"Idiosyncrasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • 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 abruptly arched; the beard, which will grow no more, is shaved close, save ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... 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, ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... 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 extent the great literary men of the one race have influenced the great literary ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... 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 ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... the word "opera"—), just as the word "spirit" is a misunderstanding in the New Testament.—He was not enough of a psychologist for drama; he instinctively avoided a psychological plot—but how?—by always putting idiosyncrasy in its place.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Very modern—eh? Very Parisian! very decadent!{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Incidentally, the plots that Wagner knows how to unravel with the help of dramatic inventions, are of quite another kind. For ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... IDIOSYNCRASY.—By idiosyncrasy we understand a peculiarity of constitution by which an individual is affected by external agents in a manner different from mankind in general. Thus, some persons cannot eat strawberries without a kind of urticaria appearing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... correspondence, which was never intended for the public eye, reveal a considerable amount of individuality. The interpretation of the rule was elastic enough to give scope to much diversity of opinion, and if superiors were jealous guardians of the Institute, they encountered sufficient idiosyncrasy among their subjects to prevent ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... was 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 arm, or else on woollen, and by shaking it might ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... 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 wise men keep ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... likely to be regarded, a hundred years hence, as having produced "literature." He is so unassuming, so mild, so intensely and unconsciously original in the expression of his naive emotions before the spectacle of life, that a hasty inquirer into his idiosyncrasy might be excused for entirely missing the point of him. His new book (which helps to redeem the enormous vulgarity of a booming season), "A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs" (Methuen), ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... himself, and I liked him the better for it. Without pressing for a more particular account, I led the conversation to treat of the different countries he had visited, referring, by the way, to some principal objects of attraction. Here I touched an idiosyncrasy of my new friend. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... of the idiosyncrasy referred to. There was in Johannesburg a man who, having arrived there with twenty-five pounds in his pockets—as he liked to relate with evident pride in the fact—had, in the course of two years, amassed together a fortune of two millions sterling. One ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... 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 ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... the lapse of time. Advance always originated with one or a few. If, however, in the end, a given portion found no place in the consciousness of generation truly evidencing their Christian life, that position would be adjudged an idiosyncrasy, a negligible quantity. This view of Schleiermacher's as to the Church is suggestive. It is the undertone of a view which widely prevails in our own time. It is somewhat difficult of practical combination with the traditional ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... 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
... of culture, 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 the other, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... also experience, and an even temper, and a little sympathy as well, to sum up the animal in hand—its special aptitudes, its limitations, its disposition, and that something in addition, which he called a "kink," and would probably have described as its idiosyncrasy if he had known the word. There was as much individual difference among dogs as there is in boys; but if the breed was right, and you went the right way about it, you could hardly fail to get a good servant. ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... within the 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, duties, and favors of near relatives, instead of engendering a consciousness ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... 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 of the Lunch Club that, within her own province, ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... 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 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 on the Big Blue, and that those ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... "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, too. He'll ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... contrast those fair, large parchments in which he has stated his results with those tattered and filthy papers which the latter- day literary rag-picker exists but to grope out from kennel and sewer is to know the difference between the artist in health and the artist possessed by an idiosyncrasy as by ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... in the bustle of business, to greet each other, then hurrying off again,—and the fondness of the females for gazing in the shop-windows where fine wares lay exposed, frequently blocking up the small foot-pavement in the gratification of this idiosyncrasy, assimilated them to my own countrymen and women. I looked under many a blue bonnet, and caught the sly glance of many a blue eye; but they were not the blue eye and bonnet of England. I gazed upon many a sweet, ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... the Double Bluff. That is to say, when he had two courses open to him, A and B, he pretended he was going to take B, and so got us guessing that he would try A. Then he took B after all. So I reckoned that his camouflage must correspond to this little idiosyncrasy. Being a Boche agent, he wouldn't pretend to be a hearty patriot, an honest old blood-and-bones Tory. That would be only the Single Bluff. I considered that he would be a pacifist, cunning enough just to keep inside the law, but with the eyes ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... "What has a woman to do with dates—cold, false, erroneous, chronological dates—new style, old style, precession of the equinox, 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 favor of incidents; and an authority more appropriate, Madame de Genlis, who began her own memoirs at eighty, swept through nearly an age of incident ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... 