"Sociability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which I take to be the experience we all need. In the old dreary books of my childhood, the elders were always hounding the young people into doing something useful—useful reading, useful sewing, and so forth. But I am inclined to believe that sociability and talk are more useful than reading, and that solitary musing and dreaming and looking about are useful too. All activity is useful, all interchange, all perception. What isn't useful is anything which hides life from you, any habit that drugs you into inactivity and idleness, ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... region, I walked along a narrow path through dark pines, beside a brook swollen with melting snow, and found the old man I came to see, sitting silent and alone before his blackened small old house. I did my errand, and then not to offend against our country standards of sociability, sat for ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... impression, by further observation, for which I soon had abundant opportunity. When the train moved on, he came and took his seat on the flap seat (or strapontin) just opposite my compartment. I could not tell why, until presently he made overtures of sociability and began a desultory talk across the corridor. My cabin or compartment, it will be remembered, was the last but one; the newcomer had been given the one behind mine, and here from his seat he commanded the whole length of the carriage forward, which included the compartment occupied by Mrs. ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... in bed blinking; then slowly collected his thoughts, threw off the bed-clothes, and stood up. It seemed to him in some curious way that all the safety and sociability of the night before fell with the bedclothes off him, and he stood up in an air of cold danger. He still felt an entire trust and loyalty towards his companion; but it was the trust between two men going to ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... drawing or music-master, and had never pretended to be on equal terms in society with her daughters, and she had no doubts or scruples in leaving Rachel to her business interview with him, though she much regretted this further lapse from the ordinary paths of sociability. ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... gaily decorated floor it glides through the light dance of life, innocent, and concerned only to follow the rhythm of sociability and friendship, and not to disturb the harmony of love. And during it all an eternal song, of which it catches now and then a few words ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... "I knew Sam Meynell as well as I knew my own brother, and I knew old Christian Meynell almost as well as I knew my own father. There was more sociability in those days, you see, sir. The world seems to have grown too full to leave any room for friendship. It's all push and struggle, and struggle and push, as you may say; and a man will make you a frame for five-and-twenty ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... came in at that moment, Dinah retailed their little plan for his benefit. Cedric was delighted, and voted Betty a brick. Any form of sociability was welcome to him—an impromptu garden-party in Malcolm's honour met with his ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... But, be that as it may, Ireland played Cleopatra to the Antony of the invaders. Some of them, indeed, the "garrison" pure and simple, had all their interests centred not only in resisting but in calumniating her. But the majority yielded gaily to her music, her poetry, her sociability, that magical quality of hers which the Germans call Gemuetlichkeit. In a few centuries a new and enduring phrase had designated them as more Irish than the Irish themselves. So far as any superiority of civilisation manifests itself in this first period ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... hospitality which exists in this and some other of the old families, is a pleasing remnant of Spanish manners and habits, now falling into disuse, and succeeded by more pretension to refinement, and less of either real wealth or sociability. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... perhaps than coffee or tea, candy or lobster, overeating or undersleeping. Therefore the physician, the bishop, the school superintendent, candidly run the necessary risk for the sake of nerve soothing and sociability. ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... had begun to play mischievous pranks. He also declared that he was no longer minded to tolerate the tyranny of the school, and that he had not the slightest desire to enter the university. He was a wilful, obstinate boy with a marked tendency to sociability. He paid a great deal of attention to his clothes, and was ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... come up as I think of him. To begin with, there was something physically rustic which suggested to the end his farm-boy origin. His voice was sweet and its Scottish cadences most musical, and the extraordinary sociability of his nature made friends for him as much among women as among men; he had, moreover, a sort of physical dignity; but neither in dress nor in manner did he ever grow quite "gentlemanly" or Salonfaehig in the conventional and obliterated sense of the terms. He was too cordial and emphatic for ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... is impolite to stare!) And to talk to any one, male or female, who looked or acted as if he or she wanted to talk to you. Only even a short experience has taught that that abandon leads to more trouble than it is worth. What a pity mere sociability need suffer so much repression! We hate to make that concession to ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... inclined to sociability—the stronger sort of man rarely is. On board the Croonah he was usually considered morose and self absorbed. He did his duty, and in this was second to no man on board; but he was content to get the passengers to their destination, looking upon the Croonah as a mere conveyance for a ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... and going of color, due perhaps to her agitation at this tentative reentering into worldly life, which was nevertheless quite virginal in effect. A vague solemnity pervaded the introductory proceedings, and a singular want of sociability was visible in the "sociable" part of the entertainment. People talked in whispers or with that grave precision which indicates good manners in rural communities; conversed painfully with other people whom they did not want to talk to rather than appear to be alone, or rushed ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... continually threw back her head to emit howls of laughter at Barclay's drolleries while she displayed the large red cavern of her mouth and all her wonderful teeth. After every one of these exhausting paroxysms she said, with her characteristic exuberance of sociability, "Isn't he the ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... miners and other artisans, as a means of adding to the family income. Beer is very cheap, costing only two sous a litre. Wine and spirits are more costly, though a great deal of gin is made, and inexpensively made, in the country. There is much sociability among the people, and great practical liberality as to the conduct of young girls, the ancient practice known as 'bundling' in New England being still in vogue among these worthy Flemings. M. Baudrillart, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... deformed fellow, called by the other servants Gnome because of his stubborn silence, his want of sociability, his rough manner and voice, his caring for nothing but his service, which he performs with great method. Every morning at six he enters her majesty's apartment, makes the fire, throws back the curtain to admit the light, arranges the chairs, and then withdraws without the least noise. All ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... added sociability to the gathering. By degrees the natural levity of Roaring Camp returned. Bets were freely offered and taken regarding the result. Three to five that "Sal would get through with it," even, that the child would survive; side bets as ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... most farmers thought the best place for the pig-pen was immediately in front of the house. There is nothing like sociability. ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... tea across to my bay window, with that wistful sociability of his, as of a man who cannot always find ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... reproach to the rustic Acastes and Clitandres of the Lincoln bursary. They might have tolerated his intellect and overlooked his industry, if his intellect and his industry had not spoiled his sociability. But irony and the ars tacendi are not favourite ingredients in the boon companion. Pattison never stayed in the common-room later than eight in the evening, and a man was no better than a skeleton at a feast who left good fellows for the sake of going over an essay with a pupil, instead ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... "There is no sociability in that. And you seem very lonesome here—stuck for two more hours at least. Come, Captain, fetch your bottle and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... The Boston Events' young men," found his way into an eating-house not far from the track. It had a simple, domestic effect inside, and the young man gave a sigh of comfort in the pleasant warmth and light. There was a woman there who had a very conversable air, a sort of eventual sociability, as the young man realized when she looked up from twitching the white, clean cloths perfectly straight on the little tables set in rows on either ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... zeros; the unit which turns them into a number must be added from outside; it may be royalty, the writer of the day, the favorite newspaper, or any other temporary master of fashion. All this is probably the result of an exaggerated sociability, which weakens the soul's forces of resistance, destroys its capacity for investigation and personal conviction, and kills in it the worship ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... meetings, for pleasant acquaintances, perhaps for love-adventures. In this life of elbowings, not only those with whom we have come into daily contact, but strangers, assume an extreme importance. Curiosity is aroused, sympathy is ready to exhibit itself, and sociability is ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... an element in my enjoyment that was yielded neither by the sights, the adventures, nor the chewing-candy. I had a keen feeling for the sociability of the crowd. All plebeian Chelsea was abroad, and a bourgeois population is nowhere unneighborly. Women shapeless with bundles, their hats awry over thin, eager faces, gathered in knots on the edge ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... of the table heaved and quivered with primeval mirth. Even Flossie Walker was moved to a faint smile. For Mr. Soper, though outwardly taciturn and morose, was possessed inwardly by a perfect fury of sociability, an immortal and insatiable craving to converse. It was an instinct which, if gratified, would have undermined the whole fabric of the Dinner, being essentially egoistic, destructive and malign. Mr. Soper resented the rapidity with which Rickman had been accepted by the boarding-house; ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... blackboard should be kept thoroughly clean, that each day's lessons should be carefully planned, that, in short, every little duty should be well performed, they putter away at such tasks until there is no time left for much larger duties, such as physical exercise, sociability, and general reading. As a result they become habitually tired, unsympathetic, and narrow, and therefore schoolish. It is a strange commentary on education when conscientiousness means particular care for ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... time feelings of sociability and companionship begin to grow in such gatherings of men, then kingship has truck root; and the notions of goodness, justice, and their opposites begin to arise ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... haven't yet exhausted. This forms a clear intellectual atmosphere into which you may turn aside from the modern world and fill your lungs as with the breath of a forgotten creed. The memorials of the past here address us moreover with a friendliness, win us by we scarcely know what sociability, what equal amenity, that we scarce find matched in other great esthetically endowed communities and periods. Venice, with her old palaces cracking under the weight of their treasures, is, in her influence, insupportably sad; Athens, with her maimed marbles and dishonoured memories, transmutes ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the traveller gain a better impression of the essential gaiety and sociability of the Parisian temperament than by sitting outside a cafe on the boulevards on a public festival and observing his neighbours and the passers-by: their imperturbable good humour; their easy manners; their ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... legal profession to the ministry. By a second marriage, December 6, 1615, to Thomasine Clopton, of a good family in the neighborhood, he had the promise of renewed joy in a condition which his warm-hearted sociability and his intense fondness for domestic relations made essential to his happiness, if not to his virtue. But one single year and one added day saw her and her infant child committed to the tomb, and made him again desolate. His biographer, not without ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... stiffness is sure to melt rapidly away. Jack, hearing mention of "The Talisman," joined in and the others drew up their chairs, so that when Miss Betty rustled back from an excursion to the dining room she found the ice broken and sociability prevailing. But she startled ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... cracking of nuts and the popping of corn, the picnic supper on the lawn, the tennis court or croquet ground, the home parties, the guests ever-welcome at meals, these are but items in a possible scorecard of the sociability of the home. We are giving much thought to all sorts of group activities, but how much attention have we given to systematically encouraging the social unit which has the largest possibilities, the family? Last ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... almost as common with them as at the North, and far more common than with well-bred slave-holders. They have meekly accepted it. "Want to go out to de nigger-houses, Sah," is the universal impulse of sociability, when they wish to cross the lines. "He hab twenty house-servants, an' two hundred head o' nigger," is a still more degrading form of phrase, in which the epithet is limited to the field-hands, and they estimated like so many cattle. This want of self-respect of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... noble exercise was thus enjoyed by both of them to the fullest extent. There was an exhilaration in it which each felt equally. The excitement of the rapid gallop or the full run, the quiet sociability of the slow walk, the perfect freedom of movement in almost any direction, were all appreciated by one as much as by the other. Then, too, the country itself was of that character which was best adapted to give pleasure. There were broad public roads, ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... Saturday. I feel a fresh excitement at going back to my job; the factory draws me toward it magnetically. I long to be in the hum and whir of the busy workroom. Two days of leisure without resources or amusement make clear to me how the sociability of factory life, the freedom from personal demands, the escape from self can prove a distraction to those who have no mental occupation, no money to spend on diversion. It is easier to submit to factory government which commands five hundred girls with one law valid ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... of her state. She was no longer ordered, but requested, and that politely. The other members of the cast looked at her enviously as she came out arrayed in her simple habit, which she wore all through the play. All those who had supposedly been her equals and superiors now smiled the smile of sociability, as much as to say: "How friendly we have always been." Only the star comedian whose part had been so deeply injured stalked by himself. Figuratively, he could not kiss ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... obtained exceedingly minute. The dinner passed off heavily; Miss Saville was unusually silent, and all Freddy's sallies failed to draw her out. Mr. Coleman was very pompous, and so distressingly polite, that everything like sociability was out of the question. When the ladies left us, matters did not improve; Freddy, finding the atmosphere ungenial to jokes, devoted himself to cracking walnuts by original methods which invariably failed, and attempting to torture into ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... is allowed to individuals of the Christian community, in social life, in conversation between men and women, in the holding of private opinions, which the non-Christian order of society did not permit. Sociability between the sexes was not allowed. The new freedom naturally results in greater vivacity and a far freer play of facial expression than the older order could produce. The vivacity and sociability ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... "that English folk, decent ones, have no need to fight shy of each other when they meet as strangers. We all know more or less about each other by hearsay, or about each other's people; and we're all pretty sure to have some common acquaintances. The smallness of England makes for sociability and confidence." ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... unless the inevitable Andalusian—he who takes the place of the Gascon in France—is present with his babble and his laugh, his fine opinion of himself, and his faculty for making a sacrifice of his own dignity at that over-rated altar—the shrine of sociability. ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... was all dirt, life and animation, and as full of his eccentricities as ever. He was a character seldom met with—ever full of a quaint humor and sociability, but never known to get mad, no matter how great the provocation ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... sociable of beasts of prey. Not only do they gather in bands, but they arrange to render each other assistance, which is the most important test of sociability. The most gray wolves I ever saw in a band was five. This was in northern New Mexico in January, 1894. The most I ever heard of in a band was thirty-two that were seen in the same region. These bands are apparently formed ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... tempered the tongues of even the most violent, and the newspapers of South Carolina for eight years, it is said, did not contain one abusive word. The ownership of slaves, even more than of realty, held families steadfast on their estates, and everywhere prevailed the sociability of established neighborhoods. Money counted least in making the social status, and constantly ambitious and brilliant youngsters from no estate married into the families of the planter princes. Meanwhile the one character utterly condemned ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... Chaumette answered Yes, and Robespierre cried No. Robespierre followed Rousseau in thinking that any one who should refuse to recognise the existence of a God, should be exiled as a monster devoid of the faculties of virtue and sociability. Chaumette followed Diderot, and Diderot told Samuel Romilly in 1783 that belief in God, as well as submission to kings, would be at an end all over the world in a very few years. The Hebertists might have taken for their motto ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... earnestly disposed toward the acquirement and dissemination of absolute spiritual truth, as was not unnatural, I thoroughly investigated the 'Supernaturalism' of the day. I soon assented to the general proposition that sociability with the invisibles is practicable, if not profitable; but ever held at a cheap rate the philosophies and religions, harmonious and other, which the full-blooded ghost-mongers so zealously promulgated. I still maintain that great good ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... for comic writing from time immemorial. But if we look a little deeper we shall find there is a pathetic, one might almost say a tragic, side to the picture. A shy man means a lonely man—a man cut off from all companionship, all sociability. He moves about the world, but does not mix with it. Between him and his fellow-men there runs ever an impassable barrier—a strong, invisible wall that, trying in vain to scale, he but bruises himself against. He sees the pleasant faces ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... least, is the conversation during the weaving. Anyone who has attended a teachers' meeting, where the industrial work was being given, has not failed to remark the sociability all over the room. "How are you getting on?" "Let me see yours." "Oh, I cannot get it at all," etc., etc., are heard everywhere, and yet those same teachers go into their class rooms the next day and expect the children to work without whispering. If they will read what Mrs. Wiggin says ...
— Hand-Loom Weaving - A Manual for School and Home • Mattie Phipps Todd
... walls. Murray told me he well remembered Byron and his ways; could still in fancy see him and Scott, and also hear them, as they stamped heavily (lame as both were) down the somewhat narrow stairs. Sociability may well come to the relief of people who cannot amuse themselves at home, for the weather, mild, and too mild, is gray, sunless and spiritless, altogether. To-day ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... capital. I'll tell her you'll pop in tomorrow morning. And now do sit down a minute, there's a dear, and let's have a nice quiet jaw together. You won't take a drop, just for sociability? Tell me what you think of that cigarette. Why, don't you like it? What are ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... constructed by 44 States. These buildings were designed as clubhouses for the citizens of the various States and were provided with rest rooms, social halls, and other rooms to contribute to the comfort of and promote sociability among the people of the various States visiting the exposition. At the beginning of the exposition it seemed one of the duties of the board of lady managers would be to provide a hall for the meeting of women visiting the exposition and also a rest room, but this want was provided ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... more that face approximates to a sheet of bookbacks, the more of that society he will enjoy. And so it is that three great advantages come hand in hand, and, as will be seen, reach their maximum together: the sociability of books, minimum of cost in providing for them, and ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... presumed but to flounder and recede, elated at once and abashed and on the whole but feebly sophisticated. The cousinship, on the other hand, all unalarmed and unsuspecting and unembarrassed, lived by pure serenity, sociability and loquacity; the oddest fact about its members being withal that it didn't make them bores, I seem to feel as I look back, or at least not worse bores than sundry specimens of the other growth. There can surely never have been anything like their good faith ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... a social animal. The very follies for which he was doing penance had been bred of his excessive sociability. And here, in the fourth year of his exile, he found himself in company—which were to travesty the word—with a morose and speechless creature in whose sombre eyes smouldered a hatred as bitter as it was unwarranted. ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... tea on rare occasions, and then it was cooking and baking and cleaning up the choice old silver and dusting and polishing, and the next day clearing up. Everything out of the routine made so much extra work. Among the few English-speaking people in India there had been a sort of free and easy sociability. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... substitution of cheap fish for dear—it would have appeared to him simply a penny-wise, mean notion. Rosamond, even without such an occasion as Captain Lydgate's visit, was fond of giving invitations, and Lydgate, though he often thought the guests tiresome, did not interfere. This sociability seemed a necessary part of professional prudence, and the entertainment must be suitable. It is true Lydgate was constantly visiting the homes of the poor and adjusting his prescriptions of diet to their ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Dorian warmed to their sociability and their clatter. He learned from them that their Christmas this year would likely be somewhat of a failure. Daddy was sick. There was no Christmas tree, and they doubted Santa Claus' ability to find his way up ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... of chipmunks and ground-squirrels. All of the former have striped backs and do more or less climbing of trees. Of their friendliness, greediness, and even sociability—where nuts are in evidence or anticipated—I have written fully in the chapter on Tahoe Tavern. Of the three ground-squirrels the largest is the common ground-squirrel of the valleys of California. It is gray, somewhat ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... he had gone in here, and then his friend had come forth with him, for there were two tracks leading from this doorway. I followed them to a third humble entrance, not far off, where the tracks were so numerous that I lost the trail. It was pleasing to see the evidence of their morning sociability written there upon the ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... form of friendship still akin to general sociability and gregariousness. When men are "in the same boat together," when a common anxiety, occupation, or sport unites them, they feel their human kinship in an intensified form without any greater personal affinity subsisting between them. The same effect is produced by a common estrangement ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... small bottle, hang it about his neck with a string, conceal it under his fur coat, and present himself at our house every now and then for the ostensible purpose of congratulating us upon some Russian holiday. Of course we were expected to reward this disinterested sociability with a drink. The Cossack would swallow all he could of the fiery stuff, and then holding as much as possible in his mouth he would make a terrible grimace, cover his face with one hand as if the liquor were ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... its potentiality is definite and its fate precarious; and in man it requires society to rear it and tradition to educate it. The good is accordingly social, in so far as the soul demands society; but it is the nature of the individual that determines the kind and degree of sociability that is good for him, and draws the line between society that is a benefit and society that is a nuisance. To subordinate the soul fundamentally to society or the individual to the state is sheer barbarism: the Greeks, sometimes invoked to support this ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... mind and body, and confidence in mankind—that is, in others, by active relations with life and a loving interest in the past and present destinies of our fellow-men. This required an eye and heart open to our surroundings, sociability, and a deeper insight into history. Here Nature seems to be forgotten. But Nature comes into the category of religion, for to him religion means: To know and feel at one with ourselves, with God, and with man; to be loyal to ourselves, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... our Duchess!" Lady Sandgate repeated, but with a grace that took the sting from her triumph. And she seemed still all sweet sociability as she added: "I wish he'd tell you too, you dreadful rich thing, that you ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... gadding set," she thought; and then, as a lady in flaunting robes took a seat beside her, crowding her into a narrow space, the good old dame thought to show that she did not resent it, by an attempt at sociability, asking if she knew "Mrs. Peter Tubbs, whose husband kept ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... East is sport-mad it is Bombay. Men work there mornings and engage in something of a sportive character afternoons. The school-boy, even, slings his books from a hockey stick, and the departmental clerk sets out for an afternoon's sociability accompanied by his faithful tennis racquet. Nowhere can better polo be seen than on the Marine Lines Maidan; as for cricket, there probably are more players in Bombay, British and native, than in any town of its population in England—and Bombay's cricket is of the best. More than ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... string outside the window, and fishes up your card.] or by the unsocial domestic habits of Europe. You bow and give good-day to the people whom you meet in the common hall and on the common stairway, but you rarely know more of them than their names, and you certainly care nothing about them. The sociability of Europe, and more especially of Southern Europe, is shown abroad; under the domestic roof it dwindles and disappears. And indeed it is no wonder, considering how dispiriting and comfortless most of the houses are. The lower windows are heavily barred with iron; the wood-work is rude, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... sometimes said be true, that love is diffident, reserved, and unassuming, this man must be tinctured with it. These symptoms were visible in his deportment when I entered the room. However, he soon recovered himself, and the conversation took a general turn. The festive board was crowned with sociability, and we found in reality "the feast of reason and the flow of soul." After we rose from table, a walk in the garden was proposed—an amusement we are all peculiarly fond of. Mr. Boyer offered me his ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... until meals, that a beggar in our towns or cities would hardly deign to touch, are by him eaten with a relish to which he has long been a stranger. It is on these long tramps that the dyspeptic and melancholic man becomes the liveliest of the party; his sociability often increases to such a degree that he soon can spin a yarn in ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... cost of living.] There is nothing like the same amount of sociability amongst the foreigners in Binondo as prevails in English and Dutch colonies; and scarcely any intercourse at all with the Spaniards, who envy the strangers and almost seem to look upon the gains the latter make in the country as so many robberies committed upon themselves, its owners. ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... who were sitting at home and keeping Christmas all alone. They didn't know themselves, there were so many of them! Hanne and her mother were invited too, but they had gone to bed early—they were not inclined for sociability. One after another they were pulled into the room, and they came with cheerful faces. Marie turned the lamp out and went in to light up ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... to London had this consequence, chilling to a person who had had a vision of sociability in a railway-carriage, that most of the company, after breakfast, drove back to town, entering their own vehicles, which had come out to fetch them, while their servants returned by train with ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... respected. His home was at "Fort Hill," in the northwestern district of South Carolina; and here he spent all the time he could spare from his public duties, in the enjoyments of domestic life and in cultivating his plantation. In his home he was remarkable for kindness, cheerfulness, and sociability. ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... there is light there is also shadow. It is not in vain that Adonai our God gave his chosen people the tenacity of a snake, the cunning of a fox, the look of a falcon, the memory of a dog, the diligence of an ant, and the sociability of a beaver. We were in captivity on the rivers of Babylon, and have become powerful! Our temple was destroyed, but we have built a thousand new temples! For eighteen hundreds years we were slaves; now we have grown head and shoulders ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... answered. For his successful progress, throughout the savage state, man has been largely indebted to those qualities which he shares with the ape and the tiger; his exceptional physical organization; his cunning, his sociability, his curiosity, and his imitativeness; his ruthless and [52] ferocious destructiveness when his ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... is an expression of the instinct for imitation. The reaching out of its hand to grasp the sunshine is in obedience to the instinct for acquisition. All human association is due primarily to the instinct for sociability. These instincts are inborn. They cannot be eradicated, but they can be modified ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... George was right in this. Sociability is, to a certain extent, a duty, and one that ought not without the soundest reason to be shirked. George may have carried his reserve rather too far, but at any rate you will allow he erred on the right side, if he erred at all, and carried his purpose ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... he pulled the zodiac partially over him, and tried to button his alapaca duster a little closer, but his sleep was troubled by the sociability of the coyotes and the midnight twitter of the mountain lion. He ate moss agates rare and spruce gum for breakfast. When he got to the camp he looked like a forty-day starvationist ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... country betake themselves at night, and thence they disperse in all directions again in the early morning. The crow is a social bird, a true American; no hermit or recluse is he. The winter probably brings them together in these large colonies for purposes of sociability and for greater warmth. By roosting close together and quite filling a tree-top, there must result some ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... unsociability; a claim to absolute loneliness. The anarchist is at least as solitary as the ascetic. And the men of very vivid vigour in literature, the men such as Dickens, have generally displayed a large sociability towards the society of letters, always expressed in the happy pursuit of pre-existent themes, sometimes expressed, as in the case of Moliere or Sterne, in downright plagiarism. For even theft is a confession of our dependence on society. In Dickens, ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... not themselves, or some one from them, to invite us in a manner that might be accepted. From this time, however, we became more comfortable, as absconding was our mutual desire; and we were flung, by this means, into a style of sociability we might else never ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... show much sociability; but Hal persisted, refusing to believe that any one in a country store would miss an opening to discuss politics, even with a miner's helper. "Tell me," said he, "just what is ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... timing of his exculpatory visit and the coming of Colonel John, that he would scarcely be home before the latter was due to arrive. Anyhow, Groby had got it over, and six or seven months might decently elapse before he need again sacrifice his comforts and inclinations on the altar of family sociability. He was inclined to be distinctly cheerful as he hopped about the room, picking up first one object, then another, and subjecting each ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as 'Kenyon the Magnificent.'" There is something thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling, not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability, but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability. Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission of superficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be congratulated ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... was, in the month of November, ready for delivery to the select few among whom it was intended to circulate; and to Mr. Becher the first copy of the work was presented.[55] The influence which this gentleman had, by his love of poetry, his sociability and good sense, acquired at this period over the mind of Lord Byron, was frequently employed by him in guiding the taste of his young friend, no less in matters of conduct than of literature; and the ductility with which this influence ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... this disease gives no idea whatever of its serious nature. The technical term, Tsundayeligaktanh[)i], really refers to the enthusiastic outburst of sociability that ensues when two old friends meet. In this instance it might be rendered "an ordeal." The application of such a name to what is considered a serious illness is in accordance with the regular formulistic practice of making light of a dangerous malady in order to convey to the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... annoyance to anybody; each person is at liberty to employ himself or herself as best pleases them, though very little is done in common, and in this respect Windsor is totally unlike any other place. There is none of the sociability which makes the agreeableness of an English country house; there is no room in which the guests assemble, sit, lounge, and talk as they please and when they please; there is a billiard table, but in such a remote corner of the Castle that it might as well be ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the taste that heaps up in the palaces what is first-rate, what is good, what is bad, what is detestable, all pell-mell. He is disgusted at the amusements, which have the air of religious ceremonies; with the men, on whose countenances you never see confidence, friendship, gaiety, sociability, but on every face the inscription, 'What is there in common between me and you?'; disgusted with the great people, who are gloomy, cold, proud, haughty, and vain; and with the small people, who are hard, insolent, and barbarous. The only thing that I have heard him praise is the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... of Miss Grace, with its work, gave a sort of impression of modern family household life. It was a wide, open, hospitable, generous-minded room, that seemed to breathe a fragrance of invitation and general sociability; it was a room full of associations and memories, and its daily arrangement and ornamentation made one of the pleasant tasks of Miss ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Bellamy told about the skating tournaments every afternoon of the cold weather for the school children, and Saturday afternoons for the older young folks. More people went than skated too, the garrulous farmer asserted. It was just another of that young preacher's sociability schemes, and there was no end to 'em, ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... walked twenty miles on a bad road, in a tropical climate. Here we were to stay the night, and our first object was to prepare dinner and then to eat it; all seemed disposed to assist in the last part of this operation, and where every one was anxious to please, and determined to be pleased, sociability could not be absent. After this we whiled away our time with books and conversation, till one by one dropping asleep, all became quiet, except a wretched child belonging to our hostess, who, from one corner of the hut, every now and then set up its shrill ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... our author believes that the state has a right to insist. There is a purely civil profession of faith, whose articles the sovereign may fix, not exactly as dogmas of religion, but as principles of sociability. These must be few, simple and clear, and announced without explanation or commentary. The existence of a deity, powerful, intelligent, beneficent, foreseeing, and providing; the life to come, with the happiness of ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... the sullenness of his manner. As for Mrs. Plaskwith, poor woman! she positively detested the taciturn and moody boy, who never mingled in the jokes of the circle, nor played with the children, nor complimented her, nor added, in short, anything to the sociability of the house. Mr. Plimmins, who had at first sought to condescend, next sought to bully; but the gaunt frame and savage eye of Philip awed the smirk youth, in spite of himself; and he confessed to Mrs. ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... annual subscription. It kept him in touch with civilisation, in touch with Home. He loved to know that when, at length, he found himself once again in the city of his birth he would have a firm foothold on sociability. The friends of his youth might die, or might forget him. But, as member of a club, he would find substitutes for them in less than no time. Herding bullocks, all day long, on the arid plains of Central Australia, he used to keep up his spirits by thinking ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... man here and there. For we all have friends whom we are content to see pass by on the other side. Deulin's duty was, moreover, such that it got strangely mixed up with his pleasure, and it often happens that discretion must needs overcome a natural sociability. ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... genial open kitchen-fire, with the crane, the pot-hooks, and trammels,—where hissed and boiled the social tea-kettle, where steamed the huge dinner-pot, in whose ample depths beets, carrots, potatoes, and turnips boiled in jolly sociability with the pork or corned beef which they were destined to flank at the ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... supper, as they had first intended, but to turn their "spread" into the common college type, where "plowed field" and chocolate made with condensed milk and boiling water are the chief refreshments, and light-hearted sociability ensures a good ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... traits known to possess inheritable elements are generosity, piousness, independence, industry, will-power, faithfulness, fairness, sociability, reliability, self-reliance, tendency to work hard, perseverance, carefulness, impulsiveness, temperance, high-spiritedness, joviality, benignity, quietness, cheerfulness, hospitality, sympathy, humorousness, love of fun, neighborliness, love of ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... made the part of female education, to counterbalance, in the family, the effects of the ever increasing division of labor among the male portion, by the development of that which is universally human—art, sociability, house-keeping etc. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... divergence of manners or ideas from the present British standard in a nation speaking the same tongue, as a barbarism, if not as a personal insult to himself. Worse then all, he has perhaps less than anybody of that quality, we might almost say faculty, which Mirabeau called "political sociability," and accordingly can form no conception of a democracy which levels upward,—of any democracy, indeed, except one expressly invented to endanger the stability of English institutions, certainly the most comfortable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... of rapid motion, of walks of thirty miles a day which the lame lad yet found no fatigue to him; of mad enterprises, scrapes and drinking-bouts, in one of which Scott was half persuaded by his friends that he actually sang a song for the only time in his life. But even in these days of youthful sociability, with companions of his own age, Scott was always himself, and his imperious will often asserted itself. Writing of this time, some thirty-five years or so later, he said, "When I was a boy, and on foot expeditions, as we had many, no creature could be so indifferent which way our ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... tempted to consider it genetically among the oldest of the emotions, synonymous almost with the will to live, and to make it scarcely less fundamental than fear or anger. In fact, jealousy readily passes into anger, and is itself a brand of fear.... In sociability and mutual aid we see the other side of the shield; but jealousy, however anti-social it may be, retains a function in zooelogical economy: viz., to conserve the individual as against the group. It is Nature's great corrective for the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... given us so many proofs of intelligence, kindly disposition, and sociability that she has been promoted, by common consent, to the dignity of a person, for it is plain that a higher order of reason than instinct guides her actions. This dignity entails the right of eating at table like a person, and ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... Mr. Sheepshanks to himself, when he heard of his successor's affability, and sociability, and amiability, and a variety of other agreeable 'ilities,' from the friends whom the old steward still retained ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... There is too much sociability—I do not get along fast enough with work. Tomorrow I lunch with Mr. Toole and a Member of Parliament—Toole is the most able Comedian of the day. And then I am done for a while. On Tuesday I mean to hang a card to my keybox, inscribed—"Gone ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... barely sufficient to bring the little ones in their low chairs to an effective level with the table. Incredible stowage having been effected, the sleepy after-dinner hours are somewhat heavily passed; but with the lamps and the tea-board, sociability revives. The evening passes among the old people, with chequers and back-gammon. Puss-in-the-corner, the game of forfeits—blind-man's-buff entertain the young folks. Apples, nuts and cider come in at nine o'clock, and perhaps a mug of flip—but it is rather for form's sake ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... been on round-up," remarked Gowan, with an insistent sociability oddly at variance with his usual taciturn reserve. "According to Miss Chuckie, you're some rider, and according to Mr. Knowles, you can shoot. I wouldn't mind hearing from you direct about that ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... imitated, not one streak of color which was not "right." It was a masterpiece of correct furnishing, but it gave one a curious sense of limitation. One could not escape the scheme. The inelasticity of it hampered sociability—and there grew on one, too, a sense of unfitness. His clothes were an anachronism! They were the only thing which did ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... contracted an aperture I never could squeeze myself into it—the last I always hated—there was contamination in the very entrance! Thus abandoned of aim or view in life, with a strong appetite for sociability, as well from native hilarity as from a pride of observation and remark; a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm that made me fly solitude; add to these incentives to social life, my reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild logical talent, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the Senator a sartorial address of repute, and presently the hansom drew up before it, in Piccadilly. We went about as a family in one hansom for sociability. ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Deerham that night, not quite so full of sociability as was Lady Verner's. For one, may be instanced that of the Misses West. They sat at the table in the general sitting-room, hard at work, a lamp between them, for the gas-burners above were high for sewing, ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... buildings and grounds of Washington, still swarm with soldiers from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, and all the Western States. I am continually meeting and talking with them. They often speak to me first, and always show great sociability, and glad to have a good interchange of chat. These Western soldiers are more slow in their movements, and in their intellectual quality also; have no extreme alertness. They are larger in size, have a more serious physiognomy, are continually looking at you as they pass in the street. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... did not prevent the utterance of witty jests, for in that respect M. de Bernis was a true Frenchman. I have travelled much, I have deeply studied men, individually and in a body, but I have never met with true sociability except in Frenchmen; they alone know how to jest, and it is rare, delicate, refined jesting, which animates conversation and ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... degradation of their fellow-creatures and those who sought to save mankind from perdition. That the millions of people who enjoyed drinking, to whom it was a cherished source of refreshment, recuperation, and sociability, had any stake in the matter, the agitators never for a moment acknowledged; if a man stood out against Prohibition he was not the champion of the millions who enjoyed drink, but the servant of the interests who sold drink. This preposterous fiction was allowed to pass ...
— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin
... for a boy to play baseball on a crowded street, it is not because there is intrinsically anything unwholesome or harmful in play. What is clearly demanded is not a crushing of the play instinct, but better facilities for its expression. A boy's native sociability and gift for leadership may make him, for want of a better opportunity, a gangster. But to cut off those impulses altogether would be to cut off the sources of good citizenship. The settlement clubs or ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... daughters keep turning up with one thing and another till there is a little crowd on the rocks, and any one who is passing stops for an hour or two to talk on his way to the sea, so that, like the kelp-burning in the summer-time, this work is full of sociability. ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... allow me to offer you one of these plutocratic perfectos. Only the elect get these, I can tell you. In that drawer there I keep a brand made out of car waste and hemp rope, that does very well for ordinary commercial sociability. Got a match? All right; smoke up and tell me what you're doing to make the world a better place to live in, as old Prexy used to ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... be ready for a little sociability," remarked the Governor, "when we return from the West. We are motoring from Portland to Portland, with a few little side trips like this, and we ought to have some good yarns to tell ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... the most obvious and natural pet for a gentleman; but still, a dog, with all his familiarity, is a selfish sort of companion, for he generally bestows his whole sociability either upon his master, or his master's servant who feeds him, or upon his master's friend who accompanies him to the fields. To all others he is not only cold, but often surly and impertinent. This, indeed, ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... novel entitled the "Minister's Wooing," which ran first as a serial in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859, she describes a quilting supposed to have been given about the year 1800. Here we can view at close range a real old-fashioned quilting, and gain some insight into its various incidents of sociability and gossip, typical of an early New England seafaring village, as set forth in Mrs. ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... of Wincot Abbey bore a sad character for want of sociability in our county. They never went to other people's houses, and, excepting my father, and a lady and her daughter living near them, never received anybody under ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... engage the usual run of foreign singers and the best known mountebanks of the moment. Mrs. Trevor Harrison, the woman whom he had selected as chaperon for Virginia, more than once displayed some curiosity, when talking to her charge, as to this sudden change in the habits of a man whose lack of sociability ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... greatest effort is always required to overcome original inertness, and that two efforts, like two horses starting a carriage instead of one, combined give more than double the value of each taken separately. The fact of this aesthetic sociability is so obvious that we need not discuss it any further, but merely hold it over to add, at last, to the result of the two other reasons, negative and positive, which tend to make aesthetic enjoyment the type of unselfish, nay, even of ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... the best—that made Sonny Sahib's blue eyes widen in the dark, when they all sat together on a charpoy by the door of the hut, and the stars glimmered through the tamarind-trees. A charpoy is a bed, and everybody in Rubbulgurh puts one outside, for sociability, in the evening. Not much of a bed, only four short rickety legs held together with knotted string, but it ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... up on the wagon seat, and she sat beside him with her head on his arm, and they rode home in absolute silence, each feeling too much for speech. After they reached home, however, Cecil showed her all over the place, and she barked out her ideas in glad sociability. ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... the Arno, at Pisa - appear to consider the prospects of an inundation. "Il monte; il monte toujours," - there was not much said but that. It was a general holiday, and there was an air of wishing to profit, for sociability's sake, by any interruption of the common- place (the popular mind likes "a change," and the element of change mitigates the sense of disaster); but the affair was not otherwise a holiday. Suspense and anxiety were in the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... College, of a rather advanced High-Church type. Having received a so-called classical education, he had no particular intellectual interests. He was not an athlete; he worked just enough to secure a pass-degree, and spent his time at Cambridge in mild sociability. He takes no interest in politics, books, art, games, or even agriculture. Just when his mind began to expand a little he went off to the Theological College, where he was indoctrinated with high ecclesiastical ideas, and formed a great idea of the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... time, doing his best as a social being. Take the so-called sleepy market-town; it is bubbling with all manner of associated activities, and these of the quite voluntary kind, forms of zealously united effort such as are never dreamt of in the countries supposed to be eminently "social." Sociability does not consist in a readiness to talk at large with the first comer. It is not dependent upon natural grace and suavity; it is compatible, indeed, with thoroughly awkward and all but brutal manners. The English have never (at all events, for some ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... as Antonia said, a city man. He liked theaters and lighted streets and music and a game of dominoes after the day's work was over. His sociability was stronger than his acquisitive instinct. He liked to live day by day and night by night, sharing in the excitement of the crowd.—Yet his wife had managed to hold him here on a farm, in one of the loneliest countries in ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... restraint of the mill and factory. He is found out of doors, making roads and excavations, railways, skyscrapers, and houses. If he has a liking for trade he trundles a pushcart filled with fruit or chocolates; or he may turn a jolly hurdy-gurdy or grind scissors. In spite of his native sociability, the south Italian is very slow to take to American ways. As a rule, he comes here intending to go back when he has made enough money. He has the air of a sojourner. He is picturesque, volatile, and incapable of ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... reading and music seem to me far better occupations for home evenings than games. There is too much hard work in chess and whist and too little sociability to make them in any way desirable. Euchre and backgammon seem invented to pass away time, which is so precious to most of us that we should like to feel we had something at the end of an hour by which our lives were richer ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... how dye's and good mornings, and curious glances at this stranger in their midst, who, although with them, did not seem to be one of them. They were all Southerners and inclined to be friendly, but nothing in the stranger's attitude invited sociability. He was looking off upon the water in the direction from which they had come, and never turned his head in response to the loud shouts, when an alligator was seen lying upon the shore, or a big turtle was sunning itself on a log. He was a Northerner, they knew from ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... are very pretty, and look like a sort of fantastic stitching on the coverlid of the snow. One is curious to know what brings these tiny creatures from their retreats; they do not seem to be in quest of food, but rather to be traveling about for pleasure or sociability, though always going post-haste, and linking stump with stump and tree with tree by fine, hurried strides. That is when they travel openly; but they have hidden passages and winding galleries under the snow, ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... the farmers in every great agricultural state had been organizing, under such names as Patrons of Husbandry, Farmers' League, the Grange, Patrons of Industry, Agricultural Wheel, Farmers' Alliance. Their object was to promote sociability, spread information concerning agriculture and the price of grain and cattle, and guard the interests and welfare of the farmer generally. By 1886 many of these began to unite, and the National Agricultural Wheel of the United States, the Farmers' Alliance and Cooperative Union of ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... nothing," says he, mildly, "that so clearly declares the sociability—the bon camaraderie, so to speak—that ought to exist in every well-brought-up family as the sight of washing done at home. There is such a happy mingling and yet such a thorough disregard of ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... except as an End: not chosen both for itself and with a view to something ulterior. It must thus be—(1) An end-in-itself pursued for its own sake; (2) it must farther be self-sufficing leaving no outstanding wants—man's sociability being taken into account and gratified. Happiness is such an end; but we must state more clearly ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... he? I don't drink very much, and you know it. I don't hardly touch a drop, except maybe just for sociability. God! this temperance wave gets my goat! Lot of hot-air females telling me what I can do and what I can't do—fella that knows when to drink and when to stop. Drink? Why, you ought to see some of the boys! There's Burke McCullough. Say, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... aristocratical notions in some degree from being admitted occasionally to a precarious sociability with some of the small country gentry, who were sometimes in want of company to help while away the time. With these Andrew would now and then play at cards and dice, and he never lacked "siller in pouch" to stake on a game, which he did with a perfect air of a man to whom money was ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... for so carefully, was never written. Hundreds of the stylographic pages were filled, and the duplicates sent home for the entertainment of Olivia Clemens, but the notes were not completed, and the actual writing was never begun. There was too much sociability in London for one thing, and then he found that he could not write entertainingly of England without introducing too many personalities, and running the risk of offending those who had taken him into their hearts and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... said Miss Marsh; "St. Benet's was made for sociability as well as study, and I have no patience with the students who don't try to combine the two. By the way," she added, turning round and speaking in a rather impertinent voice to Priscilla, "I sent you a message ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... always correctly, but at all events in a way that he never reasoned before. The best way to convey to the reader the state of his mind will be to let him speak for himself. As he had a habit of thinking aloud— for sociability, as it were—in the dark cell to which he had been relegated, we have only to bend down our ear ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... people, at another a community for poor and sensitive people, who "if they could get away from squalor and conflict, would blow like flowers." With his love of precise detail, he drew up time-tables, so many hours for devotion and meditation, so many for work and exercise, so many for sociability. ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... it is necessary to drink in order to impress your sociability upon companions who also drink, is utterly erroneous. One day a dinner was given by one of the great lawyers of this country in honor of another lawyer of distinction, and among those present was a young man of promise who at that time ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... it reminded her of gala nights at the Italiens, in the days of her triumph at the Tuileries. Possibly Beaufort, who was her match in daring, would have succeeded in bringing about a fusion; but his grand house and silk-stockinged footmen were an obstacle to informal sociability. Moreover, he was as illiterate as old Mrs. Mingott, and considered "fellows who wrote" as the mere paid purveyors of rich men's pleasures; and no one rich enough to influence his ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... agreement in the fact, there is a considerable divergence of opinion as to its nature. What is the nature of this fact of sociability? What is the character of the force that binds the members of a group so closely together? By some, the cause of sociability is found in the pressure exerted upon all by purely external forces. The need for protection, it is said, drives human beings together, and thus in course ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... his position and resources. His mansion was one of the most showy and luxurious in the city. He kept his carriages and horses, his cellar of costly wines, and entertained on a scale of great extravagance and sumptuousness. He was, in fact, the centre of fashion, frivolity, sociability, and even of the fashionable dissipations of the day. His person, which even in extreme old age was remarkable for dignity, erectness, and courtliness, at the period we write of, was conspicuous for all the graces of manhood. Indeed, he was styled the handsomest man in the colony. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... began to inquire very politely if smoking were offensive to me; and as I assured him that it was not, he took out his pipe. And knowing by experience that nothing is more conducive to sociability, be it among Chippeways or Gipsies, than that smoking which is among our Indians, literally a burnt-offering, {35} I produced a small clay pipe of the time of Charles the Second, given to me by a gentleman who has the amiable taste to collect such curiosities, and give them to his friends ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland |
