"Excitability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quickly, and when kindled, he shot forth a strong and brilliant flame. To any one with less power of self-control such intensity of emotion as he frequently showed would have been dangerous; nor did this excitability fail, even with him, to prompt words and acts which a cooler judgment would have disapproved. But it gave that spontaneity which was one of the charms of his nature; it produced that impression ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... confused apology which was not even necessary. Anybody could see that the boy had burst among us with eyes for his father only, and thoughts of nothing but the report about his health; as for Miss Belsize, she looked as though she liked him the better for it, or it may have been for an excitability rare in him and rarely becoming. His pink face burnt like a flame. His eyes were brilliant; they met mine at last, and I was warmly greeted; but their friendly light burst into a blaze of wrath as almost simultaneously they fell upon ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... my wife's excitability too much to heart, nurse. It is true she goes up in the air sometimes, but she always comes down again. She's rather like a spoiled child, but that ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... temper is hushed to a transient calm by expedients, which in time must lose their effect, and which can have no power over confirmed fretfulness. The pleasure of exercising their senses, is in itself sufficient to children without any factitious stimulus, which only exhausts their excitability, and renders them incapable of being amused by a variety of common objects, which would naturally be their entertainment. We do not here speak of the attempts made to sooth a child who is ill; "to charm the sense of pain," ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... only four days since we discussed the Vicar Apostolic's letter, and laughed somewhat at French excitability; but in four days what a change! The cloud no bigger than your hand is now bigger than your whole body, bigger, indeed, than the combined bodies of all your neighbours, supposing you could spread them fantastically in great layers ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... remember, in imagining the opening scenes, that she is deliberately bent on counteracting the 'human kindness' of her husband, and also that she is evidently not merely inflexibly determined but in a condition of abnormal excitability. That exaltation in the project which is so entirely lacking in Macbeth is strongly marked in her. When she tries to help him by representing their enterprise as heroic, she is deceiving herself as much as him. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... respect, which was heightened when Dick told him of the Senator's achievements during the past few weeks. The brilliant society which surrounded the Count was quite different from that which the Senator had found in Florence. The people were equally cultivated, but more serious. They had less excitability, but more deep feeling. Milan, indeed, had borne her burden far differently from Florence. Both hated the foreigner; but the latter could be gay, and smiling, and trifling even under her chains; this the ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... taken by his friend, Colonel Samuel Osgood, to the home of the latter in Andover. There the enfeebled patriot passed the remainder of his life. He became very obese, and his nervous excitability to an ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... with the individual artist or man of letters, we touch first of all upon certain temperamental inclinations. It is a question again of the national mind, of the differentiation of the race under new climatic and physical conditions. We have to reckon with the headiness and excitability of youth. It was young men who emigrated hither, just as in the eighteen-sixties it was young men who filled the Northern and the Southern armies. The first generations of American immigration were made up chiefly of vigorous, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... with all the extravagant excitability of his southern blood, beat his forehead and his breast, bemoaned himself as a betrayed and ruined man, and bewailed his wife and children. Rufinus, however, put an end to his ravings. He had consulted with the abbess, and he put it strongly to the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... from either its isolation or antiquity. He thrives very well, like the generality of parsons, and will be a long liver if careful. He has what a phrenological physiologist would call a vitally sanguine constitution—has a good deal of temper, excitability, and determination in his character. You may persuade him, but he will be awkward to drive. He has a somewhat tall, gentlemanly, elastic figure; looks as if he had worn stays at some time; is polished, well-dressed, and careful; respects scented soap; hates the smell ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... maintained through other channels, such as branches from the superior intercostal arteries which enter the anterior spinal artery. While total anaemia of the brain instantaneously abolishes consciousness, partial anaemia is found to raise the excitability of the cortex cerebri. By estimation of the exchange of gases in the blood which enters and leaves the brain, it has been shown that the consumption of oxygen and the production of carbonic acid in that organ is not large. Further, it may be noted that the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... breed as it exists to-day. Such a comparison will show that among the best dogs now living are some which might have been the model for this picture. It is true that in the interval the white and black Newfoundlands have been coarser, heavier, higher on the legs, with an expression denoting excitability quite foreign to the true breed, but these departures from Newfoundland character are passing away—it is to be hoped for good. The breed is rapidly returning to the type which Landseer's picture represents—a dog of great beauty, dignity, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... and with which I had become familiar in my acquaintance with men of wide authority and outstanding ability. What disturbed me was that his blindness, his ill health, and his suffering had united to these traits an intense excitability and a ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... nervous energy and excitability, Americans often show a good deal of a quality that rivals the phlegm of the Dutch. Their above-mentioned patience during railway or other delays is an instance of this. So, in the incident related in Chapter ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... whether the wit be great or little, the "thin partition" separating madness from sanity is equally mysterious. It is true that the excitability attendant upon genius approximates so closely to madness, that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them; but, without the attendant "genius" to hold up the train of madness, and call for our special ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... their brows. Others whispered in one another's ears, imparting excessively mysterious information of the utmost importance, putting a finger to their lips, screwing up their eyes to enjoin secrecy. A provincial flavor distinguished them all, with differences of inflection, Southern excitability, the drawling accent of the Centre, Breton sing-song, all blended in the same idiotic, strutting self-sufficiency; frock-coats after the style of Landerneau, mountain shoes, and home-spun linen; the monumental assurance of village clubs, local ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... hold upon life through an exceptional sensibility. Strindberg laid hold on life through an exceptional excitability—even an exceptional irritability. In his plays, novels, and essays alike, he is a specialist in the jars of existence. He magnified even the smallest worries until they assumed mountainous proportions. He was the kind ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... not tuned up to concert-pitch by a dance or other social event. It may well be, then, that it is not the hereditary temperament of the Negro, so much as the habit, which he shares with other peoples at the same level of culture, of living and acting in a crowd, that accounts for his apparent excitability. But after all, "mafficking" is not unknown in civilized countries. Thus the quest for a race-mark of a mental kind ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... with passion,—the plainness of her features was transformed into momentary beauty. Maryllia was silent. She knew that the aspirations of genius pent up in this elf-like girl were almost too strong for her, and that the very excitability and sensitiveness of her nature were such as to need the greatest care and tenderness in training and controlling. Tactfully she changed the conversation to ordinary subjects, and in a little while Cicely had learned all that Maryllia herself knew about ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... imagination had been before worked upon, even from my earliest childhood, and the great nervous excitability of my temperament, it is a wonder that my mind did not reel, if not succumb— but I now began to combat the approaches of one sort of insanity with the actual presence of another—I wrote verses. That was "tempering the wind to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... space at the right of the sternum. This may not be due to narrowing of the aortic orifice; it may be due to a sclerosis of the aorta. On the other hand, it may be due entirely to the hastened blood stream from the nervous excitability. This is probably the case if this sound disappears when the patient reclines. If it increases when the heart becomes slower and the patient is lying down, the cause ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... soul, but soul has commonly a fuller and more determinate meaning; we can conceive of spirits as having no moral nature; the fairies, elves, and brownies of mythology might be termed spirits, but not souls. In the figurative sense, spirit denotes animation, excitability, perhaps impatience; as, a lad of spirit; he sang with spirit; he replied with spirit. Soul denotes energy and depth of feeling, as when we speak of soulful eyes; or it may denote the very life ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... setting forth or assembling to defend their king or church, and we see it without surprise; a rich daring loves danger, a deep excitability likes excitement. If we look around us, we may see what is analogous: some say that the battle of the Alma was won by the "uneducated gentry"; the "uneducated gentry" would be Cavaliers now. The ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... active" rays; this is shown by the fact that the production of electricity is extremely small behind a glass colored with cuprous oxide, and behind a film of a solution of quinine sulphate; while it is not appreciably diminished by a film of a solution of alum. The photo-electric excitability of fluor-spar crystals is increased by a moderate heat (80 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... both my mother and myself (persons of exceptional impatience of disposition and irritable excitability of temperament) should have taken such delight in so still and monotonous an occupation, especially to the point of spending whole days in an unsuccessful pursuit of it. The fact is that the excitement of hope, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... disease resulting from infection of a wound by a specific micro-organism, the bacillus tetani, and characterised by increased reflex excitability, hypertonus, and spasm of one or more groups of ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... the cough depends mainly whether the larger bronchial tubes and the trachea are affected; the more this is the case, the more violent the inclination to cough. Further the strength of the cough depends on the excitability of the patient; the greater this is, the more as a rule will he cough. Sometimes the position of the patient is of influence; if he lies mostly on the diseased side the expectoration becomes more difficult and ...
— Prof. Koch's Method to Cure Tuberculosis Popularly Treated • Max Birnbaum |
