"Eccentricity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... went to extremes. It was due to Gnosticism that art and science found an entrance into the Church. It preserved the Church from becoming stereotyped in form; but, built up entirely on ideas and not on historical facts, it died from its own hollowness and eccentricity. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... was one of the most acute and learned bibliographers I have known. He was a man of marked individuality and independent views; with a spice of eccentricity and humor, which crept into all his catalogues, and made his notes highly entertaining reading. Besides his services to the British Museum Library, in building up its noble collection of Americana, and in whose rooms he labored for many years, with the aid of Panizzi and his successors, whom ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... manner of doing things than this. But we have already said that Eaglenose was an eccentric youth; moreover, he was a Christian, and we do not feel bound to account for the conduct or sentiments of people who act under the combined influence of Christianity and eccentricity. ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... men call old Christy their "professor of equitation;" and in accounting for the appellation, they let me into some particulars of the Squire's mode of bringing up his children. There is an odd mixture of eccentricity and good sense in all the opinions of my worthy host. His mind is like modern Gothic, where plain brick-work is set off with pointed arches and quaint tracery. Though the main ground-work of his opinions is correct, ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... past, Madame Deberle had with passionate fervor devoted herself to foreign politics. Her ideas were very pronounced on the various eventualities which might arise; and Pauline greatly annoyed her by her eccentricity in advocating Russia's cause in opposition to the clear interests of France. Juliette's first desire was to convince her of her folly, but ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... loud bellowing reverberations and blinding flashes of lightning, such as the wildest stage effects of the tempest in the Catskills when Rip Van Winkle is lost would have been nothing to. Foreboding the inner chill of a Spanish hotel on such a day, we had telegraphed for a fire in our rooms, and our eccentricity had been interpreted in spirit as well as in letter. It was not the habitual hotel omnibus which met us at the station, but a luxurious closed carriage commanded by an interpreter who intuitively opened our compartment door, and conveyed us dry and warm to our hotel, in every ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... friends, and country, for my sake, and come with me to some southern isle—or say South America—where we can be all in all to one another. Or you can tell your husband and let him jolly well punch my head if he can. But I'm damned if I'm going to stand any eccentricity. It's not respectable. ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself.—I really do not know where my head can have been. I seem to have forgotten all that makes it glorious to be man.—'Tis an omission that renders the book philosophically unimportant; but I am in hopes the eccentricity may please ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it ever become habitual. He affected to be much more so than he was: his pretensions were moderated by constitutional incapacity. His health was not vigorous; and his delicacy defeated his endeavours to show that he inherited the recklessness of his father. He affected extravagance and eccentricity of conduct, without yielding much to the one, or practising a great deal of the other. He was seeking notoriety; and his attempts to obtain it gave more method to his pranks and follies than belonged to the results of natural impulse and passion. He evinced occasional instances of the generous ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... of it by persons of genius and talent: but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge of the preposterous, if not over it. The eighteenth century was indeed almost the capital time of English eccentricity: and it was also a time of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness. But its eccentricities were not at this special period romantic: and its lawlessness was rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it. A rascally attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict great hardship ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... in the weird grivoiserie Affected by VERLAINE, And charmed by the chinoiserie Of MARINETTI'S strain, In all its multiplicity He worshipped eccentricity, And found his chief felicity In aping ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... thick, yellow coat and long, sharp teeth, a half-savage beast, bearing the name of Ortog (Satan), were Marsa's companions in her walks; and their submission to their young mistress, whom they could have knocked down with one pat of their paws, gave the Tzigana reputation for eccentricity; which, however, neither pleased nor displeased her, as she was perfectly indifferent to the opinion of ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... idea not savagely in works, but very wildly indeed in words, had several results; the most important of which was this. It started English literature after the Revolution with a sort of bent towards independence and eccentricity, which in the brighter wits became individuality, and in the duller ones, Individualism. English Romantics, English Liberals, were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision. The lonelier version of liberty was a sort of aristocratic ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the sum, it occurred to Birt, growing more familiar with the eccentricity of his companion, that he ought not in sheer silliness to throw away a chance ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... and there people, even American people, are so placed that they take from the situation a color of eccentricity, if they impart none to it, and the old, old story, which we all wish to have end well, zigzags to a fortunate close past juts and angles of individuality which the heroes and heroines have not willingly or wittingly thrown out. They would have chosen to arrive smoothly and uneventfully ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... understood by my tone when I understood what I read and when I did not, and accordingly would stop me, examine me, and open the most difficult passages to me." Milton must have felt a special tenderness for the Quakers, whose religious opinions, divested of the shell of eccentricity which the vulgar have always mistaken for the kernel, had become substantially his own. He had outgrown Independency as formerly Presbyterianism. His blindness served to excuse his absence from public worship; to which, so long at least as Clarendon's intolerance prevailed ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... there is no eccentricity of man in any part of the world for which a close parallel shall not be found in some other part. Such strange probation as is here spoken of, appears to have had too close a parallel in the old Celtic Church, and perhaps even, at ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Keene's middle-class protagonists are peculiar and exceptional, and much of their humour lies in their eccentricity, they are characters themselves, rather than types of English characters. Are they really observed and drawn from life, do they really exist just as they are, or are they partly evolved from the depths of an inner consciousness that is not quite satisfied with ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... boorish squires for understanding their real interests so imperfectly. In short, she talked a good deal of nonsense, which would have let the light into heads less dense, but left her audience agape at her eccentricity. And in these ways she conjured away the storm with her ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... her little fists and looked round for the means of vengeance. David went down on his knees. La Bazalgette glared through the crack, and wondered what on earth he was at now. Oh! he was praying. "He loves her: he is eccentricity itself; so he is praying for her, and on my doorsteps" (the householder wounded as well as the flirt). It was lucky she had not "a thunderbolt in her eye"—Shakespeare, or a celestial messenger of the wrong sort would have descended on the devout mariner. ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... eccentricity of the flood may be gathered from the fact that houses that were situated at Woodvale and points above Johnstown are piled at the lower end of the town, while some massive houses have been lifted and carried from the lower end as far as the cemetery at the extreme upper portion ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... discord that fell upon his sensitive ear made itself felt in his dauntless comment upon social shams and falsehoods.... But he was a lover of peace, and, ... as he was the ideal gentleman, the ideal citizen, he was also the ideal reformer, without eccentricity or exaggeration. However high his ideal, it never parted company with good sense. He never wanted better bread than could be made of wheat, but the wheat must be kept good and sound,' and I may add," the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... and is content to make them his own, to set his stamp upon them, by imparting to them a more meretricious gloss, a higher relief, a greater loftiness of tone, and a characteristic inveteracy of purpose. Even in those collateral ornaments of modern style, slovenliness, abruptness, and eccentricity (as well as in terseness and significance), Lord Byron, when he pleases, defies competition and surpasses all his contemporaries. Whatever he does, he must do in a more decided and daring manner than any one else—he lounges with extravagance, and yawns so as to ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... our winter by its turning that much from it. In one case the sun's rays are caused to shine more perpendicularly, and in the other more obliquely. This wabbling, like that of a top, is the sole cause of the seasons; since, owing to the eccentricity of our orbit, the earth is actually fifteen hundred thousand miles nearer the sun during our winter, in the northern hemisphere, than in summer. That there is no limit to a planet's inclination, and that inclination is not essential, we have astronomical proof. Venus's axis is inclined ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... mire.—Plain common sense has long pointed out a rule of action, from which all deviation is fatal, both to nations and individuals. England, as well as France, has furnished its examples; and the annals of genius in all countries are replete with the miseries of eccentricity.—Whoever has followed the course of the French revolution, will, I believe, be convinced, that the greatest evils attending on it have been occasioned by an affected contempt for received maxims. A common banditti, acting ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... respect for chastity—in other people Scenery in California requires distance Slept, if one might call such a condition by so strong a name Useful information and entertaining nonsense Virtuous to the verge of eccentricity ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger
... somewhat abruptly, as is his wont; for we grant him a license, in virtue of his eccentricity, which we should hardly expect to be claimed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the centres of the two planets is 59.9643 of the earth's equatorial radii, or only about 237,000 miles. I say the mean or average interval. But it must be borne in mind that the form of the moon's orbit being an ellipse of eccentricity amounting to no less than 0.05484 of the major semi-axis of the ellipse itself, and the earth's centre being situated in its focus, if I could, in any manner, contrive to meet the moon, as it were, in its perigee, the above mentioned distance would be materially diminished. But, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... impulse, goads humanity on to achievements. Every age, every person, and every art obeys the wand of the enchanter. History moves by indirections. The first historic tendency is likely to be slightly askew; there follows then an historic triumph, then an historic eccentricity, then an historic folly, then an explosion; and then the series begins again. In the grade of folly, hard upon an explosion, lies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... walk arm in arm with a young man if she was engaged to him." Lydia blushed darkly red, and then turned paler than usual, while her aunt went on. "You might do it, perhaps, and have it set down to American eccentricity or under-breeding, but I'm not going to have that. I intend you to be just as dull and diffident in society as if you were an Italian, and more than if you were English. Your voice, of course, is a difficulty. If you sing, ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... sprang up for these indispensable articles of dress. Or if the fashion had so changed that men had taken to wearing two shirts instead of one, that also might account for it,—though the wearing of two would be considered as great an eccentricity as the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... once hideous and grotesque in the appearance of the pile. The monstrous figures of the idols, with their rude carved draperies and symbolic weapons, lay in every wild variety of position, and presented every startling eccentricity of line, more especially towards the higher portions of the mass, where they had evidently been flung up from the ground by the hand ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... were thus confided to silence and darkness, there was, in other parts of his conduct more open to observation, a degree of eccentricity and indecorum which, with superficial observers, might well bring the sensibility of his nature into question. On the morning of the funeral, having declined following the remains himself, he stood looking, from the abbey door, at the procession, till the whole had moved off;—then, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... adventurer, the concubine of a king, and the paramour of every daring lover - a Welshwoman whose passions embroiled all Wales, and England too, in war, and the mother of heroes - Fitz-Geralds, Fitz-Stephens, and Fitz-Henries, and others - who, regardless of their mother's eccentricity in the choice of their fathers, united like brothers in the most adventurous undertaking of that age, the ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... Schiller which almost anyone might have written, Carlyle retired for some years to Craigenputtoch, and then brought forth Sartor Resartus, which was personal and soul-revealing to the verge of eccentricity. In the same way Wagner was a mere continuator of Weber in Lohengrin and Tannhaeuser, and first came to his own in the Meistersinger and Tristan, after years of meditation ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... union with the fantastic and the fanciful. His fertility in the most unexpected analogies becomes to the reader of his works a matter of continual wonder. Strange and curious contrasts and likenesses, both mental and. verbal, which might never once occur even to a mind of more than common eccentricity and invention, seem to have been in his mind with the ordinary flow of thinking. Plenteous and sustained, therefore, as his wit is, it never fails to startle. We have no doubt of his endless resources, and yet each new instance becomes a new marvel. His ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... was an old bachelor, very rich, and some people said very eccentric, though, in truth, his eccentricity was only indiscriminate generosity. He was very fond of children, boys especially; he often spoke of adopting some promising lad to inherit a portion of his great fortune, and continue the grand old firm in the City that had flourished for over a hundred years ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the softer feelings of the heart. They would as soon thought of attributing sentiment to one of the japanned deed-boxes. But they would have accepted the surprising revelation with well-bred English tolerance for eccentricity, not allowing it to affect their judgment that Mr. Brimsdown was one of the soundest and safest lawyers ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... strange sort of eccentricity: to the day of his death he never liked to tell the same thing twice. There were times when, if you asked him to relate a thing afresh, behold, he would interpolate new matter, or alter it so that it was impossible to recognize it. Once on a time, one of those gentlemen (it is ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... been one of the greatest ordeals she had ever faced, but she had endured it unflinchingly, and had found that London had already almost forgotten the eccentricity of her marriage. In the height of the ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... inherit his father's talents and his father's inability to make the best use of them; he possessed in a no less remarkable degree his father's independence of mind. In both cases, this quality was coupled with a corresponding eccentricity of conduct, which occasionally, to puzzled onlookers, wore the appearance of something very near insanity. Many stories are related of the queer behaviour of Dr. Beddoes. One day he astonished the ladies of ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... hospitality on the impulse would be as strange here as offering it without some special inducement for its acceptance. The inducement is, as often as can be, a celebrity or eccentricity of some sort, or some visiting foreigner; and I suppose that I have been a good deal used myself in one quality or the other. But when the thing has been done, fully and guardedly at all points, it does not seem to have been done for pleasure, ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... method identical with that which would be employed by modern astronomers. They ascertained the position of the stars by right ascension and declination. They knew the obliquity of the ecliptic, and determined the place of the sun's apogee as well as its mean motion. Their calculations on the eccentricity of the moon prove that they had a rectilinear trigonometry and tables of chords. They had an approximate knowledge of parallax. [Footnote: Delambre, Hist. d'Astr. Anc., tom. 1, p. 184.] They could calculate eclipses of the moon, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... his claim to celebrity upon this "difference"; an effect usually achieved by the adoption of a harsh, amorphous style, and a tone of analytical, introspective subjectivity so individual that all the common and universal elements of beauty and poetry are excluded. Indeed, eccentricity has come so completely into fashion, that he who follows up the wildest vagaries is actually the least different from the hectic scribbling ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... me the flying female wants?" he exclaimed, at last. "You'd better stop, perhaps" he added, to the flyman. "It is an age of eccentricity, an abnormal era of the world's history. She may want me. Very likely I left my pocket-handkerchief behind me, and Mr. Talboys has sent this person with it. Perhaps I'd better get out and go and meet her. It's ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... who had a graceful way of handing dishes and a dignified deference in his bow which in his own opinion excused certain attacks of solemn speechlessness and eccentricity of gait that occasionally ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... improved,—rather perhaps that the setting of fine clothes, cleanliness, and the absence of petty worries, made his characteristics respectable. That which is ill breeding in homespun, is apt to become mere eccentricity in purple and fine linen; Grant felt that Harcourt jarred on him less than he did before, and was grateful without superciliousness. Harcourt, relieved to find that Grant was neither critical nor aggressively ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... over him until he revived. It is a curious fact that this act of common humanity was regarded as something remarkable in the neighborhood; the grateful sot himself always said "it was mighty clever of Abe to tote me so far that cold night." It was also considered an eccentricity that he hated and preached against cruelty to animals. Some of his comrades remember still his bursts of righteous wrath, when a boy, against the wanton murder of turtles and other creatures. He ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... their fancy led them, eating when they felt inclined, sleeping when and where they pleased. And, in order to see if I were really established in my original rights, I gave myself up to a thousand acts of eccentricity, which enraged the tall Dutchman who was my guide, and who, in his heart, thought ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... letters, which were directed in a feigned handwriting, seemed sane and sensible enough, although they showed signs of eccentricity of character. ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... with smiles, but his friends came to the rescue, and proved that he was in the habit of writing names on every bit of paper which came to hand. That this eccentricity was well known, and his explanation should be received with favor. The grand jury, however, found an indictment against him, and he was held as ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... she declared, "I have an idea. It is the most charming and flattering thing, and it never occurred to me before. After all, it was not eccentricity which caused you to throw up your work at the Bar—and disappear. It was your hopeless devotion to me. Don't disappoint me now by denying it. Please don't! It was the announcement of my ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as a man have exerted a pernicious influence on many since, is, we fear, undeniable. He had been taught, by the lives of the "wits," to consider aberration, eccentricity, and "devil-may-careism" as prime badges of genius, and he proceeded accordingly to astonish the natives, many of whom, in their turn, set themselves to copy his faults. But when we subtract some half-dozen pieces, either coarse in language or equivocal in purpose, the influence ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... were cases here and there of whipping by the hangman, and other more ferocious cruelties. For among the Quakers themselves there were varieties of milder and wilder, less provoking and more provoking. The Quakerism of men like Fox and Dewsbury was, at worst, but an obdurate and irritating eccentricity, in comparison, for example, with the Quakerism run mad of James Nayler. This enthusiast, once quarter-master in a horse troop under Lambert, and regarded as "a man of excellent natural parts," had for three or four years kept himself within bounds, and been known only as one of the ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... those who, on the strength of what slanderers and plagiarists say, imagine that Rousseau embraced his theory only from a vain love of eccentricity, to read "Emile" and the "Social Contract" once more. That admirable dialectician was led to deny society from the standpoint of justice, although he was forced to admit it as necessary; just as we, who believe in an indefinite progress, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... been a reporter, Anne. Why are n't you more careful! There may come a time when your efforts to uphold your reputation for eccentricity and for doing the cleverly ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... stretched full length across their bosoms, not many can live down a turquoise ring set with pearls, and very few can bear the handicap of a bright gold front tooth. Artists, alone, may gratify their taste for velvet jackets, Tam-o'-Shanters, and Windsor ties, but the privilege is denied business men. Eccentricity of dress usually indicates eccentricity of temper, and we do not want temperamental business men. It is hard enough to get along with authors and artists and musicians. The business man who is wise wears conventional clothes ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... measurably enhanced his attractiveness; making him "different" and lending him a distinction which, without it, he might have lacked. And yet, patent as this singularity must have been to the dullest, it was something quite apart from any eccentricity of manner, though, heaven knows, I was soon to think ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... sentiment, but in something more fundamental and primitive which draw many, if not most, of the young men and young women from the security of their homes in the country into the big, booming confusion and excitement of city life. In a small community it is the normal man, the man without eccentricity or genius, who seems most likely to succeed. The small community often tolerates eccentricity. The city, on the contrary, rewards it. Neither the criminal, the defective, nor the genius has the same opportunity to develop ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... appearance and habits, I mean. You see, Wigan, your own idea of him is not sufficient. He may have deceived you entirely regarding his character, assuming eccentricity for some purpose. Think the affair out from that point of view, and when you have been to the Yard, come to Chelsea. If you do not mind I will take these two unopened letters. We will look at them ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... am getting cranky and diffident. I am beginning to get nervous about people's opinion and sensitive to my own eccentricity. It is a sad case for a man who never used to care a straw for ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... son—thus, the inheritance may be pardoned; and when they quarrelled it was not to be expected the son would relinquish the traits so paternally bestowed. Now the parent is obstinate and the son 'cute; but the son has an eccentricity that prompts him to outwit. Not unfrequently the father lets the son—just for peace sake—have his own way; but this letting him have his own way has inclined his heart rather to the ungrateful than otherwise. His demands are at times somewhat funny, and when ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... this kingdom in a cursory manner will imagine, that he beholds a solid, compacted, uniform system of monarchy; in which all inferior jurisdictions are but as rays diverging from one centre. But on examining it more nearly, you find much eccentricity and confusion. It is not a monarchy in strictness. But, as in the Saxon times this country was an heptarchy, it is now a strange sort of PENTARCHY. It is divided into five several distinct principalities, besides the supreme. There is indeed this difference from the Saxon times, that ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... structures have been erected, and French architecture has shown a remarkable vitality and flexibility under new conditions. Its productions have in general been marked by a refined taste and a conspicuous absence of eccentricity and excess; but it has for the most part trodden in well-worn paths. The most notable recent monuments are, in church architecture, the Sacr-Coeur, at Montmartre, by Abadie, avotive church inspired from the Franco-Byzantine style of Aquitania; in civil architecture ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... being extinguished—poetry is extinct. To talk of poetry now is eccentricity—to write it is absurdity—to publish it is moonstruck madness." So the changes are rung. Now, it is impossible to deny that what is called poetry has become a drug, a bore, and nuisance, and that the name "Poet," as commonly applied, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... another illustrious master, inundate their canvasses with violet shades do not see in nature more violet than was detected there fifty years ago; but they are influenced, "suggestioned," by the personal and special impressions of a painter who, in spite of this eccentricity, was successful in acquiring great prestige. Similar examples might be brought forward in connection with ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... also very prominent in the same line—Together with a fund of humour he possesses a whimsical eccentricity of character which is always diverting; his voice however, is frequently too weak to be heard in the remote ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... "I will not disguise that there was a time about a year ago when I felt very anxious in regard to you. Eccentricity, as I have often told you before, is all very well when one has nothing to lose and everything to gain by it. I can understand how a young person with no antecedents or opportunities for getting on in society might secure a temporary advantage by making herself an ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... eccentricity," he replied. "I'm a busy man, and having the money thrown back on my hands, as it was not mine, caused me considerable inconvenience. I deposited three thousand of it against the note to save both your father and myself needless worry. There are still ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... after the interment of his second Duchess, Maria, that great and gifted lady. I know not whether it was that her bonny mien fanned in him some embers of his youth, or that he was loth to be outdone in gracious eccentricity by his crony the Duke of Dewlap, who himself had just taken a bride from a dairy. (You have read Meredith's account of that affair? No? You should.) Whether it was veritable love or mere modishness that formed my ancestor's resolve, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... to an eccentricity, engendered of loneliness, that altered the whole course of his life. Want had battered down his door. Truth had been evolved from despair. He was at last to ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... intercommunion, which seems rather a national characteristic, we need not be surprised to find in quiet Scottish families a sort of intercourse with old domestics which can hardly be looked for at a time when habits are so changed, and where much of the quiet eccentricity belonging to us as a national characteristic is almost necessarily softened down or driven out. Many circumstances conspired to promote familiarity with old domestics, which are now entirely changed. We ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... lives as heroic a life as can be attained by playing golf and shooting pheasants is more trusted and respected than a rich man who paints or composes music for his amusement. Field sports are intelligible enough; the pursuit of art requires some explanation, and incurs a suspicion of effeminacy or eccentricity. Only when authorship becomes a source of profit is it ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... His eccentricity had no apparent harmony with anything else nor any especial sensibility about it. The boys hooted his hat, and the little girls often joined in, crying "Steeple-top! He's got it on! Meshach's loose!" But he paid no attention to anybody, until once, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... rarely sees, her complexion was clear and bright, her figure extremely small and trim. Without being exactly pretty, she was very agreeable to the eye, and also had the attraction of looking remarkably different from other people. Indeed her costume was so uncommon as to be on the verge of eccentricity. Her face had a slightly Japanese look, and she increased this effect by wearing a gown of which a part was decidedly Japanese. In fact it was a kimono covered with embroidery in designs consisting of a flight of storks, some chrysanthemums, and a few butterflies, ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... I read again, as I approached the Plaza. "Can this man be Spanish, then? Surely not;—how could he have acquired his excellent English, without a trace of foreign accent, or the least eccentricity of idiom? His child, too, said nothing of that. English, no doubt, of Spanish parentage; or,—oh, patience! I shall know by-and-by, thanks to my merry Virginia jade, who shall be arrayed in resplendent hues, and throned in a golden ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... your mother had been brought up in solitude, and without having seen the face of another man than her father. Such was the case;—Colonel Beverley, of English name, but Scottish connections, was an old gentleman of considerable eccentricity of character. He had taken a part in the rebellion of 1715; but sick and disgusted with an issue by which his fortunes had been affected, and heart-broken by the loss of a beloved wife, whose death had been accelerated by circumstances connected ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... and cornices to discover all the gold, hoarded with such passionate greed by a Dutch miser worthy of a Rembrandt's brush. In all the course of my professional career I have never seen such impressive signs of the eccentricity of avarice. ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... Thomas Marvel as a person of copious, flexible visage, a nose of cylindrical protrusion, a liquorish, ample, fluctuating mouth, and a beard of bristling eccentricity. His figure inclined to embonpoint; his short limbs accentuated this inclination. He wore a furry silk hat, and the frequent substitution of twine and shoe-laces for buttons, apparent at critical points of his costume, ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... harmony with the frankness of her speech and the directness of her gaze, hung around her. She was a large-hearted girl and no one but her banker knew of the thousands of pounds that were quietly distributed amongst the charities of the city every year: a decided eccentricity, and most directly opposed to the current method, which consists in having the name of the donor published in the leading papers, to be cabled over to England and brought at any cost under the notice of Her Majesty, in case there ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... the figures comprising the principal zone of ornament departs somewhat from the four ruling directions of the textile combination. This was accomplished by increasing the width of the steps in the outline as the dark rays progressed, resulting in curved outlines of eccentric character. This eccentricity, coupled with the very unusual character of the details at the outer extremities of the figures, leads to the surmise that each part of the design is a conventional representation of some life form, a bird, an insect, ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... it now seems to us, the botanist of the past has been content with the simple technical description of the feature, without the slightest conception of its meaning, dismissing it, perhaps, with passing comment upon its "eccentricity" or "curious shape." Indeed, prior to Darwin's time it might be said that the flower was as a voice in the wilderness. In 1735, it is true, faint premonitions of its present message began to be heard through their first though faltering interpreter, ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... climax came. Some smiled indulgently and called it an artistic eccentricity, others looked upon it as a wise provision, in view of the many events which were crowding thick and fast in Paris just then, but to all, the real motive of that climax remained a puzzle and a mystery. Anyway, ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... everything, extended his, her, or its hand to this cub, who, quite puzzled, but too brutal to be confused, kept driving on the red van, and each day perpetrating some new act of profligacy, some new instance of coarse profusion, tasteless extravagance, and inelegant eccentricity. ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... circumstances, might have been of great importance to him; my father, though himself of a very sweet disposition, was most unhappy. His parents looked upon him as moonstruck, while he himself, whatever his aspirations, was conscious that he had done nothing to justify the eccentricity of his course, or the violation of all prudential considerations in which he daily indulged. In these perplexities, the usual alternative was again had recourse to—absence; he was sent abroad, to travel in France, which the peace then permitted, visit some friends, see Paris, and then proceed ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... traveler heard Don Quixote speak in so wise and discerning manner, he was aghast; and he was entirely at a loss to know how to judge him. He was inclined to think that what he had taken for madness in him was nothing but eccentricity. ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... It is a great consumer of fuel, and radiates but little heat. By dint of constant wooding I contrived to warm mine; but my Italian friends always avoided its vicinity when they came to see me, and most amusingly regarded my determination to be comfortable as part of the eccentricity inseparable ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... to caricature a bluestocking, but to point out one or two real dangers. Education is good; but perfect sanity is better still. Sanity is the most excellent of all women's excellences. We forgive eccentricity and one-sidedness—the want of perfect sanity—in men, and especially men of genius; and we rather reluctantly forgive it in women of genius; but in ordinary folk, no. These are the strong-minded women; ordinary folk, who make a vigorous protest against one or two of the minor mistakes of society, ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... sufficiently remote township as in realms unnamed on any map. It will be seen that the sober stripling was reduced to arguing with himself, and that his main argument was not to be admitted in his own heart. The mysterious eccentricity of his employer, coupled with the adventurous character of his alleged prospects, was what induced the lad to embrace both in defiance of an unimaginative hard-headedness which he aimed at rather ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... made too much of the savanna sparrow's innocent eccentricity. He fills his place, and fills it well; and who knows but that he may yet outshine the skylark? There is a promise, I believe, for those who humble themselves. But what shall be said of species which do not even try to sing, and ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... chubby little eccentricity revolved in his humble orbit among the castor-oil bushes and in the dust; always fashioning magnificent palaces from stale flowers thrown away by the bearer, smooth water-worn pebbles, bits of broken glass, and feathers pulled, I fancy, from my fowls—always ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... way, for his vision is not very distinct;—his head is delightfully buoyant, his optics inclined to multiply, and his legs very refractory, having a great desire to dance or go sideways, but obstinately refusing, in their eccentricity, to proceed in a straight line; for Mr. Brown is more merry than particular—taking Newgate Market in his way home to Mizzlington from the 'Change. Having a great veneration for old customs, he buys ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... character is only the heroic way of understanding it. When we love, by some noble method of our own or some nobility of mien or nature in the other, we apprehend the loved one by what is noblest in ourselves. When we are merely studying an eccentricity, the method of our study is but a series of allowances. To begin to understand is to begin to sympathise; for comprehension comes only when we have stated another's faults and virtues in terms of our own. Hence the proverbial ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of his own. This was mid-winter, two years after the end of the War, where Dick and his uncle had worked in the Ambulance Corps to the limit of their capacities—Dick, no soldier, because of what seemed to him a diabolic eccentricity of imperfect sight, and Raven, blocked by what he felt to be the negligible disability of age. John Raven had, with the beginning of the War—which, as early as 1914 he had decided to be his war—made up his mind that although he was over forty and of a business training with inconsiderable ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... nostalgia seizes him amid the fairy scenes of Orient that have seduced his senses. More weary than he had ever yet been, Wilfrid dropped into a chair and looked about him for a time, like a man who awakens from sleep. Monsieur Becker and his daughter accustomed, perhaps, to the apparent eccentricity of their guest, continued the employments in ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... hurry to the Gardens, so sure was he of the success of his undertaking. The frowsy black coat, in which he made his bow to the millionaire, had not seen the light for many years—his hat was a wide-brimmed eccentricity in soft felt which greatly delighted the nursemaids who passed him by. Gessner would never have recognized, in the hollow-cheeked, pale-faced, humble creature the sturdy young Pole who had come to him nearly ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... for reform, to a small eccentricity in costume, the English are the most intolerant people in the world, in their reception of anything which presents itself to them under the form of a perfect novelty. Let any man display a new project before the Parliament of England, or a new ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... This eccentricity was the source of much worry to Breed. Shady could see no good reason why she should not revisit Collins when the mood so moved her. One night she turned abruptly from her course and headed for the twinkling lights of ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... this day, and may be seen on the right-hand of the broad walk on the north side of the spacious churchyard. His coffin was constructed at the same time; and, until it should be required for other and personal purposes, was used as a wine-bin. But, to carry his eccentricity even to the grave, he left strict orders that he should be buried in an erect posture: and "tradition" (of course) says that his request was complied with. Your correspondent says that tradition "assigns no reason for the peculiarity" of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... are more disturbing to the functioning of a staff than undue eccentricity on the part of the commander or of senior members of the staff. For instance, a personal habit to be rigorously suppressed—a habit not infrequently in evidence, especially under strain of active operations—is that of absent-mindedly pocketing documents needed in the work ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... habit of especially asserting itself in the midst of these youthful orgies, a curious sense of waiting for something to happen, a sensation which had been responsible very often for what his friends had looked upon as eccentricity. He knew now that this thing had arrived, and everything else in life seemed to pale by the side of it. Hunterleys' words had thrown him temporarily into a strange turmoil. Solitude for a few moments he had felt to be entirely necessary. ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... belong to these descriptions of men. It formed a majestic pile, the effect of which was not inspired, but improved, by order and symmetry. There was nothing in it to dazzle by wildness, and surprise by eccentricity. It was of a higher species of moral beauty. It contained everything great and elevated, but it had no false or trivial ornament. It was not the model cried up by fashion and circumstance: its excellence was adapted to the true and just moral taste, incapable of change from the varying accidents ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... her indignation the absurd Fyne dog began to bark in the porch. It might have been at a trespassing bumble-bee however. That animal was capable of any eccentricity. Fyne got up quickly and went out to him. I think he was glad to leave us alone to discuss that matter of his journey to London. A sort of anti-sentimental journey. He, too, apparently, had confidence in my sagacity. It was touching, this confidence. It ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... Proportional Representation is not a faddist proposal, not a perplexing ingenious complication of a simple business; it is the carefully worked out right way to do something that hitherto we have been doing in the wrong way. It is no more an eccentricity than is proper baking in the place of baking amidst dirt and with unlimited adulteration, or the running of trains to their destinations instead of running them without notice into casually selected sidings and branch lines. It is not the substitution of something ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... first, in some way, having discovered old Max Diestricht's hiding place; and, if I had given him time enough, he would probably have stuck one of these seals, in clumsy imitation of that little eccentricity of mine, on the wall over there to stamp the job as genuine. You begin to get it, don't you Lannigan? Pretty sure-fire as an alibi, eh? And he'd have got away with it, too, as far as you were concerned. He had only to fire that shot, smash the window, tuck his false beard, mustache, and peaked ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... which at such a moment the grave dignity of Kilmarnock, contrasted with the lofty indifference of Balmerino, might excite, there was some diversion among the Peers, owing to the eccentricity of several of their body. Of these, one, Lord Windsor, affectedly said when asked for his vote, "I am sorry I must say, guilty upon my honour." Another nobleman, Lord Stamford, refused to answer to the name of Henry, having been christened Harry. "What a great way of thinking," ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... rest and think. After she married she would be taken from the quiet Quaker society in Philadelphia, in which she always had moved, to one that would put her personal and mental powers to a sharp proof; for Birkenshead, by right of his professional fame, and a curiously attractive personal eccentricity, had gradually become the nucleus of one of the best and most brilliant circles in the country, men and women alike distinguished for their wit and skill in extracting the finest tones from life while they lived. The quiet Quaker girl was secretly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... other—sometimes two at a time—might be seen staggering about the raft, or crawling over its planks, as if unconscious of what they were doing. It seemed a wonder that some of them—semi-somnambulists in a double sense—did not fall overboard into the water. But they did not. Notwithstanding the eccentricity of their movements, they all succeeded in maintaining their position on the raft. To tumble over the edge would have been tantamount to toppling into the jaws of an expectant shark, and getting "scrunched" ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... whether "Norbert Franks" was the son of an old friend of whom he had lost sight for many years. By way of answer, Franks called upon his correspondent, who lived in a pleasant little house at Ashtead, in Surrey; he found a man of something less than sixty, with a touch of eccentricity in his thoughts and ways, by whom he was hospitably received, and invited to return whenever it pleased him. It was not very long before Franks asked permission to make the Pomfrets acquainted with his friend Warburton, a step which proved entirely justifiable. Together or separately, ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... where his eccentricity became the most dangerous to the peace of mind of our family," continued Mrs. Selwyn. "My father seemed never able to discover that he was doing the lad harm by all sorts of indulgence and familiarity with him, a sort of hail-fellow-well-met way that surprised me more than I can express, when ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... insularity, and an overweening estimate of themselves and their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honore—if he would have the full aroma of British conceit. The most surprising feature of the English quarter of the French capital is the eccentricity of the English visitors, as it strikes their own countrymen. I cannot find it in me to blame Gallican caricaturists. The statuettes which enliven the bronze shops; the gaunt figures which are in the chocolate establishments; the prints in the ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... what conditions you must fulfill to gain that! You must lead a life like that of the cloister, and sacrifice all your dearest habits. The Englishman, though he invented the word eccentric, does not tolerate eccentricity in a foreigner. And, on the whole, the bourgeoise hospitality is not worth ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... is this?" said the Vicar, raising his glasses to his eyes, but knowing perfectly well all the time, he having been one of the first to learn of the doctor's eccentricity. "Ah, to be sure; Doctor Grayson's protege. Yes, I remember him perfectly well, and I suppose ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... easy to help you to understand a woman who doesn't understand herself," he answered. "But I will try. The key to my poor dear mother's character is, in one word—Eccentricity." ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... I kept my purpose a secret from every one, because I wished to contemplate the treasures of art there quite after my own way, and, as I thought, to allow no one to perplex me. Besides this, so simple a matter became more complicated by still another eccentricity. ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
