"Propensity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ownership of Thomas Edward, he was dismissed from the school in great disgrace. His perplexed parents sent him to another school, the teacher of which used more vigorous measures to cure him of his propensity, applying to his back an instrument of torture called "the taws." It was in vain. From this second school he was expelled, because some horse-leeches, which he had brought to school in a bottle, escaped, crept up the legs of the other boys, ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... shelter under a shield of indifference; but it is equally true that any reasonably acute mind, if only charitably disposed, can readily distinguish between an inactivity which springs from craven or sluggish propensity, and that other which belongs to constitutional temperament, and which, while passing calm and dispassionate judgment upon excesses of opinion of either party, contributes insensibly to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... say, of diseased intellectual activity, with an almost perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a decided preference of the latter, because it falls more readily in with his favourite propensity, gives greater zest to his thoughts and scope to his actions. He is quite or nearly as indifferent to his own fate as to that of others; he runs all risks for a trifling and doubtful advantage; and is himself the dupe and victim of his ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... clubs, one of which appropriately adopted his name. He was a voluminous writer and an inexhaustible collector. It is generally classed among the failings of the book-hunter that he looks only to the far past, and disregards the contemporary and the recent. Wodrow was a valuable exception to this propensity. Reversing the spirit of the selfish bull which asks what posterity has done for us, he stored up contemporary literature for subsequent generations; and he thus left, at the commencement of the eighteenth century, such a library as a collector of the nineteenth, could he have sent ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... say, but that, having been lately in a versifying mood, I have set to rhyme your story of the cook and the lottery ticket; and herein I have avoided that malicious propensity of our numerous tellers of stories, whose only pleasure, as it appears to me, lies in the plunging the heroes and heroines of their tales into inextricable troubles and difficulties, and in continuing them ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
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