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 ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... possible under present circumstances. With these thunder-clouds hanging over me, I dare not set foot in England, and run the risk to be dropped upon. I can stand a few things, but I shudder at the bare idea of a prison. Something peculiar in my idiosyncrasy, I take it, for those who have tried it, say that it's nothing when you're used ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... here a 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 me that (accepting ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... (the leading Bolshevists prefer vodka to tea in any form) and the consequent recourse to inferior synthetic substitutes. The rival merits of cream, milk and lemon are carefully discussed both from the gustatory and hygienic standpoint, Mr. WELLS pronouncing in favour of lemon, in which idiosyncrasy he resembles Mr. CONRAD and Mr. GALSWORTHY. The volume is richly illustrated with pictures of rare tea-pots, tea-caddies and samovars, and contains a set of humorous verses dedicated to the author ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... is this: "Am I 'like folks'?" To be normal and to be well is to be "like folks." Can the average man stand this or that? If he can, then you are not normal if you cannot. Do the people around you eat the thing that upsets you? If they do, ten chances to one your trouble is not a physical idiosyncrasy, but a nervous habit. In bodily matters, at least, it is a good thing to be ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... is 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 ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... 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, he translated into ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... never struck her that he might be a coward, unmanly. Such a quality would have sickened her at once, and she knew she would have at once divined it. He did not hold himself very well, but was inclined to stoop and to keep his head low, as if he were in the habit of looking much on the ground. The idiosyncrasy was rather ugly, and suggested melancholy to her, the melancholy of a man given to over-much meditation and afraid to face the radiant wonder ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... deal of slaughter, 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 ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... perhaps there was nothing significant after all in Farfrae's look at Elizabeth-Jane at that juncture. Yet he could not forget that the Scotchman had once shown a tender interest in her, of a fleeting kind. Thereupon promptly came to the surface that idiosyncrasy of Henchard's which had ruled his courses from the beginning and had mainly made him what he was. Instead of thinking that a union between his cherished step-daughter and the energetic thriving Donald was a thing to be desired for ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... charity: and 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 ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... seems to be the existence of the human nature in this central and paramount object that imparts to Christianity, in its subjective character, its peculiar power of influencing and controlling the human mind. There may be men who, through a peculiar idiosyncrasy of constitution, are capable of loving, after a sort, a mere abstract God, unseen and inconceivable; though, as shown by the air of sickly sentimentality borne by almost all that has been said and written on the subject, the feeling in its true form must be a very rare and exceptional ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... 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 immaculate. The damp sea breeze had ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... Patty had grown indignant at Miss Daggett's conversation, but soon she felt rather amused at what was doubtless the idiosyncrasy of an ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... eggs vary in shape, color and firmness. These variations are more a matter of breed and individual idiosyncrasy than of ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... His black tenacity of purpose won strength from the repulse, but the problem for the time being was removed from its former sphere of active hatred towards his foe. How long this attitude would last, and what idiosyncrasy of character led to it, matters little. The fact remained that Grimbal's mental posture towards Blanchard now more nearly resembled that which he wore to his other interests in life. The circumstance still stood first, but partook of the nature of his emotions towards ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... with 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 are culture conflicts in which the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... to Dorothea, and they will. This is just one of those queer situations in which you'll get 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 ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... obedient slavery. She was pretty still, to be sure, in a certain faded, jaded, unassuming way; but her patient face wore a constant expression of suppressed terror, as if she expected every moment to be the victim of some terrible and unexplained exposure. And that feature at least in her idiosyncrasy could hardly be put down to Gilbert Gildersleeve's account; for hectoring and strong-minded as the successful Q.C. was known to be, nobody could for a moment accuse him in any definite way of deliberate unkindness to his wife or daughter. On the contrary, ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... Through all the fine, divaricating ways of the new life, it grew ever more evident, there were for every one certain persons, mysteriously and indescribably in the key of one's self, whose mere presence gave pleasure, whose mere existence was interest, whose idiosyncrasy blended with accident to make a completing and predominant harmony for their predestined lovers. They were the essential thing in life. Without them the fine brave show of the rejuvenated world was ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... 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 could strike out a course showing a marked difference from those with whom ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... Bartolo has discovered the fraud practised upon him. The music is a delightful example of Rossini in his gayest and merriest mood. It sparkles with wit and fancy, and is happily free from those concessions to the vanity or idiosyncrasy of individual singers which do so much to render his music tedious to modern ears. Of Rossini's lighter works, 'Il Barbiere' is certainly the most popular, though, musically speaking, it is perhaps not superior to 'La Gazza Ladra,' which, however, is saddled with an idiotic libretto. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... 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. And on the mental side we are further perplexed by the ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... causes and effects, whole nations must have already been extinguished under its use. Many mighty nations have used it for centuries, and show no aggregated deterioration from its employment. Individual exceptions exist in every community. They arise either from idiosyncrasy or from excess, and they have no weight in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... shock his lordship 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 under ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... O'Connor's idiosyncrasy of fear was a source of much amusement among the boys at the office where he worked. They made open sport of it, and yet, recognizing him for a sensitive plant, and granting that genius was entitled to whimsicalities, it was their custom when they called for him ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... borrowed, writing, it may be, as nearly like his long-studied original as Julio Romano's painting was like Raphael's; and all this with the unquestioning conviction that he is talking from his own consciousness in his own natural way. So far as tones and expressions and habits which belonged to the idiosyncrasy of the original are borrowed by the student of his life, it is a misfortune for the borrower. But to share the inmost consciousness of a noble thinker, to scan one's self in the white light of a pure and radiant soul,—this is indeed the highest ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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 ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... in 'Robinson Crusoe' precisely the field in which his talents could be most effectually applied; and that a very slight alteration in the subject-matter might change the merit of his work to a disproportionate extent. The more special the idiosyncrasy upon which a man's literary success is founded, the greater, of course, the probability that a small change will disconcert him. A man who can only perform upon the drum will have to wait for certain combinations of other instruments ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... and agreeable to some men acts as virulent poison to others (e.g. shell-fish, egg, quinine, opium). The smallest change in the substance administered or the smallest difference in the living substance of an individual (what is called "idiosyncrasy") makes all the difference between ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... 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 physical mate ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Corneille, of Racine, of 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 and of society is made ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... States. When 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 of the present ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... accent of 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 ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... the 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 humanity. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... friends, and friends whom he holds in deep affection, among the adherents of opinions most entirely antagonistic to his own. Hazlet's repulsiveness was due to a very mistaken education, developing a very foolish idiosyncrasy, and especially to the pernicious system of encouraging sentiments and expressions which in a boy's mind could not be other than sickly exotics. He had to be taught his own hypocrisy by the painful progress of events, and, above ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... harassed by uncertain 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
... soul reached forward 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 weird ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... 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 alliance it may be noticed ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... nothing of 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
... the laws of sound to any great extent, and there's a 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 ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... 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 ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... period of authorship. The play naturally falls, by the internal notes of style, temper, and poetic grain, into the middle period of his productive years. It has no such marks of vast but immature powers as are often met with in his earlier plays; nor, on the other hand, any of "that intense idiosyncrasy of thought and expression,—that unparalleled fusion of the intellectual with the passionate,"—which distinguishes his later ones. Every thing is calm and quiet, with an air of unruffled serenity and composure about it, as if the Poet had purposely taken to such matter as he could easily mould into ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... 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 ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... did 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 ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... 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 ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... engaging figure in American history, none more entirely free from disfiguring idiosyncrasy, than the son of ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... 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
... defect in the 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. Childhood is too buoyant, fresh, ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... the "ribbed" variety to all values but, as we have pointed out in earlier chapters, it is extremely unlikely that any such variety as a real ribbed paper was used, the ribbed lines being simply due to some idiosyncrasy of manufacture. To again quote ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... the old phrase, have '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 more ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... have lost any friends they were friends whose loss does not bother me. I find that all the true-blue chaps, the worth-while ones, though they look—in most instances—on my non-drinking idiosyncrasy with amused tolerance, have not lost any respect or affection for me, and are just as true blue as they formerly were. Most of them drink, but I fancy some of them wish they did not; and none of them holds my strange behavior ...
— The Old Game - A Retrospect after Three and a Half Years on the Water-wagon • Samuel G. Blythe
... 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 publications and skimming readers, rather than under conditions of greater permanency; ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... himself that Paris was worth a few masses. But the leader knows by experience that only when symbols have done their work is there a handle he can use to move a crowd. In the symbol emotion is discharged at a common target, and the idiosyncrasy of real ideas blotted out. No wonder he hates what he calls destructive criticism, sometimes called by free spirits the elimination of buncombe. "Above all things," says Bagehot, "our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... are its effects limited to these objects: much of what is vigorous in the character of its northern converts may be traced to the operation of its principles, in the development of their peculiar idiosyncrasy, which, unlike that of the unwarlike Singhalese, rejected sloth and effeminacy to aim at conquest and power. Looking to the self-reliance which Buddhism inculcates, the exaltation of intellect which it proclaims, and ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... 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 ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... burghers, who accordingly never issue out of their town walls. They have forgotten the use of ordinary appliances of country life, such as thick boots and walking-sticks; you will not see them hereabouts. Unaware of this idiosyncrasy, I used to carry a stick on my way through the streets into the surroundings, but left it at home on learning that I was regarded as a kind of perambulating earthquake. The spectacle of a man clattering ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... abandon the body, and elevating itself above mortal affairs just so far as to 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 of life; and thus ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... directly at my face; afterward I had to work away at the wagon, and thought no more about it; and when, on our return, each of our wagoners affirmed that the guns had pointed at him and no one else, I came to the conclusion that this many-sidedness must be part of the idiosyncrasy of guns—a sort of optical unmannerliness that does not ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... same color and texture. His two feet, always 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 generals of the War of 1812—at, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... idiosyncrasy, its constitution, often its own code of morality. The levity of some of the younger women in and about Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the choice spirit who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity. The place had also a more abiding defect; ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... 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 ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... penalty of the heroic sceptical resolve in strong and constant minds; commonly those who would measure man's large scope by the gauge of their own ability and experience fall into such idiosyncrasy as is the fruitful mother of sects, abortive social schemes, and all the various brood of dwarfed life; but, for most men, the pressure of life itself, which compels them, like Descartes, doubting the world, to live as if it were real, corrects their original method of independence. They ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... Majesty, there ain't nothin' goin' to stop Link," said Nels, with a reassuring smile. The significance of the incident had not dawned upon Nels, or else he was heedless of it. After all, he was afraid only of the car and Link, and that fear was an idiosyncrasy. Madeline began to see her cowboy driver with clearer eyes and his spirit awoke something in her that made danger of no moment. Nels likewise subtly responded, and, though he was gray-faced, tight-lipped, his eyes took on the cool, ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... 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
... 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 by a rather charming deference mingled ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... and the mise en scene of his novels, however, Broadstairs appears to have contributed nothing, except that the lady whose aversion to donkeys furnished so strong an idiosyncrasy to Miss Betsy Trotwood's character was a native, not of Dover, as in the ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin |
