"Robustness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... drawing. Sometimes, in fact, Signorelli gains his end by the very crudeness and heaviness for which he is generally condemned, the sharp contrasts giving a rugged strength to his painting, and the copper colour of the flesh adding robustness ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... girl looked at him with startled eyes. His fire warmed her. She wondered if she had been cold all her days. She wanted to lean toward this burning, blazing man that was like a volcano spouting forth strength, robustness, and health. She felt that she must lean toward him, and resisted by an effort. Then, too, there was the counter impulse to shrink away from him. She was repelled by those lacerated hands, grimed by toil so that the very dirt of life was ingrained in the flesh ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... laughing. "But I was serious, Lucian. Alice is energetic, ambitious, and stubbornly upright in questions of principle. I believe she would assist you steadily at every step of your career. Besides, she has physical robustness. Our student-stock needs an infusion ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Shelley's singular purity and beauty of character, testimonies borne out by the evidence of his own writings. Impulse with him took the place of conscience. Moral law, accompanied by the sanction of power, and imposed by outside authority, he rejected as a form of tyranny. His nature lacked robustness and ballast. Byron, who was at bottom intensely practical, said that Shelley's philosophy was too spiritual and romantic. Hazlitt, himself a Radical, wrote of Shelley: "He has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... for all his robustness, flushed hotly, and then became impertinent. "My pulse is twenty beats too quick still, after quinsy. If you don't believe the doctor, ma'am, ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... world's literature. In addition, Cooper created the Indian of literature—perhaps a little too noble to be entirely true to life—and various simple, strong seamen. His Chingachgook and Uncas and Long Tom Coffin justly brought him added fame. In these narrative gifts, as well as in the robustness of his own character, Cooper was not unlike Sir Walter Scott. He once modestly referred to himself as "a chip from Scott's block" and has frequently ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... men such opposites, never two so seemingly ill-matched. Leicester's dark face and its sardonic look, his lithe figure, the nervous strength of his bearing, were in strong contrast to the bulking breadth, the perspiring robustness of Lempriere of Rozel. It was not easy of belief that Lempriere should be set to fight this toreador of a fighting Court. But there they stood, Lempriere's face with a great-eyed gravity looming above his rotund ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the heroes of his stories, creatures very near to primitive existence, peasants, sailors, poachers, girls of the farm, and the source of the vigor with which he describes these rude figures. The robustness of his animalism permits him fully to imagine all the simple sensations of these beings, while his pessimism, which tinges these sketches of brutal customs with an element of delicate scorn, preserves him from coarseness. It is this constant and ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... full-grown lady. When I recall her personal appearance as she was then, and for ten or twelve years subsequent, I have the idea of a blooming girl of florid complexion and vigorous health, with a tendency to robustness of which she was painfully conscious, and which, with little regard to hygienic principles, she endeavored to suppress and conceal, thereby preparing for herself much future suffering." She had, ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... better, ideals of passion, of mysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth; but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy as they did by their delicacies. It scarcely seems as if we were as robust in our very robustness as they were robust in ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... in a certain inferiority. When all his personal history becomes known, when his papers and letters have all been published and read, when the memoirs of others have told all that there is to be told, there will stand clear something inadequate, a lack of robustness, mental or nervous, an excessive sensitiveness, over self-consciousness, shrinking from life, a neurotic something that in the end brought on defeat and the final overthrow. He was never quite a normal man ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... or that contemptuous, cankerous, euphemistic brutality, of which, I believe, we can show vastly more samples than Great Britain. Indeed, I believe, for the most part, that the brutality of the English people is only the excess and plethora of that healthful, muscular robustness and full-bloodedness for which the nation has always been famous, and which it should prize beyond almost anything else. But for our brutality, our recklessness of life and property, the brazen ruffianism in our great cities, the hellish greed and robbery and plunder in high ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... Hamilton's illness and my watching over him night and day, keeping firearms out of reach. I have never seen—and hope I never may—any other being age so swiftly and perceptibly. I had attributed his worn appearance in Fort Douglas to the cannon accident and trusted the natural robustness of his constitution would throw off the apparent languor; but as autumn wore into winter, there were more gray hairs on his temple, deeper lines furrowed his face and the erect shoulders began ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... be cited and each give his fragment of evidence. Mr W.J. Stillman, an excellent observer, was specially impressed in his intercourse with Browning, by the mental health and robustness of a nature sound to the core; "an almost unlimited intellectual vitality, and an individuality which nothing could infringe on, but which a singular sensitiveness towards others prevented from ever wounding even the most morbid sensibility; a strong man armed in the completest defensive armour, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Whiting of Hampton. Hers were the face and form to take captive his poet's fancy, and she possessed a character as lovely as her person; a courage and strength of will far out of proportion to her dainty shape, and an intellect of masculine robustness. Often the editor brought his work to the table of his library that he might avail himself of his wife's judgment, and labor with the faces around him that he loved, for their union was a very congenial one, and when two daughters came to bless it, ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... can see its tendency, if uncorrected, to make men shrink from importing anything like absolute quality into their propositions. We can see also, what is still worse, its tendency to place individual robustness and initiative in the light of superfluities, with which a world that goes by evolution can very well dispense. Men easily come to consider clearness and positiveness in their opinions, staunchness in holding and defending them, and fervour ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... personal touch with schools and with insurance companies. He created for himself sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, wards. He endowed them, severally, with ages, with backwardness, with brilliancy, with robustness, with delicacy, with qualities that were immature and required development, with absence of qualities that were desirable and required implanting, with unfortunate tendency to qualities that were undesirable and needed repression and nipping in the bud. He ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... it reveals, not for the last time, the influence of Giorgione with which its beginnings were saturated. The beautiful head of St. John shows the Giorgionesque type and the Giorgionesque feeling at its highest. The Joseph of Arimathea has the robustness and the passion of the Apostles in the Assunta, the crimson coat of Nicodemus, with its high yellowish lights, is such as we meet with in the Bacchanal. The Magdalen, with her features distorted by grief, resembles—allowing for the necessary differences imposed by the situation—the ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... graceful conceits of fashion. The too slim throat encircled by velvet or ornamented with a jewelled buckle or brooch is effectively framed. The unsightly lines of the shoulders are covered, and just enough individual robustness is disclosed to suggest with becoming propriety the conventional decollete corsage. The Princess of Wales is as constant to her velvet or pearl neck-band, as to her especial style of coiffure. Her throat, in evening dress, never appears unadorned by one or the other of these ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... passed his grand climacteric; and though it was a hale old age with him, yet it was not his lusty youth; that though he was daily getting rounder, and rounder in girth, and more florid of face, that these, howbeit, were rather the symptoms of a morbid obesity, than of a healthful robustness. These wise ones predicted that very soon poor Bello would go off ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... over it, and even a little breathless. It seemed incredible to her, still, that Jerry and she had parted, and it would, she knew, seem so to her mother when she should be told. She sat eating cup-cake delicately, but with an ostentatious relish, to prove the robustness of her state. ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... the court came together at the next term. In the interval the State had become sensible of the defects of their counsel, and had retained Mr. Pinkney, who stood at that time at the head of the bar of the United States. He had all the qualifications of a great lawyer, except perhaps that of robustness. He was keen, strong, and learned; diligent in preparation, he was ready and fluent in action, a good debater, and master of a high order of eloquence. He was a most formidable adversary, and one whom Mr. Webster, then just at the outset of his career, had probably ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... distinction which poor men can appreciate, even when less sternly summoned to its duties; not only by courage as fiery and as passively enduring as the courage of the lower ranks, but by a physical robustness superior to that of any other class taken separately; and, above all, by a scale of accomplishments in education, which strengthen the claim to command, even amongst that part of the soldiery least capable of appreciating such advantages. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... of manly action in Cooper and a robustness of imagination which compel attention. He is rather slow in starting his tale; but he always sees a long trail ahead, and knows that every turn of the trail will bring its surprise or adventure. It is only when we analyze and compare his plots that we discover ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... a hint of a typical difference in the American and the Englishman which I have long recognized in the two elms as compared to each other. It may be fanciful, but I have thought that the compactness and robustness about the English elm, which are replaced by the long, tapering limbs and willowy grace and far-spreading reach of our own, might find a certain parallelism in the people, especially the females of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... ancestors, but which now prevail universally, and are complicated with almost every other distemper. The bodies of men are enfeebled and enervated; and it is not uncommon to observe very high degrees of irritability under the external appearance of great strength and robustness. The hypochondriac, palsies, cachexies, dropsies, and all those diseases which arise from laxity and debility, are, in our days, endemic every where; and the hysterics, which used to be peculiar to the women, as the name itself indicates, now attacks ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... was President of the Parliament of Bordeaux. He was a voluminous writer, his most celebrated work being his "L'Esprit des Lois." Burke described him as "A genius not born in every country, or every time: with a Herculean robustness of mind; and nerves not to be ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... or did disappointed her. His anxiety caused him to be indulgent, where he had formerly been unbending. The difference in their ages made him patient and tractable. He feared he could not show her the love that she in her freshness and natural, unconsumed robustness desired. On this account he denied himself many things which he formerly could not have got along without, and put up with, many things that would have been intolerable to him as a ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... our speed had chilled me bitterly, I noticed Miss West coming along the narrow deck, and could not avoid being struck by the spring and vitality of her walk. Her face, despite its firm moulding, had a suggestion of fragility that was belied by the robustness of her body. At least, one would argue that her body must be robust from her fashion of movement of it, though little could one divine the lines of it under the shapelessness of ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... for Mandeville; and I fear he is getting to have private thoughts about the Young Lady. Mandeville naturally likes the robustness and sparkle of winter, and it has been a little suspicious to hear him express the hope that we shall have ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Fancy old Hank and you playing a foursome with Aunt Mary and me for the cider and apples. Why, it would add years of robustness to our ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... world, notwithstanding that for centuries, or even for millenniums, they have been surrounded by or in immediate contact with neighbours possessing records, it seems to follow that a nation's greatness may begin at any time, independently of the blueness of its blood, the robustness of its warriors, the beauty of its women; that is, whenever it chooses to keep records, and thus to cultivate itself: for records are nothing more than the means of keeping experiences in stock, instead of having to repeat them every day; they are thus ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... which was essentially that of the French monarchy, presupposed for success the constant personal supervision of an industrious and strong-willed king. Henry III was never a strenuous worker, and his character failed in the robustness and self-reliance necessary for personal rule. The magnates, who regarded themselves as the king's natural-born counsellors, were bitterly incensed, and hated the royal clerks as fiercely as they had disliked ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... clearest, most simple, and without taste"—yet genius in a man will always cover many defects of manner, and much will be excused to the strong and the original. Without genuineness and individuality, human life would lose much of its interest and variety, as well as its manliness and robustness of character. ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis |
