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More "Caprice" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a yawn, and perhaps make a request with a view to the exercise of two rights, both of which are indispensable to her happiness: individual liberty, that is, the privilege of going and coming according to the caprice of her will; and the liberty of the press, that is, the privilege of writing and receiving letters without fear ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... whose qualities are mixed; not wholly good nor entirely evil, but balanced between the two, sometimes doing a generous action, then descending to a petty meanness, but never rising to nobility of character nor sinking to the depths of depravity; good from whim, and mischievous from caprice. ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... who had ever yet oppressed the Church. When Nero lighted up his gardens with the flames which issued from the bodies of the dying Christians, he wished to transfer to them the odium of the burning of Rome, and he acted only with the caprice and cunning of a tyrant; and when Domitian promulgated his cruel edicts, he was haunted with the dread that the proscribed sect would raise up a rival Sovereign; but Marcus Aurelius could not plead even such miserable apologies. He hated the Christians with the cool acerbity of a Stoic; and he took ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... in oblivion. Would they were so in my mind! I am afraid they never will. And can I, my dear Sister, look up to this mother, with that respect, that affection I ought? Am I to be eternally subjected to her caprice? I hope not—; indeed a few short years will emancipate me from the Shackles I now wear, and then perhaps she will govern her passion better ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... quite disembarrassed. A reception of finished politeness would probably have confused me: I could not have returned or repaid it by answering grace and elegance on my part; but harsh caprice laid me under no obligation; on the contrary, a decent quiescence, under the freak of manner, gave me the advantage. Besides, the eccentricity of the proceeding was piquant: I felt interested to see how he would ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Chapman, musingly, 'we should all become as these people about us, and do the same things, and believe and act as they do. You will, but I think I remain a little strange. I seem a spectator that a caprice has cast upon this globe, and though I live here, I must succumb to a certain alienation, a lack of mediation between their life and my former existence, and because of this subtle estrangement, I shall contract disease, or meet with accident, or waste in age, while you shall stay young, and ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... caprice of the physician." (In a word, instead of being dependent upon blind chance, that there is an infallible law, guided by which; the physician MUST select the proper remedies.') ['Ibid.,' in a notice of Menzel's paper.] Who are they that practice Homoeopathy, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... this, and further was resolved not to expose himself to any manifestation of her caprice. He perceived Miss Thorne was disinclined to converse, and fancied she was preparing to be reserved. So he passed quietly into the next room, where he found Miss Innis quite ready to welcome him, though surrounded by a number of gentlemen. He ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... pieces, as In a Balcony; and even in the longer dramas certain sharp climaxes of love are recorded, not as if they belonged to the drama, but as if they were distinct studies introduced by chance or caprice. In the short poems called "dramatic" these studies are numerous, and I group a few of them together according to their motives, leaving out some which I shall hereafter treat of when I come to discuss the women in Browning. Evelyn Hope has nothing to do with ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... somewhat of a myth, making her avatars in literature with all the caprice and variety of Vishnou or Brougham; her maiden name of Rose Stewart has not, that we can discover, been stained with printer's ink, but we trace her as 'Arthur Dudley' in the Revue des Deux Mondes writing ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... revised, during the reign of James I., the most accomplished Anglo-Hebraist was, by some caprice of jealousy, forced to leave this country; I mean Hugh Broughton. He communicated many renderings to the revisers, some of which they thoughtlessly rejected, and others, to use Broughton's own phrase, "they thrust ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... point had been canvassed under the reign of John Casimir; and it only remains to be remarked that such very subtle analysis of the motives and progress of actions generally overshoots the mark, since no men can act always according to rule, but are in some degree influenced by circumstances and caprice. It would be equally absurd to imagine that Frederick, in the complicated intrigues which preceded the first partition, was actuated by one deeply laid scheme of policy to arrive at one end: the possession of Polish Prussia. It was, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... us Christian men and women turn to find relief from these bewildering fears by plunging deeply into the waters of life's amusements and ambitions. It is the uncertainty of things, wearing to some the aspect of caprice, which leads to recklessness, and sometimes ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... growing wild, sheltered every cottage door, and the olive and the laurel threw their shadows across the little rivulet which traversed the village. The houses, observing no uniform arrangement, stood wherever the caprice or the inclination of the builder suggested, surrounded with little gardens, the inequality of the ground imparting a picturesque feature to even the lowliest hut, while upon a craggy eminence above the rest, an ancient convent and a ruined chapel looked down ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... for advice, he saw him holding, and in awkward yet tender manner trying to caress and soothe, the little lady with the yellow hair. The second pirate had sought to hand her, too, to Bowdoin, but some caprice had made the little maiden shy, and she had run and buried her face in the ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... many other and very artificial forms that exist, but their treatment would be irrelevant here. During the nineteenth century the caprice of the poet invented many new forms of which the arrangement is evident ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... historical investigation; it is enough to point out that our history up to the most recent times has not fostered among us the development of a respect for equity, has not created any solid guarantees for personal rights, and has left a wide field to arbitrary tyranny and caprice." This criticism of Dobroliubov's was written in 1860, the date of the play; but we have only to look back at the internal history of Russia for the last thirty years to see that it too "has not created any solid guarantees for personal ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... consulted her sketch, and was so far convinced of her own instincts, and the profound impression the fountain had made upon her, that she was enabled to secretly finish her interrupted sketch from memory. For Miss Charlotte Forrest was a born artist, and in no mere caprice had persuaded her father to let her adopt the profession, and accepted the drudgery of a novitiate. She looked earnestly upon this first real work of her hand and found it good! Still, it was but a pencil sketch, and wanted the ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... regretting him for you. Last Monday he was good enough to play, in his usual and admirable manner, at the concert for the Orchestral Pension Fund. The pieces he had selected were his new 'Concerto Pathetique' (in F sharp minor) and an extremely piquant and brilliant 'Caprice on Hungarian Melodies.' (This latter piece is dedicated to me.) The public was in a good humour, even really warm, which is usually one of ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... coarseness, and a brisk, bright good-nature chirps in his very scurrility. In the midst of distresses of all kinds, he still seems, like his own Fortunatus, "all felicity up to the brims"; but that his content with Fortune is not owing to an unthinking ignorance of her caprice and injustice is proved by the words he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... appealed in comradely fashion to Katherine and Rachel. Betty alone she utterly, though quite unostentatiously, ignored; and Betty, too much hurt to make any effort, stood aside and tried to solve the riddle of Eleanor's latest caprice. On the way up-stairs Eleanor spoke to her for the first time. She went up just ahead of her and at the top of the ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... In this caprice, if I may call it so, I think that my Father had before him the fine republican example of 'Sandford and Merton', some parts of which book he admired extremely. Accordingly George and I were sent out to take walks together, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... to tell, for you do not as yet know, but that Madge herself—hoidenish, blue-eyed Madge—is to be the very one who will gain such hold upon your riper affections as she has held already over your boyish caprice. It is a part of the pride—I may say rather an evidence of the pride—which youth feels in leaving boyhood behind him, to talk laughingly and carelessly of those attachments which made his young years so balmy ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... head of his sister's grave. He wanted the rule to measure the dimensions of the old board: he desired to be directed to a timber-merchant's, where he could buy a new piece of wood; and, after that, he would worry Mrs. Peckover about nothing more. Extraordinary as his present caprice appeared to her, the good woman saw that it had taken complete possession of him, and wisely and willingly set herself to humor it. She procured for him the rule, and the address of a timber-merchant; and then they parted, Mat promising to call again in the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... not-wholly-to-be-discommended days, the residue of the meal was consumed in the servants' hall, and the scraps bestowed on the poor at the gate; and the last part of the business was carried out, not as a matter of chance or caprice, but on as methodical a principle as the payment of a poor-rate. At the servants' table, besides the waiters and other attendants on the principal board, mentioned by Harrison, sat the master-cook, the pantler, ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... last time, mademoiselle," he said, "will you speak? Will you assign a reason for this change, this fickleness, for this caprice?" ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the horse, whether through some wild caprice of its own, or some touch of its dying rider, circled back, galloping down the long slope toward the man who had come to help Hall adjust his differences with these contemptible sheepmen. Hall's hat fell off as his ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... given a new divine revelation to the world; and through the last, Newton, had come a vast new conception, destined to be fatal to the old theory of creation, for he had shown throughout the universe, in place of almighty caprice, all-pervading law. The bitter opposition of theology to the first four of these men is well known; but the fact is not so widely known that Newton, in spite of his deeply religious spirit, was also strongly opposed. It was vigorously urged against ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... behaviour in their preceding meeting, the more angry as well as amazed she became at the change, and though she still concluded the pursuit of some other object occasioned it, she could find no excuse for his fickleness if that pursuit was recent, nor for his caprice if it ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... in the eyes of the world the high hopes he had inspired in his protectress. The transient favor she showed him was regarded as a feminine caprice, one of the fancies characteristic of artist souls. Madame de Stael determined to save Louis Lambert alike from serving the Emperor or the Church, and to preserve him for the glorious destiny which, ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... Indians. This war was not one of their own choosing. It had been forced upon them by the British Cabinet, in its resolve to drive the French off the continent of North America. The Americans were allowed no representation in Parliament. They were to be taxed according to the caprice of the government. Franklin, with patriotic foresight, vehemently, and with resistless force of logic, resisted ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Diary to publish concerning visits to places. But he saw a number of distinguished persons, of whom he gives pleasant accounts, so singularly different in tone from the rough caricatures in which Carlyle vented his spleen and caprice, that one marvels how the two men could have talked ten minutes together, or would wonder, had not one been as imperturbable as the other was explosive. Horatio Greenough and Walter Savage Landor are the ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... And if I do not feel so anxious about him as you feel, it is because I know him better than you do. And I know that it is some unjustifiable caprice that is keeping him from his home. When he comes to his senses he will return. In the meanwhile, we must not, by any show of anxiety, give the servants or the neighbors any cause to gossip of his disappearance. And I must not have my plans upset ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... his reign, the stream of Christianity flowed with a gentle, though accelerated, motion: but its general direction was sometimes checked, and sometimes diverted, by the accidental circumstances of the times, and by the prudence, or possibly by the caprice, of the monarch. His ministers were permitted to signify the intentions of their master in the various language which was best adapted to their respective principles; and he artfully balanced the hopes and fears of his subjects, by publishing ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... emancipation proclamation, they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large, and whenever opportunity serves, they treat the colored people just as their profit, caprice or passion may dictate." (Accompanying document No. 27.) An ingrained feeling like this is apt to bring forth that sort of class legislation which produces laws to govern one class with no other view than to benefit another. This tendency can be ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice? 'Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world, so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as patronizing infidelity ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... refined, Conceived and kindled in the mind; Which, having found an equal flame, Unites, and both become the same, In different breasts together burn, Together both to ashes turn. But women now feel no such fire, And only know the gross desire. Their passions move in lower spheres, Where'er caprice or folly steers, A dog, a parrot, or an ape, Or some worse brute in human shape, Engross the fancies of the fair, The few soft moments they can spare, From visits to receive and pay, From scandal, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... miraculous, has its determining current in the development of physical science, seems to have engaged comparatively little of his attention; at least, he gives it no prominence. The great conception of universal regular sequence, without partiality and without caprice—the conception which is the most potent force at work in the modification of our faith, and of the practical form given to our sentiments—could only grow out of that patient watching of external fact, and that silencing of preconceived notions, which are urged upon the mind ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... mother to say that, or for his father; but, after what had taken place, he could consent to remain in England on no other understanding than that his income should be made permanent to him. Such permanence must not be any longer dependent on his father's caprice. In these days he had come to be somewhat in love with poverty and Pau, and had been feeding on the luxury of his grievance. There is, perhaps, nothing so pleasant as the preparation for self-sacrifice. ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... to study, that the billows are God's billows; and that though we go down into Hell, He is there also; the belief that not we, but He, is educating us; that these seemingly incoherent miseries, storm following earthquake, and earthquake fire, as if the caprice of all the demons were let loose against us, have in His mind a spiritual coherence, an organic unity and purpose, though we see it not; that these sorrows do not come singly, only because He is making short work with our spirits; and because the more effect He sees produced by one blow, ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... mouth of the Mississippi, had refused to permit the citizens of the United States to follow its waters into the ocean, and had occasionally tolerated or interdicted their commerce to New Orleans, as had been suggested by the supposed interest or caprice of the Spanish government or of its representatives in America. The eyes of the inhabitants adjacent to the waters which emptied into that river were turned down it as the only channel through which the surplus produce of their luxuriant soil could be conveyed to the markets ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... without a perversion of all history. There was no doubt an immense difference between the Hebrew prophets and the pagan Sibyl. The predictions of the Sibyl were accompanied by strange fantastic circumstances, and wore the appearance of a blind caprice or arbitrary fate; whereas the announcements of the Hebrew prophets, founded upon the denunciation of moral evil and the reign of sacred and peremptory principles of righteousness in the world, were calm, dignified, and self-consistent. But ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... after a moment of thought; then laughing lightly again, she added, quickly; "But I fear, in exonerating you from the charge of unmitigated caprice, I shall ascribe a reason that does little less ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... whom Theodora's lovers were wont to turn when suffering from her caprice, was on very friendly terms with the young Earl. He used to come and stand by her, and talk to her about Wrangerton, and seemed quite amused and edified by her quiet enthusiasm for it, and for Helvellyn, ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "The caprice which had led me to choose the old Moore house to be married in led me to plan dressing there on my wedding morning. It was early when we started, Cora and I, for Waverley Avenue, but not too early for the approaches to that dreadful house to be crowded ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... that, in sum, the term wealth is never to be attached to the accidental object of a morbid desire, but only to the constant object of a legitimate one.[14] By the fury of ignorance, and fitfulness of caprice, large interests may be continually attached to things unserviceable or hurtful; if their nature could be altered by our passions, the science of Political Economy would remain, what it has been hitherto among us, the weighing of clouds, and the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... reciprocates the sentiment. Now the question simply reduces itself to this: Shall this sentiment, this love, be founded on a complete and accurate knowledge of what is necessary to the complete gratification of the whole nature, or shall it be founded upon mere caprice or whim, the gratification of a mere fragmentary instinct which has never been educated to the comprehension of its true needs? Ponder on these questions for a few moments and you will realize that, instead of eliminating the sentiment of love from ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... immense army of the young crying to the dumb and impotent sky, and they all cry for bread. Mercy! how the little children suffer! And I have seen them by the hundred—by the thousand—and only helped from caprice; I could do no other. The iron winter is nearing us, and soon the dull agony of cold will swoop down and bear the gnawing hunger company while the two dire agencies inflict torture on the little ones. Were it not for Drink the sufferers might be clad and nourished; but then ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... their whole faculties sunk in a species of stupor, which I am unable adequately to describe. Habited like the meanest Arabs of the desert, they appear degraded even below the negro slave. The succession of hardships, which they endure, from the caprice and tyranny of their purchasers, without any protecting law to which they can appeal for alleviation or redress, seems to destroy every spring of exertion or hope in their minds; they appear indifferent to every thing around ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... but reaping an experience which enriched his writings; "Confessions d'un Enfant du Siecle" appeared in 1836, and is a significant confession of his life at this time; two years later he was appointed librarian at the Home Office, and in 1847 his charming comedy, "Un Caprice," was received with enthusiasm; in 1852 he was elected to the Academy, but his work was done, and already an ill-controlled indulgence in alcohol had fatally undermined his never robust strength; his writings, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the Shamash cult in Assyria in the express statement of Pudilu (c. 1350 B.C.) that he built a temple to the sun-god in the city of Ashur. He calls Shamash the 'protecting deity,' but the protection vouchsafed by Shamash is to be understood in a peculiar sense. Shamash does not work by caprice. He is, as we have seen, preeminently a god of justice, whose favors are bestowed in accordance with unchangeable principles. So far as Assyria is concerned, the conceptions regarding Shamash reach ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... commutation of property is their only traffic. Where money passes in the way of barter our old coin is the most acceptable, particularly that which is indented at the edge, or stamped with the impression of a chariot and two horses, called the Serrati and Bigati. Silver is preferred to gold, not from caprice or fancy, but because the inferior metal is of more expeditious use in the purchase ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... she said, impetuously: "I will be myself for a moment, in spite of everything. Maurice, don't think me unkind, don't reproach me, or ask my leave to come where I am. There is a reason for the change you see in me; it's not caprice, it is obedience." ...
— The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation • A. M. Barnard
... wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, envy, murder, deceit, malignity. They were backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without natural affection, implacable and unmerciful." Their manners and habits were the results of mere whim and caprice when they were not the results of simple love of wickedness. The vice of one community was the virtue of another; and refinement in one was unpardonable rudeness in another. The public festivals celebrated in Egypt are disgraceful ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... The very liberality of this accommodation might indeed have appeared in the event to give its own account of the matter—as if it had fairly written the Princess down as a person of variations and had accordingly conformed but to a rule of tact in accepting these caprices for law. The caprice actually prevailing happened to be that the advent of one of the ladies anywhere should, till the fit had changed, become the sign, unfailingly, of the advent of the other; and it was emblazoned, in rich colour, on the bright ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... State cannot interfere in such matters. The faiths of the empire are manifold. Beside, Nero has enough on his hands, and knows better than to stir up the passions of the Ionian people for the sake of a woman who in no way interferes with his caprice. No, my dear fellow; I am afraid all will be settled by the Temple custom, and Saronia must accept ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... more. It was of no real importance to her to know whether he bore her any grudge or not, but since she had taken so much trouble to see him she did not mean to go away without knowing the truth, and though her curiosity was a mere caprice, it was perhaps ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... and Claudius. He had imagined it in his power to influence the Duke's opinion, whereas in trying to effect that object he had roused the Englishman's animosity. Besides, Mr. Barker was to the Duke a caprice. He found the quick-thinking man of business amusing and even useful, but for steady companionship he did not want him. A passage across the Atlantic was more than enough to satisfy his desire for Mr. Barker's society, even if Barker ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... swear that thou wouldst, in thought, word, and deed, always maintain the religion inculcated on earth by the Vedas. Do thou further swear that thou wouldst fearlessly maintain the duties laid down in the Vedas with the aid of the science of chastisement, and that thou wouldst never act with caprice. O puissant one, know that Brahmanas are exempt from chastisement, and pledge further that thou wouldst protect the world from an intermixture of castes.' Thus addressed, Vena's son replied unto the deities headed by the Rishis, saying, 'Those bulls among men, viz., the highly blessed Brahmanas, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... sensible. You have a high position, a reputation to protect, friends to preserve and relations to deal with. You must not lose all these through a mere caprice." ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... meteorological changes quite past computation. Yet if one were as willing to be honest as one is willing to be graphic, one would allow that probably the weather on the other side of the Atlantic was then behaving with quite as swift and reckless caprice. The difference is that at home, having one's proper business, one leaves the weather to look after its own affairs in its own way; but being cast upon the necessary idleness of sojourn abroad, one becomes critical, becomes censorious. If ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... language, 'My lord, I see, has been purchasing slaves; I could clothe them cheaply.' There was something mysterious in the manner of this Jew, and I did not like his countenance; but I considered that I ought not to be governed by caprice in my dealings, and that, if this man could really clothe my slaves more cheaply than another, I ought not to neglect his offer merely because I took a dislike to the cut of his beard, the turn of his eye, or the tone of his voice. I, therefore, bade the Jew follow me home, saying that ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... me, and when we had been at work perhaps an hour and a half, we were again interrupted by the violent howlings of the dog. His uneasiness, in the first instance, had been, evidently, but the result of playfulness or caprice, but he now assumed a bitter and serious tone. Upon Jupiter's again attempting to muzzle him, he made furious resistance, and, leaping into the hole, tore up the mould frantically with his claws. In a few seconds he had uncovered a mass ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of a few owners, who lived in state at Madrid and never laid eyes on their farms, forests, or pastures. The peasantry had no interest to improve what might be taken from them at the death of the proprietor, or by caprice be appraised at a higher value on account of their very efforts toward the amelioration of their lot. The grandees kept gloomy state in vast palaces filled with hordes of idle servants. The remnants from their lavish but poorly served tables supported the crowds of beggars that ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... she found all that she liked, and escaped all that she hated. She therefore lived on the sea-shore.—She had persuaded her father to build that house, and they had furnished it according to their own recollections, and even their own whims.—Caprice was liberty, and liberty was essential to the enjoyment of every thing. Thus, she loved caprice, and laid herself open to the charge of being fantastic with those who ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... winds and many accidents might prevent his return to the Chesapeake. During his absence, a temporary naval superiority might be acquired by the British in those waters, and the army of Lord Cornwallis might be placed in perfect security. The movement would expose to the caprice of fortune, an object of vast importance, which was now reduced almost to certainty. The admiral was therefore ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... which afterwards proved of great importance. It took place under singular circumstances, which placed both him and me in a situation of peculiar embarrassment, brought about in the most wanton fashion by Devrient's exasperating caprice. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... hemisphere, if we limit the latter to what we know of their history within the past two or three thousand odd years, and American civilization to the past fifteen hundred years. The matter is somewhat greater than that—just as man is somewhat greater than a fool of natural caprice. ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... all that popularity which he had earned during the last ten years; and the security in which he indulged hurried him on to other acts of despotism, which inevitably led to his ruin. He raised money by forced loans; he compelled the judges to expound the law according to his own prejudices or caprice; he required the former adherents of Gloucester to purchase and repurchase charters of pardon; and, that he might obtain a more plentiful harvest of fines and amercements, put at once seventeen counties out of the protection of the law, under the pretence that they ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... by-road through the wood served as a short cut, for horsemen and pedestrians, from one divergent point to the other. It was next to a certainty that Arthur would return by the short cut. But if accident or caprice led to his preferring the highway, it was clearly necessary to wait for him within ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... come up to our ideal of what a man should be, does not seem to have been physically very wretched. Even here, however, we see how degraded a thing a slave was, and the frequent threats of torture prove how utterly he was at the mercy of a cruel master's caprice. We know, too, that when a master was arraigned on a criminal charge, the first thing done to prove his guilt was to torture his slaves. But just as in America the popular figure of the oily, lazy, jocular negro, brimming over with grotesque good-humour and screening himself in the weakness ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... slender, scholarly hand on her shoulder was trembling with the intensity of his repressed emotion. He did care, then. A wild caprice flashed into her brain. She ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... saw in action around him, the great Whig writer, who in past times had so passionately defended the liberties of America and the constitutional tradition of the English Parliament against the aggression of George III., attacked the Revolution as a system of violence and caprice more formidable to freedom than the tyranny of any Crown. He proved that the politicians and societies of England who had given it their sympathy had given their sympathy to measures and to theories opposed to every principle of 1688. Above ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... I have not been very diligent to observe. Some plays have more, and some fewer judicial observations, not in proportion to their difference of merit, but because I gave this part of my design to chance and to caprice. The reader, I believe, is seldom pleased to find his opinion anticipated; it is natural to delight more in what we find or make, than in what we receive. Judgement, like other faculties, is improved by practice, and its advancement ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... woman's wild caprice? It played with Goethe's silvered hair, And many a Holy Father's "niece" Has softly ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... bearing a dazzling mask, as among the Zuni), and thunder is the rumbling of quoits pitched by the shades of old-time giants, as among different American tribes. Eventually all the leading agencies of nature are personified in anthropic form, and retain the human attributes of caprice, love, and hate which are found in the minds of ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... side of Elizabeth's character was fully balanced by her feminine foibles. Her vanity was inordinate. Her love of adulation and passion for display, her caprice, duplicity, and her reckless love- affairs, form a strange background for the calm, determined, masterly statesmanship ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... empire, traitor to every man, every principle and motive of human conduct, Duke of Otranto, and the wily artisan of the Second Restoration, was trying the fit of a court suit, in which his young and accomplished fiancee had declared her wish to have his portrait painted on porcelain. It was a caprice, a charming fancy which the Minister of Police of the Second Restoration was anxious to gratify. For that man, often compared in wiliness of intellect to a fox but whose ethical side could be worthily symbolised by nothing less emphatic ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... depreciation, and other ingenious devices still dear to the virtuoso, she succeeded in obtaining possession of articles which would have enraptured a modern collector. Judith was apparently indifferent to a habit which she looked upon as a caprice of her faithful servant, and the only evidence of her noticing it was her concentration in her own apartments of all that related to ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... them, or putting burning soapstones in their beds. It was a pity Life had cheated her of having a dozen babies to pilot through the mazes of measles and whooping cough, for then Mary would have been in her element. Yet nature is a thing of inconsistencies, and through some strange, unaccountable caprice, Mary's marital instincts stopped with this fostering instinct. In every other respect she was an old maid. Men she abhorred. Like Jennie Wren, she knew their tricks and their manners—or thought she did—which ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... of Pyrrhus's life, a misfortune resulting apparently from an inherent and radical defect in his character, that he had no settled plans or purposes, but embarked in one project after another, as accident or caprice might incline him, apparently without any forethought, consideration, or design. He seemed to form no plan, to live for no object, to contemplate no end, but was governed by a sort of blind and instinctive ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... her journal, they have been carefully composed or re-composed for publication, and were always intended to be seen. Now if my poor little Diary should ever be seen! I tremble but to think of it!—what egotism and vanity, what discontent—repining—caprice—should I be accused of?—neither perhaps have I always been just to others; quand on sent, on reflechit rarement. Such strange vicissitudes of temper—such opposite extremes of thinking and feeling, written down at the moment, without noticing the intervening links of circumstances ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... mantelpiece. There was a nicely fitted cabinet, and the Chinese flower-stands were handsomely filled. The bed, the toilet-table, the wardrobe with its mirror, the little sofa, and all the lady's frippery bore the stamp of fashion or caprice. Though everything was quite third-rate as to elegance or quality, and nothing was absolutely newer than three years old, a dandy would have had no fault to find but that the taste of all this luxury was commonplace. Art, and the distinction ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... times as suited his caprice and his resources—to give exhibitions of his genius for mimicry to the rest of the boys. I had heard from Rupert of these entertainments, which were much admired by the school. They commonly consisted of funny ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... qualities of both the others known to us. Could it supplant them, it would be a great happiness, as it would enable us to get rid of those ponds of stagnant water, so fatal to human health and life. But such is the force of habit, and caprice of taste, that we could not be sure beforehand it would produce this effect. The experiment, however, is worth trying, should it only end in producing a third quality, and increasing the demand. I will endeavor to procure some to be brought from Cochin-China. ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... pre- occupying the mind with all the colour and circumstance of the relationship of person to person, the idea of Beauty, conveyed into the entire theory of ideas, the associations which belong properly to such relationships only. A certain measure of caprice, of capricious preference or repulsion, would thus be naturally incidental to the commerce of men's minds with what really is, with the world in which things really are, only so far as they are truly known. "Philosophers are lovers ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... justice, all that was done for me ought to have been done for him. The enormous sums spent upon me were not really mine; they came to me by an error of blind Fortune, when they ought to have gone to P——'s son. They should have gone to benefit him, not me, in whom P—— interested himself by a mere caprice, instead of doing his duty as a father. If I wished to behave nobly, justly, and with delicacy, I ought to bestow half my fortune upon the son of my benefactor; but as economy is my favourite virtue, and I know this is not a case in which the law can intervene, I will not give up half my millions. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... at any sort of a game, financial, political, or domestic—therefore dangerous, safe, or commonplace, full of intrigue, or a mystery, or the silliest caprice. ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... another tribunal which should be styled monstrous, rather than by the milder term of exceptional; this is the "Fabbrica di S. Petro" (house of St Peter.) To this was granted, by the caprice of the Pope, the right to claim from the immediate or distant heirs of any testator, even at remote epochs, the sum of unpaid legacies for pious purposes. The Cardinal Arch-Priest and the Commons, who represent the pretended creditor, are judges between themselves and the presumed ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... of manners and customs. For the young, motor education is cardinal, and is now coming to due recognition; and, for all, education is incomplete without a motor side. Skill, endurance, and perseverance may almost be called muscular virtues; and fatigue, velleity, caprice, ennui, restlessness, lack of control and ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... him, (for then, Sir, he was not known to be Beelzebub himself,) and by endeavouring to force her inclinations in favour first of one worthless man, then of another, in antipathy to him, through her foolish brother's caprice, turned that indifference (from the natural generosity of her soul) into a regard which she never otherwise would have had for a man of ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... appear that he resigned in consequence of being restricted in his action; but he knows very well that the latitude allowed him became less and less circumscribed; and that, hitherto, he was well content to operate within the prescribed limits. Therefore, if it was not a silly caprice, it was a deliberate purpose, to escape a cloud of odium he knew must sooner or later ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... live on her smile? Is it less sweet because it is withdrawn from me? Did I not adore her every grace? Does she bend less enchantingly, because she has turned from me to another? Is my love then in the power of fortune, or of her caprice? No, I will have it lasting as it is pure; and I will make a Goddess of her, and build a temple to her in my heart, and worship her on indestructible altars, and raise statues to her: and my homage shall be unblemished as her ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... increased by the solicitation of my companions, who removing one by one to London, as the caprice of their relations allowed them, or the legal dismission from the hands of their guardian put it in their power, never failed to send an account of the beauty and felicity of the new world, and to remonstrate how much was lost by every hour's continuance in ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... the effect is that of some great unseen hand writing cabalistic sentences (perhaps the "Mene, Mene" of De Wet!), with a pen dipped in fire. This night there was scarcely a breath of wind to determine the track of the fires, or quicken their speed, and they wound and intersected at their own caprice, describing fantastic arcs and curves from which one could imagine pictures and letters. The valley gradually became full of a dull, soft glow, and overhung with red, murky smoke, through which the moon shone down ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... Abu-Taleb,[19] and in much the same line of argument—to the effect that the dowery which the eastern husband is bound by law to pay over in money to his wife in the event of a separation, is a far more effectual protection to the wife from the fickleness and caprice of her partner, ("whose interest it thus becomes, setting affection wholly out of the question, to remain on good terms with her,") than any remedy afforded by the laws of England; where a wife, though bound by ties less easily dissolved than under the Mohammedan ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... night, to receive such a guest. Besides, the hour is most suited to the convenience of one of thy quality who would breathe the fresh evening air on the canals. Were I to limit thee to hours and minutes, some truant wish of the moment—some innocent caprice of thy sex and years, might go ungratified. Ah! Donna Florinda, we may well pray that all our affection—not to call it weakness—for this persuasive girl, shall not in the end lead to ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... which shone like yellow ivory in the subdued light. This rank flattery cooled me. A woman who has any regard for a man is not likely to flatter him in respect to his looks on so short and slight an acquaintance. "Monsieur," she proceeded, "this is to be no escapade, no caprice. I ask your aid as a desperate woman. At court I can find no one to succor me, save at the peril of that which is dearer to me than my life. Among the commoners, who would dare? An Englishman? It is too much trouble. A Frenchman? I would trust him not quite so far as the door. You are the first ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... articles of house consumption in this way, while the growing facilities of postage and conveyance of goods enable them to purchase from a large central store by means of a price-list all other consumables into which the element of individual taste or caprice does not largely enter. This habit is spreading in the smaller towns among the middle classes, so that the small dispersed retail businesses are becoming more and more dependent upon the supply of the needs of the working classes, and of such articles of comfort and luxury as may appeal to ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... in the confessional, to explain the motives why I have so long persisted in disclaiming the works of which I am now writing. To this it would be difficult to give any other reply, save that of Corporal Nym—It was the humour or caprice of the time. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... in all its diverse manifestations is found to be only a repetition of responses seen in the inorganic. There is in it no element of mystery or caprice, such as we must admit to be applied in the assumption of a hypermechanical vital force, acting in contradiction or defiance of those physical laws that govern the world of matter. Nowhere in the entire range of ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... distribution of the nightingale, indeed, within the limits of its summer home is among the most remarkable of the many problems confronting the student of distribution, and successive ingenious but unconvincing attempts to explain its seeming eccentricity, or at any rate caprice, in the choice of its nesting range only make the confusion worse. Briefly, in spite of a number of doubtful and even suspicious reports of the bird's occurrence outside of these boundaries, it is generally agreed by the soundest observers that its travels do not extend much north of the city ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... that royal lady's penetrating eye. Shiftiness, poverty, debts, modes of getting money that were, perhaps, equivocal, help too lightly accepted, all these are bad enough; but they are not in a woman the unpardonable sin. And a caprice in English society was always possible. The young beauty of Bice might attract the eye of some one whose notice would throw down all obstacles; or it might touch the heart of some woman who was so high placed as to be able to defy prejudice. And after that, of course, they would go everywhere, ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... seldom either expressed or exhibited much gratitude. Even towards persons who had been his greatest benefactors, and who possessed the greatest share of his good-will, he frequently displayed much caprice and jealousy. A lady who had known him from his infancy, and who has furnished us in the most obliging manner with some particulars respecting him, says, that although Davie showed as much respect and attachment to her father's family, as it was in his nature to show to any, yet they were ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... article of diet, salt seems to act simply as a stimulus, not containing any nourishment, and is the only fossil substance which the caprice of mankind has yet taken into their stomachs along with their food; and, like all other unnatural stimuli, is not necessary to people in health, and contributes to weaken our system; though it may be useful as a ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... with our existential judgment, we might indeed deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible's worth. Thus if our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, to possess it, must have been composed automatically or not by the free caprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... which was as natural on his part as it was undeserved on mine. Indeed I could not wonder at his Majesty's anger; nor should I have wondered at it in a greater man. I knew that but for reasons, on which I did not wish to dwell, I should have shared it to the full, and spoken quite as strongly of the caprice which ruined hopes ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... the impetuosity and caprice of his wife (at the same time that he acknowledged her many redeeming good qualities), did not further attempt to thwart her inclinations. His great objection to her plan was, the impropriety of retaining a ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... without it, the assurance that there will always be at the head of the Government a sensible ruler trained up to office in the best school in the world; and that the security of the rights, and the enforcement of the duties, presented or defined by law, will not depend upon the will or caprice of individuals in power. These assurances the people in India now everywhere thoroughly understand and appreciate. They see in the native states around them that the lucky accident of an able governor is too rare ever to be calculated upon; ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... blubbered is that pretty face! Thy cheek all on fire, and thy hair all uncurled! Prithee quit this caprice, and (as old Falstaff says) Let us e'en talk a little like folks of ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... himself if he himself was able to endure poverty; no one knows the weight of a burden until he has carried it, at least for a moment, upon his own shoulders. He desired to know what it is like to have nothing, and to depend for bread upon the charity or the caprice ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... was a love-match on both sides." One incident of the wedding-day was ominous. As the newly-married couple rode back from church, Mrs. Johnson showed her spirit by reproaching her husband for riding too fast, and then for lagging behind. Resolved "not to be made the slave of caprice," he pushed on briskly till he was fairly out of sight. When she rejoined him, as he, of course, took care that she should soon do, she was in tears. Mrs. Johnson apparently knew how to regain supremacy; ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... the man to whose knowledge and skill they had willingly committed their fortunes and themselves, who had ruled them as with a rod of iron, whose will was their law, who had held their very lives in his hands, at whose caprice they were either happy or miserable, and who now lay there without the power to move so much as a finger either to help or hurt them, and whose lifeless clay they were about to launch to its last resting-place, there to repose "till the sea gives up her dead,"—this, ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... at me," interrupted the courtier with gentle reproachfulness, and yet in a tone of entreaty. "If I took your side it was not from caprice, but simply and expressly from a desire to remain faithful to the one aim ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the hands, arms, and legs of many, on very small and frivolous causes; or causing them to be thrown to the elephants, he himself commanding a sagacious elephant to toss the culprits so high and so often, as either to bruise or kill them, according to his caprice at the time. No one that arrives at his port may land without his chop or licence. On one occasion, a Dutch general came on shore without his licence, by desire of the principal factor, who presumed on his favour with the king. When the general came ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... his curacies long, either losing them from the caprice of his principals, or being compelled to resign them from the parsimony which they practised towards him. In the year 1756 he was living in a garret in London vainly soliciting employment in his sacred calling, and undergoing with his family ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... pleasant memories? I tell you that everything in our bachelor life leads to fatal errors in the married man unless he is a profound observer of the human heart. In the happy days of his youth a man, by the caprice of our customs, is always lucky; he triumphs over women who are all ready to be triumphed over and who obey their own desires. One thing after another—the obstacles created by the laws, the sentiments ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... imagine, that they had no sort of form of government, that they knew no laws nor subordination, and that living in an entire independence, they suffered themselves to be entirely guided by chance, or by the most wild, untamed caprice: yet they enjoy almost all the advantages, which a well-regulated authority can procure to the most civilized nations. Born free and independent, they hold in horror the very shadow of despotic power; but they rarely ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... capitalism had already arisen. Large aggregations of capital in the hands of trading companies were becoming common. The Roman law was establishing itself in the place of the old customary tribal law which had hitherto prevailed in the manorial courts, serving in some sort as a bulwark against the caprice of the territorial lord; and this change facilitated the development of the bourgeois principle of private, as opposed to communal, property. In intellectual matters, though theology still maintained its supremacy as the chief subject ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... knew that to go on in spite of them would produce a quarrel, and, of course, a fight, which, as it would certainly result in bloodshed, was by all means to be avoided for we could not bear to think that a mere caprice of ours in visiting Africa should be the means of causing the death of a single human being, if we ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... of which we have been speaking, it was a common practice to adorn the books with gay illuminated initials or page borders, which were sometimes very beautiful in both design and color. In these rather more freedom was allowed to the caprice of the individual artist, and they were frequently enlivened with very charming and lifelike flowers, birds, squirrels, ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... swelled her song With maiden coy caprice In a labyrinth of throbs, Pauses, cadences; Clear-noted as a dropping brook, Soft-noted like the bees, Wild-noted as the shivering wind Forlorn through forest trees: Love-noted like the wood-pigeon Who hides herself for love, Yet ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... hungry, very down in the mouth, staring at the cork ball on the jet of water under the glass shade, and drearily likening it to my own mental condition, flung hither and thither, drenched, rolled over, lifted and dropped by a caprice beyond the power of resistance. It was at this mournful moment that I found my first friend in London. The story of that event shall be told hereafter. What I want to say now is that the sight of that permanent ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... to her. They were to have been married next spring, but now Edna declares that nothing would induce her to marry him. She will have it that he is jealous and monopolizing, and that he distrusts her. Over and over again she told us both that she would be the slave of no man's caprice. Of course it is all her temper; she is just mad with him because he is always in the right, and she knows how ungenerously she has acted; but bye and bye she will repent, and break her heart, for she is certainly fond of him, and then it ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... earliest scrape; but whether I shall proceed with his adventures is Dependent on the public altogether; We'll see, however, what they say to this: Their favour in an author's cap's a feather, And no great mischief's done by their caprice; And if their approbation we experience, Perhaps they'll have some more ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... but with the Persians equality is held to be an essential part of justice: and first and foremost, your father himself must perform his appointed services to the state and receive his appointed dues: and the measure of these is not his own caprice but the law. Have a care then, or you may be scourged to death when you come home to Persia, if you learn in your grandfather's school to love not kingship but tyranny, and hold the tyrant's belief that he and he alone should have more than all ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... some uneasy martyrs do) by small instalments of long repining; but that he carried the spirit of the hour in which he first knew and took his course to his last. So far from thinking that his sacrifice of youth and love to his sister gave him a license to follow his own caprice at the expense of her feelings, even in the lightest matters, he always wrote and spoke of her as his wiser self, his generous benefactress, of whose protecting ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... expressed, and which, as I have never since felt any enthusiasm for royal persons, I must suppose that the female attendants in the family must have put into my head, to long to see the king. This childish caprice was so strong, that my mother solicited the Duchess of Kendal to obtain for me the honour of kissing his Majesty's hand before he set out for Hanover. A favour so unusual to be asked for a boy of ten years old, was still too slight to be refused to the wife of the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... and quietly shoot at each other with firearms, till one of them is killed or wounded; and this too, in many cases, when the injury has been merely nominal. If you show such a contempt of death, in deference to a custom founded in mere caprice, can it be wondered that a woman should show it, in the first paroxysms of her grief for the loss of him to whom was devoted every thought, word, and action of her life, and who, next to her God, was the object of her idolatry? My dear Atterley," he continued, with emotion, "you little know ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... kinswoman. We are told that Judith was the enemy and accuser of her husband. This may have touched William's one weak point. Yet he would hardly have swerved from the practice of his whole life to please the bloody caprice of a niece who longed for the death of her husband. And if Judith longed for Waltheof's death, it was not from a wish to supply his place with another. Legend says that she refused a second husband offered her by ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... well-authenticated fact that the royal apartments were fumigated with powdered tobacco (then a recent and costly importation into France), in lieu of the perfumes which had previously been in use for the same purpose, it will scarcely be denied that caprice rather than taste dictated the habits of the Court ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... people, who had for a century been struggling with oppression and innumerable difficulties, changing with their repeated changes of masters, was owing to the keen sagacity and prompt decision of Napoleon. It is thus that the destinies of mankind wait upon the fortunes, the caprice, the foresight, and the blunders of the great, and are determined, for weal or wo, by causes and accidents in which those who are most affected by them have no agency. The people of Louisiana, and their fertile territory, which from their first settlement had been a subject of barter among ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... of whom she had spoken to him with derisive contempt!—this cold and calculated deception of him with some one who made not the least appeal to her!—Cold and calculated, did he say? No, far from it! What COULD it have been but the sensual caprice of a moment?—but a fleeting, manlike desire ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... authors, like the Children in the Fable, track our journey through the maze by the pebbles which we strew along the path. From others who wander after us, they may attract no notice, or, if noticed, seem to them but scattered by the caprice of chance; but we, when our memory would retrace our steps, review in the humble stones the witnesses of our progress, the landmarks of ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... imagination, predilection, caprice, humor, inclination, supposition, conceit, idea, liking, vagary, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... levity and youthfulness of blood, a malady incident to young men, physicians call it caprice. Nothing else. He, that slighted her, knew her value: and 'tis odds, but, for thy sake, Margaret, John will yet go to his grave a bachelor. (A noise heard, as ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Amelia assumed toward him what she imagined were very pretty airs of proprietorship. Eoger knew well that her manner would have been the same toward the youth with whom, from a sudden caprice, she had broken her engagement for the evening. Her habitual coquetry nevertheless unwittingly carried out his original programme with a success that made him grind his teeth with rage, for he supposed that Mildred would gain the idea that they were congenial spirits drawn together ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... make one forswear the whole sex," the commissary angrily replied. "Nor am I the man to put up with such womanish humoursomeness. "I've stood your caprice till my patience is exhausted; now I'll ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... temper; and it ought to be held out as an example to the world, to shew how necessary it is to conduct the business of government with civility. In short, other revolutions may have originated in caprice, or generated in ambition, but here, the most unoffending humility was tortured into rage, and the infancy of existence made ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... the most boundless Freedoms. There is a kind of Nature that is to be observed in this sort of Compositions, as well as in all other, and a certain Regularity of Thought [which [1]] must discover the Writer to be a Man of Sense, at the same time that he appears altogether given up to Caprice: For my part, when I read the delirious Mirth of an unskilful Author, I cannot be so barbarous as to divert my self with it, but am rather apt to pity the Man, than to laugh at any ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... drift. There was no caprice to offend when he turned with courtly logic from one great ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... would. Never doubting her own power to turn him any instant adrift, she found delight in the passion of so virile, graceful, glorious a lover, the man of whom she had heard other women speak for three long years, and now he was hers—hers to do with as she dared—to break or make as was her caprice. What—what if men looked stern and women shrank? This was a game well worth the candle, let ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... means I recovered such portion of quiet as is compatible with a situation like mine: for she soon returned entirely to such behaviour as preceded the offence of my eyes; and I obtained a little leisure at which she could not repine, as a caprice of her own bestowed it. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... slavery are sure to prevail; and these personal accomplishments, so far from being of use to the owner, serve only to deprive her of liberty, and the society of her friends; to render her a degraded victim, subservient to the sensual gratification, the caprice, and the jealousy of tyrant man. Among savage tribes the labour and drudgery invariably fall heaviest ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... happiness; it belongs to the perfection of creatures. But the unchangeableness of God is the negation of all imperfection, it is the negation of all dependence on circumstances, it is the negation of all possibility of decay or exhaustion, it is the negation of all caprice. It is the assurance that His is an underived, self-dependent being, and that with Him is the fountain of light; it is the assurance that, raised above the limits of time and the succession of events, He is in the eternal present, where all things that were and are, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... mind," Mr. Keller answered. "But your objection is simply unaccountable; and I press you for your motives, having this good reason for doing so on my side. If I am to disappoint my sister—cruelly to disappoint her—it must be for some better cause than a mere caprice." ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... to flatter your passing caprice, mademoiselle," said the duke, to whom the little scene, so tragical for Modeste, had left time for thought; "but I declare I am so profoundly disgusted with the world and the Court and Paris that had I a Duchesse d'Herouville, gifted with the wit and graces of mademoiselle, I would ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... of most of the other powers, which I have said are occasionally manifested by persons in trance, which sometimes attain an extraordinary vigour and compass, and which are maintained, or are maintainable, for several years, being manifested for that time, though not without caprice and occasional entire failures, on the patient reverting to the entranced condition. One of the most interesting features in what follows is, that it is evident M. Petetin was entirely unacquainted with mesmerism; and, at the same time, that he had all but discovered and developed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... organisation and surpassed it in the homogeneity of its interests. The body of capitalists who had assumed the titular designation of knights, had long been chafing at the complete subjection of their commercial interests to the caprice of the provincial governor and the arbitrary dispositions of the home government. Tiberius Gracchus, when he revealed the way to the promised land, had probably reflected rather than suggested the ambition of the great business men to have a more definite place in the administration assigned ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... he would unite his joy with their joy, and would chant hymns of victory (epinicia)—"which by the way," said he, suddenly, breaking off to his favorite pursuits, "it is necessary that I should immediately compose." This caprice vanished like the rest; and he made an effort to enlist the slaves and citizens into his service, and to raise by extortion a large military chest. But in the midst of these vascillating purposes fresh tidings surprised him—other armies had ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... think? Would he not be ashamed to find himself in such an association, in which the leaders arouse the greatest expectations and carry out the best plan in such a miserable manner? And all this out of caprice, expediency, etc. Judge whether I ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... crypt was now a pretty young woman whose hair was growing again, instinct with life in every curl and wave of its soft luxuriance. The reappearance of this fair hair gave a touch of lightness, almost of brightness, to the widow's mourning, which seemed now no more than a caprice of fashion. In the movements and tones of the Princess was perceptible the stirring of spring; she had the air of relief and repose noticeable in young widows in the second period of their mourning. It is a delightful position. For the first time after ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... true history of that public feeling on the subject of Reform which had been ascribed to causes quite inadequate to the production of such an effect. If ever there was in the history of mankind a national sentiment which was the very opposite of a caprice, with which accident had nothing to do, which was produced by the slow, steady, certain progress of the human mind, it is the sentiment of the English people on the subject of Reform. Accidental circumstances may have brought that feeling to maturity ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wished for a wife who, instead of indulging the caprice of indolence would have awakened him to energy, and have taught him to be just not captious, his desires would have been more rational: but, to a man who had formed a system of obedience to authority, and not to reason, the arguments he used were irrefragable. To a woman ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... her thousands of wooers who follow her to the rocks, seeking her with back-breaking toil and dreaming ever of her by day and by night. Variable and cruel, deaf to all beseeching, she picks out her favorites by some rule of caprice which none but ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... had suddenly shown him something beyond caprice, beyond accident of mood or temper. The true woman had spoken; all outer modish garments had dropped away from her real nature, and showed its abundant depth and sincerity. All that was roused in him this moment was never known; he never could tell ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... quarter, to the disturbance of the peace of the neighbourhood, and the promotion of dissension. Some they threaten, others they frighten; and, in short, would be lords paramount, and have every one govern himself according to their caprice, though they know not how to govern themselves. Indeed, I am sorry to see that they meddle with any thing but their Koraun, and will not ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... exceeded by the confiscating power exercised in a country, where, instead of leaving values to be measured by a standard common to the whole world, they are left to be depressed or raised at the whim, caprice or interest of a body of legislators. When this power is given, the power of prices is inevitably included ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... consul, was in a dungeon, and a slave was sent in with commission to put him to death. These were the persons,—the two extremities of exalted and forlorn humanity, its vanward and its rearward man, a Roman consul and an abject slave. But their natural relations to each other were, by the caprice of fortune, monstrously inverted: the consul was in chains; the slave was for a moment the arbiter of his fate. By what spells, what magic, did Marius reinstate himself in his natural prerogatives? By what marvels drawn from heaven ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... possessed me, and when we had been at work perhaps an hour and a half, we were again interrupted by the violent howlings of the dog. His uneasiness, in the first instance, had been evidently but the result of playfulness or caprice, but he now assumed a bitter and serious tone. Upon Jupiter's again attempting to muzzle him, he made furious resistance, and, leaping into the hole, tore up the mould frantically with his claws. In a few seconds he had uncovered a mass of human bones, forming two complete skeletons, intermingled ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... having taken some pains to hide even my existence from her husband, who, nevertheless, conscientiously took up the burden. A man more strongly conscientious never lived; and his sudden neglect of me had nothing to do with caprice, but came—as I am now assured—of some lesion of memory under the shock of my sister's death. As an unregenerate youngster I thought little of it at the time, beyond rejoicing to be free of ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... a wild, a resolute, and an active nature. Thrown on the world at the age of sixteen, he had passed his youth in alternate pleasure, travel, and solitary study. At the age in which manhood is least susceptible to caprice, and most perhaps to passion, he fell in love with the loveliest person that ever dawned upon a poet's vision. I say this without exaggeration, for Gertrude Vane's was indeed the beauty, but the perishable beauty, of a dream. It happened ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... probability that her uncle would hear what had passed did not trouble her. She was convinced that whatever he might say would be on the side of her accepting Grandcourt, and she wished to accept him if she could. At this moment she would willingly have had weights hung on her own caprice. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the caprice of the physician." (In a word, instead of being dependent upon blind chance, that there is an infallible law, guided by which; the physician MUST select the proper remedies.') ['Ibid.,' in a notice of Menzel's ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... verb or noun following, or the preposition going before, use to govern."—Dr. Adam's Gram., p. 203. "Which the verb or noun following, or the preposition going before, usually govern."—Gould's Adam's Gram., p. 200.[401] "In the different modes of pronunciation which habit or caprice give rise to."—Knight, on the Greek Alphabet, p. 14. "By which he, or his deputy, were authorized to cut down any trees in Whittlebury forest."—Junius, p. 251. "Wherever objects were to be named, in which sound, noise, or motion were concerned, the imitation by words ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... delight in humouring therewith, the fancies of Dymock, and administering to the more sober and benevolent plans of Mrs. Margaret; for this lady's principal delight was, to assist the needy, and her only earthly or worldly caprice, that of restoring the Tower and its environs, and furnishing, to what she conceived had been its state, in the, perhaps, imaginary days of ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... dispute cannot be compared with that danger. It cannot be the intention of the Alliance that we, the life interest of our ally not being endangered, should enter upon a life-and-death conflict for a caprice of that ally. Should it become evident that the other side intend to attack, the danger must ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... conduct, in some of the most interesting relations of domestic life, so many strong and honorable testimonies remain. The pains he took to win back the estranged feelings of his father, and the filial tenderness with which he repaid long years of parental caprice, show a heart that had, at least, set out by the right road, however, in after years, it may have missed the way. The enthusiastic love which his sister bore him, and retained unblighted by distance or neglect, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... the cause of this second fit of silence, I cannot conjecture; but after one trick, I will not be cheated by another, nor will harass my thoughts with conjectures about the motives of a man who, probably, acts only by caprice. I therefore suppose you are well, and that Mrs. Boswell is well too; and that the fine summer has restored Lord Auchinleck. I am much better than you left me; I think I am better than when I ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... current in the development of physical science, seems to have engaged comparatively little of his attention; at least he gives it no prominence. The great conception of uniform regular sequence, without partiality and without caprice—the conception which is the most potent force at work in the modification of our faith, and of the practical form given to our sentiments—could only grow out of that patient watching of external fact, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... vast empire, composed of many different peoples, was under the rule and subject to the caprice of one man. The form of the government imposed practically no checks on his power. With such able emperors as Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius the State was safe; but the wise men of Rome had foreseen ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... not left by the Greeks, as it is by the moderns, to operate at random, or yielded up to the will or the caprice of vain, ignorant, presumptuous, or corrupt pretenders. A bench of judges to the number of ten, selected for their learning, integrity, and acknowledged excellence, were appointed by law to preside at theatric ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... even to the unfair accidents of luck that befall books. For it is well known to all who watch literature with vigilance, that books and authors have their fortunes, which travel upon a far different scale of proportions from those that measure their merits. Not even the caprice or the folly of the reading public is required to account for this. Very often, indeed, the whole difference between an extensive circulation for one book, and none at all for another of about equal merit, belongs to no particular blindness in men, but to the simple fact, that the one has, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... sense of the word can be said to honor our nature, while many make us almost ashamed of it. The curtain is seldom drawn aside without exhibiting to us beings worn out with vicious indulgence, diseased in mind, if not in body, the creatures of caprice and insensibility. On the other hand, since the foundation of the American Republic, the chair has never been filled by a man, for whose life (to say the least,) any American need once to blush. It must, therefore, be some compensation ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... he had earned during the last ten years; and the security in which he indulged hurried him on to other acts of despotism, which inevitably led to his ruin. He raised money by forced loans; he compelled the judges to expound the law according to his own prejudices or caprice; he required the former adherents of Gloucester to purchase and repurchase charters of pardon; and, that he might obtain a more plentiful harvest of fines and amercements, put at once seventeen counties out of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of 1789 and so forth, and at another plainly say that the campaign of 1812 and other things they do not like were simply the product of Napoleon's misdirected will, and that the very ideas of 1789 were arrested in their development by Napoleon's caprice. The ideas of the Revolution and the general temper of the age produced Napoleon's power. But Napoleon's power suppressed the ideas of the Revolution and the general ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... wallowed in the gutter. She took up the lovers whose passions are exhausted in one night, those whom she passed or met on the street, those whom chance throws in the way of a wandering woman. She had no need to give herself time for the growth of desire: her caprice was fierce and sudden, kindled instantly. Pouncing greedily upon the first comer, she hardly looked at him and could not have recognized him. Beauty, youth, the physical qualities of a lover, in which the passion of the most degraded woman ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... confession of faith: "I shall have to find my way across the harbour bar without the aid of any pilot. In these matters I have for many years carried an exempt flag, and, as it has not been carried through caprice or ignorance, I am compelled to carry it to the last. There is an impassable bar of what I honestly believe to be the inexorable logic of philosophy and facts, history and experience of the nature of ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... Powers of caprice, confusion, and dismay! It was Jessie Yelverton herself—arriving, without a word of warning, exactly ten ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... summarily outside the stable-door with all his harness on, was trying in vain to understand this singular caprice on the part of Carpenter, Carpenter and the head of the house lifted Uncle Meshach's form and carried it into the hall. The women watched, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... she was said to be exacting. With a slender figure and delicate proportions, she could afford to indulge in languid manners, savoring somewhat of affectation, but revealing passion and the consciousness that every least caprice will ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... looking after her neat figure, less concerned in the advent of the strangers than in her sudden caprice. He was not so young and inexperienced but that he noted certain ambiguities in her dress and manner: he was by no means impressed by her dignity. But he could not help watching her as she appeared to be volubly recounting her late interview to her ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... personage was, or is, an artist; and we may not be mistaken in believing that we have seen, cast aside in the vast storerooms of Haseltine's galleries in this city—an example and gnomon of disenchanted glory—her water-color sketch called the "Fellah Woman," and the very one of which Gautier sang: "Caprice of a fantastic brush and of an imperial leisure!... Those eyes, a whole poem of languor and pleasure, resolve the riddle and say, 'Be thou ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... offer her the alternative of public shame or public trial and jail; yet she had a patient smile for him, a dignified submission that touched him. After all, he thought with emotion, she is of the same nature with myself; a poor castaway from conventional life playing one part or another by caprice, for gain or sport or notoriety; only the devil has entered into her, while I have been lucky enough to cast my lot with the exorcists of the race. He almost ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... twelve years old my mother died, and after four years spent in school I returned to find a great change in my father. He would at times be gloomy and morose for days together, keeping the whole house in a state of fear and discomfort by his sudden caprice and unreasonable exactions. This would pass away and he would appear as usual. These attacks grew to be more frequent, and at last came to be his habitual frame, and his frequent absence from home, which at first was a great sorrow to me, came to ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... younger children. This concession on her part shows that she must have had their well-being at heart, even when her policy in their regard was most misguided, and that her unkindness was not, like her husband's cruelty, born of caprice. But it was sad for Mary that her mother did not discover her ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Madrid said: "It was no caprice of the fortunes of war. From the very first cannon-shot our fragile ships were at the mercy of the formidable hostile squadron. They were condemned to fall one after another under the fire of the American batteries, powerless to strike, and were defended only by ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... utility and comfort. If poetic diction be different in species from plain English, then let us have it as poetical as possible, and as unlike English; as ungrammatical, abrupt, involved, transposed, as the clumsiness, carelessness, or caprice of man can make it. If it be correct to express human thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphysic, and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti, which bear an entirely ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... between street-lamps thereabouts. I could see none between the one under which I was standing and the brow of the hill below. Then it occurred to me that this circumstance might not be due to the caprice of the street department of the city government, but to the thoughtfulness of the gentlemen who were paying such close attention to my affairs. I decided that there were better ways to get down town than were ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... and of orange blossoms, yet ethereal and fugitive, gave something as it were celestial to that mysterious flower, which Seraphitus sadly contemplated, as though it uttered plaintive thoughts which he alone could understand. But to Minna this mysterious phenomenon seemed a mere caprice of nature giving to stone the freshness, softness, and ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... and was so far convinced of her own instincts, and the profound impression the fountain had made upon her, that she was enabled to secretly finish her interrupted sketch from memory. For Miss Charlotte Forrest was a born artist, and in no mere caprice had persuaded her father to let her adopt the profession, and accepted the drudgery of a novitiate. She looked earnestly upon this first real work of her hand and found it good! Still, it was but a pencil sketch, and wanted the vivification ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... had rebelled against the authority of Louis XV, who had commanded him to marry the Princess Henriette, cousin to both of them. The princess was reported to be openly devoted to the cousin who refused to accept her hand at the bidding of the king; and, as rumor ran, the prince's caprice elected in preference the discipline of Vincennes, to which retirement the furious king had consigned him. The story was the staple gossip of all polite Europe; and Captain Rohrer, having in his mind a purpose to make use of it in leading ...
— Monsieur Beaucaire • Booth Tarkington
... foreigners as have been inspired to compose pieces founded on Cuban music, are also included in Don Laureano's repertory. Ravina's far-famed 'Habaneros,' Gottschalk's 'Ojos Criollos' and Salaman's 'Spanish Caprice,' are favourites with a Cuban audience. But, like all Cuban and Spanish music, they require to be played with a certain local sentiment, and it is for this reason that the most accomplished European performers often fail to satisfy the Cuban musical appetite. Under the practised ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... time, could overturn thrones, and had authority sufficient to send above a million of men on THEIR errand to the deserts of Asia, they could never prevail against these long pointed shoes: on the contrary, that caprice, contrary to all other modes, maintained its ground during several centuries; and if the clergy had not at last desisted from their persecution of it, it might still have been the prevailing fashion in Europe. [FN [g] Order. Vital. ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... whispered Althea, "needs the faithful devotion of every well-disposed subject, for perhaps you have already learned how cruelly the King embitters the life of the mother of his three children. Many a caprice can be forgiven the suffering Ptolemy, who recently expressed a wish that he could change places with the common workmen whom he saw eating their meal with a good appetite, and who is now tortured by the gout; yet he watches the hapless woman with the jealousy of a tiger, though ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... perfect, that absolute contentment of the one with the other, that mutual sufficiency, that fitting in of each to each, that ultimate oneness of soul which is the block from which is hewn love's image. And the block is there, though by fate's caprice it lie unshaped. The thing had been between the Countess and myself; its virtue had availed to abolish difference of years, to rout absurdity, to threaten the strongest resolution of my mind. It was between Elsa and Varvilliers. In none other ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... quite guiltless in this respect, since it often happens that they refuse partners from simple caprice, and no gentleman likes to be refused, even for a quadrille. It may be added that these introductions necessitate no after acknowledgments on ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... England ought to be the shibboleth of his policy. Unfortunately, Lord Palmerston, in spite of such statements, was too much inclined to throw the moral weight of England into this or that scale on his own responsibility, and, as it often seemed to dispassionate observers, on the mere caprice of the hour. He took up the position that the interests of England were safe in his hands, and magnified his office, sometimes to the annoyance of the Court and often to the chagrin of the Cabinet. No matter what storm raged, Palmerston always contrived to ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... adds to her burden of grief. I knew always when she had received one by the traces of secret tears upon her cheeks. Forgive me for saying so, Doctor, but you men, either in order to test the strength of a woman's affection, or perhaps out of mere caprice, often try her patience until the strained thread snaps, and she who was a good and pure woman becomes reckless of everything—her name, her family pride, ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... their future expectations; they have accustomed themselves to bound their ambition accordingly: and feeling conscious that passive obedience is the surest road to advancement, are led quietly, here or there, to be slaughtered at the will and caprice of their superiors. But the leader of the disaffected against an established government has a difficult task. He has nothing to offer to his followers but promises. There is nothing on hand—all is expectation. If allowed time for reflection, they soon perceive that they are acting an ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... once, the scene stood out to him in a lurid light, and through this he seemed to see a horror in Elizabeth Royal's face. For one moment the whirl of anguish and remorse blinded him. The next, that Archdale pride, so grand in a worthy cause, so fatal when in the hands of caprice and passion, was driving him on again. But as he was about to speak, the surgeon's voice by his bed commanded him to stop, for his own sake and for others. "Not another word," it said. "One,—I must speak one," returned Edmonson. "Then I have ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... in our civilization, were being pushed forward. They instinctively rallied to uphold Law, the slow product of centuries of growth, the sheet anchor of Society in a time of change. Where could we look for solidity, or permanence, if judicial decisions could be recalled at the caprice of the mob—the hysterical, the uninstructed, the fickle mob? The opinion of one trained and honest judge outweighs the whims of ten ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... furs brought by the Indian hunters. These difficulties would doubtless have smothered the infant nation in its cradle, had it not been for the untiring zeal and constancy of its great founder. At every step he met with new trials from the indifference, caprice, or contradiction of his associates, but, with his eye steadily fixed upon the future, he devoted his fortune and the energies of his life to the cause, and ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... considered everything, I am writing now with the object of fulfilling that promise. My decision is as follows. Whatever your conduct may have been, I do not consider myself justified in breaking the ties in which we are bound by a Higher Power. The family cannot be broken up by a whim, a caprice, or even by the sin of one of the partners in the marriage, and our life must go on as it has done in the past. This is essential for me, for you, and for our son. I am fully persuaded that you have repented and do repent of what has called forth the present ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... comes cold from the family table; in the wealthier houses, where many of them are kept, they are supplied with a coarser and cheaper victual bought and cooked for them apart from that provided for the family. They are subject, at all hours, to the pleasure or caprice of the master or mistress. Every circumstance of their life is an affront to that just self-respect which even Americans allow is the right of every human being. With the rich, they are said to be sometimes indolent, dishonest, mendacious, and all that Plato long ago explained ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... belief; for those jugglers differ so much from each other in their accounts of these beings, that those who believe any thing they say have little to do but change their opinions according to the will and caprice of the conjuror, who is almost daily relating some new whim ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... receive a last message of love before her splendid young life was quenched in the black blot of death? Besides grief there was fury in the runner's heart, wrath against Owen for encouraging this foolish and dangerous caprice, against the unfortunate driver who had failed to preserve his precious freight, and against nature who condemns every living thing by one means or another to that same final ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... midland counties in England, and to whom the ocean is an unseen wonder, that a new-comer to the tropical regions, his head loaded with these false views, will be very apt to mistake his own ignorance for the caprice of Nature, and perhaps call out, as I once heard a man do, in all the agony of impatience caused by a protracted head-wind,—"Now, this is really scandalous usage of the clerk of the weather-office!" The scandal, however, lay not ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... often, when I have been sitting, and she has been writing, told me that she was taking me as a model for her heroine, is very true, but I have considered it as a mere whim of hers, knowing how very eccentric she is. I little thought from my having good-naturedly yielded to her caprice, that I should have been so mortified as I have been by what you have communicated to me. That she must have been indiscreet, is certain, for it was known only ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... of Paris, amid the dreariness of a winter's evening. You are to understand that everybody quits London and Paris just as night sets in. I cannot tell you whether this is caprice, or whether it is a usage that has arisen from a wish to have the day in town, and a desire to relieve the monotony of roads so often travelled, by sleep; but so it is. We did not fall into the fashion simply because it is a fashion, but the days are so short in February ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Sinding's Violin Concerto in A major given by the Philharmonic Society in New York City, with Henri Marteau as soloist. Also Guiraud's "Caprice" for violin. ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... if he is a patrician in rank and feeling, he would fain be one of the people. His ruling motive is not the love of the people, but of distinction not of truth, but of singularity. He patronizes men of letters out of vanity, and deserts them from caprice, or from the advice of friends. He embarks in an obnoxious publication to provoke censure, and leaves it to shift for itself for fear of scandal. We do not like Sir Walter's gratuitous servility: we like Lord Byron's preposterous ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... manufacture, and its worsted and stuff manufactures: and in both these the estimation in which British wool is held has mightily sunk of late years, never apparently to rise again; for it has sunk, not through any caprice of fashion, but in the natural progress of improvement. Mr. Dodd, in his interesting little work on the Textile Manufactures of Great Britain, refers incidentally to the fact, in drawing a scene in the Cloth Hall of Leeds, introduced simply for the purpose of showing at how ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... some sprightly caprice prompted Denry to raise his hat to two young women who were crossing the road in front of them. Neither of the two young women responded to ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... spring flowers, gleaming with crystal streams, and fringed on all sides by deciduous and coniferous trees, above and among which are great glaciers and the snowy peaks of Tilail. Fashion has deserted Sonamarg, rough of access, for Gulmarg, a caprice indicated by the ruins of several huts and of a church. The pure bracing air, magnificent views, the proximity and accessibility of glaciers, and the presence of a kind friend who was 'hutted' there for the summer, ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... kiss To be compared with those I tasted? Which but for me had all been wasted On a bald man, a fat man, a gross man, a beast To scare the best guest from the very best feast!' Cydilla need not hear half that he said, For he was mad awhile. But having given rein to hot caprice, And satyr jest, and the distempered male, At length, I heard his story. At sun-down certain miles without the town. He'd chanced upon a light-wheeled litter-car, And in it there stood one Yet more a woman than her garb was rich, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... imagine any one so obtuse to musical impressions as not to find Nevin's "Valse Caprice," Op. 6, No. 1, thoroughly delightful. It is the first of a set of several pieces comprised in his sixth work, this fact being expressed by the designation Opus 6, No. 1. The piece is full of pretty sentiment and I always like to imagine that ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... Freely, too, it must arise, for there is nothing behind it to bring it under constraint: indeed, all origination is by its nature free. But our philosopher tells us that wherever there is a pure and free origination of will, there is lawlessness, caprice, chance. The universe, therefore, should be a scene, not of absolute order, but of absolute disorder; and since it is not such, we have nothing for it but to say that either the logic of the universe, or that of Mr. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... John and I walked under, less than a year ago, making great plans for a golden future; and a golden future there must be, but I had then no hope of it, no joy in life, no happiness even in my beauty. One only thought spurred me on, to forget past, present and future; to buy forgetfulness by any caprice; to win diversion ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... us!" Pep declared sadly. "How about what happened that stormy night? What caprice impelled the senor to present himself at the courting, taking the chair beside Margalida, as if he were a suitor? Ah, Don Jaime! The 'festeigs' are solemn occasions; men kill one another on account of them. I knew that fine gentlemen laugh ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... fact in particular had amazed Dora. Louie insisted, for a caprice, on going with her one night, in Easter week, to St. Damian's, and thenceforward went often. What attracted her, Dora puzzled herself to discover. When, however, Louie had been a diligent spectator, even at early services, for some weeks, Dora timidly urged that she ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her husband, catching her by the arm. His face showed no more than an amused indulgence to her caprice, but Rachael knew he was pleased. "Well, when you first planned this outfit I thought it was going to be an awful mess," said he, turning her slowly about. "But ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... is inestimable, having reference to this world and the next. Hence they in every way neglect its interests. They eat and drink, they walk and ride; they will practise no self-restraint, but will indulge every caprice, every passion, utterly regardless of ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... not long before she mastered her emotions. She had learned to do so in a bitter school. Beaten for the slightest fault, or at the mere caprice of one of her many mistresses, she had learned to suffer pain without a tear; to assume a submissive attitude under the greatest provocation; to receive, without attempting to defend herself, punishment for faults ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... of getting his trunk over to Conboy's from the station and changing back into the garb of civilization before meeting that girl again, that wonderful girl, that remarkable woman who could play a tune on him to suit her caprice, he thought, as she would ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... Cavigni, went out to mingle in the scenes of the evening. Madame then became serious and thoughtful. Emily, who was charmed with every thing she saw, endeavoured to enliven her; but reflection had not, with Madame Montoni, subdued caprice and ill-humour, and her answers discovered so much of both, that Emily gave up the attempt of diverting her, and withdrew to a lattice, to amuse herself with the scene without, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... the Argonauts did succeed in getting their vessels out into the river, it would immediately descend the stream, and that it, and those upon it, would either be upset altogether, or taken to whichever bank and whatever part of it, the river in its caprice might please. ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... you!" I thrilled at her words. My Queen! Yes, but only if I were her king. Now that I was away from her, and her glowing eyes were not melting my heart to softest wax, I was resolved never again to submit to her tyranny and caprice. I would go to supper, because she commanded it; but I would never for a moment forget that she was a great lady of France, and I a proud citizen of America—too proud to woo where I could only meet ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... impossible to make the Southern planter believe that his slave feels and reasons just as he does—that injustice and subjection are as galling as to him—that the degradation of living by the will of another, the mere dependent on his caprice, at the mercy of his passions, is as keenly felt by him as his master. If you can force on his unwilling vision a vivid picture of the negro's wrongs, and for a moment touch his soul, his logic brings him instant ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... lest in these affairs thou deemest me To have seized upon this point by sleight to serve My own caprice—because I have assumed That earth and fire are mortal things indeed, And have not doubted water and the air Both perish too and have affirmed the same To be again begotten and wax big— Mark well the argument: in first place, ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... Knight-errantry, which was a caprice in France and in England, in Spain was a calling. No other country could afford such a field for it, and to no other society was it so well suited. The grave and wise Fernando de Pulgar, the counsellor and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... that the dramatic author is always to a certain extent a slave to the public, and must ever seek to please the passing taste of his time, it will be recognized that he is often, alas! compelled to sacrifice his artistic leanings to popular caprice-that is, if he has the natural desire that his generation should ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... short, this New Woman of the New South wants to be a citizen queen as well as a queen of hearts and a queen of home, whose throne under the present regime rests on the sandy foundation of human generosity and human caprice. It should be remembered that the women of the South are the daughters of their fathers, and have as invincible a spirit in their convictions in the cause of liberty and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... love my fellow-creatures and detest the effusion of blood, but if ever a villain, white or black, should snatch me from my freedom, my family, and my friends, should overwhelm me with outrages and blows, to gratify his caprice, should extend his barbarities to my wife and children—my blood boils at the thought—perhaps in a transport of revenge.... If such vengeance would be lawful in me, what makes the Negro more guilty? Why should that be called wickedness and depravity in ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... see why the mummeries of European heraldry should be introduced into any part of our Indian system. Heraldry is not a science which has any eternal rules. It is a system of arbitrary canons, originating in pure caprice. Nothing can be more absurd and grotesque than armorial bearings, considered in themselves. Certain recollections, certain associations, make them interesting in many cases to an Englishman; but in those recollections and associations the natives of India do not participate. A lion, rampant, ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... an unexplained caprice! I am vexed, however, very much vexed, at the whole business. I hope she left Norbury Park with full satisfaction in its steady and more comfortable connection. I fear mine will pass ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... stalked gravely to the place of meeting, wrapped in colored blankets, with lances in their hands. The accomplished young aide-de-camp studied his strange companions with an interest not unmixed with disgust. "Of all caprice," he says, "Indian caprice is the most capricious." They were insolent to the French, made rules for them which they did not observe themselves, and compelled the whole party to move when and whither they pleased. Hiding ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... United States, from the beginning has been whether the carefully devised provisions of oar organic Constitution of 1787 would or would not be found in practice to protect the sentiment of loyalty to a National Union as effectually against popular caprice and political intrigues as the sentiment of loyalty to a National Crown has been protected in England by the hereditary principle. The American Revolution of 1776, and the foundation of the American Republic of 1787, can never be understood without a thorough appreciation of the fact that the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... considerable figure. He is not without a natural tincture of that cruelty, sometimes charged upon the Italians; and being nursed in arms, hath so far extinguished pity and remorse, that he will at any time sacrifice a thousand men's lives, to a caprice of glory or revenge. He had conceived an incurable hatred for the treasurer, as the person who principally opposed this insatiable passion for war; said he had hopes of others, but that the treasurer was un ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... generally of but two figures, one of which is the representative of Death. The second always represents a class; and in this figure every rank, from the very highest to the lowest, finds its type. The number of these groups or pictures varies considerably in the different dances, according to the caprice of the artist, or, perhaps, to the expense of his time and labor which he thought warranted by the payment he was to receive. But all express, with sufficient fulness, the idea that Death is the common lot of humanity, and that he enters with impartial feet the palace and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... pray you, this wild enterprise. A great and good king should not be sacrificed to the strange caprice of the Queen of Issland. You know that like all others who have contested against the unmatched strength of Brunhild, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... generations. To effect objects so dear to every patriot I shall devote myself with anxious solicitude. It will be my desire to guard against that most fruitful source of danger to the harmonious action of our system which consists in substituting the mere discretion and caprice of the Executive or of majorities in the legislative department of the Government for powers which have been withheld from the Federal Government by the Constitution. By the theory of our Government majorities rule, but this right is not an arbitrary or unlimited ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... that which brings felicity,' said Flora, speaking in a choking voice, and not meeting the glance of Coningsby. 'You had some views in life which displeased him who has done all this; they may be, they must be, affected by this fatal caprice. Speak to me, for I cannot speak, dear Mr. Coningsby; do not let me believe that I, who would sacrifice my life for your happiness, am the ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... reveals itself to the rapture of our astonished eyes. This wing of the great building, in which the two queens, Catherine de' Medici and Mary Stuart, held their sumptuous court, is divided in the centre by a hexagon tower, in the empty well of which winds up a spiral staircase,—a Moorish caprice, designed by giants, made by dwarfs, which gives to this wonderful facade the effect of a dream. The baluster of this staircase forms a spiral connecting itself by a square landing to five of the six sides of the tower, requiring ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... Signora had alighted upon the soft grass as lightly as a bird, and that the sole consequences of the fall or shock had been psychic. That is to say, after Krespel's heroic deed she had become completely altered; she never showed a trace of caprice, of her former freaks, or of her teasing habits; and the composer who wrote for the next carnival was the happiest fellow under the sun, since the Signora was willing to sing his music without the scores and hundreds of changes which she at other times had insisted upon. ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... for the Christian States that it cannot on any account be subjected to the will and pleasure of so small a portion of the Catholic world as the Roman States. It is the belief of Spain that the Catholic Powers cannot commit the liberty of the Pope to the caprice of the city of Rome. Nor can they permit that, whilst all the Catholic nations are warmly offering to the Holy Father proofs of their profound respect, a single town of Italy shall dare to outrage his dignity, and restrict the Pope to a state of independence which could be ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... know of such a thing? Hardly. Now and then, for sake of its traditions, the world took some hapless boy, or some still yet unhappier woman, and pilloried one of them, and drove them out under a shower of stones, selecting them by caprice, persecuting them without justice, slaying them because they were friendless. But that was all. For the most part sin was an obsolete ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... just so,' returned Harry. 'Well, the way I've been a martyr to that man's caprice is perfectly heart-rending. He came of some gorgeous family in the middle of Pennsylvania, where all the tribes, like leaning towers, incline toward Germany. To be sure, you'd never dream it from his looks, for he is a perfect Mark Antony in that respect. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a heartless caprice of fate. I felt the full measure of its strangeness, yet the thought never occurred to me of shrinking back from duty, nor slightest dream of realizing a personal victory through any act of baseness. I was not ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... not be forgotten that one of the chief drawbacks to their prosperity is the want of confidence in the stability and permanency of existing regulations. There can be no success, and there can be no safety, whilst those regulations and laws are liable to the influence of peculiar views or individual caprice. It is the people themselves, for whose government the laws are intended, who should be allowed to impose, to ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... always in Nyssia's path. A chance had enabled him to behold her beauty, though walled up from all other eyes. Among many princes and satraps she had chosen to espouse Candaules, the very king he served; and through some strange caprice, which he could only regard as fateful, this king had just made him, Gyges, his confidant in regard to the mysterious creature whom none else had approached, and absolutely sought to complete the work of Boreas on the plain of Bactria! Was not the hand of the gods visible in all these circumstances? ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... of the poor, the good opinion of the world; every living creature was prepossessed in his favor but one, and that one despised him; it was a diabolical prejudice; it was the spiteful caprice of his fate. ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... spoken to him with derisive contempt!—this cold and calculated deception of him with some one who made not the least appeal to her!—Cold and calculated, did he say? No, far from it! What COULD it have been but the sensual caprice of a moment?—but a fleeting, manlike desire for the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... hard to lead such a life without becoming morbid, but Anne was fashioned upon generous lines. She strove ever to maintain the calm level of reason wherewith to temper the baleful influence of her husband's caprice. She never argued with him; argument was worse than futile. But steadfastly and incessantly she sought by her moderation to balance the difficulties with which she was continually confronted. And to a certain extent she succeeded. Open struggles were very rare. Sir Giles knew that there was ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... anxiety, moved about and stamped in his cab. It was torture thus to be kept from the key to a terrible enigma by the caprice of a worthless hussy! He was dying to rush after her, to seize her by the arm, and cry out to her: "Home, wretched, creature, home at once! What are you doing here? Don't you know that at this moment your lover, he whom ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... money passes in the way of barter our old coin is the most acceptable, particularly that which is indented at the edge, or stamped with the impression of a chariot and two horses, called the Serrati and Bigati. Silver is preferred to gold, not from caprice or fancy, but because the inferior metal is of more expeditious use in ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... He moved freely, more like a man accustomed to stride over plains and hills, than like one who from his earliest youth had been used to counteract by sudden swayings of his body the rise and roll of cramped decks of small craft, tossed by the caprice of angry ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... horrid crimes. This is not a proper place in which to insert the baseness with which he abused the delicacy and weakness of females. Fathers of families * * * *. Every man was intimidated. Every feeling man wept, because all were the victims of the caprice of this insolent upstart, who made an ostentation of atheism ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... inference. They show us one of God's ways of hiding himself. Order prevails, but it is the expression of God's will, and not a mere result of the working of material forces. He operates by method, not by caprice, and hence the unchanging stability of things. While doing nothing in particular, he does everything in general. And this idea must be extended to human history. God endows man with powers, and allows him freedom ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... the "levitation" of Sludge & Co. at the other end, there is a complete continuity of the miraculous, with every gradation, from the childish to the stupendous, from the gratification of a caprice to the illustration of sublime truth. There is no drawing a line in the series that might be set out of plausibly attested cases of spiritual intervention. If one is true, all may be true; if one is false, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... renewed, and continued from that time till his going abroad. Whatever faults Lord Byron might have had towards others, to myself he was always uniformly affectionate. I have many slights and neglects towards him to reproach myself with; but I cannot call to mind a single instance of caprice or unkindness, in the whole course of our ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... had worn a cold white unresponsive face when he had seen her last; she did not listen to what he said, her mind evidently elsewhere. She looked at him as if she did not see him. She did not think of him. He was sure that this was not caprice. It was some deep absorbing feeling in which ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the first place by their own mismanagement and again by the conduct of every institution which connects them with the center of trade in our own country, they are yet subjected beyond all this to the effect of whatever measures policy, necessity, or caprice may induce those who control the credits of England to resort to. I mean not to comment upon these measures, present or past, and much less to discourage the prosecution of fair commercial dealing between the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... details the well-authenticated fact that the royal apartments were fumigated with powdered tobacco (then a recent and costly importation into France), in lieu of the perfumes which had previously been in use for the same purpose, it will scarcely be denied that caprice rather than taste dictated the habits of the Court under ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... entering into alliances with Charles or Francis, seldom followed any regular or concerted plan of policy, but was influenced chiefly by the caprice of temporary passions, such occurrences often happened as recalled his attention toward that equal balance of power which it was necessary to keep between the two contending potentates, the preservation of which he always boasted to be his peculiar office. He had expected ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
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