"Temperamental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it to be wondered that McLean's austere Scotch soul stood in danger of being thawed in the sunshine of Lit-lit's eyes. She was pretty, and slender, and willowy; without the massive face and temperamental stolidity of the average squaw. "Lit-lit," so called from her fashion, even as a child, of being fluttery, of darting about from place to place like a butterfly, of being inconsequent and merry, and of laughing as lightly as she darted and ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... temperamental impossibility for Dumont to believe that Scarborough could really be sincere in a course which was obviously unprofitable. Therefore he attached even more importance to Arabella's cordiality than did Gladys herself. And, when the Legislature adjourned and Scarborough returned ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... made for nervousness, illness, or temperamental conditions, but the same measuring-rod is applied to all with no discrimination, and she has the marks on the papers to prove her infallibility. If a pupil should dare to question the correctness of her grades, he would be punished or penalized for impertinence. Her grades are ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... it at once. She had a certain feminine secretiveness which made her doubly enjoy a happiness undiluted by publicity; moreover, some further deference was due to Carnath. She was very happy, the more so as she had believed until a short while ago that her strong temperamental possibilities were vaulted in her nature's little church-yard. "Our hearts after first love are like our dead," she thought; "they sleep until the hour of resurrection." Hedworth dominated her, had taken her love rather than asked for it, ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... Temperamental. That is, he got soused on about three, and, while snooted, would deride Victor Herbert, thus proving that ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... no attention to my attempt to be facetious, if indeed she heard the remark at all. She seemed to be deep in a brown study, and several times I caught her watching me narrowly from the corner of her eye. I was already beginning to have some misgivings as to the temperamental fitness of my strange "learner" and new-found friend as a steady, day-in-and-day-out person with whom to live and eat and sleep. And this feeling increased with every block we covered, for by and by I found myself studying Henrietta in the same furtive manner ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... took with her only the Kewpie and the Baby. The Japanese doll was perfectly willing either to go or stay; he was not at all temperamental, and anything suited him. She could tell from the Billiken's smile that he didn't mind staying in the least; and the Brown Teddy-Bear looked tired. He couldn't talk, of course, on the everyday-side of the ivory doors; but with ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... by their own undirected and misguided energies. A mere temperamental outbreak in a brief period of obstreperousness exposes a promising boy to arrest and imprisonment, an accidental combination of circumstances too complicated and overwhelming to be coped with by an immature mind, ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... are the temperamental differences in men which make some desirous of giving themselves to the cultivation of a small area of irrigated land under intensive conditions and others to dry-farming under extensive conditions. In fact, it is being observed in the arid region that men, because ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... mine. He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. He had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle; of one whom the clenched fist of Fate has smitten beneath the temperamental third waistcoat-button. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... was temperamental, Lanier had ideas. He was alive to the problems of his age and to the beauties of nature. One has only to think of the names of his poems to realize how many themes occupied his attention. He wrote of religion, social questions, science, philosophy, nature, love. "My head and ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... escape. At the door, however, she suddenly turned and came back, walking nonchalantly but hastily out through the windows upon the side porch. A second later Paul Gresham and Billy Wobbles, the latter walking with temperamental knees, passed through ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... "presentation stage" and at all stages, Redmond absolutely declined to put forward a plan in his own name. This was not only from temperamental reasons: there was an official obstacle. He was an individual member of the Convention: but he was Chairman of the Irish party, pledged not to bind it without its consent. He felt, no doubt, that any detailed proposal from him would be taken as binding ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... busy little train of cars—for Athens owned a tiny spur of railroad connecting with the neighboring town of Conejo and operated for reasons germane to the coal industry—gave it, if you were very temperamental, something of the air of a metropolis seen through a ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... that cell which in one second can raise us through the bluest ether to the heaven as understood by the prayer-book, or send us diving to the mud flats of the ocean bed to co-habit for a time with wingless and non-temperamental oddities. ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... too, by the sight of simple and and unashamed piety among the common folk, which appeared to him to put the colder and more cautious religion of England to shame. Perhaps he did not allow sufficiently for the temperamental differences between the two nations, but at any rate he was comforted ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... without exception, entirely objective. Contemporary poetry is, on the other hand, very largely subjective; and even when it deals with events or incidents it invests them to such a degree with personal emotion and imagination, it so modifies and colours them with temperamental effects, that the resulting poem is much more a study of subjective conditions than a picture or drama of objective realities. This projection of the inward upon the outward world, in such a degree that the dividing line between the two ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... detract in any way from the heroism of those who faced the last plunge of the Titanic so courageously when all the boats had gone,—if it does, it is the difficulty of expressing an idea in adequate words,—to say that their quiet heroism was largely unconscious, temperamental, not a definite choice between two ways of acting. All that was visible on deck before the boats left tended to this conclusion and the testimony of those who went down with the ship and were afterwards rescued is of the ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... would have surprised Courtlandt could he have foreseen the drawing together of the ends of the circle and the relative concernment of the duke in knotting those ends. The labors of Hercules had never entailed the subjugation of two temperamental women. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... again, are subdivided into two families: Serbs and Bulgars. And here it is more difficult to distinguish the dividing line, for although there is a marked difference between the characteristics of the two peoples, both physical and temperamental, so nearly alike are their languages that speech forms no sure guide to distinguishing, especially in Macedonia, where dialects vary with a day's travel. The trend of popular feeling seems ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... that he could add to that whirlwind of ideas, but forbearing on account of his youth. His mind, by now, was so mature that he reminded himself, with some difficulty, that he was but seventeen. He was as lively and as happy as ever, but that was temperamental and would endure through all things; mentally he had no youth in him, had had little since the day he began ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... intends to undertake machine design is, what constitutes natural fitness for it. There seems to be no positive basis on which to determine in advance a natural fitness for this work, but there are certain temperamental characteristics that undoubtedly have much to ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... every-day occurrence, into a world peopled by strange men and women who always carried secrets about with them. And, in a sense, no one was more mysterious than Fenella herself. He asked himself as he stood there whether her vagaries were merely temperamental, the air of mystery which seemed to surround her simply accidental. He thought of that night at her house, the curious intimacy which from the first moment she had seemed to take for granted, the confidence with which she had treated him. He remembered ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are all more or less under this spell of the Past, some natures are more particularly enthralled by it, even in the very zenith of life, showing it to be of temperamental origin rather than the outcome of the passing years. Of such a temperament is John Burroughs. Now, when the snows of five-and-seventy winters have whitened his head, we do not wonder when we hear him say, ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... temperamental men, Beethoven was doubtless the most so, and the anecdotes written of him are many. He was especially irascible. His domestic annoyances are revealed freely in his diary: "Nancy is too uneducated for a housekeeper—indeed, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... wise Emperor of China, "Truth hath not an unchanging name." A modern English writer says: "I have long been convinced by the experience of my life, as a pioneer of various heterodoxies, which are rapidly becoming orthodoxies, that nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or given in the affections and intuitions; and that discussion and inquiry do little more than feed temperament." Our poet seems to mean that the Perceptions, when they perceive truly, convey objective truth, which is universal; whereas the Reflectives and the Sentiments, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... he thinks you are some one else. A pleasant, unaffected man to talk to. Somewhat dazed, however, in effect. Curious manner of speech, of which evidently he is unconscious, partly native English accent, partly temperamental idiosyncrasy. A very simple eccentric, what in the eighteenth century was called ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... there is no subtler form of flattery, than to call individuals by name who believe themselves to be forgotten pawns in a great game; and he may well have cultivated the profitable habit. Still, the fact remains, that it was an innate temperamental quality which made him frank and ingenuous in his intercourse with all sorts and ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... which cover the same period and were fought broadly for the same causes. But the French Radical extremist could never see his way to subscribe to the Socialist creed. His stalwart individualism, in part temperamental, was also as a political working faith the result of a distrust of logic divorced from the experience and responsibility of actual administration. Somewhat similarly the English Socialist refused to let logic press him into the premature Internationalism ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... Temperamental Optimism and Pessimism, 33. How reconcile with life one bent on suicide? 38. Religious melancholy and its cure, 39. Decay of Natural Theology, 43. Instinctive antidotes to pessimism, 46. Religion involves belief in an unseen extension of ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... underlying bronze which tells of years spent beneath a merciless sun, and the touch of gray at his temples only added to the eager, almost fierce vitality of the dark face. Paul Harley was notable because of that intellectual strength which does not strike one immediately, since it is purely temperamental, but which, nevertheless, invests its possessor with an aura ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... not exist as assuredly as it does not exist for the mystics who take refuge on the tops of high mountains. I am speaking now of that innermost life, containing the best and the worst that can happen to us in the temperamental depths of our being, where a man indeed must live alone but need not give up all hope of holding converse ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... to expand his chest in pride, for fear the movement would disturb those temperamental studs. He would fain have lingered indefinitely in the warmth of Barney's admiring smile, but the signal for the first dance was already given, and he moved nervously out ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... dramatic step in the overthrow of the idol in person, and the care with which he planned to impress each chief and native with his omnipotence and magic. This system of the application of political science as well as of military science, of course, was sound, save for a temperamental error: the lack of sufficient imagination to realize the unknown quantity of chance, the inevitable mistake of military scientists who are loath to admit the artist to their counsels, exemplified by men ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... endeavor may hesitate to pursue it through lack of the necessary gift or failure in self-confidence. The forces which enter into the making of character are so complex, including as they do not only acquisitions of new moral standards, but temperamental qualities, early training, potent example, physical stamina, dozens of accidental circumstances, that it is unfair to use the tests applicable, let us say, to a course ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... their social relations and varied expressions of individuality. As a result of my close acquaintance with this band of primates, I feel more keenly than ever before the necessity of taking into account, in connection with all experimental analyses of behavior, the temperamental characteristics, experience, ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... young man's character under strain; besides, Lewis's confidential position had no doubt made him acquainted with the inner details of the plan, its broader significance, and the political obstacles to be overcome in carrying it into effect. Aside from his temperamental disposition for such an enterprise, his public service had strengthened his grasp of national interests; enthusiasm for adventure had been supplemented by maturity of judgment in affairs of state. Altogether, a better man for ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... characteristics, which sharply conflict with Northern traits. Fuhkien province is not only as diversified but speaks a dialect which is virtually a foreign language. And so on North and West of the Yangtsze it is the same story, temperamental differences of the highest political importance being everywhere in evidence and leading to perpetual bickerings and jealousies. For although Chinese civilization resembles in one great particular ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... the principal characters in that story. Upon the completeness of his understanding of the meaning of the poem, and his revelation of its meanings, as well as upon the absence of stiffness or self-consciousness in suggesting the moods or characteristics displayed, will depend the impression of temperamental force upon ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... carrying contraband—she must not escape. On the other hand, there had been a deal of unpleasantness of late because President Wilson had been protesting the sinking of vessels without warning—and the Narcissus was a United States steamer. Consequently if he torpedoed her without warning the temperamental Kaiser might make of Captain Emil Bechtel what is colloquially known as the goat; whereas, on the other hand, should he conform to international law and place her crew in safety before sinking her, there was a chance that her wireless might summon a patrol boat ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... fact, so far as I can remember, there was seldom a casus belli which could be defined and discussed. The warfare simply effervesced, like gas from a mineral spring. It was chronic, geographical, temperamental, and its everlasting continuance was suggested in the threat with which the combatants usually parted: 'wait till we ketch you alone, ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... replied Sanders, with a little grimace, "and I was being requested to restore a husband to a temperamental lady who has a passion for shying cook-pots at her husband when ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... to let the dead past bury its dead," and murmured the lines from a celebrated new play, "Smashed to hell is smashed to hell!" If she were willing to see her creation die, Ernestine ought to be. But that was not Ernestine's nature: she was not artistic nor temperamental, as Milly often proved to her. In her dumb, heavy fashion she still tried to prop up the ill-fated Cake Shop and make it pay expenses at least, ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... pleasures is, to a son of communities strenuous as ours are strenuous, the most salient characteristic of the so-called Latin civilisations. It charms him and vexes him, according to his mood; and for the most part it represents a moral gulf between his own temperamental and indeed spiritual sense of race, and that of Frenchmen and Italians, far wider than the watery leagues that a steamer may annihilate. But I think his mood is wisest when he accepts the "foreign" easy surrender ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... this work are mongrels. By far the finest lion dog I ever saw was a cross between a shepherd and an airedale. He had the intelligence of the former and the courage of the latter. The airedale himself is not a good trailer, he is too temperamental. He will start on a lion track, jump off and chase a deer and wind up by digging out a ground squirrel. After a good hound finds a lion, the airedale ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... the coal pile is altogether too large and my back is altogether too refined. There should be individual coal piles provided for temperamental sailors. Small, colorful, appetizingly shaped mounds of nice, clean, glistening chunks of coal they should be, and the coal itself could easily be made much lighter, approaching if possible the weight of feathers. This would be a task any reasonably inclined ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... precocious sexuality, M.O. had from the very first an extreme disgust for obscene stories, and for any association of sexual things with filthy words and anecdotes. Owing in part to this and in part to his temperamental skepticism, he disbelieved what associates told him regarding sexual emissions, only becoming convinced when he actually experienced them; and the facts of reproduction he denied indignantly until he read them in a medical work. Until he was well over 25 the physical aversion from any ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual. The serene, calm character of a Tolstoy will wish different methods for social reconstruction than the intense, overflowing personality of a Michael Bakunin or a Peter Kropotkin. Equally so it must be apparent that the economic and ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... why doesn't my uncle? My uncle is a temperamental conservative, a devotee to his traditions—the sort of man who will never do anything that hasn't been the constant habit of his forebears. He would no more dream of healing a well-established family feud than of selling the family plate. And I—well, surely, it would never be ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... sickly youth and a reaction from the narrow theologic thought with which she was then surrounded. Always frail—subject through life to distressing illness—it would not be fair to ask of this woman an optimism of the Mark Tapley stripe. In part, the grave outlook was physical, temperamental: but also it was an expression of a swiftly approaching mood of the late nineteenth century. And the beginning can be traced back to the autumn evenings in the big farmhouse at Griff when, as a mere child, she wrestled or prayed with what she called her ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... skill in handling this perfected instrument of analysis, stolen from the enemies of the Church, represented only one of the temperamental phases of ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... very labile make-up with increased affective reactions, with marked tendencies to impulsions and antisocial acts. These cases are characterized by the fact that they do not concern psychogenetic psychotic exaggerations of a certain temperamental predisposition, but psychically evoked disease states which appear to be irreconcilably opposed ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... generation—the spiritual state of the peoples concerned in this international quandary is not likely to undergo so radical a change as to seriously invalidate an argument that proceeds on the present lie of the land in this respect. Preconceptions are a work of habit impinging on a given temperamental bent; and where, as in these premises, the preconceptions have taken on an institutionalised form, have become conventionalised and commonly accepted, and so have been woven into the texture of popular common ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... for Italy, the ancient home of Civilization, the mother of arts and refinement, to accept the standard of the Huns which the Germans embraced and imposed upon their allies. The conflict between the Germans and the Italians was instinctive, temperamental. For a thousand years it took the form of a struggle between the German Emperors and the Italian Popes for mastery. The Germans strove for political domination, for temporal power; the Italians strove, at least in ideal, in order that the spiritual ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... lofty temperamental Upper Fall, the Lower Fall appears a smug and steady pigmy. In such company, for both are always seen together, it is hard to realize that the Lower Fall is twice the height of Niagara. Comparing Yosemite's three most conspicuous features, these gigantic falls seem to ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... the soul upon which true renown rests, and out of which it springs. The region in which the mind acts is, necessarily, circumscribed by the constant pressure of a never-absent egotism; and when this mental constitution happens to be united to timidity, distrust, and temperamental coldness, greatness ceases to be a possible achievement. Moreover, he wanted principle, which is the natural foundation of public virtue; and he had no higher an idea of morality than its conveniency. His sense of propriety, which, in some cases was high, was merely a conventional ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... to-day that you would to a big leak in the pipes, you'd be farther ahead on your job and a good deal bigger man. Roger, the more I see of you the more I'm convinced that your failure is a good deal less the result of other people's indifference than it is of your own temperamental ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... Fort Henry. This action of Halleck was the consequence partly of accidents which had prevented communication between them and caused Halleck to think him insubordinate, partly of false reports to Halleck that Grant was drinking to excess, partly of Halleck's dislike of Grant,—a temperamental incapacity of appreciation. After Donelson he issued a general order of congratulation of Grant and Foote for the victory, but he sent no personal congratulations, and reported to Washington that the victory was due to General Smith, whose promotion, not ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... programs presented to it by circumstances, receives a brilliant refutation in the course of the powerful minority that was concentrating around the three great "Jacobins." The subjective side of politics, also the temperamental side, here found expression. Statecraft is an art; creative statesmen are like other artists. Just as the painter or the poet, seizing upon old subjects, uses them as outlets for his particular temper, his particular ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... lovely cantilena extorted anger from the young pianist. It was true that he played badly, but not so badly as his mother imagined. His very hatred of music reverberated in his playing and produced an odd, inverted, temperamental spark. The transposition of an emotion into a lower or higher key may change its external expression; its intensity is not thereby altered. Racah hated the piano, hated Chopin, hated music; yet potentially Racah was a ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... conversational fashion. "Now to me half the evils of life lie in anticipation. When the time of danger actually arrives, those evils seem to take to themselves wings and fly away. Take the case of a great actress on her first night, an emotional and temperamental woman, besieged by fears until the curtain rises, and then carried away by her genius even unto the heights. Our curtain has risen, Miss Beverley. All we can do is to pray that the ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... humid) was once a "moisture"; then one of the four moistures or liquids that entered into the human constitution and by the proportions of their admixture determined human temperament; next a man's outstanding temperamental quality (the thing itself rather than the cause of it); then oddity which people may laugh at; then the spirit of laughter and good nature in general. Normally we do not connect the idea of moisture with ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... spread this love of bold coloring, so that at the dawn of the Renaissance we find a return to the Greek and Roman coloring, which, however, was modified in England, Germany and Flanders, according to temperamental conditions. ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... speakers and audience, often lasting until midnight, and were charged with animosity which might flame into violence. All of the speakers lived under a strain, and under emotional pressure. Consequently they were not always easy to handle. Some of them were temperamental, a bit jealous of each other, and not always satisfied with the tours Susan mapped out for them. She expected of her colleagues what she herself could endure, but they often complained and sometimes ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... merchant was an invalid, rather, though he kept about his business, and our people merely recognized him as being out of health. He was what we could call, for that day and region—the Middle West of the early fifties—a man of unusual refinement. I suppose this was temperamental with him largely; but he had cultivated tastes, too. I remember him as a peculiarly gentle person, with a pensive cast of face, and the melancholy accomplishment of ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... Mrs. Scales had put an end to all the strain, and Constance had been once again mistress in Constance's house. Constance would never have admitted these facts, even to herself; and no one would ever have dared to suggest them to her. For with all her temperamental mildness ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... whence he was digged. With a deep and abiding pride of race, linking him spiritually with the historic past of his people, he was inclined to look askance at the subverting spirit of Puritanism, which was now beginning to give Merrie England food for serious thought. His temperamental bias against Puritanism was accentuated by the openly avowed hostility of the Puritans to his chosen profession. Though born of the people, Shakespeare's social ideals were strongly aristocratic, and, while possessing, in an unusual degree that unerring ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... If you were not so—so temperamental, I would say go back and begin again. But that is risky. It will be better to go on, I think, trying to recapture the more serious style, until the whole book it at least in some form. Then you will know exactly where you are and ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... The temperamental talker is one of the greatest of nerve-destroyers. He deals in superlatives. He views everything emotionally. He talks feelingly of trifles, and ecstatically of friends. He gushes. He flatters. To him ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... stimulant, except under medical advice. As to my experience, it is very limited; and, in my judgment, it is quite unsafe in this matter to make one man's experience another man's guide: too much depends upon temperamental and constitutional peculiarities, and upon special conditions of ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... everything that comes to his hand—particularly novels—and is an inveterate patron of picture shows. "Under no strain trying to hear 'em talk," he confidences. While such occasions really are very rare, once in an age he becomes depressed—a peculiar fact (their rarity) in one so temperamental. After the fifth call within a month to act as pall-bearer at a funeral, he was in the depths. A friend was trying ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... of life too well, saw the whole pattern with too great clarity. This alone would have relegated him to the background, for it is the frame of mind which, when it is temperamental from the outset, makes the looker-on at life; while when it is attained it creates the person to whom other people come for sympathy and help in matters that seem to them enormously important, even while they appeal to the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... saloon there runs a code, the only possible code, the final code; and it is observed. If it is not observed, the infraction causes pain, distress. Another marked characteristic is its gigantic temperamental dullness, unresponsiveness to external suggestion, a lack of humour—in short, a heavy and half-honest stupidity: ultimate product of gross prosperity, too much exercise, too much sleep. Then I ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... not like her expression. It was not the one he was used to seeing in those vain, "temperamental" pupils of his—the downcast vanity that will be up again in a few hours. It was rather the expression of one who has been finally and ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... hypersensitive to criticism. Her intense desire to do right and to serve her fellow-beings animated her whole life, and it seemed to her rather hard to be found fault with. Indeed, she had not many faults, and the defects of her character were mostly temperamental. ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... His temperamental instability may have been such that the desire for a change—the "wanderlust"—was driving him to distraction. Or perhaps, under the urge of his own subconscious feeling of failure, he may have convinced himself that if he could "shake" the old environment and all in it that hampered ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... lessened or abolished unless we are willing to state that a man and a woman should live together as husband and wife, hating, despising, or fearing one another. We cannot countenance brutality, unfaithfulness, or temperamental mismating. It is true that divorces are often obtained for trivial reasons, but usually the partners are not adapted to one another, according to modern ways of thinking and feeling. What is commonplace in one age is cruelty in the next, and this ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... with me when I get like that. Sometimes I fairly rave. But I won't do it often. I don't know why I should feel that way now. I have never been so happy. Yet that feeling came over me like a suffocating wave. I am afraid your wife is rather a temperamental creature, Bob." ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... union is possible only at the center, the crux, of Being. This truth is represented by the algebraical X, the symbol of spiritual sex-union. Therefore sex relationships which do not have for their crux spiritual as well as temperamental affinity, are not final, or eternal, however beautiful they may be; and there are many sex-relationships which are pure and sacred even though they do not fulfil this highest of all relationships, ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... allowances for what the actors and actresses will do. There's no telling about these moving picture people," and Russ gave Ruth and Alice, as well as Paul, a laughing look as though to indicate that they were very temperamental, and hard to get ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... did not impress me as it has impressed certain other travelers. You see, I was born and raised in one of those Ohio Valley towns where the river gets emotional and temperamental every year or two. In my youth I had passed through several of these visitations, when the family would take the family plate and the family cow, and other treasures, and retire to the attic floor to wait for the spring rise to abate; and when really the most annoying phase of the ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Italian Renaissance, with traces of Byzantine influence, and while a superficial view might pronounce them almost identical, a further study reveals marked individuality in conception and development. In each, the note of emphasis and the temperamental appeal are entirely distinct. The Court of Palms is simpler, more dignified, more conventional. The Court of Flowers is richer in ornament and suggestion, more softly brilliant in atmosphere. The prevailing color is ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... herself a love-child, and the knowledge of this is shown very clearly in its influence upon their mutual attitude. As for her own affairs, these were, first—to her father's unbounded astonishment—marriage with a temperamental violinist, who ran rapidly down the scale from adoration of his own wife to intrigue with another's; second, clandestine relations with a man of her own race and breed, who loved her to idolatry, and within a few months was found embracing his cousin. Poor Gyp! I jest; but you will need ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... For in such matters as teaching, a man may put a strain on himself for a certain length of time; he may even be a success, up to a point. But if he lacks the temperamental gift of holding classes, the results in the long run will not be fair to the children, to say nothing of himself. With reluctance I rose to depart, Mr. F—— adding, by way of letting ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... of the man, as it often is of minute observers of nature. I am not at all surprised to learn from one who knew him of his "temperamental melancholy." He was austere and aloof; but exactly the type of mind that would give all he had to those who possessed his confidence. It must have been a privilege to know him intimately. I have said that his poems resemble the work of no other poet; this is true; but ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... brilliance of his colouring, the light curl of his coal-black hair and the lustre of his eyes, which asserted themselves roundly in an open, manly face. Between two such organisms one would not have expected to find the slightest temperamental accord. But I have observed that profane men living in ships like the holy men gathered together in monasteries develop traits of profound resemblance. This must be because the service of the sea and the service of a temple are both detached ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... "Heydenreich thought of that, too. He got this up for me, about five years ago. The intelligence test is based on the new French Surete test for mentally deficient criminals. Then there's a memory test, and tests for judgment and discrimination, semantic reactions, temperamental and emotional makeup, and general ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... site makes this vivid contrast between the levels of the front door and the back gate. Many of the streets have been widened since Heine saw the gossiping neighbors touching knees across them, but nothing less than an earthquake could change the temperamental topography of the place. It has its advantages; when there is a ring at the door the housemaid, instead of panting up from the kitchen to answer it, has merely to fall down five pairs of stairs. It cannot be denied, either, that the steep incline gives a charm to the streets which overcome it ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... enjoy it. I did it—I suppose because it seemed sporting. It never made me feel peaceful—only nervous. I don't believe tobacco is a temperamental need with women as it is with some men—otherwise it wouldn't have taken so many centuries to establish the custom. It would only—seem silly, ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... for going," said Latisan. He followed her, and to her profound amazement she discovered that a woodsman could be as temperamental as a prima donna. "I'm going, too, Mr. Flagg," he called over his shoulder. "I'm going for good and all where you're concerned. I'm done with you. I gave you your fair warning. Send another man ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... his country so that it hangs over the landscape and blends with it for ever; he owned his nativity, too, by his pictures of the prairie and the fur-trade and by his life of Washington, who had laid his hand upon his head; but he had spent half his life abroad, in the temperamental enjoyment of the romantic suggestion of the old world, and by his writings he gave this expansion of sympathy and sentiment to his countrymen. If his temperament was native-born and his literary taste home-bred, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the great Steinway and ran his long white fingers loosely over the keys, and said to Margarita, while the butler gazed in agony at his mistress, and the other guests, all arrayed for one of the climaxes of one of England's most temperamental importations from the kitchens of France, stood ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... exactly as you liked, if you did not like it? Oh, Michael! Michael! Michael! He forgot that he had often been nearly as miserable as this when Michael had been free and happy. Not quite, but nearly. Now he attributed the whole of his recurrent wretchedness, which was largely temperamental, to his ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... he said he would have nothing to do with it, its subject being, in his opinion, unlikely to interest, or its argument to benefit, anyone. It is, I think, not merely an author's vanity which inclines me to regard his decision not so much as a mistaken literary judgment, but as the expression of a temperamental apathy with which many Conservatives are inflicted with regard to social problems. An entire edition of the work was bought soon after its publication by the Central Conservative Office as a textbook ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... priest and acolytes knelt solemnly (with bowed heads) and prayers were said. While the procession was passing from station to station, the girls sang their hymn in French. It was the age old pageantry of the Catholic church, a pageantry that perhaps indicates an age old temperamental difference between the Latin and the ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... to her breast. It was a recognized gesture with her, a physical holding of herself together in the last minute that preceded her temperamental flying to pieces. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... there who had committed merciless robberies, cruel murders, heartless swindles, abominable depravities. I have felt greater temperamental aversion from many highly respectable persons than I did from them. Their crimes were one thing, they were another. Not that crime does not corrupt a man—stain him of its color. But there is always another side to ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... at this crucial moment that Wilson's peculiar temperamental faults asserted themselves. Sorely he needed the sane advice of Colonel House, who would doubtless have found ways of placating the opposition. But that practical statesman was in London and the President lacked the capacity to arrange the ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... known the girl since he ushered her into the world. If there were any one with whom she had shown the slightest sign of intimacy, it was with him. Like all doctors whose associations are so largely with women, and who are moderately intelligent and temperamental, he knew a great deal about the dangers of the imagination. No one ever heard just what passed between the two. One thing is pretty sure, he made no secrets regarding the affair, and at the end of the interview he advised ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... glowing accounts of the elegant school-house, the bright pupils, and the congenial society of the neighborhood. He spoke almost entirely in superlatives, and, after making due allowance for what Rena perceived to be a temperamental tendency to exaggeration, she concluded that she would find in the school a worthy field of usefulness, and in this polite and good-natured though somewhat wordy man a coadjutor upon whom she could rely in her first efforts; for she was not over-confident of her powers, which seemed to grow less ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Temperamental elements enter here very largely. But we might at least take the whole matter out of the hands of charlatans and the half-informed and establish it upon a sound scientific basis. There is, beyond debate, a real place for the physician who utilizes and directs the elements of suggestion. They have ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... decadent New England state, himself master of the state political machine. Also, he is nobody's fool. He possesses the brain and strength of character to play his part. His most distinctive feature is his temperamental opportunism. ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... One Thyroid-centered Type has Bright eyes Good clean teeth Symmetrical features Moist flushed skin Temperamental attitude toward life Tendency to heart, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... lamp,' it said; and with an overpowering feeling of relief Mr Pickering recognized it as Lord Wetherby's. A moment later the temperamental peer's dapper figure became visible in silhouette against a ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... might be defined on the one hand as a temperamental reaction to the vision of Reality: on the other, as a form of prophecy. As it is the special vocation of the mystical consciousness to mediate between two orders, going out in loving adoration towards God and coming home to tell the secrets of Eternity to ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... France, with her brilliant temperamental unstable people, will always provide interesting players and charming opponents. I do not look to see France materially change her present position—which is one of extreme honour, of great friendliness, and keen competition. Her game will not greatly rise, nor will she lose in any way the ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... that quality of the greatest, the living communication with the experience embodied in the music. It was on the stereotyped memories of such communication that she depended, on the half hypnotic possession by the past; filling in vacancies with temperamental caprice or an emotion no longer the music's but ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... them. The sands of Egypt breed scandals as quickly as the climate degenerates the morals of shallow-minded tourists. But this woman Freddy knew to be as dangerous as she was charming; and he also knew the enthusiastic nature of Michael and how it was temperamental with him to place all women on pedestals and worship them as pure, high beings, far above mere men. Fallen idols never shattered his belief; they ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... importance to even the simplest case. Whatever office anybody may hold,—he and his mates are commissioned in the common task, and should the thing come up for judgment, everybody does his best. The difference here is not due to temperamental freshness or tediousness; the result depends only upon a correct or incorrect psychological handling of the participants. The latter must in every single case be led and trained anew to interest, conscientiousness and co-operation. In this need lies the educational opportunity ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... you'd be glad to see me. I've never rowed with you, have I? I've tried not to be temperamental with you. That's why I wired you, when there are others I've known ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... the 16th of December 1751. He studied at Harvard from 1766 to 1768, when he went to sea as a cabin boy. He gradually became a ship-owner and a successful merchant, retiring from business in 1794. Throughout his life he was much interested in politics, and though his temperamental indolence and his aversion for public life often prevented his accepting office, he exercised, as a contributor to the press and through his friendships, a powerful political influence, especially in New England. He was a member of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... immediate action is imperative. But action is delayed by misunderstanding arising out of temperamental differences between the Governing Class and the People. Curiously enough the respective responsive characteristics of the Anglo Saxon and the Indians are paralleled by the two types of responses seen in all living matter. In ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... Savelli, the self-willed, temperamental daughter of an Italian violin virtuoso, furnished much of the interest of the book. The efforts of Grace and her chums to create in this girl a healthy, wholesome enjoyment for High School life, and her repudiation ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... the result of that drivelling scheme of yours. What did you expect a sensitive, temperamental French cook to do, if you went about urging everybody to refuse all food? I hear that when the first two courses came back to the kitchen practically untouched, his feelings were so hurt that he cried like a child. And when the rest of the dinner ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... of this experience that I said for years: "The country is good, but it is not for me...." I loved to read about the country, enjoyed hearing men talk about their little places, but always felt a temperamental exile from their dahlias and gladioli and wistaria. I knew what would happen to me if I went again to the country to live, for I judged by the former adventure. Work would stop; all mental activity would ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... forth. There is but a tiny residue of persons who do not swell and sparkle. And of these glum bystanders at the carnival I am one. Our aloofness is mainly irrational, I suppose. It is due mainly to temperamental Toryism. We say 'The old is better.' This we say to ourselves, every one of us feeling himself thereby justified in his attitude. But we are quite aware that such a postulate would not be accepted by time majority. For the majority, then, let us make some show of ratiocination. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... "That temperamental dignotions, and conjecture of prevalent humours, may be collected from spots in our Nails, we are not averse to concede. But yet not ready to admit sundry divinations vulgarly raised upon them. Nor do we observe it verified in others, what Cardan discovered as a ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... not an inevitable, event, in view of his temperamental affiliations with the Celtic genius, that MacDowell should have been made aware of the suitability for musical treatment of the ancient heroic chronicles of the Gaels, and that he should have gone for his inspiration, in particular, to the legends comprised ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... earnestness, even in outward manner, in a world through which the artist is bound to go on a wholly 'secret errand,' as bad form, which shocked him as much in persons as bad style did in books. He hated every form of extravagance, noise, mental or physical, with a temperamental hatred: he suffered from it, in his nerves and in his mind. And he had no less dislike of whatever seemed to him either morbid or sordid, two words which he often used to express his distaste for things and people. He never would have appreciated writers like Verlaine, because of what seemed ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... youth in his own heart. It set his old enthusiasms singing like birds uncaged. It made him want to be again all the things he had decided not to be. It brought back beliefs in realities that he had feared were illusions. In other words, it freed the temperamental artist and dreamer from the spoilt and successful millionaire. But he could have let the bright vision go, perhaps, and have been pleasantly contented later to remember it, if—it hadn't been for Aline. Because she wanted ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... differs from an ugly one by a difference of surfaces and proportions that are sometimes almost infinitesimally small. I find myself setting down little things and little things; none of them do more than demonstrate those essential temperamental discords I have already sought to make clear. Some readers will understand—to others I shall seem no more than an unfeeling brute who couldn't make allowances.... It's easy to make allowances now; but to be young and ardent and to make allowances, to see one's married life open before ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... color estimate thus disclosed, lead some to seek shelter in "feeling and inspiration"; but feeling and inspiration are temperamental, and have nothing to do with the simple facts of vision. A measured and unchanging scale is as necessary and valuable in the training of the eye as the musical scale in the discipline of ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... illness Tom's heart, quickened doubtless by jealousy, had grown more and more to yearn for Sukey's manifold charms, physical and temperamental. Billy Little, who did not like Sukey, said her charms were "dimple-mental"; but Billy's heart was filled with many curious prejudices, and Tom's judgment was much more to be relied ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... that this letter doesn't contain a word of the kind of news that you like to hear. But it's that beastly twilight hour of a damp November day, and I'm in a beastly uncheerful mood. I'm awfully afraid that I am developing into a temperamental person, and Heaven knows Gordon can supply all the temperament that one family needs! I don't know where we'll land if I don't preserve my sensibly stolid, ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... light task for a nation to achieve the temperamental qualities without which the institutions of free government are but an empty mockery. Our people are now successfully governing themselves, because for more than a thousand years they have been slowly fitting themselves, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... courage to go down and hear her mother's account of the interview. Adelaide was still in bed, but one long, pointed fingertip, pressed continuously upon the dangling bell, a summons that had long since lost its poignancy for the temperamental Lucie, indicated that she ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... to find the answer; but he needs a kind of flexibility or playfulness, just because his job is that of seeing things in a new light. We must allow him to toy with his materials a bit, and even to be a bit "temperamental", and not expect him to grind out works of art or other inventions as ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... might as yet scarcely imagine. For, in an environment which for dearth of mental stimulus and incentive could scarcely be matched; amid poverty but slightly raised above actual want; untouched by the temperamental hopelessness which lies just beneath the surface of these dull, simple folk, this child lived a life of such ecstasy as might well excite the envy of the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking |
