"Idiosyncrasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shudder, which could produce the tender, persuasive, manly, but fascinating voice which had aroused Jasper's ready compassion and had secured Freya's sympathy! Who could ever have supposed such an end in store for the impossible, gentle Schultz, with his idiosyncrasy of naive pilfering, so absurdly straightforward that, even in the people who had suffered from it, it aroused nothing more than a sort of amused exasperation? He was really impossible. His lot evidently ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... eye produces the appearance of a corresponding defect in every object toward which it is turned. This defect in character is more generally the result of vicious or improper habits of mind, than any constitutional idiosyncrasy. It is the result of the indulgence of gloomy thoughts, morbid fancies, inordinate ambition, habitual melancholy, a complaining, fault-finding disposition. It is generally early acquired, not in childhood, but in youth. ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... impulses, inexplicable pains and diseases. And not only have we to remember that we are dealing with disharmonies that may at the very best be only patched together, but we are dealing with matters in which the element of idiosyncrasy is essential, insisting upon an incalculable flexibility in any rule we make, unless we are to take types and indeed whole classes of personality and write them down as absolutely bad and fit only for suppression and restraint. ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... interrogate him, his conception of and attitude towards the Unseen. He wore his religion as Sir William Gull wore the fur of his coat, INSIDE. Outwardly he died as he had lived, a Stoic; that on the most personal and sacred of all topics he should consult the Silences was in keeping with his idiosyncrasy. Another famous man, questioned as to his religious creed, made answer that he believed what all wise men believe. And what do all wise men believe? "That all ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... tendency to brood on horrors was no result of calculation. It belonged to his idiosyncrasy. He seems to have been suckled from birth at the breast of that Mater Tenebrarum, our Lady of Darkness, whom De Quincey in one of his 'Suspiria de Profundis' describes among the Semnai Theai, the august goddesses, the mysterious foster-nurses of suffering ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... characterised by borrowed expressions. So much of linguistic difference as actually remains is sufficiently accounted for by the difference of subject: first come laws in a dry matter-of-fact style, then prophecy in a poetical pathetic style. The idiosyncrasy of the writer has no scope in the former case, from the nature of the materials, some of which had already assumed their form before he made use of them. In the latter case he can express himself freely; and it is fair that this should ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... sight-seers, she falls into the following vein of well-rounded remark: "Truth can only be pure objectively, for even in the creeds where it predominates, being subjective, and parcelled out into portions, each of these necessarily receives a hue of idiosyncrasy, that is, a taint of superstition more or less strong; while in such creeds as the Roman Catholic, ignorance, interest, the basis of ancient idolatries, and the force of authority, have gradually accumulated ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... sourer soil, centuries of unequal yet not inglorious conflict, a separate race of kings, a body of separate traditions, and a peculiar crisis of reformation issuing in peculiar forms of religious worship, confirmed and strengthened the national idiosyncrasy. If a difference between the races be allowed, it is sufficient for the present purpose. That allowed, and Scot and Southern being fecund in literary genius, it becomes an interesting inquiry to what ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... side for the observer to study, another item for him to note. It came back, this latter personage knew, to his own previous perception—that of the Prince's inability, in any matter in which he was concerned, to CONCLUDE. The idiosyncrasy, for him, at each stage, had to be demonstrated—on which, however, he admirably accepted it. This last was, after all, the point; he really worked, poor young man, for acceptance, since he worked so constantly for comprehension. And how, when ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... for a week—for two weeks—for three weeks. At the end of that time my friends had grown accustomed to this idiosyncrasy and were making bets on how long I would last. I didn't go round where they were much. I was as lonesome as a stray dog in a strange alley. I had carefully cultivated a large line of drinking acquaintances and I hardly knew a congenial person who ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... domestic circle, they look outside for inspiring intercourse and thrilling attachments, and for calls to lofty sacrifice and delight. This is too often the case. Identity of inheritance and situation, sameness of idiosyncrasy, and habitude of union, squeeze poppies into the household cup, and clothe in dull gray the familiar landscape around; and yet, happily, in numerous instances it is not so. The confidential intimacies, the incessant dependencies, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... in the superior quality of the claret. The Doctor's wine was admirable, and it may be communicated to the reader that while he sipped it Morris reflected that a cellar-full of good liquor—there was evidently a cellar-full here—would be a most attractive idiosyncrasy in a father-in-law. The Doctor was struck with his appreciative guest; he saw that he was not a commonplace young man. "He has ability," said Catherine's father, "decided ability; he has a very good head if he chooses to use it. And he is uncommonly well turned ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... peculiar idiosyncrasy in the matter forbids me to do so. I do acknowledge that Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, Pecksniff, and others have become household words in every house, as though they were human beings; but to my judgment they are not human beings, nor are any ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... Voltaire, of Alfieri, of Goethe, of those dramatists, in many forms, and with genius the most diverse, who have so steadily set themselves to idealize the great types of public life and of the phases of human history. Let us all beware lest worship of the idiosyncrasy of our peerless Shakespeare blind us to the value of the great masters who in a different world and with different aims have presented the development of civilization in a series of dramas, where the unity of a few great types of man ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... buttons entire, and one of that metallic sort which is used in the less conspicuous sutures of the human Oeconomy. These remains have been accepted by persons in authority as conclusive of a destroyed and scattered Skinner, but for my own entire conviction, and in view of his distinctive idiosyncrasy, I must confess I should prefer fewer buttons and ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... fundamental wisdom, springing from the very roots of life. And he submitted. At intervals he would say resentfully: "But surely she could find five minutes each day to drop me a line! What's five minutes?" But he submitted. Submission was made easier when he co-ordinated with Hilda's idiosyncrasy the fact that Maggie, his own unromantic sister, could never begin to write a letter with less than from twelve to twenty-four hours' bracing of herself to the task. Maggie would be saying and saying: "I really must write that letter... Dear me! ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... understand any conception of a German philosopher; but, so far as we can make it out, the Kindergarten appears to be based on the idea of formulating the child's physical as thoroughly as his intellectual training, and at the same time closely consulting his idiosyncrasy in the application of both. His natural disposition and endowments are to be sedulously watched, and guided or wholly repressed as the case may demand. The budding artist is supplied with pencil, the nascent musician with trumpet or tuning-fork, the florist with tiny hoe and trowel, and so ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... passage, have nothing to do with the general statements in the book. They occur with reference only to my own idiosyncrasy. I was much surprised when I found first how individual it was, by a Pre-Raphaelite painter's declaring a piece of unwholesome reedy fen to be ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... a time when Alice overlooked this idiosyncrasy upon my part; that was before I achieved what Alice terms a national reputation by my discovery of a satellite to the star Gamma in the tail of the constellation Leo. Alice does not stop to consider that our neighbors have never read the royal octavo volume I wrote upon the subject of that discovery; ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... into the civil and social and domestic life of London? Would the Mauritian gospel of human brotherhood and social service—in short, the programme of the Christian Social Union—win the workers to the side of orthodoxy? These questions were answered according to the idiosyncrasy or bias of those to whom they were addressed, and they were not settled when, twenty-seven years later, Holland returned from St. Paul's to Oxford. Indeed, several answers were possible. On one point only there was an absolute agreement among those who knew, and this was that ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... 'formed their style,' by the imitation of accepted models, and who have, therefore, possessed it only by right of appropriation. Boswell has a discussion as to the writers who may have served Johnson in this capacity. But, in fact, Johnson, like all other men of strong idiosyncrasy, formed his style as he formed his legs. The peculiarities of his limbs were in some degree the result of conscious efforts in walking, swimming, and 'buffeting with his books.' This development was doubtless ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... technical difficulty. Turner of Oxford was a water-color painter. I had learned water-color with two masters, but had never liked it or felt the slightest impulse to continue it. One man is naturally constituted for one process, another for another. There is something in my idiosyncrasy repugnant to the practice of water-color and favorable to oil, and this in spite of the greater convenience of water-color, and the facility with which it may be left off and instantaneously resumed. In after-life I learned water-color a third time with a very able artist, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Adventure—for the obvious reason that their tastes and experiences are opposed to success—they had no difficulty in abandoning a decaying school, and in throwing all their freshness of mind and subtlety of observation into the department which precisely suited their idiosyncrasy. The spread of education among female readers and writers has undoubtedly aided them. And thus the rise of feminine novelists has operated as a formidable contingent of fresh troops that has joined the camp of Manners, to which ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... and fervour of belief in his creed to redeem him from the charge of absolute dulness. An abler thinker was Colonel (Robert) Torrens (1780-1864).[352] He had served with distinction in the war; but retired on half-pay, and was drawn by some natural idiosyncrasy into the dry paths of economic discussion. He was already confuting the French economists in 1808; and was writing upon the Bank-charter Act and the Ten Hours' Bill in 1844. Torrens held himself, apparently with justice, to be rather an independent ally than a disciple of Ricardo. His chief works ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... are two things I always avoid in my dress—possibly an idiosyncrasy of my bachelor existence. These tabooed articles are red neckties and tan shoes. And not only were the shoes the porter lifted from the floor of a gorgeous shade of yellow, but the scarf which was run through the turned over ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... plans, disappointed hopes, and humbled pride—we find her with a mind strengthened by good purposes, holy aspirations, and prayers for humility. Still, we left her and find her Winifred Gwynne. She has not lost her idiosyncrasy. ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... confined within narrow limits, and not easily perceived at a glance. The difference between blank verse in the hands of its few masters and in the hands of a third-rate imitator strikes the ear in every line. Far more is left to the individual idiosyncrasy. But it does not at all follow, and in fact it is quite untrue that the distinction which turns on an apparently insignificant element is therefore unimportant. The value of all good work ultimately depends on touches so fine as to elude the sight. And the ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... are said to be more predisposed toward "running amok" than any other Malayan people. Having been warned of this unpleasant idiosyncrasy, I took the precaution, when among them, of carrying in the right-hand pocket of my jacket a service automatic, loaded and ready for instant action. For when a Bugi runs amok he will almost certainly ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... get a comprehensive and general view, makes this an estimate of its humanity, as accurate as it is possible, under the circumstances, to that particular spirit. The soul here separates itself from its own idiosyncrasy, or individuality, and considers its own being, not as appertaining solely to itself, but as a portion of the universal Ego. All important good resolutions of character are brought about at these crises ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... et severe' of the mediaeval Bargello, with the open, airy brightness of the Doge's Palace, or the glorious Byzantine gold-and-blue of St. Mark's at Venice, and you get at once an admirable measure of this persistent trait in the Etruscan idiosyncrasy. Tuscan architecture is massive and morose where Venetian architecture ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... "There are four million Murnans, friendly people who consider a white skin no more than a personal idiosyncrasy. Aaron's what his folks call a Chentelmaan, ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... Negro is confident that he will take himself with all his peculiarities to the land of promise. Each physical feature and habitual idiosyncrasy will abide in his redeemed personality. Old Joe will be there in person with the wrinkle crossing the bridge of his nose and little stephen will wear his wool pulled back from his eyes and each will recognize his fellow man. "What fools we all ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... fact of the late Mr. Hamerton having made his first French home here. In the memoir of her husband, affixed to his autobiography, Mrs. Hamerton gives us particulars, not only of individual, but of super-personal interest. I use the last expression because the idiosyncrasy described is common to most men and women of genius or exceptional talent. The charming essayist then, the art-critic, gifted with so much insight and feeling settled down at Sens we are told, for the purpose of painting ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the Malincourt temperament, of which he had recognized the share she had inherited. And she realized that her guardian and Miles Herrick had been equally discerning. Though differing in its effect upon each of them, consequent upon individual idiosyncrasy, the fact remained that she and Garth were both "breaking" beneath the strain which destiny ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... principles is correct with respect to military problems, as well as for all others (page 22). This purpose, however, cannot be served by a mere collection of nouns or noun-phrases. Such expressions make no statements of cause and effect. Their meaning is therefore left to inference and to the idiosyncrasy of individual interpretation. The formulation, moreover, of useful principles cannot be satisfactorily established by the more-or-less random selection of matters, however important, pertaining to the subject at hand. What is required is a systematic analysis of the essentials ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... with a heap of sausages before them, or while out walking. Beethoven used to pour cold water over his hands till he soaked off the ceiling of the room below; in short, most musicians except Mozart had some surprising idiosyncrasy. He needed even no instrument when composing music. He could enjoy a game of bowls, sitting and making his MS. while the game was in progress, and leaving his work to take his turn. He was not strong, physically, and was often in poor circumstances, but wherever he was there was likely ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... him to one of the ordinary agricultural colleges for fear of a repetition, on a larger scale, of the Cheltenham disaster, she thought that it might be possible to find a capable land-agent who would give him some kind of training and put up with his idiosyncrasy for the sake of ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... and easily demonstrated by the records of the police courts, that "a shop-lifter once, a shop-lifter always." It is a lamentable psychological idiosyncrasy that, despite the most earnest and apparently sincere resolutions to lead an honest life, the female shop-lifter, intent on making a legitimate purchase, is incapable of withstanding the temptation offered by a display of fancy articles. She will usually attempt ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... of the conversation latterly had been to quietly but surely disparage her; and she was fain to take Stephen into favour in self-defence. He would not have been so unloving, she said, as to admire an idiosyncrasy and features different from her own. True, Stephen had declared he loved her: Mr. Knight had never done anything of the sort. Somehow this did not mend matters, and the sensation of her smallness in Knight's eyes still remained. Had the position been reversed—had Stephen loved her in spite of ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... it an idiosyncrasy, as I have known those who by combing their hair can elicit sparks with a crackling as from a cat's back rubbed. It is very possible that the sleeve might be silk, tightened either on a very hairy ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... of station, of idiosyncrasy there may be, these are but surface and accidental. We are all alike in this, that we 'have sinned, and come short of the glory of God'; and our Great Physician, in His great remedy, insists upon treating us all as patients, and not as this, that, or ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... science, is one thing; and Ecclesiasticism, the championship of a foregone conclusion[83] as to the truth of a particular form of Theology, is another. With scientific Theology, Agnosticism has no quarrel. On the contrary, the Agnostic, knowing too well the influence of prejudice and idiosyncrasy, even on those who desire most earnestly to be impartial, can wish for nothing more urgently than that the scientific theologian should not only be at perfect liberty to thresh out the matter in his own fashion; but that he should, if he ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Was it not Mr. Gosse who early in the war glorified the blood that was being shed as a cleansing stream of Condy's Fluid? The truth is, apart from his thoughts about literature, Mr. Gosse thinks much as the leader-writers tell him. He is sensitive to beauty of style and to idiosyncrasy of character, but he lacks philosophy and that tragic sense that gives the deepest sympathy. That, we fancy, is why we would rather read him on Catherine Trotter, the precursor of the bluestockings, than on any subject ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... have been believed that a transmutation had taken place in Cytherea's idiosyncrasy, that her moral nature ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... idiosyncrasy as to dem'd unpleasant bodies; and when he hears that his mother is dead, he straight-way jumps into a bath with his clothes on. Many mantras and much holy-water, together with incense of sandal-wood, and other perfumery, regardless of expense, can alone relieve his premises ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... laughing, "you need not fear for me. I've lived in good society too many years not to know how to deal with a bore. A little idiosyncrasy like that will not mar my enjoyment one bit. Do go ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... Church stands to me above all else as appointed of God for all that organization means in the attainment of any other object. Atmospheric religion is desirable, but to progress, to permanence, organization is essential. Moreover, being conscious of the idiosyncrasy of the human mind, I have every use for the various communions if no man is to ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... practice and natural aptitude. A clear head, a quick imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless. He who daily hears and reads well-framed sentences, will naturally more or less tend to use similar ones. And where there exists any mental idiosyncrasy—where there is a deficient verbal memory, or an inadequate sense of logical dependence, or but little perception of order, or a lack of constructive ingenuity; no amount of instruction will remedy the defect. ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... and say: "Seven tums eight? Why—ah, lemme see now. Seven tums—what was it you said? Oh, seven tums eight. Why—ah, seven tums eight is sixty-three—fifty-six I mean." There's nothing really to spelling. It's just an idiosyncrasy. If there was really anything useful in it, you could do it by machinery—just the same as you can add by machinery, or write with a typewriter, or play the piano with one of these things with cut paper in it. Spelling is an old-fashioned, ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... its errors; all the purpose of life degenerating into instinct; and the web of his work wrought, at last, of beauties too subtle to be understood, his liberty, with vices too singular to be forgiven—all useless, because magnificent idiosyncrasy had become solitude, or contention, in the midst of a reckless populace, instead of submitting itself in loyal harmony to the Art-laws of an understanding nation. And the life passed away in darkness; and its final work, in all the best beauty of it, has already perished, only enough ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... bourgeoisie. It is not mine. I don't belong to the respectables—I would sooner kill myself a dozen times over. I can't breathe in their company. I know how to protect myself; none of the men I meet dare to insult me; that is my idiosyncrasy—everyone has his own. But I have my ideas, and nobody else matters a fig to me.—So now, Monsieur, if you regret our forced introduction of last night, let me wish you a good morning. It will be perfectly easy for your sister ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... another judgment. And this wide possibility of contradiction is particularly to be recognized when the differing ideas or beliefs have arisen not within the same individual mind but in different minds, and are therefore colored by personal or partisan interest and warped by idiosyncrasy of mental constitution. The contradictions of, or rather among, ideas and beliefs, with which we are now concerned, are more extensive and more varied than mere logical duels; they are also less definite, less precise. In reality they ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... guard of the Army of the Valley buried the dead of Port Republic in trenches, and then it, too, vanished. To the last wagon wheel, to the last poor straggler, all was gone. It was an idiosyncrasy of Jackson's to gather and take with him every filing. He travelled like a magnet; all that belonged to him went with him. Long after dark, high on the mountain-side, an aide appeared in the rain, facing the ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... sort of aggregation to which men and women will refer themselves is determined partly by the strength and idiosyncrasy of the individual imagination, and partly by the reek of ideas that chances to be in the air at the time. Men and women may vary greatly both in their innate and their acquired disposition towards this ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... for his books, presenting the amount due him either to the publisher, or, more generally, to some friend who had been most active in aiding their publication. Few will applaud this idiosyncrasy, the general and sensible opinion being that the laborer is worthy of his hire: but Landor took peculiar pride in writing for fame alone, without thought of the more tangible product of genius; and, unlike most authors, he could well afford ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... if I hold the true anatomy of myself, I am delineated and naturally framed to such a piece of virtue; for I am of a constitution so general that it consorts and sympathizeth with all things: I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in diet, humor, air, anything. I wonder not at the French for their dishes of frogs, snails, and toadstools; nor at the Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst them, make them my common viands, and I find they agree with my stomach as well as theirs. I could ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... Brahmans. If you continue to live as you do now, you would everywhere miss England,—perhaps also Oxford, if you went to London. Of this I am not clear: in general a German lives far more freely in the World-city than in the Don-city, where every English idiosyncrasy strengthens itself, and buries itself in coteries. Unfortunately I have neither read "Indophilus" nor "Philindus:" please tell me the numbers of the "Times." I can get a copy of the "Times" here from the library ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... while it did not convey actual malice or ill-will, it roused in the spectator an uncomfortable feeling, not altogether easy to analyze. He wore his iron gray locks quite long, and to this distinguishing idiosyncrasy, as well as to his invariable custom of taking his dog with him wherever he went, was due the interest always shown in him by street urchins. On account of his whimsicalities, he had acquired the epithet of Uncle ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... being kindly, and sympathetic, and impressible, she took the color of what was nearest to her, and especially when it came from a beloved object, so that it was difficult to discover that it was not really one of her native tastes. The only thing, perhaps, altogether suited to her idiosyncrasy (because it was truly feminine, calculated for dainty fingers, and a nice little subtlety) was that kind of embroidery, twisting, needle-work, on textile fabric, which, as we have before said, she learnt ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... against M. Necker, and ask him to take the necessary measures against these anonymous publications this was appealing to the very man who secretly encouraged them.. Although Madame Necker had plenty of wits, she, bred in the mountains of Switzerland, had no conception of such an idiosyncrasy as that of M. de Maurepas, a man who saw in an outspoken expression of feeling only an opportunity of discovering the vulnerable point. As soon as he knew M. Necker's susceptibility he flattered himself that, by irritating it, he would drive him to give in his resignation." ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... and had ended by being violently sick into the bowl of pig's blood. In hunting Ishmael found, like many another, that his own excitement helped him to bear with the thought of the fox's pain, though he was always glad, in guilty secret, when there was no kill. It was not this idiosyncrasy that troubled Boase; it was the social questions that hunting evoked. Boase, who also followed to hounds, felt his heart glow to see how well the boy was received; for Ishmael's surly shyness had passed into a new phase, expressed ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... further effort to enlighten him. She looked at him thoughtfully, and said, slowly, "I begin to hold the clew to your idiosyncrasy. You have attached yourself to the modern doctrine of a struggle for existence, and look on life as a ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Naples," he having been a soldier,—and the descriptive phases of Parkman's "History of Pontiac," the author having been a Prairie traveller, and familiar with the woods and the bivouac. In like manner, it is the idiosyncrasy of historians which gives original value to their labors: Botta's knowledge of American localities and civilization was meagre, but his sympathy with the patriots of the Revolution was strong, and this gave warmth and effect ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... chronometer watches that make a specialty of being exact within a few seconds a month. They think too much of themselves. So does everybody that considers himself as having a right to fall back on what he calls his idiosyncrasy. Yet a man has such a right, and it is no easy thing to adjust the private claim to the fair public demand on him. Suppose you are subject to tic douloureux, for instance. Every now and then a tiger that nobody can see catches one side of your face between his jaws and holds ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... author should be more at home in an assumed character than his own. But experience shows the position to be correct. Conscious he is no longer individually associated with his work, the writer proceeds with all the freedom of irresponsibility. His idiosyncrasy is merged in that of the personages he represents. He thinks with their thoughts, sees with their eyes, speaks with their tongues. His strains are such as he himself—per se—would not, perhaps could not, have originated. In this light ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... that some of their disciples' composition may be of higher value. The spirit of God may have wrought within the apostles generally with greater power and clearness than in other teachers; but its operation is conditioned not merely by outward factors but by individual idiosyncrasy; so that one who had not seen the Lord and was therefore not an apostle proper, may have apprehended his mind better than an immediate disciple. Paul stood above the primitive apostles in the extent to which he fathomed ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... a woman to do with dates—cold, false, erroneous, chronological dates—new style, old style, precession of the equinoxes, ill-timed calculation of comets long since due at their station and never come? Her poetical idiosyncrasy, calculated by epochs, would make the most natural points of reference in woman's autobiography. Plutarch sets the example of dropping dates in favour of incidents; and an authority more appropriate, Madame de Genlis, who began her own ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... and crushed the youngest gentleman at every step. His bedroom was at the top of the house, and it was a long way; but they got him there in course of time. He asked them frequently on the road for a little drop of something to drink. It seemed an idiosyncrasy. The youngest gentleman in company proposed a draught of water. Mr Pecksniff called him ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... made. She knew every idiosyncrasy of the hooks and buttons of her well-worn afternoon frock. It was dark blue, of some clinging material that fell naturally into graceful lines, and was relieved at the throat and wrists by embroidered bands always ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... them with a difference, and a difference is the one thing a small community, accustomed comfortably to scan its own intelligible averages, will not tolerate. The unusual may take on an exaggeration of these; an excess of money, an excess of piety, is understood; but idiosyncrasy susceptible to no common translation is regarded with the hostility earned by the white crow, modified among law-abiding humans into tacit repudiation. It is a sound enough social principle to distrust that which is not understood, like ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... soundly, secure in that stodgy immobility that takes no risks. Oblivious, apparently, of all secret warnings of excitement or alarm, she lay in a tight round ball, inactive, undisturbed. Even her breathing revealed her peculiar idiosyncrasy: no actual movement on her surface was discernible. Her breathing involved the least possible disturbance of the pink and white contours that bulged the sheets and counterpane. Her face was calm, expressionless, and even dull, yet wore a certain ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... the leading principles' which guide them. The philosophy of the matter rests mainly on the fact that it is very rare for any two persons to write hands similar enough to deceive a careful observer, unless one is imitating the other. "Fists," like faces, have all some special idiosyncrasy, and the imitator has not merely to copy that of some one else but to ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... more engaging figure in American history, none more entirely free from disfiguring idiosyncrasy, than the son ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... in evidence, rested on their heels, and were generally encased in carpet slippers—shoes being out of the question owing to his life-long habit of storing inside his own person the drainings of the decanters, an idiosyncrasy which produced a form of gout that only carpet slippers could alleviate. In his earlier life he had carried General Washington around in his arms, had waited on Henry Clay, and had been body-servant to Lafayette, besides holding the horses of half ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... seems to me not only to be eminent in the style and forms of poetical expression that mark the present age, (an idiosyncrasy, almost a sickness, of verbal melody,) but to bring what is always dearest as poetry to the general human heart and taste, and probably must be so in the nature of things. He is certainly the sort of bard and counteractant most needed for our materialistic, self-assertive, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Audrey, were we?' he replied, with a slight change of expression. 'I think it is the Ross idiosyncrasy to wander hopelessly from any given subject; I imagined that we were suggesting an impossible wife for your humble servant. Far be it from me to deny myself comfort in the shape ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... meadow beyond the orchard was a prairie studded with herds of buffalo, which it was our delight, moccasined and tomahawked, to ride down with those whoops that announce the scenting of blood. He neither laughed nor sneered, as the Olympians would have done; but possessed of a serious idiosyncrasy, he would contribute such lots of valuable suggestion as to the pursuit of this particular sort of big game that, as it seemed to us, his mature age and eminent position could scarce have been attained without a practical knowledge of the creature in its native lair. Then, too, ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... all upon these closing incidents of the Yorick and Eliza episode, is, that in their striking illustration of the soft, weak, spiritually self-indulgent nature of the man, they assist us, far more than many pages of criticism would do, to understand one particular aspect of his literary idiosyncrasy. The sentimentalist of real life explains the ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... needed some work not to be acquired save through outright purchase, the guests would pay further if unconscious tribute through the sly abstraction of small coins. Your true Parisian, however, keeps track of his money to the ultimate sou, an idiosyncrasy which obliged the boy to practise most of his peculations on the fugitive ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... idiosyncrasy of mine," answered Von Stein, showing his teeth. "Before anything is done I must, in order to aid the receptivity of your mind, go a little further with the explanation of certain things which I mentioned the other day. I promise not to bore you. More than that, Mr. Parker, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... into his frozen face all the character and idiosyncrasy of life. He has not changed one line of his grave, grotesque countenance, nor smoothed out a single feature. The hue is rather bloodless and leaden; but he was alway sallow. The dark eyebrows seem ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... Leipzig might have greatly contributed to those diseases from which I had suffered so much. It is, indeed, a tedious, and withal a melancholy, business to take too much care of ourselves, and of what injures and benefits us; but there is no question but that, with the wonderful idiosyncrasy of human nature on the one side, and the infinite variety in the mode of life and pleasure on the other, it is a wonder that the human race has not worn itself out long ago. Human nature appears to possess a peculiar kind of toughness and many- sidedness, since it subdues every thing ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... exposed to the effects of the compressed air were more exhilarated by it than others. Upon superficial reflection one might have supposed that this discrepancy in physiological effect was to be accounted for merely on the basis of constitutional idiosyncrasy; maturer thought, however, convinced me that the exaggerated effects of the condensed air were both too numerous and too constant to be amenable to such an explanation. This led me to study the habits of the men; and thus it was that I arrived at a discovery of real practical value to neurotherapy. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... natives shall become as self-conscious as themselves. The Sud-Express brings them from England and Germany, vast ships convey them from New York. Then there are the newspapers, eager as ever to make bricks without straw. Against Teutonic travellers, and journalists, no idiosyncrasy can stand out. The country will run to pulp, as a pear, bitten without by wasps and within by a maggot, will get sleepy and drop. But that end is not yet, the Lord be praised, and will not be in your time or mine. The tale I have to tell—an old one, ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... Age, idiosyncrasy, tolerance, and disease, all exert modifying influences on the action of a poison. The form in which the poison is swallowed and the quantity also determine its action. In the gaseous form, poisons act most rapidly and fatally. When in solution and injected hypodermically, they also ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... and I afterwards found out (every man having his hobby) that the idiosyncrasy of this officer's disposition had led him to the practice of neutralising the males of any species of bird or beast, in order to render them more palatable at ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... his father before him. It all seemed very simple to him. The handsome Philippa respected him, obeyed him particularly, and never differed from him in opinion. But she coloured every compliance with his decrees with an idiosyncrasy so marked as to make them seem her own. Where he held that Rome pandered to the emotions, she laughed it to scorn as a forcing—house of spiritual foppery; where he saw in divorce a treason to the law of contract, she said that it tempted women to fall. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... sleep unless every ray of light is shut out from my chamber. Thus, at bedtime I have all my windows closed, their shutters fastened and their curtains drawn, lest the first dawn of morning should awaken me prematurely. Another constitutional idiosyncrasy of mine is the necessity of a great deal of air. Therefore I always had the doors between my bedroom and my dressing ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... The idiosyncrasy of Lyons is silk. There are two schools of introduction in the art of silk weaving, one of them free to any lad in the city, the other requiring a trifle of matriculation. The first of these witnesses the whole process of fabrication ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... impression that 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 "an original." Reads ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... aim is not a moral one; and we, furthermore, believe that, within their own scope and province, they may at least be serviceable in training and developing the understanding. Not to dwell longer on this little eccentricity of opinion, which is simply one of idiosyncrasy, let us follow the author into some of the more congenial sections of his dissertation. The following passage, on 'The three essential qualities of an author,' seems ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... The idiosyncrasy of either officer is emphasized in their respective plans of campaign, while commanding the Channel Fleet during the French Revolution. Howe will maintain a certain station in port, keeping his fleet there in hand, well ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... at the expense of one's honour? It would have taken a wondrous alchemy—working backwards, as it were—to produce this latter result. Besides these two alternatives (that she suffered tortures in silence and that she was so much in love that her husband's humiliating idiosyncrasy seemed to her only an added richness—a proof of life and talent), there was still the possibility that she had not found him out, that she took his false pieces at his own valuation. A little reflection rendered this hypothesis untenable; it ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... time I had heard him at his old habit since my return to Pellucidar, and I had thought that he had given up his little idiosyncrasy; but he hadn't. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... don't think it is; but that is an idiosyncrasy of mine; and I have no doubt there are plenty of other men who are precisely in the position you describe. Take, for example, a man like the late Jay Gould. Do you suppose that he, in his business operations, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... the educator here, it is evident, is to help nature correct a tendency to one-sided development; just as the task is this also in the former case; but here the variation is on the side of idiosyncrasy ultimately, and of genius immediately. For genius, I think, is the more often developed from the contemplative mind, with the relatively dammed-up brain, of this child, than from the smooth-working machine ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... nature can be resolved into a combination of the material. The material processes will always remain vital, if we take this word in a descriptive and poetic sense; for they will contain a movement having a certain idiosyncrasy and taking a certain time, like the fall of an apple. The movement of nature is never dialectical; the first part of any event does not logically imply the last part of it. Physics is descriptive, historical, reporting after the fact what are found to be the habits of matter. But if these habits ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the habits of the tiger of the grass plains, but those of the hill tiger are very interesting, the cattle lifter especially, as he is better known to men. Each individual has his special idiosyncrasy. I wrote of this once before as follows: "Strange though it may seem to the English reader that a tiger should have any special character beyond the general one for cruelty and cunning, it is nevertheless a fact that each animal has certain peculiarities ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... simple fairy story. It is the only opera in which character, a personal idiosyncrasy as distinct from an overwhelming passion, produces the dramatic action. It has been urged that Lohengrin's stipulation is monstrous; but seeing that he is bound—we do not know how—and that if Elsa had not agreed her fate had been quickly settled, it seems to ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... should not force this consideration too far: Hood is a central figure in the group and the period, and the tendency of the time may be almost as much due to him as he to the tendency. Mainly, we have to fall back upon his own idiosyncrasy: he was born with a boundlessly whimsical perception, which he trained into an inimitable sleight-of-hand in the twisting of notions and of words; circumstances favored his writing for fugitive ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... green in their gravies, decorate desserts with nut-meats, flowers and fruits, and in so doing add a bit to the gayety of the table, satisfied that the trifling extra expense, time and energy incurred is more than compensated for in the pleasure the results afford. A fair trial of this pleasant idiosyncrasy of the French is convincing that the appearance of a dish has more bearing on the relish of a meal than we over ...
— Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them • Cora Moore
... deceive them. In a word, the monster was crippled in its infancy, and has never as yet recovered from the stroke. It is true, that like its ancient sire, that was "more subtile than all the beasts of the field," it has inherited a large portion of his most prominent characteristic—an idiosyncrasy with the animal—that enables him to entwine himself into the greater part of the Church and other institutions of the country, which having once entered there, leaves his venom, which put such a spell ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... reverse the natural order of waking and sleeping hours. I am convinced that during the time I was with him only the necessity of securing a certain short interval of daylight, by which it was possible to paint, prevailed with him to rise before noon. Alluding to this idiosyncrasy, he said: "I lie as long, or say as late, as Dr. Johnson used to do. You shall never know, until you discover it for yourself, at what hour I rise." He sat up until four A.M. on this night of my second visit,—no unaccustomed ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... informed; and how could he let slip an opportunity, such as will probably never be afforded him again in this life, of being eloquent on the Silver Eagle? Ornithology is surely the department of Ornither. Yet there is evidently something odd and peculiar in his idiosyncrasy; for we observe that he never once alludes to "these animals," birds, during the whole excursion. He has not taken his gun with him into the Highlands, a sad oversight indeed in a gentleman who "is to be regarded as generally fond of the sports ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... British and Belgians and Italians, for example, going to help each other in Africa, or are they going to work against and cheat each other? Is the Russian seeking only a necessary outlet to the seas of the world, or has he dreams of Delhi? Here again, as in all these questions, personal idiosyncrasy comes in; I am strongly disposed to trust the good in ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... in his eyes the glitter called insanity—the glitter that reflects the state of mind of any strong man when possessed of one of those fixed ideas that are the idiosyncrasy of the strong. It would have been impossible for Lockyer to be possessed in that way; he had not the courage nor the concentration nor the independence of soul; like most men, even able men, he dealt ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... anxiously into futurity. If it were possible to change Miss Thusa's opinions and peculiarities into something after the similitude of her kind! Change Miss Thusa! As soon might you expect to change the gnarled and rooted oak into the flexible and breeze-bowed willow. Her idiosyncrasy had been so nursed and strengthened by the two great influences, time and solitude, it spread like the banyan tree, making a dark pavilion, where legions of ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... this decisive influence, and in projecting the same convictions into other minds. He was a believer in the sense of the old Puritans, and, amid the doubt and skepticism of the nineteenth century, held as firmly as any of them by the doctrines of atonement and grace. He had most of the idiosyncrasy of Baxter, though not without the contemplation of Howe. The doctrines of Calvinism, mitigated but not renounced, and received simply as dictates of Heaven, without any effort or hope to bridge over their inscrutable depths by philosophical theories, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... reserve the trial that it had once been. After having become habituated to it as a necessary idiosyncrasy, she had become rather proud of his lofty inaccessibility. Besides, her brother's visit, her recovery, and the renewed hope and joy in this promising child, had not been without effect in rousing him from his apathy. He was less inclined to shun his fellow-creatures, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... recognized the sound as one which he and the marshal had heard more than once at this hour, and, after discussion, had attributed to an idiosyncrasy of water ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... I have therefore refrained from any attempt to excite the reflective faculties of the reader, excepting in the first and third of the accompanying sketches, and even in these have only ventured to suggest ideas, the full scope and pregnancy of which it must be left to his own idiosyncrasy to appreciate and develop, the more especially as they bear upon a certain current of investigation which ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... she not been inspired by her voices and her visions to take up arms for the salvation of her country, Joan of Arc would probably have lived and ended her obscure life in some place of holy retreat. An all-absorbing love for all things sacred was her ruling idiosyncrasy. From her childhood her delight was to hear the church bells, the music of anthems, the sacred notes of the organ. Never did she miss attending the Church festivals. When within hail of a church it was her wont, however hurried the march, to enter, attended by any of the soldiers whom ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... by, and every moment of the time Saul was elate and busy, providing for me in every possible way, devising comforts that exceeded my imagination, remembering every idiosyncrasy that I had given expression to in his hearing. Under the guard of the United States mail, we left Fort Leavenworth. Meotona, the yellow savage, went with us. Oh, the delight of those days! it comes to me now, and I almost forget that I am alone ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... the credit and she'll get the blame. You can always make a poem on Young Lochinvar, when it's less easy to approve of the damsel who springs to the pillion behind him. I don't pretend to account for this idiosyncrasy of human nature; I merely state it as a fact. Society will forget that you ran away with Dorothea, but it will never forget that she ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... Idiosyncrasy could not; but its morbid excess could, especially when taken in time. Advice was generally called in too late. However, here the only serious symptom was the Insomnia. "We must treat her for that," said he, writing a prescription; "but for ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... that Mr. "Q." has, doubtless from some idiosyncrasy, since developed a faculty of seeing lights where other people ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... sad tragedies, neither of which would have been demanded by the story, had not such sadness been agreeable to the author's own idiosyncrasy. The one is the ruin of the old colonel's fortunes, he having allowed himself to be enticed into bubble speculations; and the other is the loss of all happiness, and even comfort, to Clive the hero, by the abominations of his mother-in-law. The woman is so iniquitous, and so tremendous in her ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... inevitable? No machine is perfectly efficient. No man either. There is always a waste. Waste of the type; waste of the individual idiosyncrasy. This little car, for instance, isn't pulling as she ought to pull—she never does. She's low in her class. So with myself; there is a natural and necessary high rate of energy waste. Moods of apathy ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... should have seen how great was Caesar because he accomplished so much, and that he should have thought Cicero to be small because, burdened with scruples of justice, he did so little, is in the idiosyncrasy of the man. A Caesar was wanted, impervious to clemency, to justice, to moderation—a man who could work with any tools. "Men had forgotten what honesty was. A person who refused a bribe was regarded not ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... this idiosyncrasy, or else he recognized the tall form in spite of its wrappings, for he said, "Yes, I think very likely it is your mother, Barrie. But we can't be sure; and in any case I strongly advise you not to try and speak to her here ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... that is quite unnecessary, but by promptitude, and striking a blow at the right moment. The Chinese do not care much about being killed, but they hate being frightened, and the knowledge of this idiosyncrasy of theirs is the key of the position. I have just written a letter to my friends the Imperial Commissioners here, which will, I think, shake their nerves considerably, and bring them to a manageable frame ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... obvious thing to do with a horse is to ride it; with a cake, to eat it; with a sixpence to spend it.' A few boyish persons carry this further, and think that the natural thing to do with a book is to read it. The mere reading of a rare book is a puerility, an idiosyncrasy of adolescence; it is the ownership of the book which is the matter of distinction. The collector of coins does not accumulate his treasures for the purpose of ultimately spending them in the marketplace. The lover of postage-stamps, small as his horizon may be, does not hoard ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... must be directed to the remarkable variations observed in different patients. Sometimes the virulent character of the disease can only be accounted for by an idiosyncrasy of the patient. Constitutional symptoms, particularly pyrexia and anaemia, are most often met with in young women. Patients over forty years of age have greater difficulty in overcoming the infection than younger adults. Malarial and other infections, ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... great deal in ventriloquism that we don't know much about." "If it's the same to you," I said, "I wish you'd keep all that to yourself, Simson. It doesn't suit my state of mind." "Oh, I hope I know how to respect idiosyncrasy," he said. The very tone of his voice irritated me beyond measure. These scientific fellows, I wonder people put up with them as they do, when you have no mind for their cold-blooded confidence. Dr. Moncrieff met us about eleven o'clock, the same time as on the previous night. He was a large ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... birth to any other derivatives which would throw their converging rays of light on its radical meaning. In other cases, again, such seems to have been the boldness of the original name-giver that we can hardly enter into the idiosyncrasy which assigned such a name to ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... most extraordinary character, who, in most other points, commanded respect: he was a kind man and a good officer; but from the idiosyncrasy of his disposition, whether from habit or from nature, could not speak the truth. I say from nature, because I have witnessed the vice of stealing equally strong, and never to be eradicated. It was in a young messmate of good ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... Madame Grambeau was barely detectable, and her phraseology was that of a well-translated book—correct, but not idiomatic, and bearing about it the idiosyncrasy of the language from which it was derived. She was evidently a person of culture and native power of intellect combined, and her finely-moulded face, as well as every gesture and tone, indicated superiority ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Books were written to read; if one read them what more could be expected? To be questioned in detail regarding the contents of a volume seemed to her as great an outrage as being searched for smuggled laces at the Custom House. The club had always respected this idiosyncrasy of Mrs. Plinth's. Such opinions as she had were imposing and substantial: her mind, like her house, was furnished with monumental "pieces" that were not meant to be disarranged; and it was one of the unwritten rules ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... paid it less attention than it deserves. But criticism has been hindered, perhaps, by the fact that these books of Henry James's, in which the art is written large, are so odd and so personal and so peculiar in all their aspects. When the whole volume is full of a strongly-marked idiosyncrasy, quite unlike that of anyone else, it is difficult to distinguish between this, which is solely the author's, and his method of treating a story, which is a general question, discussible apart. And thus it happens that the novelist who carried his research into the theory of the art ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... was the more singular, as he belonged to a branch of the Church of England well inclined to regard its temporalities with avowed favour, and had habitually lived with men who were accustomed to much worldly comfort. But such was his idiosyncrasy, that these very facts had produced within him, in early life, a state of mind that was not natural to him. He was content to be a High Churchman, if he could be so on principles of his own, and ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... of a small boy with whose friends The Bible in Spain passed muster on the strength of its title-page. For Mr. Birrell is the son of a venerated Nonconformist minister; and perhaps he, or at least those who were of his household, had this religious idiosyncrasy. It may be that the distinction which pervaded the evangelical circles of Mr. Birrell's youth as to what were Sunday books, as distinct from books to be read on week-days, has disappeared. In any case think of the advantage of the boy of that generation who was ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... not know that Eileen had studied her harder than she ever studied any book, that she had deliberately set herself to make the most of every defect or idiosyncrasy in Marian, at the same time offering herself as a charming substitute. Marian was prepared to be the mental, the spiritual, and the ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... only equalled by his outsight, and he suffered in a way not to be readily conceived, from any failure in beauty, physical, moral, or intellectual. It is not, therefore, mere love of upholstery that impels him to ask for perfect settings to priceless gems of art; but a native idiosyncrasy, which always made me feel that "the New Jerusalem," "even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal," "where shall in no wise enter anything that defileth, neither what worketh abomination nor maketh a lie," would alone satisfy him, or rather alone not give him actual pain. It may give an ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... suggestive of the choicest satisfaction. Let us try to discover what good news such an idiosyncrasy as that of John Dillaway would be pleased to designate as "bones." He had forthwith gone to his father's room as merry at the chance of ousting poor Maria, as the heartlessness of avarice could make him; and omnipresent authorship jotted ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Michelet, the milder and feebler but still inspiring enthusiasm of Quinet, the academic clearness and discipline of Villemain and Nisard, the Lucianic wit of Merimee, the matchless appreciation of Gautier, and, above all, the great new critical idiosyncrasy of Sainte-Beuve. Between these men there were the widest possible differences, not merely of personal taste and genius, but of literary theory and practice. But where they all differed quite infinitely from the lower class of English critics, and favourably from all but the highest in their ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... individual treatment of the humane and pathetic, for near the end of the poor woman's narrative the author seems to recollect a fundamental sentence of Sterne's creed, the inevitable admixture of the whimsical, and here he introduces into the sentimental relation a Shandean idiosyncrasy: from page 43 the narrative leaps back to the beginning of the volume, and Schummel advises the reader to turn back and re-read, referring incidentally to his confused fashion of narration. The awkwardness ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... (of those who die) make good communicators, I may be permitted to suggest, perhaps, a tentative explanation of the rarity of good communicators (and communications), based upon this principle. Certain it is that special adaptability and idiosyncrasy are necessary to the one on this side—this constituting, in fact, a "medium," as we understand it. It seems highly probable that a medium is born and not made, that the gift is hereditary, and that it depends but little, if at all, upon physical, mental, or moral characteristics, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... Lorna puzzle over this idiosyncrasy of her father. She retained vague memories of her early childhood, when he had surely been utterly different and would come into the nursery to romp with her. It had not been altogether her mother's death; that had happened when she was only six years ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... The thoroughbred wanderer's idiosyncrasy I presume to be a composition of what phrenologists call "inhabitiveness" and "locality," equally and largely developed. After a long and toilsome march, weary of the way, he drops into the nearest place of rest to become the most domestic of men. For a while he smokes the "pipe of permanence" ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... we have made allowance for the absence of a number of picturesque phenomena which are due to temporal and physical conditions, and would be equally lacking if the country were an autocracy or oligarchy, there remains in the United States greater room for the development of idiosyncrasy than, perhaps, in any other country. It has been paradoxically argued by an English writer that individualism could not reach its highest point except in a socialistic community; i.e., that the unbridled competition ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... physiological experiments upon men and the lower animals, that musical sounds produce a marked effect upon the circulation. The pulse-rate is usually quickened, and the force of the heart-beats increased in varying degrees, dependent upon the pitch, intensity and timbre of the sounds, and the idiosyncrasy ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... exile to shame. The truest man, when assailed by sudden calamity, rallies all the reserved forces of a splendid manhood to meet the shock, and, like a good ship, lifting itself from the trough of the swelling sea, mounts the wave and rides on. It was a curious idiosyncrasy that led this man, when fortune and reason were swept away at a stroke, to fall back upon this imaginary imperialism. The nature that could thus, when the real fabric of life was wrecked, construct such another by the exercise of a disordered imagination, ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... being as a first man, some seven thousand years old; that his existence, his history, is a myth, traced upon the cylinders of Babylon; that man never fell except to himself and his own conscience; that the "redemption" scheme is an idiosyncrasy of Paul; that a priesthood is avowedly a pagan conception, and sacrifice a relic of barbarism. Tell them this, for you know it is true, and that your creeds and confessions are false. Speak out as your conscience ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... trousers half-covered by a leathern apron; and his two coats both threadbare, and decorated with ribands in an equally worn-out state—such, bowing and smiling as he approached, was the proprietor alike of the dogs and the workshop. In spite of his poor appearance and idiosyncrasy—almost approaching to madness—he had a certain dignity of manner which we could not fail to notice. But he was very trying to deal with. Whenever the price was the object of our inquiry, he began in the following strain: "Very good, very good; which does Monsieur like? which does ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... ascend the stairs Juno with well affected indifference caught up her train, thereby revealing the latest idiosyncrasy of the feminine toilet. She wore silver slippers and black silk tights and had quite dispensed with petticoats. The stage and the Hotel Astor had developed Juno's knowledge of la mode en regle at a ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... neglect will appear the more singular to anyone who has observed how apt is the person whom I have called the "average reader of culture" to be drawn to the perusal of an author's works by some attractive idiosyncrasy in the author's private life or character. Lamb is a staring instance of this attraction. How we all love Lamb, to be sure! Though he rejected it and called out upon it, "gentle" remains Lamb's constant epithet. And, curiously enough, in the gentleness and dignified melancholy ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... idiosyncrasy there is a considerable strain of practical philosophy. The blood of the massacred mission was not dry when it was recognised in Cabul that stern retribution would inevitably follow. Well, said the ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... a plan to rob the house of Mr. Trevlyn. It was a field that promised well. Mr. Trevlyn, with the idiosyncrasy of age, had invested most of his fortune in diamonds, and these he kept in a chamber in his house. His chief delight consisted in gloating over these precious stones. Night after night he would sit handling his diamonds, chuckling ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... his head, with a brief little laugh, and then, resigned to my uncle's idiosyncrasy—divining the importance of it—gave me a quick nod of permission: the which I was glad to get, aware, as I was, of the hospitable meaning of my uncle's invitation and his sensitiveness in respect to its reception. So I got the ill-seeming ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... two young lords,—not after all so very young,—which sounded like lessons recited by schoolboys. There was no touch of eloquence,—no approach to it. It was clear that either of them would have been afraid to attempt the idiosyncrasy of passionate expression. But they were exquisitely dressed and had learned their lessons to a marvel. The flutter of the ladies' dresses, and the presence of the peers, and the historic ornamentation ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... than anything else Chopin's idiosyncrasy is his friendship for Titus Woyciechowski. At any rate, it is no exaggeration to say that a knowledge of the nature of Chopin's two passions, his love and his friendship—for this, too, was a passion with him—gives into our hands a key that ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... pages of Lavengro. From the same pages we may detach just a few of the earlier influences which went to make up the rare and complex individuality of the writer. Borrow's father, a fine old soldier, in revealing his son's youthful idiosyncrasy, projects a clear mental image of his own habit of mind. "The boy had the impertinence to say the classics were much over-valued, and amongst other things that some horrid fellow or other, some Welshman, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... on this island that I have plenty of time to ponder over my own lot and that of other people. Write to me when you feel the wish or need to do so. I will reply to the best of my ability. If I am very taciturn about my own affairs, it springs from an idiosyncrasy that I cannot overcome. To make sure of my meaning I have read my letter through once more, and find that it does not express all I wanted to say. Never mind, it is true in the main. Only try to understand that I do not wish to sit in judgment ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... an organization, which may be termed an alcoholic idiosyncrasy; with them the latent desire for stimulants, if indulged, soon leads to habits of intemperance, and eventually to a morbid appetite, which has all the characteristics of a diseased condition of the ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... and contented lives; for the most part honest, and amongst themselves cheerful and kindly: preserving much grace of colour, of costume, of idiosyncrasy, because apart from the hueless communism and characterless monotony of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... good critical edition, without attempting to harmonize the different editors or to apply any general rules of my own. The reader is thus assured of a fairly authentic text, though he will find inconsistencies of spelling due to the idiosyncrasy of editors. Thus one editor may preserve vnd or vnnd, while another prints und; one may have itzt, another jtzt, ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... to manage their own affairs in the best way they could, - a way that commonly ended in their mismanagement and total confusion. Indeed, the idiosyncrasy of the family appears to have been so well known, that we continually meet with them performing the character of catspaw to some monkey who had seen and understood much more of the world than they had, - putting their hands to the fire, and ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... are attacked by all the emunctories. The difference in the power of the system to absorb different substances, appropriate whatever can be utilized, and throw off whatever can not be used, is sometimes called idiosyncrasy, but more properly it may be called vital resistance, and upon the integrity of this power rests the ability to combat disease in all its forms, whether it be the absorption of any animal virus or the poison ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen |
