"Eccentricity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is essentially a true one; but Swift's was a many-sided character. He was a misanthrope, with deep, though very limited affections, a man frugal to eccentricity, with a benevolence at once active and extensive. His powerful intellect compels our admiration, if not our sympathy. His irony, his genius for satire and humour, his argumentative skill, his language, which is never wanting in strength, and is as clear as the most pellucid ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Connie Stapleton invited these people down to Newbury? Why, if she wished to give a dinner party, had she not given it in town? From the conversation during dinner I had gathered that the guests, one and all, lived in London. It seemed strange therefore to the verge of eccentricity to ask them to come fifty miles to dine. True, the cuisine at "The Rook" was above reproach, the hotel itself excellently appointed, but none ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... of such persons as Lucy Stone, Mrs. Mott, Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, and their male coadjutors, Greeley, Garrison, Oliver, Johnson, Burleigh, and others, is because they themselves do not believe in the truth or feasibility of the doctrines they utter. In some cases eccentricity is a harmless disease; but the idiosyncrasies of these people spring from another source. They admit the principle that fame and infamy are synonymous terms. Disappointed in their struggle for the first, they grasp the last, and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... youthful prettinesses and follies, or in the strenuous opinion of mature years. She is neither a flirt as a girl, nor a radical as a woman. Color has not yet come into her maidenly days, nor violence of opinion into her womanly years. She affects neither fashion nor intellectual eccentricity. Yet she attains to a better average of reasonable, sensible action than she could otherwise do. She knows less of the impulsive, emotional prettiness of adolescence than women of other country communities, and in later years ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... it, will understand and feel the force of what I am now going to say; while those who make it their business, in this world, to seek happiness, without being careful to do it through the medium of personal excellence or holiness, will perhaps only smile at what they suppose is a mere eccentricity of opinion. ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... lapse of years. In other words, they are sterile only during a certain period of their lives, and then, a change occurring in their temperament with age, they become fruitful. History affords a striking example of this eccentricity of generation, in the birth of Louis XIV., whom Anne of Austria, Queen of France brought into the world after a sterility of twenty-two years. Catherine de Medicis, wife of Henry II., became the mother of ten children after a sterility of ten years. Dr. Tilt, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... officiated as his grand carver—on the other, Le Glorieux, his jester, without whom he seldom stirred for, like most men of his hasty and coarse character, Charles carried to extremity the general taste of that age for court fools and jesters—experiencing that pleasure in their display of eccentricity and mental infirmity which his more acute but not more benevolent rival loved better to extract from marking the imperfections of humanity in its nobler specimens, and finding subject for mirth in the "fears of the brave and follies of the wise." ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... the abstract, this conception might be treated as a harmless eccentricity or speculative aberration, and is likely to be so treated by the ordinary "practical" man, with his contempt for "theories," and his pathetic conviction that speculation does not matter; let us, however, see what is implied in this particular speculative theory. From the primary assumption ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... pedigree. A person does not lose caste by using the pen, or even by taking the not-needed pay for using it. To publish a book or to have an article accepted by a magazine may give a sort of social distinction, either as an exhibition of a certain unexpected capacity or a social eccentricity. It is hardly too much to say that it has become the fashion to write, as it used to be to dance the minuet well, or to use the broadsword, or to stand a gentlemanly mill with a renowned bruiser. Of course one ought not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different times; and, in all respects, appears as a good husband with no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good-natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in the theater, not in any striking manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit the importance of this information. It is ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... axis of revolution of the earth will never deviate much from its present position. He also gave a mathematical proof that this stability is not accidental, but the result of design, of an arrangement by which the planets all move in the same direction, in orbits of small eccentricity and slightly inclined to each other. Reasoning from analogy, as the author of the Vestiges is prone to do—extending our views from our solar system to other systems—other suns and revolving planets—it is fair to conclude that they are not less perfect in arrangement—subject to ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... Irish of "Henry V.," and Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade the humour: into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later, "The Humourous Lieutenant," and Jonson, besides "Every Man Out of His Humour," returned to the title in closing ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... thousand yards upon a counter! Mine host, here, seems a little bewildered;—but he has been anxious, I find, for poor Mary, and 'tis national in him to blend eccentricity with kindness. John Bull exhibits a plain, undecorated dish of solid benevolence; but Pat has a gay garnish of whim around his good nature; and if, now and then, 'tis sprinkled in a little confusion, they must have vitiated stomachs, who ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... the sailor in port, when paid off and with full pockets—making every effort to deplete them—so is the trapper during his stay at a fort, or settlement. He does things that seem odd, are odd, to the extreme of eccentricity. Among such the late guests of the Choctaw Chief would not, and did not, attract particular attention. Not much was said or thought of them, till after they were gone; and then but by those who had been victimised, resignedly abandoning claims ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... my discourse somewhat abruptly, as is his wont; for we grant him a license, in virtue of his eccentricity, which we should hardly expect to be claimed by a perfectly ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... perilously near the prizefighter's line, and never went into society, except for money. He was a model business man; the impresarios worshipped him. Such business ability, such frugality, such absence of eccentricity, such temperance, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... day was sultry, and the heat, even in the dense shade of the jungle, oppressive. Slowly she retraced her steps, her eyes upon the ground, her mind absorbed in sad consideration of her father's increasing moodiness and eccentricity. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Shelley was not quite sane; and certainly he was not quite sane, if we place sanity in justness of external perception, adaptation to matter, and docility to the facts; but his lack of sanity was not due to any internal corruption; it was not even an internal eccentricity. He was like a child, like a Platonic soul just fallen from the Empyrean; and the child may be dazed, credulous, and fanciful; but he is not mad. On the contrary, his earnest playfulness, the constant distraction of his attention from observation to daydreams, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... a character is only the heroic way of understanding it. When we love, by some noble method of our own or some nobility of mien or nature in the other, we apprehend the loved one by what is noblest in ourselves. When we are merely studying an eccentricity, the method of our study is but a series of allowances. To begin to understand is to begin to sympathise; for comprehension comes only when we have stated another's faults and virtues in terms of our own. Hence the proverbial ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... house, however, he had convinced himself, that the priest was not perfectly sane, and that some fancied resemblance had touched the chords of memory, and revived the fading images of early, and perhaps unhappy days. This appeared to him, the only rational way to account for his eccentricity; and under this impression, as well as from the priest's injunction, he resolved not to mention the interview and conversation to any person. He was particularly anxious to conceal it from Lucie, whose apprehensions might be increased by the account; and, in a ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... comrades. Those who require nothing from a man save health, wealth, strength, and beauty, will of course consider him fit and proper to make a woman happy. Yet having regard to the following facts (1) that the aforesaid baron is not merely unstable in love affairs but capricious to the verge of eccentricity, and a winebibber and gourmand to boot; (2) that he is as vain as an Indian prince who takes unto him a wife for the mere pomp and show of the thing; (3) that he is violent and brutal, sparing nobody in his sudden fits of passion and, as the documents testify, has frequently inflicted ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... tavern, or ordinary, of unusual interest spent its brief career of less than a year under the Piazza of Covent Garden. It was the experiment of Charles Macklin, an eighteenth century actor of undoubted talent and just as undoubted conceit and eccentricity. He had reached rather more than the midway of his long life—he was certainly ninety-seven when he died and may have been a hundred—when he resolved to leave the stage and carry out an idea over which he had ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... have quite accounted, as I believe, by the peculiarity both of my disposition and circumstances, for unusual wanderings under conditions when most people consider themselves fortunate within doors, I must return to Catherine Weir, the eccentricity of whose late behaviour, being in the particulars discussed identical with that of mine, led to the necessity for the explanation of my ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... rage. In many of the deities both male and female principles were represented in one,—an Androgyne deity—which was an ideal frequently attempted. The idea that these grotesque deities were merely the expression of eccentricity or caprice on the part of their originator is not to be entertained. Richard Payne Knight has pointed out that they occur almost entirely on national coins and emblems, and so were the ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... to their costume and think only of the audience; a few act as those who have mastered the secrets of a serious art, with deliberate subordination of themselves to the great end and motive of the play, spending themselves like good servants, indulging no wilfulness, obtruding no eccentricity, lending heart and tone and gesture to the perfect progress of the action. These have "found themselves," and have all the ease of ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson
... interlinear description, although it might be played during a reading on account of the general agreement of the color and spirit of the music. But there is the sense and feeling of the story, das Maerchen, and the romance of adventure. The brilliancy of harmony, the eccentricity and gaiety of rhythm seem symbolic and, in a subtle way, descriptive. As in the subject, the stories themselves, there is a luxuriant imagery, but no sign of the element of reflection ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... Dudley (or "Deadly") Smooth of Money. Faint traces of the practice survive in T.W. Robertson, as in his master, Thackeray. But it was in his earliest play of any note that he called a journalist Stylus. In his later comedies the names are admirably chosen: they are characteristic without eccentricity or punning. One feels that Eccles in Caste could not possibly have borne any other name. How much less living would he be had he been called ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... of Pheidias and Ictinus, is still the wise mother to whom we must return. The lesson of the Parthenon is the lesson of a steadfast vision of beauty, held high above individual effort and failure, realizing itself not in complex detail or calculated eccentricity, but in a serene and exquisite simplicity of form. It teaches us that in the arts there are no short cuts, and that anarchy, the destruction of what has been won for us in the past, is not advance but the straight road to the bottomless ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... therefore maintain, in spite of Morcerf, that not only is the count the object of interest at this present moment, but also that he will continue to be so for a month longer if he pleases to exhibit an eccentricity of conduct which, after all, may be his ordinary ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to "my own, my native land!" that is nothing to the transports of joy that now infect our colonists. They laugh, they sing, they dance about the decks, they chatter "sixteen to the dozen," and display every eccentricity ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... population of New Canaan the Doc was considered the most blasphemous man in America, but there seemed to be a sort of general impression in the village that his profanity was, in some way, an eccentricity of genius. ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... Upon his return, his love of knowledge and active habits induced him to glean as much as he could of his father's profession, and he could repair most articles that were sent in. Although Newton amused himself with the peculiarities and eccentricity of his father, he still had a high respect for him, as he knew him to be a worthy, honest man. For his mother he certainly had none: he was indignant at her treatment of his father, and could find no redeeming quality to make amends for her ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... Babylon or anywhere else the elements of a cosmogony, whether of a more or less abstruse scientific nature or a personal mythological narrative, it must have been subsequently forgotten or at least has not survived in China. But for Ko Hung's eccentricity and his wish to experiment with cinnabar from Cochin-China in order to find the elixir of life, P'an Ku would probably never have been invented, and the Chinese mind would have been content to go on ignoring the problem or would have quietly acquiesced in the abstract philosophical explanations ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... recorded that the next minute Angela was steeped in regret—- not for the lost verse, but because of her ingratitude and rudeness to Wee, by which it will be seen that she had all the eccentricity of genius, combined with rare kindness of heart, a combination that endeared her to teachers ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... was not interpreted by the cadet, of course, as the Sep meant it should be, but in the sense we use it when we speak of the eccentricity ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... Edgar's head at that moment. He pulled his red night-cap well down over his eyes, and sat down with a crash, while another hearty laugh greeted his supposed eccentricity. ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... repellent, but, on the contrary, measurably enhanced his attractiveness; making him "different" and lending him a distinction which, without it, he might have lacked. And yet, patent as this singularity must have been to the dullest, it was something quite apart from any eccentricity of manner, though, heaven knows, I was soon to think him ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... man of fifty, with fine aquiline features deeply grooved and cut, a delicate nostril, and a domed forehead over which fell thick locks of black hair. He looked what he was—a man of wealth and family, spoilt by long years of wandering and irresponsible living, during which an inherited eccentricity and impatience of restraint had developed into traits and manners which seemed as natural to himself as they were monstrous in the sight of others. He had so far treated the agent with the scantest civility during their progress through the house; and ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... identical with that which would be employed by modern astronomers. They ascertained the position of the stars by right ascension and declination. They knew the obliquity of the ecliptic, and determined the place of the sun's apogee as well as its mean motion. Their calculations on the eccentricity of the moon prove that they had a rectilinear trigonometry and tables of chords. They had an approximate knowledge of parallax. [Footnote: Delambre, Hist. d'Astr. Anc., tom. 1, p. 184.] They could calculate eclipses ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the professor assumes, the lady would like to match the hair. Too much eccentricity the professor does not agree with. Nature, after all, is the best guide; neatness combined with taste, that is the ideal to be aimed at. The eyebrows should be almost straight, the professor thinks; the eyelashes long and silky, with just the suspicion ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... locks unconsciously, so that it was singularly wild and rough. In times when it was the mode to imitate stage-coachmen as closely as possible in costume, and when the hair was invariably cropped, like that of our soldiers, this eccentricity was very striking. His features were not symmetrical (the mouth, perhaps, excepted), yet was the effect of the whole extremely powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... to Neufchatel, through the towns of Granson, St. Aubin, and Boudri. The banks of the lake present a continued succession of vineyards, which afford the best red wine in Switzerland. The conductor of our voiture amused us a good deal by his eccentricity. He seemed thoroughly happy and contented; and when an old gentleman of the party wished for a bag of crowns that were put into the carriage, to be conveyed to Berne, the conductor declared, he was not like Napoleon, and wished for nothing he had not. ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... went to search for him, face downward in a little green-scummed pool, which lay at the foot of the garden. There was no sign of any violence, and the water was but two feet deep, so that the jury, having regard to his known eccentricity, brought in a verdict of 'suicide.' But I, who knew how he winced from the very thought of death, had much ado to persuade myself that he had gone out of his way to meet it. The matter passed, however, and my father entered into possession of the estate, and of some 14,000 pounds, ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... at the Proclamation of Emancipation. The dogmatist has called the great Emancipator a compromiser. The scholar, with the eccentricity peculiar to genius, has solemnly declared that the slaves were freed purely as a war necessity and not because of any consideration for the slave. The undergraduate, in imitation of his erudite tutors, has asserted that the freedmen owe more to the pride of the haughty Southerner ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... mind when they met. This story, and the fact that, by the North Sea, he had stood before breakers twenty feet high, were the only particulars Maurice bore away from their interview. His previous impatience with such eccentricity returned, but none the less, he looked grudgingly after ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Bezobiedoff declined the invitation, and departed. Having seen him off, Dimitri returned, and, smiling a faintly complacent smile as he did so, and rubbing his hands together (in all probability partly because he had sustained his character for eccentricity, and partly because he had got rid of a bore), started to pace the room, with an occasional glance at myself. I felt more offended with him than ever. "How can he go on walking about the room and grinning like that?" was my ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or churlish austerity. But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... gastronomic ending displays Armstrong's interest, as a physician, in the relation of diet to literary taste. If Armstrong's boast that "I'm a shrewd observer, and will guess What books you doat on from your fav'rite mess," is a personal eccentricity, his attack on false criticism and his exhortation to judge for oneself are typical harbingers of late eighteenth-century individualism and ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... and temperament set apart for eternal celibacy, or even that he had ceased to be agitated by matrimonial aspirations. I dimly felt that there was a sort of refined cruelty in thus excluding a man from the common lot of the race; men often have pity but seldom love for those who either from eccentricity or peculiar excellence separate themselves from the broad, warm current of human life, having no part in the errors, ideals, and aspirations of their more commonplace brethren. Even a slight deviation from the physical type of common manhood and womanhood, as for instance, the possession ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... my whimsical disposition; for I kept my purpose a secret from every one, because I wished to contemplate the treasures of art there quite after my own way, and, as I thought, to allow no one to perplex me. Besides this, so simple a matter became more complicated by still another eccentricity. ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... wanting to enlarge on his mother's eccentricity. "She said good-bye and went out and shut the door. Then in a minute or two I looked up and saw her face against the glass.... I offered to open the door, but she shook her ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... This eccentricity was the source of much worry to Breed. Shady could see no good reason why she should not revisit Collins when the mood so moved her. One night she turned abruptly from her course and headed for the twinkling lights of the wolfer's cabin. Breed turned with her. ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... seen staggering about the raft, or crawling over its planks, as if unconscious of what they were doing. It seemed a wonder that some of them—semi-somnambulists in a double sense—did not fall overboard into the water. But they did not. Notwithstanding the eccentricity of their movements, they all succeeded in maintaining their position on the raft. To tumble over the edge would have been tantamount to toppling into the jaws of an expectant shark, and getting "scrunched" between no ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... to puzzle the expert, gladden the heart of the prospector, and madden the shareholder, but the eccentricity of gold is further exemplified by the way in which it has been been deposited ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... able to meet him from any illuminating viewpoint of his own. This was mid-winter, two years after the end of the War, where Dick and his uncle had worked in the Ambulance Corps to the limit of their capacities—Dick, no soldier, because of what seemed to him a diabolic eccentricity of imperfect sight, and Raven, blocked by what he felt to be the negligible disability of age. John Raven had, with the beginning of the War—which, as early as 1914 he had decided to be his war—made up his mind that although he was over forty and of a business training with ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... unknown to me, I had apparently roused his suspicions. He opened the portfolio, and counted the loose leaves of writing in it carefully. While he was absorbed in this occupation, old Toller's eccentricity assumed a new form. His little restless black eyes followed the movements of his lodger's fingers, as they turned over leaf after leaf of the manuscript, with such eager curiosity and interest that I looked ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... solitude is that one can read aloud or speak to oneself without risk of being thought demented. The fact is, the inhabitants of the little village on the outskirts of which we are camping regard us as so hopelessly and utterly mad already that no further display of eccentricity on our part could make ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... which at such a moment the grave dignity of Kilmarnock, contrasted with the lofty indifference of Balmerino, might excite, there was some diversion among the Peers, owing to the eccentricity of several of their body. Of these, one, Lord Windsor, affectedly said when asked for his vote, "I am sorry I must say, guilty upon my honour." Another nobleman, Lord Stamford, refused to answer to the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... his present post of tutor to the heir, which post he will retain only during Mrs Ingleton's pleasure. It is also provided that, in the event of any difference of opinion among the trustees, Mrs Ingleton (as is most proper) shall be permitted to decide; and lastly—a curious eccentricity on our dear friend's part, which was perhaps hardly necessary to insert—in the event of Roger Ingleton, previous to his attaining his majority, becoming a felon, a lunatic, or marrying, he is to be regarded as dead, and the property thereby passes to the next heir, Captain Oliphant. I think ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... character, of mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common centre round which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an eccentricity. And yet, society cannot intervene at this stage by material repression, since it is not affected in a material fashion. It is confronted with something that makes it uneasy, but only as a symptom—scarcely a threat, at the very most a gesture. A gesture, therefore, ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... Chatterton's career came to such a miserable close in London, and when Gilbert was dying in a hospital at Paris—it happened that a worthy physician, well known in the town of Southampton for his benevolence and eccentricity, was on a professional visit to the child of a poor journeyman trunk-maker, in the same place. A supply of old paper had just been brought in for the purpose of lining trunks, according to the practice of the day. A workman was busy sorting these, rejecting some as refuse, and preserving others, ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... coat and long, sharp teeth, a half-savage beast, bearing the name of Ortog (Satan), were Marsa's companions in her walks; and their submission to their young mistress, whom they could have knocked down with one pat of their paws, gave the Tzigana reputation for eccentricity; which, however, neither pleased nor displeased her, as she was perfectly indifferent to the opinion of the public ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... creamy curves of shoulder and limbs, he sought diversion in the treetops. She spoke, and at the sound of the clear little voice he looked at her, and in looking forgot the eccentricity of her frank costume. Her dark eyes held him: he knew that he was gazing at the only wholly ingenuous being he had ever seen. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... shabby, and the carpets and curtains were faded; but the master paid little heed to such matters. Indeed, Don Pedro Quinones showed an indifference, bordering upon eccentricity, on the point. Neither the entreaties of his wife, nor the remarks which some bolder spirit, like Paco Gomez, who was always ready to be facetious, dared to make, ever induced him to call in the ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... know its whims and moods as one comes to know those of a petulant woman one lives with. It was a bizarre and preposterous intimacy, in which Leavitt seemed to find a wholly acceptable substitute for human society, and there was something repellant about the man's eccentricity. He had various names for the smoking cone that towered a mile or more above his head: "Old Flame-eater," or "Lava-spitter," he would at times familiarly and irreverently call it; or, again, "The Maiden Who Never Sleeps," or "The ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... up into obscurity, masquerading as profundity, or pure silliness without reason or a smile. The whimsies of one language become amazing contortions in another. The humor of Shandy, though deep-dyed in Sterne's own eccentricity, is still essentially British and demands for its appreciation a more extensive knowledge of British life in its narrowest, most individual phases, amore intensive sympathy with British attitudes of mind than the German of the eighteenth ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... club, strode down the room and addressed me abruptly with the words: "The sooner you go away again the better; there's nothing to see, nothing to do, and nothing to learn," I was naturally much interested. He has a dash of acquired eccentricity of tone and manner, is very proud, but, unlike some proud people, appreciates the co-humanity of his inferiors, is a brilliant talker, dashing over art, literature, politics, society, tells stories brilliantly, never flags, is totally regardless of "the equities ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That's the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself—often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... subject of continual interest to local landladies, among whom were several lifelong residents, on friendly terms of old time with the Jordan family. To them it seemed an astonishing thing that a man in such circumstances had not yet married; granting this eccentricity, they could not imagine what made him change his abode so often. Not a landlady in Islington but would welcome Mr. Jordan in her rooms, and, having got him, do her utmost to prolong the connection. He had been known to quit a house on the paltriest excuse, removing ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... was sparsely and sketchily clad. At first. his tanned face seemed to be of several different colors and to have been modeled by some bungling caricaturist. Yet, despite this eccentricity of aspect, something about the obsequiously hurrying man struck Brice as familiar. And, all at once, he ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... as a person to know and observe, to the genius of the two Mozleys, to the brilliant social charm of Frederic Faber, to the keen, refined intelligence of Mark Pattison, to the originality and clever eccentricity of William Palmer of Magdalen. And he was nothing as a man of practical power for organising and carrying out successful schemes: such power was not much found at Oxford in those days. But his faith in his cause, as the cause of goodness ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... age. All these Masterman had eminently displayed, and here he was, ab agendo, at seventy-three; while Joseph, barely two years younger, and in the most excellent preservation, had disgraced himself through life by idleness and eccentricity. Embarked in the leather trade, he had early wearied of business, for which he was supposed to have small parts. A taste for general information, not promptly checked, had soon begun to sap his manhood. There is no passion more debilitating to the mind, unless, perhaps, it be that itch ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... the latter entered his study. At the moment when that name, which he had buried beneath so many layers, was so strangely articulated, he was struck with stupor, and as though intoxicated with the sinister eccentricity of his destiny; and through this stupor he felt that shudder which precedes great shocks. He bent like an oak at the approach of a storm, like a soldier at the approach of an assault. He felt shadows filled with thunders and lightnings descending upon his head. As he listened to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Cristo, "and it was very unnecessary to disturb me at the opera for such a trifle. In France people fight with the sword or pistol, in the colonies with the carbine, in Arabia with the dagger. Tell your client that, although I am the insulted party, in order to carry out my eccentricity, I leave him the choice of arms, and will accept without discussion, without dispute, anything, even combat by drawing lots, which is always stupid, but with me different from other people, as I am ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... are not business men, of whom but few are to be found in the Socialist ranks, but pushing writers in search of self-advertisement, whose special domain is the highly spiced and the sensational, writers who, knowing that many people mistake eccentricity for genius and paradoxical absurdity for brilliancy, have discarded common-sense, let their imaginations run riot, and outbid one another ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... champagne to freedom. And they are consistent in their choice; for, to them, every exertion of the mind which does not serve the aims of the will is folly. Intellectual effort for its own sake, they call eccentricity. Therefore, persistence in the aims of the will and the belly will be concentricity; and, to be sure, the will is the centre, the kernel of ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... rendered the cause great service by this mission. This writer says that "in bearing what he believed to be his testimony against this system of oppression, he adopted sometimes a singularity of manner, by which, as conveying demonstration of a certain eccentricity of character, he diminished in some degree his usefulness to the cause which he had undertaken; as far indeed as this eccentricity might have the effect of preventing others from joining him in ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... been a reporter, Anne. Why are n't you more careful! There may come a time when your efforts to uphold your reputation for eccentricity and for doing the cleverly unexpected ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... and the difficulty of expressing what was true without hurting anyone, or acquiring character without becoming a character part. The difference between originality and eccentricity; kindness and tenderness; sympathy and understanding; and the delicate grades by which your attempts at goodness may either help or ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her by this time to be, beneath the service of her eccentricity, one of those unselfish creatures—found only among women—who will, for pure love and admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, to youth when they have lost it, to beauty that they never had, to accomplishments that they were never ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... Gusher, again bowing and pressing his hand to his heart, "wiz so good a lady for his wife, I am sure he shall be so happy and so proud." Detecting the small vein of eccentricity in the little woman's character, Mr. Gusher was evidently inclined to encourage it, hoping that it would still further ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... to describe one of them accurately. It will then be obvious that his memory has been playing him tricks, and that he has remembered only those parts of it which tell somewhat to his credit—a common eccentricity of memories. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... valve rod. The straps are semicircular and held together by strong bolts, B B, passing through lugs, or thickenings at the ends of the semicircles. The sheave has a deep groove all round the edges, in which the straps ride. The "eccentricity" or "throw" of an eccentric is the distance between C^2, the centre of the shaft, and C^1, the centre of the sheave. The throw must equal half of the distance which the slide-valve has to travel over the steam ports. A tapering steel wedge or key, K, sunk half in the eccentric and half in a slot ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... no doubt," said Mrs. Nickleby, "that he is a gentleman, and has the manners of a gentleman, and the appearance of a gentleman, although he does wear smalls, and gray worsted stockings. That may be eccentricity, or he may be proud of his legs. I don't see why he shouldn't be. The Prince Regent was proud of his legs, and so was Daniel Lambert, who was also a fat man; he was proud of his legs. So was Miss Biffin: she was—no, "added Mrs. Nickleby, correcting herself, "I think ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... varied courses. Wordsworth's letters are the product of cultivated taste, a fine eye for rural scenery, and lofty moral sentiment. Southey is the high-class litterateur, with a strong dash of Toryism in Church and State; in both there is a total absence of eccentricity, but in neither case is the attention forcibly arrested or any striking passage retained. When Coleridge is served up the flavour of unique expression and a sort of divine simplicity is unmistakable; he is alternately indignant and remorseful; he ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... forgot the importance of what he had been told as he watched the graceful beauty of the movement that revealed not only some eccentricity but personal vanity of a harmless kind and wholesome tastes ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... am not! I am a mere wanderer—a literary loafer—a student of men and manners. I read books, and I write them too,—this will perhaps explain the eccentricity of my behaviour in trying to read under the lamplight in ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... the worldly wise, but was long before it took to the nobler end of raising the poor, and then, as he would have added, under the influence of the Clapham Sect. The Church presented itself to him mainly as the religious department of the State, in which more care was taken to suppress eccentricity than to arouse enthusiasm; it was eminently respectable, but at the very antipodes of the heroic. Could he then lean to Rome? He could not do so without damning the men he most loved, even could his keen and in some ways sceptical intellect have consented to commit suicide. Or ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... short hair was criticized in my presence, but the young minister was right in his disapproval and I was wrong, as I subsequently realized. A few years later I let my hair grow long, for I had learned that no woman in public life can afford to make herself conspicuous by any eccentricity of dress or appearance. If she does so she suffers for it herself, which may not disturb her, and to a greater or less degree she injures the cause she represents, which should ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... government; yet the Quakers have caused no political convulsion. I confess, to me it seems, that if Paul, and John, and Peter, and James, had done as these Quakers, the imperial administration would have looked on it as a harmless eccentricity of the sect, and not as an incentive[16] to sedition. But be this as it may, I did not say what else the apostles might have succeeded to enforce; I merely pointed out what it was that they actually taught, and that, as a fact, they did not declare ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... the passages which, by corridors at the right and left, gave access to these seats, at either end of the oval arena, were also the entrances for the combatants. Strong palings at these passages prevented any unwelcome eccentricity in the movements of the beasts, and confined them to their appointed prey. Around the parapet which was raised above the arena, and from which the seats gradually rose, were gladiatorial inscriptions, and paintings wrought in fresco, typical of the entertainments for which ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... sun of an Eastern mid-day you can sit with your feet figuratively or literally on the table, if it pleases you; it will but be accounted as one more eccentricity unto you; but in the shadows, an' you would retain the position of teacher to the world at large, keep the heels on the rail of your chair; for there are ears and eyes a-many in the shadows and behind the ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... eccentricity of the flood may be gathered from the fact that houses that were situated at Woodvale and points above Johnstown are piled at the lower end of the town, while some massive houses have been lifted and carried from the lower end as far as the cemetery at the extreme upper portion ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... made too much of the savanna sparrow's innocent eccentricity. He fills his place, and fills it well; and who knows but that he may yet outshine the skylark? There is a promise, I believe, for those who humble themselves. But what shall be said of species which do not even try to sing, and that, notwithstanding they have all the structural ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... of this singer and of that. The young American is instinctively loyal to the long tradition of English literature. He is content to undergo the influence of the great masters, and does not seek for premature originality on the by-paths of eccentricity. But while he is the disciple of many, he is the vassal of none. His matter is always his own, the fruit of personal vision, experience, imagination, even if he may now and then unconsciously pour it into a mould provided by another. He is no mere echo of the rhythms ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... and that it was still within the bounds of possibility that I might hear the cry of the trapped victim, my historic attitude entirely failed, and I was sensible of some repugnance for the natives. But here, too, the priests maintained their jocular attitude: rallying the cannibals as upon an eccentricity rather absurd than horrible; seeking, I should say, to shame them from the practice by good-natured ridicule, as we shame a child from stealing sugar. We may here recognise the temperate and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of control over her motions in requital. The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled, were none the less inclined to pronounce the child a demon offspring, from the indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity that shone through her little figure, and sparkled with its activity. She ran and looked the wild Indian in the face; and he grew conscious of a nature wilder than his own. Thence, with native audacity, but still with a reserve as characteristic, she flew into the midst of a group of mariners, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... few words on the second sight, a few calm, quiet words, in which there is not the slightest wish to display either eccentricity or book-learning. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... female wants?" he exclaimed, at last. "You'd better stop, perhaps" he added, to the flyman. "It is an age of eccentricity, an abnormal era of the world's history. She may want me. Very likely I left my pocket-handkerchief behind me, and Mr. Talboys has sent this person with it. Perhaps I'd better get out and go and meet her. It's civil to ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... belongings under the care of Veraci the poet, telling him I would call for them some day; but I never came, and after a lapse of thirty-one years Veraci keeps them still. He was one of the strangest poets I have ever met. He affected eccentricity to make himself notorious, and opposed the great Metastasio in everything, writing unwieldy verses which he said gave more scope for the person who set them to music. He had got this extravagant notion ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... really. Everyone who got to know him said that he improved on acquaintance. His eccentricity increased as he grew older, but particularly after he had lost ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... read those Greek and Latin books which John only knew at second hand, but from whose beautiful fanciful stories of gods and heroes he derived all the subjects for his works of statuary. His other brother, Solomon, a strange, wild, odd man, in whom the family genius had degenerated into mere eccentricity, never did anything for his own livelihood, but lived always upon John Gibson's generous bounty. In John's wealthy days, he and Mr. Ben used to escape every summer from the heat and dust of Rome—which is unendurable in July and August—to the delightfully cool air and ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... not, because they had morbidly bad manners. Still of course manners are very small change and count for very little; the violet, being an artist, is entitled to any manners it likes, while the daisy has no temperament whatever, and no excuse for eccentricity. Grasshoppers tatted industriously and impartially among ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... Sergeant-at-Arms from the House." It was a strange beginning for one of the greatest parliamentarians of our epoch—and one of the greatest conservatives. The whole bent of his mind was towards moderation in all things. Temperamentally, he hated all forms of extravagant eccentricity; he loved the old if only because it was old; he had the keenest sense not only of decorum but of the essential dignity which is the best guardian of order. Yet here he was committed to a policy which aimed deliberately at outraging ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... the current, and watched at a little distance by a man in a canoe. Sometimes the ducks would swim tail first, contrary to the practice of all live ducks; but the fish, I supposed, did not observe the eccentricity, for they bit just as readily at the bait below. As soon as the fisherman perceived that a duck began to bob and dive, he paddled forward and secured the living prize beneath. I soon grew expert at ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... gaiety and courage which is the appanage of an ancient Gallic race. The old troopers, who pretend to govern us by the sword, do not approve of this joyous mode of regarding death; and all the writers whose pens are dipped in the ink of reaction and Jesuitism are eager to discover any eccentricity in which soldiers who are going under fire for the first time permit themselves to indulge. The Intendance, with that intelligence which characterises our military administrations, had put off the departure of the battalion for several hours. What were ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... there were certain moments when, in spite of all, I still thought of it. In the midst of my madness, eccentricity, and stupidity, there were within me certain impulses that at times brought me to myself. It was a breath of air which struck my face as I came from my dungeon; it was a page of a book I read when, in my bitter days, I happened to read something besides ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... cranky and diffident. I am beginning to get nervous about people's opinion and sensitive to my own eccentricity. It is a sad case for a man who never used to care a straw ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... could only give vent by incessant laughing, whistling, and telling stories. When other resources failed, we used to amuse ourselves by tormenting him; a fair compensation for the trouble he cost us. Tete Rouge rather enjoyed being laughed at, for he was an odd compound of weakness, eccentricity, and good-nature. He made a figure worthy of a painter as he paced along before us, perched on the back of his mule, and enveloped in a huge buffalo-robe coat, which some charitable person had given him at the fort. This extraordinary garment, which would have contained two men of his size, he ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... went to the writing-table, snatched up the music sheets which lay scattered upon it, tore them across and across. There should be an end to it, an end to austere futilities which led, which could lead, to nothing. In that moment of unnatural excitement he saw all his past as a pale eccentricity. He was bitterly ashamed of it. He regretted it with his whole soul, and he resolved to have ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... possesses you. The eccentricity of the going constantly hides it, and each reappearance brings again the joy of discovery. And at last you reach it, dismount beside the small clear stream which flows beneath it, approach reverently, overwhelmed with a strange mingling of awe and great elation. You ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... frightened other vessels away; their commanders preferring going on to Port Jackson, where they half ruin themselves by the unavoidable expenses they incur. Even when their vessels have anchored here, the thoughtlessness and eccentricity of this class of men, when they are under no restraint or control, has sometimes not only led to disputes with the natives, but with each other, which eventually have proved equally detrimental. In short, New Zealand is a ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... and Lewis, English binding, like French, became purely imitative in its designs; but while in our own decade the French artists have endeavoured to shake themselves free from old traditions by mere eccentricity, in England we have several living binders, such as Mr. Cobden Sanderson and Mr. Douglas Cockerell, who work with notable originality and yet with the strictest observance of the canons of ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... Association in 1881 Sir John Lubbock called attention to the fact that these animals appear to indicate both a hot and a cold climate, and he referred to the fact (known to astronomers) that the earth passes through periods of slow change in the eccentricity of its orbit, and in the obliquity of the ecliptic. The result of the latter condition is, to produce periods of about 21,000 years each, during one-half of which the Northern hemisphere will be hotter, ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... sitting with Marya Dmitrievna at the window was her father's sister, the same aunt with whom she had once spent some solitary years in Pokrovskoe. Her name was Marfa Timofyevna Pestov. She had a reputation for eccentricity as she was a woman of an independent character, told every one the truth to his face, and even in the most straitened circumstances behaved just as if she had a fortune at her disposal. She could not endure Kalitin, and directly her niece ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... her father spoke repeatedly of longing to embrace his Fredi, of the joy her last letter had given him, of his intention to send an immediate answer: and he showed Dudley a pile of manuscript ready for the post. He talked of public affairs, was humorous over any extravagance or eccentricity in the views he took; notably when he alluded to his envy of little Skepsey. He said he really did envy; and his daughter believed it and saw ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... way, we refer our sensations to the peripheral endings of the nerves concerned, according to what physiologists have called "the law of eccentricity." Thus I am said to feel the pain caused by a bruise in the foot in the member itself. This applies also to some of the sensations of the special senses. Thus, impressions of taste are clearly localized in the corresponding ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... not hurry to the Gardens, so sure was he of the success of his undertaking. The frowsy black coat, in which he made his bow to the millionaire, had not seen the light for many years—his hat was a wide-brimmed eccentricity in soft felt which greatly delighted the nursemaids who passed him by. Gessner would never have recognized, in the hollow-cheeked, pale-faced, humble creature the sturdy young Pole who had come to him nearly a generation ago and had said, "Our fortunes are made; this ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... Winesburg grotesques, to unpack their hearts, to release emotions buried and festering. Wash Williams tries to explain his eccentricity but hardly can; Louise Bentley "tried to talk but could say nothing"; Enoch Robinson retreats to a fantasy world, inventing "his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he explained the things he had been unable to ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... anxiety or incompatibility, "if admitted to participation in the act of impregnation will each, in turn or in combination, often set the seal of their presence in the shape of idiocy, imbecility, eccentricity, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... she talked so little and her attention was so concentrated upon the lesson which she appeared to be studying, that her school companions left her entirely alone. Polly's passion for studying had always been regarded as an eccentricity. But now since she had announced on that afternoon that she had her own living to make there was possibly some excuse for her industry. Nevertheless the girls felt more convinced than ever that she was not in the least like any of the rest of them and, although ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... ornamental women, women who are exclusively wives, or mothers, or sweethearts, women purely spiritual or purely material; just as there are soldiers, artists, artisans, mathematicians, poets, merchants, men who understand money, or agriculture, or government, and nothing else. Besides all this, the eccentricity of events leads to endless cross-purposes; many are called and few are chosen is the law of earth as of heaven. Madame Rabourdin conceived herself fully capable of directing a statesman, inspiring an artist, helping an inventor ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... the cleverest member, and he was well calculated to fill the situation in which fortune had placed him. His talents were certainly of a superior description, but their efficacy was counteracted by the eccentricity of his habits, the indolence of his mind, and his vacillating and uncertain disposition. He was, however, occasionally capable of intense application, and competent to make himself master of any subject he thought ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... artist from the hand of Nature, when, vanquished by Art in the person of Michelangelo, she deigned to be subjugated in that of Raphael, not by art only but by goodness also. And of a truth, since the greater number of artists had up to that period derived from nature a certain rudeness and eccentricity, which not only rendered them uncouth and fantastic, but often caused the shadows and darkness of vice to be more conspicuous in their lives than the light and splendor of those virtues by which man is rendered immortal—so was there good cause wherefore she should, on ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... people came to church the next Sunday in crowds— twice as many as the usual assembly—some who went seldom, some who went nowhere, some who belonged to other congregations and communities—mostly bent on witnessing whatever eccentricity the very peculiar young man might be guilty of next, but having a few among them who were sympathetically interested in seeing how far his call, if call it ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... came. Some smiled indulgently and called it an artistic eccentricity, others looked upon it as a wise provision, in view of the many events which were crowding thick and fast in Paris just then, but to all, the real motive of that climax remained a puzzle and a mystery. Anyway, Marguerite St. Just married Sir Percy Blakeney one fine day, ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... An inequality in the moon's march, arising from the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, whereby the diurnal motion is sometimes quicker and at other times slower ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... CAVALIER VERSE. The numerous minor poets of this period are often arranged in groups, but any true classification is impossible since there was no unity among them. Each was a law unto himself, and the result was to emphasize personal oddity or eccentricity. It would seem that in writing of love, the common theme of poets, Puritan and Cavalier must alike speak the common language of the heart; but that is precisely what they did not do. With them love was no longer a passion, or even a fashion, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... life, the Gnostics generally went to extremes. It was due to Gnosticism that art and science found an entrance into the Church. It preserved the Church from becoming stereotyped in form; but, built up entirely on ideas and not on historical facts, it died from its own hollowness and eccentricity. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... he has seen something of the world. He has not outgrown the age which mistakes eccentricity for genius and bad temper for boldness. We shall see,—we shall see very soon. They will both hate Cutter, with his professorial wisdom and his immense experience of things they have never seen. How do ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford |
