"Habitual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that charming expression which was habitual to her, and pressing her companion's arm, said: "Thank the ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Democratic parties, and later by the Republican party. The classification cannot be made exact, but the word "Abolitionists" generally designated the men and women to whom the extinction of slavery was a primary interest, and who gave to it their habitual and earnest attention, through the anti-slavery societies and otherwise. In this broader sense, the Abolitionists were a notable company. They were bound together by a disinterested and noble sentiment, and by sacrifices to ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... varieties. It may be defined, generally, as that state of mind which involves either the denial or the doubt of the existence and government of God as an all-perfect Being, distinct from the created universe; or which leads to the habitual forgetfulness and wilful neglect of His claims as our Creator, Preserver, and Lord. This state of mind, whether evinced by words or by actions, contains in it the essence of Atheism, and it is recognized in Scripture, in each of its two aspects, as an evil ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... a little way back along the street from the Sanctuary to the corner on the Bowery where as Jimmie Dale he had left her, where as Larry the Bat now he was going to meet her again; it would take only a moment or so, even at Larry the Bat's habitual, characteristic, slouching, gait—but it seemed that was all too slow, that he must throw discretion to the winds and run the distance. His blood was tingling; there was elation upon him, coupled with an almost childlike dread ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... testimony concerning habit, they will help us to more just interpretations and will reduce the number of crass contradictions. This is so because many an assertion will seem probable when the witness shows that the thing described was habitual. No definite boundary can be drawn between skill and habit, and we may, perhaps, say rightly, that skill is possible only where habit exists, and habit is present where a certain amount of skill has been attained. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... redeem Yon aweless Libertine from rooted vice. Misleading thought! has he not paid the price, His taste for virtue?—Ah, the sensual stream Has flow'd too long.—What charms can so entice, What frequent guilt so pall, as not to shame The rash belief, presumptuous and unwise, That crimes habitual will forsake the Frame?— [1]Thus, on the river's bank, in fabled lore, The Rustic stands; sees the stream swiftly go, And thinks he soon shall find the gulph below A channel dry, which he may safe pass o'er.— Vain hope!—it flows—and flows—and ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... became very different, though not so, that all sins were given up at once. My wicked companions were given up; the going to taverns was entirely discontinued; the habitual practice of telling falsehoods was no longer indulged in, but still a few times after this I spoke an untruth.—At the time when this change took place, I was engaged in translating a novel out of French into German, for the press, ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... in the beer shop. At bottom they are no doubt the same as the rest of their countrymen, and the Yorkshire men, though a hard headed, are a soft hearted race; the doctor tells me that except that their constitutions are ruined by habitual drinking he has no better patients; they bear pain unflinchingly, and are patient and even tempered. I know he loves them with all their faults, and I consider him to be a ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... apparent aridity a fresh growth of luxuriant bloom, unhoped for in such a soil! What intuitive penetration is repealed by this exclusive choice, which, wresting the different effects of the various instruments from their habitual domain, where the whole foam of sound would have broken at their feet, transported them into a sphere, more limited, indeed, but far more idealized! What confident perception of the future powers of his instrument must have presided over his voluntary renunciation of an empiricism, so widely ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... of the day following Christmas the two cousins had been across the estuary to Ashbridge together. Francis, who, in spite of his habitual easiness of disposition and general good temper, had found the conditions of anger and anxiety quite intolerable, had settled to leave next day, instead of stopping till the end of the week, and Michael acquiesced in this without any sense of desertion; he had really only ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... love; With choice we fix, with sympathy we burn; Each virtue in each passion takes its turn; And still new needs, new helps, new habits rise, That graft benevolence on charities. Still as one brood, and as another rose, These natural love maintain'd, habitual those: 140 The last, scarce ripen'd into perfect man, Saw helpless him from whom their life began: Memory and forecast just returns engage, That pointed back to youth, this on to age; While pleasure, gratitude, and hope, combined, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Polk • James Polk
... real, no forecast could make them lighter. But I shall speak more particularly on these matters after I have first considered Epicurus's opinion, who thinks that all people must necessarily be uneasy who believe themselves to be in any evils, let them be either foreseen and expected, or habitual to them; for, with him, evils are not the less by reason of their continuance, nor the lighter for having been foreseen; and it is folly to ruminate on evils to come, or such as, perhaps, never may come; every evil is disagreeable enough when ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... opened, and Madame de Morcerf alighted, leaning on her son's arm. Albert soon left her, ordered his horses, and having arranged his toilet, drove to the Champs Elysees, to the house of Monte Cristo. The count received him with his habitual smile. It was a strange thing that no one ever appeared to advance a step in that man's favor. Those who would, as it were, force a passage to his heart, found an impassable barrier. Morcerf, who ran towards him with open arms, was ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... may be that the homeliness of Plato's illustration has misled us as to the seriousness of the problem. Let us forget about beds and buildings and think of actual life in the more dignified way that has become habitual to us since the war. Then it must appear that Plato's charge is as truly a live issue here and now as it ever was in Athens. The claims for the supremacy of poetry, set forth by Aristotle, Sidney and the rest, seem to weaken, for ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... rest itself. Her forehead was rather low. Her eyes were softly dark, and her features very regular—her nose perhaps hardly large enough, or her chin. Her mouth was rather thin-lipped, but would have been sweet except for a seemingly habitual expression of pain. A pair of dark brows overhung her sweet eyes, and gave a look of doubtful temper, yet restored something of the strength lacking a little in nose and chin. It was an interesting—not a quite harmonious face, and in happiness ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... are tucked snugly away out of sight," said she demurely, with a pretty gesture which straying tendrils had made habitual, and the warm colour ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... aestheticisms the soul of John Norton had long slumbered, but now it awoke in remorse and pain, and, repulsing its habitual exaltations even as if they were sins, he turned to the primal idea of the vileness of this life, and its sole utility in enabling man to gain heaven. Beauty, what was it but temptation? He winced before a conclusion so ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... mountain-visage had found its human counterpart. It is true, Ernest had imagined that this long-looked-for personage would appear in the character of a man of peace, uttering wisdom, and doing good, and making people happy. But, taking an habitual breadth of view, with all his simplicity, he contended that Providence should choose its own method of blessing mankind, and could conceive that this great end might be effected even by a warrior and a bloody sword, ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... men who strove to act generously towards the people serving in their vessels, though these, I am persuaded, were in the minority, and it is to the credit of that minority that they had to struggle against precedent, example, and it may be the habitual conviction that it was part of the sailor's business to take whatever food was put aboard for him. Running short of provisions was to them only an incident natural to the sailor's calling. This view had been handed down by successive generations of avaricious stoats, ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... of stating that the characters in "The Hill," whether masters or boys, are not portraits, although they may be called, truthfully enough, composite photographs; and that the episodes of Drinking and Gambling are founded on isolated incidents, not on habitual practices. Moreover, in attempting to reproduce the curious admixture of "strenuousness and sentiment"—your own phrase—which animates so vitally Harrow life, I have been obliged to select the less common types of Harrovian. Only the elect are capable of ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... streets, but those of Constantinople, which are more nervous and more dangerous. She rang and a maid appeared. She entered an alcove without a word, and a few minutes later I saw her leaning on her elbow in her habitual attitude ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... of wings overhead, the whirring of larger birds in the cover, and a frequent rustling in the undergrowth, as of the passage of some stealthy animal, began equally to attract her attention. It was so different from the habitual silence of these sedate solitudes. Kate had no vague fear of wild beasts; she had been long enough a mountaineer to understand the general immunity enjoyed by the unmolesting wayfarer, and kept her way undismayed. She was descending ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... that I should be a ruined man, upon which he jumped from his chair, reproved me for my habitual levity, which made it impossible for him to discuss any reasonable subject in my presence, and bounced off out of the room to dress ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... requisite in constructing them, that I can scarcely believe they were built by the ancestors of the present inhabitants. If indeed they were, the race has sadly deteriorated in their knowledge of the mechanic arts. To say nothing of their habitual indolence, by what contrivance within the reach of so simple a people could such enormous masses have been moved or fixed in their places? and how could they with their rude implements have chiselled and hammered them ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... Habitual observation is the more necessary, when any sudden call arises. If "Fanny" had observed "the bottle of salvolatile" in "the aunt's room," every day she was there, she would more probably have found it when it was ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... lady's," observed the Doctor, "has certainly been neglected by the whole number of doctors; for had a treatment with certain medicines been initiated at the time of the first occurrence of her habitual sickness, I cannot but opine that, by this time, a perfect cure would have been effected. But seeing that the organic complaint has now been, through neglect, allowed to reach this phase, this calamity ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... was at once enraptured and humbled. Perhaps then, for the first time since I had left my schoolboy's haunts, I bethought me that there was a God. Too, too often I had heard his awful presence wantonly invoked, his sacred name taken in vain. Lately, I had not shuddered at this habitual profanation. The work of demoralisation had commenced. I knew it then, and with this knowledge, the first pang of guilty shame entered my bosom. I stood up with reverence upon the cross-trees. I took off my hat, and though I did not even whisper ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... out with a grimace habitual to him in moments of feeling, and for an instant said nothing. When he spoke his voice broke on her name, as it had the night before when he had stood looking up at her windows. "Oh, Lydia!—Oh, my dear, I'm terribly ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... thought of style nor of enduring interest, all whom they are likely to interest or to reach must already know. A journalist traveling in foreign lands, especially those which have been once the homes of his habitual readers or at least of their ancestors, cannot well refrain from writing of what he sees and hears; his observations have a value in the eyes of those readers which will be utterly unrecognized by the colder public outside of the sympathizing circle. ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... own; a dreary place, where a few sickly plants tried to hold their own against neglect and the splashings of rinsed glasses. There was a wooden terrace at the back of this place—the back overlooked the river, while the front was on the by-road—and here the habitual revellers, the haunters, whose scored crosses lent the creaking shutters an unnatural whiteness over their weather-beaten surface, dark with age and dirt, loved to linger of a summer evening, and ply the noggin ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... said the foreman, glancing at the editor's copy with his habitual half humorous toleration of that work, it being his general conviction that news and advertisements were the only valuable features of a newspaper; "I only wanted to talk to you a minute about makin' suthin more o' this yer ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... an hour before had hastened hot-footed through the Newlyn streets, whose habitual stern expression had softened before the well-known sights and smells of the gray village, whose earnest soul was full of happiness under the rain of the night, now turned back upon his way and skulked through the darkness with a murderer's heart in him. The clear spectacle of his revenge blinded ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... great start and dropped the Times as though it burnt him. For a moment he did not speak. With all his mildness and benevolence, he was a man of strong passions, though no one would have guessed it from his habitual self-control. ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... remember which was not in accordance with her habitual reserve in this respect. I noticed one day that her eyes were red. Of course I dared not ask her why she had cried. During the lesson she seemed absent; and when leaving she said, without looking at me, 'I may perhaps be obliged to interrupt our lessons ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... other criminals who do not come from the class I have described, but the habitual visitor to criminal courts knows that they are very few. Of the others, some are born of parents who could care for them and have done their best and yet, in spite of this, they have repeatedly been entangled in the law; these are often the only ones of a large family who have not ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... taste for it. You see, comparatively few alcoholics are born in a generation. And by alcoholic I mean a man whose chemistry craves alcohol and drives him resistlessly to it. The great majority of habitual drinkers are born not only without desire for alcohol, but with actual repugnance toward it. Not the first, nor the twentieth, nor the hundredth drink, succeeded in giving them the liking. But they learned, just as men learn to smoke; though it is far easier to learn to smoke than to ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... run through his property in a few years, and perhaps become an habitual drunkard ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... that his habitual mental attitude was, "What is there in this for me?" He did not indeed use just those words or give such crude expression to his self-centeredness; but she had come to know that personal advantage was the usual mainspring of his actions. Presently deciding ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... a great error to imagine, that an habitual dexterity, a daily practice, with their arms, their legs and feet, were the only talents of these pantomime dancers. Their execution, without doubt, required all these advantages of the body in the most eminent degree; but their compositions supposed, and ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... deadly thing it was behind the footlights at night. I could scarcely gasp in his presence, my heart bounded so in awe and honor of him when he paid a visit to us; perhaps he used to bring the copy of the show-bills. The company he belonged to left town in the adversity habitual with them. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... was, by his natural temper, quick of resentment; but, by his established and habitual practice, he was gentle, modest, and inoffensive. His tenderness appeared in his attention to children and to the poor. To the poor, while he lived in the family of his friend, he allowed the third part of his annual revenue; and for children, ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... led. It is seldom that a uniform hypocrite is found among the uneducated; a more than ordinary degree of talent and prudence being necessary to sustain a character that is but assumed. Nature may be suppressed by habitual caution; but the meaner, though not the baser, villain, finds appetite too strong for even interest to control. The household of Sir Willmott Burrell was ill-governed, and the lessons which the master sometimes taught, but never ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... poor law relief is about as rotten and as stupid as it can be, and its administration is in itself a scandal. There is no general rule throughout the country as to dietary or as to the nature of the labour executed, or as to the hours over which that labour shall be extended. The habitual loafer knows perfectly well the places where life is made easy to him, and as a matter of course avoids those in which the fare is poorest and the work most arduous. The honest seeker after work knows nothing ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... say, what may ever last?" Yet the subject brought its consolation likewise. Patient labour, such as this poem attests, is the surest road to that enduring fame, which is "conserved with the shade;" and awaking from his vision, Chaucer takes leave of the reader with a resolution already habitual to him—to read more and more, instead of resting satisfied with the knowledge he has already acquired. And in the last of the longer poems which seem assignable to this period of his life, he proves that one Latin poet at ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... intense that the footfall of a cab-horse crossing Waterloo Bridge could be faintly heard, as the eye followed the light slowly moving between the two rows of golden stars—seemed to possess but little interest for the owner of these rooms. For the moment he had lost altogether his habitual air ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... his fidelity to him was unshaken. No notice, no kind word, seemed to have any effect upon him if offered by a stranger, but he obeyed and understood the slightest signal from his owner. This man was an habitual drunkard, at least whenever he could procure the means of becoming one. It was a cold, frosty night in November, when T——y was returning from a favourite alehouse, along one of the Thames Ditton lanes, some of which, ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... were passed against pluralities which frightened every benefice hunter among the clerks of the royal household. Orders were also issued for the periodical denunciation of ecclesiastical penalties against all violators of the Great Charter in a fashion that suggested that the king was an habitual offender against the fundamental ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... they make him avaricious. The covetousness too, which they introduce as it were into his nature, is of a kind, that is more than ordinarily injurious. It brings disease upon the body, as it brings corruption upon the mind. Habitual gamesters regard neither their own health, nor their own personal convenience, but will sit up night after night, though under bodily indisposition, at play, if they can only grasp the ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... 7th of May 1812, while at Valencia, in Spain, I caught a fair- sized male Tarantula, without hurting him, and imprisoned him in a glass jar, with a paper cover in which I cut a trap-door. At the bottom of the jar I put a paper bag, to serve as his habitual residence. I placed the jar on a table in my bedroom, so as to have him under frequent observation. He soon grew accustomed to captivity and ended by becoming so familiar that he would come and take from my fingers the live Fly which I gave him. After killing ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... generation taught the most licentious principles concerning it, by a body of professed witnesses among ourselves: and this they design to do, without (as they are slanderously reported of by some) laying aside themselves, or withdrawing others, from the study of internal and habitual ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... old-time grace habitual to him, his hand upon his heart, but he made no answer. The real reason might have been read in the mottled face of Pakenham, now all the colors of the rainbow, as he looked from one ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... habitual reading of Homer appears to familiarize our thoughts even to his incongruities; or rather, if we read in a right spirit and with a heartfelt appreciation, we are too much dazzled, too deeply wrapped in admiration of the whole, to dwell upon the minute spots which mere analysis can discover. ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... told himself, "he will go to the Countess. I fancy she will corroborate me—and then—!" He dismissed the matter with his habitual shrug. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... that she had overheard some words of theirs on the night of her arrival, and that these had put bitterness into her heart and nearly destroyed her faith in her fellow-students. Both Maggie and Nance made several overtures of kindness to Prissie, but the cold manner which was more or less habitual to her never thawed, and, after a time, they left her alone. There is no saying what might have happened to Prissie had she never overheard this conversation. As it was, however, after the first shock it gave ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... opium violently constricts, or in whom it excites nausea, there is little danger that its use will degenerate into a habit. Those, however, over whose nerves it spreads only a delightful calm, whose feelings it tranquillizes, and in whom it produces an habitual state of reverie, are those who should be upon their guard lest the drug to which in suffering they owe so much should become in time the direst of curses. Persons of the first description need little caution, for they are rarely injured by opium. Those of the latter class, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... individuals in one season has no effect in producing more regularity on their parts, or on that of others in the ensuing season, until the same process has been again gone through; whilst the contempt and odium attaching to a system of collecting the revenues, by the habitual intervention of the troops of another State, infallibly tend to aggravate the evil, by destroying all remains of confidence in his Majesty, ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... British idea." "The use of 300 British tanks at Cambrai," says a German document, "was a 'battle of material.' The German Higher Command decided from the very outset not to fight a 'battle of material.'" They preferred instead their habitual policy of "massed attack"—using thereby in the fighting line a number of inferior men, "classified as fit for garrison or labour duties," but who, if they "can carry a rifle, must fight." The German Command were, therefore, "not in a position to find the labour for the construction ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a man appeared, and slowly made its way down to the cabin. As she knew while he was still far off, it was Matthew Braile who, as long as he sat in the seat of the scorner, with his chair tilted against the wall, seemed a strong middle-aged man; but when he descended from his habitual place, with the crook of his stick, worn smooth by use, in his hard palm, one saw that he was elderly and stiff almost to lameness. He carried himself with a forward droop, and his gaze bent ponderingly on the ground, as ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... mixed monuments, not artificial in their origin, but which gradually came to act upon the feelings as such from their use, and habitual connection with human purposes. Such for instance is the Acro-Corinthus, of which Mr. Mure says—that it 'is by far the most striking object that I have ever seen, either abroad or at home. Neither the Acropolis of Athens, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... potent Sir Robert,' says you, 'if thou art indeed noble knight, wherefore go ye devoid of mail, surcoat, cyclas, crested helm, banderol, lance, shield and the like pomps and gauds?' 'Brother,' says I, 'habit is habit and habit sticketh habitual, and my habit is to go habited as suiteth my habit, suiting habit o' body to habit o' mind.' Thus I, though Sir Robert, am Robin still, and go in soft leather 'stead of chafing steel, and my rogues, loving Robin, love Sir Robert the better therefor, as sayeth ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... watches faces can have failed to observe that more beauty is marred and youth curtailed by vulgar worry than by almost any other disfigurement. In the less educated classes, where self-control is not very habitual, and where interests beyond petty and personal ones are rare, the soft brows and tender lips of girlhood are too often puckered and hardened by mean anxieties, even where these do not affect the girls personally, but only imitatively, and as the daily interests of their ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... because he is happier without it. I recollect that when I walked with him, I was in a state of divine exaltation, such as Adam and Eve must have enjoyed when the savour of the fruit was still unfaded between their lips; and I recognise that this must be the man's habitual state. He has the forbidden fruit in his waistcoat pocket, and can make himself a god as often and as long as he likes. He has raised himself upon a glorious pedestal above his fellows; he has touched the summit of ambition; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the same "as if we smelled a bad smell." This is an example of the temporary expression of a passing emotion, and there are many others like it. But each of us has his prevailing and dominant emotions which constitute the habitual attitude of his mind. And by the habitual indulgence of any emotion the features will become habituated to the expression of it, and so the set of our features comes at last to express our prevailing and dominant emotions; in ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... is to be considered, my lords, as the opinion of an author whose birth and employment had tainted him with an inveterate hatred of the house of Austria, and filled his imagination with an habitual dread of the imperial power. He was born, my lords, in Sweden, a country which had suffered much by a long war against the emperour; he was a minister to the electors of Brandenburgh, who naturally looked ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... union or not? The servitor answered: No, it is not the most perfect, but a preliminary, gently drawing a man on, that he may arrive at an essential way of being carried up into God. The maiden asked him what he meant by essential and non-essential. He answered: I call that man essential or habitual (so to speak), who by the good and persevering practice of all the virtues, has arrived at the point of finding the practice of them in their highest perfection pleasant to him, even as the brightness of the sun remains constant in the sun. But I call him non-essential, ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... adhesion to conservative methods which caused him to blunder in his treatment of Colwyn's information about the missing necklace. He rarely acted on impulse. His habitual distrust of humanity was deep, and to it was wedded a wariness which was the heritage of long experience. But his obstinate conviction of Hazel Rath's guilt led him to make a false move in his effort to square the loss of the necklace with the evidence against ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... poetry, although Dante and Shakespeare are full of instances of the same kind: Dante indeed more than any other poet, and with greater success. But the Greek poets, as writers to whom no resource of awakening the sympathy of their contemporaries was unknown, were in the habitual use of this power; and it is the study of their works (since a higher merit would probably be denied me) to which I am willing that my readers should impute ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... attention which she did not perceive, and he noticed the wider rings round her eyes and the deeper marks of wrinkles. Yet he considered her handsomer than he had thought, with that touching beauty which habitual suffering gives to certain faces that are more ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... in literature and the society of literary men, and subsequently in England, in commerce with Franklin, Dr. Price, Samuel Romilly, and Wilkes—among whom be it said, en passant, he acquired the reputation of an habitual liar—a thousand circumstances must have presented themselves, not more in his own studies than in the freedom, seriousness, and activity he saw around him, to prepare and stimulate his ambition for the lofty career of political action that awaited ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... very difficult to be read. Even Mrs Baggett had hardly read them all correctly. He was shamefaced to such a degree that Mrs Baggett could not bring herself to understand it. And there was present to him a manner of speech which practice had now made habitual, but which he had originally adopted with the object of hiding his shamefacedness under the veil of a dashing manner. He would speak as though he were quite free with his thoughts, when, at the moment, he feared that thoughts should be read of which he certainly ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... gestures, perfect intonation, and impressive pauses, when the lifted finger, and flashing eye told more than utterance, were the result of sleepless toil; while his high acquirement was the product of stern habitual thought, study ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... one of the celebrators and the ambulancing to the hospital of another on the homeward way, the ensuing proceedings in court bringing to the whole affair a publicity devoutly unsought for. Mr. Happy Fear (such was the habitual name of the imprisoned gentleman) had to bear a great amount of harsh criticism for injuring a companion within the city limits after daylight, and for failing to observe that three policemen were not too distant from the scene of ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... and prudence, qualities so highly necessary to success in war, became in some degree vices, from the manner in which they were employed. The circumstances of his education, however, must be admitted as some extenuation of his habitual transgressions against the law; and for his political tergiversations, he might in that distracted period plead the example of men far more powerful, and less excusable in becoming the sport of circumstances, than the poor and desperate outlaw. On the other hand, he was in the constant exercise ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... was gentle and kind in the extreme, Madame de Villereine's countenance wore an expression of sadness which seemed habitual to it. I concluded, however, that this arose very much from her anxiety about the health of her only son. Emilie tried to cheer up her parents by assuring them that Henri was better than he had been, and she hoped that before long they should ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... his colleagues. If he went into company which suited him, or read anything which interested him, it seemed as if the ten hours of the gallery in Fleet Street had been made thereby only the more insupportable, and his habitual mood was one of despondency, so that his fellow clerks who knew his tastes not unnaturally asked what was the use of them if they only made him wretched; and they were more than ever convinced that in their amusements lay true happiness. Habit, which is the saviour of most of us, the opiate ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... dreamy in the cool shade of imaginative cloisters and groves, the wanton joyousness of Life, with its long waving lily-stems and the luscious pending of vines, comes with dim recollections into the mind, but modified by a certain habitual chastity of thought. Follow the line still farther, and you will find it grateful to the sight, neither fatiguing with excess of monotony nor cloying the appetite with change. And when the round hour is full and the end comes, this end is met ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... It was a lamentable position for them; their industrial and commercial prosperity was being ruined; their security at home was going from them; their communal liberties were compromised; divisions set in among them; by interest and habitual intercourse they were drawn toward England, but the Count, their lord, did all he could to turn them away from her, and many among them were loath to separate themselves entirely from France. "Burghers of Ghent, as they chatted in the thoroughfares and at the cross-roads, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and convertibility of natural forces; certain ideas regarding the vibrations of light and their relations to the lines of magnetic force; these views and ideas drove him to investigation. And so it must always be: the great experimentalist must ever be the habitual theorist, whether or not he gives to his theories ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... parrot-like, a current view; he was adopting the fashionable attitude of scorn towards what is regarded as an ancient tyranny, long since indicted and exploded. This bland acceptance of the meaninglessness and the inefficacy of beauty is habitual to most young professionals who wield pen or pencil. They have learnt it from Mr. Shaw, forgetting that when Mr. Shaw demands complete freedom for the writer he also demands objective truth; or they have learnt ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... may call it, might cause one variety to differ in some character from its parents, and the offspring of this variety again to differ from its parent in the very same character and in a greater degree; but this alone would never account for so habitual and large a degree of difference as that between the ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... Like the lighthouse keeper who could not sleep when the diaphone did not wrneeee-hrnawwww for five seconds of each and every minute, Jerry Markham's brain was filled with a mild concern about the total lack of unimportant but habitual data. There was no speckle of light to classify and ignore, no susurrus of air molecules raining against the eardrum. Blankness replaced the smell and taste and their absence was as disturbing as a pungence or a poison. ...
— Instinct • George Oliver Smith
... According to his own after-confession, this gratified him, and he was willing to die for the glory of that touching scene. However, he disappointed them, and was presently up and about in search of fresh laurels.—[In later life Mr. Clemens did not recollect the precise period of this illness. With habitual indifference he assigned it to various years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required. Without doubt the "measles" incident occurred when he was very young.]—He must have been a wearing child, and we may believe that Jane Clemens, with her ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... been drawn, he would conclude that the draftsman was a specialist who had had long practice in this particular kind of work, but who now worked almost as it might be said automatically and without consciousness, and found it difficult to depart from a habitual method ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... gentleman; Wych Hazel knew at once who it must be. Middle-sized, stout, with rather thin locks of white hair, and a face not otherwise remarkable than for its look of habitual high thought and pure goodness. It took but a moment to see so much of him. She stopped short, and then came close up ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... economy by all who take the responsibility of householders. Nor are its first principles in the least obscure: they are, many of them, disagreeable in their practical requirements, and people in general pretend that they cannot understand, because they are unwilling to obey them: or rather, by habitual disobedience, destroy their capacity of understanding them. But there is not one of the really great principles of the science which is either obscure or disputable,—which might not be taught to a youth as soon as he can be trusted with an annual allowance, or to a young lady as soon as she ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... even Louis XIV., notorious for his open and profligate as well as habitual adulteries, had a confessor, and complied with the duties of confession and communion in the presence of his whole court. In Spain, robbers, assassins, and the most corrupt of the people, pursued by justice for their crimes, and who are the terror of society, always ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... endurance of little troubles. Her brows had an upward turn at the center which gave her a quaint, questioning look. Her mouth was tucked in at either corner, lending a wistful expression that was habitual. ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... numbers, and the few who dwelt here gained but a precarious and scant subsistence. To a large extent they lived on seeds and roots. The low, warm canyons furnished admirable shelter for the people, and their habitual costumes were loincloths, paints, and necklaces of tiny arrowheads made of the bright-colored agates and carnelians ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... Without doubt, the licentiousness of the saloons of the great theatres in London is a most serious evil, and it well deserves the consideration of Government, whether some means should not be taken for its correction; but is the Opera-house so very pure in its purlieus? and are the habitual admirers of the ballet likely to be corrupted by occasionally seeing Othello and Juliet? The prevailing, and in fact universal, passion for reading novels at home, unquestionably affords an inexhaustible ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... and results when Syrup of Figs is taken; it is pleasant and refreshing to the taste, and acts gently yet promptly on the Kidneys, Liver, and Bowels, cleanses the system effectually, dispels colds, headaches, and fevers and cures habitual constipation. Syrup of Figs is the only remedy of its kind ever produced, pleasing to the taste and acceptable to the stomach, prompt in its action and truly beneficial in its effects, prepared only from the most healthy and agreeable substances, its many excellent qualities commend it to all ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... indeed, a first-class mind both in natural gifts and acquired cultivation, but his habitual bearing was that of suspicion of error; as man and prelate he had a joyful readiness to search it out and correct it from his own point of view. He was a type of mind common then and not uncommon now—the embodiment of a purpose to refute ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... that there exists a considerable amount of error in this opinion. A stranger will frequently submit to extortion, to insolence, or to inconvenience, because, being a stranger, he believes that extortion, insolence, and inconvenience are the habitual characteristics of the new place in which he finds himself: they do not strike him as things to be objected to, or even wondered at; they are simply to be submitted to and endured. If he were at home, he would die sooner ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... from the trackless desert. But they could not reach her, Ethie did not come, and the term of Richard's governorship glided away, and he declined a re-election, and went back to Olney, looking ten years older than when he left it, with an habitual expression of sadness on his face, which even strangers noticed, wondering what was the heart trouble which was aging him so fast, and turning his brown ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... the four quarters of the earth? Protestant countries may have a higher worldly civilization, more education and intelligence, more manufactures and commerce; but Catholic countries have more humility and reverence, a more habitual piety, more gentle manners. If Protestants have more ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... and cries of his wife and children had just roused them to the assumption of that summary mode of vengeance, so gratifying to an English mob, when the appearance of Dr. Beaumont suspended their fury. The long-formed associations of habitual reverence were not so intirely abrogated as to allow them to continue their riotous conduct under the influence of that mild eye, which had often silently reproved their faults, or that benevolent countenance, which had pitied their wants, and confirmed their ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... their walk he found delightful. Marcia was pleased to throw off, in a measure, the reserve, the absorption which seemed almost habitual with her, and she chatted with him frankly, occasionally even ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... carefully recorded as his lavish highland hospitalities; and when he sends his silver cup to the Gaelic bard who chaunts his greatness, the faithful historian does not forget to let us know that the cup is his last, and that he is hard-pressed for the generosities of the future. So too the habitual thievishness of the highlanders is pressed upon us quite as vividly as their gallantry and superstitions. And so careful is Sir Walter to paint the petty pedantries of the Scotch traditional conservatism, that he ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... in defending himself. The count, eager to return (so it ran), had persuaded the king to meet him by declaring that he held a state-document of great importance and of a most secret nature; the king, with his habitual fearlessness, had gone alone, but only to refuse with scorn Count Rupert's terms. Enraged at this unfavorable reception, the audacious criminal had made a sudden attack on the king, with what issue all knew. He ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... eyes lifted as though with intent to the melancholy and watery skies. He was a young man well above medium height, slim, almost inclined to be angular, yet with a good carriage notwithstanding a stoop which seemed more the result of an habitual depression than occasioned by any physical weakness. His features were large, his mouth querulous, a little discontented, his eyes filled with the light of a silent and rebellious bitterness which seemed, somehow, ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... differences of opinion between officials and governed, or with internal differences of opinion among each of these two categories, whose polemics for many years considerably swelled the bulk of the records, my habitual impression was, "Well, yes, that is one way of doing it"; and that questions, the decision of which one way or the other was not worth the paper wasted upon them, created a mass of business which a single prefect could have disposed of with the fourth part of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... bestow his own confidence in return. It is thought that the expression is merely the development of certain features designed by nature. For my own part I think that over and above this development a man's face is shaped, all unconsciously, by the frequent and habitual influence of certain affections of the heart. These affections are shown on the face, there is nothing more certain; and when they become habitual, they must surely leave lasting traces. This is why I think the expression ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... deep, and he had a knack of deepening it when he wished to be impressive. His articulation was extremely deliberate, so that every word told; and his habitual manner was calm, but not stolid. I say "habitual," because it had variations. When Gladstone, just the other side of the Table, was thundering his protests, Disraeli became absolutely statuesque, eyed his opponent ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... an indifferent village, but our billets were not bad. Brigade Headquarters were at the chateau. One heard much about the habitual occupation of the French chateaux by our staffs during the war. On this particular occasion the Brigade had only two or three rooms at its disposal, and on many others would be licencees of only a small portion of such buildings. The ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... too the Living voices call In many a vulgar and habitual place, I catch a sight of lands beyond the wall, I see a strange ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... revelations, the breaks in habitual existence caused by the aspect of death, the touch of love, the flood of music, I never lived, that I remember, what you call a common natural day. All my days are touched by the supernatural, for I feel the pressure of hidden causes, and the presence, sometimes the communion, of unseen powers. ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... I said, "is an habitual violator of the Law. I am here to testify to that; so are my companions. We have the evidence of his law-breaking here," and I pointed to the bottles that we had ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... the house I caught sight of Eveena's figure among the party gathered on the roof. She had witnessed the interview, but her habitual and conscientious deference forbade her to ask a confidence not volunteered; and she seemed fully satisfied when, on the first occasion on which we were alone, I told her simply that the stranger belonged to the Zinta and had been recommended ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... of Eve's habitual self-command to prevent a smile, but she had the tact and discretion to receive Steadfast as an utter stranger. John Effingham bowed as haughtily as man can bow, and then it was whispered that he and Mr. Dodge were rival travellers. The distance of the former, coupled with an expression of countenance ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... answered in the dull inward voice now become habitual with him. "Why should I come in? Val, you know where my ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... room, he seemed to Andy to have grown five years older. His face was sad, and he had lost the brisk, cheerful manner which was habitual to him. ...
— Andy Grant's Pluck • Horatio Alger
... taught to abhor Vanity and Vice as monsters, and to discern the loveliness of Wisdom and Virtue; and by these means, and God's concurring grace, his knowledge was so augmented, and his native goodness so confirmed, that all became so habitual, as it was not easy to determine whether Nature or ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... needless, which to many a husband and father must have intensified the last struggle. These negroes had been systematically brutalized from childhood; they had been allowed no legalized or permanent marriage; they had beheld around them an habitual licentiousness, such as can scarcely exist except under slavery; some of them had seen their wives and sisters habitually polluted by the husbands and the brothers of these fair white women who were now absolutely in their power. Yet I have looked through the Virginia newspapers ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... consequently all the lesser degrees of a partial one, if entered upon before fifty. And this distemper I take to be the most obstinate, intractable, and disheartening one that can afflict the human machine; and is chiefly produced by intemperate cookery, with its necessary attendant, habitual luxury. ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... tenth of November, the eve of the fiesta. Emerging from its habitual monotony, the town has given itself over to unwonted activity in house, church, cockpit, and field. Windows are covered with banners and many-hued draperies. All space is filled with noise and music, and the air is saturated ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... to keep up in your mind and heart this habitual sense of religion by every means in your power. It will require from you considerable care and attention. The lively spirits natural to your time of life, and the thoughtless levity of some of the young men into whose society you will be thrown, will ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... the mind. These qualities are also none of the least of the many endearingments of the female character. But if that kind of sympathy and pleasing melancholy, which is familiar to us under distress, be much indulged, it becomes habitual, and takes such a hold of the mind as to absorb all the other affections, and unfit us for the duties and proper enjoyments of life. Resignation sinks into a kind of peevish discontent. I am far, however, from thinking there is the least danger ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the stocks and by flogging, was dwelt upon in a manner that left no room to doubt but that Joe had been a very great sufferer under his master's iron rule. As he described the brutal conduct of overseers in resorting to their habitual modes of torturing men, women, and children, it was too painful to listen to with composure, much more to ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still |
