the law of Parisian felicities,—selfishness the background of French politeness,—sociability flourishes in an inverse ratio to attachment; we become skeptical almost in proportion as we are attracted. If we ask the way, we are graciously directed; but if we demand the least sacrifice, we must accept volubility for service. Thus the perpetual flowering in manners, in philosophy, in politics, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of Chicago. On this trip we visited also my mother's old home in Carroll County, Ohio, and while there saw many things, which, although new to us, seemed familiar because of her oft-repeated stories in regard to them. Although we had a pleasant time, because of the sociability and kindness of the people we visited, yet our hearts were saddened that we found none of our relatives enjoying a clear experience ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... of the Northern Neck, living in widely separated plantations, took steps in 1670, to bring together the families and promote sociability in the section. An agreement was entered into by Mr. Corbin, Mr. Gerrard, Mr. Lee and Mr. Allerton to build a banqueting house "for the continuance of a good neighborhood." Each man or his heirs ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... corrugated iron, and the rain began to fall in torrents. They stood there for some time and then were joined by Mr Davidson. He had been polite enough to the Macphails during the journey, but he had not his wife's sociability, and had spent much of his time reading. He was a silent, rather sullen man, and you felt that his affability was a duty that he imposed upon himself Christianly; he was by nature reserved and even morose. His appearance was singular. ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... bore a sad character for want of sociability in our county. They never went to other people's houses, and, excepting my father, and a lady and her daughter living near them, never received anybody under their ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... closely in costume. Though engaged in individual tasks, the first seeks the society of her kind, as do certain of the Sphex-wasps, while the second establishes herself in solitude, after the fashion of the Ammophila. Neither the personal form nor the nature of the occupation determines sociability. ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... New England, in Western New York, and all over the West, even to the far side of Arkansas, which impress the visitor at once as being homelike and full of sociability and kindliness; which delight him, and lead him almost to wish that his own lot had been cast within their shades. These are chiefly villages where the evidences of public and private care predominate, or are at least conspicuous. A critical examination would, ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... unperceived while I was watching Mr. Armstrong's door. Not very well pleased with myself for having missed the one opportunity which might have been of service to me, I was asking myself whether I should follow her, and make the best attempt I could at sociability, if not at eating, when Mr. Armstrong approached from the side hall, and, accosting me, inquired if Mr. ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... never appeared to distinguish Sir John from any other person. The dog would never follow him, even from one room to another; nor would he come when called, unless tempted by the offer of food. Wolves and foxes have shown much more sociability than he did. He appeared to be in good spirits, but always kept aloof from the other dogs. He was what would be called tame for an animal in a menagerie; that is, he was not shy, but would allow strangers to handle him, and never attempted to bite. If he were led near sheep or poultry, he ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... with lawful amusements, civic needs, and social relations. The great danger is that when adults take a hand in these matters they fix their attention upon the civic and moral virtues and overlook the instincts of activity and sociability which call the gang into being, and the club degenerates into a preachy ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... perceived it. The plainly doomed duellist with the insensible Black Goddess offered her all the advantages of the Immortals challenged by flesh. His effort to smile was a line cut awry in wood; his big eyes were those of a cat for sociability; he looked cursed, and still he wore the smile. In this condition, the gambler runs to emptiness of everything he has, his money, his heart, his brains, like a coal-truck on the incline of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... stopping point up to which tobacco hurts less perhaps than coffee or tea, candy or lobster, overeating or undersleeping. Therefore the physician, the bishop, the school superintendent, candidly run the necessary risk for the sake of nerve soothing and sociability. ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... hospitably open whenever her health allowed; but her natural refinement, and the conservatism which so strongly marks the higher class of Americans, preserved it from the heterogeneous character which Anglo-foreign sociability so often assumes. Very interesting, even important names lent their prestige to her circle; and those of Don Carlos and his family, of Prince and Princess Iturbide, of Prince and Princess Metternich, and of Princess Montenegro, were on the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... of favorite stories any stiffness is sure to melt rapidly away. Jack, hearing mention of "The Talisman," joined in and the others drew up their chairs, so that when Miss Betty rustled back from an excursion to the dining room she found the ice broken and sociability prevailing. But she startled them all ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... was now thinned daily by departures; but if the persons who had departed were as agreeable as those yet remaining, and animated by a similar spirit of enjoyment, their absence was a serious loss. A spirit of sociability and good-humour seemed to prevail here; and the inducements for walking being limited to loose sand-hills, without the least shade, on a rough shingle beach, the fun was all reserved for the evening, when the inmates assembled in the drawing-room, where ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... Nothing mattered but this, for it had already elicited a splendid bid, much talked about in Mrs. High-more's drawing-room, where at this point my reminiscences grow particularly thick. Her roses bloomed all the year and her sociability increased with her row of prizes. We had an idea that we "met every one" there—so we naturally thought when we met each other. Between our hostess and Ray Limbert flourished the happiest relation, the only cloud on which was that ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... discovered, not one article which was not of the period imitated, not one streak of color which was not "right." It was a masterpiece of correct furnishing, but it gave one a curious sense of limitation. One could not escape the scheme. The inelasticity of it hampered sociability—and there grew on one, too, a sense of unfitness. His clothes were an anachronism! They were the only thing which ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... not play into one another's hands. They did not re-act upon one another, as the blower's breath moulds the yielding glass. There is something hard and dry in them. What is the most wonderful thing in Shakespeare's faculties is their excessive sociability, and how they gossiped ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... diffident, reserved, and unassuming, this man must be tinctured with it. These symptoms were visible in his deportment when I entered the room. However, he soon recovered himself, and the conversation took a general turn. The festive board was crowned with sociability, and we found in reality "the feast of reason and the flow of soul." After we rose from table, a walk in the garden was proposed—an amusement we are all peculiarly fond of. Mr. Boyer offered me his arm. When at a sufficient ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... Charlecote, and though speaking little herself, was gratified by the visit, and the voices talking before her gave her a sense of sociability. This preference enabled Phoebe to enjoy a good deal of quiet conversation with her friend, and Honora made a point of being at Beauchamp twice or three times a week, as giving the only variety that could there be enjoyed. Of Mervyn ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... said Mr. Sheepshanks to himself, when he heard of his successor's affability, and sociability, and amiability, and a variety of other agreeable 'ilities,' from the friends whom the old steward still retained ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... ought to be sociable certainly. But I am always afraid of the sociability of young men without ladies. Do not be angry with me if I venture as a friend to ask you not to be ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... congregation, and elaborately sung by the Chazan. The minister was Vox et praeterea nihil. He was the only musical instrument permitted, and on him devolved the whole onus of making the service attractive. He succeeded. He was helped by the sociability of the gathering—for the Synagogue was virtually a Jewish Club, the focus of ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... college had formed a deep and sincere attachment for Conning Truedale and at vacation time the two boys and Lynda were much together. To be sure the visiting was largely one-sided, as the gloomy house of the elder Truedale offered small inducement for sociability; but Lynda managed to wedge her way into the loneliness and dreariness and eventually for reasons best known to herself became the one bright thing in the old ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... may be told how it is possible to make appeal to the principles of sociability, fraternity, and solidarity, when society itself rejects every solidary and fraternal transaction? At the beginning of each industry, at the first gleam of a discovery, the man who invents is isolated; society abandons him and remains in the background. To ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... of their votaries, rendered them unsocial, and made them consider as outcasts all those who had not the same ideas and form of worship as their own. This is the way religion succeeded in closing the heart, and in banishing from it that affection which man ought to have for his fellow-being. Sociability, tolerance, humanity, these first virtues of all morality are totally in compatible with ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... bosom of civilized nations that have issued those personages who have carried sociability, agriculture, art, laws, gods, superstition, forms of worship, to those families or hordes as yet scattered; who united them either to the body of some other nations, or formed them into new nations, of which they themselves became ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... ladies ever got out of the sugar-house, history does not relate; nor what they did. It was not a time for sociability, either personal or epistolary. At one offensive word your letter, and you, very likely, examined; and Ship Island for a hotel, with soldiers for hostesses! Madame Des Islets died very soon after the accident—of rage, ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... I doubt whether all my card playing with these doomed men, successful though it has been, has ever brought me as much as a half dollar. No, as I said, sociability is the object of these games and all I aim for is to put the doomed man at his ease ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Kemble, who was as quick as Pincher in her movements, rang the bell and snapped out, "Not at home!" denying herself her stimulating dose of high-life gossip, and her companion what she would have called a little "genteel sociability," rather than bring face to face her fine friends and Mrs. Whitelock's flounced white muslin apron and towering Pamela cap, for she still wore such things. I have said that Mrs. Kemble was not (superficially) a vulgar woman, but it would have taken the soul of gentility to have presented, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... were this morning looking positively good-humoured, cheerful, some of them even gay. I warrant if I had stepped up to one of them that morning and intimated that he was a slave he would have—well, I should have had serious trouble with him! There was a degree of sociability in those back streets, a visiting from window to window, gossipy gatherings in front area-ways, a sort of pavement domesticity, that I had never seen before. Being a lover myself of such friendly intercourse I could actually feel the hum and warmth ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... up in bed blinking; then slowly collected his thoughts, threw off the bed-clothes, and stood up. It seemed to him in some curious way that all the safety and sociability of the night before fell with the bedclothes off him, and he stood up in an air of cold danger. He still felt an entire trust and loyalty towards his companion; but it was the trust between two men ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... hymns. It occupied the minister a long time to give out the notices of the week, and there was not an evening or afternoon that had not its meetings, its literary or social gathering, its picnic or fair for the benefit of the church, its Dorcas society, or some occasion of religious sociability. The raising of funds appeared to be the burden on the preacher's mind. Two collections were taken up. At the first, the boxes appeared to get no supply except from the two white trash present. But the second was more ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... sometimes entertained, that it is necessary to drink in order to impress your sociability upon companions who also drink, is utterly erroneous. One day a dinner was given by one of the great lawyers of this country in honor of another lawyer of distinction, and among those present was a ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... occasions, and then it was cooking and baking and cleaning up the choice old silver and dusting and polishing, and the next day clearing up. Everything out of the routine made so much extra work. Among the few English-speaking people in India there had been a sort of free and easy sociability. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... is it?" cry I, springing up and running to meet him with an elate sensation of company and sociability; "I had quite forgotten that you lived near ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... doors, or in large parties in the house; and the unostentatious hospitality which exists in this and some other of the old families, is a pleasing remnant of Spanish manners and habits, now falling into disuse, and succeeded by more pretension to refinement, and less of either real wealth or sociability. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... For we all have friends whom we are content to see pass by on the other side. Deulin's duty was, moreover, such that it got strangely mixed up with his pleasure, and it often happens that discretion must needs overcome a natural sociability. ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... a long, sleek fish without scales, black on the back, and white and gray beneath. He is from four to ten feet in length, and his sociability and good-nature are proverbial among ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... the "dare-devil" from the sociability of country life, without substituting an artificial stiffness, is the problem for every thoughtful and refined man and woman in rural circles. How to "be kindly affectioned one to another, in brotherly love, in honor preferring one another"—perhaps that would furnish the keynote ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... brought over to this country from Paris some years ago. It speedily became a favourite, and for several seasons was much danced in London and the provinces. It unites the cheerfulness of the quadrille with the sociability of the country dance; and when its lively figures are correctly performed, it is both ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... beggar in our towns or cities would hardly deign to touch, are by him eaten with a relish to which he has long been a stranger. It is on these long tramps that the dyspeptic and melancholic man becomes the liveliest of the party; his sociability often increases to such a degree that he soon can spin a yarn in a ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... which is calculated to promote sociability, he rarely appears alone, but is usually accompanied by Bacchantes, ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... said, generally, of fine letter-writing that it is a distinctive product of a high civilisation, denoting the existence of a cultured and leisurely class, implying the conditions of secure intercourse, confidence, sociability, many common interests, and that peculiar delight in the stimulating interchange of ideas and feelings which is one characteristic of modern life. The language of a country must have thrown off its archaic stiffness, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... still, as Antonia said, a city man. He liked theaters and lighted streets and music and a game of dominoes after the day's work was over. His sociability was stronger than his acquisitive instinct. He liked to live day by day and night by night, sharing in the excitement of the crowd.—Yet his wife had managed to hold him here on a farm, in one of the ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... tea across to my bay window, with that wistful sociability of his, as of a man who cannot always find ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... visitor. He has since said that I looked at him as though he were a "statute." I was "citified," Horace said; and "citified" with us here in the country is nearly the limit of invective, though not violent enough to discourage such a gift of sociability as his. The Scotch Preacher, the rarest, kindest man I know, called once or twice, wearing the air of formality which so ill becomes him. I saw nothing in him: it was my fault, not his, that I missed so many weeks of his friendship. Once ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... and cared for music only because it reminded her of gala nights at the Italiens, in the days of her triumph at the Tuileries. Possibly Beaufort, who was her match in daring, would have succeeded in bringing about a fusion; but his grand house and silk-stockinged footmen were an obstacle to informal sociability. Moreover, he was as illiterate as old Mrs. Mingott, and considered "fellows who wrote" as the mere paid purveyors of rich men's pleasures; and no one rich enough to influence his opinion had ever ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... For awhile I had pleasanter companions than my own sullen thoughts: a pair of blue-birds kept with me, for two or three miles at least, fluttering and twittering along the fences by my side, with the prettiest sociability—sometimes ahead, sometimes behind—never more than a dozen yards off; their brilliant plumage shot through the twilight like jets of sapphire flame: I felt absurdly sorry when they disappeared at last into the deepening blackness. I had been warned of the probability of encountering a cavalry ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as 'Kenyon the Magnificent.'" There is something thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling, not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability, but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability. Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission of superficial philanthropy. He ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... rough weather of a stormy autumn obliged Katherine to keep in-doors she began to feel the monotony of existence by the sad sea waves, and to wish for the sociability of London. The end of October, then, saw Miss Payne and party re-established in Wilton Street, having left Cecil at school. With Charlie, Katherine could not part just yet. She intended to keep him till after Christmas, when he was to go to school ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... "Fort Hill," in the northwestern district of South Carolina; and here he spent all the time he could spare from his public duties, in the enjoyments of domestic life and in cultivating his plantation. In his home he was remarkable for kindness, cheerfulness, and sociability. ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... to sociability—the stronger sort of man rarely is. On board the Croonah he was usually considered morose and self absorbed. He did his duty, and in this was second to no man on board; but he was content to get the passengers to their destination, looking upon the Croonah as a mere ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... wonderment, she had vanished as softly as she came. Jerry was disappointed. He had thought they were going on talking about the domestic frenzies wrought by aunt Hill, but it seemed that further sociability was to be denied him until to-morrow night. He took up his axe, and went on paying into the heart of the tree. But he whistled now, and omitted to think how much he hated Stella. He was debating whether her ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... courtyard, the factory-hand with her little boy; all those who were sitting at home and keeping Christmas all alone. They didn't know themselves, there were so many of them! Hanne and her mother were invited too, but they had gone to bed early—they were not inclined for sociability. One after another they were pulled into the room, and they came with cheerful faces. Marie turned the lamp out and went in to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... annual subscription. It kept him in touch with civilisation, in touch with Home. He loved to know that when, at length, he found himself once again in the city of his birth he would have a firm foothold on sociability. The friends of his youth might die, or might forget him. But, as member of a club, he would find substitutes for them in less than no time. Herding bullocks, all day long, on the arid plains of Central ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... find that he had not, as he feared, been prosing; but would rather not be considered in the formal light of a preacher; he preferred being still received in that of the equal and genial companion. To which end, throwing still more of sociability into his manner, he again reverted to the unfortunate man. Take the very worst view of that case; admit that his Goneril was, indeed, a Goneril; how fortunate to be at last rid of this Goneril, both by nature and by law? If he were acquainted with the unfortunate man, instead ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... the table heaved and quivered with primeval mirth. Even Flossie Walker was moved to a faint smile. For Mr. Soper, though outwardly taciturn and morose, was possessed inwardly by a perfect fury of sociability, an immortal and insatiable craving to converse. It was an instinct which, if gratified, would have undermined the whole fabric of the Dinner, being essentially egoistic, destructive and malign. Mr. Soper resented the rapidity with which ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... serial in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859, she describes a quilting supposed to have been given about the year 1800. Here we can view at close range a real old-fashioned quilting, and gain some insight into its various incidents of sociability and gossip, typical of an early New England seafaring village, as set forth in Mrs. ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... adorn the walls. Murray told me he well remembered Byron and his ways; could still in fancy see him and Scott, and also hear them, as they stamped heavily (lame as both were) down the somewhat narrow stairs. Sociability may well come to the relief of people who cannot amuse themselves at home, for the weather, mild, and too mild, is gray, sunless and spiritless, altogether. To-day it rains, ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... d'hote is a wordless function unless the inevitable Andalusian—he who takes the place of the Gascon in France—is present with his babble and his laugh, his fine opinion of himself, and his faculty for making a sacrifice of his own dignity at that over-rated altar—the shrine of sociability. ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... means of adding to the family income. Beer is very cheap, costing only two sous a litre. Wine and spirits are more costly, though a great deal of gin is made, and inexpensively made, in the country. There is much sociability among the people, and great practical liberality as to the conduct of young girls, the ancient practice known as 'bundling' in New England being still in vogue among these worthy Flemings. M. Baudrillart, who evidently inclines to a favourable judgment ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... as a preliminary. The capacity to understand others and to sway them, to impress them according to their make-up, is a trait of great importance for success or failure. It needs cultivation, but often it depends on a native sociability, a friendliness and genuine interest, on a "good nature" that is what it literally purports to be,—good nature. Though many of the persuasive kind are insincere and selfish, I believe that on the whole the taciturn and gruff are less interested in their fellows ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... is agreement in the fact, there is a considerable divergence of opinion as to its nature. What is the nature of this fact of sociability? What is the character of the force that binds the members of a group so closely together? By some, the cause of sociability is found in the pressure exerted upon all by purely external forces. The need for protection, it is said, drives human beings together, and thus in course of time the ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... with her breakfast, and her companion attacked his own; so that it was all, in form at least, even more than their old sociability. "Everything she could think of. She was as nice to her as you are," the child said. "She talked to her ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... was all dirt, life and animation, and as full of his eccentricities as ever. He was a character seldom met with—ever full of a quaint humor and sociability, but never known to get mad, no matter how great ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... same stamp as the lovable and brilliant Major Brighten. He was an ideal company commander. One could not hope for a better either from a military or from a social point of view. He was ability, wit, and sociability combined. Those were ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... great sociability pervaded the quaint room that the Spectacle Man called his study, when on Friday evening, two weeks after the candy pulling, his ...
— The Spectacle Man - A Story of the Missing Bridge • Mary F. Leonard
... such grave shape as hatred of slavery and tenderness to the poor. His sense of kinship with other men was, indeed, a serious conviction held on serious grounds. But it was also the expression of his natural good nature, and overflowed into {130} the obvious channels of kindly sociability which come to every man unsought, as well as into these deeper ones of sympathy which are only found by those who seek them. Those who know him only through Boswell are in danger of over-accentuating the graver ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... death's-head at a feast or merrymaking where drinking is going on. Your social intercourse with these people is predicated on taking an occasional drink, in going to places where drinks are served, both public and at homes. The kind of drinking you do makes greatly for sociability, and you are a sociable person and like to be round with congenial people. You will miss a lot of fun, a lot of good, clever companionship, for you are too old to form a new line of friends. Your whole game is organized along these lines. Why make a hermit of yourself ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... gymnasium and had begun to play mischievous pranks. He also declared that he was no longer minded to tolerate the tyranny of the school, and that he had not the slightest desire to enter the university. He was a wilful, obstinate boy with a marked tendency to sociability. He paid a great deal of attention to his clothes, and was proud of his ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... tobacco is conveniently used to promote sociability among men, a fact which has much to do with its very general use. If it could be limited to social purposes, it would likely do little harm, but the habit, once started, is continued without reference to sociability—a matter of selfish indulgence. ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... kinds each of chipmunks and ground-squirrels. All of the former have striped backs and do more or less climbing of trees. Of their friendliness, greediness, and even sociability—where nuts are in evidence or anticipated—I have written fully in the chapter on Tahoe Tavern. Of the three ground-squirrels the largest is the common ground-squirrel of the valleys of California. It is gray, somewhat spotted on the back, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... render the amount of information he obtained exceedingly minute. The dinner passed off heavily; Miss Saville was unusually silent, and all Freddy's sallies failed to draw her out. Mr. Coleman was very pompous, and so distressingly polite, that everything like sociability was out of the question. When the ladies left us, matters did not improve; Freddy, finding the atmosphere ungenial to jokes, devoted himself to cracking walnuts by original methods which invariably failed, and attempting to torture into ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... The friendliness and sociability of the beasts and birds of Kashmir has been a great joy to us. The thing can be overdone, though, and both the wasps and the rats of Harwan were inclined to overstep the ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... luxurious in the city. He kept his carriages and horses, his cellar of costly wines, and entertained on a scale of great extravagance and sumptuousness. He was, in fact, the centre of fashion, frivolity, sociability, and even of the fashionable dissipations of the day. His person, which even in extreme old age was remarkable for dignity, erectness, and courtliness, at the period we write of, was conspicuous for all the graces ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... His wife could bear her solitary second floor, and she was in general more discreet; showing by various small reserves that she was alive to the propriety of keeping our relations markedly professional—not letting them slide into sociability. She wished it to remain clear that she and the Major were employed, not cultivated, and if she approved of me as a superior, who could be kept in his place, she never thought me quite good enough ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... course. But the tutoring sections were only for the "plutes" or the athletes, many of whom were subsidized by fraternities or alumni. Most of the students had to learn their own lessons; so they often banded together in small groups to make the task less arduous, finding some relief in sociability. ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... Moore began, and that seemed all Moore was likely to expect. Then they all sat down and there was, Lydia decided, as she glanced from one to another, no more pleasure in it. There was talk. Moore chatted so exuberantly, his little hands upon his fattish knees, that he seemed to squeeze sociability out of himself in a rapture of generous willingness to share all he had. He asked the colonel how he liked Addington, and was not abashed at being reminded that the colonel had known Addington for a good ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... things to the wind with characteristic prodigality, little recking by whom or in what spirit they were received. How many witticisms, I wonder, were roared into the deaf ears of old Thomas Westwood, who heard them not, alas! but who laughed all the same, out of pure sociability, and with a pleasant sense that something funny had been said! And what of that ill-fated pun which Lamb, in a moment of deplorable abstraction, let fall at a funeral, to the surprise and consternation of the mourners? Surely ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... punish but also to prepare the offender for the duties of society, the system of solitary confinement will not effectually accomplish this task. On this point let me refer to the words of M. Prins, the eminent Director General of Belgian prisons: "Can we teach a man sociability," he says, "by giving him a cell only, that is to say, the opposite of social life, by taking away from him the very appearance of moral discipline; by regulating from morning till night the smallest details of his day, all his movements and all his thoughts? Is not this to place him ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... farmers thought the best place for the pig-pen was immediately in front of the house. There is nothing like sociability. ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... anecdote illustrating these accomplishments: in short he was very nearly as clever and his career had been very nearly as wonderful as he pretended. His best quality however remained that indiscriminate sociability which took interest and credulity for granted and about which he bragged least. It made him cheap, it made him even in a manner vulgar; but it was so contagious that his listener was more or less on his side as against the probabilities. It was a private reflection of Oliver Lyon's ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... selected papers will be read by experts, the subjects of which will be given out as long in advance as possible, in order that all may be thoroughly prepared for a full and open discussion; and then, after these meetings, in order to promote sociability amongst the members, and to show how thoroughly practical we are, we propose to have something to eat. We also hope later to establish schools, not only for young men, but particularly for draughtsmen, where they ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... social restraints of the old social order are somewhat removed. A freedom is allowed to individuals of the Christian community, in social life, in conversation between men and women, in the holding of private opinions, which the non-Christian order of society did not permit. Sociability between the sexes was not allowed. The new freedom naturally results in greater vivacity and a far freer play of facial expression than the older order could produce. The vivacity and sociability of the geisha (dancing and singing ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... in at that moment, Dinah retailed their little plan for his benefit. Cedric was delighted, and voted Betty a brick. Any form of sociability was welcome to him—an impromptu garden-party in Malcolm's honour met ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... mildly, "that so clearly declares the sociability—the bon camaraderie, so to speak—that ought to exist in every well-brought-up family as the sight of washing done at home. There is such a happy mingling and yet such a thorough disregard of sex about it. It is 'Hail, fellow! well met!' all through. ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... told, a squad that does nothing but squabble; the men have nearly all in turn been corporal, and no one will obey. But mostly there is bound to spring up a feeling of unity, as the eight men sleep and march and manoeuvre together. This will differ according to the men's natural sociability or feeling of loyalty, with perhaps jealousy in one man, or officiousness in another. Occasionally you will find a squad whose masterful corporal interferes too much with his men's personal freedom—and that has ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... time feelings of sociability and companionship begin to grow in such gatherings of men, then kingship has truck root; and the notions of goodness, justice, and their opposites begin to arise ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... speech and manners; and as conversation developed and became a power, the great lords began to respect men of letters and to cultivate their society. Anyone who possessed good manners, vivacity, and wit was admitted to the salon, where a new and more elevating sociability ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... friendship because circumstances happened to have thrown you together fairly frequently—and one of us has a beautiful house and the other an excellent cook—these people press upon my spirit like a strait-waistcoat. I gabble the conventional small-talk of polite sociability, and I thank God when they are gone! They are called "friends," but we have absolutely nothing in common—not even ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... a form of friendship still akin to general sociability and gregariousness. When men are "in the same boat together," when a common anxiety, occupation, or sport unites them, they feel their human kinship in an intensified form without any greater personal affinity subsisting between them. The same effect is produced ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... author believes that the state has a right to insist. There is a purely civil profession of faith, whose articles the sovereign may fix, not exactly as dogmas of religion, but as principles of sociability. These must be few, simple and clear, and announced without explanation or commentary. The existence of a deity, powerful, intelligent, beneficent, foreseeing, and providing; the life to come, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... like thirty bills to make out, and the same number of pouches to properly close and send out. When the mails were running heavy the clerks never had a minute to spare, but when they were light, as they frequently were one or two nights each week, there was some opportunity for sociability and innocent amusement. ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... tempted to consider it genetically among the oldest of the emotions, synonymous almost with the will to live, and to make it scarcely less fundamental than fear or anger. In fact, jealousy readily passes into anger, and is itself a brand of fear.... In sociability and mutual aid we see the other side of the shield; but jealousy, however anti-social it may be, retains a function in zooelogical economy: viz., to conserve the individual as against the group. It is Nature's great corrective for the purely ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... generally agreed that the main function of food is to repair the tissues of the body. Other effects are present, such as pleasure and sociability, but its chief benefit is reparative, so we may well regard the subject from a strictly utilitarian standpoint and inquire how we may produce the highest efficiency from our eating. Some of the important questions about eating are, how much to ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... deformed fellow, called by the other servants Gnome because of his stubborn silence, his want of sociability, his rough manner and voice, his caring for nothing but his service, which he performs with great method. Every morning at six he enters her majesty's apartment, makes the fire, throws back the curtain to admit the light, arranges ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... the other. "That's a new way of receiving an invitation. Why, for pleasure—sociability, ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... individuals are so many zeros: the unit which turns them into a number must be added from outside; it may be royalty, the writer of the day, the favorite newspaper, or any other temporary master of fashion.—All this is probably the result of an exaggerated sociability, which weakens the soul's forces of resistance, destroys its capacity for investigation and personal conviction, and kills in it the worship ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... factory. He is found out of doors, making roads and excavations, railways, skyscrapers, and houses. If he has a liking for trade he trundles a pushcart filled with fruit or chocolates; or he may turn a jolly hurdy-gurdy or grind scissors. In spite of his native sociability, the south Italian is very slow to take to American ways. As a rule, he comes here intending to go back when he has made enough money. He has the air of a sojourner. He is picturesque, volatile, and ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... not to say any more just then; but the thought of sociability, the notion of chattering freely to young companions, and of a real game at play, and the terror of having all this withheld, and of being thought too proud and haughty for the Wardours, put her into ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... their followers, rendered them unsociable, and made them regard with an evil eye all persons who had not the same mode of worship and the same ideas as they had. Thus it is, that Religion has shut up the heart and for ever banished from it the affection that man ought to have for his fellow-creature. Sociability, indulgence, humanity, those first virtues of all morality, are totally incompatible with ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... profoundly, perhaps, nor always correctly, but at all events in a way that he never reasoned before. The best way to convey to the reader the state of his mind will be to let him speak for himself. As he had a habit of thinking aloud— for sociability, as it were—in the dark cell to which he had been relegated, we have only to bend ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... piano singing old and modern songs, the reading aloud by one member of the circle, the cracking of nuts and the popping of corn, the picnic supper on the lawn, the tennis court or croquet ground, the home parties, the guests ever-welcome at meals, these are but items in a possible scorecard of the sociability of the home. We are giving much thought to all sorts of group activities, but how much attention have we given to systematically encouraging the social unit which has the largest possibilities, the family? Last summer my friend, ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... particular horse; the second for its proprietor. Happily both were in. The proprietor asked no question of a customer of Clarence's condition. The horse, half Spanish, powerful and irascible, was quickly saddled. As Clarence mounted, the man in an impulse of sociability said,— ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... make agreeable acquaintances, perhaps to meet with a love adventure. In this life of elbowings, unknown strangers assume an extreme importance. Curiosity is aroused, sympathy is ready to exhibit itself, and sociability is the order ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... bottle, hang it about his neck with a string, conceal it under his fur coat, and present himself at our house every now and then for the ostensible purpose of congratulating us upon some Russian holiday. Of course we were expected to reward this disinterested sociability with a drink. The Cossack would swallow all he could of the fiery stuff, and then holding as much as possible in his mouth he would make a terrible grimace, cover his face with one hand as if the liquor were very strong, and start hurriedly ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... Trevor Harrison, the woman whom he had selected as chaperon for Virginia, more than once displayed some curiosity, when talking to her charge, as to this sudden change in the habits of a man whose lack of sociability had become ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that the greatest effort is always required to overcome original inertness, and that two efforts, like two horses starting a carriage instead of one, combined give more than double the value of each taken separately. The fact of this aesthetic sociability is so obvious that we need not discuss it any further, but merely hold it over to add, at last, to the result of the two other reasons, negative and positive, which tend to make aesthetic enjoyment the type of unselfish, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... has given us so many proofs of intelligence, kindly disposition, and sociability that she has been promoted, by common consent, to the dignity of a person, for it is plain that a higher order of reason than instinct guides her actions. This dignity entails the right of eating at table like a person, ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... tremens, the victim of a self-inflicted disease, whose horrors no one knew or could picture so well as himself. Who says man is not a fallen, broken creature, and that there is not a devil at hand to tempt him? This devil, under the guise of sociability, false pride, or moral cowardice, tempted Horace B—, and he yielded. Like tinder touched by flame, he blazed into drunkenness, and again and again the proud-spirited, manly, and cultured young lawyer and jurist was seen staggering along the streets, maudlin ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... a penny-wise, mean notion. Rosamond, even without such an occasion as Captain Lydgate's visit, was fond of giving invitations, and Lydgate, though he often thought the guests tiresome, did not interfere. This sociability seemed a necessary part of professional prudence, and the entertainment must be suitable. It is true Lydgate was constantly visiting the homes of the poor and adjusting his prescriptions of diet to their small means; but, dear me! has it not by this time ceased to be remarkable—is ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Lincoln continued, and for many years increasingly, to be equally marked by indiscriminate sociability and brooding loneliness. Comfort and the various influences which may be associated with the old-fashioned American word "elegance" seem never to enter into it. What is more, little can be discerned of positive happiness in the background of his life, as the freakish elasticity of ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... of manners or ideas from the present British standard in a nation speaking the same tongue, as a barbarism, if not as a personal insult to himself. Worse then all, he has perhaps less than anybody of that quality, we might almost say faculty, which Mirabeau called "political sociability," and accordingly can form no conception of a democracy which levels upward,—of any democracy, indeed, except one expressly invented to endanger the stability of English institutions, certainly the most comfortable in the world for any ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... the cloud, — a quiet air; it was one of summer's choice days, when she escapes from the sun's fierce watch and sits down to rest herself. But Elizabeth's eyes, if they wavered at all, were called off by some burst of the noisy sociability of the party, in which she deigned not to share. Her cousin, Mr. Herder, Rufus, Asahel, and Winifred, were in full cry after pleasure; and a cheery hunt they ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... and in it he developed his intense individualism; but in the first half of the eighteenth century some three thousand public coffeehouses and a large number of private clubs appeared in London alone; and the sociability of which these clubs were an expression was typical of all English cities. Meanwhile country life was in sore need ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the Irish gentleman & the Irish lady, the Scotch gentleman & the Scotch lady? These are darlings, every one. Night before last it was all Irish—24. One would have to travel far to match their ease & sociability & animation & sparkle & absence of shyness & self-consciousness. It was American in these fine qualities. This was at Mr. Lecky's. He is Irish, you know. Last night it was Irish again, at Lady Gregory's. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... on round-up," remarked Gowan, with an insistent sociability oddly at variance with his usual taciturn reserve. "According to Miss Chuckie, you're some rider, and according to Mr. Knowles, you can shoot. I wouldn't mind hearing from you direct about that ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... traits known to possess inheritable elements are generosity, piousness, independence, industry, will-power, faithfulness, fairness, sociability, reliability, self-reliance, tendency to work hard, perseverance, carefulness, impulsiveness, temperance, high-spiritedness, joviality, benignity, quietness, cheerfulness, hospitality, sympathy, humorousness, love of fun, neighborliness, love of frontier life, love of ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... majority are against it, juries will violate their oath, and witnesses will get around the truth, and the result is demoralization. Take wine and malt liquors out of the world and we shall lose a vast deal of good fellowship; the world would lose more than it would gain. There is a certain sociability about wine that I should hate to have taken from the earth. Strong liquors the folks had better let alone. If prohibition succeeds, and wines and malt liquors go, the next thing will be to take tobacco away, and the next thing all other ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... are often found collected around the same table, all the modifications of society which extreme sociability has introduced among us: love, friendship, business, speculation, power, ambition, and intrigue, all enhance conviviality. Thus it is that it produces fruits of ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... the lawyers much into one another's company. There were long evenings to be spent in the country taverns, when sociability was above par. Lincoln's inexhaustible fund of wit and humor, and his matchless array of stories, made him the life of the company. In this number there were many lawyers of real ability. The judge was David Davis, whose culture and legal ability will hardly ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... of headstrong Peter, as self-confidence and perseverance; the physical grossness of the old burghers, as constitutional vigor. Many of their customs too have come down to us; their heavy afternoon teas are recalled in our informal receptions; their New Year's Day sociability in our calls, their Christmas celebrations in our festival of Santa Claus. Much of our domestic architecture reflects their influence: the gabled fronts, the tiled fireplaces, the high "stoops," and ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne |
