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More "Irritability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eternal punishment. It is rather an amusing phenomenon that those who have no visible basis for pride are likely to be the most consumed with it. The pride of Diogenes was visible through the holes in his carpet; the pride of liberalism is visible in its irritability whenever the subject of sin, especially original sin, is mentioned. Yet the very complacency of liberalism about the perfection of man, is but another evidence (if we needed another) of his inherent sinfulness, ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... with this pure air and in contemplation of this peaceful and silent night: thus she awoke next day calmer and more resigned. Unfortunately, the sight of Lady Lochleven, who presented herself at breakfast-time, to fulfil her duties as taster, brought back her irritability. Perhaps, however, things would have gone on smoothly if Lady Lochleven, instead of remaining standing by the sideboard, had withdrawn after having tasted the various dishes of the courses; but this insisting on remaining throughout the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Elsie, when she heard, with her fine sense quickened by the irritability of sickness, a light footfall on the stair, with a cadence unlike that of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... like so dreadful as if she bored him. Then indeed her vanity would have been sadly ruffled. For now that Rose was not able to say her prayers she was being assailed by every sort of weakness: vanity, sensitiveness, irritability, pugnacity —strange, unfamiliar devils to have coming crowding on one and taking possession of one's swept and empty heart. She had never been vain or irritable or pugnacious in her life before. Could it be that San Salvatore was capable of opposite ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... himself with impunity to a tropical sun. If preferred coffee should always be taken with cream or milk and sugar, because it is then less irritating to the stomach. One of the symptoms of native fever is said to be nervous irritability of the stomach; hence, all exciting causes to irritation of that part should be avoided as much as possible. Such fruits as best agree with each individual should be most indulged in; indeed, all others ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... occasionally exhibited in a stroll for exercise up and down the aisle. Yet no one would call her a beauty. Her eyes were of a somewhat fishy and uncertain blue; the lids were tinged with an unornamental pink that told of irritation of the adjacent interior surface and of possible irritability of temper. Her complexion was of that mottled type which is so sore a trial to its possessor and yet so inestimable a comfort to social rivals; but her features were handsome, her teeth fine, her dress, bearing, and demeanor ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... the bird was still alive when London was reached, though the cook, who from his connection with the cabin had suddenly reached a position of unusual importance, reported great loss of strength and irritability of temper. It was still alive, but failing fast on the day they were to put to sea again; and the fo'c'sle, in preparation for the worst, stowed their pet away in the paint-locker, ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... penetrating rostellum. I can, if you like, lend you these Reviews; but they must be returned. R. Brown, I remember, says pollen-tubes separate from grains before the lower ends of tubes reach ovules. I saw, and was interested by, abstract of your Drosera paper (637/2. A short note on the irritability of Drosera in the "Trans. Bot. Soc. Edin." Volume VII.); we have been at very much the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... fence; and though I have carefully abstained from using my foot since I did so, it is still so weak that I am afraid of standing upon it much, and must consequently abide the results (invariable with me) of want of exercise, headache, sideache, and nervous depression and irritability. When I get to Philadelphia, if I am no better, I will hire a horse for a little while, and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... shadows she had thrown around her had darkened the atmosphere of her dwelling, and were now reflected back upon her heart, enshrouding it in deeper gloom. The want of harmony among her children increased her mental disturbance, obscured her perceptions, and added to her state of irritability. She could not speak calmly to them, nor wisely endeavour to restore the harmony which had been lost. Her words, therefore, while, by their authoritative force, they subdued the storm, left the sky black with clouds that poured down another and ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... in these ambiguous circumstances, is everything that could be desired. My original feeling of irritability has passed away. I should have supposed it to be what Pallas calls "fatigue," a confusion or discord of the nerve-centres, which she tells me is incident to mortality. What Pallas can possibly know about it is more than I can guess, especially, as there were not infrequent occasions on Olympus ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... harmless; but what is moderate and what is not, must be determined in each individual case, according to the habits and constitution of the subjects. If it cures asthma, it may destroy digestion; if it soothes the nerves, it may, in excess, produce a chronic irritability. ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... readiness of man at all times to astonish on the one hand, and to court the marvelous on the other, is abundantly proved by present and past experience. That the nervous system may be worked upon by it to such a degree that a state either of extreme irritability, or of sleep and coma, may be induced, in the latter case paralyzing the senses so as to become deadened to pain, is certain; and a highly sensitive temperament may exhibit phenomena beyond the reach of explanation; but it requires very little experience to know that we are wonderfully affected ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... which I have fallen, but the humble position from which I have risen. As long as I have my brother and you with me, let those fellows be hanged, drawn, and quartered for all I care: I can play the philosopher with you. That part of my soul, in which in old times irritability had its home, has grown completely callous. I find no pleasure in anything that is not private and domestic. You will find me in a state of magnificent repose, to which nothing contributes more than the prospect of your return. For there is no one in the ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... berated Jim because the biscuits were cold (which was not Jim's fault), and because the coffee was hot (which was according to his orders). Trivial annoyances, most of them of his own making or imagining, multiplied on all sides, fomenting his irritability until, by the time he strode out of the cottage, his temper was at white heat. What might have happened to the patient, devoted men about the stable and corrals is not difficult of conjecture, but they were saved by Sunnysides. Almost the first object that caught ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... her grandmother was really seriously unwell, and that her irritability she could not help. Mrs. Barnes did not know it herself. Mona only realised that she was almost always cross, that nothing pleased her, that she never ran and fetched and carried, as she used to do, while Mona sat by the fire and read. It was granny who sat by ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... in an aviator are impatience and irritability. A man who has these temperamental drawbacks in a form which is strongly marked, and who cannot control them, should not think of becoming an aviator. The man who is impatient and irritable finds himself out of harmony with the whole theory of aerial navigation. ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... that singular sensation in the roots of the hair, when he came on the traces of the girl's presence, reminding him of a line in a certain poem which he had read lately with a new and peculiar interest. He even recalled a curious evidence of exalted sensibility and irritability, in the twitching of the minute muscles of the internal ear at every unexpected sound, producing an odd little snap in the middle of the head, which proved to him that he was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... corridor by this time, and I heard the full, cosy tones of Mrs. Garnett's voice in "Hush a bye, baby," and the sound of rockers on the floor. The sound made me indignant that my baby should be soothed with that wooden tapping. No wonder so many children suffered from irritability of the brain; for I was as full of ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... business, and indulging, during the time, more deeply than ever in his favourite potations. It was in vain that his distressed family endeavoured to rouse him into activity. All their efforts were met by an irritability and a moroseness of temper so unlike what he had been used to exhibit towards them, that they gave up all idea of influencing him ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... contrasting her own burning sensations with this quaint, innocent devotion to Art and passion for music, felt in a manner guilty; and whenever he stormed with additional violence, she became suppliant, and seemed to bend and have regrets. Mr. Pericles would then say, with mollified irritability: "You will come to Italy to-morrow?—Ze day after?—not at all?" The last was given with a roar, for lack of her immediate response. Emilia would find a tear on her eyelids at times. Surround herself as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cheeks were hollow, the complexion as yellow as that of the typical Anglo-Indian. The special character of the mouth was hidden by a fine black moustache, but his prevailing expression varied between irritability and a kind of plaintiveness. The conspicuous blue eyes were as a rule melancholy; but they could be childishly bright and self-assertive. There was a general air of breeding about Richard Boyce, of that air at any rate which our common generalisations connect with the pride of old family; ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... well as on all other occasions of display or grievance, and of course she did not spare poor Ormond. Age and drunkenness had made sad inroads on his constitution and looks during the last half year. His fretful irritability sometimes amounted almost to madness, when thirty female tongues joined in the chorus of their leader's assault. They boldly charged him, singly and in pairs, with every vice and fault that injured matrimony habitually denounces; and as each item of this abusive ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... drawing-material: these attracted visitors, and visitors were a trouble. Perhaps there was impertinence in their curiosity, very likely their presence hindered him; but, nevertheless, it was by no means like the sweet-tempered Clarian to show irritability and petulance, and finally, closing his door obstinately against all comers, to elect for solitude and silence at his work. No,—the boy was changed, grown morbid, a pervert, ripe for whatever Devil's sickle might be put forth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... away his rising irritability, and replied, "I think, Ronald, your mind is so full of poetic arrows that one could not take a step, or lift a finger, or draw a breath, without your being able to hit him with ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... degradation. Having a strong, clear mind, without any imagination, she believed that she beheld an inevitable doom. The tart remark and the contemptuous comment on her part, elicited, on the other, all the irritability of the poetic idiosyncrasy. After frantic ebullitions, for which, when the circumstances were analysed by an ordinary mind, there seemed no sufficient cause, my grandfather always interfered to soothe with good-tempered commonplaces, and promote peace. He was a man who ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... his thinking and feeling. We cannot see within his mind. But experience with ourselves and others has taught us that certain attitudes of body, certain shades of countenance, certain gestures, tones of voice, spontaneous or willed actions, represent anger or joy, impatience or irritability, stern control or poise of mind. We realize that the average man has learned to conceal his mental reactions from the casual observer at will. But if we see him at an unguarded moment, we can very often get a fair idea ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... matches. It seemed probable that with four members of the School Eleven in the team, the ancient house must prove invincible. But to John's surprise, as this delightful probability ripened into conviction, Warde betrayed unwonted anxiety and even irritability. Miss Iris confided to Desmond, who paid her much court, that she couldn't imagine what was the matter with papa. And mamma, it transpired (from the same source), really feared that the strain at Lord's had been too much, that her indefatigable husband was about to break down. Finally, John ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... as he sat by David's bedside, was David's attitude toward that threatened return of his. For David had opposed it, offering a dozen trivial, almost puerile reasons. Had shown indeed, a dogged obstinacy and an irritability that were somehow oddly like fear. David afraid! David, whose life and heart were open books! David, whose eyes never wavered, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... that smote Him, and bid the daughters of Jerusalem not to weep; could open paradise to the dying thief, and the door of John's home to the reception of His mother. Few things betray the presence of His peace more than the absence of irritability, fretfulness, and feverish haste, which expend the tissues ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... continually repeated miracle of life. But it does not remain long in this condition. In contact with the oxygen from the air it is soon oxidized, burned up to furnish the energy necessary for the motion and irritability of the body. We are all of us low-temperature engines. The digestive function exists in all animals merely to bring the food into a soluble, diffusible form, so that it can pass to all parts of ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... I should be ashamed to have recorded, for I lost my temper entirely. Neither I nor those who were with me saw her again till we reached the Inn at Broughton, seven miles. This may perhaps in some degree excuse my irritability on the occasion, for I could not but think she had been much to blame. It appeared, however, on explanation, that she had remained on the rock, calling out and waving her handkerchief as we were passing, in order that we ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... of considering herself or her children abused, accepting her lot as the natural one of woman, who was created to be a child-bearer, and to keep man well fed and comfortable. The only variation from the deadly monotony of her mechanical and unceasing labor was found in her habit of irritability with her stepchild. She considered Tillie "a dopple" (a stupid, awkward person); for though usually a wonderful little household worker, Tillie, when very much tired out, was apt to drop dishes; and absent-mindedly she would ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... however, a man of the kindest heart, and the strictest honor. But, after all, he was one of the round men put into the square holes of Provincial Government by the "authorities" at home. Still, on the whole, a noble character, and in very truth a gentleman. His chronic ailment led to some irritability of temper; and when, during the visit of the Prince of Wales, one of the Governor's aides-de-camp was pushed over from the steamer at Detroit by the press of the crowd, and fell into the water, Colonel Irving said:—"Ah! there was no danger whatever to ——'s life. The Governor-General has ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... mask this piece of startled irritability with a vague platitude did not deceive his audience in the smallest degree. Doubt became conviction in Mrs. Barraclough's mind. She did not know in what way this man was connected with her son's affairs but none the less she was certain he represented a positive barrier ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... being a laxative, allays irritability of the stomach; it is consequently useful during dentition, at which period there is both much irritability and a prevailing acescency of the stomach. The dose is from five grains to ten for an infant, increasing the quantity to fifteen grains or twenty ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... sallied forth, very much overdressed, and in a youthful hat, to use the waters. They are valued chiefly for the complexion, I learned; I wondered then why Lady Georgina came there—for she hadn't any; but they are also recommended for nervous irritability, and as Lady Georgina had visited the place almost every summer for fifteen years, it opened before one's mind an appalling vista of what her temper might have been if she had not gone to Schlangenbad. The hot springs ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... would show clearly enough what is alone of importance to me. In addition to this, I will undertake to avoid in my writings, even of a purely artistic nature, such combative expressions open to misapprehension as may have escaped me formerly in my irritability. Considering all these declarations, the future need be dealt with no longer, only the past. And over that it would be well, in the case of an artist, to throw the veil of forgetfulness, not to make it a cause for revenge. All this you might in conversation ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... have my say," Charles asserted with increasing irritability. "And it's lucky for you with your fool sentiments that you've got somebody to think ahead for you, else you'd all starve to death. I tell you that famine's coming. I've been studying the situation. Flour will be two dollars a pound, or ten, and no ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... bodily organs concerned, from 'the contractility of those organs, and from the regulation of that contractility by an automatically acting nervous apparatus;' that muscular contractility and the automatic activity or irritability of the nerves are 'purely the results of molecular mechanism;' and that 'the modes of motion which constitute the physical bases of light, sound, and heat are transmuted by the sensory organs into affections ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... touched by the spur; though his original good-nature from time to time shone through it all. When the line had been brought to a successful completion, a very marked change in him became visible. The irritability passed away, and when difficulties and vexations arose they were treated by him as matters of course, and with perfect ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... of fruit and cereal and chops and wheat cakes and coffee he had laid in to stay him until lunch time, would together have given pause to any but such a physical organization as his. The only evidence of it was a certain slight irritability—but this may have been due to his state ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... fanning their faces as they headed out to sea, Dickie's irritability vanished. Desirous of starting conversation after a protracted silence, she began: "Who do you think I saw down-town the ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... not take manifest faults like irritability or selfishness—we all strive against those, but I would suggest turns of mind that are often ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... of course, seeing that you make such a point of it, but I'm not specially proud of the business, I can assure you," Mrs. M'Kree said, with a touch of irritability very unusual with her. "Oily Dave was up here about a week ago, and he said that he had some buckets of rough fat that would do for greasing sledge runners, or to mix with caulking pitch. He told us he bought the stuff from one of the ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... rattling noise, as if money was being shaken up in a box. A loud crashing bang, as if someone had banged the box down on a table. A rap, as if a knife had been dropped. Then somebody, in a petulant voice full of vexation and irritability, ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... strong, and she is doing far too much. Dawson and I both think so." Perhaps he spoke with some degree of bluntness, for Mrs. Herrick responded with unusual irritability. ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... pieces nervously if you are obliged to repeat a remark to some one who did not understand you? I have known a home to be ruined by just such infinitesimal annoyances. It is a habit, like the drug or alcohol habit—this irritability. ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of fright or sorrow, the cause and cure of diseases through emotional disturbances, and death, usually directly by apoplexy, caused by anger, grief, or joy, have been current and generally accepted. On the other hand, irritability and moroseness caused by disordered organs of digestion, change of acumen or morals due to injury of the brain or nervous system, and insanity produced by bodily diseases, are also accepted proofs of the effect of the body ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... so impressive in all this history as the difference between Moses when called upon to take responsibility as a military commander, and Moses when, not to mince matters, he acted as a quack. On the one hand, he was all vacillation, timidity, and irritability. On the ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... Prussian we have just mentioned, but is a frequent hectic symptom—often an associate of febrile and inflammatory disorders—frequently accompanying inflammation of the brain—a concomitant also of highly excited nervous irritability—equally connected with hypochondria—and finally united in some cases with gout, and in others with the effects of excitation produced by several gases. In all these cases there seems to be a morbid degree of sensibility, with which this symptom is ready to ally itself, and which, though inaccurate ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... with the patient that same afternoon, and towards evening the Major dropped in, glass in eye, and sat talking for a bit, with Bracy fighting hard to keep down his irritability, for the Major was a bad ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... their occasional temperamental outbursts to the altitude, which was "getting on their nerves," it was no secret between them that their irritability was due to exasperation with Disston. With scientific skill and thoroughness they dissected him privately until he was hash, working their scalpels far into the watches of the night with unflagging interest. His words, his actions, his thoughts, as indicated by his changing expressions, were ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... subtle interpretations, agreement was impossible. Natural life, denied and set aside at every point, gave place to the unnatural, and every colonist was, quite unconsciously, in a state of constant nervous tension and irritability. The questions that to us seem of even startling triviality, were discussed with a fervor and earnestness it is well nigh impossible to comprehend. They were a slight advance on the scholastic disputations of the preceding century, ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... drug habit would explain; often that winter she had found Miss Kiametia dozing in her chair at the theater, at dinners, in motors, but had put it down to over-fatigue from too much social gayety. Miss Kiametia's variable likes and dislikes, her sudden whims and fancies, her irritability—all were traceable to ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new, quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting troth and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... to the more painful knowledge of the world around him: they only made him laugh, while men and women made him angry. His feverish impatience made him view the infirmities of that great baby the world, with the same scrutinizing glance and jealous irritability that a parent regards the failings of its offspring; but, as Rousseau has well observed, parents have not on this account been supposed to have more affection for other people's children than their own. In other ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... the sun this day in a cloudless sky was so great, that Mr. Rae and I were glad to take shelter in the water while the crews were engaged on the portages. The irritability of the human frame is either greater in these Northern latitudes, or the sun, notwithstanding its obliquity, acts more powerfully upon it than near the Equator; for I have never felt its direct rays so oppressive within the Tropics as I have experienced ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... fever went away, but there seemed to be no power to rally in the little worn-out frame of the child. His father, for a little while, spoke hopefully of a change of air, and the sea-side; but he could not long so cheat himself with false hopes. The restlessness and irritability, which they had said to one another were hopeful signs, passed away. His smiles were more languid and constrained, and he soon failed to recognise the anxious, loving friends ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... to the quick, "surely even a baron, a knight, a franklin, a poor priest like myself, would rise against the man who dictated to his hospitality. Is a king less irritable than baron, knight, franklin, and priest,—or rather, being, as it were, per legem, lord of all, hath he not irritability eno' for all four? Ay, tut and tush as thou wilt, John, but thy sense must do justice to my counsel at the last. I know Edward well; he hath something of mine own idlesse and ease of temper, but with more of the dozing lion than priests, who have only, look you, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lowering, shading it, experimenting, to bring out all that might still be seen of the withdrawn image on its faintly glinting field of gold. His face was keen with interest; the love of beautiful things in this moment of satisfaction smoothed away from it every line of dejection and irritability. ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... insatiable appetite. One would never have thought so, judging from appearance: his clever, clean-cut face, his small, thin figure, together with the little hand-bag he always carried, rather suggested a lawyer or a clergyman. His eccentricity was a combination of absent-mindedness and irritability. The latter failing, he told me, would at times take complete control of him: for instance, he had to leave a train before his journey was completed, as he felt it impossible to sit in the carriage and look at the alarm bell without ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... in the room with me had a headache, or any kind of nervous irritability, which made it particularly necessary for others to be quiet, and if I was in an especial desire unto the same, I was sure, while stepping around on tiptoe, to fall headlong over a chair, which would give an introductory push to the shovel, which would fall upon the tongs, which ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... burst forth, with explosions more or less Vesuvian, in the inner man of Herr Diogenes; as indeed how could it fail? A nature, which, in his own figurative style, we might say, had now not a little carbonized tinder, of Irritability; with so much nitre of latent Passion, and sulphurous Humor enough; the whole lying in such hot neighborhood, close by "a reverberating furnace of Fantasy:" have we not here the components of driest Gunpowder, ready, on occasion of the smallest spark, to blaze up? Neither, in ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... which seems to me weak—that about the claws of lobsters and the tails of lizards moving and acting when detached from the body. It may be argued, fairly, that this is only an incidental result of the extreme muscular irritability and contractibility of the organs, which might have been caused on Lamarckian as well as on the Darwinian hypothesis. The running of a fowl after its head is chopped off is an example of the same kind of ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... towards him were not, and could not be, those of trust and confidence. He was extremely severe at times, often much more so than the occasion warranted, this being partly natural in a strong authoritative man, and partly the result of irritability brought on by his habit of drinking. When inflamed with brandy he became positively dangerous, and I had a well-founded dread of his presence. At all times he was very uncertain—he might greet me with a kind word or ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... day, when his old habits of impatience and irritability reappeared, more marked than ever, the captain said to his wife: "My dear, an evening walk will do me a world of good; an old sailor like myself cannot bear to sit around the house after dinner. Nevertheless, if you ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... pains to induce every member of the Expedition to do his. It was impossible for him not to be anxious as to how the team would pull together, especially as he knew well the influence of a malarious atmosphere in causing intense irritability of temper. In some respects, though not the most obvious, this was the most trying period of his life. His letters and other written papers show one little but not uninstructive effect of the pressure and distraction that now came on him—in the great change which his handwriting ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... taunts and jeers so often levelled at my friend the poet, would now and then rouse him into rage; and at such times the haughty scorn he would hurl on his foes, was proof positive of his possession of that one attribute, irritability, almost universally ascribed to the votaries of Parnassus ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... face were in motion; his long, ravenous nose was stirring, and in his voice rang notes of irritability ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... now. She had wanted to write. Without doubt he had helped her, comforted her loneliness; had given her a charming friendship, a delightful comradeship. Much of his work had been written for her, to her. It was fine work. She had been proud of her share in it. Even allowing there were faults—irritability, shortness of temper, a tendency to bossiness!—underneath it all was a man. The gallant struggle, the difficulties overcome, the long suffering, the high courage—all that she, reading between the lines, had divined of his life's battle! Yes, ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... bestowed upon him his wife. Mrs. Burke, like her father, was, up to the time of her marriage, a Catholic. Good judges belonging to her own sex describe her as gentle, quiet, soft in her manners, and well-bred. She had the qualities which best fitted and disposed her to soothe the vehemence and irritability of her companion. Though she afterwards conformed to the religion of her husband, it was no insignificant coincidence that in two of the dearest relations of his life the atmosphere of Catholicism was thus poured round the great preacher of the crusade against ...
— Burke • John Morley
... immune from interruption?" muttered Mr. Belford, with the nearest approach to irritability of which his equable temper ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... had summoned malignant spirits from outer space only to be destroyed by them. Not in Corsica or Sicily, in Africa nor the south of France, did Guy fight off his rapidly growing disease. He worked hard, he drank hard, but to no avail; the blackness of his brain increased. Melancholia and irritability supervened; he spelled words wrong, he quarrelled with his friends, he instituted a lawsuit against a New York newspaper, The Star; then the persecution craze, folie des grandeurs, frenzy. The case ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... into the willing ears of the sympathetic woman the details of her gradual awakening from Dalton's spell as his irritability, cowardice, and selfishness became more and more apparent. Nor yet of her growing anxiety as their resources declined; an anxiety which had so weighed upon her mind that she could neither sleep nor rest, despite his ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... room adjoining this one was where Montesquieu's secretary worked. He was the drudge of a literary man, who was probably not exempt from the constitutional irritability of those who carry a whirling grindstone within their brains for the sharpening and polishing of thought. The unremembered scribe may have done good service to literature while undergoing his purgatory ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... with his condition. It may have been that his health became worse; or it may be that, like to many men who are idle and make no effort to work, he became annoyed at the ennui which is so often the result of an unoccupied life. Anyhow, in his letters there crept in a note of irritability, which ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... all put strength with gentleness, in some form. "All the firmness that does not exclude delicacy, and all the softness that does not imply weakness. Loving, helpful, and trusting, she must be able to soothe anxiety by her presence; charm and allay irritability by her sweetness of temper." Another writes: "A beauty of spirit in which love, gentleness, and kindness are mingled. Patience and meekness, fortitude, a well-governed temper, sympathy, and tenderness," Says another: "Kind, courteous, humble, ...
— Girls: Faults and Ideals - A Familiar Talk, With Quotations From Letters • J.R. Miller
... human body naturally divide themselves into two principal classes. The first class embraces those which no known laws and phenomena of the physical world enable us to comprehend; and to these belong the sensibility of the nerves and the irritability of the muscles. Inasmuch as it has hitherto been impossible to penetrate the economy of the invisible, men have sought to interpret this unknown mechanism through that with which they were already familiar, and have considered the nerves as a canal ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... seasoned to care what amount of liquor he drank; Philip had what was called a weak head, and disliked muddling himself with drink because of the immediate consequence of intense feelings of irritability, and the more distant one of a racking headache next day; so both these two preserved very much the same demeanour they had held at the beginning ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... he was made to seem morally obtuse, cut Douglas to the quick. Even upon his tough constitution this prolonged campaign was beginning to tell. His voice was harsh and broken; and he gave unmistakable signs of nervous irritability, brought on by physical fatigue. When he rose to reply to Lincoln, his manner was offensively combative. At the outset, he referred angrily to Lincoln's "gross personalities and base insinuations."[761] In his references to the Springfield resolutions and to his mistake, or rather ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... occurred to Victoria, in the light of a new discovery, that in the past her father's irritability had not extended to her. And this discovery, she knew, ought to have some significance, but she felt unaccountably indifferent to it. Mr. Flint walked to a window at the far end of the room and flung apart the tightly ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of his constant irritability, her husband had become more affectionate than customary since ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... newspaper where she filled the post of secretary and typist, she was a sort of cheerful institution to smooth worried faces and call up a smile amidst the irritability and frowns. ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... all the qualities in him which needed control received daily stimulus, and his ardour and high-aiming temper turned into impatience and restless irritability. He had a mistress who was at one time in the humour to be treated as a tender woman, at another as an outrageous flirt, at another as the haughtiest and most imperious of queens; her mood varied, no one could tell how, and ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... as the Antipodes. His mind is after all rather the recipient and transmitter of knowledge, than the originator of it. He has hardly grasp of thought enough to arrive at any great leading truth. His passions do not amount to more than irritability. With some gall in his pen, and coldness in his manner, he has a great deal of kindness in his heart. Rash in his opinions, he is steady in his attachments—and is a man, in many particulars admirable, in all ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... there was a constant tremor in Hepzibah's frame. With all her affection for a young cousin there was a recurring irritability. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... re-elect them. This would liberate him from a promise and strengthen both with a legislative endorsement. It was neither an intrepid nor an exalted proposition, but Conkling accepted it. Perhaps his nature required a relief from its high-strung irritability in some sort of violence, and resignation backed by the assurance that he would soon be restored to office and to greater power on the shoulders of the party offered the seductive form which ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... they could scarcely have yielded themselves to the sway of any passion more difficult of gratification, for they have no means of communicating with the busy world except through European travellers; and these, in consequence I suppose of that restlessness and irritability that generally haunt their wanderings, seem to have always avoided the bore of giving any information to their hosts. As for me, I am more patient and good-natured, and when I found that the kind monks ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... household affairs, his orders for sudden and expensive changes in the palaces, his substitution of German for English servants, his frequent visits to the stables unaccompanied by the equerry, his irritability on the most trifling occasions, and, alternating with this undignified bustle, fits of somnolence which at times overtook him even on horseback. Then, too, there were quarrels with the Queen, whose conduct, said Villiers, was such as to aggravate these ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... in our experience, goes back in the history of the race to the primitive sensitivity (or irritability) of living matter, seen in the protozoa. These minute unicellular creatures, though having no sense organs—any more than they have muscles or digestive organs—respond to a variety of stimuli. They ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... trying operation Dick Varley never once betrayed the slightest feeling of irritability or impatience. He did not expect success at first; he was ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... said Oliver, whose deadly faintness was giving way to irritability, caused by the sharp pain. "I only, as I said before, wish I knew who shot me. How could a man ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... States and from the complex relations of their citizens. The State may identify its infinitude and honor with every one of its single aspects. And if a State, as a strong individuality, has experienced an unduly protracted internal rest, it will naturally be more inclined to irritability, in order to find an occasion and field ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... declared, with a note of irritability in her tone. "You would appear to be trying to destroy a comradeship which has been very, very pleasant. For you know that I have made up my mind to dig a little way into life single-handed. I, too, want to understand—to walk with my head in the light. Love is a great thing, and happiness a ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hired that carriage by the hour, and so am in no hurry. Your excuse for your irritability will be, I suppose, that it is constitutional, and not to be controlled. A selfish, paltry, miserable excuse! I have turned down a leaf in Dr. Johnson's works, and will read what he says in regard to ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... the lot of every public man, and I leave one account to balance the other." So serene was the aged philosopher, a real philosopher, not one who, having played a part in life, was to be betrayed in the weakness and irritability of old age. He felt none of the mental weariness which years so often bring. He was by no means tired of life and affairs in this world, yet he wrote in a characteristic vein to the Bishop of St. Asaph: "The course of nature must soon put a period to my present mode of existence. ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... feeling of irritability that he heard the quick sharp note of the "Whip-poor-will," as she flew from bough to bough of an old withered tree beside him. Another, and again another of these midnight watchers took up the monotonous never-varying cry of "Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will;" and then came forth, from many ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... occasionally. Even this marriage survived Miss Ladd's boarding house, for a time. At first it went smoothly enough because Maurice couldn't blame Eleanor's cook, and Eleanor couldn't say that "nothing she did pleased Maurice"; so two reasons for irritability were eliminated; but a new reason appeared: Maurice's eager interest in everything and everybody—especially everybody!—and his endless good nature, overflowed around the boarding-house table. Everyone liked him, which Eleanor entirely understood; but he ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... humble men in company, if they produce any thing, are in that thing of the most exquisite irritability and vanity. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... to carry out his desires to a satisfactory conclusion. These periods came at irregular intervals; but, all in all, the intervals were shortening and the revels were increasing. Beatrix learned their symptoms far too quickly; she learned to know the depression and irritability which greeted her every effort to rouse and to please him. It was at such times that Lorimer made bitter revolt against what he termed her narrowness and prejudice, or burst into occasional angry petulance, if she tried to urge him to cut loose from the club and from the constantly-growing ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... drew back the curtain and passed into the room; and straight-way was he met by the glance of stinging, cold disdain that all these many years had, hour by hour, and day by day, tortured his love to madness, and lashed his very soul to fiercest irritability. A most beautiful woman was Lady Randolph, though now in the ripe autumn of her days; stately and magnificent in dress and appearance, with pride in every gesture and movement, and a haughty self-love filling that swelling breast, and curling the finely chiselled lips. She ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... my family, in these ambiguous circumstances, is everything that could be desired. My original feeling of irritability has passed away. I should have supposed it to be what Pallas calls "fatigue," a confusion or discord of the nerve-centres, which she tells me is incident to mortality. What Pallas can possibly know about it is more than I can guess, ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... had suffered from repeated attacks of it. "I have some infirmities upon me," he owned twice over in his speech at the reopening of the Parliament in January 1658, after an adjournment of six months; and his feverish irritability was quickened by the public danger. No supplies had been voted, and the pay of the army was heavily in arrear, while its temper grew more and more sullen at the appearance of the new Constitution and ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... done, but so managed that nothing should be done to weaken the power of the eight thousand proprietors over the mass of the nation dependent on the land for their existence. Hence has arisen a great amount of jealousy, distrust, and irritability in the landlord class towards the tenantry and ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... place, where I have tarried in the expectation of obtaining rest. Sligo has very kindly proposed a union of our forces for the occasion, which will be perhaps as uncomfortable to him as to myself, judging from previous experience, which, however, may be explained by my own irritability and hurry. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... Wellington, framed in her mind a mental picture of all that she had undergone as a result of that stupid blowing out of steam valves, which, by the way, had seriously scalded several of the engine-room staff and placed the keenest of edges upon her home-coming mood. No subject of nervous irritability, she. Incidents, affairs, persons, or things qualified to set the fibres of the average woman of her age tingling, were, with her, as the heat to steel; they tempered her, made her hard, ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... cold (which was not Jim's fault), and because the coffee was hot (which was according to his orders). Trivial annoyances, most of them of his own making or imagining, multiplied on all sides, fomenting his irritability until, by the time he strode out of the cottage, his temper was at white heat. What might have happened to the patient, devoted men about the stable and corrals is not difficult of conjecture, but they were saved by Sunnysides. Almost the first object ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... Feverish irritability, a constant absorption in thought, made Calyste almost doltish. Often he would sit for hours with his eyes fixed on some figure in the tapestry. One morning his mother implored him to give up Les Touches, and leave the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... not have been to him if she had gathered him into her arms, and soothed all his irritability and suffering with ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... other thoughts were once more drowned and swept away. She forgot how he often rendered her life miserable, wellnigh unbearable, by small vices, faults that defy definition, unending selfishness and unceasing irritability. But now all dissatisfaction and bitternesses were again merged into a sentiment that was akin to love; and in this time of physical degradation he possessed her perhaps more truly, more perfectly, than even in his best ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... knight, and George I, raised the painter's rank to that of a baronet. Sir Godfrey was notorious for his conceit, irritability, and eccentricity, and for the wit which sparkled more in his conversation than in any originality of observation displayed in his painting. Walpole attributes to Kneller the opposite qualities of great negligence and great love of money. The negligence or slovenliness, whether ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... well done, or your eggs fried on both sides, then you have good cause for cursing the confounding of tongues at the Tower of Babel. A Hong Kong hotel is not a place for a person predisposed to irritability. ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... an unsparing flash of comprehension, that it was useless. She would never marry him as long as the past stayed embodied, actual, to peer into their beings. A return of his familiar irritability, spleen, possessed him. "You are too pure for this world," he said brutally. She turned and stood facing him, meeting his scorn with an uplifted countenance. A shifting reflection from the Furnace stack fell over her in a wan veil, over the vaporous, sprigged ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... which would show clearly enough what is alone of importance to me. In addition to this, I will undertake to avoid in my writings, even of a purely artistic nature, such combative expressions open to misapprehension as may have escaped me formerly in my irritability. Considering all these declarations, the future need be dealt with no longer, only the past. And over that it would be well, in the case of an artist, to throw the veil of forgetfulness, not to make it a cause for revenge. All this you might in conversation explain in a much more comprehensive ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... ministers who were in London, and not only dismissed them from office, but ordered them each into separate confinement. John de Pulteney was one of those made to feel the king's anger, and he was relegated to the castle of Somerton, but as soon as Edward's irritability had passed off he and others obtained their freedom.(529) A searching enquiry was instituted in the spring of the following year (1341) as to the way in which the king's revenues had been collected in the city. ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... which is large enough to embrace the activities of the highest form of life, covers all those of the lower creatures. The lowest plant, or animalcule, feeds, grows, and reproduces its kind. In addition, all animals manifest those transitory changes of form which we class under irritability and contractility; and, it is more than probable, that when the vegetable world is thoroughly explored, we shall find all plants in possession of the same powers, at one time ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... shamefaced. Still, the justice of his capture appealed to the German, trained in the soldier's school, for it was true that he had transgressed the law, and knowingly. That he should have yielded to the weakness aroused his irritability. ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... uncomfortable sensations, one would imagine that the victims were made by a special pattern, like the tongue, of ends of nerves, all super-sensitive. The Nerves are a mysterious portion of their being, to whose account everything is laid, from extreme irritability and vexation, to nausea and rheumatism. "My nerves are that sensitive!" ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... confidence in his artistic powers, she had not the stimulus of his faith in his ultimate success to sustain her. Moreover a heart trouble with which she was afflicted resulted, through the strain to which their uncertain material condition subjected her, in a growing irritability which was accentuated by jealousy of women who entered the growing circle of Wagner's admirers as his ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... meanness of Dominic are qualified with the talent and wit necessary to save him from being utterly detestable; and, from the beginning to the end of the piece, these qualities are so happily tinged with insolence hypocrisy, and irritability, that they cannot be mistaken for the avarice, debauchery, gluttony, and meanness of any other profession than that of a bad churchman. In the tragic plot, we principally admire the general management of the opening, and chiefly censure ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... him write down the name, so as not to make a blunder. But this he refused to do. "He guessed he could remember that horrid name; there was not another like it in Christendom," he said, and on the Sunday morning of which we write he took his baby in his arms, and in a state of great nervous irritability started for church, repeating to himself the names, particularly the last, which troubled him the most. Many a change he rang upon it, and by the time he stood before the altar the perspiration was starting from every pore, so anxious ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... expectoration. His countenance was florid; his pulse very irregular, though not quite intermittent. The occasional variations in the state of the disease were remarkable. Some periods were marked with uncommon mental irritability. Pain in the region of the liver, oedema of the inferior extremities, paucity and turbidness of the urine, yellowness of the skin, and great emaciation attended the latter stages of the disease. A degree of stupor occurred. ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... controlling instinctive impulse is due to his recognition of its non-intellectual origin. He may even be able to extend this recognition to his own impulses, and to overcome the conviction that his irritability during afternoon school in July is the result of an intellectual conclusion as to the need of special severity in dealing with a set of unprecedentedly ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... people to quarrel with you. The irritability which crowded conditions aggravate makes it necessary to adhere, from principle, to the rule of strict ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... irritability kept him constantly on the wing. Though little interested in politics, he liked to be on the edge of any political commotion. He appeared in London on the death of Queen Caroline, in 1737; and Bathurst remarked that "he was as sure to be there in a bustle as a porpoise in a storm." ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... the muscle to respond. Falling blood pressures diminish proportionately the power of muscular response. Rising blood pressure is effective "in largely restoring in fatigued structures their normal irritability" and an increase of adrenin seems to raise blood pressure by driving the blood from the interior regions of the body "into the skeleton muscles which have to meet, by extra action, the urgent demands ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... day, so that every hour will bring renewed occasion for annoyance. And the more strongly a woman realizes the value of time, and the importance of system and order, the more will she be tempted to irritability ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... Indifference to need for help. Too close holding to the text. Distant attitude—aloofness. Partiality. Excitability. Irritability. Pessimism—"in the dumps." Indifferent assignments. Hazy explanations. Failure to cover assignments. Distracting facial expressions. Attitude of "lording it over." Sarcasm. Poor taste in dress. Bluffing—"the tables turned." Discipline for ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... correspondence, in his lightest and most unstudied conversation. He was a kind friend, a generous enemy, and in deportment a thorough gentleman. But his splendid talents and virtues were rendered almost useless to his country, by his levity, his restlessness, his irritability, his morbid craving for novelty and for excitement. His weaknesses had not only brought him, on more than one occasion, into serious trouble; but had impelled him to some actions altogether unworthy of his humane and noble nature. Repose was insupportable to him. He loved ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... abstained from using my foot since I did so, it is still so weak that I am afraid of standing upon it much, and must consequently abide the results (invariable with me) of want of exercise, headache, sideache, and nervous depression and irritability. When I get to Philadelphia, if I am no better, I will hire a horse for a little while, and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... this dog to regain confidence in the human being, and making him the merry, happy fellow he had once been; on the other, there was the test as to whether this could be done without loss of hope in the face of repeated and almost continuous failure, and without the exhibition of irritability or loss of temper when provocations arose at first a score of times ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... who's afraid even when he's passing everywhere as an American syndicate a cowardly custard," rejoined Madame, who appeared to be suffering under that peculiar form of flushed irritability which is apt to follow on heavy thought, indulged in to excess in a recumbent position during the daytime. "There, that's settled. So now let us get to business. Kindly hand me your prophecy of last night, ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... certain and less hazardous. Perforation of the esophagus by the foreign body, or by blind instrumentation, is a contraindication to esophagoscopy. It is manifested by such signs as subcutaneous emphysema, swelling of the neck, fever, irritability, increase in pulsatory and respiratory rates, and pain in the neck or chest. Gaseous emphysema is present in some cases, and denotes a dangerous infection. Esophagoscopy should be postponed and the treatment mentioned at the end of this chapter instituted. After the subsidence of all symptoms ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... prove that she had a rare gift of diplomacy. She had, moreover, an unfailing cheerfulness and goodness of heart which quickly endeared her to the moody and capricious Peter. In his frequent fits of nervous irritability which verged on madness, she alone had the power to soothe him and restore him to sanity. Her very voice had a magic to arrest him in his worst rages, and when the fit of madness (for such it undoubtedly was) was passing away she would "take ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... leave her alone, but it made her heart ache to see the lines under Hatty's eyes, that showed she had cried herself to sleep. She knew it was unhappiness and not temper that was the cause of her irritability. ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... life tingle through her; she sank entirely to family affairs, excluded even from the ladies' committee. Her lord's life, too, shrank, though his business extended—the which, uneasily suspected, did but increase his irritability. He had now the pomp and pose of his late offices minus any visible reason: a Sir Oracle without a shrine, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... in short, a man who is a MASTER by nature—when such a man has sympathy, well! THAT sympathy has value! But of what account is the sympathy of those who suffer! Or of those even who preach sympathy! There is nowadays, throughout almost the whole of Europe, a sickly irritability and sensitiveness towards pain, and also a repulsive irrestrainableness in complaining, an effeminizing, which, with the aid of religion and philosophical nonsense, seeks to deck itself out as ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Otto's little fopperies and eccentricities quite as much as he had ever done in college days; his finicky dress, his foreign ways in eating, his tendency to boast about his music, his country, and his forebears, on his good days, balanced by a brooding irritability on his bad days. And he was conscious that his own ways and customs were no less teasing to Radowitz; his Tory habits of thought, his British contempt for vague sentimentalisms and heroics, for all that panache means to the Frenchman, or "glory" ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Pioneer to return. Ammunition needed. The arrangement of the men for scouting and picketing. Leaving security harbor. A plant which devours insects. Venus's fly-trap. How plants absorb food. Irritability. How the leaf digests the fly. Food absorbed by leaves as well as by roots. A cache of human skulls. Head hunters. The vele. A hoodoo. The rattle. The vele and the bamboo box. How it is worked to produce the ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... the highest order—with which he has discharged his portion of the duty of conducting these proceedings, unprecedented in their harassing complexity and their overwhelming magnitude. He has manifested throughout—'bating a little irritability and strictness in petty details at starting—a self-possession; a resolute determination; a capability of coping with unexpected difficulty; a familiarity with constitutional law; a mastery over the details of legal proceedings; in short, a degree of forensic ability, which has been fully appreciated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... blinked the last fragments of sleep out of his system, and became filled with a restless irritability. There was only one instrument in the house which could create this infernal din—the orchestrion in the drawing-room, immediately above which, he recalled, his ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... that has what the Physiologists call irritability in it: how much more all wherein irritability has perfected itself into vitality; into actual vision, and force that can will! All stirs; and if not in Paris, flocks thither. Great and greater waxes President Danton in his Cordeliers Section; his rhetorical tropes are ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form—hourly and momently gaining vigor—and at length obtaining over me the most incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... day since their return was a dark one for everybody. Max and Wally had to meet the enemy at eleven, in the lawyer's office. The air was electric with Mrs. Bryce's irritability. She left the two culprits ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... had manifested signs of impatience and irritability during Mr. Forbes's address, and he now said, with his peculiar snarl for which he was famous, "Once upon a time there was a great redistribution of land in Egypt, and the fifth part of the increase was given to Pharaoh, and the other four parts ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... traits in an aviator are impatience and irritability. A man who has these temperamental drawbacks in a form which is strongly marked, and who cannot control them, should not think of becoming an aviator. The man who is impatient and irritable finds himself out of harmony with the whole theory of aerial navigation. ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... was finally palsied; and then the constable's services were in constant requisition. The fact that he was entirely dependent on Luke's care, and was obliged to be tended like an infant, instead of inspiring any gratitude or compassion towards his poor slave, seemed only to increase his irritability and cruelty. As he lay there on his bed, a mere degraded wreck of manhood, he took into his head the strangest freaks of despotism; and if Luke hesitated to submit to his orders, the constable was immediately sent for. ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... The fatigue and irritability, consequent upon too much mental labour, and too little fresh air and exercise, had vanished. John was in good health and good spirits, clear of brain and eye, and vigorous of person, when he arrived at Barracombe; in the mild, wet, misty weather which heralded ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... riding to those who knew the filly's irritability, uncertainty. Clean-cut veteran horsemanship, with horse and rider as one; a mechanically precise pace, heart-breaking for a following field. The major slowly climbed off the rail, mechanically eyeing his watch. He ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... tickle with a straw without succeeding in rousing them from their torpor. The palpi, on the other hand, their immediate neighbours, wave at the least touch. The Epeira is placed in safety, in a flask, and undergoes a fresh examination a week later. Irritability has in part returned. Under the stimulus of a straw, I see her legs move a little, especially the lower joints, the tibiae and tarsi. The palpi are even more irritable and mobile. These different movements, however, are ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... the effect of accentuating Mrs. Rastall-Retford's always rather pronounced irritability. She was a massive lady, with a prominent forehead, some half-dozen chins, and a manner towards those in her employment which would have been resented in a second mate by the crew of a Western ocean tramp. Even at her best she was no ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... on my best garments, but as I got into the car something of the old protest at having to do what I did not want to do, to go where I did not want to go, came over me, and I was conscious of childish irritability. I did not care to know the Swinks. Eternity wouldn't be long enough, and certainly time wasn't to waste on people like that, and yet because Selwyn had asked me to call I was doing it. All men are alike. When they don't ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... them—so changed that he hardly recognized him. His neighbors on the corridor were common criminals. The president of the committee offered him the use of a library, but he only asked for a Bible, "with which," he says, "I was no longer alone." His greatest suffering arose from the nervous irritability caused by the unremitting watch of the sentinel at his door, which drove him almost frantic. The sensation of being spied at every instant, in every action, of meeting this relentless, irresponsive gaze on waking, of encountering it at each minute ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... the pocket of his coat, and he rightly judged that a very little of that would put an end to the life that was hanging in the balance. Nearly half an hour passed before either spoke again. Then Keyork looked up. This time his voice was smooth and persuasive. His irritability had all disappeared. ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... her 'two men and a dog'; that will take her mind off your father." It must be confessed that Dr. Lavendar was out of temper—a sad fault in one of his age, as Mrs. Drayton often said; but his irritability was so marked that Cyrus finally slunk off, uncomforted, and afraid to meet Gussie's eye, even under its bandage ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland
... glance with expressions of uniform gravity. To torment a nervous horse is something which does not fit with the ways of the men of the mountain desert, even at their roughest. Besides, there was an edgy irritability about Slim Dugan which had more than once won him black looks. They wanted to see him tested now by a foeman who seemed worthy of his mettle. And Slim saw that common desire in his flickering side glance. He turned a cold eye ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... Cuvier, who has so clearly distinguished between instinct and intelligence in animals, 'instinct is a natural and inherent faculty, like feeling, irritability, or intelligence. The wolf and the fox who recognize the traps in which they have been caught, and who avoid them; the dog and the horse, who understand the meaning of several of our words, and who obey us,—thereby show intelligence. The dog who hides the remains of his dinner, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... craving of hunger was satisfied, she appeared to suffer less from the persecution of her tormentor than, before; whether it was, as Mrs. Sullivan thought, that the food with which she plied it, appeased in some degree its irritability, or lessened that of the stranger, it was difficult to say; at all events, she became more composed; her eyes resumed somewhat of a natural expression; each sharp ferocious glare, which shot, from them! with such intense ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... my say," Charles asserted with increasing irritability. "And it's lucky for you with your fool sentiments that you've got somebody to think ahead for you, else you'd all starve to death. I tell you that famine's coming. I've been studying the situation. Flour will be two dollars a pound, or ten, and no ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... state of miserable physical tension is the portion of all great singers alike, though in somewhat varying degrees, and it is interesting to note the forms it assumes with different people. In many it is shown by excessive irritability and the disposal to pick quarrels with anyone who comes in contact with them. This is an unhappy time for the luckless "dressers," wig man and stage hands, or even fellow artists who encounter such singers ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... child and that they have failed, but the fault largely lies in the parents undertaking the task with every expectation of failure, and the chief characteristics noticed by the child have been the parental irritability, impatience and incompetence. Having estimated these the child then knows exactly how to gain its own ends and has sufficient determination to persevere until it does. A certain amount of harsh treatment will suffice, until the child is old enough to rebel, in order to keep it in check, or, as is ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... injuries we have fixed in their hearts—in hearts, it may be, bound to our own, and to which we owed gentleness instead of harshness. The shafts of reproach, which come from the graves of those who have been wounded by our fretfulness and irritability, are often hard to bear. Let meek forbearance and self-control prevent such suffering, and guard us against the condemnations of the ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... argued, and admitted that he was exceedingly weary with the comments made concerning the fit of the issue uniform that he was compelled to wear. Every man professed innocence, but Larkin did not believe a word of their stout denials. The manner in which he took the joke was evidence of the irritability caused by the days of inaction. Every member of the squadron was looking for something over which they ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... and interest. I have no doubt that I, and my sisters and cousins, in our visits to Chawton, frequently disturbed this mystic process, without having any idea of the mischief that we were doing; certainly we never should have guessed it by any signs of impatience or irritability ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... and shoreless sea. She shuddered, as if she were cold—for she thought of her husband, the man who here in the desert should have been all in all to her, but whose presence filled her with aversion, whose indifference had ceased to wound her, and whose tenderness she feared far more than his wild irritability—she had never ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... huffing and arrogance, by acting systematically upon it to that end; and, in a worldly point of view, he succeeded to perfection; with this drawback—which always accompanies false pretensions of the kind—that, knowing to what extent they were false, his mind was kept in a proportionate state of irritability and dissatisfaction; so that his success, after all, was only that of a man who prospers by parading an infirmity. With good intention as a judge in ordinary cases, he had sufficient patience neither to study nor to listen. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... interviews at my office, if perchance they happen to find me there. But on this occasion—I could not at the moment tell why—its clanging seemed the very essence of discord. It jangled with my nervous system, and as it ceased I was conscious of a feeling of irritability which is utterly at variance with my nature outside of business hours. In the office, for the sake of discipline, I frequently adopt a querulous manner, finding it necessary in dealing with office-boys, but the moment I leave ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... father's feelings upon the subject impelled him to the utmost exertion. Above all, he had that sort of self-command which is essential to success in every arduous undertaking, and he was constitutionally free from that feverish irritability by which those whose over-active imaginations exaggerate difficulties, render themselves incapable of ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... do not strike us with sufficient surprise. Supernumerary petals, stamens, and pistils, are often produced. I have seen a leaflet low down in the compound leaf of Vicia sativa converted into a tendril, and a tendril possesses many peculiar properties, such as spontaneous movement and irritability. The calyx sometimes assumes, either wholly or by stripes, the colour and texture of the corolla. Stamens are so frequently converted, more or less completely, into petals, that such cases are passed over as not deserving notice; but as petals have special ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... place in him. The irritability approaching to violence, which had attended every speech and infused itself into every movement since he came into the room, had left him. He spoke quietly, and with a touch of irony in his tone. He seemed more the ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... head. Now he turns on his right side, then on his left—presently he starts up, and with muttered curse shakes his little pillow, flinging it down angrily. He cannot sleep—he cannot rest—he cannot keep still. Bursting with irritability, he gets out of bed, and steps to the window, which opening wide, a slight gush of fresh air cools his hot face for a moment or two. His wearied eye looks upward and beholds the moon shining overhead in cold splendor, turning the clouds to gold as they flit past her, and shedding a softened lustre ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... learnt that the sweet-smelling plant yields what chemists call "apiol," or Parsley-Camphor, which, when given in moderation, exercises a quieting influence on the main sensific centres of life—the head and the spine. Thereby any feverish irritability of the urinary organs inflicted by cold, or other nervous shock, would be subordinately allayed. Thus likewise the Parsley-Camphor (whilst serving, [4] when applied externally, to usefully stimulate indolent wounds) proves ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... explain this increased irritability, for I myself, as well as every soul in the city, was nervously awaiting the next prowl of the Head-hunter, and in it I recognized more fuel for the fire that was burning Carse's reason. He was waiting for the fatal Monday night as a man waits for his doom, and each hour found him closer ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... noticeable improvement in trade work. Where the obstructions of nose and throat still remain there is loss in weight and diminished chest expansion and a generally weakened condition. The extraction of decayed teeth and the providing of well-fitting glasses have diminished nervous irritability and the frequency of headaches. Three cases of tuberculosis were sent to camps. Seven cases of organic heart trouble were treated by specialists; nineteen girls were given corrective exercises at Teachers ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman
... fretful words, they come back to me like echoes. If I bristle all over with irritability, the quills will begin to rise all about me. One thoroughly irritable person in a breakfast-room spoils coffee and toast, sours milk, and destroys appetite for a whole family. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... one lasting about four months. No precipitating cause was known for any of them. Only one of the attacks, the fifth, (none were well observed) seems to have shown features different from an elated excitement with irritability. At the end of this attack she was said to have ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... the world naturally answers that no man of sixty should live, which is doubtless true, though not original. The man of sixty, with a certain irritability proper to his years, retorts that the world has no business to throw on him the task of removing its carrion, and that while he remains he has a right to require amusement — or at least education, since this costs nothing to any one — and that a world which cannot ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... last night, that something will yet happen to prevent the marriage. What has produced this singular fancy? Is it the indirect result of my apprehensions for Laura's future? Or has it been unconsciously suggested to me by the increasing restlessness and irritability which I have certainly observed in Sir Percival's manner as the wedding-day draws nearer and nearer? Impossible to say. I know that I have the idea—surely the wildest idea, under the circumstances, that ever entered a woman's ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... snow surface of the roads presented in itself a factor that materially magnified the heavy labouring beneath full pack, arduous to a degree under the easiest of conditions. Before mid-day the constant vigilance and care necessary if a hard fall was to be avoided began to tell on the nerves, irritability forced its grip, and they glared savagely at one another at every sideslip—inevitable in a long ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... being produced by centuries of servitude; while in a Madame Gorka you recognize beneath her smiling amiability the fanaticism of truth of the Puritans; beneath the artistic refinement of a Lincoln Maitland you find the squatter, invincibly coarse and robust; in Boleslas Gorka all the nervous irritability of the Slav, which has ruined Poland. These lineaments of race are hardly visible in the civilized person, who speaks three or four languages fluently, who has lived in Paris, Nice, Florence, here, that same ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... scream is given with almost every repetition, it will scream in the same way when even a weak stimulus is applied. If, for instance, after a two-volt stimulus has been given a few times, the animal be merely touched with a stick, it will scream. It thus appears as if the strong stimulus increases the irritability of the center for the scream-reflex to such an extent that even weak stimuli are sufficient to cause the reaction. Are we to say that the weak stimulus is painful because of the increased irritability, or may it be concluded that the reflex is in this case, like ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... in repose, gleamed and glowed whenever he became animated in conversation. He had warm affections, a tender, shrinking, sensitive disposition, was a kind parent, an attached friend, truly pious, and could be charged with no fault, save an irritability of temper, which grew upon him with his misfortunes and infirmities, and, latterly, that occasional excess to which we have alluded, which sprung rather from dotage and wretchedness than from inclination, and in which he was far more to be pitied ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... a touching irritability, and every one looked sadly at him. The day after Antony's frank statement of his plans, the squire rode early into Bradford and went straight to the house of old Simon Whaley. For three generations the ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... had meanwhile taken fresh forms. After the failure of his attempt to restore Bartja, (transformed as he fancied into a bow) to his original shape, his irritability increased so frightfully that a single word, or even a look, was sufficient to make him furious. Still his true friend and counsellor, Croesus, never left him, though the king had more than once given him over to the guards for execution. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... I have said that sweetness and gentleness were not its only constituents; that he was also fiery and strong. At the time now referred to, his fire was low and his strength distilled away; but the residue of his life was neither irritability nor discontent. He was unfit to mingle in society, for conversation was a pain to him; but let us observe the great Man-child when alone. He is at the village of Interlaken, enjoying Jungfrau sunsets, and at times watching the Swiss nailers making their nails. He keeps a ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... sad deprecatory answers as made him reproach himself, and still more lose sight of peace of mind. This struggle could not last long without affecting his health; and Tom, his sole companion through the long evenings, noticed his increasing languor, his restless irritability, with perplexed anxiety, and at last resolved to call his mother's attention to his brother's haggard, careworn looks. She listened with a startled recollection of Will's claims upon her love. She noticed his decreasing appetite ...
— Lizzie Leigh • Elizabeth Gaskell
... stolidly under the arched door-way of the big court-yard he swerved a little, as if startled out of his thoughts. He realized his swerve almost before it was accomplished, and pulled himself together with nervous irritability. ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... been Appin's one successful pupil, and he was destined to have no successor. A few weeks later an elephant in the Dresden Zoological Garden, which had shown no previous signs of irritability, broke loose and killed an Englishman who had apparently been teasing it. The victim's name was variously reported in the papers as Oppin and Eppelin, but his front ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... waited a moment, shifting his position nervously; then he said, with a touch of irritability: "You ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... quantities of magnesia and soda. The water is heated for bathing purposes, but drunk in its natural state. It is tonic in its action, but diuretic and purgative as well, and is used efficaciously in liver complaints, dyspepsia, neuralgia, and nervous irritability. Hotel accommodation in the Bathing Establishment and Apartments ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... of "perfidious Albion," the "traitor" Pitt, and the whole brood of hoary power. I was too feeble to turn him out of the room, and too contemptuous to reply. But his overthrow was not the further off. The old nurse, who, old as she was, still retained some of the sinews and all the irritability of a stout Champenoise peasant, roused by his insults to the aristocracy, one of whom she probably regarded herself, from having lived so long under their roof, watched her opportunity, made a spring at him like a wild-cat, wrested the sabre from his hand, and, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... more than a surface sweetness; she loved harmony and serenity, and there was almost no inclination to irritability or ugliness in her nature. Her voice was always soothing and soft, and her patience in the unravelling of other people's problems was inexhaustible. Alice was, as all the world ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... marriage, a Catholic. Good judges belonging to her own sex describe her as gentle, quiet, soft in her manners, and well-bred. She had the qualities which best fitted and disposed her to soothe the vehemence and irritability of her companion. Though she afterwards conformed to the religion of her husband, it was no insignificant coincidence that in two of the dearest relations of his life the atmosphere of Catholicism was thus poured round the ...
— Burke • John Morley
... is a terrible affliction, and nothing is so certain to produce that nervous irritability which is so trying to the patient as well as to the outer world, as this so-called spiritual disease. Nietzsche was probably quite right when he said the only real and true music that Wagner ever composed did not consist of his elaborate arias ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... how the state of mind of a whole household is influenced by the heads of it. Mr. Skratdj was a very kind master, and Mrs. Skratdj was a very kind mistress, and yet their servants lived in a perpetual fever of irritability that fell just short of discontent. They jostled each other on the back stairs, said harsh things in the pantry, and kept up a perennial warfare on the subject of the duty of the sexes with the general man servant. They gave warning ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... length of time and the degree of cold, decided tonic effects are observed on the circulation and on the nervous system. The rapid changes of temperature vigorously exercise the non-striated muscles of the blood vessels (page 57) and the nerves controlling them. The irritability of the nervous system in general is also lessened. For this reason the cold bath is one of the best means of keeping both mind and body in good condition during the warm months. Sponging off the body with cold or tepid ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... coughed as before, and drew lines on the carpet with the ivory end of her parasol. Miss Tox, who had experience of her fair friend, and knew that under the pressure of any slight fatigue or vexation she was prone to a discursive kind of irritability, availed herself of the pause, to change ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... good management) would be done so as not to annoy the husband, were to my father a sort of annoyance; and he, from an ignorant and mistaken notion, sought comfort in an alehouse. My mother's ignorance of household duties; my father's consequent irritability and intemperance; the frightful poverty; the constant quarrelling; the pernicious example to my brothers and sisters; the bad effect upon the future conduct of my brothers,—one and all of us being forced out to work so young that our feeble ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... against the dry grass and brushwood, produces a rattling noise, which can be distinctly heard at the distance of six feet. As often as the animal was irritated or surprised, its tail was shaken; and the vibrations were extremely rapid. Even as long as the body retained its irritability, a tendency to this habitual movement was evident. This Trigonocephalus has, therefore, in some respects the structure of a viper, with the habits of a rattlesnake: the noise, however, being produced by a simpler device. The expression of this ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... cap upon the table, turned up my coat to hide the absence of collar, and started for the door. My last sight of Smith showed him standing looking after me, tugging at the lobe of his ear and clicking his teeth together with suppressed irritability. I stumbled down the dark stairs, along the hall, and opened the front door. Vaguely visible in the light of a street lamp which stood at no great distance away, I saw a slender man of medium height confronting me. From the shadowed face two large and luminous eyes looked out into ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... fascinate more than beautiful ones! My laughter died away. It is difficult to keep on laughing by oneself. I was tired, and had been giving out sympathy all day; depression clutched me, and a restless irritability. At this auspicious moment the orphan knocked at the door and announced that Number 19 would be glad ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... in no hurry with the night-refuge," he went on, speaking with vexation and irritability, and addressing the doctor, who looked at him, as it were, blankly and in perplexity, evidently unable to understand what induced him to raise the question of medicine and hygiene. "And most likely it will be a long time, too, before I make use of our estimate. I ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... at him; but evidently her depression and irritability were increasing with every moment. Totski was dreadfully alarmed to hear her promise a revelation out of her ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... more clearly portrayed than at far-famed Pisa. The stagnant life, the death-like silence, the dreary solitude of this dull town, whatever utility these elements may have in allaying the restless irritability of nervous and excitable patients, always produce serious evils upon those consumptive invalids of a melancholy turn of mind, or whose spirit is broken by hope deferred. Brooding over their melancholy condition, in a foreign land, away from the comforts of home, without ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... mind is much clearer, the spirits much better, the temper more even, and "less irritability pervades the system." The mind can continue a laborious investigation longer than when she subsisted ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... Effi got better, gained a little in weight (old von Briest belonged to the weight fanatics), and lost much of her irritability. But her need of fresh air kept growing steadily, and even when the west wind blew and the sky was overcast with gray clouds, she spent many hours out of doors. On such days she would usually go out into the fields or the marsh, often ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... things—Cornelia among others—he became aware, through some subtle channel of sensation, that somebody was standing in the door-way. He was lying in such a position that he could not see the door, so, after waiting a few moments, he exclaimed, with an invalid's irritability: ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... of feverishly sleepless nights disposed him to snappish irritability or the thirst for tenderness. Gower had singular experiences of him on the drive North-westward. He scarcely spoke; he said once: 'If you mean to marry, you'll be wanting to marry soon, of course,' and his curt nod before the reply was formulated appeared to signify, the sooner ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... faculties of the sensorium during their inactive state are termed irritability, sensibility, voluntarily, and associability; in their active state they are termed as above ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... more words Christie took leave, and scandalized the sable retainer by smiling all through the hall, and laughing audibly as the door closed. The contrast of the plaid boy and beruffled girl's irritability with their mother's languid affectation, and her own unfortunate efforts, was too much for her. In the middle of her merriment she paused suddenly, ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... she declared, with a note of irritability in her tone. "You would appear to be trying to destroy a comradeship which has been very, very pleasant. For you know that I have made up my mind to dig a little way into life single-handed. I, too, want to understand—to walk with my head in the light. Love is a great thing, and happiness ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... or circle of friends is so constituted that some are obsessed to do certain things and others are obsessed not to stand them the foundation is laid for a degree of irritability inconsistent with mental health. Mrs. X. simply cannot stand hearing Mr. X. tap the floor, and if he continues, her discomfort becomes acute; the sound so dominates her that she can think of nothing ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... a laxative, allays irritability of the stomach; it is consequently useful during dentition, at which period there is both much irritability and a prevailing acescency of the stomach. The dose is from five grains to ten for an infant, increasing the quantity to fifteen grains ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... domestic afflictions, tugging at his heart-strings even in his hours of genial intercourse, and converting his very smiles into spasms; the anxious days and sleepless nights preying upon his delicate organization, producing that morbid sensitiveness and nervous irritability which at times overlaid the real sweetness and amenity of his nature, and obscured the unbounded ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... synonymous, but not wholly so. It is somewhat difficult for the mind to grasp the shades of difference in their meaning. It appears, however, that lowliness is the deepest depth of humility and meekness. Meekness is the opposite of impatience, harshness, or irritability, and has for its fruit gentleness and kindness. Humility is the opposite of pride, and has for its fruits modesty, unforwardness, etc. Lowliness is simply the opposite of highness in self in any respect, and has for its fruits meekness and ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... has since been called his 'will.' In this epistle, which is addressed to 'My brothers Carl and Johann Beethoven,' and which they are admonished to 'read and execute after my demise,' Beethoven pleads for consideration both on account of his irritability and his apparent lack of affection. To his misfortunes, not to his faults, must be attributed the obstinacy, the hostility, or the misanthropic attitude which he has shown towards those whom he loves, and by whom ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... insulting and contumelious to a good man, when they are puffed up with prosperity and success. But the contrary often happens; afflictions and public calamities naturally embittering and souring the minds and tempers of men, and disposing them to such peevishness and irritability, that hardly any word or sentiment of common vigor can be addressed to them, but they will be apt to take offense. He that remonstrates with them on their errors, is presumed to be insulting over their misfortunes, and any free spoken expostulation is construed into contempt. ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... necessities of existence is gradually made up to it a thousandfold by the nervous power, which, in a chemical sense, is thereby released. And since the intelligence and sensibility which are thus promoted are on a higher level than the muscular irritability which they supplant, so the achievements of mind exceed those of the body a thousandfold. One wise counsel is worth the work of ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
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