"Temperamental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be seeking sociability by bellowing ferociously, thudding his hard fist on the counter. Mayo was not easily surprised by the temperamental vagaries of queer old 'longcoast crabs like Captain Candage, but this sudden conversion did take away ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... His temperamental instability may have been such that the desire for a change—the "wanderlust"—was driving him to distraction. Or perhaps, under the urge of his own subconscious feeling of failure, he may have convinced himself that if he could "shake" the old environment and all in ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... also for Italy, the ancient home of Civilization, the mother of arts and refinement, to accept the standard of the Huns which the Germans embraced and imposed upon their allies. The conflict between the Germans and the Italians was instinctive, temperamental. For a thousand years it took the form of a struggle between the German Emperors and the Italian Popes for mastery. The Germans strove for political domination, for temporal power; the Italians strove, at ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... shot at Donna Ana a terrible glance, which caused the latter to cringe. Evidently, the duenna stood in considerable awe of her temperamental ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... page and dedicated the work to Hans von Billow, who not long after performed it with tremendous success in America, where he was on tour. When we think of all the pianists who have won acclaim in this temperamental, inspiring work, from Carreno to Percy Grainger, to mention two who have aroused special enthusiasm by their thrilling performance of it, we can but wonder that his own countrymen were so short sighted at the time it was composed. Later on Nicholas ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... smoke, and displayed an unaccountable indisposition to run on any gear but the lowest. Sir Richmond thought aloud, unpleasing thoughts. He addressed the little car as a person; he referred to ancient disputes and temperamental incompatibilities. His anger betrayed him a coarse, ill-bred man. The little car quickened under his reproaches. There were some moments of hope, dashed by the necessity of going dead slow behind an interloping van. Sir Richmond did not notice the outstretched arm of the driver of the van, and ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... sort. He is a man of acute perceptions and fine feelings; and with those whom he knows well he is scrupulous to make due allowance for temperamental peculiarities. When you have learnt to know him well, when you have seen him in his rare moments of leisure and repose, you realize how abundantly he is possessed of those qualities which go to form what is called depth of character. His humour and good-fellowship ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... the personality which his eyes should show, all the force which should dwell in his nose, all the temperamental qualities that should reveal themselves in his mouth and chin, all the genius which should illumine his brow — these dwell within his Adam's apple. The man has run entirely to that feature; his moods, ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... rather, though he kept about his business, and our people merely recognized him as being out of health. He was what we could call, for that day and region—the Middle West of the early fifties—a man of unusual refinement. I suppose this was temperamental with him largely; but he had cultivated tastes, too. I remember him as a peculiarly gentle person, with a pensive cast of face, and the melancholy accomplishment of ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... generations. He had sat in the Virginian House of Burgesses and had taken a prominent part in the resistance of that body to the royal demands. As a speaker, however, he was never highly successful, and a just knowledge of his own limitations, combined perhaps with a temperamental dislike, generally led him to rely on his pen rather than his tongue in public debate. For as a writer he had a command of a pure, lucid and noble English unequalled in his generation and equalled by ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... to be not only the set policy of England, but to be based on the temperamental foundations of the English character itself, from which that people could not, even if they would, depart. The lists are set. The English mind, the English consciousness are such, that to oppose German influence in the world is to this people a necessity. ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... hitting off a foible or "celebrating truth and justice" in one of the unconscious epigrams which it is sought herein to preserve, even when having occasionally to hammer them into shape, for, while Daddy was almost unerring in rhyme, his rhythm, never at fault in delivery, was strictly a temperamental matter, not ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... admit Luther's fault and proceed to apologize for him and find plausible reasons for extenuating his indiscretions in speech and his temperamental faults? We shall do neither. We shall let this "foul-mouthed," coarse Luther stand before the bar of public opinion just as he is. His way cannot be our way, but ultimately none of us will be his final judges. ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... landscape and blends with it for ever; he owned his nativity, too, by his pictures of the prairie and the fur-trade and by his life of Washington, who had laid his hand upon his head; but he had spent half his life abroad, in the temperamental enjoyment of the romantic suggestion of the old world, and by his writings he gave this expansion of sympathy and sentiment to his countrymen. If his temperament was native-born and his literary taste home-bred, and if his affections gave a legend to the countryside and his feelings ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... opportunities for testing the fibre of the young man's character under strain; besides, Lewis's confidential position had no doubt made him acquainted with the inner details of the plan, its broader significance, and the political obstacles to be overcome in carrying it into effect. Aside from his temperamental disposition for such an enterprise, his public service had strengthened his grasp of national interests; enthusiasm for adventure had been supplemented by maturity of judgment in affairs of state. Altogether, a better man for the place could not ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... population-mass possessing very distinct characteristics, which sharply conflict with Northern traits. Fuhkien province is not only as diversified but speaks a dialect which is virtually a foreign language. And so on North and West of the Yangtsze it is the same story, temperamental differences of the highest political importance being everywhere in evidence and leading to perpetual bickerings and jealousies. For although Chinese civilization resembles in one great particular the Mahommedan religion, in that ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... entirely objective. Contemporary poetry is, on the other hand, very largely subjective; and even when it deals with events or incidents it invests them to such a degree with personal emotion and imagination, it so modifies and colours them with temperamental effects, that the resulting poem is much more a study of subjective conditions than a picture or drama of objective realities. This projection of the inward upon the outward world, in such a degree that the dividing line between the two is lost, is strikingly ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... irresponsibility of the average unmarried mother is known to every social worker. The difficulty is dwelt upon in the reports of rescue homes and police-workers. I have read many separate articles which refer to it. "Temperamental instability," as it is fittingly called, inevitably makes capable motherhood impossible. True, these unmarried mothers may, and frequently do, "pour out a wealth of pent-up affection on the child," but often she ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... for a woman, and eight for a fool." This is somewhat arbitrary, and, moreover, is not in harmony with physiological law. In the first place, no hard and fast rule can be laid down that will cover all cases. Apart from the difference of sex, there are temperamental conditions which vary with every case. We are decidedly of the opinion that eight hours' sleep is necessary for the adult individual. It has been affirmed by some authorities that the more the individual sleeps the longer ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... attitude was utterly incomprehensible—a study of violently opposing contrasts. Diana felt bruised and shaken by the fierce contradictions of his moods, the temperamental heat and ice which he had meted out to her. It seemed as if he were fighting against the attraction she had for him, prepared to contest every inch of ground—discounting each look and word wrung from him in some moment of emotion by the mocking raillery with which ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... Of all temperamental men, Beethoven was doubtless the most so, and the anecdotes written of him are many. He was especially irascible. His domestic annoyances are revealed freely in his diary: "Nancy is too uneducated ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... He was very Temperamental. That is, he got soused on about three, and, while snooted, would deride Victor Herbert, thus proving that he was ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... wise Emperor of China, Truth hath not an unchanging name. A modern English writer says: I have long been convinced by the experience of my life, as a pioneer of various heterodoxies, which are rapidly becoming orthodoxies, that nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or given in the affections and intuitions; and that discussion and inquiry do little more than feed temperament. Our poet seems to mean that the Perceptions, when they perceive truly, convey ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... occasions into great pleasures is, to a son of communities strenuous as ours are strenuous, the most salient characteristic of the so-called Latin civilisations. It charms him and vexes him, according to his mood; and for the most part it represents a moral gulf between his own temperamental and indeed spiritual sense of race, and that of Frenchmen and Italians, far wider than the watery leagues that a steamer may annihilate. But I think his mood is wisest when he accepts the "foreign" easy surrender to all the senses as ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... there who had committed merciless robberies, cruel murders, heartless swindles, abominable depravities. I have felt greater temperamental aversion from many highly respectable persons than I did from them. Their crimes were one thing, they were another. Not that crime does not corrupt a man—stain him of its color. But there is always another side to him, a place in him which it has not dominated. ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... more or less temperamental things but they do not do them as frequently nor on as short notice ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... relaxed. Thus tone production, in my case, is made at all times with ease; there is never any strain. You ask if it is not very fatiguing to sing against a large orchestra, as we have to, and with a temperamental conductor, like Marinuzzi, for instance, I do not find it so; there is a pure, clear tone, which by its quality, placement and ease of production, will carry farther than mere power ever can. It can be heard above a great orchestra, ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... several sorts of people. The nucleus was a small, intellectually honest set of men who believed, in the law per se, in the sacredness of formal institutions in the constitution, and in the subservience of the individual to the institution. This was temperamental. Behind them were many much larger groups of those needed either the interpretation or the protection of the law for their private interests. These were of all sorts from honest literal-minded dealers, through shady contractors and ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... mind to decide between programs presented to it by circumstances, receives a brilliant refutation in the course of the powerful minority that was concentrating around the three great "Jacobins." The subjective side of politics, also the temperamental side, here found expression. Statecraft is an art; creative statesmen are like other artists. Just as the painter or the poet, seizing upon old subjects, uses them as outlets for his particular temper, his particular ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... nature never quite integrated into wholeness of structure, into harmony with itself. His writing, at its best, is noble and delightful, full of human charm, but it is difficult for him to master a certain waywardness and to sustain any note steadily. This temperamental flaw does not affect the winsomeness of his letters, unless to add to it. It is lost to view, often, in the sincerity and pathos of his lyrics, but it is felt in most of his longer efforts in prose, and accounts for a certain dissatisfaction which many grateful and loyal readers nevertheless feel ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... two, yet the "resonant voice" was somehow, somewhere lost. Possibly Cope gave too great heed to his hostess' caution; but it seemed as if a voice essentially promising had slipped through some teacher's none too competent hands, or—what was quite as serious—as if some temperamental brake were operating to prevent the complete expression of the singer's nature. Lassen, Grieg, Rubinstein—all these were carried through rather cautiously, perhaps a little mechanically; and there was a silence. Hortense ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... of the old school. Whatever his temperamental drawbacks, he undoubtedly aimed at a conscientious conduct of any case he had in charge. Fandor had made an exceedingly bad impression on him. He had been scandalised that a civilian, a mere journalist, had dared to treat the army with contempt, by so lightly taking the place of a ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... I am not poor enough for that." He possesses the sixth sense of infinity. A cosmical jester, his badinage is well-nigh dolorous. His verse and prose form a series of personal variations. The lyric in him is through some temperamental twist reversed. Fantastic dreams overflow his reality, and he always dreams with wide-open eyes. Watteau's l'Indifferent! A philosophical vaudevillist, he juggles with such themes as a metaphysical Armida, the moon and her minion, Pierrot; with celestial spasms and the odour of mortality, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... independence of his native land. To these distinguished foreigners, who freely threw in their lot with American revolutionary fortunes, was due much of that spirit and discipline which fitted raw recruits and temperamental militiamen to cope with a military power of ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... evidently cherishing a smoldering resentment that might burst into flame at an awkward moment. Two of the girls were limping about in high heeled shoes and these must be shielded from the critical eye and caustic tongue of the cooking teacher, lest they become temperamental and refuse to "wait" at all. Assuredly ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... For in such matters as teaching, a man may put a strain on himself for a certain length of time; he may even be a success, up to a point. But if he lacks the temperamental gift of holding classes, the results in the long run will not be fair to the children, to say nothing of himself. With reluctance I rose to depart, Mr. F—— adding, by way of letting me ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... advised to avoid nerves and sensibilities, and try for the repose of the common—the uncommon—domestic virtues. Ah, he said, they were sweet, like lavender. (Already, I told him, he smelled the housekeeper's linen-chest.) But I did not interrupt him much; I couldn't, he was too absorbed. To temperamental pairing, he declared, the century owed its breed of decadents. I asked him if he had ever really recognized one; and he retorted that if he hadn't he didn't wish to make a beginning in his own family. In a quarter of an hour he repudiated the theories ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... immediate action is imperative. But action is delayed by misunderstanding arising out of temperamental differences between the Governing Class and the People. Curiously enough the respective responsive characteristics of the Anglo Saxon and the Indians are paralleled by the two types of responses seen in all living matter. In the one type the response is slow but ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... famous, are naturally temperamental. They will rise in dozens at unexpected times, just as they will refuse all temptations for weeks on end. An Englishman, and no mean fisherman, once went to Nipigon to show the local inhabitants how fishing should be done. A master in British waters, he considered the speckled monsters of the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... maltreat good things, cooked to perfection, even before they tasted them, sprinkling them as a matter of habit, with quantities of salt and pepper, paprika, cayenne, daubing them with mustards of every variety or swamping them with one or several of the commercial sauce preparations. "Temperamental" chefs, men who know their art, usually explode at the sight of such wantonness. Which painter would care to see his canvas varnished with all the hues in the rainbow by a patron afflicted with ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... Captain Link. "These Moros always get very much worked up in their war-dances, and occasionally they forget that it is all make-believe and send a spear into a spectator. It's safer to leave them alone. They're very temperamental." ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... breach. Where in all history can you find twelve men more radically different mentally and temperamentally than the Apostles? Yet the Holy Spirit did not establish separate churches to cater to and further develop these temperamental eccentricities. All were united in one church so they could counterbalance and complement each other and thus perfect their own character and give greater symmetry to the church. "And when the day of Pentecost was fully come they were all with one accord in one place" (Acts ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... Miss Caroline's difficulties before him. As any common catalogue of troubles will not provoke Solon from a happy unconcern which is temperamental, I spared no details in my recital, and I observed at length that my listener was truly aroused to the bad way in which Miss Caroline found herself. He sat forward in his chair, rested one elbow upon his untidy desk, and for several moments ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... when we remember that Puritanism, which means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... effect was temperamental and sketchy. The boards which formed the floor were never even nailed down; they were fine, wide planks without a knot in them, and they looked so well that we merely fitted them together as closely as we could and lightheartedly let them go at that. Neither did we properly chink the ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... know your type. I see now you are quite what I thought you would be. I say you are entirely ineffective, and must leave your father alone. You do not understand him. You do not even know him. With me it is different. I have seen the world. He is temperamental, your father, a genius in his way, and a little mad, perhaps. Leave him to me, Monsieur, and it will be quite all right. Last night, it was so sudden, that I was frightened for a moment. I should have remembered he is erratic and apt to change his mind. I should have guessed ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual. The serene, calm character of a Tolstoy will wish different methods for social reconstruction than the intense, overflowing personality of a Michael Bakunin or a Peter Kropotkin. Equally so it must be apparent that the economic and political needs of ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... union is possible only at the center, the crux, of Being. This truth is represented by the algebraical X, the symbol of spiritual sex-union. Therefore sex relationships which do not have for their crux spiritual as well as temperamental affinity, are not final, or eternal, however beautiful they may be; and there are many sex-relationships which are pure and sacred even though they do not fulfil this highest of all ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... inclined to question whether it is right to call such things as self-consciousness, reserve and fear, sins. "Call them infirmities, disabilities, temperamental weaknesses, if you will," some have said, "but not sins. To do so would be to get us into bondage." The reverse, however, is true. If these things are not sins, then we must put up with them for the rest of our ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... lips sought to assume the well-bred curves of conformity to the environment of entertainers who valued him so far as to demand a series of his own lectures; but the cynic of his temperamental revolt from us, or, to be exact, from the thing which he supposed us to be, lurked in every ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... we have witnessed a bewildering rise and fall of methods and ideals. We were captivated for a time by the quest of the golden phrase and the accompanying cultivation of exotic emotions; and then, wearying of the pretty and the temperamental, we plunged into the ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... months. If every scene took place in a studio, where artificial lights could be used, the filming could go on every day the actors were on hand, or whenever the director felt like working them and the camera men. Often in a studio, even, the director will be notional—"temperamental," he might call it—and let a day go by, and again the glare of the powerful lights may so affect the eyes of the players that they have to rest, and so time is lost ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... a decadent New England state, himself master of the state political machine. Also, he is nobody's fool. He possesses the brain and strength of character to play his part. His most distinctive feature is his temperamental opportunism. ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... of December 1751. He studied at Harvard from 1766 to 1768, when he went to sea as a cabin boy. He gradually became a ship-owner and a successful merchant, retiring from business in 1794. Throughout his life he was much interested in politics, and though his temperamental indolence and his aversion for public life often prevented his accepting office, he exercised, as a contributor to the press and through his friendships, a powerful political influence, especially in New England. He was a member of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1770-1780, of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... complimentary verse, with which the New England poets showered each other to such an extent as to arouse Lowell's protest. [Footnote: See A Fable for Critics.] Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the temperamental jealousy that the philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brother-artists are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from unreserved enjoyment even of his ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... of Virgil. The influence of Horace on Luis de Leon has been often noted. It exists no doubt, but has perhaps been exaggerated: why should we suppose that his love of moderation was learnt from Horace and was not partly, at least, temperamental? May not the references to Horace be a characteristic of humanism? An opinion backed by the weight of classical authority must reach us with irresistible force, must it not? However this may be, the predominant influence in De los nombres de Cristo, ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... was always a most dreadfully sensitive child, and temperamental. She took after me, I'm afraid; the others were more like their father. I remember when she ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... primitive mind. The very simplicity of his reasoning was its strength, and his materialism was far more compelling than the subtly complex materialism of Charley Furuseth. Not that I—a confirmed and, as Furuseth phrased it, a temperamental idealist—was to be compelled; but that Wolf Larsen stormed the last strongholds of my faith with a vigour that received ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... you know when a lot of different people and agencies work on a movie film there must be all sorts of compromises. This was done by a temperamental Italian director, and other people had parts in it, so what you see is a compromise. They made 30 copies in Italian. H has been shown in many moving picture houses, and it is also on the loan basis to the United States. There are extensive film ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... looked upon undue earnestness, even in outward manner, in a world through which the artist is bound to go on a wholly 'secret errand,' as bad form, which shocked him as much in persons as bad style did in books. He hated every form of extravagance, noise, mental or physical, with a temperamental hatred: he suffered from it, in his nerves and in his mind. And he had no less dislike of whatever seemed to him either morbid or sordid, two words which he often used to express his distaste for things and people. He never would have appreciated writers like Verlaine, because of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... about that. If you were not so—so temperamental, I would say go back and begin again. But that is risky. It will be better to go on, I think, trying to recapture the more serious style, until the whole book it at least in some form. Then you will know exactly where you are and what is necessary to harmonize the whole. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... pursued evenly, bent on choosing her words, "that I cannot personally understand your emancipation, that mine is different. I can only see the preponderance of evil, of deception, of injustice—it is that which shuts out everything else. And it's temperamental, I suppose. By looking at you, as I told you, I can see that your emancipation is positive, while mine remains negative. You have somehow regained a conviction that the good is predominant, that there is some purpose in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of industry. The foundation was in readiness for the handiwork of love, for Burton Raines, feeling that he could not concentrate on business in such sentimental environs, explained patiently that he was only an ordinary married man and that love rhapsodies to the tune of temperamental hammering upset him. So he had taken the morning off from his own business, to lay the foundation ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... upon him a deep despondency. That fall and winter he wandered alone in the woods along the Sangamon, almost distracted with sorrow. When he seemed on the verge of insanity a friend, Bowling Green, took him to his own home and nursed him back to health, and the grief settled into that temperamental melancholy, which, relieved only by his humor, was part of the deep mystic there was in him, part of the prophet, the sadness that so early baptised him in the tragedy of life, and taught him to ...
— Life of Abraham Lincoln - Little Blue Book Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 324 • John Hugh Bowers
... path, and in their plays put men and women whose motives and conduct were nearer to the humanity of their audience. The departure from old lines in these dramatists is patent; and, after discounting the part that may have been temperamental or contingent on some other cause, there remains the larger share to attribute to Balzac's influence. Dumas' Dame aux Camelias originally staged in 1852, was a timid start in the new direction. The theme, that of the courtezan in love, was ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... convicts would say, it had a "grouch" against the world. He never played with the other flies either. He was strong and healthy, too; for I studied him long to find out. His indisposition for play was temperamental, not physical. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the heroism of those who faced the last plunge of the Titanic so courageously when all the boats had gone,—if it does, it is the difficulty of expressing an idea in adequate words,—to say that their quiet heroism was largely unconscious, temperamental, not a definite choice between two ways of acting. All that was visible on deck before the boats left tended to this conclusion and the testimony of those who went down with the ship and were afterwards rescued ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... Lois, was a trifle temperamental, had fallen before the charms of one Lawrence Hastings. The manner of Hastings's advent in Montgomery is perhaps worthy of a few words, inasmuch as he came to stay. Hastings was an actor, who visited ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... and mollycoddling isn't good for that boy of yours, or anybody else's boy." And he proceeded to explain that my Dinkie was an ordinary, every-day, normal child and should be accepted and treated as such or we'd have a temperamental little ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... tune him down, if she could, into a lower key, "the C-major of every-day life," as Browning calls it. But in this effort she has had no success, for Sang's ecstatic elevation above the concerns of earth is not only temperamental; nature itself, in the extreme North, favors ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... rationalism, some would say a morbid and hypertrophied reason. This rationalism is certainly in part a product of systematic education and propaganda, a conscious exploitation of science, and it is in part temperamental. Such a result is always possible in a small state with a highly centralized form of government. It is a notorious fact that Germany's type of civilization can be spread neither by persuasion nor by force. If we may apply a biological analogy we may say that German Kultur ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... of more or less temperamental people, suddenly transplanted from a rigorous climate to sunshine and the beauty and abundance of life in Southern California, perhaps give a too highly colored picture, so please make allowance for the bounce of the ball. I mean to be quite fair. ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... triumphant—like the noise a baby makes getting what it wants. The eyes closed, and that strangled sound of breathing began again. Soames recoiled to the chair and stonily sat down. The lie he had told, based, as it were, on some deep, temperamental instinct that after death James would not know the truth, had taken away all power of feeling for the moment. His arm brushed against something. It was his father's naked foot. In the struggle to breathe he had pushed it out from ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... correspondent, wrote of Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz: "This man, who may be a heroic figure to our grandchildren, is essentially an unheroic figure to his contemporaries. He is in fact such a friendly, human person that observers tend to minimize his stature as a war leader. He is not temperamental. He makes no rousing speeches, writes no inspirational orders. Spaatz, in issuing orders for a major operation involving 1,500 airplanes, is about as inspiring as a groceryman ordering another five cases ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... a deeply lined face and a tendency to nervousness that was increasing with her years. She was a very clever teacher and a very incompetent business woman, so that her small school, of excellent standing and repute, proved difficult to finance. In character Miss Stearne was temperamental enough to have been a genius. She was kindly natured, fond of young girls and cared for her pupils with motherly instincts seldom possessed by those in similar positions. She was lax in many respects, severely strict in others. Not always were her rules and regulations dictated by ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... inclined her to spring rather than autumn, had she not inherited joyousness and the temperamental gayety of the well-born, she must long ago have failed, broken down. Behind her were generations of fathers and mothers who had laughed heartily all their days. The simple gift of wholesome laughter, often ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... 'Captains Courageous' and 'The Flying Cloud' balance each other with temperamental exactitude. Each is a fine account of sea-doings with a touch of fiction to keep the sailor reading, neither of them in the very highest class. 'The Cruise of the Cachalot' is balanced by the 'Log of a Sea Waif,' each in Bullen's ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... heard the remark at all. She seemed to be deep in a brown study, and several times I caught her watching me narrowly from the corner of her eye. I was already beginning to have some misgivings as to the temperamental fitness of my strange "learner" and new-found friend as a steady, day-in-and-day-out person with whom to live and eat and sleep. And this feeling increased with every block we covered, for by and by I found myself studying Henrietta in the same ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... that this letter doesn't contain a word of the kind of news that you like to hear. But it's that beastly twilight hour of a damp November day, and I'm in a beastly uncheerful mood. I'm awfully afraid that I am developing into a temperamental person, and Heaven knows Gordon can supply all the temperament that one family needs! I don't know where we'll land if I don't preserve my sensibly stolid, ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... never been popular in the South since the war. There is hauteur in my omission of it, and it is a fact that we can express ourselves with far more vigour without g's or r's than you of the North can with them. For expression with us is not scholastic, but temperamental! Where is Jack? ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... the peoples concerned in this international quandary is not likely to undergo so radical a change as to seriously invalidate an argument that proceeds on the present lie of the land in this respect. Preconceptions are a work of habit impinging on a given temperamental bent; and where, as in these premises, the preconceptions have taken on an institutionalised form, have become conventionalised and commonly accepted, and so have been woven into the texture of popular common sense, they must needs be a work of protracted and comprehensive ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... temperamental," she said with a shrug. "Sometimes I believe you think more of your work than you ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... genius, Paul, violently anti-Christian, enters on the scene, holding the clothes of the men who are stoning Stephen. He persecutes the Christians with great vigor, a sport which he combines with the business of a tentmaker. This temperamental hatred of Jesus, whom he has never seen, is a pathological symptom of that particular sort of conscience and nervous constitution which brings its victims under the tyranny of two delirious terrors: the terror of sin and the terror of death, which may be called also the terror ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... metals, or coal. He believes in the faculty, but not in 'psychic' explanations, or the Devil. He talks about 'electricity' (pp. 170, 190). He describes his precautions to avoid vulgar fraud, but he took no precautions against unconscious thought-transference. He reckoned the faculty 'temperamental' and useful. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... know of anything that can beat a lumber-jack on a squeeze job, once you get him to realize that he's up against long odds. It's this ten-hour-a-day thing and too much ready money every pay-day; it's a town too temptingly close that makes them a—a trifle temperamental, Mr. Elliott. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... of picture shows. "Under no strain trying to hear 'em talk," he confidences. While such occasions really are very rare, once in an age he becomes depressed—a peculiar fact (their rarity) in one so temperamental. After the fifth call within a month to act as pall-bearer at a funeral, he was in the depths. A friend was trying ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... his organisation. In his plans he allows for most possibilities, but he is nonplussed when the situation does not turn out exactly as it should on paper. Again, man for man, he loses "guts" in tight corners, because of this same lack of initiative. It is perhaps a temperamental failing. There have been moments in this War when only his incapacity to deal with a suddenly-developed situation has stood between him and stupendous success. He has assumed, let us say, that by all the ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... A temperamental dislike of the methods of politicians was followed by a strong animosity towards those who crossed his political path and some of those who went along beside it. He became hypercritical of those with whom he associated and allowed a natural germ of cynicism ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... Cleves suddenly woke up and began to fight. One man beat out a grounder, and one struck out; another error of the temperamental White Mountain Canary put a man on third and one on second. Then Cheyenne, pulling himself together, ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... a marriage palaver," replied Sanders, with a little grimace, "and I was being requested to restore a husband to a temperamental lady who has a passion for shying cook-pots at her husband ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... discovered that he was not afraid. The discovery struck him as curious. He argued with himself that he had every right to feel afraid, that he ought to feel "queer." He said to himself, "Here you are, as nervous and temperamental a youth as ever stepped, with a mental laziness that amounts to moral cowardice, in the deuce of a hole that I don't expect you'll ever get out of. You ought to be in an awful state. Your cheeks ought to be white, and there ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... always been mental and temperamental barriers between the Dresden china lady and her daughter; but they loved each other, and never had the girl been so dear to her mother as now. The Grand Duchess thought of the summer day when Virginia had knelt beside her, saying, ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... and she did odd jobs for the women who were her neighbours. There were always babies to be looked after, and "bits of 'elp" needed, sometimes there were "movings" from one cottage to another, and "confinements" were plainly at once exhilarating and enriching. Her temperamental good cheer, combined with her experience, made her a desirable companion and assistant. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a race of the colder regions and there evolved those qualities, physical, mental and temperamental, which constitute its greatness. A large section of the race has left the habitat and environments in which and because of which it grew to greatness, and in the southern part of the United States finds itself confronted with the problem of maintaining in warmer climes ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... spiritually with the historic past of his people, he was inclined to look askance at the subverting spirit of Puritanism, which was now beginning to give Merrie England food for serious thought. His temperamental bias against Puritanism was accentuated by the openly avowed hostility of the Puritans to his chosen profession. Though born of the people, Shakespeare's social ideals were strongly aristocratic, and, while possessing, in an unusual degree that unerring knowledge of ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... hold of me. Partly I think that was because I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly because of a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way and have my private dreams, partly because I was a little antagonised by the family traditions that ran through the school. I was made to feel at first that I was a rank outsider, and I never quite forgot it. I suffered very little ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... as she did, at that time, she could not find the slightest physical trace of likeness, and she brought old photographs to her aid. While, on the other hand, the mental and temperamental characteristics of both little girls were such as were common to ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... stayed up until nearly morning in the company of his completed work. It was as if he watched the night out with a loved one who in the morning must go upon a long uncertain journey. . . . This also Shirley, had she known, would have called very temperamental. ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... faculty, nor safely used by laymen as a stimulant, except under medical advice. As to my experience, it is very limited; and, in my judgment, it is quite unsafe in this matter to make one man's experience another man's guide: too much depends upon temperamental and constitutional peculiarities, and upon special conditions of climate and ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... work are mongrels. By far the finest lion dog I ever saw was a cross between a shepherd and an airedale. He had the intelligence of the former and the courage of the latter. The airedale himself is not a good trailer, he is too temperamental. He will start on a lion track, jump off and chase a deer and wind up by digging out a ground squirrel. After a good hound finds a lion, the ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... process of writing history which Trench describes as "a moral whitewashing of such things as in men's sight were as blackamoors before." Religious or temperamental prejudice often obscures the vision and warps the judgment of even the most scholarly minds. Conscious of this infirmity in the ablest writers of history it would be absurd to claim complete exemption from the power of personal bias. It ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... precocious sexuality, M.O. had from the very first an extreme disgust for obscene stories, and for any association of sexual things with filthy words and anecdotes. Owing in part to this and in part to his temperamental skepticism, he disbelieved what associates told him regarding sexual emissions, only becoming convinced when he actually experienced them; and the facts of reproduction he denied indignantly until he read them in a medical work. Until he was well over 25 the physical aversion from any thought of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the practical purposes of the dramatist, it may be defined as a complex of intellectual, emotional, and nervous habits. Some of these habits are innate and temperamental—habits formed, no doubt, by far-off ancestors.[1] But this distinction does not here concern us. Temperamental bias is a habit, like another, only somewhat older, and, therefore, harder to deflect or eradicate. What do we imply, then, when we complain that, in a given character, no development ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... aristocracy of the realm; a witty woman, somewhat lean, and a trifle close, who was losing her income, her estates, and her very chemise at faro. She showed much kindness to Monsieur de Boulingrin, lending herself to an intercourse for which she had no temperamental inclination, but which she thought suitable to her rank, and useful to her interests. Their intrigue was conducted with an art which revealed their good taste, and the elegance of the prevailing morality; ...
— The Story Of The Duchess Of Cicogne And Of Monsieur De Boulingrin - 1920 • Anatole France
... only the vaguest of plans for the future. The despairing youth seemed to have no other purpose than to rid his father of his vexatious presence. There were friends in London, on one of whom Francis was directed to call for a weekly allowance from home. But a temperamental reluctance kept the young man away from those who could help him, and even the weekly allowance after a while came to be unclaimed. The rough, cyclonic forces of the huge city caught this helpless child of a man's years in the full swing of their blind ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson |
