"Wilfulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appetites into passions, and lends impetus to daring ambition, if it does not always purify the motives which prompt its exercise. This genius divorced from wisdom, scornful of moral obligations, and ravenous for notoriety, is especially marked by wilfulness, presumptuous self-assertion, the curse and plague-spot of the perverted soul. Alcibiades in politics and Byron in literature are among its most conspicuous examples. Their defiance of rule was not the confident ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... somewhat sour and of no plausible utterance: the gentleman's chance was to say: 'My lord, the simple woman is not so much to blame as her leud abettors, who by violent persuasions have led her into this wilfulness.' Quoth the Judge; 'What need such eloquent terms in this place?' The gentleman replied, 'Doth your lordship mislike the term (violent)? and methinks I speak it to great purpose; for I am sure she would never have done it, but ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... of the early period shows Debussy developing freely and naturally. The independence of his thinking is unmistakable, but it does not run into wilfulness. There is no violent break with the past, but simply the quickening of certain French qualities by the infusion of a new personality. It seemed as if a new and charming miniaturist had appeared, who was doing both for piano and song what had never been done before. ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... of the raillery of the young officers, answering Mrs. Evelyn with polite words, and silencing his mother as he came up with one of those looks out of his dark eyes to which she always forgave the wilfulness for the sake of the beauty and the winning power. She was completely conquered, and stepped back with ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... loss of a complete knowledge of the peculiarities of the Messianic age in the lapse of the ages since; by the almost universal change in our associations, modes of feeling and thought, and styles of speech; and by the gradual accretion and hardening of false doctrines and sectarian biases and wilfulness. As we examine the words of Christ to find their real meaning, there are four prominent considerations to be especially weighed and borne ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... weakness. And men are striving in different, and in some cases opposite ways, to bring about re-union. But when we begin to ask, What is the remedy? we find that we are facing a mighty problem. God's loving purpose for the salvation of the world has been marred by man's wilfulness. His Kingdom, which might have been irresistible and have won the whole world for Christ, has been split up into many portions, which have been opposing and weakening one another, instead of fighting His enemies. How can these ...
— The Kingdom of Heaven; What is it? • Edward Burbidge
... some length on the then prevailing epidemic of whimsicality, showing that shallowness beheld in the then existing interest in humor a justification for all sorts of eccentric behavior and inconsistent wilfulness. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... almost with fear, that I began with Gwen; but even had I been able to foresee the endless series of exasperations through which she was destined to conduct me, still would I have undertaken my task. For the child, with all her wilfulness, her tempers and her pride, made me, as she did all others, her ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... was near to surrender. Had it not been for the persistent fear that her proud old father might suffer from her wilfulness, she would have thrown down the barrier and risked everything in the choice. Her heart was crying out hungrily for the love of this tall, mysterious soldier ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... to me," replied her mother. "I will manage him into it. Never tell a man anything, my dove, if thou wouldst have him do it. Men are such obstinate, perverse creatures, that as often as not they will just go the other way out of sheer wilfulness. Thou must always contrive to manage them ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... went to sleep that night he made up his mind that it was his duty as a clergyman and a Christian to look over Phillis's wilfulness, and to befriend to the utmost of his power the strangers, widow and fatherless, that Providence had placed at his ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... consciousness of what he felt then, when it was so long from one Midsummer to another; what he felt when his school fellows shut him out of their game because he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfulness; or on a rainy day in the holidays, when he didn't know how to amuse himself, and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness; or when his mother ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... solemn obligation of which I have told you—and he must be honourable, dear Mrs Varden, or he is no son of mine—a fortune within his reach. He is of most expensive, ruinously expensive habits; and if, in a moment of caprice and wilfulness, he were to marry this young lady, and so deprive himself of the means of gratifying the tastes to which he has been so long accustomed, he would—my dear madam, he would break the gentle creature's heart. Mrs Varden, my good lady, my ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... with a readiness in which he divined the wish to make amends for her wilfulness the previous night. Her eyes and cheeks glowed with an excitement which counterfeited the effects of a night's rest, and he thought he had never seen her more radiant. She approached the table on which the wine and bread had been placed, and drew another ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... how often do men embark in foolish and ruinous schemes! how often do they squander their money, and destroy their worldly prospects! And what, I ask, is so frequent a cause of these many errors as wilfulness and presumption? The same thing happens also in religious inquiries. When I see a person hasty and violent, harsh and high-minded, careless of what others feel, and disdainful of what they think,—when I see such ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... own days, and shortened those of the adored partner of his guilt. Let my confession be public, that warning may be taken from my example; and may the sincerity with which I acknowledge my offence, and the tears which I have shed, efface it from the accumulated records of the wilfulness and ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... With all the stubborn wilfulness and unfeeling carelessness of consequences that characterized his temper, he plunged into all manner of vicious indulgences; but what seemed to attract him the most irresistibly, and fix him the most firmly, was a fondness for gambling. The "time-honored" black-legs of the billiard and roulette ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... if the words stung him. "You make a jest of it!" he said. "Heaven send we do not sorrow for your wilfulness. For my part, I've small hope of that same." He opened the door, and, turning his back upon his companion, went heavily, and without any attempt at concealment, past the pantry and up the stairs to his room. Colonel John heard him slip ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... wayward little fancies of the river, piercing the wild wood, curling around the base of the granite hills, now let loose a space to shoot across the glade, joyful of the permission to indulge its railroad instinct of straightness; and, amid so much irregularity and headlong wilfulness, a straight line is really refreshing. Up the sides of its embankment wild vines have twisted and climbed, and ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... been all very well, if he had not added to such kindly and unobtrusive evidence a certain wilfulness in discharging what he called debts. When his mother worked for him, he paid her by showering about her his bright animal spirits, with even more affluence than his gay, taunting, teasing, loving wont. If Lucy Snowe were discovered to have put her ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Faithful, "and wilfulness. He will not utter a word. I would beat it out of him, as I was wont with our ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... read it, well enough. Yet with a man's wilfulness, drawing Wych Hazel into his arms and bending his face to hers, ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... a decorousness of curve, although the hue was unchanged. The shoulders were exactly the same in contour, on a slightly larger scale; and the manner of carrying her head—a manner peculiarly her own, and suggestive of a certain gentle wilfulness—was unaltered. ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... law may be due to ignorance, to indifference or to wilfulness and viciousness. The effects will always be commensurate with ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... marvelous fashion, and often says ptoe-ptoe, pt-pt, and verlapp, also dla-dla, without meaning, no matter what was the form of the word pronounced to him. In such practice there often appears likewise a wilfulness, showing itself in inarticulate sounds and the shaking of the head, even when it is merely the repetition of easy like-syllabled words that is desired. Hence, in the case of new words, it is more difficult than before, or is even impossible ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... 'notions' as you call them. Ask me to wear an orange-colored gown, or dance with the plainest, poorest man in the room, and I'll do it; for there never was a kinder aunt than mine in all the world," cried Debby, eager to atone for her seeming wilfulness, and really grateful for her escape from what seemed to her benighted mind a very ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... so very well-bred and amiable, that they never spoke their minds to either the mother or the daughter about what they endured from the latter's rudeness, wilfulness, and powers of destruction. But this was not the case with the dogs, and they expressed their sentiments by many a growl and snap. At last one day Amelia was tormenting a snow-white bulldog (who was certainly as well-bred and as amiable as any living ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... among my patients, most of them, as it happens, "nervously" sick, I sometimes stop to consider why it is they are ill. I know that some are so because of physical weakness over which they have no control, that some are suffering from the effects of carelessness, some from wilfulness, and more from simple ignorance of the rules of the game. There are so many rules that no one will ever know them all, but it seems that we live in a world of laws, and that if we transgress those laws by ever so little, we must suffer equally, whether our transgression is a mistake or ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... sighing to return to it. Living as he had done amongst the outcasts, his ideal of domestic virtue was high and pure. He chose to believe that good women were entirely good. Duplicity he could not understand; ill-temper shocked him: wilfulness he seemed to fancy belonged only to the profane and wicked; not to good girls, with good mothers, in honest homes. Their nature was to love their families; to obey their parents; to tend their poor; to honour their husbands; to cherish their children. Ethel's ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... manifestations; according to the various characters, "Scenes and Characters" was meant to exemplify the effects of being guided by mere feeling, set in contrast with strict adherence to duty. In "Henrietta's Wish" the opposition is between wilfulness and submission—filial submission as required, in the young people, and that of which it is a commencement as well as a type, as instanced in Mrs. Frederick Langford. The design of the "Castle Builders" is to show the instability and dissatisfaction of mind occasioned by the ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... penned by one who seems to have desired to do justice, but whose personal dislike to the young Chevalier over-masters his inclination to the cause. Notwithstanding a plain disapproval of many measures, and a marked conviction of the wilfulness of his young leader, Lord Elcho was true to the cause which he had adopted. His account of the manner in which the council of the Regent, as he was styled, was conducted, is so characteristic, not only ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... he went to Mr. Clements, the builder at Norwich, and said, "Well, Clements, you have built a machine to surprise all the world, and I am come to surprise you by paying you for it." And to show his early quick perception, ready reply, wilfulness, and precocity, I must here relate two well-attested anecdotes: the first, when quite a child, and at his lessons in the nursery, on his mother's running up to dispel the noise and disturbance he was making, she exclaimed in anger, after in some measure correcting him, "Why, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... gave her less, and then was puzzled to find time hanging so empty, so wretchedly empty, on his hands. When they were together in these days they found less to talk about, and had it not been for the Silver Fleece which in magic wilfulness opened both their mouths, they would have found their companionship little more than a series of awkward silences. Yet in their silences, their walks, and their sittings there was a companionship, a glow, a satisfaction, as came to them ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... green silken summer dress, So simply flower'd in white and gold, She scorns to let our eyes behold, But hides through very wilfulness: ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... cursed; Christ, God and Man, Whom God the Father strook And shamed and sifted and one while forsook:— Cry shame upon our bodies we have nursed In sweets, our souls in pride, our spirits immersed In wilfulness, our steps run all acrook. Cry shame upon us! for He bore our shame In agony, and we look on at ease With neither hearts on flame nor cheeks on flame: What hast thou, what have I, to do with peace? Not to send ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... Saxony, a consideration hardly to be avoided. Each considered the other the prey of the devil, but in secret each esteemed in the other a manly worth. Again and again they fell into dissension, even in writing, but again and again Luther prayed warmly for his neighbor's soul. The reckless wilfulness of Henry VIII. of England, on the other hand, offended the German reformer to the depths of his soul; he reviled him horribly and without cessation; and even in his last years he treated the hot-headed Henry ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... shastras, intelligent and endowed with wisdom. My inclination was never to war, not did I delight in the destruction of my race. I made no distinction between my own children and the children of Pandu. My own sons were prone to wilfulness and despised me because I am old. Blind as I am, because of my miserable plight and through paternal affection, I bore it all. I was foolish alter the thoughtless Duryodhana ever growing in folly. Having been a spectator ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Marthe, I implore you—get up and dress yourself. It's for your own interest that I ask you to do it, for your luxury, for your comfort. What will become of you if, by a mere whim, by naughty wilfulness, we are to be reduced ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... and her father; and she, therefore, looked very red when she began her story. But she got courage as she went on, and told it all, just as it is related in the last chapter; only she passed slightly over the wilfulness which her brother had shown in opening the cage door. She finished by saying, that as they had given away their suppers, they had agreed together not to eat another; "and we settled not to tell our reasons till the things were ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... thing in the conduct of public affairs, where they have been managed with rashness or wilfulness, corruption, ignorance or injustice; barely to relate the facts, at least, while they are fresh in memory, will as much reflect upon the persons concerned, as if we had told ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... a girl could well do. And yet Polly had originally no actual intention or desire to do wrong. Simply she had yielded to a sudden impulse, to an intense curiosity. But now things were different; for Polly was realizing her wilfulness completely, and instead of repenting and turning back to confess her folly, was every moment trying to plan by what method her purpose ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... that she was living between two alternatives that seemed almost equally terrible, and of which she must choose the one or the other within two months. She must either marry Contarini and never see Zorzi again, or she must refuse to be married and face the tremendous consequences of her unheard-of wilfulness, her father's anger, the just resentment of all the Contarini family, the humiliation which her brothers would heap upon her, because, in the code of those days, she would have brought shame on them ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... most respectful and impartial consideration to the arguments of brethren, and especially of seniors. If a single mind remains unmoved, its dissent is decisive. But it would be the gravest dereliction of duty to persist from wilfulness, obstinacy, or pride, in adhesion to a view perhaps hastily expressed in opposition to authority and argument. The debate to which my speech gave rise lasted for two hours. Each speaker spoke but a few terse expressive sentences; and after each speech came a pause allowing ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... was indeed deep rooted. Whatever heart she had not frivoled away in wilfulness had been caught and won by Forsythe, the first grown man who had ever dared to make real love to her. Her jealousy of Margaret was the most intense thing that had ever come into her life. To think of him looking at Margaret, talking to Margaret, ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... Oliver, the politician, again, with a double reference in his thoughts, it would almost seem, to an erring State or an absent child, "one may break away in wilfulness or crime—what then?" ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... a character, I thought, as we passed on—the very embodiment of a certain kind of wilfulness. She would not resist or chafe at authority, but, with an easy, good-natured, don't-care expression, would do as she pleased, "though the heavens fell." A little later there was a heavy rumble of thunder in the west, and we met again the young woman whose marital relations resembled ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... hands that lay cross-folded on the breast, the motionless features, and the dreadful stillness of the whole figure, spoke eloquently of the change that had taken place, I thought of my many acts of wilfulness, ingratitude, and unkindness, which had often pained the loving heart that had now forever ceased to beat. Could I but see those still features again animated with life, I felt that never again would my tongue utter aught but words of kindness; ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... capable (alas! few are so) of such a course of conduct. Far different in its effects from the blind tenderness of infatuated passion is the noble blindness of Christian self-control. While the one warms into existence, or at least into open manifestation, all the selfishness and wilfulness of the fondled plaything, the other creates a thousand virtues that were not known before. Flowers spring up from the hardest rocks, the coldest, sternest natures are gradually softened into gentleness, the faults of temper or of character that never meet with worrying ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... simplicity, in simplicity she had continued, partly because she had been too industrious and too earnest for luxurious caprices, partly because she had never been accustomed to anything else but simplicity, and partly from wilfulness. It had pleased her to think that she was piling tens of thousands upon ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... of dogs, and praying for the suppression of horses and the protection of the small trader's dog, "because the dog carts of poor people were continually, almost, and sometimes quite, run over by these rough beasts [horses], and that this tyranny and wilfulness is very difficult for the poor man to bear, who may have as good a spirit as any coachman, although he is not so ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... wilfulness possessed them, they took to marauding, surrounded by the sons of the lords of the men of Erin. Thrice fifty men had they as pupils when they (the pupils) were were-wolfing in the province of Connaught, until Maine Milscothach's swineherd saw them, and ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... unfrequented roads, therefore narrow, therefore worse than other roads, to the end that his policy of utter secrecy might be the better served; but to the majority his course seemed sprung from a certain cold wilfulness, a harshness without object, unless his object were to wear out flesh and bone. The road, such as it was, was sheeted with ice. The wind blew steadily from the northwest, striking the face like a whip, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... the voices of sorrow and want. The cry hath entered into the ears of the Lord God of Sabaoth; the creature groaneth and travaileth; all men unconsciously pray this prayer when they weep and when they hope. Christian men pray it when they mourn their rebellious wilfulness and when they feel the weight of all this anarchic world, or when their work in bringing it back to its King seems almost vain, the souls underneath the altar pray it when they cry, 'How long, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... exchanged a look which reminded him of their first meeting; though now, mellowed by gratitude, and regard, and esteem, it was perhaps even more delightful. He was loved, and he was loved by an exquisite being, who was the object of universal admiration. What could he desire more? Nothing but the wilfulness of youth could have induced him for a moment to contemplate breaking chains which had only been formed to secure his felicity. He determined to bid farewell for ever to the impetuosity of youth. He had not been three days under the roof of Cleve ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... eyesight prevents her sewing, and whose earnings by charing cannot support herself and four children, heard Miss Macpherson speak at the Moorgate Street Hall Noon Prayer-Meeting, and was led to bring little Alice to her, pleading for Christian care. Amid many tears she tells of the wayward wilfulness of the elder girl, out at all hours of day and night, and whose pernicious example is too likely to ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... in Lady Calmady's presence, all that was changed. Trenchant statements of opinion, words of blame, were proscribed. The sinner, if spoken of at all, must be spoken of with due reticence and respect, his wilfulness ignored, the unloveliness of his conduct gently, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... that were put about our ankles set up sores and galled us so that we scarce could move for pain. And if the iron galled my flesh, my spirit chafed ten times more within those damp and dismal walls; yet all that time Elzevir never breathed a word of reproach, though it was my wilfulness had led us into ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... on again, somewhat unwillingly on my part, for though I thought my apprehensions might be cowardly and ignorant, yet D. was but a child, and had the attractive wilfulness of childhood, and she was, I saw, determined to get back to her husband, and the devotion and affection of the young wife were so pleasant to see, that I had not the heart to offer serious opposition to her wishes, especially as I knew that I might be ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... Devonshire, one of whom had been concerned with Wyatt and Carew. Here also came John Daniel, in the service at one time of Lord Northampton, who, not being in parliament, was excluded from the more private consultations, but heard much of the general talk; "how they, with great wilfulness, as might be perceived by their behaviour, did sore mislike such Catholic proceedings as they saw the queen went about, and did intend to resist such matters as should be spoken of in the Parliament House other ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... beginning of Sue's history. He projected his mind into the future, and saw her with children more or less in her own likeness around her. But the consolation of regarding them as a continuation of her identity was denied to him, as to all such dreamers, by the wilfulness of Nature in not allowing issue from one parent alone. Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy. "If at the estrangement or death of my lost love, I could go and see her child—hers solely—there ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... perhaps in the open yard of the Red Bull Tavern, played the part of King Edward's delicate minion. On Marlowe's death, he seems to have returned to Shakespeare, who, whatever his fellow-partners may have thought of the matter, was not slow to forgive the wilfulness and ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... God," prayed the Prioress, with folded hands, "give me patience in dealing with wilfulness; grant me wisdom to cope with unreason; may it be given me to share the pain of this heart in torment, even as—when thou didst witness the sufferings of thy dear Son, our Lord, on Calvary—a sword pierced through ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... not directed the moralist's unmeasured censure. His reproaches in such cases tend less to condemn than to awake to a sense of moral responsibility; earnestness in pointing out remedy and safeguards takes the place of severity against wilfulness. For he knows that not a few sentences of condemnation Christ writes on the sands, as He did in a celebrated case, and many an over-zealous accuser he has confounded, like the villainous Pharisees whom He challenged to show a hand white ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... pleasure in everything else, to find out that everything else disappoints, and to come back to him, the fountain of all wholesome pleasure, the well-spring of all life fit for a man to live. When the fool finds out his folly; when the wilful man gives up his wilfulness; when the rebel submits himself to law; when the son comes back to his father's house—there is no sternness, no peevishness, no up-braiding, no pride, no revenge; but the everlasting and boundless love of God wells ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... Law makes it certain that no amount of past opposition to it, whether from ignorance or wilfulness, will prevent it from working in accordance with its own beneficent and life-giving character as soon as we quit our inverted position and place ourselves in our true relation towards it. The laws ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... decade of this twentieth century after Christ. In the old days we punished drastically and killed quickly. We did it because we so desired, because of whim, if you so please. But we were not hypocrites. We did not call upon press, and pulpit, and university to sanction us in our wilfulness of savagery. What we wanted to do we went and did, on our legs upstanding, and we faced all reproof and censure on our legs upstanding, and did not hide behind the skirts of classical economists and bourgeois philosophers, nor behind the skirts of ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... own pains and troubles, so often imaginary, joined with his inconsiderate blindness to his wife's real sufferings, led to many heart-burnings. If she contributed to them, in some degree, by her wilfulness, jealous temper, and sharpness of tongue, ill-health and solitude ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... at home said a word of blame to Gertrude. There was no need. They had heard the whole story and they only pitied her, and her grief was far greater than their own, they thought, for there was no self-blame, no shadow of deception, no regret of wilfulness in their sorrow. Even Conway felt unutterably tender towards this least dear of his sisters, when he came in from a fruitless errand, and found the proud, dark head resting on little Maud's high chair, while Gertrude's whole frame ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... pang. Perhaps she had better not have meddled. Perhaps it was never well to meddle. One event bears many readings, and the tragedy of Catherine Elsmere's life took shape in the uneasy consciousness of the vicar's spouse as a more or less sharp admonition against wilfulness in match-making. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... true as well as the technical chastity; and she is really the victim of inauspicious stars, and of the misconduct of other people—the questionable wisdom of her own father; the folly of Nelvil's; the wilfulness in the bad sense, and the weakness of will in the good, of her lover; the sour virtue and borne temperament of Lady Edgermond. Almost all her faults and not a few of her misfortunes are due to the "sensibility" of her time, or the time a little before her; for, as has been more than ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... out my hand for it, not venturing on words, for fear of disturbing the patient; but Jeffy, with unpardonable wilfulness, danced out of my circuit, and at the same instant the sick man turned his head, and beheld Jeffy in the possession of his property. Jeffy looked very repentant, said in low, deprecatory tones, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... meets her fate in the fire or at the sword's point, in 'Clyde Water' or in 'the dowie den in the Lawlands o' Balleichan.' In Gil Morice, that ballad which Gray thought 'divine,' it is 'Willie, the bonnie boy,' whom the hero trusted with his message, that in malice and wilfulness brings about the tremendous catastrophe of the tale. He calls aloud in hall the words he was bid whisper in the ear of Lord Barnard's lady—to meet Gil Morice in the forest, and 'speir ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... age, and the indulgence due to that. When a man has done his work, and nothing can any way be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil, and jest with his fate, if he will; but what excuse can you find for wilfulness of thought, at the very time when every crisis of future fortune hangs on your decisions? A youth thoughtless! when all the happiness of his home for ever depends on the chances, or the passions, of an hour! A youth thoughtless! when ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... general, and of mankind in particular, were orderly and rational. Such indulgence as her father had given her had served to strengthen her individuality rather than to confirm her temper; and, though she had a strong and stubborn will of her own, her tact was such that her wilfulness appeared to be the most natural as well as the most charming thing in the world. Moreover, she possessed in a remarkable degree that buoyancy of mind that is more engaging ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... I had previously known (from Methley, I think, who had travelled in Persia) that this notion, so conducive to the safety of our countrymen, is generally prevalent amongst Orientals. It owes its origin, partly to the strong wilfulness of the English gentleman (which not being backed by any visible authority, either civil or military, seems perfectly superhuman to the soft Asiatic), but partly too to the magic of the banking system, by force of which the wealthy traveller will make all his journeys ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... daughter," he said, suddenly seizing her hand, and drawing her to his side, "why will you not give up this strange wilfulness, and let your papa have his own darling again? I love you dearly, my child, and it pains me more than I can express to see you so unhappy," he added, gently pushing back the curls from the little tear-stained ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... ordinarily kept him posted on village news, had, deemed it best to tell him as yet nothing of her apprehensions. She was aware that the affection between her brother and Madeline was chiefly on his side, and knew enough of her wilfulness to be sure that any attempted interference by him would only make matters worse. Moreover, now that she had warned Cordis that Madeline was pre-empted property, she hoped he ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... that he would first see what the earl intended doing—whether he would keep his force together or discharge his fleet. Sigurd Syr said, "It is for thee, king, to command; but," he adds, "I fear, from thy disposition and wilfulness, that thou wilt some day be betrayed by trusting to those great people, for they are accustomed of old to bid defiance to their sovereigns." There was no attack made, for it was soon seen that the earl's fleet was dispersing. Then King Olaf ransacked the slain, ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization. Even these stages have never been attained by public spirit, but always by intolerant wilfulness and brute force. Take the Reform Bill of 1832 as an example of a conflict between two sections of educated Englishmen concerning a political measure which was as obviously necessary and inevitable as any political ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... to effect change of heart even in the individual. We must not think that no price will have to be paid for so good a result, both by whole communions, and by the members composing them; and that the whole force of inherited prejudice, past history, and present wilfulness, ignorance, and sincere conviction will not arise in opposition. The difficulty even of approaching Rome illustrates vividly our task. The Unity of Christendom is a meaningless expression without that vast international Church, without her rich stores of devotion and experience, without her unbending ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... either through wilfulness or ignorance of his near locality, or perhaps fear of Miss Priscilla, refuses to meet his longing eyes. For my part, I ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... not think that," said Sintram. "He seemed to me the best of the two. But it is a strange wilfulness of his not to come with me. Did I not invite him kindly? I believe that he can sing well, and he should have sung to me some gentle lullaby. Since my mother has lived in a cloister, no one sings lullabies ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... to sing," said the sweet voice, with a touch of wilfulness in its tone. "Listen! I will give you a reading of Heine in music!" And suddenly, rich and clear as a bell, a golden cadence of notes ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... I do wonder sometimes that your excellent father, when he taught you Latin, should have permitted you to take such liberties with our good mother tongue. But after all it is only another sign of your right Southern wilfulness. Do you not take even greater liberties with ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... the clouds and Kasoro's wilfulness were still against me, and the weather did not give hopes of a change, I sacrificed the taking of the latitude to gain time. I sent Bombay with Kasoro to the palace, asking for the Sakibobo himself to be sent with an order for five boats, five cows, and five goats, and also for a ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... disposition, which we are not ashamed to confess we have, to guard jealously the rights of the poor and friendless and despised, and to be astute as far as we properly may, against injustice, whether proceeding from wilfulness ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... she seemed to weaken before him, he hardened. "You can't have both," he declared with as much sternness as was possible to him, and with a Norman wilfulness which was not strength. "You shall not marry an actor and a Protestant. You shall not marry a man like that— never—never—never. If you do, you will never have a penny of mine, and I ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... stole away, realizing suddenly that he was an old man, broken, infirm; that his life with its influence for good or evil was already at an end; he could never change his character now, no matter how keenly he might realize his defects. Poor little Nannie's wilfulness was at last forgiven, but the forgiveness was fifteen years too late. Why could not that moment of insight have come earlier to Colonel Gaylord, have come in time to save him from ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... the child of truth, begotten by virtue and kindness; when Nature in the temper of the spirit made even the balance of indifference. His eye is clear from blindness and his hand from bribery, his will from wilfulness and his heart from wickedness; his word and deed are all one; his life shows the nature of his love, his care is the charge of his conscience, and his comfort the assurance of his salvation. In the seat of justice he is the grace of the law, and in the judgment of right the honour ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... has no regard either for precept or for heaven; that he comes out with things that never suggest themselves to the imagination of grown-up people, and that he does everything that takes one by surprise. The result is that his father and mother are driven to their wits' ends. But wilfulness is natural to young children. Reckless expenditure is a common characteristic of young men. Antipathy to school is a common feeling with young people. Yet there are ways and means to bring him round. The worse with him is that ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... time she was never one of those who cannot be convinced that some particular course is not the wisest and most just to adopt without at once rushing to the conclusion that the leader who makes any mistakes must be in the wrong because of wilfulness or mere incapacity, and is therefore not worthy any longer ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... instructions carefully and in no case to fight an isolated combat with any of the antagonists. Most observed this injunction, but the son of Torquatus, who was on the field among the cavalry and had been sent to reconnoitre the enemy's position, transgressed it not through wilfulness but rather through ambition. The leader of the Latin horse saw him approaching and challenged him to a championship contest; and when the youth would not accept the challenge on account of the notice that had been served, the other provoked him, saying: ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... full of high spirits and wilfulness, were engaged in their morning romp of trying to evade Meekie, the colored "nannie," whose business it was to ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... forgiving love; that His peace shines bright upon the soul which casts itself utterly on Jesus Christ the Lord for pardon, strength, and safety; that God's Spirit is ready and able to raise us out of all our sin, and sottishness, and weakness, and wilfulness, and selfishness, and renew us into quite new men, different characters from what we used to be; and so, by having hope for ourselves, we learn step by step and year by year to have hope for our friends, for our neighbours, and for ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... with a feeble voice, "My lord and king, I know well my death is come, and through my own wilfulness, for I am smitten in the wound Sir Lancelot gave me. Alas! that I have been the cause of all this war, for but for me thou hadst been now at peace with Lancelot, and then had Modred never done this treason. I pray ye, therefore, my dear lord, be now agreed with Lancelot, and tell him, that ...
— The Legends Of King Arthur And His Knights • James Knowles
... second disclaimer, her parents were silent again, Sylvia looking down at her lap, picking at her fingers. Her expression was that of a naughty child—that is, with a considerable admixture of unhappiness in her wilfulness. ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... had hidden the hurts of his schoolmates' recent slights under a nonchalant manner. Each one, while it cut deeply, seemed to aggravate him to greater wilfulness. Well bred as he was, took no real pleasure in the sports of the company of which he had made a part since the loss of the position he so desired, and for which he had worked so faithfully. He felt himself disgraced and barred ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... upbraiding. Then she slowly turned her painful eyes upon Miss Monro's face, and moved her lips without a sound being heard, and fainted dead away. In all her life she had never done so before, and when she came round she was not like herself; in all probability the persistence and wilfulness she, who was usually so meek and docile, showed during the next twenty-four hours, was the consequence of fever. She resolved to be present at the wedding; numbers were going; she would be unseen, unnoticed in ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... had left themselves but just time to dress); so that she simply possessed herself of her own note and ascended to her room. As she did so she felt that all the while she had known it would be there, and was conscious of a kind of treachery, an unfriendly wilfulness, in not being more prepared for it. If she could roll about New York the whole afternoon and forget that there might be difficulties ahead, that didn't alter the fact that there were difficulties, and that they might even become considerable—might ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... is, of delusion. This, together with self-love, which always hoodwinks the mind, and will not suffer a serious impartial examination of a man's self, these, I say, are the bottom of this vain persuasion, that possesseth the generality of men. Now, what it wants of knowledge, it hath of wilfulness. It is a conceit altogether void of reason, but it is so wilful and pertinacious, that it is almost utterly inconvincible, and so it puts souls in the most desperate forlorn estate that can be imagined. It ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... she was. She knew, now, the wilfulness of her sins, and the merciful interposition of the river's inviolable strength. Her sight of the mission boat had awakened in her soul the knowledge that she must go out and talk to the good man on board, confess her naughtiness, and beg the ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... had much changed her countenance. "I see," she said, thoughtfully, "I had a few intellectual tastes, and liked to think and read, which was supposed to be cleverness; and my wilfulness made me fancy myself superior in force of character, in a way I could never have imagined if I had lived more in the world. Contact with really clever people has shown me that I am ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is in the highest ingenuous spirit of the absurd wilfulness of passion, thinking that every thing is to give way before it, not excepting the same identical wishes in ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... life out of which Molly could not extract "fun" in some shape. Indeed, in less than five minutes she was laughing gayly, and caricaturing the whole scene just passed, from the baby's wilfulness, to Sara's shriek of dismay and ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... when I tried to teach him! Then Fulk tried, and he was tame for three days, but then came idleness, wilfulness, anger, punishment, but he laughed to scorn all that we could find in our hearts ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Mowbray looks double as old as papa, do you?" said grandmamma. "Ah, it is trouble that has aged her. You would not wonder at all those lines and wrinkles if you knew all the sorrow and grief her own poor boys have given her through their sin and wilfulness!" ...
— My Young Days • Anonymous
... first the Egyptians despised Amasis and held him in no great regard, because he had been a man of the people and was of no distinguished family; but afterwards Amasis won them over to himself by wisdom and not wilfulness. Among innumerable other things of price which he had, there was a foot-basin of gold in which both Amasis himself and all his guests were wont always to wash their feet. This he broke up, and of it he caused to be made the image of a god, and set it up in the city, where it was most convenient; ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... can. I told her we could not have such bread, that it was dreadful; Bob says it would give him the dyspepsia in a week; and then she went and made exactly the same;—it seems to me mere wilfulness." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... altar. There he sits—he is thinking, perhaps, of the girl who is out in the night with her drunken cousin, the girl whom he has warned, protected, thought for in a hundred ways—who had planned this day out of mere wilfulness—who cannot possibly have made any honest mistake ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... from without. There is very little action or intrigue. The dialogue, witty, brilliant, and ingenious, is all-important, and the denouement often depends upon a misunderstanding, so easy to explain that one sometimes wonders at the wilfulness of the characters in failing to set the matter right until the end.[105] As in all of his plays, marriage follows closely upon the solution of the difficulty; it has been said that his lovers "s'aiment le plus tard qu'ils peuvent, et se marient le plus ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... your face with the color painted out by the white moonshine! Let me hold you under my chin, to see whether I love blood, you tiger-lily!" Then he laughed Gearson's laugh, and released her, scared and giddy. Within her wilfulness she had been frightened by a sense of subtler force in him, and mystically mastered as she had never ...
— Different Girls • Various
... physiology? from an ignorance of which I shall mention no other case here save one—that too often from ignorance of signs of approaching disease, a child is punished for what is called idleness, listlessness, wilfulness, sulkiness; and punished, too, in the unwisest way—by an increase of tasks and confinement to the house, thus overtasking still more a brain already overtasked, and depressing still more, by robbing it of oxygen and of exercise, a system already depressed? ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... words following: 'Sir, remember yourself: I keep here the place of the King your sovereign lord and father, to whom ye owe double obedience; wherefore eftsoons in his name I charge you desist of your wilfulness and unlawful enterprise, and from henceforth give good example to those which hereafter shall be your proper subjects. And now, for your contempt and disobedience, go you to the prison of the King's Bench, whereunto ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... flirt or trifle in any way with a man's affections; but to remember that to every man they have to make a woman only the other name for truth and constancy. God only knows the number of young men who have received their first downward bent from what to a young girl, in the wilfulness of her high spirits and her ignorance of life, has been only a bit of fun, but which to the young man has been the first fatal break in his faith in woman—that faith which in his soul dwells so hard by his faith in the Divine that in making shipwreck of the one is only too likely to ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... in utter confusion. 'I—I—did not know you were here, sir!' she began. 'I was out for a little walk.' She could get no further; her eyes filled with tears. That spice of wilfulness, even hardness, which characterized her in Jim's company, magically disappeared in the presence ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... ignorance thou art; for that thou hast placed the governance of thy Kingdom in the hands of inexperienced youth and hast neglected the elders and hast dissipated thy moneys and the moneys of the monarchy, and thou hast lavished all thy treasure upon wilfulness and carnal pleasuring." Zayn al-Asnam, awaking from the slumber of negligence, forthright accepted his mother's counsel and, faring forth at once to the Diwan,[FN15] he entrusted the management of the monarchy to certain old officers, men ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... had not understood. This attack of his on the established had seemed to her just so much wilfulness of opinion. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... bed that night full of remorseful regret that through her own wilfulness she had lost many hours of her father's prized society, besides grieving and ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley |
