"Perversely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... above referred to, and in view of his antecedents, the range of Carlyle's critical appreciation is wonderfully wide. Often perversely unfair to the majority of his English contemporaries, the scales seem to fall from his eyes in dealing with the great figures of other nations. The charity expressed in the saying that we should judge men, not by the number of their faults, but ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... to leave James in charge of his parish, and take a walking tour in Cornwall, and perversely enough, Louis's fancy fixed on joining him; and was much disappointed when Mrs. Frost proved, beyond dispute, that an ankle, which a little over haste or fatigue always rendered lame, would be an unfair drag upon a companion, and ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... commanders and engineers in the service. A graduate of West Point, who, earlier in the war, had the prejudices which were held by many other men against the negro. He has changed his views. He is convinced, and honorably follows his convictions, as do all men who are not stone blind or perversely wilful."[108] ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... weakness in comparison with other animals. They are endowed with natural weapons of defense—with horns, with tusks, with hoofs, and talons; but man has to depend on his superior sagacity. In all his encounters with these, his proper enemies, he resorts to stratagem; and when he perversely turns his hostility against his fellow man, he at first continues the same subtle ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the Coming of Christ considered as a doctrine, as a truth or a motive, is not intensely practical and all-compelling to Christian devotion and service, is either blindly and excuselessly ignorant of the Word of God or brutally and perversely guilty of denying a truth that flashes like lightning from one end of the Bible to the other and illuminates every hortative passage in the ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... considerable time to Charley's education, but I regret to say the results never reflected much credit upon my educational powers. As for writing—it was a trying business to Charley, in whose hand every pen appeared to become perversely animated, and to go wrong and crooked, and to stop and splash, and sidle into corners, like a saddle donkey. It was very odd to see what old letters Charley's young hands had made. They, so shrivelled and tottering; it, so plump and round. Yet Charley was uncommonly expert at other things, and had ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... none to suggest; which made his question seem to himself silly as well as brutal. "You've a great many friends that I don't know. You've a whole past from which I was perversely excluded." ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... only to finish the sentence, and the thing was done. But the tender passion perversely delights in raising obstacles to itself. A sudden timidity seized on Arnold exactly at the wrong moment. He stopped short, in the ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... Greeks hasten for safety in all directions. He was off ; he could no more return to retract his devious idiocy than he could make his horse fly to Athens. What was done was done. He could not mend it. And he felt like a man that had broken his own heart; perversely, childishly, stupidly broken his own heart. He was sure that Marjory was lost to him. No man could be degraded so publicly and resent it so crudely and still retain a Marjory. In his abasement from his defeat at the hands of Nora Black he had performed every imaginable ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... stole a few minutes out of the busy morning to motor to the Merrimans' apartment to bear the joy-bringing tidings personally to little Rose, whose eyes shone happily and whose lips smiled their thanks, but who—perversely, it seemed to him—gave Miss Merriman the reward which he ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... to see the Republic thus perversely occupying its energies. It is melancholy to see the great soldier becoming gradually more ardent for battle with Barneveld and Uytenbogaert than with Spinola and Bucquoy, against whom he had won so many imperishable ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... given only the sacred silence, the impassioned hymn, the wealth of poetry inspired by her spirit but not addressed to her. This poem, also, was written "once, and only once, and for one only." La Saisiaz recalls to us, perversely perhaps, poems of his in which no personal sorrow beats. The glory of the dawn and the mountain-peak—Saleve with its outlook over the snowy splendour of Mont Blanc—instils itself here into the mourner's mood, as, long before, a like scene had animated the young disciples of the Grammarian; ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Now Nature is always perversely ordering that men and women of just this disposition should become desperately enamored of their exact opposites. The man of rules and formulas and hours has his heart carried off by a gay, careless little chit, who never knows the day of the month, tears up the newspaper, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... was called after the celebrated navigator Cook. These two words when united soon became corrupted, and the magnificent sheet of water was designated 'the Cucumber Lake,' while its splendid cataract, known in ancient days by the Indians as the 'Pan-ook,' or 'the River's Leap,' is perversely called by way of variation 'the Cowcumber Falls;' can anything be conceived more vulgar or more vexatious, unless it be their awkward attempt at pronunciation, which converts Epaigwit into 'a pig's wit,' and ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Claude smiled perversely and took up his paper again. "I wonder how it will look to people here if you go off and leave ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... will not bear malice for that. He discriminates between the generosity of your intention towards the children, and what he probably mistook for a will to rule himself. He acted very perversely in going ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... unhappy if I did not. And I am—most perversely hoping for happiness. I have told myself that what I saw over John Graham's signature ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... are laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... pathetic testimony to the depth to which the iron of poverty, debt, judicial and governmental oppression had entered their souls. They had thought little and vaguely, but they had felt much and keenly, and it was evident the man who could voice their feelings, however partially, however perversely, and for his own ends, would be ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... all the doings of man. This moral unfitted young men for every sort of useful activity; it made Rome a gospel of anarchy and vice; the last place under the sun for educating the young; yet it was, by common consent, the only spot that the young — of either sex and every race — passionately, perversely, wickedly loved. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Worst Authors, and reprinted it in that delightful little book The Open Road. I have a notion that even FitzGerald's most learned executor was but dimly aware of its existence. For my part, at this time of the day, I prefer it to his Omar Khayyam—perversely, no doubt. In the year 1885 or thereabouts Omar, known only to a few, was a wonder and a treasure to last one's lifetime; but I confess that since a club took him up and feasted his memory with field-marshals and other irrelevant persons ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to say so. He had reached, of his own accord, the very point to which she long had hoped to bring him. But perversely, Norma did not quite like to have Wolf go off to Philadelphia with this unpalatable affirmative ringing in his ears. She looked down. A moment's courage now, and she would win everything—and more than everything!—to which Chris had ever urged ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... really so," Chia Lien rejoined, "it will after all do! But there's only one thing; all I was up to last night was simply to have some fun with you, but you obstinately and perversely wouldn't." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... affect their love. The jealousy was a part of their general discontent—a jealousy that would grow more intense as each remained frustrate and unhappy. Neither understood the forces at work within herself; each saw these perversely illustrated in the other's faults. In each case the cause of unhappiness was unsatisfied love, unsatisfied craving for love. It was more acute in Emmy's case, because she was older and because the love ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... and facts are another," snapped out the other perversely; "and as to your constructions, what construction can you put upon a rascal, but that a rascal ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... garnered and thence dispensed bounteously to all comers? It was useless, as he fretted and chafed at these untoward omissions, to urge in his own behalf that he did not know of the existence of the mill, and that the miller, being an ungenial and choleric man, might have perversely lent himself to resisting his demand for the custody of the young runaway. No, he told himself emphatically, and with good logic, too, the miller's acrimony rose from the fact of a stranger's discovery of the still and the danger of his introduction ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... was the end of all their plans, their dreams of conquest. There could be no doubt of his meaning in this letter: he had cut himself off from her, perversely, bitterly, in despair and deep humiliation. She did not doubt his ability to keep his word. There was something inexorable in him. She had felt it before—a sort of blind, self-torturing obstinacy which would keep him to his vow though he ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... prolonging those attentions into exclusive intimacy. And it was intimated, that, while his political principles were endangered by communicating with laymen of this description, he might also receive erroneous impressions in religion from the prelatic clergy, who so perversely laboured to set up the ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... steps to seize upon Amidon as he alighted. That gentleman and Madame le Claire, however, perversely got off at the other end of the car. As they walked down the platform, Florian met his first test, in the salutation of a young woman in a tailor-made gown, who nodded and smiled to him from a smart trap at a short distance from the station, where she seemed ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... carry in his portmanteau. I have had this opportunity more than once, for I have met him at Tours, at Nantes, at Bourges; and everywhere he is suggestive. But he has the defect that he is never pictorial, that he never by any chance makes an image, and that his style is perversely colourless for a man so fond of contemplation. His taste is often singularly false; it is the taste of the early years of the present century, the period that produced clocks surmounted with sentimental ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... of the excellent admonitions in this world—affected me perversely: it made me more restless than ever. I felt that I could not rest properly until I found out who wanted me to rest, and why. It opened indeed a limitless vista for ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... after a round of alarmed inquiry, Kenny perversely chose to be truthful about it, insisted that it was not accidental and refused to be sorry. Afterward he admitted to Garry, it was difficult to believe that one spontaneous ebullition of a nature not untemperamental could provoke so much discussion, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... expect, meet me fully half-way; and if, from their fitting standpoint, they must still 'censure me in their wisdom,' they have previously 'awakened their senses that they may the better judge.' Nor do I apprehend any more charges of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely harsh. Having hitherto done my utmost in the art to which my life is a devotion, I cannot engage to increase the effort; but I conceive that there may be helpful light, as well as reassuring warmth, in the attention and sympathy I gratefully ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... the house, developing a most violent temper and acquiring the vocabulary of the roughest market porter. My wilfulness was probably innate (nearly all the Vizetellys having had impulsive wills of their own), and my flowery language was picked up by perversely loitering to listen whenever there happened to be a street row in Church Lane, which I had to cross on my way to or from Kensington Gardens, my daily place of resort. At an early age I started bullying my younger brother, I defied my grandmother, ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... Sir,' Said Nurse, 'The Dean's man brings it down.' I could have kiss'd both him and her! 