"Proclivity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that a gradually evolved tendency of mine not to go on when I am expected to was what first prompted my wife to dub me a philosopher. She fancies, dear soul, that she is a loser by this lately developed proclivity to seek refuge in silence on the occasions when she or the children sweep down upon me with some hair-lifting project which craves an immediate decision. But she is in error. It is true there are times when the ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... leisure for the behoof of the reputability of the primary or legitimate leisure class. This vicarious leisure class is distinguished from the leisure class proper by a characteristic feature of its habitual mode of life. The leisure of the master class is, at least ostensibly, an indulgence of a proclivity for the avoidance of labour and is presumed to enhance the master's own well-being and fulness of life; but the leisure of the servant class exempt from productive labour is in some sort a performance exacted from them, and is not normally or primarily directed to their ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... aptness, aptitude; proneness, proclivity, bent, turn, tone, bias, set, leaning to, predisposition, inclination, propensity, susceptibility; conatus [Lat.], nisus [Lat.]; liability &c 177; quality, nature, temperament; idiocrasy^, idiosyncrasy; cast, vein, grain; humor, mood; drift ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... turned out. By natural proclivity Laura had from the first entered heart and soul into military romance as exhibited in the plots and characters of those living exponents of it who came under her notice. From her earliest young womanhood civilians, however promising, had no chance of winning her interest if ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... particular to a shade about clothes, and has a nice taste in hats. One wonders how he acquired it. His patriotic proclivity, his hostility to national costumes other than English, his preference for uncoloured complexions—this one may understand; but his aesthetic instinct is a problem for Weismann. As the interpreter of the conventions, he is of a cast-iron rigidity, for is he not ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... that this patriotic spirit prevails throughout, among all civilised peoples, and that it pervades one nation about as ubiquitously as another. Nor is there much evidence of a weakening of this sinister proclivity with the passage of time or the continued advance in the arts of life. The only civilized nations that can be counted on as habitually peaceable are those who are so feeble or are so placed as to be cut off from hope of gain through contention. Vainglorious arrogance may run at a higher ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... prompt or dissuade from war." This certainly was obvious enough; though it would be a great deal easier for England to bring on a war than to avert it, in the angry mood in which the majority of the Democratic party then was. But Mr. Madison preserved his equanimity. Considering his old proclivity for France, and his old dislike of England, his impartiality between them is rather remarkable. But his aim was still to keep the peace while he abated nothing of the well-founded complaints he had against both ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... perceptible in his management of his newspaper. He was severely temperate, although opposed to prohibition as impracticable; he was in favor of a high protective tariff, opposed to slavery, predisposed to vegetarian diet, and at times manifested a proclivity to the doctrines of Fourier ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... essentially the land of newspapers. The colonist is by nature an inquisitive animal, who likes to know what is going on around him. The young colonial has inherited this proclivity. Excepting the Bible, Shakespeare, and Macaulay's 'Essays,' the only literature within the bushman's reach are newspapers. The townsman deems them equally essential to his well-being. Nearly everybody can read, and nearly everybody has leisure to do ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... during these hours faithfully, you have an average for the three hundred and thirteen working days of the year of two hours and forty-one minutes a day,—an amount of study that never injured any healthy child. But, going back a little to youthful recollections, and considering the amazing proclivity of the young mind to idleness, whispering, and fun and frolic in general, it seems doubtful whether our children ever yet attained to so high an average of actual study as two hours a day. As a modification of this statement, it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Balkan States are triumphing? I have been so excited over the war, it would have needed a very small opportunity to have taken me over there." It is evident, then, that the soldier's life had long been included among the possibilities which fascinated him. But apart from this general proclivity to adventure, this desire to "live dangerously", he was impelled by a simple sentiment of loyalty to the country and city of his heart, which he himself explained in a letter written from the Aisne trenches to 'The New Republic' (New York, May ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... to be considered is, that Mr. Burroughs probably discovered, soon after coming to the village, into what a hornets' nest he had got,—every one tattling about and backbiting each other. His innocent and unsuspicious wife may have indulged a little in what is considered the amiable proclivity of her sex, and have let fall, in tea-table talk, what cavillers and mischief-makers were on hand to take up; and he may have found it both necessary and difficult to teach her caution and reserve. He saw, more perhaps than she did, the danger of getting ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... for fun and mischief, there was also in his disposition as evident a proclivity to seriousness and earnestness. If it gave him delight to play off upon a stranger the joke of "bagging the game," he enjoyed with equal ardor the correct rendering of a difficult translation, or the ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... male creature, not from affection (her affections were anemic) but rather, as it seemed, from an instinctive desire to shuffle off from herself any responsibility. But, at all events, she was entirely free from Miss Delia Wall's proclivity. ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... slaveholders themselves. We must never lose sight of the fact that though the majority perhaps are on the side of freedom, large numbers of Englishmen are not slaveholders only because the law forbids the practice. In this proclivity we see a great part of the reason of the frantic sympathy of thousands with the rebels in the great Black war in America. It is true that we do sympathize with brave men, though we may not approve of the objects ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... was an out-house which ran flush along the side of Beacon Street, fencing off our bit of a garden from the road and an adjacent tenement; and this out-house, mother, who was of an inventive nature, with a strong proclivity for money-making, had converted into a shop for the sale of all sorts of birds, both foreign and native born, and pigeons, in addition to sundry specimens of the rarer species ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... paper of Charcot and Magnan I have noticed, in an anonymous review of Westphal's first paper in the Journal of Mental Science (then edited by Dr. Maudsley) for October, 1871, that "Contraere Sexualempfindung" is translated as "inverted sexual proclivity." So far as I am aware, "sexual inversion" was first used in English, as the best term, by J.A. Symonds in 1883, in his privately printed essay, A Problem in Greek Ethics. Later, in 1897, the same term was adopted, I believe ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... deny the foot that opposition which it requires. Precisely that, accordingly, which makes the difficulty of an action may at the same time make its possibility. Why is flight difficult? Because the weight of every creature draws it toward the earth. But without this downward proclivity, the wing of the bird would have no power upon the air. Why is it difficult for a solid body to make rapid progress in water? Because the water presses powerfully upon it, and at every inch of progress ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... those whose gems of protest are to be found in the setting of this volume, it is but sportsmanlike to state at the start that admission was offered to none of notable puritanical proclivity. The prohibitionists and censors are not represented. They require, in a levititious literary escapade like this, no spokesman. Their viewpoint already is amply set forth. Moreover, likely they would not be amusing.... Also, the exponents ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... time when Dora cuddled Jip, even down to our own day, when the heroine of "Queed" walks forth with her Behemoth, girls both in fact and in fiction have played with dogs; played with them no less than boys. This proclivity on the part of the little girls of our Nation is not distinctively American, nor especially childish, nor particularly girl-like; it ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... be that watcher drifting in the pellucid gulf beneath the stars watched all through the night; it may be that he dozed. But if he gave way to so natural a proclivity, assuredly on the fourth night of the great flank march he was aroused, for that was the night of the battle in the air that decided the fate of Holland. The aeroplanes were fighting at last, and suddenly ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... of authority on the part of the teacher (and without an appeal to reason). An appeal should be made to the understanding of the pupil only when he is somewhat mature, or shows by his repetition of the offence that his proclivity is deep-seated, and requires an array of all good influences to reinforce his feeble ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... that merit consideration, chief among which is the normal conformation of the coronet joint. This proclivity is constant; the normal interphalangeal articulation is an incomplete ginglymoid joint and while its dorso-volar diameter is great, this in no wise compensates for its disproportionately narrow transverse diameter. The pivotal ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... like the rest of us, had His limitations and His faults. But, on the other hand, if it be true that He sprang from the grave because 'it was not possible that He should be holden of it,' and because in His nature there was no proclivity to death, since there had been no indulgence in sin; and if it be true that He ascended up on high because that was His native sphere, and He rose to it as naturally as the water in the valley will ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... a list of members to serve on the Education Committee in a couple of sentences with a humorous twist in them which disarmed criticism.] "On a former occasion I was accused of having a proclivity in favour of the clergy, and recollecting this, I have only given them in this instance a fair proportion of the representation. If, however, I have omitted any gentleman who thinks he ought to be on the committee, I can only assure him that above all others I should have been ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... without attracting a large attendance of the public, as much from expectation of being entertained by the repartees between Bench and Bar as from interest in the proceedings before the Court. In a recent turf libel case his lordship gave a free rein to his proclivity to give an amusing turn to statements of both counsel and witnesses. At one point he intervened by remarking that other witnesses than the one under examination had said that a horse is made fit by running on the course before he is expected to win a position, and added, ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... grizzlies we took into consideration the proclivity of this beast to attack. We knew his speed was tremendous. He is able to catch a horse or a dog on the run. Therefore, it is useless for a man to try to run away from him. There is no such thing as being able to climb a tree if the animal is at close quarters. Adams has shown that it is ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... a community of interest fails to give added zest and energy. There is no possible ground of association on which societies are not formed, and the trivial, fictitious, or imaginary pretences on which men thus combine, meet, and act in concert, are manifest proofs of a social proclivity so strong as to create reasons for its indulgence where such reasons do not already exist. Even in science and in the most abstruse forms of erudition, men of learning seek mutual countenance and encouragement, and readily suspend their solitary research and study for the opportunity of intercommunication ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... scale of size and refinement. But the curious man finds no hidden connection between the carriage of the monument and the character of the dead. Messrs. Slap & Dash apparently take the urn or obelisk that comes readiest to hand. One wonders dimly why mourners have this overwhelming proclivity for Messrs. Slap & Dash and their ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... the churches, which it was the prerogative of the regularly appointed priests to do: and wrathfully alleged that the public were more ready to confess to these travelling mendicants than to the proper authorities. It is possible that the cause may be traced to that human proclivity which inclines a man to confide rather in a stranger whom he may never meet again, than in one who can remind him of uncomfortable facts at inconvenient times: but also it is possible that the people recognised in the teaching of the Minorite Friars, largely recruited as ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... ever had a stronger proclivity towards parody than Thackeray; and we may, I think, confess that there is no form of literary drollery more dangerous. The parody will often mar the gem of which it coarsely reproduces the outward semblance. The word "damaged," used ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... those who before had been silent begin to voice their reactionary feeling, while those who shortly before had been in the ascendant begin to take their turn of silent dissent. Thus the waves are accentuated, both in their rise and in their relapse, by the abdicating proclivity of the people. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... beautifies the body, while those that are mean and hateful distort it into animal forms. The more the mind departs from the likeness of the Deity, the nearer does the outward form seem to approach the animal, and always that animal which has a kindred proclivity. Thus, the mild expression of the philanthropist attracts the needy, whom the insolent look of the angry man repels. This is an indispensable guide in social life. It is astonishing what an accordance bodily appearance has with the passions; heroism and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Gunner seems to have been a man with a proclivity for Indian barter, that led him to seek a place with the "third expedition" at Cape Cod, thereby nearly accomplishing his death, which indeed occurred later, in Plymouth harbor, not long before the return ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... fact, Flemild was fairly well satisfied with the turn matters had taken. She knew she must be either wife or nun—there was no third course open for a woman in England at that day—and she certainly had no proclivity for the cloister. Derette, on the other hand, had expressed herself in terms of great contempt for matrimony, and of decided intention to adopt single life, in the only form in which it was then ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... Medocus, (26) the king of the Odrysians, and Seuthes, (27) the rival ruler of the seaboard, he reconciled them to each other, and made them friends and allies of Athens; in the belief that if he secured their friendship the Hellenic cities on the Thracian coast would show greater proclivity to Athens. Such being the happy state of affairs not only in Europe but as regards the states in Asia also, thanks to the friendly attitude of the king to his fellow-citizens, he sailed into Byzantium and sold the tithe-duty ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... well as fisherman; for while the latter is catching the fish, the former may seize on the fact, that in this word, Scuppaug, is to be found the origin of the two separate names by which Argyrops, the silver-eyed, is miscalled in local vernacular. True to the national proclivity for clipping names, the fishermen of Rhode Island appeal to him by the first syllable only of his Indian one,—for in the waters thereabout he is talked of by the familiar abbreviation, Scup. But to the excursionists and fishermen of New York he is known only as ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... magnetic rapport (for perhaps magnetism has something to do with the mystery), is very strong, one couple will make as much way in a fortnight as another will do in a year. In the present instance, Major Elliott's proclivity to fall in love with Frances may have been aided by his persuasion that she was the niece of his friend. Be that as it may, on the thirteenth day of his visit, Major Elliott invited his host to join him in a walk, in the course of which ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... picture contains a very fair analysis of the elements of the vote in opposition to the prohibitory amendment, except that, perhaps, we ought to add the vote in opposition to a well-intended class of men who have no proclivity for liquor, and who, perhaps, could give no better reason for their vote but that they abhor innovations, and are content to do as their fathers and grandfathers ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... prenatal state, of such conditions as scrofula or struma, of various forms of tuberculosis and syphilis, of epilepsy, of rheumatism, and of insanity. These are only a few. We have to contend even with hereditary proclivity to some forms of the acute communicable diseases, such as diphtheria and scarlet fever and also ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Frederick Douglass passed through every gradation of rank comprised in our national make-up, and bears upon his person and upon his soul every thing that is American. And he has not only full sympathy with every thing American; his proclivity or bent, to active toil and visible progress, are in the strictly national direction, delighting to outstrip ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... attention to the telegraph as a promoter of business, as a great and useful institution, and he resolved to become an "operator." This was his electrical beginning. Yet before he took this step he was accused of a proclivity toward extraordinary things. In the old "caboose" where he edited, set up, and printed his newspaper he had established a small chemical laboratory, and out of these chemicals there is said to have been jolted one day an accident which caused him some unpopularity with the railroad ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... That troublesome proclivity of wooing chance was uppermost again in Windham's mind. It was only natural perhaps, for all of San Francisco gambled now in mining stocks. The brokers swarmed like bees along Montgomery street; every window had its shelf of quartz and nuggets interspersed with pictures ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... lies, as I think, in training. The female sex is prone to be inaccurate and careless of apparently trivial detail, because that is the general tendency of mankind. In men destined for a business or a profession, the proclivity is harshly discouraged at an early stage. In women, who usually are not destined for anything whatever, it enjoys a merry life, and often refuses to be improved out of existence when the sudden need arises. No one by taking thought, can deracinate the mental ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... 'What is God?'" and constructing his answer frankly from his own nature. It was quite in Browning's way to take a humorous delight in imagining grotesque parallels to ideas and processes in which he profoundly believed; a proclivity aided by the curious subtle relation between his grotesquerie and his seriousness, which makes Pacchiarotto, for instance, closely similar in effect to parts of Christmas-Eve. Browning is one of three or four sons of the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... model he assiduously cultivated in his own extensive writings afterwards. He was not assisted in his studies, and all he ever knew of mathematics he taught himself. Being addicted to literature by natural proclivity he inserted his own articles in his brother's newspaper, and these being very favorably commented upon by the local public, or at least noticed and talked about, his authorship of them was discovered, and this ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... certain among these remarkable personages, it will be seen that the mainspring of their political zeal was either the fierce excitement of an overmastering passion, an irresistible proclivity to gallantry, or an absorbing ambition, rather than any patriotic motive. This may go far to explain the singular sagacity, finesse, and energy displayed in their devotion to what otherwise appears alike mischievous and chimerical by those three high-born and ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... magazines had little or no political proclivity, but were chiefly literary. Among them are Fraser's, begun in 1830, and the Dublin ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... bridge. Also, through the offices of my good friend the keeper, I was introduced to some of his "pals" in the waterguard. Because of my intimate knowledge of Robbie Burns, Walter Scott, "inside" history of Prince Charlie, and—ahem!—Scottish proclivity for a drop o' whisky, they accepted me ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... South Carolina market Gambia negroes, mainly Mandingoes, were the favorites, and Angolas also found ready sale; but cargoes from Calabar, which were doubtless comprised mostly of Eboes, were shunned because of their suicidal proclivity. Henry Laurens, who was then a commission dealer at Charleston, wrote in 1755 that the sale of a shipload from Calabar then in port would be successful only if no other Guinea ships arrived before its quarantine was ended, for the people would ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... a significant feature of Friedrich; and discloses the inborn proclivity he had to retirement, to study and reflection, as the chosen element of human life. Why he fell upon so ambitious a title for his Royal Cottage? "No-Bother" was not practically a thing he, of all men, could consider possible in this world: at ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle |
