"Idiosyncrasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... overdosage. If a person is otherwise in good health, the use of one headache powder will in all probability do no harm, but the dose should not be repeated without a doctor's authority. Many deaths have occurred from their continued use, or because of an idiosyncrasy on the part of the taker, but it is their abuse more than their use which has brought upon them such almost universal condemnation. Therefore, while the physician may advocate their use, do not take them without his advice and specific directions as ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... fundamental wisdom, springing from the very roots of life. And he submitted. At intervals he would say resentfully: "But surely she could find five minutes each day to drop me a line! What's five minutes?" But he submitted. Submission was made easier when he co-ordinated with Hilda's idiosyncrasy the fact that Maggie, his own unromantic sister, could never begin to write a letter with less than from twelve to twenty-four hours' bracing of herself to the task. Maggie would be saying and saying: "I really must write that letter... Dear me! I ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the body, and elevating itself above mortal affairs just so far as to get a comprehensive and general view, makes this an estimate of its humanity, as accurate as it is possible, under the circumstances, to that particular spirit. The soul here separates itself from its own idiosyncrasy, or individuality, and considers its own being, not as appertaining solely to itself, but as a portion of the universal Ego. All important good resolutions of character are brought about at these ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... know are so constituted that they suspect the existence of a snake under every blade of grass. It is not a happy disposition either for the person who is possessed with this idiosyncrasy, or in its reflex action upon others. True charity thinketh no evil. It is far better to be over sanguine in our charitable estimate of other men's motives, even if we do sometimes ultimately find that our estimate was wrong, than ...
— Churchwardens' Manual - their duties, powers, rights, and privilages • George Henry
... more engaging figure in American history, none more entirely free from disfiguring idiosyncrasy, than the ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... concerned no considerations of honour or friendship had stood between him and his desires; but I believed—for what reason save my own egregious vanity, I know not—that for me he had a peculiar regard. I believed that it was an idiosyncrasy of this wolf to look upon my sheepfold as sacred from his depredations. I was ashamed of any doubts that crossed my mind as to his loyalty, and did not hesitate to thrust my lamb between his jaws. And while he was giving ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... overdose, or by that only less terrible opium-delirium belonging to the same general class as mania potu—then his case admits of not a moment's delay. Opium-eaters differ so widely—every new case furnishing some marked idiosyncrasy which may demand an entirely different management and list of remedies from those required by the last one—that for any general scheme of treatment a week's study of the patient will be necessary. During that week our attitude will be simply tentative and expectant, and at its ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... has not passed at least twenty years in a district where people dine at one o'clock, and dining after dark is regarded as a wild idiosyncrasy of earls, can appreciate ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... architectural members; for instance, of the shaft and capital of pillars, of entire pediments with a portion of the wall below them, and of the walls of monuments with the cornice and architrave. M. Renan has made some strong remarks on this idiosyncrasy. "In the Grecian style," he says, "the beauty of the wall is a main object with the architect, and the wall derives its beauty from the divisions between the stones, which observe symmetrical laws, and are in agreement with ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... with light. Flower-warmth and fragrance are on her page, the soft low summer wind seems to be speaking with you as you read, her characters are like the stars impersonated, and still, however lofty her nature, always and forever genial. You catch her own idiosyncrasy throughout, and believe, that, like Evelyn Hope, she was made of spirit, fire, and dew. When we remember the very slight effect ever visible to her of all her labor, there is something sad in the thought of this young soul, thrilled ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... Gratz, "was never intended. In your condition of mind, having discharged the coin upon the floor of the bin, a mental idiosyncrasy of ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... while other men, under the generalship of one of the cable experts, took deep-sea soundings, not only that the depth of the water might be known, but also its temperature and the character of the bottom, so one could judge of its effect upon the cable when laid, every idiosyncrasy of that cable being already a study of some ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... piece of shrewdness: Wagner always affected superiority in regard to the word "opera"—), just as the word "spirit" is a misunderstanding in the New Testament.—He was not enough of a psychologist for drama; he instinctively avoided a psychological plot—but how?—by always putting idiosyncrasy in its place.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Very modern—eh? Very Parisian! very decadent!{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Incidentally, the plots that Wagner knows how to unravel with the help of dramatic inventions, are of quite ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... promenading in royal splendour the gardens of Versailles, and Monsieur de Colbert busy with the direction of maritime affairs. You must admit that in a banker of the nineteenth century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy. Luckily, in the counting-house (it occupied part of the ground floor of the Delestang town residence, in a silent, shady street) the accounts were kept in modern money, so that I never had any difficulty in making my wants known ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Companion."[14] It is impossible to lay down hard and fast rules; it is impossible to make so many jam-pots of even young humanity, to be tied up and labelled and arranged upon the same shelf. Each individuality has to be dealt with in all its mysterious idiosyncrasy. One boy may be so reserved that it is better to write to him than to talk face to face; another may find the greatest possible strength and comfort in freedom of speech and the feeling that there is no barrier between him and his mother with regard to being ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... Another idiosyncrasy of his, which seems like the idiom in a language, was his total indifference to distinguished persons, simply as such. It was not that he considered all men on a level, for no one recognized more clearly the profound inequalities of human nature; ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... stark, shining and invincible. Through all the fine, divaricating ways of the new life, it grew ever more evident, there were for every one certain persons, mysteriously and indescribably in the key of one's self, whose mere presence gave pleasure, whose mere existence was interest, whose idiosyncrasy blended with accident to make a completing and predominant harmony for their predestined lovers. They were the essential thing in life. Without them the fine brave show of the rejuvenated world was a caparisoned steed without ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... the Captain said. "There are four million Murnans, friendly people who consider a white skin no more than a personal idiosyncrasy. Aaron's what his folks call a Chentelmaan, too. He'll ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... idiosyncrasy against letters did not hold me back I should have told you long ago what pleasure your charming letter from Paris gave me, and what a sincere part I have taken in your late successes, dear enchantress. But you must know all that far ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... convictions into other minds. He was a believer in the sense of the old Puritans, and, amid the doubt and skepticism of the nineteenth century, held as firmly as any of them by the doctrines of atonement and grace. He had most of the idiosyncrasy of Baxter, though not without the contemplation of Howe. The doctrines of Calvinism, mitigated but not renounced, and received simply as dictates of Heaven, without any effort or hope to bridge over their inscrutable depths by philosophical theories, he translated into ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... sight that we rightly understand any conception of a German philosopher; but, so far as we can make it out, the Kindergarten appears to be based on the idea of formulating the child's physical as thoroughly as his intellectual training, and at the same time closely consulting his idiosyncrasy in the application of both. His natural disposition and endowments are to be sedulously watched, and guided or wholly repressed as the case may demand. The budding artist is supplied with pencil, the nascent musician with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... their efforts were but of moderate merit. A tone of exaggeration, an imagination exuberant and unrestrained, a preference for glitter over solid excellence, a love of far-fetched conceits, characterize the Shahnameh; and, though we may fairly ascribe something of this to the idiosyncrasy of the poet, still, after we have made all due allowance upon this score, the conviction presses upon us that there was a childish and grotesque character in the great mass of the old Persian poetry, which marks ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... identity altogether. The worst of a public school is that a sort of common character is substituted for individual character. The master, of course, can't attend to the separate development of each boy's idiosyncrasy. All minds are thrown into one great mould, and come out of it more or less in the same form. An Etonian may be clever or stupid, but, as either, he remains emphatically Etonian. A public school ripens talent, but its tendency is to stifle ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... perfumes and flavours, and what is healthy and agreeable to some men acts as virulent poison to others (e.g. shell-fish, egg, quinine, opium). The smallest change in the substance administered or the smallest difference in the living substance of an individual (what is called "idiosyncrasy") makes all the difference ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... wet-blanketism that tries sanguine women's souls more sorely than open opposition. Some Johns make it a point of manly duty to discourage at first hearing any plan that has originated with a woman. I am fond of John, but this idiosyncrasy cannot be ignored. Nor is it entirely explicable upon any principle known in feminine ethics, unless it be intended by Providence as a counterweight to the womanly proclivity to see but one side of a question ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... not ignore the fact that cases occur where artists, owing to some physiological peculiarity or personal idiosyncrasy, are unable to overcome certain special difficulties; where, indeed, the effort would produce but meagre results. But such instances are the exception, not the rule. The lyric artist who is gifted merely with a beautiful voice, over which he has acquired but imperfect control, is ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... of contradictions, the sailor rarely, if he could avoid it, steered the course laid down for him, and in nothing perhaps was this idiosyncrasy so glaringly apparent as in his behaviour as his country's creditor. He "would get to London if he could." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 2732—Capt. Young, 12 Dec. 1742.] "An unaccountable humour" impelled him "to quit His Majesty's service without ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... were possible to change Miss Thusa's opinions and peculiarities into something after the similitude of her kind! Change Miss Thusa! As soon might you expect to change the gnarled and rooted oak into the flexible and breeze-bowed willow. Her idiosyncrasy had been so nursed and strengthened by the two great influences, time and solitude, it spread like the banyan tree, making a dark pavilion, where legions of ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... first time I had heard him at his old habit since my return to Pellucidar, and I had thought that he had given up his little idiosyncrasy; but he hadn't. Far ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... is to the disposition, not infrequent at the North, but by no means general, to set a decisive limit to further legislation in favour of the cherished idiosyncrasy of the other half of the country. Hawthorne takes the license of a sympathetic biographer in speaking of his hero's having incurred obloquy by his conservative attitude on the question of Slavery. The only class in the American world that ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... puzzle over this idiosyncrasy of her father. She retained vague memories of her early childhood, when he had surely been utterly different and would come into the nursery to romp with her. It had not been altogether her mother's death; that had happened when she was only six years old, and there ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... from his name, to be well informed; and how could he let slip an opportunity, such as will probably never be afforded him again in this life, of being eloquent on the Silver Eagle? Ornithology is surely the department of Ornither. Yet there is evidently something odd and peculiar in his idiosyncrasy; for we observe that he never once alludes to "these animals," birds, during the whole excursion. He has not taken his gun with him into the Highlands, a sad oversight indeed in a gentleman who ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... be more predisposed toward "running amok" than any other Malayan people. Having been warned of this unpleasant idiosyncrasy, I took the precaution, when among them, of carrying in the right-hand pocket of my jacket a service automatic, loaded and ready for instant action. For when a Bugi runs amok he will almost certainly get you unless you get him first. Running amok, I should explain, is ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... faculties of the reader, excepting in the first and third of the accompanying sketches, and even in these have only ventured to suggest ideas, the full scope and pregnancy of which it must be left to his own idiosyncrasy to appreciate and develop, the more especially as they bear upon a certain current of investigation ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... as he said this the rancher made a gesture as of warning, though this, no doubt, could be attributed to his wish to silently explain away the idiosyncrasy of Terry in using his first name only. He was presented in turn to the four men, and thought them the oddest collection he had ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... they see their own faults as existing in those about them, as a defect in the eye produces the appearance of a corresponding defect in every object toward which it is turned. This defect in character is more generally the result of vicious or improper habits of mind, than any constitutional idiosyncrasy. It is the result of the indulgence of gloomy thoughts, morbid fancies, inordinate ambition, habitual melancholy, a complaining, fault-finding disposition. It is generally early acquired, not in ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... pathetic, for near the end of the poor woman's narrative the author seems to recollect a fundamental sentence of Sterne's creed, the inevitable admixture of the whimsical, and here he introduces into the sentimental relation a Shandean idiosyncrasy: from page 43 the narrative leaps back to the beginning of the volume, and Schummel advises the reader to turn back and re-read, referring incidentally to his confused fashion of narration. The awkwardness with which this is done proves Schummel's inability to follow Yorick, ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... married in his works spontaneous and supple gesture with forms of chaste sobriety, clothing them in delicately harmonious tones, of which the studied arrangement announced to the first glance the refined idiosyncrasy of his artistic temper. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... an idiosyncrasy in their otherwise generous character. Of course there are mean boys, hard-hearted boys, cowardly boys; but Boyhood is more generous, open, tender-hearted, daring, than Manhood, yet its cruelty stands out a distinguishing trait. An old French teacher, loving children, wanting in dignity, ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... present the same features; but it is just the differences in degree between the same feature in this civilization and in that—it is just these differences which together constitute and illustrate the idiosyncrasy of each. It seems to me that the brains and the imagination of America shone superlatively in the conception and ordering of its vast organizations of human beings, and of machinery, and of the two ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... of the Yorick and Eliza episode, is, that in their striking illustration of the soft, weak, spiritually self-indulgent nature of the man, they assist us, far more than many pages of criticism would do, to understand one particular aspect of his literary idiosyncrasy. The sentimentalist of real life explains ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... was fact, was it an idiosyncrasy, as I have known those who by combing their hair can elicit sparks with a crackling as from a cat's back rubbed. It is very possible that the sleeve might be silk, tightened either on a very hairy arm, or else on woollen, ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... Abbe de Brantome, that Froissart and Pepys in one, with the noble delight in noble things of the first, inextricably united to the almost innocent shamelessness of the second, and a narrative gift equal to that of either in idiosyncrasy, and ranging beyond the subjects of both. Himself a soldier and a courtier (his abbacy, like many others, was purely titular and profitable—not professional in the least), his favourite subjects in literature, and obviously his idols in life, were great soldiers and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... personality. In comedy, and in other humorous works of fiction, such peculiarities often figure prominently, but they rarely do so, I think, in tragedy. Shakespeare, however, seems to have given one such idiosyncrasy to Hamlet. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... work of his followers is confined within narrow limits, and not easily perceived at a glance. The difference between blank verse in the hands of its few masters and in the hands of a third-rate imitator strikes the ear in every line. Far more is left to the individual idiosyncrasy. But it does not at all follow, and in fact it is quite untrue that the distinction which turns on an apparently insignificant element is therefore unimportant. The value of all good work ultimately depends on touches so fine as to elude the sight. And the proof is that although Pope was so constantly ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... to the war, or induced others to go, I held as the principal in the whole list of crimes of which slavery was the synonym. Each one seemed to stand before me, his innermost soul laid bare, and his idiosyncrasy I was sure to strike with sarcasm, ridicule solemn denunciations, old truths from Bible and history and the opinions of good men. I had a reckless abandon, for had I not thrown myself into the breach to die there, and would I not sell my ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... of aggregation to which men and women will refer themselves is determined partly by the strength and idiosyncrasy of the individual imagination, and partly by the reek of ideas that chances to be in the air at the time. Men and women may vary greatly both in their innate and their acquired disposition towards this sort of larger body or that, to which their social reference can be ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... pipe of fraternity with a Turk for the same period—and know at the end of the time as little of the real feelings of the one as we should about the domestic relations of the other. But there are ways and means for lifting the veil which equally favour our national idiosyncrasy; and a new and remarkable novel is one of them—especially the nearer it comes to real life. We invite our neighbour to a walk with the deliberate and malicious object of getting thoroughly acquainted ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... seven times eight, they'd hem and haw and say: "Seven tums eight? Why—ah, lemme see now. Seven tums—what was it you said? Oh, seven tums eight. Why—ah, seven tums eight is sixty-three—fifty-six I mean." There's nothing really to spelling. It's just an idiosyncrasy. If there was really anything useful in it, you could do it by machinery—just the same as you can add by machinery, or write with a typewriter, or play the piano with one of these things with cut paper in it. Spelling is an ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... With certain persons some varieties of fruit invariably cause indigestion. Lactation does not correct such an individual peculiarity, and a nursing mother who knows she possesses it will act accordingly. Occasionally those who have no such idiosyncrasy worry after they have eaten something which contains an acid because they have heard it will do harm. In such cases it is the mental state of the woman which disturbs her milk and upsets the baby. With the exception of those who have such an idiosyncrasy and those ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... people ready to disagree with him, and to support the weight of his sarcasm and his reproof. I am one of those people. Bellicose by disposition, I nevertheless like to know what I am fighting for. This is perhaps an idiosyncrasy, but many persons share it, and they are not to be ignored. It may be argued that Mr. Asquith has defined what we are fighting for. He has not. He has only defined part of what we are fighting for. His reference to the overthrow of Prussian ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... problem. Of course the poet may choose it, with open eyes, as the Marlowe of Miss Peabody's imagination does, or as the minstrel in Hewlitt's Cormac, Son of Ogmond. The long engagements of Rossetti and Tennyson are often quoted as exemplifying this idiosyncrasy of poets. But there is something decidedly awkward in such a situation, inasmuch as it is not till love becomes so intense as to eclipse the poet's pride and joy in poetry that it becomes effective as a muse. [Footnote: See Mrs. Browning, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... insist that the natives shall become as self-conscious as themselves. The Sud-Express brings them from England and Germany, vast ships convey them from New York. Then there are the newspapers, eager as ever to make bricks without straw. Against Teutonic travellers, and journalists, no idiosyncrasy can stand out. The country will run to pulp, as a pear, bitten without by wasps and within by a maggot, will get sleepy and drop. But that end is not yet, the Lord be praised, and will not be in your time or mine. The tale I have to tell—an old one, as ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... terrier came up, and rubbed itself against his knee. "Why, Tige, old boy!" he said, stooping to pat it kindly. The hard, shallow look faded out; he half smiled, looking in the dog's eyes. A curious smile, unspeakably tender and sad. It was the idiosyncrasy of the man's face, rarely seen there. He might have looked with it at a criminal, condemning him to death. But he would have condemned him, and, if no hangman could be found, would have put the rope on with his own hands, ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... frozen face all the character and idiosyncrasy of life. He has not changed one line of his grave, grotesque countenance, nor smoothed out a single feature. The hue is rather bloodless and leaden; but he was alway sallow. The dark eyebrows seem abruptly arched; the beard, which will grow no ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... sure, in a certain faded, jaded, unassuming way; but her patient face wore a constant expression of suppressed terror, as if she expected every moment to be the victim of some terrible and unexplained exposure. And that feature at least in her idiosyncrasy could hardly be put down to Gilbert Gildersleeve's account; for hectoring and strong-minded as the successful Q.C. was known to be, nobody could for a moment accuse him in any definite way of deliberate unkindness ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... identical words to the Malincourt temperament, of which he had recognized the share she had inherited. And she realized that her guardian and Miles Herrick had been equally discerning. Though differing in its effect upon each of them, consequent upon individual idiosyncrasy, the fact remained that she and Garth were both "breaking" beneath the strain which destiny ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... unmanly. Such a quality would have sickened her at once, and she knew she would have at once divined it. He did not hold himself very well, but was inclined to stoop and to keep his head low, as if he were in the habit of looking much on the ground. The idiosyncrasy was rather ugly, and suggested melancholy to her, the melancholy of a man given to over-much meditation and afraid to face ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... part in my life's economy. I believe that to some people tobacco is downright poison; to some, life and health; to the vast majority, including myself, neither one thing nor the other, but simply a comfort or an instrument, or a mere nothing, according to idiosyncrasy. ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... know, is apt to be a little downhearted at times; and empty rooms somehow act on her idiosyncrasy. A good woman, but weak. So she's gone for the present to her sisters; and as for the girls, why, Emily is with her mother, and Jane is at the Joneses. Very decent people the Joneses. I put Jones up to a thing ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... the mise en scene of his novels, however, Broadstairs appears to have contributed nothing, except that the lady whose aversion to donkeys furnished so strong an idiosyncrasy to Miss Betsy Trotwood's character was a native, not of Dover, as in the novel, ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... greater opportunity. Nor is this due simply to the fact that they, who had never known what it was to enjoy a day of perfect health, spoke from an intimate knowledge of the subject. Each landscape preserves at least its abstract idiosyncrasy; illness is an essentially "typical" state in which individual characteristics diminish till they finally disappear. And it is especially in the portraiture of types, rather than of individuals, that the ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... pains and diseases. And not only have we to remember that we are dealing with disharmonies that may at the very best be only patched together, but we are dealing with matters in which the element of idiosyncrasy is essential, insisting upon an incalculable flexibility in any rule we make, unless we are to take types and indeed whole classes of personality and write them down as absolutely bad and fit only for suppression and restraint. ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... I hold the true anatomy of myself, I am delineated and naturally framed to such a piece of virtue; for I am of a constitution so general that it consorts and sympathizeth with all things: I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in diet, humor, air, anything. I wonder not at the French for their dishes of frogs, snails, and toadstools; nor at the Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst them, make them my ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... of sulphur and oxygen with a deficiency of carbon, and in the other an excess of carbon and a deficiency of sulphur and oxygen, it can easily be seen why such deficiency or excess, if arising from idiosyncrasy of the system, should predispose to dissimilar diseases. But here a wide field yet lies open for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... him to one of the ordinary agricultural colleges for fear of a repetition, on a larger scale, of the Cheltenham disaster, she thought that it might be possible to find a capable land-agent who would give him some kind of training and put up with his idiosyncrasy for the ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... girls, as well as of boys, the machinery and methods of instruction shall be carefully adjusted to their organization. If it were possible, they should be adjusted to the organization of each individual. None doubt the importance of age, acquirement, idiosyncrasy, and probable career in life, as factors in classification. Sex goes deeper than any or all of these. To neglect this is to neglect the chief factor of the problem. Rightly interpreted and followed, it will yield the grandest ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... Memory, intelligence, judgment, imagination, passions, diseases, and what is usually called genius, are often very markedly traced in the offspring.—I have known mental impressions forcibly impressed upon the offspring at the time of conception, as concomitant of some peculiar eccentricity, idiosyncrasy, morbidness, waywardness, irritability, or proclivity of either ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... contradiction is particularly to be recognized when the differing ideas or beliefs have arisen not within the same individual mind but in different minds, and are therefore colored by personal or partisan interest and warped by idiosyncrasy of mental constitution. The contradictions of, or rather among, ideas and beliefs, with which we are now concerned, are more extensive and more varied than mere logical duels; they are also less definite, less precise. In reality ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... towards all within the domestic circle, they look outside for inspiring intercourse and thrilling attachments, and for calls to lofty sacrifice and delight. This is too often the case. Identity of inheritance and situation, sameness of idiosyncrasy, and habitude of union, squeeze poppies into the household cup, and clothe in dull gray the familiar landscape around; and yet, happily, in numerous instances it is not so. The confidential intimacies, the incessant dependencies, duties, and favors of near relatives, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... the lesson of self-sacrifice (the right of superiority which the general interest possesses over the particular), while play develops his personal idiosyncrasy. ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... in making this appeal to Lena, to whom love was but a beneficent masculine idiosyncrasy. Dick glanced at her ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... countries we owe to the influence of their generic religion. Nor are its effects limited to these objects: much of what is vigorous in the character of its northern converts may be traced to the operation of its principles, in the development of their peculiar idiosyncrasy, which, unlike that of the unwarlike Singhalese, rejected sloth and effeminacy to aim at conquest and power. Looking to the self-reliance which Buddhism inculcates, the exaltation of intellect which it proclaims, and the perfection of ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... ecclesiastical struggles in which he took part, and the philosophical doctrines which he accepted and interpreted; and conversely, we understand the period the better when we see how its beliefs and passions affected a man of abnormal genius and marked idiosyncrasy of character. The historical revelation is the more complete, precisely because Dante was not a commonplace or average person but a man of unique force, mental and moral. The remark may suggest what is the special value of the literary criticism or its bearing upon history. ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... few among the living more likely to be regarded, a hundred years hence, as having produced "literature." He is so unassuming, so mild, so intensely and unconsciously original in the expression of his naive emotions before the spectacle of life, that a hasty inquirer into his idiosyncrasy might be excused for entirely missing the point of him. His new book (which helps to redeem the enormous vulgarity of a booming season), "A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs" (Methuen), is soberly of a piece with ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... by a great deal of slaughter, that is quite unnecessary, but by promptitude, and striking a blow at the right moment. The Chinese do not care much about being killed, but they hate being frightened, and the knowledge of this idiosyncrasy of theirs is the key of the position. I have just written a letter to my friends the Imperial Commissioners here, which will, I think, shake their nerves considerably, and bring them to ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... usual way—it's not evidence." Another evening, again, we recall quite as clearly to mind, when the Reader was revelling more even than was his wont, in the fun of this representation of the trial-scene, he suddenly seemed to open up the revelation of an entirely new phase in Mr. Winkle's idiosyncrasy. Under the badgering of Mr. Skimpin's irritating examination, as to whether he was or was not a particular friend of Mr. Pickwick the defendant, the usually placable Pickwickian's patience upon this ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... particularly abounded in the cloistered and gardened close of the Cistercian Convent, which three hundred years ago ensconsed itself within the ruinous Baths of Diocletian. I have no fable at hand to explain what seems the special preference of the birds for this garden; it is possibly an idiosyncrasy, something like that of the cats which make Trajan's Forum their favorite resort. All that I can positively say is that if I were a bird I would ask nothing better than to frequent the cypresses of that garden and tune my numbers ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... with dates—cold, false, erroneous, chronological dates—new style, old style, precession of the equinox, ill-timed calculation of comets long since due at their station and never come? Her poetical idiosyncrasy, calculated by epochs, would make the most natural points of reference in woman's autobiography. Plutarch sets the example of dropping dates in favor of incidents; and an authority more appropriate, Madame de Genlis, who began her own memoirs at eighty, swept through nearly an age ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... with an air of wondering incredulity, and seemed trying to realize some vast conception, but failing in the effort, put his pipe back, and smoked as before! Some old ladies now amiably offered to change places with me, evidently regarding me as the victim of some singular idiosyncrasy. As I changed, a light seemed to dawn on the old chimney's mind—a good-natured one he was; he looked hard at me, and his whiffs became fainter till at last they ceased, and he never smoked more till I was safe out ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the latter, then flicked the ashes from his cigar. "I didn't tell them, but I could have done so, that it wasn't an idiosyncrasy, but sense, that made you wear elbow sleeves all the time. An arm and wrist and hand like yours have no ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... either in an asylum or on the throne of an Emperor. Of these men Strafford was one, and we cannot but feel that Browning somewhat narrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by making him merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a great public demand. Strafford was something greater than this; if indeed, when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than the friend of another man. But the whole question is interesting, ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... gauger, who was also a trafficking rectifier and a parishioner of mine, preferring a woolen surtout (his choice was referrible to a vacillating, occasionally occurring idiosyncrasy), wofully uttered this apothegm: "Life is checkered; but schism, apostasy, heresy and villainy shall be punished." The sibyl apologizingly answered: "There is a ratable and allegeable difference between a conferrable ellipsis and a trisyllabic ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... and crushed the youngest gentleman at every step. His bedroom was at the top of the house, and it was a long way; but they got him there in course of time. He asked them frequently on the road for a little drop of something to drink. It seemed an idiosyncrasy. The youngest gentleman in company proposed a draught of water. Mr Pecksniff called him ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... play naturally falls, by the internal notes of style, temper, and poetic grain, into the middle period of his productive years. It has no such marks of vast but immature powers as are often met with in his earlier plays; nor, on the other hand, any of "that intense idiosyncrasy of thought and expression,—that unparalleled fusion of the intellectual with the passionate,"—which distinguishes his later ones. Every thing is calm and quiet, with an air of unruffled serenity and ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... seem strange, on a first view, that an author should be more at home in an assumed character than his own. But experience shows the position to be correct. Conscious he is no longer individually associated with his work, the writer proceeds with all the freedom of irresponsibility. His idiosyncrasy is merged in that of the personages he represents. He thinks with their thoughts, sees with their eyes, speaks with their tongues. His strains are such as he himself—per se—would not, perhaps could not, have originated. In ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... idiosyncrasy, or else he recognized the tall form in spite of its wrappings, for he said, "Yes, I think very likely it is your mother, Barrie. But we can't be sure; and in any case I strongly advise you not to try and speak to her here ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... a week—for two weeks—for three weeks. At the end of that time my friends had grown accustomed to this idiosyncrasy and were making bets on how long I would last. I didn't go round where they were much. I was as lonesome as a stray dog in a strange alley. I had carefully cultivated a large line of drinking acquaintances and I hardly knew a congenial person who didn't drink. That was the hardest ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... she took the color of what was nearest to her, and especially when it came from a beloved object, so that it was difficult to discover that it was not really one of her native tastes. The only thing, perhaps, altogether suited to her idiosyncrasy (because it was truly feminine, calculated for dainty fingers, and a nice little subtlety) was that kind of embroidery, twisting, needle-work, on textile fabric, which, as we have before said, she learnt from crusty Hannah, and which was emblematic perhaps of ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... never have investigated the laws of sound to any great extent, and there's a great deal in ventriloquism that we don't know much about." "If it's the same to you," I said, "I wish you'd keep all that to yourself, Simson. It doesn't suit my state of mind." "Oh, I hope I know how to respect idiosyncrasy," he said. The very tone of his voice irritated me beyond measure. These scientific fellows, I wonder people put up with them as they do, when you have no mind for their cold-blooded confidence. Dr. Moncrieff met us about eleven o'clock, the same time as on the previous night. ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... which could produce the tender, persuasive, manly, but fascinating voice which had aroused Jasper's ready compassion and had secured Freya's sympathy! Who could ever have supposed such an end in store for the impossible, gentle Schultz, with his idiosyncrasy of naive pilfering, so absurdly straightforward that, even in the people who had suffered from it, it aroused nothing more than a sort of amused exasperation? He was really impossible. His lot evidently should have been a half-starved, mysterious, but by no means tragic existence ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... movements of the males,—stopping, in the bustle of business, to greet each other, then hurrying off again,—and the fondness of the females for gazing in the shop-windows where fine wares lay exposed, frequently blocking up the small foot-pavement in the gratification of this idiosyncrasy, assimilated them to my own countrymen and women. I looked under many a blue bonnet, and caught the sly glance of many a blue eye; but they were not the blue eye and bonnet of England. I gazed upon many a sweet, smiling face, and saw many an elegant form; but they had not the pouting, red lip, ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... similarity of their opinions. Neither was liable to change of view, let who would be the teacher. Runciman no more took his style from Fuseli, than Fuseli from Runciman, and the unquestionable resemblance between their works was only the natural result of a similarity of idiosyncrasy. They both worked hard together, making painstaking copies of the great masters. 'Runciman I am sure you will like,' Fuseli wrote home, 'he is one of the best of us here.' No doubt Fuseli found him quite a kindred spirit—mad ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... a taste, it is his vice," returned the gentleman with the pearl stud. "It is his one dissipation. He is noted for it. You, as a stranger, could hardly be expected to know of this idiosyncrasy. Mr. Gladstone sought relaxation in the Greek poets, Sir Andrew finds his in Gaboriau. Since I have been a member of Parliament I have never seen him in the library without a shilling shocker in his hands. He brings ...
— In the Fog • Richard Harding Davis
... must be directed to the remarkable variations observed in different patients. Sometimes the virulent character of the disease can only be accounted for by an idiosyncrasy of the patient. Constitutional symptoms, particularly pyrexia and anaemia, are most often met with in young women. Patients over forty years of age have greater difficulty in overcoming the infection than younger adults. Malarial and other ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... substance of the narrative coincides, as it could not but do, with Peter's sermons, but yet with differences, partly due to the different audience, partly to Paul's idiosyncrasy. After the preceding historical resume, he girds himself to his proper work of proclaiming the Gospel, and he marks the transition in verse 26 by ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... impecunious father might have spoken. He, the master of Wendover Abbey, to whom the possession of things that money could buy must needs be a dead certainty. But it was evidently a part of his character to make light of his wealth; assuredly a pleasant idiosyncrasy. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... borne no fire? And you find the secondary schoolmaster who complies with these restrictions becoming the zealous and grateful agent of the tendencies that have made him what he is, converting into a practice those vague dreads of idiosyncrasy, of positive acts and new ideas, that dictated the choice of him and his rule of life. His moral teaching amounts to this: to inculcate truth-telling about small matters and evasion about large, and to cultivate a morbid ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... the accent of Madame Grambeau was barely detectable, and her phraseology was that of a well-translated book—correct, but not idiomatic, and bearing about it the idiosyncrasy of the language from which it was derived. She was evidently a person of culture and native power of intellect combined, and her finely-moulded face, as well as every gesture and ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... number of picturesque phenomena which are due to temporal and physical conditions, and would be equally lacking if the country were an autocracy or oligarchy, there remains in the United States greater room for the development of idiosyncrasy than, perhaps, in any other country. It has been paradoxically argued by an English writer that individualism could not reach its highest point except in a socialistic community; i.e., that the unbridled competition of the present ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... many allow her to run up bills, to her hurt and to his, rather than have her, even in her household expenditure, independent of his supervision. I sincerely hope, dear, that your intended, Ralph Jackson, will be superior to this male idiosyncrasy, to term it mildly, and allow you a stated sum monthly. The home is the woman's kingdom, and she should be allowed to think for it, to buy for it, and not to be cramped by lack of money to do as ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... discovered in 'Robinson Crusoe' precisely the field in which his talents could be most effectually applied; and that a very slight alteration in the subject-matter might change the merit of his work to a disproportionate extent. The more special the idiosyncrasy upon which a man's literary success is founded, the greater, of course, the probability that a small change will disconcert him. A man who can only perform upon the drum will have to wait for certain combinations of other instruments before his special talent can be turned to account. Now, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... nature, but they are not the only facts which are important to the politician. The Benthamites, by straining the meaning of words, tried to classify such motives as instinctive impulse, ancient tradition, habit, or personal and racial idiosyncrasy as being forms of pleasure and pain. But they failed; and the search for a basis of valid political reasoning has to begin again, among a generation more conscious than were Bentham and his disciples of the complexity of the problem, and less ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... the following vein of well-rounded remark: "Truth can only be pure objectively, for even in the creeds where it predominates, being subjective, and parcelled out into portions, each of these necessarily receives a hue of idiosyncrasy, that is, a taint of superstition more or less strong; while in such creeds as the Roman Catholic, ignorance, interest, the basis of ancient idolatries, and the force of authority, have gradually accumulated on the pure truth, and transformed it, at last, into a mass of superstition for ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... instance of the idiosyncrasy referred to. There was in Johannesburg a man who, having arrived there with twenty-five pounds in his pockets—as he liked to relate with evident pride in the fact—had, in the course of two years, amassed together a fortune of two millions ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... and not externally attractive. Within, however, Edam does honour to three fantastic figures who once were to be seen in her streets—Peter Dircksz, Jan Cornellissen and Trijntje Kever, portraits of whom grace the town hall. Their claims to fame are certainly genuine, although unexpected. Peter's idiosyncrasy was a beard which had to be looped up to prevent it trailing in the mud; Jan, at the age of forty-two, when the artist set to work upon him, weighed thirty-two stones and six pounds; while Trijntje was ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... to take the necessary measures against these anonymous publications this was appealing to the very man who secretly encouraged them.. Although Madame Necker had plenty of wits, she, bred in the mountains of Switzerland, had no conception of such an idiosyncrasy as that of M. de Maurepas, a man who saw in an outspoken expression of feeling only an opportunity of discovering the vulnerable point. As soon as he knew M. Necker's susceptibility he flattered himself that, by irritating it, he would drive him to give in his ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... London? Would the Mauritian gospel of human brotherhood and social service—in short, the programme of the Christian Social Union—win the workers to the side of orthodoxy? These questions were answered according to the idiosyncrasy or bias of those to whom they were addressed, and they were not settled when, twenty-seven years later, Holland returned from St. Paul's to Oxford. Indeed, several answers were possible. On one point only there ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... met and passed through one of the most important crises of his life. There was so much of idiosyncrasy in it that it has been, and will continue to be for years to come, the occasion of endless gossip in Sangamon County and elsewhere. Because it was not precisely like the experience of other people, who are married and ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... soon made. She knew every idiosyncrasy of the hooks and buttons of her well-worn afternoon frock. It was dark blue, of some clinging material that fell naturally into graceful lines, and was relieved at the throat and wrists by embroidered bands always immaculate. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... course of these fourteen years it had occasionally flashed upon my Father, as he overheard some speech of mine, or detected some idiosyncrasy, that I was not one of those whose temperament points them out as ultimately fitted for an austere life of religion. What he hoped, however, was that when the little roughnesses of childhood were rubbed ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... training the question is always pertinent, so here we may ask whether it be not best in all cases to some extent, and in some cases almost exclusively, to develop in the direction in which we most excel, to emphasize physical individuality and even idiosyncrasy, rather than to strive for monotonous uniformity. Weaknesses and parts that lag behind are the most easily overworked to the point of reaction and perhaps permanent injury. Again, work for curative purposes lacks the exuberance of free sports: it is not inspiring to make up areas; and therapeutic ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Books were written to read; if one read them what more could be expected? To be questioned in detail regarding the contents of a volume seemed to her as great an outrage as being searched for smuggled laces at the Custom House. The club had always respected this idiosyncrasy of Mrs. Plinth's. Such opinions as she had were imposing and substantial: her mind, like her house, was furnished with monumental "pieces" that were not meant to be disarranged; and it was one of the unwritten rules of the Lunch Club ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless. He who daily hears and reads well-framed sentences, will naturally more or less tend to use similar ones. And where there exists any mental idiosyncrasy—where there is a deficient verbal memory, or an inadequate sense of logical dependence, or but little perception of order, or a lack of constructive ingenuity; no amount of instruction will remedy the defect. Nevertheless, some practical result may be expected from a familiarity with the principles ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... himself. He is no longer an individual but the mouthpiece of an oracle. He catches some infection of style, and feels that although he may believe what he says, it is not the independent outcome of his own private idiosyncrasy. Now Fitzjames's articles are specially remarkable for their immunity from this characteristic. When I read them at the time, and I have had the same experience in looking over them again, I recognised his words just as plainly as if I had heard his voice. A signature would ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... since her forty-ninth year, but who commenced again the year he saw her. Her mother and sister were similarly affected at the age of sixty, in the first case attributable to grief over the death of a son, in the second ascribed to fright. It seemed to be a peculiar family idiosyncrasy. Velasquez of Tarentum says that the Abbess of Monvicaro at the very advanced age of one hundred had a recurrence of catamenia after a severe illness, and subsequently a new set of teeth and ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the field of the fine arts, as in nearly every other in which the French genius shows itself, the results are evident of an intellectual co-operation which insures the development of a common standard and tends to subordinate idiosyncrasy. The fine arts, as well as every other department of mental activity, reveal the effect of that social instinct which is so much more powerful in France than it is anywhere else, or has ever been elsewhere, except possibly in the case of ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... nothing of the habits of the tiger of the grass plains, but those of the hill tiger are very interesting, the cattle lifter especially, as he is better known to men. Each individual has his special idiosyncrasy. I wrote of this once before as follows: "Strange though it may seem to the English reader that a tiger should have any special character beyond the general one for cruelty and cunning, it is nevertheless a fact that each animal has certain ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... it marked them with a difference, and a difference is the one thing a small community, accustomed comfortably to scan its own intelligible averages, will not tolerate. The unusual may take on an exaggeration of these; an excess of money, an excess of piety, is understood; but idiosyncrasy susceptible to no common translation is regarded with the hostility earned by the white crow, modified among law-abiding humans into tacit repudiation. It is a sound enough social principle to distrust that which is not understood, like the strain of temperament inarticulate but vaguely manifest ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... large parchments in which he has stated his results with those tattered and filthy papers which the latter- day literary rag-picker exists but to grope out from kennel and sewer is to know the difference between the artist in health and the artist possessed by an idiosyncrasy as ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... Mr Arabin was the more singular, as he belonged to a branch of the Church of England well inclined to regard its temporalities with avowed favour, and had habitually lived with men who were accustomed to much worldly comfort. But such was his idiosyncrasy, that these very facts had produced within him, in early life, a state of mind that was not natural to him. He was content to be a High Churchman, if he could be so on principles of his own, and ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... the king who told himself that Paris was worth a few masses. But the leader knows by experience that only when symbols have done their work is there a handle he can use to move a crowd. In the symbol emotion is discharged at a common target, and the idiosyncrasy of real ideas blotted out. No wonder he hates what he calls destructive criticism, sometimes called by free spirits the elimination of buncombe. "Above all things," says Bagehot, "our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it." [Footnote: ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... word that the power of the word lay; God's love evinced itself to men as a reality in Him, in His presence in the world, and in His attitude to its sin; it so evinced itself, finally and supremely, in His death. It is not the idiosyncrasy of one apostle, it is the testimony of the Church, a testimony in keeping with the whole claim made by Christ in His teaching and life and death: 'in Him we have our redemption, through His blood, even the forgiveness of our trespasses.' And this is what the Atonement means: ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... payment for his books, presenting the amount due him either to the publisher, or, more generally, to some friend who had been most active in aiding their publication. Few will applaud this idiosyncrasy, the general and sensible opinion being that the laborer is worthy of his hire: but Landor took peculiar pride in writing for fame alone, without thought of the more tangible product of genius; and, unlike most authors, he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... Kendal's reserve the trial that it had once been. After having become habituated to it as a necessary idiosyncrasy, she had become rather proud of his lofty inaccessibility. Besides, her brother's visit, her recovery, and the renewed hope and joy in this promising child, had not been without effect in rousing him from his apathy. He was less inclined to shun his fellow-creatures, had become ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... prone to reverse the natural order of waking and sleeping hours. I am convinced that during the time I was with him only the necessity of securing a certain short interval of daylight, by which it was possible to paint, prevailed with him to rise before noon. Alluding to this idiosyncrasy, he said: "I lie as long, or say as late, as Dr. Johnson used to do. You shall never know, until you discover it for yourself, at what hour I rise." He sat up until four A.M. on this night of my second visit,—no unaccustomed ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... cruelly so; but satire had become pure whimsicality at last; and he came to see that, on the whole, the world was imperfect, but also, on the whole, was moving toward perfection rather than imperfection. He grew to realize that what seemed so often weakness in men was tendency and idiosyncrasy rather than evil. And in the end he thought better of himself as he came to think better of all others. For he had thought less of all the world because he had thought so little of himself. He had overestimated his own faults, ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... O'Connor's idiosyncrasy of fear was a source of much amusement among the boys at the office where he worked. They made open sport of it, and yet, recognizing him for a sensitive plant, and granting that genius was entitled to whimsicalities, it was their ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... opinion of you. But alas, sir! a man cannot play at the cards without exposing himself to the risk of losing. At the first table I lost—not heavily indeed, yet considerably. I rose and changed to another table; again I lost—this time the last sixpence in my pocket. Now, it is an idiosyncrasy of mine, maybe, but I cannot lose at the cards without losing also my temper; and the form it takes with me, Dr. Frampton, is too often an incontrollable impulse to pull the winner's nose. I have argued with myself against this tendency a score of times, but it will not be ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... all," Rosina answered, laughing, "you need not fear for me. I've lived in good society too many years not to know how to deal with a bore. A little idiosyncrasy like that will not mar my enjoyment one bit. Do ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... was her idiosyncrasy that these tailors, furriers, machinists, shirtmakers, by whom she was surrounded in East London, stirred her imagination far more readily than the dwellers in great houses and the wearers of fine raiment had ever stirred it. And Marcella, ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Turner of Oxford was a water-color painter. I had learned water-color with two masters, but had never liked it or felt the slightest impulse to continue it. One man is naturally constituted for one process, another for another. There is something in my idiosyncrasy repugnant to the practice of water-color and favorable to oil, and this in spite of the greater convenience of water-color, and the facility with which it may be left off and instantaneously resumed. In after-life I learned water-color a third ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... stating the nature of Catharine was.[736] In her, however, dissimulation was a well-known family trait, which she possessed in common with her kinsman, Pope Leo the Tenth, and all her house.[737] And it must be admitted that the idiosyncrasy had had a fair chance to develop during the five-and-twenty years she had spent in France, threatened with repudiation, contemned as an Italian upstart, suffering the gravest insult at the hands of her husband, but forced to dissemble, and to hide the pain his neglect gave her from ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... idiosyncrasy of mine," answered Von Stein, showing his teeth. "Before anything is done I must, in order to aid the receptivity of your mind, go a little further with the explanation of certain things which I mentioned the other day. I promise not to bore you. More than that, Mr. Parker, I promise that you will ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... of station, of idiosyncrasy there may be, these are but surface and accidental. We are all alike in this, that we 'have sinned, and come short of the glory of God'; and our Great Physician, in His great remedy, insists upon treating us ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... see him sport the Sunday patent-leathers of the "snob," who on week-a-days proceeds on eight-and-sixpenny high-lows: you never see him shambling along in boots a world too wide, nor hobbling about a crippled victim to the malevolence of Crispin. The idiosyncrasy of his foot has always been attended to; he has worn well-fitting boots every day of his life, and he walks as if he knew not whether he had boots on or not. As for stocks, saving that he be a military man, he wears them not; they want that easy negligence, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... probability, the tale was a pure invention. If I could remember, and were willing to repeat, the various misdoings which I have from time to time heard him attribute to himself, I could fill a volume. But I never believed them. I very soon became aware of this strange idiosyncrasy: it puzzled me to account for it; but there it was, a sort of diseased and distorted vanity. The same eccentric spirit would induce him to report things which were false with regard to his family, which anybody else would have concealed, though true. He told me more than once that his father ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of rabid veget- and other "arians", most foods are good (making allowances for personal idiosyncrasy) if thoroughly masticated. The oft-quoted analogy of the cow is incorrect, for herbivora are able to digest cellulose; but even cows ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... or heard, that he not only retained the law, but the author and page where it was to be found. His mind was eminently logical and delighted in analytical investigation. In truth, the law suited the idiosyncrasy of his mind, and it was most fortunate for his future life, that he adopted it as a lifetime pursuit. Nature, it seems, gives to every mind a peculiar proclivity, as to every individual a peculiar mind: to pursue this proclivity is a pleasure; it makes ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... and contented lives; for the most part honest, and amongst themselves cheerful and kindly: preserving much grace of colour, of costume, of idiosyncrasy, because apart from the hueless communism and characterless monotony ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... compositions; his object being to free himself from a narrow subjectivity and to give scope to his wide human sympathies and to his passion for perfection of utterance. It seemed to him that a plausible originality might degenerate into mere idiosyncrasy, and that universality of appeal should be a musician's highest goal. When he resigned his post and came before the public with his first large work, a concerto for pianoforte and orchestra, the gain made in increased power ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... young lords,—not after all so very young,—which sounded like lessons recited by schoolboys. There was no touch of eloquence,—no approach to it. It was clear that either of them would have been afraid to attempt the idiosyncrasy of passionate expression. But they were exquisitely dressed and had learned their lessons to a marvel. The flutter of the ladies' dresses, and the presence of the peers, and the historic ornamentation of the house ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... contemporaneously with an actual dislike for her late husband's memory. The mood of attachment grew and continued when the statue was removed. A permanent revulsion was operant in her, which intensified as time wore on. How fright could have effected such a change of idiosyncrasy learned physicians alone can say; but I believe such cases of reactionary instinct are ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... The idiosyncrasy of either officer is emphasized in their respective plans of campaign, while commanding the Channel Fleet during the French Revolution. Howe will maintain a certain station in port, keeping his fleet ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... development of idiosyncrasy, and with it of friction. Kept below much of the time by inclement weather, we are crowded and jumbled incessantly together; you jostle against the shoulders of one, you rub elbows with another, you clamber over the knees of a third; the members ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... this most extraordinary character, who, in most other points, commanded respect: he was a kind man and a good officer; but from the idiosyncrasy of his disposition, whether from habit or from nature, could not speak the truth. I say from nature, because I have witnessed the vice of stealing equally strong, and never to be eradicated. It was in a young messmate of good family, and who was supplied with money to ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... its idiosyncrasy, its constitution, often its own code of morality. The levity of some of the younger women in and about Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the choice spirit who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity. The place had also a more abiding defect; it drank hard. The ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... tastes and experiences are opposed to success—they had no difficulty in abandoning a decaying school, and in throwing all their freshness of mind and subtlety of observation into the department which precisely suited their idiosyncrasy. The spread of education among female readers and writers has undoubtedly aided them. And thus the rise of feminine novelists has operated as a formidable contingent of fresh troops that has joined the camp of Manners, to which alliance ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... and significant silences, than a mere play upon words and phrases; which, coupled with an unshakable sobriety of demeanour, furnished us with wonder and some admiration, but no resentment. We liked him pretty well and mostly unanimously: he was a good fellow, if queer; entitled to his idiosyncrasy, if he chose to ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... resent. The faces of the two men thus revealed were singularly alike. The same thin, narrow outline of jaw and temple; the same dark, grave eyes; the same brown growth of curly beard and mustache, which concealed the mouth, and hid what might have been any individual idiosyncrasy of thought or expression,—showed them to be brothers, or better known as the "Twins of Table Mountain." A certain animation in the face of the second speaker,—the first-comer,—a certain light in his eye, might have at first ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,—clinging in a coating of greasy ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... situations in which you'll get the credit and she'll get the blame. You can always make a poem on Young Lochinvar, when it's less easy to approve of the damsel who springs to the pillion behind him. I don't pretend to account for this idiosyncrasy of human nature; I merely state it as a fact. Society will forget that you ran away with Dorothea, but it will never forget that ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King |