'Nurse, give him that, with half-a-crown.' How beat my heart, how paused my breath, When, with perversely fond delay, I broke the seal, that bore a wreath Of roses link'd with ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... he said. "It is the love charm which has worked perversely. Elsa, you are under a spell, poor woman; you do not know the truth. I gave you the philtre in your drinking water, and Foy, the traitor Foy, has reaped its fruits. Dear girl, shake yourself free from this delusion, it is I ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... particular. Outside the family nothing was suspected. Lawrence Newt was simply one of those incomprehensibly pleasant, eccentric, benevolent men, whose mercantile credit was as good as Jacob Van Boozenberg's, but who perversely went his own way. One of these ways led to all kinds of poor people's houses; and it was upon a visit to the widow of the clergyman to whom Boniface Newt had given eight dollars for writing a tract entitled "Indiscriminate Almsgiving a Crime," that Lawrence Newt had first met Amy Waring. ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... ponies forward at top speed but as they drew near Bud's favorite mount, which he had brought with him from Diamond X, the steed perversely kicked up his heels, wheeled about and was ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... love Edward Benden that way," said Tabitha, perversely misinterpreting her father-in-law's words. "I'll mix him a potion 'll help to cleanse his disorder, you'll see. Bitters be good for sick folks; and he's grievous sick. I met Mall a-coming; she saith he snapped her head ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... if you will light my candle and ring for Craddock to shut up, that I had better go to bed." Which her son does, but perversely abstains from giving the old lady any assistance to saying what is in her mind ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... Perversely Carl wheeled about and drove to the north. A conscience was a luxury for a rich man. Let the thing he had done, sired by the demon of the bottle and mothered by the hell-pit of his flaming passions, ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... perversely, and then, pulling out half a dozen more sprays, she threw them indiscriminately around, to Cameron, and several of the other ushers who were grouped about. Farnsworth made a slight effort to catch one, but he didn't really try, and the flower fell to the floor just beyond his reach. He shrugged ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... professionally of my knowledge of them. I had no knowledge—nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear it—they only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my confusion—perversely, I confess—by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... breadth of the building, was a row of angels, sainted personages, martyrs, and kings, sculptured in reddish stone. Being much corroded by the moist English atmosphere, during four or five hundred winters that they had stood there, these benign and majestic figures perversely put me in mind of the appearance of a sugar image, after a child has been holding it in his mouth. The venerable infant Time has ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... demonstrated, that the true line of intellectual descent in prose lies through Bede (who wrote in Latin, the 'universal language'), and not through the Blickling Homilies, or, AElfric, or the Saxon Chronicle. And I am sure that Freeman is perversely wrong when he laments as a 'great mistake' that the first Christian missionaries from Rome did not teach their converts to pray and give praise in the vernacular. The vernacular being what it was, these men did better to ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Japanese coast. And, at first sight, this seemed to be the Russian Admiral's intention, for, on the 4th of February, the fleet, having coaled, weighed and steamed out to sea, leaving only two battleships—the Sevastopol and Peresviet—in the harbour, where they had perversely stuck on the mud and refused to be got afloat again, for the moment at least. The Russians, twenty-six ships strong, inclusive of eleven destroyers, having cleared the roadstead, steamed slowly to the eastward, and were, that same day, sighted in the offing from Wei-hai-wei, apparently ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... in this way, were nearer together than ever, but with the effect of only adding to the vividness of that dire non-intelligence from which, all perversely and incalculably, her very beauty now appeared to gain relief. This made for him a pang and almost an anguish; the fear of her saying something yet again that would wretchedly prove how little he moved her perception. So his eyes, of remonstrant, of suppliant intention, met hers close, at ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... game, the former being content to accept something like thirty in a hundred. It was speedily very clear that Lavender's heart was not in the contest. He kept forgetting which ball he had been playing, missing easy shots, playing a perversely wrong game, and so forth. And yet his spirits were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... to," retorted Genevieve, perversely. "It's only so much the worse for the United States—that ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... silence coincident with dusk. The room slowly lost its sombre color and the sense of the confining walls; it became grey and apparently limitless; as monotonous, Lee Randon thought, as life. He was disturbed by a new feeling: that perversely, trivially, he had spoiled what should have been a priceless afternoon. It would never come back; what a fool he had been to waste in aimless talk any of the few ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... clicking of the major's tools was heard again among the machinery; the corporal and his party, suddenly restored to liberty, appeared in a violent hurry, and spun furiously across the platform. Quick as they were, however, the hitherto deliberate sentry on the other side now perversely showed himself to be quicker still. He disappeared like lightning into his own premises, the door closed smartly after him, the corporal and his privates dashed themselves headlong against it for ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... to have been such a smart journeyman blacksmith that he might, if Fate had not perversely placed a crown on his head, have earned a couple of louis every week by the making of locks and keys. Those who will may see the workshop where he employed many useful hours: Madame Elizabeth was at prayers meanwhile; the queen was making pleasant parties ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... suffered keenest was Celeste. She was awake; the tender little dream was gone; and bravely she accepted the fact. Never her agile fingers stumbled, and she played remarkably well, from Beethoven, Chopin, Grieg, Rubinstein, MacDowell. And Nora, perversely enough, sang ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... it—before it went to you—and so if you did not find as many obscurities as he did in it, the reason is—his merit and not mine. But don't believe him—no!—don't believe even Mr. Kenyon—whenever he says that I am perversely obscure. Unfortunately obscure, not perversely—that is quite a wrong word. And the last time he used it to me (and then, I assure you, another word still worse was with it) I begged him to confine them for the future to his jesting moods. Because, indeed, I am not in the very least ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... rolling the word under his tongue with an accent that was a clue to the psychology of the popular drama; and Granice, perversely, said to himself: "If I could only have struck that note I should have been running in six theatres ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... agreed. "But even without that—if, as you seem to think, the very desolation of that girlish figure had a sort of perversely seductive charm, making its way through his compassion to his senses (and everything is possible)—then such words could ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... so used to delighting in Lydia's understanding of his perversely obscure figures of speech that he turned about, surprised to hear no appreciative comment. She was looking ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... something to sit on?' jerked the helm a little to windward, felt it like a pulse for a moment, with a rapid look to windward, and dived below, whence he returned with a couple of cushions, which he threw to me. I felt perversely resentful of ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... accordingly on the Corso and wandered away to the grass-grown quarters delightfully free even from the possibility of a fellow-countryman. And so having set myself an example I have been keeping Carnival by strolling perversely along the silent circumference of Rome. I have doubtless lost a great deal. The Princess Margaret has occupied a balcony opposite the open space which leads into Via Condotti and, I believe, like the discreet princess she is, has dealt ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... drinks with bobbing sliced limes, purplish sloe gin and sirupy cordials. Bernard's face was dark and there was a splash of champagne on his dinner shirt. Louise was uncertainly humming a fragment of popular song. The table was littered with empty plates and glasses. Perversely it made August think of Emmy, his wife, and acute dread touched him at the ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... felt as if her very prayer was answered in the fact that Arthur Stanley had been appointed to some high and honorable post in Sicily, and they were not therefore likely yet to meet again. The wife of such a character as Morales could not have continued wretched unless perversely resolved so to be. But his very virtues, while they inspired the deepest reverence towards him, engendered some degree of fear. Could she really have loved him as—he believed she did—this feeling would not have had existence; but its foundation ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... within and without by such desperately prosaic and inartistic surroundings?" mused Van Berg. "It glistens like a lost jewel in an ash-barrel; or, more correctly, it is like an exquisite flower that nature has perversely made the outcome of a rank and poisonous vine. Of course the flower is poisonous also, and as soon as its first delicate bloom is over, will grow as rank and repulsive as the vine that bears it. Like produces like; and with such parentage, what hope is there for her? I am glad no one ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... be obliged to think of Ursula Dearmer's mother when you would much rather not think of her; to be profoundly and irrevocably angry with the guileless Commandant, whom at the moment you regard (it may be perversely) as the prime agent in this fatuous sacrifice of women's lives; to want to stop it and to be unable to stop it, and at the same time to feel a brute because you want to stop it—when they are enjoying the adventure—I ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... perceptions of it, and not that we were let down at once into a universe composed of external perceptions of matter, that were there beforehand and from all eternity—and in which we, the creatures of a day, are merely allowed to participate by the gracious Power to whom they really appertain? We, perversely philosophising, told ourselves the former of these alternatives; but our better nature, the convictions that we have received from God himself, assure us that the latter of them is the truth. The latter is by far the simpler, as well as by far the sublimer ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... Perversely enough the times when you did NOT see deer are more apt to remain vivid in your memory than the times when you did. I can still see distinctly sundry wide jump-marks where the animal I was tracking had evidently caught sight of me and lit out before I came up to ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... to me," he remarked perversely, "that windows will be a superfluous luxury. One can see out at a dozen places already; and as for ventilation, there is plenty of that through ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... year?" he quoted, with a certain early-morning grimness. At heart he was half inclined to believe Judith responsible for the vanished world; Judith, Judith—he was riding away from her as fast as his horse could gallop, and yet his thoughts perversely lingered about the cabin in ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... view of this provocative book. The triangle we have had tiresomely with us, but it is woman's love that is, perversely, always the hero. Hergesheimer studies the man, studies him not as will, or energy, or desire a-struggle with duty or morality, but merely as sex. Man's sex in love, man's sex dominated by Cytherea, is his theme. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... schemes stood blocked for the want of so vulgar a thing as money; such fate waits often on fine schemes, but surely never more perversely. Yet, I know not why, I was glad that she had none. I was a guinea the better of her; the amount was not large, but it served to keep me still her Providence, and that, I fear, is what man, in his vanity, loves to be in woman's eyes; he struts and ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... this world, out of our own family, in whose company I should be happier; but my papa won't part with me, I think; though I have secured my mamma in my interest; and I know Nancy would be glad of my absence, because the dear, perversely envious, thinks me more valued than she is; and yet, foolish girl, she don't consider, that if her envy be well grounded, I should return with more than double advantages to what I now have, improved ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... or Tall, Hairy Golden-rod or Bitterweed (S. rugosa), a perversely variable species, its hairy stem perhaps only a foot high, or, maybe, more than seven feet, its rough leaves broadly oval to lance-shaped, sharply saw-edged, few if any furnished with footstems, lifts a large, compound, and gracefully curved panicle, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... place—he embraced the majestic figure in the splendid sable cloak. Deb said, "Bother the proper thing!" and kissed him readily—charily, however, because conscious of teeth that were not Pennycuick teeth, and perversely objecting to the faultless costume. But, looking at the frock-coat, she perceived mourning-band upon the sleeve. Another encircled ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... and understanding and the like are gifts of the Holy Ghost, according as they are quickened by charity, which "dealeth not perversely" (1 Cor. 13:4). Consequently wisdom and understanding and the like cannot be used to evil purpose, in so far as they are gifts of the Holy Ghost. But, lest they depart from the perfection of charity, they assist one another. This is what ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... and of the benevolent individuals who have contributed to the establishment of this institution, is to secure a home and a school for such girls as may be presented to the magistrates of the state, appointed for that purpose, as vagrants, perversely obstinate, deprived of the control and culture of their natural guardians, or guilty of petty offences, and exposed to a life of ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... now, and you make me as jealous as possible!' she exclaimed perversely. 'I know you will never speak to any third person of me so warmly as you do to me ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... and speak their own minds with careless freedom. With this problem Washington was obliged suddenly to deal, both in ill success and good success, as well as in many attempts which came to nothing. Let us see how he solved it at the very outset, when everything went most perversely wrong. ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... apprehensions, however, soon passed away, and though he was fully convinced that Paul had not incurred any legal penalty, he continued to keep him in confinement, basely expecting to obtain a bribe for his liberation. When disappointed in this hope, he still perversely refused to set him at liberty. Thus, "after two years," when "Porcius Festus came into Felix' room," the ex-Procurator, "willing to shew the Jews a pleasure, left ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... light-haired, like the Rendalens, she will devote her life to obliterating in it, or transforming into useful activities, the destructive vigor of the paternal character. Thomas, when he is born, chooses a golden mean between these two extremes, and perversely makes his appearance as a red-haired, gray-eyed infant, in which both a Kurt and a Rendalen might have made comforting observations. He is accordingly permitted to live, and to become the hero of one of the most remarkable novels which has ever ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... sometimes joined. Drake summoned the two to a brief interview in which Thomas Doughty learned that his friend on land, frank, boyish and unassuming, was a different person from the Admiral of the Fleet. Yet as this impression faded, the brothers perversely went on encouraging discord between the gentlemen adventurers and the sailors, and foretelling ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... for this very hour to come, now perversely wished to sleep. A belated but beatific drowsiness seized him. He was only half-conscious of the noise that attended ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... should it? But he really is not ill, only getting feeble and obstinate. The man is in his dotage. I saw him yesterday, and he refused, most perversely, to sanction the marriage until some facts shall come to his knowledge, of which he is not quite certain at present. I told him the young people would not wait; and he replied, that if I give you my daughter now, I shall ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... innocently and interpreted so perversely! And yet the fierce and blind bewilderment with which Phoebe read or misread them was natural enough. She never doubted for a moment but that the bad woman who wrote them meant to offer herself to John. She was separated from her husband, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had taken up his abode was part library, part studio, and part a good many other things. A large picture—the canvas measured six feet—was being worked upon on this second morning after the young dog's arrival; and, as was perversely ruled, it was just here that an accident occurred that might well have been judged impossible. The easel, in fact, with its huge canvas, was overset, carrying many things into limbo as they fell; and with the fate that ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... so runs the act De Heretico comburendo, "of a certain new sect, damnably thinking of the faith of the sacraments of the church, and of the authority of the same, against the law of God and of the church, usurping the office of preaching, do perversely and maliciously, in divers places within the realm, preach and teach divers new doctrines, and wicked erroneous opinions, contrary to the faith and determination of Holy Church. And of such sect and wicked doctrines they make unlawful conventicles, ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... of it amused him perversely. He smiled—but it was closer to a leer—and lunged into his cabin. What he said to Sheila was no joke. He really did have a splitting headache. It had come on suddenly and it was like no headache he had ever known. It pulsed and throbbed and beat against his temples and held red hot ...
— A Place in the Sun • C.H. Thames
... says—or rather the very word "aims" is a wrong one; there is no longer any aim or effort, except the effort to feel which way the gentle guiding hand would have us to go; the only sorrow that is possible is when we rather perversely follow our ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in danger of being destroyed, because its exposition of them may be declared unsound and unfair, even when it represents them most faithfully and defends them most successfully. The most devoted efforts of its conductors are liable to be misconstrued, and perversely turned either against the Church or against the Review itself; its best works are infected with the suspicion with which it is regarded, and its merits become almost ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... "shut-up house," as it was variously termed, must not be confounded with the press-room at Newgate, where persons indicted for felony, and perversely refusing to plead, were pressed beneath weights till they complied with that necessary legal formality. From that historic cell the rendezvous press-room differed widely, both in nature and in use. ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... dealt with him so strangely? Why had she used him with such cruel caprice? Was ever a man treated so perversely by a woman who loved him? Miss Ludington could only shake her head as he poured out his complaints to her. Ida's contradictory behaviour was as much a puzzle to her as to him, and she deplored it scarcely less. ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... husband for always, his hand about hers in sign of perpetual possession and protection? What beneath all was he who had taken with her, thus publicly, the mighty oath of fidelity, "until death us do part"? Each had said it; each believed it; each desired it wholly. Perversely, here in the moment of her deepest feeling, intruded the consciousness of broken contracts, the waste of shattered purposes. Ah, but theirs was different! This absolute oath of fidelity one to the other, each with his own will and his own desire,—this ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... all, and even saw that my own dramatic sense of Mrs. Weguelin's dignity had perversely moved me to be more flippant than I actually felt; and I promised myself that a more chastened tone should forthwith redeem me from the false position ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... had a chance to do anything with the microphone. It seemed as if Worthington were staying, perversely, later than usual. At last, however, he left with ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... array of his writings. Although his earlier plays are in every way superior to his later, there is evidence even in the best of them of the author's infirmity of hand. From the first he shows himself idly or perversely or impotently prone to loosen his hold on character and story alike before his plot can be duly carried out or his conceptions adequately developed. His "pleasant Comedie of 'The Gentle Craft,'" first printed three years ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... will do next. Though the grey eyes kindled and the kindliness in them grew yet more kindly, though the soft embroideries in the delicate lawn were ruffled by a quicker breath, the natural perversity of her sex must needs answer perversely, and Ursula de Vesc blew up his siege trench ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... of science. The Holy Father enumerates also in this Encyclical the principal grounds of faith, and exhorts all bishops to oppose with all their zeal and learning those who, alleging progress as their motive, perversely endeavor to destroy religion by subjecting it to every man's individual judgment. He condemns indifference as regards religion, eloquently defends ecclesiastical celibacy, and, mindful that the Church is the teacher of the great ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... curious glances. The grand piano, under a low arch at the far-end of the room, was cunningly raised and placed as on and in a sounding board. All jollity and banter had ceased. Evidently, he thought, the Little Lady had a way with her and was accepted as a player of parts. And from this he was perversely prepared ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... confided in him not a little—as to my Bodleian reading, and the article on the "Poema del Cid" that I was writing. He confesses, however, that he did his best to draw me—examining the English girl as a new specimen for his psychological collection. As for me, I can only perversely remember a passing phrase of his to the effect that there was too much magenta in the dress of Englishwomen, and too much pepper in the English cuisine. From English cooking—which showed ill in the Oxford ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... girls had been a part of his life. What a sad and dark and endless void lay between that past and the present! He had no right even to dream of a beautiful woman like Ray Longstreth. That conviction, however, did not dispel her; indeed, it seemed perversely to make her grow more fascinating. Duane grew conscious of a strange, unaccountable hunger, a something that was like a ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... discontent. He inherited from his mother a haughty and violent temper, and profligate tendencies from his father. He was through life a spoiled child, whose main characteristic was willfulness. He liked to shock people by exaggerating his wickedness, or by perversely maintaining the wrong side of a dispute. But he had traits of bravery and generosity. Women loved him, and he made strong friends. There was a careless charm about him which fascinated natures as unlike each other ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... ignorance, ignorance of the ancient learning and opinions on which it rested and of which it was the necessary completion; secondly, from rationalistic speculations, which, leading men to discredit the truth of the doctrine, led them arbitrarily to deny its existence in the Scripture, making them perversely force the texts that state it and wilfully blink the texts that hint it. Whether this be a proper and sound method of proceeding in critical investigations any one may judge. To us it seems equally unmanly ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... of disorder, financial and otherwise, in building his house. When I look back to the conditions that existed on this bit of Lake-front three years ago—the frog-hollows, tiling, the wasting bluffs, excavation, thirty-five cords of boulders unloaded perversely—the mere enumeration chafes like grit upon surfaces still sore.... I have sadly neglected the study of house-building in this book. It would not do now. The fact is, I don't know how to build a house, but one learns much that one didn't know about men and money. I sat ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... 17. "No one would have suspected him to be a dishonest man, if he had not perversely chosen to assume a style which (as he himself confesses) the world ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... planters was not, at first sight, of a kind to secure the admirable objects indicated above by King James's correspondent. In fact, for hundreds of years, and with the occasional interruptions of humanity or curiosity, the Boeothics were hunted to extinction and perversely disappeared, without, it must be supposed, having attained to the "civill and regular kinde of life" which was to ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... neighbors thought it would be only a little shower the people of Johnstown were yet more foolish. The railroad officials had repeatedly told them that the dam threatened destruction. They still perversely lulled themselves into a false security. The blow came, when it did, like a flash. It was as if the heavens had fallen in liquid fury upon the earth. It was as if ocean itself had been precipitated into an abyss. The slow but inexorable march of the mightiest glacier of the Alps, though comparable, ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... of the presence of Castor and Pollux, 'fratres Helenae, lucida sidera,' and held that its appearance was an omen of safety, as everybody who has read the 'Lays of Ancient Rome' must surely remember. The modern name, St. Elmo's fire, is itself a curiously twisted and perversely Christianised reminiscence of the great twin brethren; for St. Elmo is merely a corruption of Helena, made masculine and canonised by the grateful sailors. It was as Helen's brothers that they best knew the Dioscuri ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... principle to human animals, and I remained for another year in complete ignorance of the structure of woman's sexual organs and of the intercourse between man and woman. In the meantime I cultivated my fancies of intercourse with animals, often still perversely imagining myself taking the part of the female; and the notion of such relationships gradually became so familiar as to seem possible and desirable. This is especially significant in view ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... uncertain way in which I (an author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common letter into sane prose.... Ten thousand times I have confessed to you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember in any comprehensive way what I have read. I can vehemently applaud, or perversely stickle, at parts; but I cannot grasp at a whole. This infirmity (which is nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader, however partial, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... spiritless being. Public affairs were in the hands of his private advisers, of whom the most influential were the so-called cabinet-secretaries, Lombard and Beyme, men credulously anxious for the goodwill of France, and perversely blind to the native force and worth which still existed in the Prussian Monarchy. [102] Instead of declaring the entry of the French into Hanover to be absolutely incompatible with the safety of the other North ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... at once, his jealousy, as it had been the shadow of his love, presented him with the complement, with the converse of that new smile with which she had greeted him that very evening,—with which, now, perversely, she was mocking Swann while she tendered her love to another —of that lowering of her head, but lowered now to fall on other lips, and (but bestowed upon a stranger) of all the marks of affection that she had shewn to him. And ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... opinion, but that social changes are imminent appears to be almost certain. Though these changes cannot be prevented, possibly they may, to a degree, be guided, as Washington guided the changes of 1789. To resist them perversely, as they were resisted at the Chicago Convention of 1912, can only make the catastrophe, when it comes, as overwhelming as was the consequent defeat ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... the stamper battery, which is virtually a pestle and mortar on a large scale. Why we adhere to this form of pulverising machine is that, though somewhat wasteful of power, it is easily understood, its wearing parts are cheaply and expeditiously replaced, and it is so strong that even the most perversely stupid workman cannot easily break it or ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... is curiously and perversely elaborate. 'Tis a choking subject, and therefore the reader is directed to the structure of it. See you? and was this a fourteener to be rejected by a trumpery annual? forsooth, 'twould shock all mothers; and may all mothers, who would so be shocked, bed dom'd! as if mothers were ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... drawn by other reformers) that these inequalities are the work of wicked and unscrupulous men. Financial or political pirates of one kind or another have been preying on the guileless public, and by means of their aggressions have perversely violated the supreme law of equal rights. These men must be exposed; they must be denounced as enemies of the people; they must be held up to public execration and scorn; they must become the objects of a righteous ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... permitted himself this qualification of the unfortunate persons she so perversely cherished, he repented of his roughness—and partly because he expected a flash from her. But it was one of her finest sides that she sometimes flashed with a mere mild glow. "I don't see why you don't make out a little more that if we avoid stupidity we may do all. We ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... acquaintances; and at the end of the evening—such an evening!—Woodville felt as if they had barely been introduced, or had met, accidentally, in a railway train. Yet he courted these tete-a-tete as one perversely courts a certain kind of suffering. At least, Sir James talked on the only interesting subject, and Woodville was anxious to know everything about his rivals; for, though he believed in Sylvia's affection, he was subject to acute, almost ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... service, and to secure to himself the happiness which results from sobered fancy, a generous heart, and an approving conscience,—here was Ernest Maltravers, backed, too, by the appliances and gifts of birth and fortune, perversely shutting up genius, life, and soul in their own thorny leaves, and refusing to serve the fools and rascals who were formed from the same clay, and gifted by the same God. Morbid and morose philosophy, begot by a proud ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... shone with inward excitement and she carried her head proudly, but her face was white. And he, sensible that she had suddenly hardened towards him and strove, he could not divine why, to keep him at arm's length, turned perversely teasing again. He would not await a more convenient season. Here and now he would satisfy his curiosity—and at her expense—regarding one at least of the queer riddles Deadham Hard had ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... know but I should like it! What harm could it do? I'm not soluble in water—rain won't melt me away! I think upon the whole I rather prefer being caught in the storm," said Cap, perversely. ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... observed. They would have, it seems, very much to the disedification of the English esquire, "their minstrels and principal servants sit at the same table and eat from the same dish." The interpreters employed all their eloquence in vain to dissuade them from this lewd habit, which they perversely called "a praiseworthy custom," till at last, to get rid of importunities, they consented to have it ordered otherwise, during their stay ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... the girl had missed, and had come back to look for? Some trifle, no doubt, which she had not cared to lose, and yet had not wished to leave behind. He failed to find anything in the search, which he could not make very thorough, and he was going guiltily out when his eye fell upon an envelope, perversely fallen beside the door and almost indiscernible against the white paint, with the ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... tiresome piece of prudence, I don't," said Rose perversely. "And what's more, I won't, as Uncle Luke has ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... malice, gain, or pride, To a compliance with the thriving side; Not to take arms for love of change, or spite, But only to maintain afflicted right; Not to die vainly in pursuit of fame, Perversely seeking after voice and name; Is to resolve, fight, die, as martyrs do, And thus did ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debts of honour in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description and battery attorneys, to foment discord, backing their clients up to a quarrel, and then knocking their heads together; no poor relations, everlastingly occupying the spare bed-chamber, and diminishing ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... Moors of the South and the stubborn Jews of Toledo nearer home. Now his eyes were open to the perils that beset the Church from sectaries who from within were for casting off her divine authority. Wretches who questioned the very creeds and rejected the Sacraments, yet perversely insisted that they were Christian men and women, with a clearer insight into Gospel mysteries than Bishops and Cardinals or the Holy Father himself. Here was heresy rampant, and immortal souls, all astray, beguiled by evil men and deceivers, "whose word doth eat as doth ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... of golfers whom the rain had driven from the links to the shelter of the Oakwood Club was Katherine. She had gone once around the short course and perversely enough her score was unusually good; but she could not get her mind off the more exciting game which she knew must be in progress along the railway line west of the river. Altogether she welcomed the rain, and was ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... unable to follow up the author's hint I of course felt it a point of honour not to make use professionally of my knowledge of them. I HAD no knowledge—nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear it—they only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my confusion—perversely, I allow—by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... was because she seemed to be loved by man and brute alike that a big man of her own town, whose body, big as it was, was yet too small for his heart and from whose brain things went off at queer angles, always christened her perversely ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... further fact; forgotten also because we moderns forget that there is a female point of view. The woman's wisdom stands partly, not only for a wholesome hesitation about punishment, but even for a wholesome hesitation about absolute rules. There was something feminine and perversely true in that phrase of Wilde's, that people should not be treated as the rule, but all of them as exceptions. Made by a man the remark was a little effeminate; for Wilde did lack the masculine power of dogma and of democratic cooperation. But ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... Aylesbury Education Committee and the Oxford Union: to Scotland for Rectorial Campaigns: dinners at the Inner Temple and the Philosophical Society: Detection Club dinners and Mock Trials, at one of which he was Defendant on the charge of "perversely preferring ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... I was free to leave the detention camp I perversely felt a desire to remain. Now that I was free, the sight of all the other passengers kicking each other's heels and being herded by Tommies gave me a feeling of infinite pleasure. I tried to express this ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis |
