"Temperamental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... explanation of Italy's attitude given by Chancellor von Buelow when discussing the conference in Parliament next year. The impression is general, both in and out of Germany, that Italy is only a half-hearted political ally. It is based on the temperamental difference between the Latin and the Teutonic races, on the popular sympathy between the French and Italian peoples, and to the supposedly reluctant support lent by Italy to Germany during the critical time of the conference, the extra-tour, as Prince Buelow, using a metaphor of the ballroom, termed ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... differences, more or less marked, just as there are when the same piece is played by two pianists. In the broader outlines, in general spirit, the interpretations may be the same, but they will be distinguished by subtle shadings that indicate temperamental differences. The perspective of a landscape varies when viewed from different windows; so does life when observed from different points of view; so does the interpretation of a composition when played by different people on ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... that. I was going to remark that, though the temperamental conditions of Posthumus and Troilus are apparently so similar—apparently, mind—and their position as betrayed husbands so identical, we find them acting in directly opposite ways. Troilus entertains no thought of revenge upon his faithless wife; he gives his whole attention to the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... fine distinctions in his mind on the strength of insignificant differences. He drew them with a certain complacency, because the instinct of conventional respectability was strong within him, being only overcome by his dislike of all kinds of recognised labour—a temperamental defect which he shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social state. For obviously one does not revolt against the advantages and opportunities of that state, but against the price which must be paid for ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Henry. This action of Halleck was the consequence partly of accidents which had prevented communication between them and caused Halleck to think him insubordinate, partly of false reports to Halleck that Grant was drinking to excess, partly of Halleck's dislike of Grant,—a temperamental incapacity of appreciation. After Donelson he issued a general order of congratulation of Grant and Foote for the victory, but he sent no personal congratulations, and reported to Washington that the victory was due to General Smith, whose ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... her breast. It was a recognized gesture with her, a physical holding of herself together in the last minute that preceded her temperamental flying to pieces. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... melody that was temperamental, Lanier had ideas. He was alive to the problems of his age and to the beauties of nature. One has only to think of the names of his poems to realize how many themes occupied his attention. He wrote of religion, social questions, science, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... mysterious happenings were an every-day occurrence, into a world peopled by strange men and women who always carried secrets about with them. And, in a sense, no one was more mysterious than Fenella herself. He asked himself as he stood there whether her vagaries were merely temperamental, the air of mystery which seemed to surround her simply accidental. He thought of that night at her house, the curious intimacy which from the first moment she had seemed to take for granted, the confidence with which she had treated him. He remembered those few breathless ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... genius, Paul, violently anti-Christian, enters on the scene, holding the clothes of the men who are stoning Stephen. He persecutes the Christians with great vigor, a sport which he combines with the business of a tentmaker. This temperamental hatred of Jesus, whom he has never seen, is a pathological symptom of that particular sort of conscience and nervous constitution which brings its victims under the tyranny of two delirious terrors: ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... organisation. In his plans he allows for most possibilities, but he is nonplussed when the situation does not turn out exactly as it should on paper. Again, man for man, he loses "guts" in tight corners, because of this same lack of initiative. It is perhaps a temperamental failing. There have been moments in this War when only his incapacity to deal with a suddenly-developed situation has stood between him and stupendous success. He has assumed, let us say, that by all the rules ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... related; they stand to one another much as the temperament or character of a man stands to his life history, of which it is at once the cause and the result. Just as we get a total impression of a man's nature by following the story of his life, so we get the temperamental quality of lines by following them with the eye; and just as all of our knowledge of a man's acts enters into our intuition of his nature, so we discover the character of the total line by a ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... period dates that intense national antipathy felt by the English for the Irish race which has darkened all subsequent history. It was not originally a temperamental antipathy, or it would be impossible to explain the powerful attraction of Irish character, manners, and laws for the great bulk of the Anglo-Norman colonists. Nor within Ireland, even after the Reformation, was it a religious antipathy between a Protestant race ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... two men, though the reflection that she would have more amusement with Mark than with Philip may have crossed her mind. She trusted Philip, and respected his steady-going, serious view of life; it pleased her vanity, too, to feel how her nonsense and fun lightened his temperamental gravity, playing in and out and over it like a butterfly in a smoke bush. She would be safe with Philip always, but safety had no special charm for one of her age, who had never been in peril. Mark's superior knowledge of the world, moreover, his careless, buoyant ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... largely temperamental, unreflective, and concrete. In William Blake, the singularity of whose work long retarded its due appreciation, sentimentalism was likewise temperamental; but, unconfined to actuality, became far broader in scope, more spiritual, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... matter of the name, there was no fake about Signor Tomaso. He was a brilliant animal-trainer, as unacquainted with fear as the Swede, as dominant of eye, and of immeasurably greater experience. But being, at the same time, more emotional, more temperamental than his phlegmatic assistant, his control was sometimes less steady, and now and again he would have to assert his authority with violence. He was keenly alive to the varying personalities of his beasts, naturally, and hence had favorites among them. ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... Courtlandt could he have foreseen the drawing together of the ends of the circle and the relative concernment of the duke in knotting those ends. The labors of Hercules had never entailed the subjugation of two temperamental women. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... with a good temperamental blend of the imaginative and the active, was just the man, the time being ripe, to encounter and surmount that wall. Fortunately, too, the Virginians were horsemen, man and horse one piece almost, New World centaurs. They would follow the bridle-tracks that ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... without waiting for her to answer, "to the fact that neither of us is in the least romantic about the other. That may be partly, no doubt, because we've known each other so long; but I'm inclined to think there's more in it than that. There's something temperamental. I think you're a trifle cold, and I suspect I'm a trifle self-absorbed. If that were so it goes a long way to explaining our odd lack of illusion about each other. I'm not saying that the most satisfactory marriages aren't ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... by their own undirected and misguided energies. A mere temperamental outbreak in a brief period of obstreperousness exposes a promising boy to arrest and imprisonment, an accidental combination of circumstances too complicated and overwhelming to be coped with by an immature mind, ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... private dining room at the "Tourraine" for his young guests. He welcomed them with true Latin enthusiasm, and to see him seated at the head of the table one would never have suspected him to be the moody, temperamental genius whose playing had made him famous in two continents. When the time came to leave the hotel for the train he was escorted to the station by an admiring ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... difficulties before him. As any common catalogue of troubles will not provoke Solon from a happy unconcern which is temperamental, I spared no details in my recital, and I observed at length that my listener was truly aroused to the bad way in which Miss Caroline found herself. He sat forward in his chair, rested one elbow upon his untidy desk, and for several moments of ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... man coming toward us?" said Evelyn, nodding in the direction of a tall, spare young fellow, who, with his shock of black hair, long, aquiline nose, and sensitive, thin-lipped mouth, looked decidedly temperamental, even to the ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... union is possible only at the center, the crux, of Being. This truth is represented by the algebraical X, the symbol of spiritual sex-union. Therefore sex relationships which do not have for their crux spiritual as well as temperamental affinity, are not final, or eternal, however beautiful they may be; and there are many sex-relationships which are pure and sacred even though they do not fulfil this highest of all relationships, that ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... fashion of the wise Emperor of China, "Truth hath not an unchanging name." A modern English writer says: "I have long been convinced by the experience of my life, as a pioneer of various heterodoxies, which are rapidly becoming orthodoxies, that nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or given in the affections and intuitions; and that discussion and inquiry do little more than feed temperament." Our poet seems to mean that the Perceptions, when they perceive truly, convey objective truth, which is universal; whereas the Reflectives and ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... to observe their social relations and varied expressions of individuality. As a result of my close acquaintance with this band of primates, I feel more keenly than ever before the necessity of taking into account, in connection with all experimental analyses of behavior, the temperamental characteristics, experience, and ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... fiction, Conscience. Such persons are under suspicion of being unstable—and temperamental. Matrimonially ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... minus quantities added to the total of temperamental characteristics and inherited traits left, unfortunately, in balancing the personal equation a minus quantity. Not that he had any realization of such a result—what man has? On the contrary, he firmly believed that his inherited ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... in outward manner, in a world through which the artist is bound to go on a wholly 'secret errand,' as bad form, which shocked him as much in persons as bad style did in books. He hated every form of extravagance, noise, mental or physical, with a temperamental hatred: he suffered from it, in his nerves and in his mind. And he had no less dislike of whatever seemed to him either morbid or sordid, two words which he often used to express his distaste for things and people. He never would have appreciated writers like Verlaine, because ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual. The serene, calm character of a Tolstoy will wish different methods for social reconstruction than the intense, overflowing personality of a Michael Bakunin or a Peter Kropotkin. Equally so it must be apparent that ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... mechanistic view of life, or evolution,—the view which Herbert Spencer built into such a ponderous system of philosophy, and which such men as Huxley, Tyndall, Gifford, Haeckel, Verworn, and others, have upheld and illustrated,—is temperamental rather than logical. The view is distasteful to a certain type of mind—the flexible, imaginative, artistic, and literary type—the type that loves to see itself reflected in nature or that reads its own thoughts and emotions into nature. In a few eminent examples the two types of mind to ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... Folks at Home." The scene through which she had gone with the Captain had awakened deep emotions, and her voice was in the temperamental condition to give a sadly-weird effect to the lines of the chorus. ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... would never speak of the past weighed with her not at all. She guessed that long ago he had been guilty of some mad, boyish escapade which, with his exaggerated sense of honour and the delicate idealism that she had learned to know as an intrinsic part of his temperamental make-up, he had magnified into a cardinal sin. And she was content to leave it at that and to accept the present, gathering up with both hands the ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... other hand, fights under keen excitement. He is temperamental, imaginative; as he fights he remembers all the bitterness of the past, its wrongs, its cruelties. He sees blood. There is nothing that will hold him back. The result has made history, ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... which his eyes should show, all the force which should dwell in his nose, all the temperamental qualities that should reveal themselves in his mouth and chin, all the genius which should illumine his brow — these dwell within his Adam's apple. The man has run entirely to that feature; his moods, his emotions, ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... of his precocious sexuality, M.O. had from the very first an extreme disgust for obscene stories, and for any association of sexual things with filthy words and anecdotes. Owing in part to this and in part to his temperamental skepticism, he disbelieved what associates told him regarding sexual emissions, only becoming convinced when he actually experienced them; and the facts of reproduction he denied indignantly until he read them in a medical work. Until he was well over 25 the physical aversion from any ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a definite and agreeable fact that she and the flower of Lucien's had things to say to each other—things of the rare temperamental sort that say themselves seldom. Within a fortnight she had made a niche for him in that private place where she kept the images of those toward whom she sustained this peculiarly sacred obligation, and to meet him had become one of those pleasures which were in Sparta ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... German guns, long waiting for their prey, were seeking it in eager ferocity as they laid their curtains of fire on the appointed places which they had registered. The hell of the poets and the priests must have some emotion, some temperamental variation. This was sheer mechanical hell, its pulse that of ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... growled one of the men. He happened to own a hotel. He knew how temperamental was the pleasure-seeking stranger. Singularly, that advice was the only brand given by the rest of the Committee. They seemed strangely unable to offer any remedy except to keep on paying and in every way possible bar unpleasant news ...
— The Rat Racket • David Henry Keller
... hand—particularly novels—and is an inveterate patron of picture shows. "Under no strain trying to hear 'em talk," he confidences. While such occasions really are very rare, once in an age he becomes depressed—a peculiar fact (their rarity) in one so temperamental. After the fifth call within a month to act as pall-bearer at a funeral, he was in the depths. A friend was trying to ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... my preserver, whose table adjoined mine. He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. He had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle; of one whom the clenched fist of Fate has smitten beneath the temperamental third waistcoat-button. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... moment that Wilson's peculiar temperamental faults asserted themselves. Sorely he needed the sane advice of Colonel House, who would doubtless have found ways of placating the opposition. But that practical statesman was in London and the President lacked the capacity to arrange ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... historic and ultimately, perhaps, racial and temperamental factor in the lives of peoples which makes it difficult, though not impossible, perhaps, to transmit political and religious institutions to people of a different racial type and a different social tradition. William James' essay, "On a Certain Blindness in Human ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... many of our Australasian friends. It is not an official history. I have, in my own way, endeavoured to picture what like these warring Bohemians are. The cloak of fiction has here and there been wound round temperamental things as well ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... like Lois, was a trifle temperamental, had fallen before the charms of one Lawrence Hastings. The manner of Hastings's advent in Montgomery is perhaps worthy of a few words, inasmuch as he came to stay. Hastings was an actor, who visited Montgomery one winter as a member of a company that had trustfully ventured into the provinces ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... all action of this kind there have long been two schools of political thought, upheld with equal sincerity. The division has not normally been along political, but temperamental, lines. The course I followed, of regarding the executive as subject only to the people, and, under the Constitution, bound to serve the people affirmatively in cases where the Constitution does not explicitly ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... then, admit Luther's fault and proceed to apologize for him and find plausible reasons for extenuating his indiscretions in speech and his temperamental faults? We shall do neither. We shall let this "foul-mouthed," coarse Luther stand before the bar of public opinion just as he is. His way cannot be our way, but ultimately none of us will be his final judges. The character of the duties which ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... palaver," replied Sanders, with a little grimace, "and I was being requested to restore a husband to a temperamental lady who has a passion for shying cook-pots at her ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... process of writing history which Trench describes as "a moral whitewashing of such things as in men's sight were as blackamoors before." Religious or temperamental prejudice often obscures the vision and warps the judgment of even the most scholarly minds. Conscious of this infirmity in the ablest writers of history it would be absurd to claim complete exemption from the power of personal bias. It is sincerely hoped, however, that the strongest passion ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... Italy, the ancient home of Civilization, the mother of arts and refinement, to accept the standard of the Huns which the Germans embraced and imposed upon their allies. The conflict between the Germans and the Italians was instinctive, temperamental. For a thousand years it took the form of a struggle between the German Emperors and the Italian Popes for mastery. The Germans strove for political domination, for temporal power; the Italians strove, at least in ideal, in order ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... of his temperamental enmity to Nostromo went out of Dr. Monygham's eyes. He stepped back submissively. He did not believe Mrs. Gould. But her word was law. He accepted her denial like an inexplicable fatality affirming the victory ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... cell which in one second can raise us through the bluest ether to the heaven as understood by the prayer-book, or send us diving to the mud flats of the ocean bed to co-habit for a time with wingless and non-temperamental oddities. ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... veritable bee-hive of industry. The foundation was in readiness for the handiwork of love, for Burton Raines, feeling that he could not concentrate on business in such sentimental environs, explained patiently that he was only an ordinary married man and that love rhapsodies to the tune of temperamental hammering upset him. So he had taken the morning off from his own business, to lay the foundation for ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... hand, temperamental pliability and lovableness were the directing traits of the man who, in his way, made contributions quite as solid to the extension of the Pittsburgh steel industry. Schwab worked with the human material quite as successfully as other men worked with iron ore, ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... contemporary masters of the violin whose name stands for more at the present time than that of the great Belgian artist, his "extraordinary temperamental power as an interpreter" enhanced by a hundred and one special gifts of tone and technic, gifts often alluded to by his admiring colleagues? For Ysaye is the greatest exponent of that wonderful Belgian school of violin playing ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... who had committed merciless robberies, cruel murders, heartless swindles, abominable depravities. I have felt greater temperamental aversion from many highly respectable persons than I did from them. Their crimes were one thing, they were another. Not that crime does not corrupt a man—stain him of its color. But there is always another side to him, a place in him which it has not dominated. Given his ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... hands were peculiar hands for a fat man. They were tapering, slender, delicate, blue-veined, temperamental hands. At this moment, despite his purpling face, and his staring eyes, they were the most noticeable thing about him. His fingers clawed the empty air, quivering, vibrant, as though poised to ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... and handed it across. "Heydenreich thought of that, too. He got this up for me, about five years ago. The intelligence test is based on the new French Surete test for mentally deficient criminals. Then there's a memory test, and tests for judgment and discrimination, semantic reactions, temperamental and emotional ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... they spread this love of bold coloring, so that at the dawn of the Renaissance we find a return to the Greek and Roman coloring, which, however, was modified in England, Germany and Flanders, according to temperamental conditions. ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... There is hauteur in my omission of it, and it is a fact that we can express ourselves with far more vigour without g's or r's than you of the North can with them. For expression with us is not scholastic, but temperamental! Where ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... of this experience that I said for years: "The country is good, but it is not for me...." I loved to read about the country, enjoyed hearing men talk about their little places, but always felt a temperamental exile from their dahlias and gladioli and wistaria. I knew what would happen to me if I went again to the country to live, for I judged by the former adventure. Work would stop; all mental activity would sink into ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... a sullen, disgruntled creature. As the convicts would say, it had a "grouch" against the world. He never played with the other flies either. He was strong and healthy, too; for I studied him long to find out. His indisposition for play was temperamental, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... questioned on the first day out, had told him that this stateroom was occupied by an invalid gentleman travelling alone, who preferred to remain there instead of trusting to his crutches on a temperamental deck. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... her neighbours. There were always babies to be looked after, and "bits of 'elp" needed, sometimes there were "movings" from one cottage to another, and "confinements" were plainly at once exhilarating and enriching. Her temperamental good cheer, combined with her experience, made her a desirable companion and ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... fly—numbering as they do thousands nowadays—cannot be endowed specially by nature for their task. There is indeed a wide latitude for temperamental differences—always provided that nothing more is required of a man than a certain average of skill. But if a man is to become a first-class pilot, one distinctly above the average, then the question of his temperament, as it influences his ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... States and Spain have always been peculiarly irritating, owing to temperamental differences between the two peoples. McKinley, however, had in mind a program for which there was some hope of success. He was willing to agree to some form of words which would leave Spain in titular possession of the island, thereby making a concession to Spanish pride, for he ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... or less under this spell of the Past, some natures are more particularly enthralled by it, even in the very zenith of life, showing it to be of temperamental origin rather than the outcome of the passing years. Of such a temperament is John Burroughs. Now, when the snows of five-and-seventy winters have whitened his head, we do not wonder when we hear him say, "Ah! the Past! the Past has ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... his understanding of the meaning of the poem, and his revelation of its meanings, as well as upon the absence of stiffness or self-consciousness in suggesting the moods or characteristics displayed, will depend the impression of temperamental force ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... if we live it out. Go to it, Simec." There was sort of a reckless ring in the writer's voice which was taken as a sign that he was seriously impressed. But Bates would be; he had imagination and was temperamental. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... added oracularly, "Better to let the dead past bury its dead," and murmured the lines from a celebrated new play, "Smashed to hell is smashed to hell!" If she were willing to see her creation die, Ernestine ought to be. But that was not Ernestine's nature: she was not artistic nor temperamental, as Milly often proved to her. In her dumb, heavy fashion she still tried to prop up the ill-fated Cake Shop and make it pay expenses at least, in one way ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... temperamental and some of them are full of cussedness but the only ones who could sass Paul Bunyan and get away with it were the stars like Big Joe and Sourdough Sam. The lunch sled, - most popular institution in the lumber industry! Its arrival at, the noon rendezvous has been hailed ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead
... A temperamental dislike of the methods of politicians was followed by a strong animosity towards those who crossed his political path and some of those who went along beside it. He became hypercritical of those with whom he associated and allowed a natural germ of cynicism ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... taken would have been great in moral value to them as in moral loss to the French. Their spirits would have been exalted as much as the French spirits would have drooped, and even in modern war victory is secured as much by temperamental qualities as by ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... Lewis's confidential position had no doubt made him acquainted with the inner details of the plan, its broader significance, and the political obstacles to be overcome in carrying it into effect. Aside from his temperamental disposition for such an enterprise, his public service had strengthened his grasp of national interests; enthusiasm for adventure had been supplemented by maturity of judgment in affairs of state. Altogether, a better man for the place could not ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... are so temperamental, I scarcely know what to suggest. What does a leading lady and producer like to do in ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... no means a rabid New Englander. I love the New England scene and I have the feeling for it that we all have for the place in which we played as children. Most New Englanders have a kind of temperamental shyness. They are still like the English from whom they are descended. It is difficult for them to talk about the things on which they feel most deeply. The typical New Englander would discuss his native place with no more ease than he would ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... the lofty temperamental Upper Fall, the Lower Fall appears a smug and steady pigmy. In such company, for both are always seen together, it is hard to realize that the Lower Fall is twice the height of Niagara. Comparing Yosemite's three most ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... it said; and with an overpowering feeling of relief Mr Pickering recognized it as Lord Wetherby's. A moment later the temperamental peer's dapper figure became visible in silhouette against ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... heroism of those who faced the last plunge of the Titanic so courageously when all the boats had gone,—if it does, it is the difficulty of expressing an idea in adequate words,—to say that their quiet heroism was largely unconscious, temperamental, not a definite choice between two ways of acting. All that was visible on deck before the boats left tended to this conclusion and the testimony of those who went down with the ship and were afterwards rescued ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... Mr. Bradley couldn't have prevented it.... Yes; I remember her perfectly. She came to tea with Mrs. Newbolt several times. Rather a temperamental person, ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... exception, entirely objective. Contemporary poetry is, on the other hand, very largely subjective; and even when it deals with events or incidents it invests them to such a degree with personal emotion and imagination, it so modifies and colours them with temperamental effects, that the resulting poem is much more a study of subjective conditions than a picture or drama of objective realities. This projection of the inward upon the outward world, in such a degree that the dividing ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... swooning lady into his arms and held her there to his great content, triumphing in her beauty and successful capture. Truly the adventure had gone by clockwork: he might say (he thought) that there was not one step in it but had been schemed to an eighth of an inch; and when you have to bring temperamental differences into account, the chances of Italian politics, the influence of climate, the panic alarms of a ridden mob—and still succeed, why, then you may lawfully be happy. Happy he was, but Molly was ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... seeking means by which to study the mental and temperamental traits of wild birds and mammals, the definite and clearly cut manifestations are so few in kind that we are glad to seize upon everything available. Of the visible evidences, pugnacity and the fighting habit are valuable materials, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... Camoens by enriching Portugal with The Lusiads, Burton by his travels and by presenting to England vast stores of Oriental lore. Each received insult and ill-treatment, Camoens by imprisonment at Goa, Burton by the recall from Damascus. There was also a temperamental likeness between the two men. The passion for travel, the love of poetry and adventure, the daring, the patriotism of Camoens all find their counterpart in his most painstaking English translator. Arrived at Panjim, Burton obtained lodgings and then set out by moonlight ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... Arctic regions, and the North American Indians. While in such a mass of material there are some games that are found in almost all countries, so that one is continually meeting old friends among them, a very considerable harvest of distinctive material has been gathered, eloquent of environment, temperamental, or racial traits. Such, among many others, are the Japanese Crab Race; the Chinese games of Forcing the City Gates, and Letting Out the Doves; the Korean games with flowers and grasses; the North American Indian games of Snow Snake and Rolling Target; and the poetic game of the little Spanish ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... temperamental, the apotheosis of brilliancy—genius. The sudden dart up, the terrifying drop down seemed her main accomplishment. The wonder of it was that the men could never tell where she would land. Did it seem ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... there is an underlying cause in extenuation for this temperamental shortcoming which in justice to the ostensibly weaker sex should be set forth here. Even though I am taking on the role of Devil's Advocate in the struggle to keep woman from canonizing herself ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... If you were not so—so temperamental, I would say go back and begin again. But that is risky. It will be better to go on, I think, trying to recapture the more serious style, until the whole book it at least in some form. Then you will know exactly where you are and what is necessary to harmonize ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... large in Paris," replied Miss Lancaster, as if she were reciting a verse out of a catalogue. She had, as she sometimes found occasion to remark, been "born tired," and this temperamental weariness showed now in her handsome face, so wrinkled and dark around her bravely smiling eyes. Where she came from, or how she spent her time between the hour she left the shop and the hour she returned to it, the two women knew as little as they knew the intimate personal ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... stopped, the priest and acolytes knelt solemnly (with bowed heads) and prayers were said. While the procession was passing from station to station, the girls sang their hymn in French. It was the age old pageantry of the Catholic church, a pageantry that perhaps indicates an age old temperamental difference between the Latin and the ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... precluded the drive. It seemed that young Eddy Carroll was given to romancing in more respects than one, and had not told the truth to Anderson when he had been asked if his family would feel anxious at his non-return to dinner. Eddy knew quite well that they would be anxious. In spite of a certain temperamental aversion to worry, the boy's mother and sisters were wont to become quite actively agitated if he failed to appear at expected times and seasons. Eddy Carroll, in the course of a short life, had contrived to find the hard side of many little difficulties. He had ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... towards her in conversational fashion. "Now to me half the evils of life lie in anticipation. When the time of danger actually arrives, those evils seem to take to themselves wings and fly away. Take the case of a great actress on her first night, an emotional and temperamental woman, besieged by fears until the curtain rises, and then carried away by her genius even unto the heights. Our curtain has risen, Miss Beverley. All we can do is to pray that the gods may ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... needed no courage to go down and hear her mother's account of the interview. Adelaide was still in bed, but one long, pointed fingertip, pressed continuously upon the dangling bell, a summons that had long since lost its poignancy for the temperamental Lucie, indicated that she was ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... was coming, and Crowder was expected on a later train with Pancha Lopez and her father—eight people, quite an affair. Fong had been marketing half the morning, and was now in the kitchen in a state of temperamental irritation, having even swept Lorry from his presence with a commanding, "Go away, Miss Lolly. I get clazy if ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... going," said Latisan. He followed her, and to her profound amazement she discovered that a woodsman could be as temperamental as a prima donna. "I'm going, too, Mr. Flagg," he called over his shoulder. "I'm going for good and all where you're concerned. I'm done with you. I gave you your fair warning. Send another man north to ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... Of all temperamental men, Beethoven was doubtless the most so, and the anecdotes written of him are many. He was especially irascible. His domestic annoyances are revealed freely in his diary: "Nancy is too uneducated for a housekeeper—indeed, quite a beast." "My precious servants were occupied from seven ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... temperamental and whimsical old Negro of San Antonio, Texas, who still sees the sunny side of his 92 years, in spite of his total blindness. He was born and bred a slave in St. Hedwig, Bexar Co., Texas, the son of slave parents bought in Mississippi by his master, William Gudlow. Before ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... protecting her hair from any imaginary dust, and this became a symbol, a battle flag of the goddess of housecleaning. Father was ordered out of the library, where he did his writing, and his thread was rudely broken; it was a day when sap did not run. For a high-strung, temperamental being, hasty and quick tempered, I think he showed wonderful patience, a patience that does him great credit. And yet in many ways Mother was an invaluable helpmate, she was a balance wheel that kept their world moving steadily, and ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... functioning vigorously all the time in order to keep up the brilliance of his colouring, the light curl of his coal-black hair and the lustre of his eyes, which asserted themselves roundly in an open, manly face. Between two such organisms one would not have expected to find the slightest temperamental accord. But I have observed that profane men living in ships like the holy men gathered together in monasteries develop traits of profound resemblance. This must be because the service of the sea ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... the other hand, which argue what ought to be done, make their appeal in the main to the moral, practical, Or aesthetic interests of the audience. These interests have their ultimate roots in the deep-seated mass of inherited temperamental motives and forces which may be summed up here in the conveniently vague term "feeling." These motives and forces, it will be noticed, lie outside the field of reason, and are in the main recalcitrant to ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... work published on this important and interesting subject. The author made it the special subject of study and was thoroughly familiar with all temperamental questions. ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... chronicle and commentary of the battles of another, battles which cover the same period and were fought broadly for the same causes. But the French Radical extremist could never see his way to subscribe to the Socialist creed. His stalwart individualism, in part temperamental, was also as a political working faith the result of a distrust of logic divorced from the experience and responsibility of actual administration. Somewhat similarly the English Socialist refused to let logic press him into the premature ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... "That temperamental dignotions, and conjecture of prevalent humours, may be collected from spots in our Nails, we are not averse to concede. But yet not ready to admit sundry divinations vulgarly raised upon them. Nor do we observe it verified in others, what Cardan discovered as a property in himself: ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... to question whether it is right to call such things as self-consciousness, reserve and fear, sins. "Call them infirmities, disabilities, temperamental weaknesses, if you will," some have said, "but not sins. To do so would be to get us into bondage." The reverse, however, is true. If these things are not sins, then we must put up with them for the rest of our lives, there is no deliverance. ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... strayed from the bell; sick, indeed, when that jangle failed to hold her to the work. Something very strange and sorrowful about these mighty creatures. If they can but muzzle the flanks of the bell-mare once in twenty-four hours, often stopping a jolt from the heels of this temperamental monster—the mules appear morally refreshed ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... that right now I am having the happiest time of my life. For, though I don't very much want books and opera and etchings and wines and liqueurs—still, if I want them I can have them at any moment. And that sense of security is worth more than a thousand of the temperamental ecstasies and agonies that are the appanage of ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... and how such a dark face could make lovely the blue, richly lashed eyes. He knew she must be from Lonely Farm—Jerry-Jo used to speak of her; lately he had said nothing, to be sure, but this certainly must be the child who had once cried over a book of his. Poor, little, temperamental beggar! ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... a bad way. He bulged badly amidships and seemed greatly disturbed, not to say temperamental. With tenderness and gentle care, Denver cradled the damaged Charley in his arms and made his way back to the living shack at the mine. Space Cops were just hustling in the last of the prisoners and making ready ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... undoubtedly characteristic of the man, as it often is of minute observers of nature. I am not at all surprised to learn from one who knew him of his "temperamental melancholy." He was austere and aloof; but exactly the type of mind that would give all he had to those who possessed his confidence. It must have been a privilege to know him intimately. I have said that his poems resemble the work of no other poet; this is true; but there is a ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... knew I'd hear that yodel. Eve didn't have anything to speak of, but she travelled a lot. Truth is, Kitty, you'd better dress in monotones. She might wake up to the fact that you're a mighty pretty young woman and suddenly become temperamental. She has a husband round the lot somewhere. Make him think his wife is a lucky woman. Here's all the dope—introduction, expenses, and tickets. Train leaves at two-fifty. Run along home and pack. Remember, I want a page yarn. No flapdoodle or mush; straight stuff. She doesn't need any ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... Mrs. Gusty was temperamental. Her intensely energetic nature demanded an emotional as well as a physical outlet. Sometime during the course of each day she indulged in emotional fireworks, bombs of anger, rockets of indignation, or set pieces of sulks ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... daring conceptions, were founding our modern school of painting. Into this maelstrom of revolution, Berlioz—he of the flaming locks, "that hairy Romantic" as Thackeray calls him—flung himself with temperamental ardor; for he was a born fighter and always in opposition to someone. The audacity and dramatic energy of his compositions are but the natural result of the tendencies of the period. Berlioz's early career is of extreme interest to ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... you are not of those who cheat themselves. You choose rigorously, straining for the heart of the end as do all rigorists who are also hedonists. Because we are in possession of this bit of data as to your temperamental cosmos we can congratulate you with the more abandon. Oh, Herbert, do you know that this is a rampant spring, and that on leaving Barbara I tramped out of the confines into the green, happier, it almost seems, than I have ever been? Do you know that ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... Michael! Michael! He forgot that he had often been nearly as miserable as this when Michael had been free and happy. Not quite, but nearly. Now he attributed the whole of his recurrent wretchedness, which was largely temperamental, to his ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... effect was temperamental and sketchy. The boards which formed the floor were never even nailed down; they were fine, wide planks without a knot in them, and they looked so well that we merely fitted them together as closely as we could and light-heartedly ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... most dreadfully sensitive child, and temperamental. She took after me, I'm afraid; the others were more like their father. I remember when she was ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... over the landscape and blends with it for ever; he owned his nativity, too, by his pictures of the prairie and the fur-trade and by his life of Washington, who had laid his hand upon his head; but he had spent half his life abroad, in the temperamental enjoyment of the romantic suggestion of the old world, and by his writings he gave this expansion of sympathy and sentiment to his countrymen. If his temperament was native-born and his literary ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia |
