"Perversity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the fellow had gone wrong more through ignorance than perversity, and that it was a stubbornness of spirit rather than a badness of heart that kept him from going right. He sometimes wondered whether it was not more a baffled wish to be justified in his own esteem ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... see them grope their way to their mother's side, and turning their sightless eyes toward her, ask, in childish accents,—'Mamma, what made the naughty man put out our eyes?' Well, the woman, with a singular perversity of human nature, liked me, and commenced to place herself under my protection. She could be of service to me; but her children were likely to prove a burden—and so I got ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... enough by report of the French Court to cause her to shrink instinctively, as from a repulsive insect, at the name of the mistress of Louis XV. She trembled at the thought of Angelique's infatuation, or perversity, in suffering herself to be attracted by the glitter of the vices ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... in a carriage," said the doctor, who for some unaccountable reason had taken a fit of perversity,—"I understand he was in ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... was something elusive about Mrs. Oke, which made it next to impossible to speak seriously with her; and besides, I was by no means sure that any interference on my part would not merely animate her perversity. ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... opinion will no longer be feared, and an olive crown will be more valued than a purple mantle. Impotence and perversity alone have recourse to false and paltry semblance, and individuals as well as nations who lend to reality the support of appearance, or to the aesthetic appearance the support of reality, show their moral unworthiness and their aesthetical impotence. Therefore, a short and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... a pregnant pause. Six months: conception of the idea to delivery of finished product; six months, working together, fighting men, nature, and the perversity of inanimate objects—all of this now ...
— Question of Comfort • Les Collins
... Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, which God hath given to make known unto his servants those things which are shortly to be; and hath signified, sending by his angel,... I exorcise you, ye angels of untold perversity! ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... some reasons of his own, perhaps constrained thereto by necessity, he had given the old man an asylum for his age and infirmity: but while thus giving him shelter he considered him a burden, and from mere perversity of mind refused him all such consolations as were possible to his afflicted state, mewed him up as a prisoner, cut him off from the companionship ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... evening. It was a theatre where free farcical pieces were produced, and on its walls were posted huge portraits of its "star," a carroty wench with a long flat figure, destitute of all womanliness, and seemingly symbolical of perversity. Passers-by stopped to gaze at the bills, the vilest remarks were heard, and Mathieu remembered that the Seguins and Santerre were inside the house, laughing at the piece, which was of so filthy a nature that the spectators at the dress ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... blow out their brains forthwith, if they refused. It seems strange that men guilty of such crimes should make use of the sign of the cross to confirm their oaths, and call God especially to witness their misdeeds. What extraordinary perversity such is of reason! Yes; but are not those we mix with every day guilty of similar wickedness and madness, when in their common conversation they call on the name of the most high God to witness to some act of folly, if not of vice, of extravagance, ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... her knees and was praying aloud: praying to the Virgin with sighs and sobs and all her soul: wrestling so in prayer with a dead saint as by a strange perversity men cannot or will not wrestle with Him, who alone can hear a million prayers at once from a million different places,—can realize and be touched with a sense of all man's infirmities in a way no single saint with his partial experience of them can realize and be touched by them; who unasked ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... either ez our brother or ez a beast,—and Dimocrisy, with that liberality wich hez always distinguished it, gives every man his choice wich theory to take,—his condition is servitood. But he, with a cussidness, a perversity wich I never cood understand, flies into the face uv the Divine decree, flies into the face uv science, and asserts his independence! He turned agin them ez hed fostered him; turned agin, in many instances, ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... at it, or he had looked at it while walking about; but he had only looked at it. It was as far as he could go. Now that to go farther had become what he called a duty the perversity of his nerves was such that they refused. It was like him. He could always do the forbidden, the dare-devil, the crazily mad; but when it came to the reasonable and straightforward something in him balked. Here he was at what should have been the beginning of the end, and the demon which at another ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... a sharp eye to her baggage, for she will not leave my side. I tried to flatter her by saying that the true order of things was reversed,—her sex being entitled to that name and position, and mine to the relation she now bore to me. She had the perversity to consider this a twit, and gave me a stinging reply, which I will not repeat to you, because you are a woman likewise, and would enjoy it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... make him alter his resolve by addressing him in the following words fraught with humility: 'Though residing in this terrible crematorium, thou desirest yet to live in such purity of behaviour. Is not this a perversity of understanding on thy part, since thou art by nature an eater of carrion? Be thou our like. All of us will give thee food. Eat that which ought always to be thy food, abandoning such purity of conduct.' Hearing these words of theirs, the jackal replied unto them, with rapt attention, in these ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... their children. Their attempts, however, made me not to swerve either to the right hand or to the left, although to see and feel so sorely their injustice and ingratitude made me often lament the frailty, the perversity, and sinfulness of our fallen nature. I persevered in an onward course, determined, as the steward and servant of my Master, to do them good whether they would have it or not. And I have so strove, so labored, to the last. The ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... solution has been applied to various difficulties which have been discovered or invented in the text by the care or the perversity of recent commentators, whose principle of explanation is easier to abuse than to use with any likelihood of profit. It is at least simple enough for the simplest of critics to apply or misapply: whenever they see or suspect an inequality or an incongruity ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... had her trunk packed and her simple belongings gathered up. She knew that Peabody was fully aware of her intention to leave, but, as her board was paid for nearly a week in advance, he could make no possible objection. It was sheer perversity, she decided, that kept him from mentioning ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... hardly refrain from giving public utterance to the anathemas that burned on my tongue, when the wretched animal, who seemed to have an insane attraction to me, floundered about my legs as I moved, or flapped his stump tail under my chair when I sat still. Dora alone, with strange perversity, persisted in ignoring his bad habits, his vulgar manners, his uselessness, his ugliness, and his impudence, and set me at defiance when I objected to him, by pressing him in her beautiful arms—happy cur that he was!—and laying her soft cheek against ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... till poor Lady Diana, with a fagged miserable face, came to my room at night, and I called Dermot in. And then she told us how the child had "seemed to bear everything most beautifully," and had never given way. I believe it was from that grain of perversity in Viola's high-spirited nature, as well as the having grown up without confidence towards her mother, which forbade her to mourn visibly among unsympathising watchers; and when her hope was gone led her in her dull despair to do as they pleased, ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on this subject is not without some reason, severe though it certainly is; it is there death to marry a girl without the consent of her friends. The instances in which this occurs are rare; yet there are those who, through pride and perversity, choose to be miserable in their own way rather than happy in one proposed, or sanctioned even, by others. Young women are sometimes disinterested in the indulgence of a passion, for they do it to their own injury, and to the sorrow of their relatives. Because ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... away towards the window, whence were to be seen the stretch of the lawn and the park-meadows beyond. I believe that with a little more coaxing she would have pardoned me, but at the instant, by another stroke of perversity, a small figure sauntered across the sunny fields. The fairest ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... out against God. We know as well as we know anything, that in doing this and in not doing that we are going every day right in the teeth both of God's law and God's grace; and yet in the sheer obstinacy and perversity of our heart we still go on in what we know quite well to be the suicide of our souls. We are told by our minister to do this and not to do that; to begin to do this at this new year and to break off from doing that; but, partly through obstinacy towards him, reinforced by a deeper and ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... them to St. Mark's Church, though they had told him how beautifully High Church it was; how it had a high altar and candles, almost like the Romanists, only that it was not at all Romish, but entirely and truly Catholic! Was ever such like woful perversity? When they had just got a brother to be proud of, who could take them to theatres, concerts, balls, operas, and everywhere, for him to go and degenerate into an old solemn Presbyterian minister! It would be bearable, if he must be a minister, if he would only be a High ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... the civilization of the Middle Ages was fixed and unprogressive is a mere literary superstition, and its origin is to be found in the ignorance and perversity of the men of the Renaissance; and hardly less, it must be added, in the foolishness of many of the conceptions of ...
— Progress and History • Various
... little Hetty's future in this world decided. Before her brother had spoken, the lady of Amber Hill had had no intention of keeping Hetty for more than a week in her house. And now she felt bound (by the laws of human perversity) to take her and bring her up as her ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... experienced coquette, who has undertaken to seduce a man, which she would prefer,—to be convicted, in presence of the man whom she is engaged in conquering, of falsehood, perversity, cruelty, or to appear before him in an ill-fitting dress, or a dress of an unbecoming color. She will prefer the first alternative. She knows very well that we simply lie when we talk of our elevated sentiments, that we seek only ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... show the perversity of the sex," continued Barbemouche, "that same day I saw another man kiss her, and she gave him back two ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the world in order; those possessed of extreme maliciousness turn the world into disorder. Purity, intelligence, spirituality and subtlety constitute the vital spirit of right which pervades heaven and earth, and the persons gifted with benevolence are its natural fruit. Malignity and perversity constitute the spirit of evil, which permeates heaven and earth, and malicious persons are affected by its influence. The days of perpetual happiness and eminent good fortune, and the era of perfect peace and tranquility, which ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the ingratitude and indignant at the perversity of a prince for whom he had done so much, he ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... itself, and Aholibah remained in the arid and flavourless town. Her intimate friends had weeks earlier gone to Trouville, to Dinard, to Ostende, to Hombourg, even as far as Brighton; but she lingered, seemingly from perversity. She came regularly to the cafe about eleven, always in company with her Prince, and was untiringly served by Ambroise. He was rewarded for his fidelity with many valuable tips and latterly with gifts—for on being ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... clearly demonstrated by the fact of its frequent recrudescence, or rather, the natural renewal of the organ after surgical removal—a spontaneous physiological organic mutiny, as it were, supported by its lymphatic glandular dependents, against the reckless ignorance of medical practitioners and the perversity of the ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... fully agree with Mr. Hallam in reprobating their treatment of Laud. For the individual, indeed, we entertain a more unmitigated contempt than, for any other character in our history. The fondness with which a portion of the church regards his memory, can be compared only to that perversity of affection which sometimes leads a mother to select the monster or the idiot of the family as the object of her especial favour, Mr. Hallam has incidentally observed, that, in the correspondence of Laud with Strafford, there are no indications of a sense of duty towards God ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... perverse people. In Scotland, according to one Wesleyan minister,[51] the miners read Adam Smith. In Northumberland, with still greater perversity, they preferred Plato. 'A translation of Plato's Ideal Republic is much read among those classes, principally for the socialism and unionism it contains; in pure ignorance, of course, that Plato himself subsequently modified his principles and that ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... answer these questions in the affirmative, then you will be glad of a hint as to the method of dealing with your friends who have a touch of cerebral strabismus, or are liable to occasional paroxysms of perversity. Let them have their head. Get them talking on subjects that interest them. As a rule, nothing is more likely to serve this purpose than letting them talk about themselves; if authors, about their writings; if artists, about their pictures or statues; and generally ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... him; the rest of the village disliked and distrusted him; but she, with a strange perversity, loved him as it seldom falls to the lot of man to be loved—with her whole heart ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... ill-luck gave me a night of misery. I was so afraid lest you might meet the Duke, whose perversity I know too well. What made Vendramin let your ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... region is broad and deep, with a stout neck, we know the great force and activity of the animal nature, and unless the upper surface of the brain is well developed all over, we may expect some excess in the way of violence, temper, selfishness, perversity, sensuality, dishonesty, avarice, rudeness of manners, moral insensibility, slander, contentiousness, jealousy, envy, revenge, or some other form of wickedness, according ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... heathen poet whose words these are, ("We move towards what is forbidden"), describes well the perversity and the imbecility of our nature. Vid Ovid Amor. lib. iii. eleg. 4 ver. 17 Met. ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... soul must have been wearied with the perversity of the "dead foul winds" (as he described his bitter fate to Ball) that prevented him from piercing the Straits of Gibraltar against the continuous easterly current that runs from the Atlantic and spreads far ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... rung of the ladder, and was regularly signed as a member of the crew of the Island Princess, bound for Canton with a cargo of woolen goods and ginseng. There was much that puzzled me aboard-ship—the discontent of the second mate, the perversity of the man Kipping (others besides myself had seen that wink), and a certain undercurrent of pessimism. But although I was separated a long, long way from my old friends in the cabin, I felt that in Bill Hayden I had found a friend of a sort; then, as I began my first real ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... intimate a union could never have been formed among previously discordant allies but for their overmastering fear of Napoleon. Such a treaty was without parallel in European history; and the stringency of its clauses serves as the measure of the prowess and perversity of the French Emperor. It is puerile to say, as Mollien does, that England bribed the allies to this last effort. Experiences of the last months had shown them that peace could not be durable as ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... progressed in her insidious designs. For that Miss Chipchase, under her aunt's guidance, was not doing her best to entangle Lionel Beauchamp in her toils, no power could have persuaded Lady Mary. Mrs. Wriothesley was one of the few people who thoroughly understood the whimsical perversity of Mr. Cottrell's character, and she shrewdly suspected, as was indeed the case, that he had no more heard of that hack than that he ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... out in two vehicles. Old Mr. Giles drove one and the "hired man" the other. Clytie, despite her best endeavours to go in company with Bond, found herself associated with Abner, and a spirit of unchristian perversity took complete possession ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... beyond the edges and projecting around hundreds and hundreds of miles over the neighboring states. She can't hold a tenth part of her weather. You can see cracks all about where she has strained herself trying to do it. I could speak volumes about the inhuman perversity of the New England weather, but I will give but a single specimen. I like to hear rain on a tin roof. So I covered part of my roof with tin, with an eye to that luxury. Well, sir, do you think it ever rains on that tin? No, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a certain human perversity in this, for the pirate was unquestionably a bad man—at his best, or worst—considering his surroundings and conditions,—undoubtedly the worst man that ever lived. There is little to soften the dark yet glowing picture of his exploits. But again, it must ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... cat on the door-step. It was then that Leo said, "Let us stop singing and making jokes." And it was then that the Girl said, "No." But she did not know why she said "No" so energetically. Leo maintained that it was perversity, till she herself, at the end of a dusty day, made the same suggestion to him, and he said, "Most certainly not!" and they quarrelled miserably between the hedgerows, forgetting the meaning of the stars above them. Other singers and other talkers sprang up in the course ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... in some confusion said "I wish much to apologize to Miss Beverley, before her departure, for the very gross mistake of which I have been guilty. I know not if it is possible she can pardon me, and I hardly know myself by what perversity and blindness I persisted so long ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... birth and history. I say this will be involved, because I am sure that the warm affections of Mademoiselle Chalet will never allow of the concealment of her maternal relations, and that her present religious perversity (if you will excuse the word) will not admit of further deceits. I tremble to think of the possible consequences to Adele, and query very much in my own mind, if her present blissful ignorance be not better than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... bus so near him gave him fresh hope, and with it fresh strength. It seemed a kind of perversity of fate that he should have reached a point ordinarily within earshot, and yet could not make ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... assumed, of course, that it was a real child in the water, and they wasted no time in marvelling as to why it should continue to ride blithely on top of the waves. They simply put forth every effort to reach the white object, whatever it might be, but the perversity of wind and ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... catastrophe. With the mad perversity of his kind, her sled deer, suddenly turning from his position beside the sled, whirled about in a wide, sweeping circle which threatened to overturn her sled and leave her alone, ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... whose intent was plainly to get drunk, boasted of his doings on either side of the line. He hinted that he had put more than one Mexican out of the way—and he slapped Flores on the back—and Flores laughed. He spoke of raids on the horse-herds of white men, and through some queer perversity inspired in his drink, openly asserted that he was the "slickest hoss-thief in Arizona," turning to Pete ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... said to himself that he had completely resigned her, since with the perversity of a Desdemona she had not affected a proposed match that was clearly suitable and according to nature; he could not yet be quite passive under the idea of her engagement to Mr. Casaubon. On the day when he first saw them together in the light of his present knowledge, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... parlor at the Melbourne, pompously furnished, and bare of all things that make a room reflective of personality, Mrs. Swink and her daughter were awaiting me on my arrival, and the moment I met the former all the perversity of which I am possessed rose up within me, and for the latter I was conscious of sympathy, based on nothing save intuitive antipathy to her mother. Inwardly I warned myself to behave, but I wasn't sure I ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... interesting in them! GENTLEMEN she must allow them—but of such an old-fashioned type as to be gentlemen but by courtesy—not gentlemen in the world's count! She was of the world; they of the north of Scotland! All day Mercy had been on their side and against her! It might be from sheer perversity, but she had never been like that before! She must take care she did not make a fool of herself! It might end in some unhappiness to the young goose! Assuredly neither her father nor mother would countenance the thing! She must throw herself into the breach! ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... art not," said Don Quixote; "for not only art thou not sage silence, but thou art pestilent prate and perversity; still I would like to know what three proverbs have just now come into thy memory, for I have been turning over mine own—and it is a good ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... teacher nor the elevator of the people. All over the world he has been the ally of oppression and darkness, he has hindered and cramped social and intellectual progress. And yet, in spite of all this, there the office stands, and wherever men go, by some strange perversity they take with them this idea, and choose from among themselves those who, being endowed with some sort of ceremonial and symbolic purity, shall discharge for their brethren the double office of representing them before God, of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and this was particularly the case on this day, he seemed to be discovering nothing but the incurable perversity and militancy of human nature. It was a day under an east wind, when a steely-blue sky full of colourless light filled a stiff-necked world with whitish high lights and inky shadows. These bright harsh days of barometric high pressure in England ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... There is a certain perversity in this furious contemplation of stupidity, this fanatical insistence on the exasperating attraction of the sordid and the disagreeable; and it is by such stages that we come to A Rebours. But on the way we have to note a volume of Croquis Parisiens ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... of the journey the pup had strained a good deal at the leash, and had displayed a strong desire to return to its former master, as well as a powerful objection to follow its new one. It had also, with that perversity of spirit not uncommon in youth, exhibited a proneness to advance on the other side of bushes and trees from its companion, thus necessitating frequent halts and numerous disentanglements. On all of these occasions Bladud had remonstrated ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... were talking declared that he would not take us across for less than $3.50. We were on the point of yielding to necessity, when a rival appeared and offered to do the work for $2.50. Such is human perversity that we now insisted that he must go for $2.00, which he finally agreed to do. Hurrying away to get his canoe, he soon appeared, and our hearts sank. The man who had demanded $3.50 had a large, well-built boat, which should ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... wrath as a child's tantrum, and let him do most of the talking as well as the business. And Beecher's great welling heart touched a side of Pond's nature that few knew existed at all—a side that he masked with harshness; for, in spite of his perversity, Pond had his virtues—he was simple as a child, and so ingenuous that deception with him was impossible. He could not tell a lie so you would ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... ill-fitting black clothes approached Moonson's table, interrupting his reflections with thoughts that seemed designed to disturb and distract him out of sheer perversity. So even here there were flies in every ointment, and no dream ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... The perversity in attaching through preconceived views a wrong significance to signs is illustrated by an anecdote found in several versions and in several languages, but repeated as a veritable Scotch legend by Duncan Anderson, esq., Principal of ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... performance at the Old Assembly Rooms, where, owing to the faulty arrangement of the stage, hardly a word could be heard, to the dissatisfaction of the audience. The stage, it seems, was put too far behind the proscenium, "owing to the headstrong perversity of Dickens, who never forgave the Bath people." Charles Knight, it was said, remonstrated, but in vain. Boz, however, was not a man to indulge in such feelings. In "Bleak ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... they almost lost their minds. And yet the fact that they cherished hatred or envy in their hearts, that they had cursed before or after Mass, that they had intentionally lied or slandered, all this moved them not at all. Whence this perversity? From the "traditions of men who turn from the truth," [Tit. 1:14] as the Apostle says. Because we have neglected to offer God a confession of true sins, He has given us up to our reprobate sense, [Rom. 1:24] so that we delude ourselves with fictitious sins and deprive ourselves ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... dream, dream, and absolutely ignore homage that would turn another girl's head. I wish she were well married, or—I had almost said ill married! anything is better than the convent for my only surviving child! If she will not accept an earl or a baronet, why cannot her perversity take the form of any other girl's perversity? Why can she not fall in love with some penniless younger son, or some dissipated captain in a marching regiment? I am sure even under such circumstances I should not perform the part of the 'cruel ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... great pity!—And still I fancy that the stone in the work was a trifle longer. In such a case it is almost folly and perversity to doubt, and yet I feel—and yet I ask myself: Is this really the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and all snow, when you come to that," Thorpe insisted, with jocose perversity. "You're on mountains yourself, all ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... male, clad in expensive garments, and wearing a derby hat and too much jewellery, became somehow personified in this tirade. I was led to picture him a residuary legatee who had never done a stroke of work in his life, and believed that no one else ever did except from a sportive perversity. I was made to hear him tell her that she, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, was leading the ideal life on her country place; and, by Jove! he often thought of doing the same thing himself—get a nice ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... allowed to be infallible, I see no reason why the same privilege should not be extended to woman;—but times have changed; and since the happy age of credulity is past, leave the opinions of men to their natural perversity—their actions are the best test of their faith. Instead then of a belief in your infallibility, endeavour to enforce implicit submission to your authority. This will give you infinitely less trouble, and will answer ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... see the effect of antiquity? Not in language, not in the imitation of something or other, and not in perversity and waywardness, to which uses the French have turned it. Our museums are gradually becoming filled up: I always experience a sensation of disgust when I see naked statues in the Greek style in ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... with an eye for Gavin, kept carefully in the crowd. But Gavin had turned and gone away at once with the other boys who were unattached. And with the perversity of a woman's mind Christina felt a little hurt. She wondered why he seemed to have stopped trying for her favour. Was it because he was discouraged, or because he did not care? She was so far from understanding Gavin that she did not guess ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... imagined with what feelings Kit heard this colloquy. He had no confidence in the humanity of his captors, and considered them, Dick Hayden in particular, as capable of anything. He did not dare to remonstrate lest in a spirit of perversity the two ...
— The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus • Horatio Alger Jr.
... freaks of perversity which are so hard to account for, Dicky's spirits went up higher every moment, and when the doctor stood over him and repeated the question a third time, he almost, I believe, enjoyed himself. He had never ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... their misery; but attribute their vices to the imperfection of their natures, and their unhappiness to the anger of the gods. They offer to heaven vows, sacrifices, and presents, to obtain the end of sufferings, which in reality, are attributable only to the negligence, ignorance, and perversity of their guides, to the folly of their customs, and above all, to the general want of knowledge. Let men's minds be filled with true ideas; let their reason be cultivated; and there will be no need of opposing to the passions, ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... Finally, when this enslaved child, this little tyrant, full of learning and devoid of sense, enfeebled alike in mind and body, is cast upon the world, he there by his unfitness, by his pride, and by all his vices, makes us deplore human wretchedness and perversity. We deceive ourselves; this is the man our whims have created. Nature makes men by a ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... word strikes oddly on our ears, but every stage of the passion of Phedre is indeed reasonable, logical, as only a French poet, since the Greeks themselves, could make it. The passion itself is an abnormal, an insane thing, and that passion comes to us with all its force and all its perversity; but the words in which it is expressed are never extravagant, they are always clear, simple, temperate, perfectly precise and explicit. The art is an art exquisitely balanced between the conventional ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... and self-confident, and the round fur cap that he wore was cocked ever so slightly to one side. I did not want to see him, but I was caught. I fancied that he knew very well that I wanted to escape, and that now, for sheer perversity, he would see that I did not. Indeed, he caught my arm and drew me out of the Market. We passed ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... see this melancholy perversity of conduct exemplified in every little coterie and school ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... complain of such attacks and misrepresentations. As a matter of fact, no nation washes so much of its dirty linen in the face of the whole world as does our own; and, what is worse, there is washed in our country, with much noise and perversity, a great deal of linen which is not dirty. Many demagogues and some "reformers" are always doing this. There is in America a certain class of excellent people who see nothing but the scum on the surface of the pot; nothing but the worst things thrown to the surface in the ebullition ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... with the best will in the world, it was a merely pecuniary assistance which he could give her, half angry with himself the while that his indolent good nature (it appeared to him little else) forbade him to cast back at her what seemed a curious ingratitude almost passing the proverbial feminine perversity, and let her go her own way as she would have it. On two occasions, since that chance meeting in the Park, he had called at the lodging in which he had helped her to install herself; and from the last he had come away with a distinct sense of failure. ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... The whole of Dr. Stukeley's tract is a most curious instance of learned perversity and obstinacy. The coin is broken away where the letter F should be, and Stukeley himself allows that the upper part of the T might be worn away, and so the inscription really be Fortuna Aug; but he cast all such evidence aside, to construct an imaginary ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... kick through the clapboards? What if the floor should cave in? Such were the questions which tortured the half crazed man, as he wiped the perspiration from his face and wondered at the perversity of the boy in selecting that spot of all others, where he must play and sit and kick as only a healthy, active ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... between any one of them and remote foreign nations. The Biscayans, for example, could even import and export commodities to and from remote countries by sea, free of duty, while their merchandize to and from Castile was crushed by imposts. As this ingenious perversity of positive arrangements came to increase the negative inconveniences caused by the almost total absence of tolerable roads, canals, bridges, and other means of intercommunication, it may be imagined that internal traffic—the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... very keen student of physiognomy might have discovered grounds for suspecting her demureness by reason of the thick, level brows that cast a shadow on the bland innocence of her face. For the rest, she possessed a knack of rather harmless perversity, a fair smattering of grammar and spelling, and a lively sense of humor within her own limitations, with a particularly small intelligence in other directions. Her one art was histrionics of the kind that made an individual appeal. In such, she was inimitable. She had been reared in a criminal ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... 242. The perversity of man is as strong and piercing as the thorn of the jungle. With eyes of suspicion and venomous anger do they accuse and persecute them who ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... voice in Hindustani. "With a little clemency, look quickly in the rubbish heap for the pepper pot. The masalchi,[2] out of the perversity of his youthfulness, has lost that and every other ingredient for the flavouring of the soup; and now, what can I do? Of a truth, this night will the Sahib give me much abuse for that which is no fault of mine. I shall twist the idle one's ear the moment he returns with ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... eagerness for truth, the care to track it from proposition to proposition, was chilled out of him. In fact, the conclusion was there already, and might have been foreseen, in the premises. By a singular perversity, it seemed to him that every one of those passing "affections"—he too, alas! at times—was for ever trying to be, to assert itself, to maintain its isolated and petty self, by a kind of practical lie in ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... only striking character in the play which bears his name. The narrow fanatical republican virtue of Verrina, the mild and venerable wisdom of the old Doria, the unbridled profligacy of his Nephew, even the cold, contented, irreclaimable perversity of the cutthroat Moor, all dwell in our recollections: but what, next to Fiesco, chiefly attracts us, is the character of Leonora his wife. Leonora is of kindred to Amelia in the Robbers, but involved in more complicated relations, and brought nearer to the actual condition ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Bayard's drooping eyes and the unmistakable signs of anxiety and trouble in her sweet face. "My wife is right," he muttered to himself; "she always is, in such things at least,"—for with masculine perversity he could not vouchsafe a sweeping verdict as to a woman's infallibility. "There is small chance here for Holmes," he mentally added. "I only wish young McLean were out of his troubles." And the doctor's hearty voice was heard without, and the tread of feet, and the next moment ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... too great confidence in ministers, who though in duty bound to ascertain the temper and disposition of the Americans, had totally failed for want of that knowledge. An appeal to the sword was denounced as a most dangerous precedent, and by a strange perversity of mind the leaders of the American revolution were described and especially by Wilkes, as men averse to a change of government, and as being only driven to extremities by an accumulation of neglect, insult and injury, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Egotism originates in blind instinct: individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as much in the deficiencies of the mind as in the perversity of the heart. Egotism blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright egotism. Egotism is a vice as old as the ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... suns themselves; and when these starry lustres that now glorify the firmament shall wax dim, and fade away like a wasted taper, the light of the soul shall still remain; nor time, nor cloud, nor any power but its own perversity, shall ever quench its brightness. Again I would say that whenever a human soul is born into the world, God stands over it, and pronounces the same sublime fiat, "Let there be light!" And may the time soon come, when all human governments shall coperate with the divine government ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... composed long before the Hindus came in contact with the Muhammedans. Even in Europe, during mediaeval times, maugre the "lady fair" of chivalric romance, it was quite as much the custom to decry women, and to relate stories of their profligacy, levity, and perversity, as ever it has been in the East. But we have changed all that in modern times: it is only to be hoped that we have not gone to the other extreme!—According to an Arabian writer, cited by Lane, "it ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... at three years old, had been brought up at first by a relation who turned him out for theft; afterwards by two sisters, his cousins, who were already beginning to take alarm at his abnormal perversity. This pale and fragile being, an incorrigible thief, a consummate hypocrite, and a cold-blooded assassin, was predestined to an immortality of crime, and was to find a place among the most execrable ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... interpretations were put upon this theory (natural selection) and a function was assigned to it which it could never fulfil, will some day be recognised as one of the least creditable episodes in the history of science. With a curious perversity it was the weakest elements in the theory which were seized upon as the most valuable, particularly the part assigned to blind chance in the occurrence of variations. This was valued not for its scientific truth,—for ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler |
