"Womanish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was at home with his slender store of much-beloved books in his villa at Chippenham. With him were a few of his thanes and a small body of armed attendants, their enjoyment the pleasures of the chase and the rude sports of that early period. Doubtless, what they deemed the womanish or monkish tastes of their young monarch were objects of scorn and ridicule to those hardy thanes, upon whom ignorance lay like a thick garment. Yet Alfred could fight as well as read. They might disdain his pursuits; they ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... she should appear cold and lifeless; that when the bridegroom came to fetch her in the morning, he would find her to appearance dead; that then she would be borne, as the manner in that country was, uncovered, on a bier, to be buried in the family vault; that if she could put off womanish fear, and consent to this terrible trial, in forty-two hours after swallowing the liquid (such was its certain operation) she would be sure to awake, as from a dream; and before she should awake, he would let her husband know their drift, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... he sat thus, something of his grief easing in the flood of almost womanish tears. Until, finally, it was Jamie who saved the situation. His sobs died out abruptly, and the boy ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... womanish feeling of being exultant at the idea of the envy I shall awaken in the breasts of your adoring circle of lady friends—my lady cousins among them—in having, spite of my unattractiveness, secured the husband they have long striven by every wile to win. Ah! they ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... this that sent my heart flying into my mouth at the sight of him. For by his curls and womanish face, no less than the amber cloak with the black bars, I knew him at once for the same I had seen ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... me then, Womanish fear farewell: I'le never melt more, Lead on, to some great thing, to wake my spirit: I cut the Cedar Pompey, and I'le fell This huge ...
— The False One • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... the evening. Rudin left him in possession of the field. He afforded Darya Mihailovna much entertainment; first he told a story of one of his neighbours who, having been henpecked by his wife for thirty years, had grown so womanish that one day in crossing a little puddle when Pigasov was present, he put out his hand and picked up the skirt of his coat, as women do with their petticoats. Then he turned to another gentleman who to begin with had been a freemason, then a hypochondriac, ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... one of the seats as soon as I had pulled her out of the water, expecting her to faint, or do some other womanish thing. She brushed the water from her eyes, and bending down so that she could look under the foresail, she caught a glimpse of ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... above all praise—the religious ceremonies affected me, like all others of that faith, as tedious and empty. Each of the cardinals, as he entered the chapel, blew a sonorous nose; and was received standing by his brother prelates—a grotesque company of old-womanish old men in gaudy gowns. One of the last to come was Antonelli, who has the very wickedest face in the world. He sat with his eyes fastened upon his book, but obviously open at every pore to all that went on about him. As he passed out he cast gleaming, terrible, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... very foolish, womanish question, seeing that he was holding letters in his hand; ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... poor dear did them; she wa'n't very partial to knittin'," old Elijah went on, after he had counted his stitches. "Our rugs is beginnin' to show wear, but I can't master none o' them womanish tricks. My sister, she tinkers 'em up. She said last time she was here that she guessed ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... slight shrug of contempt at such womanish weakness, ran to his assistance. He straightened the Easterner out and placed his folded coat under his head. "He'll come around in a minute," he muttered. He glanced toward the gulch and then back to the shaft. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... out of the room, conscious that he was getting rather womanish, and feeling confusedly that his being sorry was not of much use to the Garths. They could see him mount, and quickly ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... hitherto known only in a misty, intangible, and seldom recurring form—the suspicion that, if the passive girl before her were really an enemy, it was not owing to any mere ordinary impulse of fear, or envy, or inexplicable womanish dislike, but rather ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... punishment for his affront to the god Pan. For I am now in a humour to act awhile the sophist, yet not of that sort who undertake the drudgery of tyrannizing over school boys, and teach a more than womanish knack of brawling; but in imitation of those ancient ones, who to avoid the scandalous epithet of wise, preferred this title of sophists; the task of these was to celebrate the worth of gods and heroes. Prepare therefore to be entertained with a panegyrick, yet not upon Hercules, Solon, ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... history, and he too was "broken" like the wretched soldier whom I did not stay to see. He has been rehabilitated, however, by an age which does not fear the imputation of paradox, and a marble statue of him ornaments the street in front of his house. To interpret him according to this image—a womanish figure in a long robe and a turban, with big bare arms and a dramatic pose—would be to think of him as a kind of truculent sultana. He wore the dress of his period, but his spirit was very modern; he was a Vanderbilt or a Rothschild of the fifteenth century. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the best families in Athens. From him the inhabitants of Pythopolis call a certain place in their city Hermus's House, and, by exchanging an accent, transfer the honour from the hero to the god (Mercury). Hence the war with the Amazons took its rise: and it appears to have been no slight or womanish enterprise, for they could not have encamped in the town, or joined battle on the ground about the Pnyx and the Museum, or fallen in so intrepid a manner upon the city of Athens, unless they had first reduced the country about it. It is difficult, indeed, to believe (though the story ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... feeling, boy-like, that he never quite knew what being good involved, he wriggled uneasily in his chair. His father laid one of his hands on the boy's dark hair and the other beneath the delicately pointed chin, and, turning up the little face towards him, he kissed it with womanish affection. ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... benefactress silenced me gratitude would not allow me to persevere for the moment. But from what I had already seen of Her Majesty the Queen, I was too much interested to lose sight of my object,—not, let me be believed, from idle womanish curiosity, but from that real, strong, personal interest which I, in common with all who ever had the honour of being in her presence, felt for that much-injured, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... He wore his own hair dressed high in front in the fashion first set for the women by the Grand Monarque's loose-wife; and as he passed under the candles I saw that it was graying slightly. His face, high-browed, long-nosed, double-chinned, with the eyes womanish for bigness and marked with brows that might have been penciled by the hair-dresser, I had seen before; but lacking this present sight of it, the orders on his breast would have named him the ranking general ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... of boughs, which to this day the Athenians celebrate, was then first instituted by Theseus. For he took not with him the full number of virgins which by lot were to be carried away, but selected two youths of his acquaintance, of fair and womanish faces, but of a manly and forward spirit, and having, by frequent baths, and avoiding the heat and scorching of the sun, with a constant use of all the ointments and washes and dresses that serve to the adorning of the head or smoothing ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... of Dumas. Ease, music, money-making, the affairs of his harem and the bringing-up of his children, are his chief interests, and his plump pale face with long-lashed hazel eyes, his curling beard and fat womanish hands, recall the portly potentates of Hindu miniatures, ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... shall be decided without the oath of the parties to the suit, and the presiding judges shall not permit either of them to use an oath for the sake of persuading, nor to call down curses on himself and his race, nor to use unseemly supplications or womanish laments. But they shall ever be teaching and learning what is just in auspicious words; and he who does otherwise shall be supposed to speak beside the point, and the judges shall again bring him back to the question at issue. On the other hand, strangers in their ...
— Laws • Plato
... often praised, my uncle has often jested at, the womanish softness of my face. There have been moments when I have seen that face in the glass, and known it not, but started in wild affright, and fancied that I beheld a demon; perhaps in that moment this change was over it. Slowly Isora gazed ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Scots, beguiled the hours of imprisonment by works of embroidery; for in sending a present of this kind to Sir Andrew Sinclair to be presented to the queen, she thanks him for "vouchsafing to descend to these petty offices to take care even of these womanish toys, for her whose serious mind must invent ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the wanting of them. They looked very womanish. I'm a deal more purpose-like without them. Then I went to a first-class tailor-man and he fit me out with the suit I'm wearing. He said it was 'the correct thing for land or water.' What dost ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... you too a sharer in their womanish fears, Suffolk?" cried Henry. "I thought you had been made of stouter stuff. If there is danger, I shall be the first to encounter it. Come," he added, snatching a torch from an arquebusier. And, drawing his dag, he hurried up the steep steps, while Suffolk followed his example, and three ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... set herself apart from him. Let her ask him to stop and rest, if she wanted to. It would do her pride good to be humbled. Yet in his heart he admired her the more, because she asked no favors of him and forbore the womanish appeal of tears. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... me that she wore a rich black gown with fluffy stuff over it, and a bit of a sparkle in the way of diamonds like a band across her parted hair. The face was deceiving, now lighted up by one of the old smiles, now hard set as one who had suffered much for her years. But there was nothing over-womanish in her talk, and we two thrashed it out there, just the same as if Ken's Island wasn't full of devils, and the lives of me and my men worth what a spin of the coin might buy ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... What taste—what feeling! A mother!—to be so treated! By the time she reached her own sitting-room, Lady Coryston was very near a womanish weeping. She sat silently there awhile, in the falling dusk, forcing back her self-control, making herself think of the next day, the arrival of the Glenwilliams, and how she would need all her ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this fancy, I say, and yet it came back to him; he was even surprised that it had not occurred to him before. Her sisters were neither ugly nor proud (Tishy, indeed, was almost touchingly delicate and timid, with exceedingly pretty points, yet with a little appealing, old-womanish look, as if, small—very small—as she was, she was afraid she shouldn't grow any more); but her mother, like the mother in the fairy-tale, was a femme forte. Madame de Brives could do nothing for Dora, not absolutely because she was too plain, but ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... of a volte face. Until this decision had been made it was the fashion to declare that China was not only not fit to be a Republic but that her final dissolution was only a matter of time. Though the empire disappeared because it had become an impossible rule in the modern world—being womanish, corrupt, and mediaeval—to the foreign mind the empire remained the acme of Chinese civilization; and to kill it meant to lop off the head of the Chinese giant and to leave lying on the ground nothing but a corpse. It was in vain to insist that this simile was wrong and ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... almost translucent with the light divine des tous deux within. For ottomans you could have piles of Scott, Moore, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; and for food and drink, you could have stringed instruments, and easel, palette, and brush. How contemptible are womanish tastes in a man!" Again he waited vainly for a reply. The pallid fingers of Althea were pulling in pieces a half-faded flower, upon which her lustrous eyes were ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... proceedings of justice, were very frequent during the witch-trials. How would it rejoice me if, upon contemplating this present age, I could exclaim with my whole heart, "What progression—infinite progression—in manners and humanity!" But, alas! our modern laws, with their womanish feebleness, and sentimental whimperings, sin quite as much against a lofty and noble justice as those of earlier times by their tyrannical and cannibal ferocity. And yet now, as then, conscience is appealed to as the excuse for all. O conscience, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... to practise obedience. In what manner? you will say. Why, as a master has over his slave, a general over his army, a father over his son. If that part of the soul which I have called soft behaves disgracefully, if it gives itself up to lamentations and womanish tears, then let it be restrained, and committed to the care of friends and relations, for we often see those persons brought to order by shame whom no reasons can influence. Therefore, we should confine those feelings, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... desire to punish the wrong-doer should be the measure of our unwillingness to inflict torture on the helpless and the innocent. "Lest we grow hard"—it should be our daily dread. "A black character, a womanish character, a stubborn character: bestial, childish, stupid, scurrilous, tyrannical." A pagan, who had observed such a character in its working, prayed to be preserved from it. Christians of the twentieth century must not sink below the moral ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... To mock the meekness of an injured king. [To Qu. M. Why did not you, who gave me part of life, Infuse my father stronger in my veins? But when you kept me cooped within your womb, You palled his generous blood with the dull mixture Of your Italian food, and milked slow arts Of womanish tameness in my infant mouth. Why stood I stupid else, and missed a blow, Which heaven and ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... seemed to be borne in upon him that womanish whims needed delicate handling. And why not yield this once? It would please her. And he could have ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... she died," Mrs. Hunt's voice dropped, "and you can believe, Maria Otway, that if I had it to do over again, the purple frock would have gone in the fire before she should ever have worn it. Poor little darling, the girls made fun of it because it was so ugly and old-womanish. I could have spared her feelings and I didn't. I have that purple frock now," she went on. "I kept it to remind me not to hurt the feelings of one of His little ones when there was no need to." The tears were running down Mrs. Hunt's cheeks ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard
... would go into the air outside. It is possible that some intelligence might have seen in this priest a caricature of his profession, a figure to be copied for the curate of burlesque, so accurately did he reproduce the common signs of the ascetic school. His face would have been womanish in its plainness but for the gravity that had grown upon it, only occasionally dispersed by a smile of scholarliness and sweetness which had the effect of being permitted, conceded. He had the long thin nose which looked as if, for preference, it would be for ever thrust among the pages of the ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... unimaginative nature of his understanding, and because he was not subject to prejudices or illusions of any kind. Words may be said to "bear a charmed life, that must not yield to one of woman born"—with womanish weaknesses and confused apprehensions. But this charm was broken in the case of Mr. Tooke, whose mind was the reverse of effeminate—hard, unbending, concrete, physical, half-savage—and who saw language stripped of the clothing of habit or sentiment, or the disguises of ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... is a miserable trade? A womanish sort of business? You sit twiddling your pen, your nerves so a-stretch that if a door bangs the mood shuts down on you for the day. And there's that fellow across the road swinging away with his axe among the trees just as he has been ever since breakfast. ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... room, he flung himself down with a groan. He hated the womanish sensibility which made him suffer so acutely from the grotesque chances of life. He had known when he married that his wife's former husbands were both living, and that amid the multiplied contacts of modern existence there were a thousand chances to one ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... gaiety, with youth and beauty revived in the sunshine of restored fortune, I could but remember all he was, in dignity and manly affection, proud and pure as King Arthur in the old romance, and all she cost him by womanish tyrannies and prejudices, and difficult commands laid upon him at a juncture ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... that they appeared to apply so specially to Sah-luma,— and the idea that any evil fate was in store for the bright, beautiful creature, whom he had, oddly enough, learned to love more than himself, moved him to an almost womanish apprehension. In case of pressing necessity, could he exercise any authority over the capricious movements of the wilful Laureate, whose egotism was so absolute, whose imperious ways were so charming, whose commands were ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... upon their helmets? Under my shield thou hast fought as securely As the young eaglet covered with the wings Of her fierce dam, learns how and where to prey. All that is manly in thee I call mine; But what is weak and womanish, thine own. And what I gave, since thou art proud, ungrateful, Presuming to contend with him to whom Submission is due, I will take from thee. Look therefore for extremities and expect not I will correct thee as a son, but kill thee As a serpent swollen ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... this! what a day is this!" said the poor mother, her womanish affliction already exhausted by sobs and tears, and now almost lost in terror for the state in which she beheld her husband"O, what an hour is this! and naebody to help a poor lone womanO, gudemither, could ye but speak a word to him!wad ye but ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... same want of comprehension, I may call it, in reference to propriety of conduct. A certain nobleness, and freedom from all that was petty and cold, kept her from coquetry. At the same time she had a womanish vanity about her admirers, and entire freedom in speaking of them. In vain I endeavored to insinuate the unpleasant truth, that the fervency of her adorers was no compliment to her. She could not understand that she ought to shrink from the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... other good, they say, can it do to ourselves, and then to our neighbour can it do none at all. And therefore they condemn it for superstitious folly. Now, heaviness of heart and weeping for our sins, this they reckon shame almost, and womanish childishness—howbeit, God be thanked, their women wax there now so mannish that they are not so childish, nor so poor of spirit, but what they can sin on as men do and be neither afraid nor ashamed nor weep for their ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... do take possession of my bosome. Reade heere yong Arthur. How now foolish rheume? Turning dispitious torture out of doore? I must be breefe, least resolution drop Out at mine eyes, in tender womanish teares. Can you not reade it? Is it not faire writ? Ar. Too fairely Hubert, for so foule effect, Must you with hot Irons, burne out both mine eyes? ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... painful labour through the stifling days, which did not show a gleam. Stupid, vacant, vicious, morose, pretty, sparkling, whatever the face might be, there was that expectation to redeem or enhance it, to make it human, to make it womanish. There was, or there would be, some day, any day, a lover outside—to whom it would be the ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... that toyed carelessly with the fob of his watch flashed a diamond; another sparkled in his cravat. His dark hair was sleek and well brushed; his bristly little moustache was clipped in the latest fashion. He was not large. His hands, as he made a gesture toward Quade, were of womanish whiteness. Casually, on the street or in a Pullman, Aldous would have taken him for a gentleman. Now, as he stared through the narrow slit between the bottom of the curtain and the sill, he knew that he was looking ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... handsome ruffian was more likely to rob a man of gold than accept it as a gift from him. Then involuntarily, his thoughts reverted to the "kiddie." He recalled the look in Tom's wild eyes, and the almost womanish tremble of tenderness in his rough voice, when he had spoken of this little child of his on whom he openly admitted he had set ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... think or to make inquiries, drew such a delightful picture of Minon-Minette that Grimace determined to spare no pains to bring about the marriage, and accordingly Fluet was presented at court. But though the young man was pleasant and handsome, the princess thought him rather womanish in some ways, and displayed her opinion so openly as to draw upon herself and Aveline the anger of the fairy, who declared that Minon-Minette should never know happiness till she had found a bridge ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... doubt. Of course we who are practical men of the world know very well that all this foolish feeling on Ernest Le Breton's part was very womanish and weak and overwrought; that he ought to have done the work that was set before him, asking no questions for conscience' sake; and that he might honestly have pocketed the three guineas, letting his supposed duty to a few ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... the contrary Party. I am obliged to conceal all I know of Tom the Bounteous, who lends at the ordinary Interest, to give Men of less Fortune Opportunities of making greater Advantages. He conceals, under a rough Air and distant Behaviour, a bleeding Compassion and womanish Tenderness. This is governed by the most exact Circumspection, that there is no Industry wanting in the Person whom he is to serve, and that he is guilty of no improper Expences. This I know of Tom, but who dare ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Emperor's battalions, with the addition of a tartan kilt, which she told me she had adopted from a picture representing a highlander, as the most feminine military dress. What would the Gordons and MacDonalds say to this? The "garb of old Gaul," chosen as a womanish attire!—Her father is a Portuguese, named Gonsalvez de Almeida, and possesses a farm on the Rio do Pex, in the parish of San Jose, in the Certa[)o], about forty leagues inland from Cachoeira. Her mother was also a Portuguese; yet the young woman's features, especially her eyes and forehead, have ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... note, and now I am wondering to myself whether you will think me very childish or womanish, or silly enough to be both together (I know your thoughts upon certain parallel subjects), if I go on to do my begging fully. I hear that you are going to Mr. Wordsworth's—to Rydal Mount—and I want you to ask for yourself, and then to send to me in a letter—by ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... happened in the case of Sophronia; on the contrary, 'twas in proper form, and in meet and seemly sort, that Gisippus gave her to Titus. And others, peradventure, will say that 'twas by one to whom such office belonged not that she was bestowed in marriage. Nay, but this is but vain and womanish querulousness, and comes of scant consideration. Know we not, then, that Fortune varies according to circumstances her methods and her means of disposing events to their predetermined ends? What matters it to me, if it be a cobbler, rather than a philosopher, that Fortune has ordained ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... with a forced smile, "she may have had a womanish feeling of revenge, knowing that Wallingford and myself had—well, both paid a good deal of attention to Mrs. Saumarez. But there were other reasons—Mrs. Mallett has few friends in the town; I was her medical attendant, and she and Wallingford frequently met each other on one or two committees—Mrs. ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... a woman's religion, invented by women and womanish men for themselves. The Church's one foundation is not Christ, as is commonly said, it is woman; and calling the Madonna the Queen of Heaven is only a poetical way of acknowledging that women are the ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... whereof sunk into my heart, so as to do it. For she wished, and I remember in private with great anxiety warned me, "not to commit fornication; but especially never to defile another man's wife." These seemed to me womanish advices, which I should blush to obey. But they were Thine, and I knew it not: and I thought Thou wert silent and that it was she who spake; by whom Thou wert not silent unto me; and in her wast despised by me, her son, the son of Thy handmaid, Thy servant. But I knew it ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... Macbeth evidently is to wish that no womanish tenderness, or conscientious remorse, may hinder her purpose from proceeding to effect; but neither this, nor indeed any other sense, is expressed by the present reading, and, therefore, it cannot be doubted that ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... her face, and saw that her resolution was the fruit of no transient womanish enthusiasm which would give way under the iron hand of difficulty. Her beautiful features, naturally statuesque in their noble outlines, seemed transformed into marble by the rigidity of her expression. The face in which he looked was the face of a woman ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... doing without sleep altogether. It would be well if professors of philosophy refrained from giving currency to a notion which is attended by practical results of a pernicious character; but then this is just what professorial philosophy does, in its old-womanish endeavor to keep on good terms with the catechism. A man should accustom himself to view his intellectual capacities in no other light than that of physiological functions, and to manage them accordingly—nursing or exercising them as the case may be; remembering ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... that he had his weak points; but in speaking of these, I must not be understood as referring to his obstinacy: which was one of his strong points—"assurement ce n' etait pas sa foible." When I mention his weakness I have allusion to a bizarre old-womanish superstition which beset him. He was great in dreams, portents, et id genus omne of rigmarole. He was excessively punctilious, too, upon small points of honor, and, after his own fashion, was a man of his word, beyond doubt. This was, in fact, one ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... it be who it is; for Romans now 80 Have thews and limbs like to their ancestors; But, woe the while! our fathers' minds are dead, And we are govern'd with our mothers' spirits; Our yoke and sufferance show us womanish. ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... may fall down and worship? We glory in our shame, in our swelling hearts, in our eyes heavy with tears. We want sympathy at all costs; we run about showing our bleeding vitals, asking one another whether they are not indeed a horrible sight. Englishmen now are proud of being womanish, and nothing is more manly than to weep. To be a man of feeling is better than to be a gentleman—it is certainly much easier. The halt of mind, the maim, the blind of wit, have come by their own; and the poor in ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... preacher holding his own like a stone wall before all the assaults, light, brilliant, and varied, of the accomplished secretary, whose smile of contempt at the unconquerable personage before him and his "devout imaginations" is often mingled with that same exasperation which drove Mary to the womanish refuge of tears. But no one could move him. And at last the day, or rather night, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... once said to her, for she and Cedric often called her grannie, probably from her careful, loving, old-womanish ways, "do you suppose such a rara avis exists in Earlsfield or Rotherwood? Let me see," ticking off each qualification on her fingers, "young Mrs. Cedric Templeton must be pretty—oh, very pretty; fair, because Cedric has a fancy for fair ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... who had been so brave in the great battle of her love became weak and womanish in the moment of her victory. Under the warmth of his tenderness she dropped her head on to his breast to conceal her face ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... a brother under my command Like her, a face as womanish as hers, But with a spirit that hath much out-grown The number of ...
— The Maids Tragedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... Hurry," he said; "and we can leave the children in his care. Now, my idea is just this; and I think you'll agree that it is rational and correct. There's a large party of these savages on shore and, though I didn't tell it before the girls, for they're womanish, and apt to be troublesome when anything like real work is to be done, there's women among 'em. This I know from moccasin prints; and 't is likely they are hunters, after all, who have been out so long that they know nothing of the war, or ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... Hold thy desperate hand: Art thou a man? thy forme cries out thou art: Thy teares are womanish, thy wild acts denote The vnreasonable Furie of a beast. Vnseemely woman, in a seeming man, And ill beseeming beast in seeming both, Thou hast amaz'd me. By my holy order, I thought thy disposition better temper'd. Hast thou slaine Tybalt? ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... come and see me again, she promised, and then I shall talk with her more. I couldn't get at her through the people yesterday. She is very nice, gentle-looking, cheerful, respectable sort of—single-womanish person (decidedly single) of the olden type; very small, slim, quiet, with the nearest approach to a poky bonnet possible in this sinful generation. I, in my confusion, did not glance at her petticoats, but, judging a ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... collapse in which Weldon had struggled back into camp. The battle, the half-dressed wounds, the nerve-racking journey, the watching the slow approach of death and the accepting the fact of the loss of a valued friend: all these were enough to wreck the vitality of a man. With an almost womanish tenderness, Carew had brought his friend back to the tent, and made him over to the care of Paddy who gave up all things else, for the sake of his little Canuck. All that afternoon and night, Weldon lay passive, inert, while Paddy bathed ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... sir, it would only be womanish vanity in me to pretend to be cold and scornful. No! Never! You deserve to find me as sincere as yourself. I do love you still, Tellheim, I ...
— Minna von Barnhelm • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... say again," replied the governess, "that you do not look at the whole of the case. You have given me a home, when it is no easy matter for such as I am to earn one, with my old-womanish ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... me short, peevishly enough,—being naturally a poor, weak, womanish sort of man. "Yes, yes, I know," says he. "You have come to tell me that your wonderfully clever man, who has bored holes in my second-floor partition, has made a mistake, and is off the scent of the scoundrel who ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... vanished, clean vanished from my heart!... That man is so fickle a being!" What was said of Werther as the counterpart of Goethe applies, of course, equally in the case of Clavigo. Goethe was not at any moment the feeble creature we have in Clavigo, yet in Clavigo's inconstancy and ambition, in his womanish susceptibility and the need of his nature for external stimulus and counsel, we have a portrayal of Goethe of which every trait holds true at all periods of his life. In the Maries of Goetz and Clavigo, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... passed. Breathless minutes of pulsing excitement for the woman who knew only monotony and the drudgery of an outland life. No womanish fears could deter her. She believed and hoped she was on the eve of a great discovery, and such was her reckless desire that nothing could ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... drawn his dagger while he was speaking, and before he had finished it was dangerously near Zorzi's throat. Contarini retired a step as if not daring to defend the prisoner, whose assailant, in spite of his careless and almost womanish tone, was clearly a man of action. Zorzi looked fearlessly into the eyes that peered at him through the ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... abused man of the party, because he has old-womanish ways with him, yet in his old-womanish ways he is disposed to do the best he can for me, though he will not carry a pound in weight without groaning terribly at his hard fate. To me he is sentimental and pathetic; to the unimportant members of the caravan he is stern and uncompromising. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... passive Valour, and can show, } Wou'd Custom give us leave, the active too, } Since we no Provocations want from you. } For who but we cou'd your dull Fopperies bear, Your saucy Love, and your brisk Nonsense hear; Indure your worse than womanish Affectation, Which renders you the Nusance of the Nation; Scorn'd even by all the Misses of the Town, A Jest to Vizard Mask, the Pit-Buffoon; A Glass by which the admiring Country Fool May learn to dress himself ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... jeweller is showing his rubies and cat's-eyes to a party of Eurasian, or half-caste clerks, that are taking advantage of their master's absence from the godown to come out into the court to smoke a Manila cigarette and gossip. The mottled tortoise-shell comb in the vender's black hair, and his womanish draperies, give ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... little retreat reminded him of Madeleine! For a moment he was overpowered, and dropped into a chair, covering his eyes with his hands; perhaps because he could not bear the sight of objects which called up such agonizing recollections; perhaps because his eyes were dim with too womanish a moisture. ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... age, in whom Adrian instantly recognised Walter de Montreal. This celebrated knight was scarcely of the personal appearance which might have corresponded with the terror his name generally excited. His face was handsome, almost to the extreme of womanish delicacy. His fair hair waved long and freely over a white and unwrinkled forehead: the life of a camp and the suns of Italy had but little embrowned his clear and healthful complexion, which retained much of the ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Her face was crimson by this with maidenly shame; but she made no effort to hide or avert it. For the good of humanity, this question must be settled once for all; and no womanish reserve should make her shrink from settling it. Happier maidens in ages to come, when society had reconstructed itself on the broad basis of freedom, would never have to go through what she was going through that moment. They would be spared the quivering ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... the origin of the war with the Amazons; and it seems to have been carried on in no feeble or womanish spirit, for they never could have encamped in the city nor have fought a battle close to the Pnyx and the Museum unless they had conquered the rest of the country, so as to be able to approach the city safely. It is hard to believe, as Hellanikus relates, that they crossed ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... broad streets, but far away from either road or path, on the rocky slopes of Libanus. It was dedicated to a shameful goddess, the goddess Aphrodite. A school of wickedness was this place for all such profligate persons as had ruined their bodies by excessive luxury. The men there were soft and womanish—men no longer; the dignity of their sex they rejected; with impure lust they thought to honour the deity. Criminal intercourse with women, secret pollutions, disgraceful and nameless deeds, were practised in the temple, where ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... satisfaction from the conversation of a man who had spent ten years of his life in the hulks than from that of my own father. Then this Indian Colonel had taken my fancy, and it had made him sick to see the womanish—he could call it no better, the weak-womanish—way in which I worshipped him. If I were a daughter instead of a son, my caprices would distress and astonish him less. He could have sent me to my mother, and my mother might ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... various districts. But the largest part of them chose the metropolitan city of Angers for their university instruction. Thus, then, withdrawing from the City of Paris, the nurse of Philosophy and the foster mother of Wisdom, the clerks execrated the Roman Legate and cursed the womanish arrogance of the Queen, nay, also, their ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... the general surprise was great; and no man was more amazed than Barillon, who had resided in England during two bloody proscriptions, and had seen numerous victims, both of the Opposition and of the Court, submit to their fate without womanish entreaties and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... while at a distance, had no sooner attained the possession of power and enjoyment of peace, than all the vigour of his mind relaxed, and he fell into contempt among those who approached his person, or were subjected to his authority. Alternately abandoned to dissolute pleasures and to womanish superstition, he was so remiss, both in the care of his treasure and the exercise of his government, that his servants pillaged his money with impunity, stole from him his very clothes, and proceeded thence to practise every species of extortion ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... stand things that scuttle and slither and crawl," said Ives. His voice was suddenly womanish. "Don't let ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... not believe he is a Jew?" said le Bourdon, smiling; willing to commence a discourse, though still determined not to betray a womanish curiosity. ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... by my brother Alfred, now a handsome, self-confident man of six-and-twenty—a thorough contrast to my fragile, nervous, ineffectual self. I believe I was held to have a sort of half- womanish, half-ghostly beauty; for the portrait-painters, who are thick as weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them, and I had been the model of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture. But I thoroughly disliked ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... sound lackadaisical. What I call womanish. But perhaps it's for the better. We have such a lot of Jacks. There's dirty Jack, and Jack the nigger, and Jack Misery,—that's poor Jack Brien;—and a lot more. Perhaps you wouldn't like not another name ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... women, this is one, that it hath given to women thicker and longer hair than to men, that it might be as a veil, to adorn and cover them. The reason whereof nature hath hid in the complexion of a woman, which is more humid than the complexion of a man; so that, if a man should take him to this womanish ornament, he should but against nature transform himself (in so ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... "You are very womanish. If the whole affair were coolly examined and discussed, I feel assured it would turn out that there is no danger ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... although the soft-voiced man with the small, womanish hands spoke to him often, and always kindly. Jim never forgot that he had called him friend. The memory of it stayed with him, like the kiss of a first love that lingers long after love is dead. Most of the men ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... cats—the soft, fattish kind, without any manlike qualities, that seemed to be by far the greater proportion of all the men one saw about in buses and in the streets and met in business; tabby cats—sloppy, old-womanish creatures. Cheshire cats—the kind that grinned out of vacuous minds and that never could speak to a woman without grinning; the unattached men at the boarding house invariably were of the Cheshire-cat cats. ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... observing the scene with displeasure, Looked on the weeping girl, and said in a tone of vexation: "This then must be the return that I get for all my indulgence, That at the close of the day this most irksome of all things should happen! For there is naught I can tolerate less than womanish weeping, Violent outcries, which only involve in disorder and passion, What with a little of sense had been more smoothly adjusted. Settle the thing for yourselves: I'm going to bed; I've no patience ...
— Hermann and Dorothea • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... exhorted every one of them in her own language, filled with courageous spirits; and stirring up her womanish thoughts with a manly stomach, ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... the rest of the party, and no doubt scared the cougar, for his womanish screech was not repeated. Then Jones got up and gatherered ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... assured and steady—she advanced and put her tiny hand in mine. The touch of the soft, uncertain little fingers almost unmanned me. I drew her toward me and lifted her on my knee. Under pretense of kissing her I hid my face for a second or two in her clustering fair curls, while I forced back the womanish tears that involuntarily filled my eyes. My poor little darling! I wonder now how I maintained my set composure before the innocent thoughtfulness of her gravely questioning gaze! I had fancied she might possibly ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Liszt is a Hungarian and the Hungarians are confessedly a completely disorganized, self-outlived, dying people. No less decadent is Chopin, whose figure comes before one as flesh without bones, this morbid, womanly, womanish, slip-slop, powerless, sickly, bleached, sweet-caramel Pole!" This has a ring of Nietzsche—Nietzsche who boasted of ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... the titlark, "I told you that secret. I was with Teague the Smith when he discovered it. . . . But he discovered it too late; and, besides, he was a dreamer, and used it only to make crosses and charms and womanish ornaments." ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... before they surround him, and fortify him against them. Intentionally to expose him to temptation in order to prove his strength, is devilish; and, on the other hand, to guard him against the chance of dangerous temptation, to wrap him in cotton (as the proverb says), is womanish, ridiculous, fruitless, and much more dangerous; for temptation comes not alone from without, but quite as often from within, and secret inclination seeks and creates for itself the opportunity for its gratification, often perhaps an unnatural ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... at all our womanish fears upon the occasion of the storm, telling me it was nothing but what was very ordinary in those seas, but that they had harbours on every coast so near that they were seldom in danger of being lost indeed. "For," says he, "if they cannot fetch one coast, they can always stand away for another, ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... said Thor, the mighty As: "Me the AEsir will call womanish, if I let myself be clad ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... remarkable extent, with all those accompaniments of permanence, fidelity, and mutual service, which are commonly held to belong only to l'union legale, in one or two strata of French society. She was capable of sentiment; she had hidden veins of womanish weakness; but at the same time the little creature's prevailing temper was one of remarkable coolness and audacity. She judged for herself; she had read for herself, observed for herself. Such a temper had ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... vision loomed—exclusively—the figure of a slim and strangely handsome young man, having jet black hair, lustreless, a face of uniform ivory hue, long dark eyes wherein lurked lambent fires, and a womanish grace expressed in his whole bearing and emphasised by his long white hands. Upon a finger of the left hand gleamed ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... to smile. By the standards of his day Jesse did not look like a man at all. He was small and very slender and womanish of body and, true to the traditions of young ministers, wore a long black coat and a narrow black string tie. The neighbors were amused when they saw him, after the years away, and they were even more amused when they saw the woman he had married ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... Dr. Harlowe, the excellent and beloved physician. When I called him by name, as he stood by the bed, counting my languid pulse, the good man turned aside his head to hide the womanish tears that moistened his cheeks. Then looking down on me with a benignant smile, he said, smoothing my hair on my forehead, as if I were ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... had been really a gentleman, with honourable intentions, he would have, ere now, appeared in his own character — I must own, my blood boils with indignation when I think of that fellow's presumption; and Heaven confound me if I don't — But I won't be so womanish as to rail — Time will, perhaps, furnish occasion — Thank God, the cause of Liddy's disorder remains a secret. The lady directress of the ball, thinking she was overcome by the heat of the place, had her conveyed to another room, where she soon recovered so well, as to return and join in ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... spirits. Later, there will be less sparkle in your eye. What! Do not the English wear pajamas? Does not the sex that is bifurcated by day keep by night to its manly bifurcation? Is not each separate leg swathed in complete divorcement from its fellow? Or, womanish, do they rest in the common dormitory of a shirt de nuit? The Englishman does wear pajamas, but the word with him takes on an Icelandic meaning. They are built to the prescription of an Esquimo. They are woolly, fuzzy and ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... womanish weakness. To the jargon of a dozen voices—a jargon that sounded like the yelping and barking of a pack of dogs—she opposed a cold and dignified silence. A dozen hands reached out to touch her, as they would touch something strange and admirable; but she ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... Meeke was, from the first, the very opposite of my mistress's. The restless, rackety, bounceable Mr. James Smith felt a contempt for the weak, womanish, fiddling little parson, and, what was more, did not care to conceal it. For this reason, Mr. Meeke (who was dreadfully frightened by my master's violent language and rough ways) very seldom visited at the Hall except when my mistress was alone there. Meaning no ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... letter in her hand. All pretence of incredulity was gone. She began to walk stormily up and down. Doris sank back in her chair, watching her, conscious of the most strangely mingled feelings, a touch of womanish triumph indeed, a pleasing sense of retribution, but, welling up through it, something profound and tender. If he should ever write such a letter to a stranger, while ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... always too weak to exercise, lies in bed two days out of three, reads and sometimes writes a letter or two. But before Christmas comes (you know she is mighty cunning with her fingers; she can sew and embroider and make all sorts of pretty, womanish things) she works so hard making presents that she's just clear done out for the next two months and won't leave her room for weeks. That's about all she does from one year's end to another, but complain of her sickness, and of late years criticize the ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... been present at many, sir," said I—"some bad enough, too; and, I confess, I have been less womanish and weak beholding them than I felt this morning, witnessing your kindness to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... origin and cause of the Amazonian invasion of Attica, which would seem to have been no slight or womanish enterprise. For it is impossible that they should have placed their camp in the very city, and joined battle close by the Pnyx and the hill called Museum, unless, having first conquered the country round about, they had thus with impunity advanced to the city. That they made so long ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... be ashamed of such old-womanish weakness. Did he not see that his father was only trying to frighten him? For were he in earnest, then were he more cruel even than her own unnatural father, who, though he had only left her two cabins in Zachow, out of ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... believed his marriage to have been an ideally happy one, that he had felt all that man can feel; and he had been inclined to treat as womanish the desperate desolation of men who had after all only suffered the same bereavement as he had himself, and which he had quickly overcome. He saw now that he had missed happiness exactly as his son-in-law was missing it. The same thing had befallen them both. Love could do there no mighty ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... life been able to understand why women were always so absurdly afraid of the doctor's eye. As if the doctor would care! Moreover, the room was being tidied for the doctor, not for the invalid! The invalid didn't matter! When she came to him with a bowl of water, soap, and a towel, he loathed the womanish scheme ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... bullet had clipped a groove in his skull, above the temple; from this the brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings. I had not previously known one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain. One of my men, whom I knew for a womanish fellow, asked if he should put his bayonet through him. Inexpressibly shocked by the cold-blooded proposal, I told him I thought not; it was unusual, and too many ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... the expedition, the less said the better; the Government instructions were vacillating and contradictory; Babbage was slow and apathetic, Warburton pompous and arbitrary; and in the end the affair was further degraded by an old-womanish wrangle between the two explorers as to the ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... although he had sometimes put on women's clothes, and had been wrapt in some embroidered garments to them belonging, and done a great many other things, in order to make the company mistake him for a woman; yet did he, by way of reproach, object the like womanish behavior to Cherea. But when Cherea received the watchword from him, he had indignation at it, but had greater indignation at the delivery of it to others, as being laughed at by those that received it; insomuch that his fellow tribunes made him the subject of their drollery; for they ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... brother and other youths, whose age considerably exceeded his own. They who had hitherto held him in contempt, now feared, if they did not love him; and, instead of Allan's being esteemed a dreaming, womanish, and feeble-minded boy, those who encountered him in sports or military exercise, now complained that, when heated by the strife, he was too apt to turn game into earnest, and to forget that he was only engaged in a friendly trial of strength.—But I speak to regardless ears," said ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... everything about the man was small and out of keeping with his height, his breadth, and his fleshy face: his smiles, his eyes, his buttons, his tiny cap, which would hardly keep on his big, closely-cropped head. When he talked and smiled there was something womanish, timid, and meek about his puffy, shaven face and his ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... stretch of coast round these islands, and Yeo was born to it. He stood up, and his long black hair stirred in the breeze under the broad brim of a grey hat he insists on wearing. The soft hat and his lank hair make him womanish in profile, in spite of a body to which a blue jersey does full justice, and the sea-boots; but when he turns his face to you, with his light eyes and his dark and leathery face, you feel he is strangely masculine and ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... among the Scythians, persons who come into the world as eunuchs, and do all the work of women; they are called Enaraeans, or womanish," &c. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... happened in Sophronia's case; nay, she hath orderly, discreetly and honourably been given by Gisippus to Titus. Others will say that he gave her in marriage to whom it appertained not to do so; but these be all foolish and womanish complaints and proceed from lack of advisement. This is not the first time that fortune hath made use of various means and strange instruments to bring matters to foreordained issues. What have I to care ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... then, as now, it is "the thinking bayonet" which conquers. The English King was slain and every man of his chosen troops with him. A monk who wrote the history of the period of the Conquest, says that "the vices of the Saxons had made them effeminate and womanish, wherefore it came to pass that, running against Duke William, they lost themselves and their country with one, and that an easy and light, battle." Doubtless the English had fallen off in many ways from what hey had been generations earlier; but the record at Hastings shows that ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... and Daughters, either the Danger were so immediate, or the Escape from it so facile as to justify these womanish Clamours, Reason would that I should listen to you. But, since that the Lord is about our Bed, and about our Path, in the Capital no less than in the Country, and knoweth them that are his, and hideth them under the Shadowe of his Wings—and since that, if the Fiat be ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... there still was place for unextinguished desire. When he had thus established a proper regard to modesty and decorum with respect to marriage, he was equally studious to drive from that state the vain and womanish passion of jealousy; by making it quite as reputable to have children in common with persons of merit, as to avoid all offensive freedom in their own behaviour to their wives. He laughed at those who revenge ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... implored, and was laughed down by Charley, who declared she could swim, and that she did not think Uncle Martyn would have been so old-womanish. Metelill was so tender and caressing with her frightened mother that I thought here at last was submission, and with a good grace. But after a turn on the esplanade among the pupils, back came Metelill in a hurry to say, "Dear mother, will you very much MIND if I go? They will be so disappointed, ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... or any of the other womanish adjectives." Eugene pauses, for Marcia comes to meet them and Mr. ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... of residence, and lasting happiness, at least to the self-conscious, comes only from within. Now Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not been overtaken by the tepid wave of feminism, which for the moment is bathing the prosperity-softened culture of America and England. It is a harsh remedy, but both America and England would gain something of virility if they were shot over. We are all apt enough to become womanish, agitated, or acidulous, according to age and condition, when we are reaping in security the fields cleared, enriched, and planted by a hardy ancestry of pioneers. There were no self-conscious peace-makers; no worshippers of those two epicene idols: a God too much ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... orderly to my husband for a very long time. We do not share any of his too-modern ideas, and there were many discussions on the duty of soldiers at the time of the massacres. I reproached him with being as womanish as we were in going down on his knees to the general behind Natacha and me, when it became necessary to kill all those poor moujiks of Presnia. It was not his role. A soldier is a soldier. My husband raised him roughly and ordered him, for his pains, to march at the head of the troops. It was ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... earth's foundations'—'The god's great altar Must be the last far coping of our work'— It should inaugurate the broad main stair'— 'Or end it'—'It must stand toward the East!' But here a grave contemptuous youth cries out 'Womanish babblers, how can we build god's altar Ere we divine its foreordained true shape?' Then one 'It is a pedestal for deeds'— ''Tis more and should be hewn like the king's brow'— 'It has the nature of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... it be this, that I sometimes had the idea in a rough womanish sort of way and then you polished it up till it came out ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... peculiar warmth and feeling his sense of the interest I had taken in his fate. I never felt in a more melancholy mood than when I rode from his solitary prison." This is a good illustration of Irving's tender-heartedness; but considering Burr's whole character, it is altogether a womanish case of misplaced sympathy with the cool slayer ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... was not an unusual act for a warrior to do this on his return from the wars. And if she had been about to renounce her mission it would have been easily comprehensible. But no such thought was in her mind. Was it a movement of despair, was it with some womanish fancy that the arms in which she had suffered defeat should not be borne again?—or was it done in some gleam of higher revelation made to her that defeat, too, was a part of victory, and that not without that bitterness of failure could the fame of the ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... feeble boy; not good at work; womanish in his ways; inclined to go in for petty bullying, until a boy showed fight, when he discovered himself to be an arrant coward. Four or five years later I met him at the university. His greeting was cool. My ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Master Mariner, we will land and proceed to the Lust in Rust, which must be the place meant in the verses. 'What's yet behind,' must be Alida, the tormenting baggage! who has been playing hide-and-seek with us, for no other reason than to satisfy her womanish vanity, by showing how uncomfortable she could make three grave and responsible men. Let the boat go, Master Tiller, since that is thy name; and many ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... Mr Georgie, never Pillson to the whole of Riseholme) was not an obtrusively masculine sort of person. Such masculinity as he was possessed of was boyish rather than adult, and the most important ingredients in his nature were womanish. He had, in common with the rest of Riseholme, strong artistic tastes, and in addition to playing the piano, made charming little water-colour sketches, many of which he framed at his own expense and gave to friends, with slightly sentimental ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... is brought prominently before us, that superstition's chief victims are those persons who greedily covet temporal advantages; they it is, who (especially when they are in danger, and cannot help themselves) are wont with prayers and womanish tears to implore help from God: upbraiding reason as blind, because she cannot show a sure path to the shadows they pursue, and rejecting human wisdom as vain; but believing the phantoms of imagination, dreams, and other childish ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... boys at work down there on the new church," he went on. His handsome boyish face was flushing. The delicate, smooth, whiskerless skin was almost womanish in its texture, and betrayed almost every emotion stirring behind it. "Allan Dy came along with my mail. When I'd read it I felt I had to come and tell you the news right away. You see, I had to tell someone, and wanted you—two to be the first ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... home—at least, so said young Mr. Robins, the rich yeoman's son, who sighed in vain for her good graces. He was a domestic man, much given to superintending himself, duties which were looked upon as women's gear—"A womanish man," ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... to betray a womanish fear that he might be getting influenza, as she knew that nothing would annoy him so much as ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... who cannot conceive of a man taking trouble unless he gets paid for it somehow, and will fight and kill, all in the way of business, without the least spark of enthusiasm for a cause. Hard stolidity and brutal carelessness shielded him from any 'womanish' tenderness. Absalom was dead, and he had killed him. It was a good thing, for it had put out the fire of revolt. No doubt David would be sorry, but that mattered little. Only it was better for the message to go by some one whose fate was of no consequence. So he ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Turning dispiteous torture out of door! I must be brief; lest resolution drop Out at mine eyes, in tender womanish tears. Can you not read it? ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... Kings motion, and we shall not seeme To worst eies womanish, though we change thus soone Never so great grudge for his ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... "Oh, in a silly, womanish sort of way. Of course she is a wonderful manager; she rules the house with a rod of iron. But really I haven't anything to do here, and I feel frightfully out of place sometimes. Then the Colonel—Oh, but what am I ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... despairing lamentations over those beloved ones at home, with sobs, groans, and tears, such as Philip could not brook to witness. Both because they were so violent and mourn-full, and because he thought them womanish, though in effect no woman's grief could have had half that despairing force. The fierte of the French noble, however, came to his aid. At the first sound of the great supper-bell he dashed away his tears, composed his features, washed his face, and demanded haughtily ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... genius in his children which might designate one of the various paths to wealth and fame, by which it would be most easy for the individual to ascend. Now it did occur that when Nicholas was yet in womanish attire, he showed a great partiality to a burning-glass, with which he contrived to do much mischief. He would burn the dog's nose as he slept in the sun before the door. His mother's gown showed ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... him to be the object of a murderous conspiracy, and loathed most thoroughly the vulgar rogue who was his treacherous enemy. But Captain Kettle scouts the idea that he was stirred by any such feeble, womanish motives. Kettle was a poet himself, and with the kinship of species he felt the poetic fire glowing out from the person of this Mr. Hamilton. At least, so he says; and if he has deceived himself on the matter, which, from an outsider's point of view, ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... found expression in Wackenroder's "Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders"; and in Tieck's novel, "Sternbald's Wanderungen," in which he accompanies a pupil of Duerer to Rome. Wackenroder, like Tieck's other friend, Novalis, was of a consumptive, emotional, and somewhat womanish constitution of mind and body, and died young. Tieck edited his remains, including letters on old German art. The standard editions of their joint writings are illustrated by engravings after Duerer, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... bathed his head and given him some slight restorative, had said something to him soothingly, and had left him. Jeff wondered if he had fainted, or was about to faint,—he had a nervous dread of that womanish weakness,—or if he were really hurt worse than he believed. He tried to master himself and grasp the situation by minutely examining the room. It was luxuriously furnished; Jeff had but once before ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte |
