"Finical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... means something, think of that, rather than of the way of saying it, your hearer, or yourself. Thus you will lose your self-consciousness, your dread, your fear, your worry. If your thought is worth anything, you can afford to laugh at some small violation of grammar, or the knocking over of some finical standard or other. Not that I would be thought to advocate either carelessness, laziness, or indifference in speech. Quite the contrary, as all who have heard me speak well know. But I fully believe that thought is of greater importance than form of expression. ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... about trifles, these conscientious objectors assure us, and trifles are unimportant. Trifles are unimportant, it is true, but then life is made up of trifles. To those who dislike the word, it suggests all that is finical and superfluous. It means a garish embroidery on the big scheme of life; a clog on the forward march of a strong and courageous nation. To such as these, the words etiquette and politeness connote weakness and timidity. Their notion of a really polite man is a dancing master or ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... highly finished, or else a wayside shrine, and a peasant woman, with her back turned, kneeling before it. She did backs very well, but she was a little weak in faces. Flowers, however, were her speciality, and though her touch was a little old-fashioned and finical, she painted them with remarkable skill. Her pictures were chiefly bought by the English. Rowland had made her acquaintance early in the winter, and as she kept a saddle horse and rode a great deal, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... "All that finical ceremony he would go through in the face of the enemy," thought Blecker, jumping down ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... you think your self a very fine Fellow now, and finical your self up to be thought so; but there's as much difference between a Citizen and ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... for the sake of the milk, certainly," responded Mrs. Norris, laughing; "but—" then she hesitated. How could she hamper the mind of this ingenuous little lad of hers with false and finical ideas of refinement and delicacy! Why should she suggest to him that it is at least not customary to go about giving the poor to drink out of our own especial milk cans? There came to her mind the noble ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... and finical tone he not infrequently adopted, he told the story of his youth, commenting on the everlasting discord between his father and his mother and the disagreeable quarrels that used to take place at home. He said that just as soon as his mother would ask that something ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... The problem was subtler than he had thought. Weakness was at the core of it, weakness revealed in self-deception and self-accusation alike, the weakness of the finical dreamer, the man with the unrobust conscience. But the weakness which Lewis arraigned himself on was the very obvious failing of the diffident and the irresolute. Wratislaw tried the ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... for his affectation and finical dandyism. He is made umpire by King Claudius, when Laert[^e]s and Hamlet "play" with rapiers ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... One thing, and one thing only, has kept him from telling you any time since last autumn: that is a sort of finical loyalty to me. I saw how matters stood when he came aboard of our train at Gaston—I'm asking you to believe that I didn't know it beforeand I saw then that my only hope was to make a handfast friend of him. And I ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... give the word?" asked the slight man, who was dressed point-device, and with a finical nicety, in black and silver. His voice was low and clear, and of a somewhat melancholy cadence, going well with the pensiveness of ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... not the ghost with the close red cap, My Pollajolo, the twice a craftsman, 210 Save me a sample, give me the hap Of a muscular Christ that shows the draftsman? No Virgin by him the somewhat petty, Of finical touch and tempera crumbly— Could not Alesso Baldovinetti 215 Contribute so ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... partisan of the Romantic movement. Its extravagance, misplaced enthusiasm, turbulence, attacks on church, state and tradition disturbed the finical Pole while noise, reclame and boisterousness chilled and repulsed him. He wished to be the Uhland of Poland, but he objected to smashing idols and refused to wade in gutters to reach his ideal. He was not a fighter, yet as one reviews the past half century it is his still ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... decided, the man kept at his work with finical precision. At a given moment he eat a lunch, and very tasteless it was too, and then to work again; the little craft went steadily on before the stroke of the strong arms, its wake unseen, its course unguided. Suddenly at sunset the fog folded its gray draperies, spread ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... and the beauty of the English language displayed by showing how many faultless sentences may be expended on an exhaustive description of irrelevant trifles, the human mind becomes recalcitrant. A man may become prolix from the fulness or fervency of his mind; but prolixity produced by this finical minuteness of language, ends by distressing one's nerves. It is the same sense of irritation as is produced by waiting for the tedious completion of an elaborate toilette, and one is rather tempted to remember Artemus Ward's description of the Fourth of July oration, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... with it? Nay, this is so common to them, that it is even the foundation of a proverbial remark, that no gentleman can be said to dance well, who dances like a dancing-master. Those false refinements, that finical, affected air so justly reproached to the generality of teachers, a master should correct in himself before he can well give lessons for avoiding them to his pupils. And, in truth, they are but wretched substitutes to the true grounds ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... prone to be rather severe on pious poets, and whose taste, too, was finical at times, says of Vaughan—'He is one of the harshest even of the inferior order of the school of conceit; but he has some few scattered thoughts that meet the eye amidst his harsh pages, like wild flowers on a barren ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... was a book which represented, far more profoundly and healthily than Schiller's "Robbers," that revolt of men of genius against every species of finical prescription, in literature and society, which ushered in the new age of Germany. And it expresses with uncalculating sincerity all the natural emotions which a century of pedantry and Gallic affectation had been crowding ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... cold and grave. The mouth was a fastidious one; the bearing of the man, though full of distinction, could sometimes be almost repellantly haughty. The merest sketch of him would not be complete unless we added that his dress was faultless, and that he was apt to bestow a somewhat finical care upon the ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... insects to secure food; and the quantity of fertile seed it is therefore able to ripen as the result of their visits is its reward. Also, its flowering season is unusually long, and it is a tireless bloomer. It is finical in no respect; its sprawling stems root easily at the joints, and ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... toilets, the men dress like all other men (alas, and alas, that we should say it, for we were continually hoping for a kilt!), though there seems to be no survival of the finical Lord Napier's spirit. Perhaps you remember that Lord and Lady Napier arrived at Castlemilk in Lanarkshire with the intention of staying a week, but announced next morning that a circumstance had occurred which rendered ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... her tiny brood. In the copse of the hollow below the resort, the mountain song-sparrows were trilling sweetly—the only ones we had encountered in our wanderings since leaving Arvada on the plains. These musicians seem to be rather finical in their choice of summer resorts. Chaseville is about a mile below Cassel's, and was made memorable to us by the discovery of our second green-tailed towhee's nest, a description of which I have decided to reserve for the last chapter of this volume. Lincoln's sparrows descanted in rich tones ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... university, so great that it can stop to measure no man by any one trait or any several traits, so busy that it must grasp him in the round, or not at all. There lay the fact of Scott Brenton's ultimate salvation. He would have been downed completely, judged by the finical standards ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray |
