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More "Perverse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... here in few words the origin and interior history of the human race. God made us for Himself: that is the only explanation that satisfies the heart of a thinking man, whatever his wild reason may say. Should faulty education and perverse reasoning lead a man to conclude otherwise, there is little that any Christian can do for him. For such a man I have no message. My appeal is addressed to those who have been previously taught in secret by the wisdom of God; I speak to thirsty hearts whose longings have been wakened by the touch ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... enjoyed the smell of a toasted bloater, rather burnt. So common! so indescribably common! And she detested bloaters, because of the hairy feel of the spines in her mouth. But to smell them like this, to know that she was in the region of "penny beef-steaks," gave her a perverse pleasure. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... having lost a hundred sons like unto riches obtained in a dream, it is Gandhari and I, who should mourn. Not having listened to the pregnant words of the high-souled Vidura, who sought our welfare, I, of perverse senses, (now) repent. The virtuous Vidura, endowed with divine insight, had told me,—'Thy race will meet with annihilation owing to the transgressions of Duryodhana. O king, if thou wish for the weal of thy line, act up to my advice. Cast off this wicked-minded ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... will often interfere with the truthfulness of his account. Whilst as regards the memory-pictures of adults, recourse to this method often fails us because the experiences are so remote as to have been largely, if not entirely, forgotten. The autobiographies of sexually perverse individuals have drawn my attention to the fallacious nature of memory. Its records are uncertain, but that especially is recorded which has aroused interest. Not only the interest felt in the experiences at the time determines what shall be recorded, but ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... over,—explained away,—ignored,—set aside. The reading is doubtful: or there are two opinions, (perhaps twenty,) concerning it: or the language may be figurative: or the words are not to be pressed too closely: or a perverse logic may pretend to find in it agreeable confirmation, instead of stern reproof. Not a few places there are, however, which defy any such handling; stubborn rocks which refuse to yield a single trace of the wished-for vegetation, in return for the most determined husbandry. Nothing of the ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... a measure so lax as that of allowing a red "varmint" to run at large in their midst, without even so much as a block and chain to hamper the freedom of his movements, or some sign to bespeak his inferiority to men and dogs. Perhaps, like some perverse people we have known, Grumbo took particular delight in being unsatisfactory to every one but himself. Or, perhaps by the observance of this policy he meant to reproach his renegade leader for suffering himself to be so easily led away from the orthodox faith in which they had ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... said, with a hard laugh. "You had better find him in church to-morrow morning, and tell him that you have been wilful and perverse and disobedient. He'll give you absolution, no doubt. So now you'd better go back to your dancing. Your many friends ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... there, in baskets, staring straight up at the ceiling; but in denoting their degrees in society, and confining them to their respective stations (which experience shows to be lamentably difficult in real life), the makers of these Dolls had far improved on Nature, who is often froward and perverse; for they, not resting on such arbitrary marks as satin, cotton print, and bits of rag, had superadded striking personal differences which allowed of no mistake. Thus, the Doll-lady of distinction had wax limbs of perfect symmetry; but only she ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... him perverse, who, weak and blind, In pride refusing to behold, shall find The ponderous roll of circumstance will grind His steps; and if he turn not, must Bruise and crush ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... object, covered with slime and filth, emerged from the slough; this was Paganini the second! who, after securing his fiddle, that had stranded on a mud-bank, scrambled up the steep slope, amidst the roars of laughter of my people and of ourselves; while the perverse mule, having turned harmony into discord, kicked up its heels and galloped off, braying an ode in praise of liberty, as the "Lay of the last Minstrel." The discomfited fiddler was wiped down by my Tokrooris, who occasionally burst into ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... "Go thy way; thy Saviour liveth." "Lo, I am with you alway." "I live, and ye shall live also." "I wait to take charge of your whole life. Will you have me do this? Trust to me all that is evil and feeble; your whole sinful and perverse nature—give it up to Me; that dying, sin-sick soul—give it up to Me, and I will take care of it." Will you not listen and hear Him speak to your soul? "Child, go forward into all the circumstances of life that have tempted you; into all the difficulties that threaten you." Your ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... you where you will have no occasion for reasons. Oh! I can match you, you perverse little wretch! I am going to send you to a boarding-school, do you hear that? send you where you will have no Aubreys to abet your obstinacy and disobedience, where that temper of yours can be curbed. How will you ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... powers, our relations with Japan have been brought into serious jeopardy through the perverse opposition of the hereditary aristocracy of the Empire to the enlightened and liberal policy of the Tycoon, designed to bring the country into the society of nations. It is hoped, although not with entire confidence, that these difficulties may be peacefully ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... it is just as well as I can tell you, only it pleases you to be perverse this morning,' said Clara good-humouredly, 'and I am not going to ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... no gradual acclimatisation of a sensitive and ardent nature in the fixed principles which are essential to right conduct in the frigid zone of our relations with other people. It was one of the most elementary of Rousseau's many perverse and mischievous contentions, that it is their education by the older which ruins or wastes the abundant capacity for virtue that subsists naturally in the young. His mind seems never to have sought much more deeply for proof of this, than ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the most exquisite specimen of pig-headedness that the world can furnish, his perverse evidence on the once famous case at the Warwick assizes, of Captain Donelan for poisoning ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... alarm on again. That sort of nonsense went on a week or two, then the expert came up and put in a new clock. He came up every three months during the next three years, and put in a new clock. But it was always a failure. His clocks all had the same perverse defect: they would put the alarm on in the daytime, and they would not put it on at night; and if you forced it on yourself, they would take it off again the ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... as yesterday should only be chronicled now and then to give an added halo to happy to-morrows,—disagreeables are remembered quite long enough by perverse human nature. ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... knew not the value of that Book Which, since that time, I have so precious found; And my perverse young temper would not brook Restraint, though it did much ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... dangers of example; never since the foundation of the town had there happened anything which so much alarmed this primitive community. One of the possessors of these profane chairs, filled with repentance, wisely sent it back to the continent; the other, more obstinate and perverse, in defiance to all remonstrances, persisted in the use of his chair until by degrees they became more reconciled to it; though I observed that the wealthiest and the most respectable people still go to meeting or to their farms in a single-horse ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... your man,' said Devereux, who took a perverse pleasure in joking; 'tell him to flay the lump, splat him, divide him, and cut him in ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... through a building such as she had not dreamed of in her wildest fantasies, and having very sweetly thanked the Arab, had clapped her hands, and being of perverse mood, had indifferently bidden him good night, and entered the rose pink sleeping-room where the couch had been designed by love, and the colouring reflected by the great mirrors by passion; to slip from out her perfumed raiment, and step down into the pink marble Roman bath and hide beneath ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... heat of discourse, engage themselves too soon, which might bias them so much, that instead of consulting the good of the public, they might rather study to support their first opinions, and by a perverse and preposterous sort of shame, hazard their country rather than endanger their own reputation, or venture the being suspected to have wanted foresight in the expedients that they at first proposed. And therefore to prevent ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... erected on the balcony which lies opposite to the Piazetti. Bodoeri reminded the Doge of this custom, and told him that it would be very absurd, and sure to draw down upon him the mocking laughter of both populace and Seignory, if, in the teeth of custom and usage, he let his perverse jealousy exclude Annunciata from this honour. "Do you think," replied old Falieri, whose pride was immediately aroused, "do you think I am such an idiotic old fool that I am afraid to show my most precious ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... gate. Not until he had paid and dismissed the chauffeur did she look up. She wore a smile, which faded as she caught his expression. With its fading came the old, worn look; he had never, even at that first meeting on the train, seen it more pronounced. A flood of perverse tenderness came over him; he found himself obliged to steel his heart. And so, it was Annette who ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... not a stranger," Julia answered; she took a perverse delight in recalling the beginning of the acquaintance which she knew quite well was better ignored. "How odd," she said, turning to Rawson-Clew, "that father should have forgotten you, just as you told me you had forgotten him and ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... vulgar tradition which represents this high-souled and gentle-hearted poet as one morbidly fascinated by a fantastic attraction toward the "violent delights" of horror and the nervous or sensational excitements of criminal detail; nor can there be conceived a more perverse or futile misapprehension than that which represents John Webster as one whose instinct led him by some obscure and oblique propensity to darken the darkness of southern crime or vice by an infusion of northern seriousness, of introspective cynicism and reflective intensity in wrong-doing, ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Both were men of the people, lowly born and hardly bred. Each knew the London of his time as few men knew it; and each represented it intimately and in elaborate detail. Both men were at heart moralists, seeking the truth by the exaggerated methods of humour and caricature; perverse, even wrong-headed at times, but possessed of a true pathos and largeness of heart, and when all has been said — though the Elizabethan ran to satire, the Victorian to sentimentality — leaving the world better for the art that ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... never seem to find their special line. I've known people so perverse they wouldn't do what they could, simply because they would have preferred something else. But I'm a firm believer that every ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... citizen of the world! It ought not to have irritated me as it did. It would be Catherine's opinion, of course; but a dispassionate view was not to be expected from her. I had not hitherto thought otherwise, myself; but now I experienced a perverse inclination to take the opposite side. Was it so utterly impossible for a woman with this woman's record to make a good wife to some man yet? I did not admit it for an instant; he would be a lucky man who won ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... at the time now engaged with. Until his providential discovery of Sen, the distinguished Provider had been immersed in a most unenviable condition of despair, for his enlightened but exceedingly perverse-minded master had, of late, declined to be in any way amused, or even interested, by the simple and unpretentious entertainment which could be obtained in so inaccessible a region. The well-intentioned efforts of the followers of the Court, who engagingly ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... have attended the war but for the perverse and factious federalist opposition to the administration. Some Federalists favored joining England out and out against Napoleon. Having with justice denounced Jefferson's embargo tactics as too tame, yet when ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... as things are situated, can blame you?—Your condescension has no doubt hitherto prevented great mischiefs. It must be continued, for the same reasons, while the cause remains. You are drawn in by a perverse fate against inclination: but custom, with such laudable purposes, will reconcile the inconveniency, and make an inclination.—And I would advise you (as you would wish to manage on an occasion so critical with that prudence which governs all your ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... could produce. What a base and foolish thing is it for any consolidated body of authority to say, or to act as if it said, "I will put my trust not in my own virtue, but in your patience; I will indulge in effeminacy, in indolence, in corruption; I will give way to all my perverse and vicious humours, because you cannot punish me without the hazard ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... strangely perverse thing, the human mind. As there dimly dawned upon me a conception of her meaning,—a knowledge that this seemingly heart-free girl cared enough for me to exhibit such jealousy of another,—I would not undeceive her by a ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... thrust himself again into the service; and, as far as wrongheadedness will go, is very proper for a hero."[698] The same caustic writer says further that he was of "a proud, sullen, and contemptuous temper," and that he "saw everything in an ill-natured and ridiculous light."[699] Though his perverse and envious disposition made him a difficult colleague, Townshend had both talents and energy; as also had Monckton, the same officer who commanded at the capture of Beausejour in 1755. Murray, too, was well matched to the ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... occasionally request that we should baptize their children, but we have refused to do so, partly on account of their lack of knowledge and of faith, and partly because of the worldly and perverse aims on the part of said negroes. They wanted nothing else than to deliver their children from bodily slavery, without striving for piety and Christian virtues. Nevertheless when it was seemly to do so, we have, to the best of our ability, taken much trouble in private and public ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor
... mischief, mind you. I will not go into that argument to-night: another day I will. I will only say one thing. To strain the meaning and the spirit of an exceptional law like the old Regulation of the year 1818 in such a fashion as this, what would it do? Such a strain, pressed upon us in the perverse imagination of headstrong men, is no better than a suggestion for provoking lawless and criminal reprisals. ("No.") You may not agree with me. You are kindly allowing me as your guest to say things with ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... the Christian Church, surely forget that St. Paul was a Jew, and that there are some transformations of which the religious mind is incapable. He never speaks of Christ as a 'Saviour God'. Even more perverse are the arguments which are used to prove that the centre of St. Paul's religion was a gross and materialistic sacramental magic. The apostle, whose antipathy to ritual in every shape is stamped upon all his writings, who thanks ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... called the Seedskeedee, knowing it to be the same stream so called in the north. This was the Colorado. Proceeding down the Colorado to the Mohaves he was kindly received by them and remained some time recuperating his stock. It may seem strange that the Mohaves should be so perverse, killing one set of trappers and treating another like old friends, but the secret of the difference on this occasion, perhaps, lay in the difference of approach. Jedediah Smith was a sort of reincarnation of the ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... opened to see things now as never before, for not as a skillful hunter, but as a seeker after peace, was he out in nature's solitudes. Everything around him seemed mysterious and contradictory. This teacher, nature, whose lessons he had come to learn, seemed to be in a very perverse mood, as if to impart just the reverse of what he would learn, and seemed herself to be destitute of the very things he had hoped she ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... found everything at home in confusion; for three days I did not know whether I was capell master, or capell servant; nothing could console me; my apartments were all in confusion; my pianoforte, that I formerly loved so dearly, was perverse and disobedient, and rather irritated than soothed me. I slept very little, and even my dreams persecuted me, for, while asleep, I was under the pleasant delusion that I was listening to the opera of "Le Nozze di Figaro," when the blustering north wind woke me, and almost ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... spectacles my heart Was oftentimes uplifted, and they seemed Arguments sent from Heaven to prove the cause Good, pure, which no one could stand up against, Who was not lost, abandoned, selfish, proud, 285 Mean, miserable, wilfully depraved, Hater perverse ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... attractive, pure, innocent little girl. Her adopted father lavished upon her numerous presents, and spent hundreds of dollars to obtain her recovery to health. Yet through this awful vice she was ruined utterly, and rendered so wholly perverse and bad that she had no desire to be better, no disposition to reform. God only knows what will be her sad end. May none who read these lines ever follow in ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... is my daughter-in-law,' said Heathcliff, corroborating my surmise. He turned, as he spoke, a peculiar look in her direction: a look of hatred; unless he has a most perverse set of facial muscles that will not, like those of other people, interpret the language ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... offered towards Mecca, Granada was not subdued; so long as the new Christian, in the retirement of his house, became again a Jew or a Moslem, he was as little secured to the throne as to the Romish See. It was no longer deemed sufficient to compel a perverse people to adopt the exterior forms of a new faith, or to wed it to the victorious church by the weak bands of ceremonials; the object now was to extirpate the roots of an old religion, and to subdue an obstinate bias which, by the slow operation of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... beginning to the end of his public life he was a steady Whig. His voice was indeed always raised, when his party was dominant in the State, against violent and vindictive counsels; but he never forsook his friends, even when their perverse neglect of his advice had brought them to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with Castillian dances, Gothic cloisters and Moorish songs, it is still worse to transform him into a rampant Idealist of the conventional kind. He belongs neither to the Aesthetics nor to the Idealists. He belongs to every individual soul whose taste is sufficiently purged, sufficiently perverse and sufficiently passionate, to enter the enchanted circle ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... erudition was prodigious. His civic conscience and his social courage both were admirable. His life was pure. He was devoted to truth and usefulness, and his character was wholly free from envy and malice (though not from contempt), and from the perverse egoisms that so often go ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... say about there being no world but the world we spin in our brains, I could not woo my lady back to it. Like the wind that bloweth where it listeth was my love. Try as I might to call up that pretty deceit of a Hortense about me in spirit, my perverse lady came not to ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... an old person of Woking, Whose mind was perverse and provoking; He sate on a rail, with his head in a pail, That illusive old ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... sent a card to Macrae to provide for meeting and for food, not even letting Miss Vincent know that she was coming. That feeling of not being able to talk about it or be congratulated would wear off, Aunt Jane said, if she was not worried or argued with, in which case it might become perverse affectation. ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Orsino,' resumed Bertrand, 'he is one of those, who love to do justice at once. I remember, about ten years ago, the Signor had a quarrel with a cavaliero of Milan. The story was told me then, and it is still fresh in my head. They quarrelled about a lady, that the Signor liked, and she was perverse enough to prefer the gentleman of Milan, and even carried her whim so far as to marry him. This provoked the Signor, as well it might, for he had tried to talk reason to her a long while, and used ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... to be," said Dolly, laughing now. "But somehow, Christina, I believe the ruins give me more pleasure than if they were all new and perfect—or even old and perfect. It is a perverse taste, I suppose, ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... What perverse and malevolent genius it must be that chooses this moment to open the flood gates and set free the pent passions of anti-Semitism! How monstrous a thing it is that from a great historic pulpit of the Christian Church which Beecher glorified by his courageous ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... and gazed at with mingled fear and admiration by the family and their immediate neighbors. Master Parris liked horses, had some knowledge of the right way to handle them, and showed more wisdom in his treatment of this rather perverse animal of Dulcibel's than he had ever ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... his own freedom. Whatever the patient may reach in the altered states is reached without his own effort, while he is the passive receiver of the other man's will. His achievement has therefore no moral value, and if he is really cured of his drunkenness or of his perverse habits, of his misuse of cocaine or of his criminal tendencies, he has lost the right to be counted a moral agent. It would be better if there were more suffering in the world than that the existence of the ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... Messiahship) an occasion of perversion, of perversion, of perversion, and it shall be-no more till he come whose right it is, and I will give it him." Viewed in this light, who will deny that this declaration has been most strangely fulfilled? The Christians reproach the Jews with "perverse and mad delusion" in having successively believed a hundred: different impostors to have been the Messiah, while the Jews in their turn say that the Christians have been as mad as themselves, in believing that Jesus ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... bed. There didn't seem to be anything to stay up for, and bed is a comforting friend on these occasions. Hilary had a perverse tendency to sit up all night when the worst had happened and he had a frightful head; Peter's way with life was more amenable; he always took what comfort was offered him. Bed is a good place; it folds protecting, consoling ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... saw how large a progress the gospel had made amongst the people, and that if there were no Brachmans in the Indies, there would consequently be no idolaters in all those vast provinces of Asia, spared no labour to reduce that perverse generation to the true knowledge of Almighty God. He conversed often with those of that religion, and one day found a favourable occasion of treating with them: Passing by a monastery, where above two hundred Brachmans lived together, he was visited by some of the chiefest, who had the curiosity ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... close as it was at the commencement of the session. He invited me frequently to his house as a friend, when other friends were to meet him there, besides requesting me to come and see him and his family whenever I could make it convenient. He said that his servant John was very perverse, and would be sure to drive me by like all others, if he possibly could; so he gave me a watchword, which he thought John, perverse as he was, would not venture to resist. I thus became possessed of a privilege of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... put them there because they were there—because the Middle Age was, in the gross, a coarse, barbarous, and profligate age—because it was necessary, in order to bring out fairly the beauty of the central character, to show 'the crooked and perverse generation' in which she was 'a child of God without rebuke.' It was, in fact, the very ferocity and foulness of the time which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at the same time the Apostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of the Mediaeval ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... "Antilochus, thou most perverse of men! Beshrew thy heart! we Greeks are much deceiv'd Who give thee fame for wisdom! yet e'en now Thou shalt not gain, but on thine ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... beyond belief, without evidence, and capacity to increase the productiveness of lands in sound condition, in such an eminent degree, that any farmer who has the power to obtain it, evinces great folly and perverse obstinacy, if he continue to cultivate his land without applying it; either for want of faith, or pretended disbelief in its efficacy; or because he thinks the price fixed upon it by the Peruvian Government, "unjustifiably ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... right place for me. There's nothing to do but to drink, when you have got the liquor; and to sleep, when you haven't. The Dead who come our way, my little friend, have one great merit. We are supposed to help them, if they're perverse enough to come to life again before they're buried. There they lie in our house, with one end of the line tied to their fingers, and the other end at the spring of the alarm-bell. And they have never rung the bell yet—never once, bless their hearts, since the Deadhouse ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... totally perverse Turk bought for himself, Out of grief for the recent death Of plump Fatme, his favorite wife, From his white-slaver, two former mannequins, in quite good condition— You could almost say: brand new— Just imported from France. When he had them, he ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... had walked about a mile, he turned into a road leading eastward, with the design of going a few miles in that direction, and then turning to the north. When he had travelled what to his weakness was a long distance, all at once, with the dismay of a perverse dream, rose above the trees the towers of Cairncarque. Was he never to escape them, in the body any more than in the spirit? He turned back, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... modern coyness has long been felt by the poets. After Juliet has made her confession of love which Romeo overhears in the dark, she apologizes to him because she fears that he might attribute her easy yielding to light love. Lest he think her too quickly won she "would have frowned and been perverse, and said him nay." Then she begs him trust she'll "prove more true than those that have more cunning to be strange." Wither's "That coy one in the winning, proves a true one being won," expresses ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the good Old Man, looking round him with a Smile, very hard, that any Part of my Land should be settled upon one who has used me so ill as the perverse Widow [1] did; and yet I am sure I could not see a Sprig of any Bough of this whole Walk of Trees, but I should reflect upon her and her Severity. She has certainly the finest Hand of any Woman in the World. You are to know this was the Place wherein I used to muse upon her; and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... One large shad, imaginably of very old family and independent property, sails at the head of several smaller shad, his flatterers and toadies, who try to look like him. Mostly his expression is very severe; but in milder moments he offers a perverse resemblance to ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... was puzzled for a moment, then opened his mouth from ear to ear in a guffaw that made the glasses ring. His humour was perverse. He was wit-proof and fun-proof; but at a feeble jest would sometimes roar like a lion inflated with laughing-gas. Laughed he ever so loud and long, he always ended abruptly and without gradation—his laugh was a clean spadeful dug out of Merriment. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... people's consciousness is, as such, a matter of indifference to us; and in time we get really indifferent to it, when we come to see how superficial and futile are most people's thoughts, how narrow their ideas, how mean their sentiments, how perverse their opinions, and how much of error there is in most of them; when we learn by experience with what depreciation a man will speak of his fellow, when he is not obliged to fear him, or thinks that what ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... are so perverse, they deserve from you nothing better," said Mrs Charlton; "speak to them, however; you will then have done your duty; and if they are obstinately unjust, you will have acquired a right to ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... and perverse, ran swarming through Falloden's brain, as though driven through it from outside. What a nursery tale!—how simple!—how crude! Could not the gods have ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her little hands close together, forming with their united palms a concave surface, and commenced dashing water upon the perverse blonde. ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... said to Balaam, while he remained flat on his face, "Wherefore hast thou smitten thine ass these three times? behold, I went out to withstand thee, because thy way is perverse before me: and the ass saw me, and turned from me these three times: unless she had turned from me, surely now also I had slain thee, and saved her alive." The moral of this is that asses stand the best chance of salvation, and that wise ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... one result so far which is forcing itself into unwilling recognition. I have seen nothing, in the various hypotheses brought forward, which did not to me involve a greater improbability than the presumption of guilt. Take that, for witness, that Byron accused himself, through a spirit of perverse vanity, of crimes he had not committed. How preposterous! He would stain the name of a sister, whom, on the supposition of his innocence, he loved with angelic ardor as well as purity, by associating it with such an infamous accusation. Suppose there are some ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... not annoyed with Mrs. Travers. After all it might have been true. She would talk exactly as she liked, and even incredibly, if it so pleased her, and make the man hang on her lips. And likewise she was capable of making the man talk about anything by a power of inspiration for reasons simple or perverse. Opera! Dresses! Yes—about Shakespeare and the musical glasses! For a mere whim or for the deepest purpose. Women worthy of the name were like that. They were very wonderful. They rose to the occasion and sometimes ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... evident that the mainspring of the undeniable and volcanic power of 'Sartor Resartus' (and the same is true of Carlyle's other chief works) is a tremendous moral conviction and fervor. Carlyle is eccentric and perverse—more so in 'Sartor Resartus' than elsewhere—but he is on fire with his message and he is as confident as any Hebrew prophet that it is the message most necessary for his generation. One may like him or be repelled by him, but a careful reader cannot remain ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Pessimism, the child is a mere human larva, weak, perverse, disagreeable, the heir of mortality, with all manner of "defects of doubt and taints of blood," gathered in the long experience of ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... hyacinth, together with dainty touches of geranium. He dreamed of Beethoven's manly music when whiffs of apple-blossom, white rose, cedar, and balsam reached him. Mozart passed roguishly by in strains of scarlet pimpernel, mignonette, syringa, and violets. Then the sky was darkened with Schumann's perverse harmonies as jasmine, lavender, and lime were sprayed over him. Music, surely, was the art nearest akin to odour. A superb and subtle chord floated about him; it was composed of vervain, opoponax, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... self-love reflected from the society she moved in, was profane and irreligious; and soon the roses of Christian virtue that bloom in the cheek of innocent maidenhood became sick and withered in the heated, feverish air of perverse influences that tainted ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... containing the names of unsatisfactory scholars of either sex, it was his custom to hoist a flag on a certain hill-top; this was a signal for the Barbary pirates, who then infested the neighbouring ocean, to set sail for the island and buy up these perverse children, at purely nominal rates, for the slave-markets of Stamboul and Argier. They were sold ignominiously—by weight and not by the piece—to mark his unqualified disapproval of talking and scribbling on blotting-pads ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... all art. We are all pleased when we write; the public of one enthusiast every author enjoys, and the literary men who depreciate the joys of their own art or profession may not be consciously uncandid, but they are decidedly perverse. [Laughter and applause.] ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... always careful if he had reviewed a book in the paper criticising its ideas to take an immediate opportunity to show the author his warm personal friendliness. Middleton Murry, sending him a book of his own, criticised G.K. as "Perverse" for thinking communism and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... agreeable a task as falls to the lot of a man of letters. And being a young man he would begin by considering the long series of poets, painters and musicians, he had read of in Balzac's novels, but as none of these would be within the harmony of Violet's perverse humour, he would turn to life, and presently a vague shaggy shape would emerge from the back of his mind, but it would refuse to condense into any recognizable face; which is as well, perhaps, else I might be tempted ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... which, he said, was sufficient to open the eyes of the most incredulous to the dangers of the country. The conspiracy referred to was one of the most desperate that could have been conceived by the perverse mind of man. It had for its object the overthrow of the government, and the irremediable confusion of national affairs, by the assassination of the whole cabinet. The chief leader of this plot was Arthur Thistlewood, who had once served as a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Mr. Colfax had evident reference to the perverse action of the Southern rebels, and were so entirely in harmony with the feeling of the House that at different stages of the brief address the Republican side of the chamber broke forth into loud applause. As soon as ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... active trouble, that he should have followed the raw student with long and careful letters of advice upon the proper direction of his studies. For five years Barry was maintained abroad by the Burkes. Most unhappily for himself he was cursed with an irritable and perverse temper, and he lacked even the elementary arts of conduct. Burke was generous to the end, with that difficult and uncommon kind of generosity which moves independently of gratitude ...
— Burke • John Morley
... and resumed her seat as the old lady rustled slowly away. Her heart was hot with fury, and she was only partly soothed by hearing Richard Carter's murmur of reproach: "How can you be so perverse, Mother—" ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... his character.[849] His anger was not the worst the Queen and her daughter had to fear; he still preserved a feeling of respect for Catherine and of affection for Mary. "The King himself," writes Chapuys, "is not ill-natured; it is this Anne who has put him in this perverse and wicked temper, and alienates him from his former humanity."[850] The new Queen's jealous malignity passed all bounds. She caused her aunt to be made governess to Mary, and urged her to box her charge's ears; and she used every effort to force the Princess to ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... Yes, he had to admit that he felt a certain affection for that huddled room which had witnessed so much spiritual travail. Somehow its dusty rafters seemed saturated with a human quality, as if they had imprisoned all the perverse longings and bitter griefs of the company that once sat in the dim lamplight and chanted their litany of hate. He never really had been a part of this company ... he never really had been a part of any company. At the office of Ford, Wetherbee & Co., at Fairview, at Storch's gatherings, ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... average share of feminine happiness. So many of the things that make for fretfulness, disappointment and discouragement in a woman's life were removed from her path that she might well have been considered the fortunate Miss Greech, or later, lucky Francesca Bassington. And she was not of the perverse band of those who make a rock-garden of their souls by dragging into them all the stoney griefs and unclaimed troubles they can find lying around them. Francesca loved the smooth ways and pleasant places ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... you will see that I am capable of sharing your literary glory on the sly, and without compunction. Indeed, the false role created in me a perverse mood. And I entered into a literary discussion with M—— that outraged his pedantic soul. It was my way of perjuring his judgment, in return for his unwitting approval of my reviews. Besides, the assumption of infallibility by dull, scholarly men who have neither imagination nor genius ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... idea of evolution in Nature thus took strong hold upon Greek thought and was developed in many ways, some ingenious, some perverse. Plato, indeed, withstood it; but Aristotle sometimes developed it in a manner which reminds ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of Botticelli and Rembrandt there is a close similarity. In temperament as well as in experience they seem to parallel each other. In boyhood Botticelli and Rembrandt were dull, perverse, wilful. Both were given up by teachers and parents as hopelessly handicapped by stupidity. Botticelli's father, seeing that the boy made no progress at school, apprenticed him to a metalworker. The lad showed the esteem in which he held his parent by dropping ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... level, and the best that he's capable of! Then I met you. You would voluntarily give up ease and luxury, for a time, for the sake of an abstract idea—whether misguided or not, I will not say, the fact remains the same—and I swear it was a new revelation to me. It was strange and perverse, and it was deuced taking! Then I tried to get you to include me among the objects of your mission, to accept me as a candidate for temporal leniency and final salvation, and you wouldn't. It is only the happy, ragged, unconscious heathen that are looked ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... in consequence of some coquetry on her part, and at present stood aloof. The politic mother was exerting all her ingenuity to widen the accidental breach; but, as is most commonly the case, the more she meddled with this perverse inclination of the son, the stronger it grew. In the meantime, old Ready-Money was kept completely in the dark; both parties were in awe and uncertainty as to what might be his way of taking the ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... a slim girl of nineteen; she had light soft hair and a small full mouth. Her eyes, which were grey with a shade of green through them, had a habit of glancing upwards when she spoke with anyone, which made her look like a little perverse madonna. Mrs. Mooney had first sent her daughter to be a typist in a corn-factor's office but, as a disreputable sheriff's man used to come every other day to the office, asking to be allowed to say a word to his daughter, she had taken her daughter home again and set ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... returned the Emperor, "have repeatedly assured us, that these Immortals retain a perverse attachment to our rebel Ursel. How is it, then, you would have us intrust our defence to these bands, when we have engaged our valiant Varangians in the proposed conflict with the flower of the western army?—Did you think of this ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... would have been amusing if it had not been ridiculous. Marian never had the slightest idea of going with him; but she is sometimes a little—shall I say perverse?—” ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... very aggravating about the tendency of this race to laugh at the wrong time, and to persist in being disconsolate when every one can see that they ought to dance. Generation after generation of these perverse creatures in the good old days of slavery would insist on going in search of the North Pole under the most discouraging circumstances. On foot and alone, without money or script or food or clothing; without guide or chart or ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... ought to be constituted in such a manner that those who compose it should be disposed to love and to venerate those whom they are bound to obey. A purposed neglect, or, what is worse, a literal, but perverse and malignant obedience, must be the ruin of the wisest counsels. In vain will the law attempt to anticipate or to follow such studied neglects and fraudulent attentions. To make them act zealously is not in the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... very perverse, if I say that perhaps the grief she then repressed may have weighed down her spirits ever since, so that you can hardly remember ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... scientific attitude of mind. The line between true and false science, however, had not yet been drawn. The age was pedantic, and appealed too much to the authority of antiquity. Hence we have such monuments of perverse and curious erudition as Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621; and Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, 1646. The former of these was the work of an Oxford scholar, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... his spurs in that sphere, and naturally enough had kept for it, after his promotion to another department, a feeling not very far removed from affection. Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... dessert-dish, and bit into it with her beautiful and efficient teeth. She was slim, and rather taller than necessary or than she desired to be. A pretty girl, dressed in a short-skirted, short-sleeved, dark blue, pink-heightened frock that seemed to combine usefulness with a decent perverse frivolity, and to carry forward the expression of her face. She had bright brown hair. She was perfectly mistress of ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... Nailles had red eyes; and Jacqueline made the reflection that women who are thirty-five should never weep. She knew that her face had not been made ugly by her tears, and this gave her a perverse satisfaction in the midst of her misery. Of Marien she thought: "He sits there as if he had been put 'en penitence'." No doubt he could not endure scenes, and the one he had just passed through must have given him the downcast ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... act in opposition to the laws of nature, to offend the ethical sense of the people that surround him, and to brave the blows of destiny; but such a one is a sublime reformer or martyr, and we are not now speaking of such, but of the perverse, the frivolous, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... condemning their neighbor and doing him harm, they are rendering a service to God Himself; but in so doing they but manifest the effects of earlier sin, personal, perhaps, and original, which has darkened their understanding and made perverse their moral vision, so that, having eyes, they see not, having ears, they hear not, neither do they understand.(35) Following the corruption of their own nature, bleeding from the wounds of original sin, they are prone to blaspheme whatsoever ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... first proposed; for that is always referred to the next meeting, that so men may not rashly and in the heat of discourse engage themselves too soon, which might bias them so much that, instead of consulting the good of the public, they might rather study to support their first opinions, and by a perverse and preposterous sort of shame hazard their country rather than endanger their own reputation, or venture the being suspected to have wanted foresight in the expedients that they at first proposed; and therefore, to prevent ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... her was Ada Rehan, born a year later, appearing on the stage two years earlier, in other words, at the age of thirteen. Ada Rehan, appropriately enough, was born at Limerick, Ireland, and the roguish and perverse Irish spirit was ever uppermost in her acting. She was brought to America when she was five years old, and lived and went to school in Brooklyn. Two of her elder sisters were upon the stage, but she does not seem to have indicated any especial desire to imitate them, and her first appearance ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... Kashima till Mrs. Vansuythen arrived. She was a charming woman, every one said so everywhere; and she charmed every one. In spite of this, or, perhaps, because of this, since Fate is so perverse, she cared only for one man, and he was Major Vansuythen. Had she been plain or stupid, this matter would have been intelligible to Kashima. But she was a fair woman, with very still gray eyes, the colour of a lake just before the light of the sun touches it. No man who ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... old for Mitchell, Morrice, Rook, Cook, Beckingham, and a long &c. Wherever I have evidence, or think I have evidence, which is the same thing, I'll be as obstinate as all the mules in Persia." This poet of warm affections felt so irritably the perverse criticisms of his learned friends, that they were to share alike a poetic Hell—probably a sort of Dunciad, or lampoons. One of these "blasts" broke out in a vindictive epigram on Mitchell, whom he describes with a "blasted eye;" but this critic literally having ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse blindness. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... afterwards definitely knew and have already intimated, that the poor lady had taken a dislike to me; and this of course was not encouraging. She thought me an obtrusive and even depraved young man, whom a perverse Providence had dropped upon their quiet lawn to flatter her husband's worst tendencies. She did me the honor to say to Miss Ambient, who repeated the speech, that she didn't know when she had seen her husband take ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... and cultivated spirit of their illustrious martyrs. As scholars, citizens, gentlemen, and, in more than one instance, authors of real genius, these Liberals stand alone, and are not to be confounded with the perverse Radicals of a subsequent epoch. Moreover, their aspirations were, as we have seen, more reactionary than experimental; for the rights for which they conspired had been in a great measure enjoyed under Europe's modern ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... their peace with St. Cyril, condemned Nestorius, and gave a clear and orthodox exposition of their faith. That heresiarch, being banished from his see, retired to his monastery in Antioch. John, though formerly his friend, yet finding him very perverse and obstinate in his heresy, and attempting to pervert others, entreated the emperor Theodosius to remove him. He was therefore banished to Oasis, in the deserts of Upper Egypt, on the borders of Libya, in 431, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... l'ambition, a l'esprit d'aspiration, a l'activite intellectuelle qui les poussent a franchir ces barrieres morales. Les actions nous affectent si peu, que, tandis que les impulsions, l'esprit interieur en toute sa perverse grandeur, paraissent seuls reels et appellent seuls l'attention, le crime n'est comparativement rien. Mais lorsque nous voyons representer ces choses, les actes sont comparativement tout, et les mobiles ne sont plus rien. L'emotion sublime ou nous ...
— Pelleas and Melisande • Maurice Maeterlinck
... drawing. She had been accustomed to ride in the open section of the car as she liked the fresh air. She had a fleeting thought of entering the body of the car and sitting where they would see her; and then a perverse spirit in Linda's heart ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... perverse. A certain amount of perversity was to be allowed for in a young lady whose lover had thrown her over; but not such an amount as would prove inconvenient to his apologists. "That you should be reasonable," said Mrs. Penniman, with some sternness. "That you should take counsel of worldly prudence, ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... open, lay them by in a dry room, sometimes turning them with a broom, but without washing, for fear of mouldiness. In Italy they arm the tops of long poles with nails and iron for the purpose, and believe the beating improves the tree; which I no more believe, than I do that discipline would reform a perverse shrew: Those nuts which come not easily out of their husks, should be laid to mellow in heaps, and the rest expos'd in the sun, till the shells dry, else they will be apt to perish the kernel: Some again preserve them in their ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... in earnest; what then remains but to jest with him? To deal seriously were to yield too much respect to such a baffler, and too much weight to his fancies; to raise the man too high in his courage and conceit; to make his pretences seem worthy the considering and canvassing. Briefly, perverse obstinacy is more easily quelled, petulant impudence is sooner dashed, sophistical captiousness is more safely eluded, sceptical wantonness is more surely confounded in this than in the simple way ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... the terrible and unexpected disaster which had overtaken her rendered impossible the serenity of those with whom all has gone well. Dread of something, she knew not what, haunted her painfully, and memory at times seemed malignantly perverse in recalling one whom she prayed ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... white knight fought with the hand rather than the head, as the chief of desultory Barbarians, who attack without fear and fly without shame; and his military life is composed of a romantic alternative of victories and escapes. By the Turks, who employed his name to frighten their perverse children, he was corruptly denominated Jancus Lain, or the Wicked: their hatred is the proof of their esteem; the kingdom which he guarded was inaccessible to their arms; and they felt him most daring and formidable, when they fondly believed the captain and his country irrecoverably lost. Instead ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... cold; and instead of seeking, like the Southern sculptor, to express only the softness of leafage nourished in all tenderness, and tempted into all luxuriance by warm winds and glowing rays, we find pleasure in dwelling upon the crabbed, perverse, and morose animation of plants that have known little kindness from earth or heaven, but, season after season, have had their best efforts palsied by frost, their brightest buds buried under snow, and their goodliest limbs ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... here below, instead of remaining in sublime dignity to guide and inspire men who look up to them by night! Even such are the epic, the lyric, the drama, the history, and the philosophy, as collected together in the revelries of the novel. To state the degree of excellence possible to a style as perverse as it is entertaining, to measure the wisdom of essential folly, is difficult; and yet it may be said that the strength of the novel is in its lawlessness, which leaves the author of genius free to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... world, the news policy of a journal tends to support its editorial policy; why a capitalist sees one set of facts, and certain aspects of human nature, literally sees them; his socialist opponent another set and other aspects, and why each regards the other as unreasonable or perverse, when the real difference between them is a difference of perception. That difference is imposed by the difference between the capitalist and socialist pattern of stereotypes. "There are no classes in America," writes an American editor. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... thrusting them into the ways of error, being separated from the true Church of Jesus Christ, from which Luther, Calvin, Zuinglio, Henry VIII, and others separated themselves, of whom Cobbell, the Protestant historian, himself has said: 'Never has the world seem gathered into one century so many perverse men as Luther, Zuiniglio, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... be kept in racks conveniently distributed in country houses for cases of sudden emergency. A single grenade, hurled at any spectral form, would, in breaking, liberate enough formaldybrom to coagulate the most perverse spirit, and the resulting vapor could easily be removed from the room by a housemaid ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... the judgment of Peter or the authority of the universal Church, by whatever dangers it be surrounded, will ever lose the weight of its force. The more it dreads being weakened by worldly prosperity, the more, divinely instructed, it grows under adversity. To let the perverse go on in their way, when you can stop them, is indeed to encourage them. He who, evidently, ceases to obstruct a wicked deed, does not escape the suspicion of complicity. If, when you see hostility arising against the Council of Chalcedon, you do nothing, believe me, I know not how you can maintain ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... moderation, it being an indisputable fact that such was conducive to lubrication of the mental processes and a sedative for the nerves besides; but the act of chewing must be discreetly and inaudibly carried on, and he who in the heat of argument or under the stress of cross-questioning a perverse witness failed to patronize the cuspidors which dotted the floor at suitable intervals stood in peril of a stern admonishment for the first offense and a fine for ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... this last unsatisfactory acknowledgment. On the morning of the 8th, however, Waad, who was employed to worm out his secrets, reported that little was to be expected. "I find this fellow," he wrote, "who this day is in a most stubborn and perverse humour, as dogged as if he were possessed. Yester-night I had persuaded him to set down a clear narration of all his wicked plots from the first entering to the same, to the end they pretended, with the discourses and projects that were thought upon amongst them, which he undertook ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... the discerner, if he is ever saying to us, This is not gold; and never, This is; is either very humbly useful, or very perverse, or very unfortunate. This is not gold, he says. Thank you, we reply, we perceived as much. And this is not, he adds. True, we answer, but we see gold grains glittering out of its rude, dark mass. Well, at least, this is not, he proceeds. Perverse ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... slim, and rather taller than necessary or than she desired to be. A pretty girl, dressed in a short-skirted, short-sleeved, dark blue, pink-heightened frock that seemed to combine usefulness with a decent perverse frivolity, and to carry forward the expression of her face. She had bright brown hair. She was perfectly ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... in spite of all your philosophers say about there being no world but the world we spin in our brains, I could not woo my lady back to it. Like the wind that bloweth where it listeth was my love. Try as I might to call up that pretty deceit of a Hortense about me in spirit, my perverse lady ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... perfection of the Christian system. Their language or their silence equally discover their contempt for the growing sect, which in their time had diffused itself over the Roman empire. Those among them who condescended to mention the Christians, consider them only as obstinate and perverse enthusiasts, who exacted an implicit submission to their mysterious doctrines, without being able to produce a single argument that could engage the attention of men of sense and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... had evident reference to the perverse action of the Southern rebels, and were so entirely in harmony with the feeling of the House that at different stages of the brief address the Republican side of the chamber broke forth into loud ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... to bed. There didn't seem to be anything to stay up for, and bed is a comforting friend on these occasions. Hilary had a perverse tendency to sit up all night when the worst had happened and he had a frightful head; Peter's way with life was more amenable; he always took what comfort was offered him. Bed is a good place; it folds protecting, consoling arms about you, and ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... nature; and this is just what I did. The only change made was in bringing the eggs, and later the young, forward from the recess of the cavity to insure better light. I wished to also take the parent bird upon the nest; but in this case they were perverse, and refused to be taken. One of the birds decided that he did not wish to be taken, and after repeated trials I concluded he knew best, and gave over the attempt. I also took the most courageous one and posed him on the stump of the tree. ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... taken for granted that Man's instincts and impulses are wholly evil, and that "Right Faith" and "Right Conduct" are entirely repugnant to his nature. In order to overcome the resistance which his corrupt heart and perverse will might therefore be expected to offer to the authority and influence of his teachers, a scheme of rewards and punishments has had to be devised for his benefit. As there is no better nature for the scheme to appeal to, an appeal has had to be made to fears ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... not sewing, and her hands lay listlessly on her lap. But, for this attitude of dejection, I could have imagined that it was the same day and the same hour, and that she was still ignorant of the change in my feelings toward her. If it had not been for our perverse fate, we should now be returning from our wedding-trip, and receiving the congratulations of our friends. A mingled feeling of sorrow, pity, and shame, prevented me from advancing into the room. She looked up to see who was standing in the doorway, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... knowledge that it reveals all other things. It is not a phenomenon like any other phenomenon of the world. When we say that knowledge has been produced in us by the external collocations, we just take a perverse point of view which is unwarranted by experience; knowledge only photographs the objective phenomena for us; but there is nothing to show that knowledge has been generated by these phenomena. This is only a theory which ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... whole, the women are treated fairly well by their husbands, but for an occasional beating, which is often provoked by foolish behaviour; and they are taken care of, as they represent a great value. There are old ruffians, however, who take a perverse pleasure in torturing their wives, and these unhappy women are quite helpless, as they are entirely in the power of their husbands. Otherwise, the fate of the women is not as bad as many people think, and the severest rules have never yet prevented Eve from ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... would have gall for blood, who was not struck with this graceful, touching evidence of the love her subjects bear her. Who could have the head, even if he had the heart, who could be so cross and peevish, who could be so solemn and perverse, as to say that some of these stories may be simple lies, and all of them might have stronger evidence than they carry with them? Do you think she is displeased at them? Why then should He, the Great Father, who once walked ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... complexion, her glance, her step, her dusky tresses, may have been seen before in a goddess, but never in a woman. And you may take this for truth, because I 'm not in love with her. On the contrary! Her education has been simply infernal. She is corrupt, perverse, as proud as the queen of Sheba, and an appalling coquette; but she is generous, and with patience and skill you may enlist her imagination in a good cause as well as in a bad one. The other day I tried ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... brought to the back of the wagon. I then sat in the rear, with my feet hanging out, and took the line; and my new friend gave hand to the rope over the back of the seat. The horse started to walk, and Little Dagon was drawn after; but the perverse little creature settled back in his strap till his tongue hung out. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... Perspiration sxvito. Perspire sxviti. Persuade konvinki. Persuasive konvinka. Pert malrespekta. Pertinacious trudpeta. Pertinacity obstineco, persisteco. Perturb konfuzi, turmenteti. Perturbation turmentado. Peruke peruko. Perusal legado. Peruse legadi, ellegi. Pervade penetri. Perverse obstina, kontrauxa. Pervert malkonverti, malverigi. Perversion malkonverto, malverigo, malverigxo. Pervious penetrebla. Pest pesto. Pester enui, turmenteti. Pestiferous pesta. Pestilence pesto. Pestilential pesta, pestiga. Pestle pistilo. Pet dorloti. Petal florfolieto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... known, although this order also is very obscure. The Rosicrucians as well as the Gnostics had phallic emblems. They worshipped in a form very similar to that under which Priapus was worshipped. Moreover, as was the case with a number of these secret societies, they introduced perverse sexual practices. They are said not only to have countenanced homosexuality, but to have made it one of the principles of their belief. At the same time, they scorned all association with women. Out of ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... new employ in boundless space, The lonely monad quits its 'customed place And from life's weary round contented flees. No more of passionate striving, will perverse And hampering obligations, long a curse: Free self-abandonment ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... at last they were to part. And, remembering what he owed to her, the Jester suddenly found himself regretting that here their paths separated forever. Swiftly his mind flew back to their first meeting; when she had flouted him in Fools' hall. A perverse, capricious maid. How she had ever ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... the barn, he was up and abroad. Ere long finding himself in the suburbs of a considerable village, the better to guard against detection he supplied himself with a rude crutch, and feigning himself a cripple, hobbled straight through the town, followed by a perverse-minded cur, which kept up a continual, spiteful, suspicious bark. Israel longed to have one good rap at him with his crutch, but thought it would hardly look in character for a poor old ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... the world Bertran hated Richard of Anjou, it was not because Richard had misused him, but because he had used him too lightly. Richard, offended with Bertran, gave him a flick on the ear and sent him to the devil with his japes. He did no more because he valued him no more. He thought him a perverse rascal, glorious poet, ill-conditioned vassal, untimely parasite of his father's realm. He knew he had caused endless mischief, but he could not hate such a cork on a waterspray. Now, it fretted Bertran to white heat that he should be despised ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... Intendant and the company. A couple of valets waited upon Le Gardeur, whom they assisted to bathe and dress. In a short time he left the Chateau almost sobered, and wholly metamorphosed into a handsome, fresh chevalier. A perverse redness about the eyes alone remained, to tell the tale of the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... distance between them. He had never felt the full power of her beauty till then, as she stood there with that haughty pose of the head and the calm contempt in her eyes; he had seen her in most moods—playfully perverse, coldly civil, and unaffectedly gracious and gentle—and in none of them had she made his heart ache with the mad passion ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... fact, he who speaks in that passage grants that the Pope may appoint an observance; he simply enquires, whether this were the intention of the Pope, to bind all equally to abstinence from meats, so that one who should partake would be liable to hell-fire, even although no perverse contempt should be committed. And he who says this in the Colloquies, adds that he hates fishes not otherwise than he does a serpent. Now, there are some so affected that fish is poison to them, just as there are found those who in like ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... he occupied when I first, by mere accident, made his acquaintance. This soon ripened into friendship, for there was much in the recluse to excite interest and esteem. I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy. He had with him many books, but rarely employed them. His chief amusements were gunning and fishing, or sauntering along the beach and through the myrtles, in quest of shells or entomological specimens—his collection ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... the persons of the Lady Le Despenser and her daughters, accused of disobedience to the law, and perverse contumacy, in that she did deny to aid with money and men the search for one John Oldcastle, a prison-breaker convict of heresy ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... transported; and that the inhabitants were satisfied with slight matts instead of roofs to their houses because not troubled with rain, and the matts were a sufficient protection from the sun: but made their walls of stone to defend themselves against the malignity and rapaciousness of the Badwis, a perverse people, void of all goodness, who often suddenly assaulted the place in hope of plunder, and frequently pillaged the caravans coming across from the Nile with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... his excesses and renounce those pursuits which were dissipating his reserve of strength! For a while he was at peace, but his brain soon became over-excited. Like those young girls who, in the grip of puberty, crave coarse and vile foods, he dreamed of and practiced perverse loves and pleasures. This was the end! As though satisfied with having exhausted everything, as though completely surrendering to fatigue, his senses fell into a ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... President of the United States, publicly made the Eucharist a subject of impious ridicule. Tom Paine has written two books for the express purpose of combating the Holy Scriptures. His Age of Reason is but too common, and his letter to the late Samuel Adams still evinces his perverse ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... often been astonished at the singularly slight sense for tempo and execution evinced by leading musicians. I found it impossible, for instance, to communicate to Mendelssohn what I felt to be a perverse piece of negligence with regard to the tempo of the third movement in Beethoven's Symphony in F major, No. 8. This is one of the instances I have chosen out of many to throw light upon certain dubious aspects of music ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... Stanley, my sister is never old enough to listen to improper subjects. Faithless, she is, ungrateful, perverse, but her innocence at least I will respect. Maria, ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... veins of their own people. His life is proof that a well-meaning bigot can do more harm than the most abandoned debauchee. "I would rather lose all my kingdoms," he averred, "than allow freedom of religion." And again, to a man condemned by the Inquisition for heresy, "If my own son were as perverse as you, I myself would carry the faggot to burn him." Consistently, laboriously, undeterred by any suffering or any horror, he pursued his aim. He was not afraid of hard work, scribbling reams of minute directions daily to his officers. His stubborn calm was imperturbable; ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... She is compelled to exert her energies at highest tension to earn the very large sums which are necessary, not to gain profits for herself, but to feed all the sharks who are eager to grab what is given to her. The blind or perverse zeal of the moral legislators not only intensifies the evils it aims at curing, but it introduces a whole crop ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... of the sacraments, and the many graces we daily receive, in spite of prayer, meditation, and other spiritual exercises, this grand object is but partially attained in this world. For we find our perverse will again and again rising in rebellion against God. When a command is imposed upon us which does not chime in with our wishes, private interests, views, or natural inclination, we not unfrequently must drag ourselves by main force to perform what is commanded. And if we ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... found these men agreeable, hospitable, intelligent, amusing. We worked too hard, dined too well, frequented too many clubs, and went to bed too late in the forenoon. We were overmuch addicted to shedding the blood of the grape. In short, we diligently, conscientiously, and with a perverse satisfaction burned the candle of life at both ends and in ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... with panting heart, Perceived the danger, but with subtle art, (Lest he should see the place) spurs on the foe, 539 Confounds his thoughts, and blames his being slow. For shame! move on; would you for ever stay? What sloth is this, what strange perverse delay? — How could you e'er my little pausing blame? — What! you would wait till night shall end the game? Phoebus, thus nettled, with imprudence slew 545 A vulgar Pawn, but lost his nobler view. Young Hermes leap'd, with sudden ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... importance), and said: 'Here; that Order to General Lossow, and tell him he is not to take it ill that I trouble him, as I have none in my Suite that can do anything.'" Let the Suite take it as they can! A most pungent, severe old King; quite perverse at times, thinks Schmettau. Thus ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... also abused the old Hotel Dieu severely, "must we exclaim, that abuses known by all the world, against which every voice is raised, have secret supporters who know how to defend them, in a manner to tire out well-meaning people? Must we speak of false characters, perverse hearts, that seemed to regard errors and abuses as their patrimony?" Let us dare to acknowledge it, Gentlemen, evil is generally perpetrated in a less wicked manner: it is done without the intervention of any strong passion; by vulgar, yet all-powerful routine, and ignorance. I ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... we are used to think as of a man artificial in phrase and pedantic in judgment. He lives, and why? Because, if you test his criticism, he never saw literature but as a part of life, nor would allow in literature what was false to life, as he saw it. He could be wrong-headed, perverse; could damn Milton because he hated Milton's politics; on any question of passion or prejudice could make injustice his daily food. But he could not, even in a friend's epitaph, let pass a phrase (however ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... months I saw him almost daily at Paris. His was a heart of gold, whether in personal or international relations; but a heart of gold does not make a great negotiator. Perverse and nationalistic races of men, incredulous of the millenium, keep their hearts of gold at home when they go out ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... such a sermon from such a perverse, bad- humoured preacher as Reginald Cruden, could do! Very likely, reader; but, after all, who are you or I to say so? Had any one told Reginald a week ago what would be taking place to-day, he would have coloured ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... we add that on the cross He loved the church and gave Himself for it. There He died for Israel and as a result the remnant of that people will some day be delivered from iniquity and perverse-ness, as Balaam, beheld them, "no iniquity in Jacob and no perverseness in Israel" (Numbers xxiii:21). Groaning creation will ultimately be freed from the bondage of corruption and brought into the liberty of the sons of God, because He shed His blood on the cross. ...
— The Work Of Christ - Past, Present and Future • A. C. Gaebelein
... distinguishing between the solidity of waking experience and what we may call the unsubstantialness of the dream. He may, indeed, have learned that the dream is not to be relied on for telling the truth; the Zulu, for example, has even reached the perverse triumph of critical logic achieved by our own Aryan ancestors in the saying that "dreams go by contraries." But the Zulu has not learned, nor had the primeval Aryan learned, to disregard the utterances of the dream as being purely subjective ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... himself and his country the nuisances of Europe. Books have been made from English journals to show how extraordinarily they berated this country during the Secession war, because Americans were so brutally perverse and so selfishly silly as not to submit their country's throat to the Southern sabre for the benefit of Britain, which condescends to think that our national existence is something not altogether compatible with her safety. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... a vulture rapacious, in falsehood a fox, Inconstant as waves, and unfeeling as rocks, As a tiger ferocious, perverse as a hog, In mischief an ape, and ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... hearts, according to 1 Cor. 4:5: "Judge not before the time; until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts." But this belongs exclusively to the Divine power, according to Jer. 17:9, 10: "The heart of man is perverse and unsearchable, who can know it? I am the Lord who search the heart, and prove the reins: who give to every one according to his way." Therefore judiciary power does not belong to Christ as man but ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... judge, the publisher might well find his gain in disregarding them. But if the standards adopted all represented sizes long tested and approved by popular favor, the publisher who should avoid them would display a confidence in the Spirit of the Perverse as sublime as it would be hazardous. Fortunately no formal standardization of book sizes is likely to be attempted. But, keenly as a publisher would resent any limitation upon his freedom in book design, ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... felt than by men facing a great fire; for here not only have they to deal with a power out of all proportion to humanity, but they confront a power perverse, saturnine, malignant, diabolic. A conflagration is wantonly cruel; not content with the simple panoply of its might, it summons to its aid the evil whims of an enraged elephant. It plays, like a kitten, with hope before it crushes ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... Scottish counsel, under whose notice he contrived to bring the point while consulting him regularly on some other business. But the Baron would not listen to such a proposal for an instant. On the contrary, he used to have a perverse pleasure in boasting that the barony of Bradwardine was a male fief, the first charter having been given at that early period when women were not deemed capable to hold a feudal grant; because, according to Les coustusmes de Normandie, c'est ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... a frozen, many a fiery alp, Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death— A universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good; Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Obominable, inutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived, Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire. Meanwhile the Adversary of God and Man, Satan, with thoughts inflamed of highest ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... number of men who, not being able to succeed themselves, distrusted and disliked the successful. There was also a plentiful supply of demagogues skilful in appealing to the prejudices of the ignorant, envious, or perverse, and as a result came a cry ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Bethink you that we are all women; nor is there any here so young, but she is of years to understand how women are minded towards one another, when they are alone together, and how ill they are able to rule themselves without the guidance of some man. We are sensitive, perverse, suspicious, pusillanimous and timid; wherefore I much misdoubt, that, if we find no other guidance than our own, this company is like to break up sooner, and with less credit to us, than it should. Against which it were ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... In The Turn of the Screw, which seems to me to be the greatest ghost-story in the English language, he has dramatized the duel between good and evil; and the effect of it, at the end of all its horrors, is that of a hymn in praise of courage. One feels—though a more perverse theory of the story has been put forward—that the governess, who fights against the evil in the big house, has the author also fighting as her ally and the children's. Similarly, Maisie has ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... and monk, of heresy for believing in the existence of antipodes.7 St. Boniface wrote to the Pope against Virgilius; and Zachary ordered a council to be held to expel him from the Church, for "professing, against God and his own soul, so perverse and wicked a doctrine." To the ancients all beyond the region they had traversed was an unknown land, clothed in darkness, crowded with mystery and allurement. Across the weltering wastes of brine, in a halcyon sea, the Hindu placed the White Isle, the dwelling of translated and immortalized ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... that the human spectacle goes on for Mr. Abbey have been a county of old England which is not to be found in any geography, though it borders, as I have hinted, on the Worcestershire Broadway. Few artistic phenomena are more curious than the congenital acquaintance of this perverse young Philadelphian with that mysterious locality. It is there that he finds them all—the nooks, the corners, the people, the clothes, the arbors and gardens and teahouses, the queer courts of old inns, the sun-warmed angles of old parapets. I ought to have mentioned ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... escape from the dreaded punishment, unless she could persuade the perverse boy to cease his annoyances; and of that there was ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... And who for power would his birthright sell— Who, anxious o'er his enemies to reign, Grabs at the scepter and conceals the chain; While pugnant factions mutually strive By cutting throats to keep the land alive. Perverse in passion, as in pride perverse— To all a mistress, to thyself a curse; Sweetheart of Europe! every sun's embrace Matures the charm and poison of thy grace. Yet time to thee nor peace nor wisdom brings: In blood of citizens and blood of kings The stones of thy stability are set, And the ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... anticipate a subject, the event of which within twenty-four hours may belie any pretensions of political sagacity, might not the difference of one day's post from London eventually delay your receiving a letter for a week, should wind and sea prove perverse, as when I passed my Christmas at Holyhead. This, and the anxiety for intelligence, which must necessarily arise from the suggestion in my note of Saturday, induces me to pursue the matter I then opened, and the more especially as the circumstance, I foresaw, is now more than likely to occur. ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... I know thou wilt say, Ay; And I will take thy word, yet if thou swear'st, Thou may'st prove false; at lover's perjuries They say Jove laughs. O, gentle Romeo, If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully; Or, if thou think'st I am too quickly won, I'll frown and be perverse, and say thee nay, So thou wilt woo; but else, not for the world, In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond; And therefore thou may'st think my conduct light; But, trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true Than those that ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... "Pug" simply and unaffectedly assures him, "Sir, that's a popular error,—deceives many."[91] Like "Pug," George Cruikshank's devils accommodate themselves, their appearance, and their costume to the prejudices of the persons they design to serve. With saints and perverse sinners it is obvious that any attempt at disguise would be futile; but with so respectable a person as a Dutch burgher, or so suspicious an individual as an English lawyer, the case is altogether different. We have specimens of ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... aspects the lesson of this parable is parallel with that which is taught by the experience of the penitent thief. Both greatly magnify the patience and long-suffering of God: they record and proclaim, each in its own way, that there is hope at the eleventh hour. But in such a case, a perverse carnal mind frequently turns the grace of God into lasciviousness. Because the mercy of our Redeemer is stretched to the furthest verge of safety to leave room for the outcast to enter, when on the ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... all his Irish ardor he was wary. He had never asked her to marry him. She thought she knew the reason. He did not want for a wife a woman who had been "Slim" Jim's girl. And Annie—because she was Irish too and perverse—held her head high and went with Collins openly before the eyes of the pained and ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... before, for not as a skillful hunter, but as a seeker after peace, was he out in nature's solitudes. Everything around him seemed mysterious and contradictory. This teacher, nature, whose lessons he had come to learn, seemed to be in a very perverse mood, as if to impart just the reverse of what he would learn, and seemed herself to be destitute of the very things he had hoped she ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... consistency of attention—not even, for that matter, when one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces shaded, as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned hats, or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols held at perverse angles in waiting victorias. And the Prince's undirected thought was not a little symptomatic, since, though the turn of the season had come and the flush of the streets begun to fade, the possibilities of faces, on the August afternoon, were still one of the notes ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... Egbert was the odd one in the Saxon family. He had inherited a testy strain of temper, and was frequently most obstinate and perverse. It was unfortunate that he was an articled pupil in his father's office, for he fretted and tried Mr. Saxon far more than Athelstane would have done in the circumstances. Egbert's saving quality was his intense love for his mother. Her influence held him steadily to ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... confinement in the stall that they made the journey with a kind of joyful impatience, going on still more eagerly as they approached the end. "Not so, however," added Moidel, "with the pigs. I have often sat and cried on these rocks at their perverse ways when I have had to bring them up. They would only stand still and grunt while I begged and prayed and pushed. When they reached the top a new spirit soon seized them: they were here, there and everywhere—in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... according to their attitude toward belief and beliefs—toward the meaning and value of belief in general—toward their own beliefs and those of their neighbors. We have the man who does not know what "belief" means, and who does not care; the man whose idea of its meaning is perverse and wrong; the man who thinks his own beliefs are important and those of his neighbors are unimportant; the man who thinks it proper to base belief on certain considerations and not on others—the man, for instance, who will say he believes that ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... place, the different prophets of Jehovah in Judaism and Christendom had, so far as Mohammed knew, been uniformly successful, for he was familiar with the glorious history of Abraham, Moses, and David, and he always held to the perverse conception that Jesus was not crucified. However deep in the dumps prophets may have been on occasion, they have invariably believed one thing: victory for their particular cause would inevitably come. Neither an unbroken series of worldly failures nor the chastisement of his god have ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... by sin and darkness blinded May now see His glory bright; Hearts perverse and carnal minded May obtain His Spirit's light. When, contrite and sorely yearning, They in faith to Him ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... it by laying him flat upon his bed. Scarce any prison so close that affords not the prisoner two or three steps. The anchorites that barked themselves up in hollow trees and immured themselves in hollow walls, that perverse man that barrelled himself in a tub, all could stand or sit, and enjoy some change of posture. A sick bed is a grave, and all that the patient says there is but a varying of his own epitaph. Every night's bed ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... that nobleman been an American or an Englishman. Storri was so loaded of alarming contradictions; he could so snarl and purr, threaten and promise, beam and glower, smile and frown, and all in the one moment of time! Mr. Harley could not read a spirit so perverse and in such perpetual head-on collision with itself! Nor could he, being fear-blind, see that in most, if not all of these, Storri was acting. If Mr. Harley had realized what a joy it was to Storri to frighten him, the knowledge might have made for his peace of mind. ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... before the day of which I speak, I was awakened by one of these stupid, perverse birds, which must have been in the cedars on the knoll close behind the house, and which disturbed my very soul by his ceaseless and melancholy hooting. For some reason it affected me more than commonly, and I lay for a long time nearly on the point of tears with vexation—and, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... melancholy truth. The Welsh mountains have a perverse habit of attracting clouds, even in June; the sky, which had been overcast since midday, was now inky dark, and great drops began to fall. It was a calamity, but one for which everybody was fully prepared. The patrols rushed round the camp loosening ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... the initiative according to the provisions of the recent Statute, and arrested him on suspicion of being a heretic. The mayor himself was a witness at the trial, and testified as to the nature of certain books found in Cleydon's possession; they were "the worst and the most perverse that ever he did read or see." Walsingham, who styles Cleydon "an inveterate Lollard" (quidam inveteratus Lollardus), adds, with his usual acerbity against the entire sect, that the accused had gone so far as to make his own son a priest, and have Mass celebrated ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... was precipitated into a romance at once. Mary had just enough of that perverse feminine pleasure in teasing to keep my interest alive. The fact was, she saw me becoming entangled from day to day without any more misgivings of conscience than the celebrated spider of the poem felt when she invited the fly to walk ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Cox, Copley Fielding, J. D. Harding, Clarkson Stanfield, and Turner—the very men whom our author brings forward as the excellent of the earth, in opposition to all old masters whatever, excepting only Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, to whom nevertheless, by a perverse pertinacity of their respective geniuses, they bear no resemblance whatever—as they are to Claude, Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin. We do not by any means intend to speak disrespectfully of these our English artists, but we must either mistrust those principles which cause ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... quiet but impressive earnestness, a perverse spirit entered into Katherine Liddell. Here was this man, sailing triumphantly on the crest of good fortune, about to ally himself to a woman, good, certainly, and suited to him, but also rich enough to set him above all care and money troubles, ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... in a more capricious power—the power that abstains from "nipping." "One nips or is nipped, and never knows beforehand," quoted Rickie, and opened the poems of Shelley, a man less foolish than you supposed. How pleasant it was to read! If business worried him, if Stephen was noisy or Ansell perverse, there still remained this paradise of books. It seemed as if he had read nothing for two years. Then the train stopped for the shunting, and he heard protests from minor officials who were working on the line. They complained that some one who didn't ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... the truth, and yet missed it with such perverse ingenuity, that Horace felt bound ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... Leavenworth are almost identically the same as what may be heard against him any day in Atlanta. If there be any basis for them, perhaps it would be expedient for the Government to supersede him. The parole law, at its best, seems to be rather a weak-kneed and perverse institution, and it would be a pity to deprive it of what value it may have by committing its dispensation to the hands of a man not peculiarly fitted by nature and temperament to carry out its provisions. It was Napoleon's opinion that a blunder is ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... good-naturedly, gently dip the little brown smooth-skinned nugget in the waves clear under, and then lay him on the moist, warm sand. The treatment was no less effectual than harmless, for it stopped the perverse, persistent squalling at once" (519. 222). Such demonstrations of tenderness have been supposed to be rare among the Indians, but the same authority says again: "Many is the Indian I have seen tending the baby with far more patience and good-nature than a civilized father would display" ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... within us would be idle and superfluous, and wholly unsuited to a being that had no higher capacity and no higher destination. In order to be at one with ourselves, we should refuse obedience to the voice of that law and suppress it as a perverse and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... following day, the father disclosed the secret and checked their vain fears; so that, undeceived by experience, they followed him with their axes, and in short order felled that thicket, which was a confused center of perverse iniquities. Thereupon, many of those infidels submitted to the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... clear in her blue eyes that she saw them come and saw them go; and both brother and sister felt this discouraging. The one fault they found in Miss Fairfax was an absence of enthusiasm for themselves; and Bessie was so thankful that she had overcome her perverse trick of blushing at nothing. When she took her final leave of them before quitting Minster Court, Mr. Cecil Burleigh said that he should probably be over at Abbotsmead in the course of the ensuing week, and Bessie was glad as usual, and ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... of the miserable vermin, thought of him as I had often watched thus his dying agonies, when a cruel urchin of eight or ten. Boys are horribly cruel, sir; boys, women, and savages. All childlike things are cruel; cruel from a want of thought and from perverse ingenuity, although by instinct each of these is so tender. You may not have observed it, but a savage is as tender to his own young as a boy is to a favorite puppy-the same boy that will torture a kitten out of existence. ...
— The Man In The Reservoir • Charles Fenno Hoffman
... Winthorpe, calm and smiling, would not be moved. John shook his head, muttered, shrugged his shoulders, threw up his hands, muttered again. "Was ever such pig-headed obstinacy! Was ever such arbitrary, voluntary blindness! I give you up, for a perverse, a triple-pated madman!" And so, John muttering and frowning, Winthorpe serenely smiling, reiterating, they passed round the corner of the Castle buildings, and were ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... moved on westwards 'towards the Beauce, intending to reach his own estates in Brittany for winter quarters. But his young captains got out of control. Led by a Gloucestershire knight, Sir John Minsterworth, "ready in hand but deceitful and perverse in mind," a considerable section of the troops refused to follow the old "tomb-robber" to Brittany, and determined to spend the winter where they were, under Minsterworth's leadership. Knowles would not give place to his subordinate, and made his way to Brittany ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... said, "Oh, that my People had hearkened to me, and Israel had walked in my ways, I should soon have subdued their Enemies, and turned my hand against their Adversaries" (Psalm 81.13-14). But now our perverse and evil carriages in the sight of the Lord, have so offended Him, that instead of turning His hand against them, the Lord feeds and nourishes them up to be a ...
— Captivity and Restoration • Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
... slaves of servants whom they have trusted with their affairs. Some are kept in continual anxiety by the caprice of rich relations, whom they cannot please and dare not offend. Some husbands are imperious and some wives perverse, and, as it is always more easy to do evil than good, though the wisdom or virtue of one can very rarely make many happy, the folly or vice of ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... gardener's cottage must, she did not doubt, agree wholly with Mr Dale; how otherwise would she have suffered the kiss in an open space in the park, where anybody might pass—and where, in fact (by the most perverse chance in the world), pretty Mistress Barbara herself passed at the moment when the thing occurred? However, if the matter could ever have had the smallest interest for her—save in so far as it touched the reputation of the village and might afford ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... ensued, "when an infatuated people, ripe and prepared for destruction, plunged by the just judgment of God into all the perverse actions of folly and madness," he reads us such important lessons as must strike an enlightened public, if recalled to their attention. He tells us, by fatal experience, "that the weak contributed to the designs of the wicked, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... there was a blending of the guttural and nasal tones of American English with the Austrian German accent of his friends. "He snaps like a mad dog. He's enough to make you split your sides laughing—that is, if the perverse creature comes at all and doesn't have dinner served in ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... puny libellers, acting under a knot of factious politicians, without virtue, parts, or character, (such they are constantly represented by these gentlemen,) are sufficient to excite this disturbance, very perverse must be the disposition of that people, amongst whom such a disturbance can be excited by such means. It is besides no small aggravation of the public misfortune, that the disease, on this hypothesis, appears to be without remedy. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... writing and willed Faustus to take a copy of it. With that the perverse Faustus being resolute in his damnation, wrote a copy thereof, and gave the devil the one, and kept in store the other. Thus the spirit and Faustus were agreed, and dwelt together; no doubt ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... so often veils Him from us—the fancy that we are anything when we are nothing. And the nearer we get to God, and the purer we are, the more shall we be keenly conscious of our imperfections and our sins. 'If I say I am perfect,' said Job in his wise way, 'this also should prove me perverse.' Consciousness of sin is the continual accompaniment of growth in holiness. 'The heavens are not pure in His sight, and He chargeth His angels with folly.' Everything looks black beside that sovereign whiteness. Get God into your lives, and you ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... M. Jeanrenaud and his mother the most perverse honesty; to hear them you would suppose that they were robbing me. In spite of all I could say, they will accept no more than the value of the lands at the time when the King bestowed them on my family. The price was settled between ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... said Mrs. North; "her letter has made me a better and happier woman. Now I love my whole country. I do justice in my feelings to hundreds of thousands whom I have hitherto regarded as perverse. I now see God's wonder-working providence in connection with the slave. It seems plain to me in what way the Union can be saved, and that is, by the general prevalence at the North of such views about slavery as the very best people at ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... among any who listened to him, but were not sufficiently acquainted with the peculiarities of his character to discern that he wanted simply to scare his audience, and that he did not mean one single word of the ferocious things he said in those moments when he happened to be in a particularly perverse mood, and when it pleased him to give a totally false impression of himself and the nature of his convictions in ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... head. "And ungrateful, and perverse, and queer, and totally unlike my father's family." She counted off her shortcomings on her fingers, and raised her brows in comical ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... excitement. When we dragged him away it was some time before he would talk of anything but the growth of an Oriental fatalism in modern thought, which had been well typified by some of the official's ingenious but perverse fallacies. At last we managed to get him to understand that we had made an astounding discovery. When he did listen, he listened attentively, walking between us up and down the lamp-lit street, while we told him in a rather feverish duet of the great ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... the haggard mouths, the vicious hands of his portraits, were shiveringly conscious of missed experiences, and for the moment felt ill at ease with what seemed just there, and just then, the dullness of virtue. The evil admired him because he made evil wonderful. To the perverse he was ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... jealousy excites in the wife derision and a sense of superiority; more often than not, it fosters an unsuspected attachment, prompts to a perverse pleasure in misleading. Monica became aware of this; in her hours of misery she now and then gave a harsh laugh, the result of thoughts not seriously entertained, but tempting the fancy to recklessness. What, she asked herself again, would be the end ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... dream the practical impossibility of confounding and disarming the ignorance of men unfortunately so ill educated and unread, and with intellect so incapable, apparently, of appreciating instruction, if not wilfully perverse, as the Cobdens, or of restraining the less coarse but more fluent flippancy and equally unscrupulous assurance of friend Bright, from resort to that stock and stale weapon of vulgar minds which is so readily drawn from the armoury of falsehood. To the end of the chapter they will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... whole project with sovereign contempt and growling hostility. This was Don Ramiro Alvarez, the father of the beautiful Serafina, to whom Don Fernando was betrothed. He was one of those perverse, matter-of-fact old men who are prone to oppose every thing speculative and romantic. He had no faith in the Island of the Seven Cities; regarded the projected cruise as a crack-brained freak; looked with angry eye and internal heart-burning on the conduct of his ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... you all the things (PIECES) you had the goodness to communicate to me,—except Charles Douze, [Voltaire's new Book; lately come out, "Bale, 1731."] which attaches me infinitely. The particulars hitherto unknown which he reports; the greatness of that Prince's actions, and the perverse singularity (BIZARRERIE) of his fortune: all this, joined to the lively, brilliant and charming way the Author has of telling it, renders this Book interesting to the supreme degree.... I send you a fragment of my correspondence with the most illustrious Sieur Crochet," some French Envoy or ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... more the perverse lecture theater was warmed the more persistently it smelled of damp plaster; and that the more brightly it was lighted, the more overgrown and lonesome it looked. I can recall to mind that the company assembled numbered about fifty, the room ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... found it very pleasant to live in England." Isabel spoke in a manner that might have seemed a little perverse, but which expressed both her constant perception of her uncle's outward felicity and her general disposition to elude any obligation to take a ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... 1, at 8 p.m., we sighted this northernmost land, the Cape, and were immediately induced to indulge in cod fishing from the decks of our steamer. It is the custom, and the cod seem to accept the situation with perverse indiscretion, for many of them are caught. Our lines and bait are provided by sailors. Dinner is again delayed to enable us to indulge in this sport, but we don't mind because we have lost all the habitual tendencies of our previous ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... have not only what is probably the first European notice of paper-money, but a partial recognition of the peculiarity of Chinese writing, and a perception that puts to shame the perverse boggling of later critics over the identity of these Cathayans with the Seres ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... especially as Mr. Frank came to her side at that very moment; and when the young lady laughed, and said, "What a goose I am! whatever could I have been thinking of?" he thought within himself (persisting in his illogical and perverse conclusions), "It is very plain what she is thinking about! I was afraid that she loved him, and now I know it." So he put up the chess-men, while she went to the piano with her cousin; and he ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... and let who will be clever,'" declaimed the Bonnie Lassie, who was feeling perverse that day. "You want me to define his social status for you and tell you whether you'd better invite him to dinner. You'd better not. He might ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... it; preferring rather to soothe the Soul through the Senses into Acquiescence with Things as he saw them, than to perplex it with vain disquietude after what they might be. It has been seen, however, that his Worldly Ambition was not exorbitant; and he very likely takes a humorous or perverse pleasure in exalting the gratification of Sense above that of the Intellect, in which he must have taken great delight, although it failed to answer the Questions in which he, in common with all men, was most ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... part this perverse creature had been playing! Now he could account for their meeting in this train coming from Rouen!... She had recently associated with Corporal Vinson as a priest. She had seen him off, no doubt, and, anxious to rid herself of her ecclesiastical exterior as quickly as might be, she had ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... DURING PREGNANCY.—This is very largely a matter of will power. Some women simply will not exert any effort in their own behalf. They are perverse, obstinate, and unreasonable. The measures which ordinarily effect a cure, they refuse to employ. It is useless to argue with them; drugs should never be employed; censure and affection are apparently wasted on them; they cannot even be shamed into obedience. The maternal ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... Calvinism appears from the Consensus Tigurinus itself, where we read: "In as far as Christ is a man, He is to be sought nowhere else than in heaven and in no other manner than with the mind and the understanding of faith. Therefore it is a perverse and impious superstition to include Him under elements of this world. Christus, quatenus homo est, non alibi quam in coelo nec aliter quam mente et fidei intelligentia quaerendus est. Quare perversa et impia superstitio est, ipsum sub elementis huius mundi includere." Again: "We ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... a Certain Island, II, 249. "Marama [the Duchess of Marlborough] has been for many Years a Grandmother; but Age is the smallest of her Imperfections:—She is of a Disposition so perverse and peevish, so designing, mercenary, proud, cruel, and revengeful, that it has been a matter of debate, if she were really Woman, or if some Fiend had not assumed that Shape on purpose to affront the Sex, and fright Mankind ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... deities; but conducted the whites to the water-side, where he communicated with them every night, and taught them to build a small vessel, which carried them to another country, from whence, after a long period, they returned with various kinds of merchandise to barter with the blacks, whose perverse choice of gold in preference to the knowledge of letters had doomed them ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... literature. His name, George Steevens, acquired in later years world-wide fame as that of the most learned of Shakespearean commentators. Of the real value of Steevens's scholarship no question is admissible, and his reputation justly grew with his years. Yet Steevens's temper was singularly perverse and mischievous. His confidence in his own powers led him to contemn the powers of other people. He enjoyed nothing so much as mystifying those who were engaged in the same pursuits as himself, and his favourite method of mystification was to announce ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... and hunt those monstrous faults bred within them; to drag out the lurking errors, like Cacus from his den; to multiply them like Hydra's heads; and rake them together like Augeas's dung; or else to drive away a sort of dangerous fowl who have a perverse inclination to plunder the best branches of the tree of knowledge, like those Stymphalian birds that ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
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