"Scrupulosity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... circumstances to find the words or the surmise 'balmy.' But if she wanted rest that night, or seemed to have wanted it, she had found it the next day, for she was all like herself. To speak with her own scrupulosity, there was perhaps just a shade of quieter gravity on her face and touching her smile, than there had been the day before. And that shade ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... but one, which Mr. C. has with unnecessary scrupulosity recorded,[3] slipped out of his mind, as they well might. As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly (I speak of the same evening) our respective manners proved so widely different that it would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... scrupulosity of the Kilmacolm people was surely singular and remarkable even in that day of tests and marks and scruples in the spiritual life. The ministry may not have been wholly dead in and around Kilmacolm, though ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... marching down Fleet Street arm-in-arm with Percy to take supper with Dr. Goldsmith. The lexicographer has on a new suit of clothes and a wig finely powdered, and looks uncommon through this unexpected scrupulosity of costume. Percy is impertinent enough to inquire the cause ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... nation of those days, we have reason to believe, enjoyed a freedom comparable to that of the old Jews. They were, to use our modern phrase, the only constitutional people of the East. The burdensomeness of Moses' law, ere it was overlaid, in later days, by Rabbinical scrupulosity, has been much exaggerated. In its simpler form, in those early times, it left every man free to do, as we are expressly told, that which was right in his own eyes, in many most important matters. ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... he used the same care in providing for some minor contingencies in the company's affairs as in leaving instructions to his children for their action until they should hear from him again. Afterwards this curious scrupulosity became a matter of comment among those privy to it; some held it another proof of the ingrained rascality of the man, a trick to suggest lenient construction of his general conduct in the management of the ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... old man was not looking up some point of his saint's history in his books, he was taking with the hopefulness of youth and the patience of age a lesson in colloquial Italian from his landlady's daughter, which he pronounced with a scholarly scrupulosity and a sincere atonic Massachusetts accent. He practised the language wherever he could, especially at the trattoria where he dined, and where he made occasions to detain the waiter in conversation. They humoured him, out of their national good-heartedness and sympathy, and they did what they ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... Richard, for he knew more minute details about these poets than any man in England, probably, and was preparing an edition of Shelley which scrupulously observed the poet's system of punctuation. He saw the humor of these researches, but that did not prevent him from carrying them out with the utmost scrupulosity. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... English habits of comfort attach an idea of abject misery to the idea of a barefooted traveller; and if the objection of cleanliness had been made to the practice, she would have been apt to vindicate herself upon the very frequent ablutions to which, with Mahometan scrupulosity, a Scottish damsel of some condition usually subjects herself. Thus far, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity. And Mr. Casaubon had many scruples: he was capable of a severe self-restraint; he was resolute in being a man of honor according to the code; he would be unimpeachable by any recognized opinion. In conduct ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... cannot be anything quite so sordid as good deeds done for the sake of spiritual investment, because our Saviour was very severe on those who, like the Pharisees, sought to acquire righteousness by scrupulosity. Nothing that is done just for the sake of one's own future benefit seems to be regarded in the Gospel as worth doing. The essence of Christian giving seems to be real giving, and not a sort of usurious loan. There is of course ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... or too vague, and upon the decisive election between meanings potentially double. Not in order to resist or evade my brother's directions, but for the very opposite purpose—viz., that I might fulfil them to the letter; thus and no otherwise it happened that I showed so much scrupulosity about the exact value and position of his words, as finally to draw upon myself the vexatious reproach of being ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the parents betray each other to their children. The opinions of children and parents, of the young and the old, are naturally opposite, by the contrary effects of hope and despondence, of expectation and experience. Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth; and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... these later writers knew really little or nothing about the primitive Romans, and that these passages only prove that this people had an extraordinary scrupulosity about forms and ceremonies in this as in other departments of action. But the argument will not hold; the survival of all this formalism into an age of disintegration really proves beyond a doubt ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... law for Judaism. In sacrifice, ITS demands were those which were regarded; but in order to fulfil all righteousness the precept of Deuteronomy was also maintained, this being applied—against the obvious meaning and certainly only as a result of later scrupulosity of the scribes—not to sacrifices but to ordinary secular slaughterings, from which also accordingly the priests received a portion, the cheeks (according to Jerome on Malachi ii. 3), including the tongue, the precept being thus harmonistically doubled. ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen |
