"Temperamental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... possible only at the center, the crux, of Being. This truth is represented by the algebraical X, the symbol of spiritual sex-union. Therefore sex relationships which do not have for their crux spiritual as well as temperamental affinity, are not final, or eternal, however beautiful they may be; and there are many sex-relationships which are pure and sacred even though they do not fulfil this highest of all relationships, ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... science is generally not adequate, and that their educational equipment is inefficient. We also know that economic necessity has deprived them of the tutelage essential to social progress and physical health, and has endowed them with temperamental characteristics undesirable in the mothers of the race. Maternity is thrust upon these physically and mentally immature young wives, and they assume the principal role in a relationship that is onerous and exacting. We know that the duties of wife and mother ...
— 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.
... beneath a merciless sun, and the touch of gray at his temples only added to the eager, almost fierce vitality of the dark face. Paul Harley was notable because of that intellectual strength which does not strike one immediately, since it is purely temperamental, but which, nevertheless, invests its possessor with an ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... used to the emotions of the geniuses and near-geniuses, whose temperamental outbreaks she had learned by heart, not to understand ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... writing history which Trench describes as "a moral whitewashing of such things as in men's sight were as blackamoors before." Religious or temperamental prejudice often obscures the vision and warps the judgment of even the most scholarly minds. Conscious of this infirmity in the ablest writers of history it would be absurd to claim complete exemption from the power of personal bias. It is sincerely ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... going to do what Nancy is going to do, just out of sheer temperamental weakness, and—and tendency to follow ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... "Tatting" also comes from the Emerald Isle, and in comparing English and Irish laces one is inevitably struck with the reflection that there is more "artistry" in the production of Irish laces and embroidery than in England with all her advantages. The temperamental differences of the two races are distinctly shown in this, perhaps ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... his courage and his organisation. In his plans he allows for most possibilities, but he is nonplussed when the situation does not turn out exactly as it should on paper. Again, man for man, he loses "guts" in tight corners, because of this same lack of initiative. It is perhaps a temperamental failing. There have been moments in this War when only his incapacity to deal with a suddenly-developed situation has stood between him and stupendous success. He has assumed, let us say, that by all the rules of War the enemy must have reserves ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... daytimes and keeps us restless all night making a new kind of beer and tending his still, and so on. You bet Ma and I, the minute he's through with this piece, are going pronto to get that face of his as naked as the day he was born. Pa's so temperamental—like that time he was playing a Bishop and never touched a drop for five weeks, and in bed every night at nine-thirty. Me? Oh, I'm having a bit of my own in this Acme piece—God's Great Outdoors, I think it is—anyway, I'm ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... harmony." It is, indeed, as far as we can ever know for certain, only "objective" in the sense of being essentially human; in the sense, that is, of being something that inevitably appeals to what, below temperamental differences, remains permanent ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... and at all stages, Redmond absolutely declined to put forward a plan in his own name. This was not only from temperamental reasons: there was an official obstacle. He was an individual member of the Convention: but he was Chairman of the Irish party, pledged not to bind it without its consent. He felt, no doubt, that any detailed ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... this theme do conceptions of and practises in regard to adolescence need more radical reconstruction. A mere accident of circumstance often condemns to criminal careers youths capable of the highest service to society, and for a mere brief season of temperamental outbreak or obstreperousness exposes them to all the infamy to which ignorant and cruel public opinion condemns all those who have once been detected on the wrong side of the invisible and arbitrary line of rectitude. The heart of criminal psychology ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... ladies attributed their occasional temperamental outbursts to the altitude, which was "getting on their nerves," it was no secret between them that their irritability was due to exasperation with Disston. With scientific skill and thoroughness they dissected him privately until he was hash, working their ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... the Latin influence—that of Horace and of Virgil. The influence of Horace on Luis de Leon has been often noted. It exists no doubt, but has perhaps been exaggerated: why should we suppose that his love of moderation was learnt from Horace and was not partly, at least, temperamental? May not the references to Horace be a characteristic of humanism? An opinion backed by the weight of classical authority must reach us with irresistible force, must it not? However this may be, the predominant influence in De los nombres de Cristo, as in all Luis ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... whose table adjoined mine. He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. He had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle; of one whom the clenched fist of Fate has smitten beneath the temperamental third waistcoat-button. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Of all temperamental men, Beethoven was doubtless the most so, and the anecdotes written of him are many. He was especially irascible. His domestic annoyances are revealed freely in his diary: "Nancy is too uneducated ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... is clear, and immediate action is imperative. But action is delayed by misunderstanding arising out of temperamental differences between the Governing Class and the People. Curiously enough the respective responsive characteristics of the Anglo Saxon and the Indians are paralleled by the two types of responses seen in all living matter. ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... progress, or at least is an anachronism. Germany has shown us the effects of rationalism, some would say a morbid and hypertrophied reason. This rationalism is certainly in part a product of systematic education and propaganda, a conscious exploitation of science, and it is in part temperamental. Such a result is always possible in a small state with a highly centralized form of government. It is a notorious fact that Germany's type of civilization can be spread neither by persuasion nor by force. If we may apply a biological analogy we may say that German Kultur in its ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... her brilliant temperamental unstable people, will always provide interesting players and charming opponents. I do not look to see France materially change her present position—which is one of extreme honour, of great friendliness, and keen competition. Her game will not greatly ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... soon became a definite and agreeable fact that she and the flower of Lucien's had things to say to each other—things of the rare temperamental sort that say themselves seldom. Within a fortnight she had made a niche for him in that private place where she kept the images of those toward whom she sustained this peculiarly sacred obligation, and to meet him had become one of those pleasures which ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... arises in the mind of one who intends to undertake machine design is, what constitutes natural fitness for it. There seems to be no positive basis on which to determine in advance a natural fitness for this work, but there are certain temperamental characteristics that undoubtedly have much ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... achievement. They are, almost without exception, entirely objective. Contemporary poetry is, on the other hand, very largely subjective; and even when it deals with events or incidents it invests them to such a degree with personal emotion and imagination, it so modifies and colours them with temperamental effects, that the resulting poem is much more a study of subjective conditions than a picture or drama of objective realities. This projection of the inward upon the outward world, in such a degree that the dividing line between the ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... the steps in the fading sunlight and the small music box flung herself into the outstretched arms with a force that was alarming. It was easy to see that Susan was most temperamental and would be a handful of anxieties in the years to come, ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... woman's face and body. His women are the pick of the lovely girls of Wuerzburg and its surroundings. Each one is adorably beautiful. Here is Veit Stoss." He took a portfolio from a shelf filled with portfolios. "Veit Stoss is superior to Riemenschneider in force of temperamental expression; he has capacities in his passions that make him superior, or at least equal, to Rembrandt." Ritter spread before them several reproductions of the master, showing the seriousness and sorrow inspiring all his works. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... spite of his precocious sexuality, M.O. had from the very first an extreme disgust for obscene stories, and for any association of sexual things with filthy words and anecdotes. Owing in part to this and in part to his temperamental skepticism, he disbelieved what associates told him regarding sexual emissions, only becoming convinced when he actually experienced them; and the facts of reproduction he denied indignantly until he read them in a medical work. Until he was well over 25 the physical aversion ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... even if famous, are naturally temperamental. They will rise in dozens at unexpected times, just as they will refuse all temptations for weeks on end. An Englishman, and no mean fisherman, once went to Nipigon to show the local inhabitants ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... you for going," said Latisan. He followed her, and to her profound amazement she discovered that a woodsman could be as temperamental as a prima donna. "I'm going, too, Mr. Flagg," he called over his shoulder. "I'm going for good and all where you're concerned. I'm done with you. I gave you your fair warning. Send another man north to ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... in the catholicity of his sympathy; in the perfect poise and self-control and imperturbability of his kindness. His biographers agree as to his never-failing good nature. He was without any of those fits of unrest and temperamental eccentricities which are supposed to be the "sign manual" of the child ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual. The serene, calm character of a Tolstoy will wish different methods for social reconstruction than the intense, overflowing personality of a Michael Bakunin or a Peter Kropotkin. Equally ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... this perfected instrument of analysis, stolen from the enemies of the Church, represented only one of the temperamental phases ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... were a pair of small, temperamental, clever girls, so trim and smart that one would think they had just left the Trianon Dairy Farm in Versailles Park, after having milked a pint of cream for the Queen, or for the royal favorite, Comtesse Du Barry. They wore Louis the XIV. (Street) high-heeled slippers, ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... not inclined her to spring rather than autumn, had she not inherited joyousness and the temperamental gayety of the well-born, she must long ago have failed, broken down. Behind her were generations of fathers and mothers who had laughed heartily all their days. The simple gift of wholesome laughter, often the best as often the only remedy for so many discomforts and absurdities ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... about that. If you were not so—so temperamental, I would say go back and begin again. But that is risky. It will be better to go on, I think, trying to recapture the more serious style, until the whole book it at least in some form. Then you will know exactly where you are and ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... foundation was in readiness for the handiwork of love, for Burton Raines, feeling that he could not concentrate on business in such sentimental environs, explained patiently that he was only an ordinary married man and that love rhapsodies to the tune of temperamental hammering upset him. So he had taken the morning off from his own business, to lay the foundation for ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... who had committed merciless robberies, cruel murders, heartless swindles, abominable depravities. I have felt greater temperamental aversion from many highly respectable persons than I did from them. Their crimes were one thing, they were another. Not that crime does not corrupt a man—stain him of its color. But there is always another side to him, a place in him which it has not dominated. ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... the front of the box and leaning towards her in conversational fashion. "Now to me half the evils of life lie in anticipation. When the time of danger actually arrives, those evils seem to take to themselves wings and fly away. Take the case of a great actress on her first night, an emotional and temperamental woman, besieged by fears until the curtain rises, and then carried away by her genius even unto the heights. Our curtain has risen, Miss Beverley. All we can do is to pray that the gods ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... one of a short row, and she did odd jobs for the women who were her neighbours. There were always babies to be looked after, and "bits of 'elp" needed, sometimes there were "movings" from one cottage to another, and "confinements" were plainly at once exhilarating and enriching. Her temperamental good cheer, combined with her experience, made her a desirable companion and assistant. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... In the colourless and pellucid dawn the wood of pines detached its columns of trunks and its dark green canopy very clearly against the rocks of the grey hillside. He kept his eyes fixed on it steadily, and sucked at an orange as he walked. That temperamental good-humoured coolness in the face of danger which had made him an officer liked by his men and appreciated by his superiors was gradually asserting itself. It was like going into battle. Arriving at the edge of the wood he sat down ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... the sort. He is a man of acute perceptions and fine feelings; and with those whom he knows well he is scrupulous to make due allowance for temperamental peculiarities. When you have learnt to know him well, when you have seen him in his rare moments of leisure and repose, you realize how abundantly he is possessed of those qualities which go to form what is called depth of character. His humour and good-fellowship ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... bad way. He bulged badly amidships and seemed greatly disturbed, not to say temperamental. With tenderness and gentle care, Denver cradled the damaged Charley in his arms and made his way back to the living shack at the mine. Space Cops were just hustling in the last of the prisoners and making ready to ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... quarters, with boarding-house memories receding into the background, it took but little time for a happy, home-y atmosphere to develop. Of course, with closer intimacy, there were temperamental adjustments, as always, but they came easily. The household machinery ran smoothly, almost from the first, because there was a machine, properly set up, operated and adjusted—rather than an ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... a man to be always searching for and racking his brain about things that either irritate or torment him. The cause of it is an internal morbid depression, combined often with an inward restlessness which is temperamental; when both are developed to their ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... is, to a son of communities strenuous as ours are strenuous, the most salient characteristic of the so-called Latin civilisations. It charms him and vexes him, according to his mood; and for the most part it represents a moral gulf between his own temperamental and indeed spiritual sense of race, and that of Frenchmen and Italians, far wider than the watery leagues that a steamer may annihilate. But I think his mood is wisest when he accepts the "foreign" easy surrender to all the senses as the sign of an unconscious philosophy ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... to her to express not only his attitude to Alice Rokeby, but his temperamental inability to call things by their right names, to face facts, to follow a straight line of thought. Here was the epitome of that evasive idealism which preferred shams ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... their daring conceptions, were founding our modern school of painting. Into this maelstrom of revolution, Berlioz—he of the flaming locks, "that hairy Romantic" as Thackeray calls him—flung himself with temperamental ardor; for he was a born fighter and always in opposition to someone. The audacity and dramatic energy of his compositions are but the natural result of the tendencies of the period. Berlioz's early career is of extreme interest to us English-speaking people, because the first strong ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... is a temperamental and whimsical old Negro of San Antonio, Texas, who still sees the sunny side of his 92 years, in spite of his total blindness. He was born and bred a slave in St. Hedwig, Bexar Co., Texas, the son of slave parents bought in Mississippi by his master, ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... into two families: Serbs and Bulgars. And here it is more difficult to distinguish the dividing line, for although there is a marked difference between the characteristics of the two peoples, both physical and temperamental, so nearly alike are their languages that speech forms no sure guide to distinguishing, especially in Macedonia, where dialects vary with a day's travel. The trend of popular feeling ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... to be wondered that McLean's austere Scotch soul stood in danger of being thawed in the sunshine of Lit-lit's eyes. She was pretty, and slender, and willowy; without the massive face and temperamental stolidity of the average squaw. "Lit-lit," so called from her fashion, even as a child, of being fluttery, of darting about from place to place like a butterfly, of being inconsequent and merry, and of laughing as lightly as she ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... attraction for her. When he had come to her orphaned, it had been with warm gratitude in his heart, and with the expectation of being loved. As he grew older, that policy of life had become accentuated. He was expectant in all that he did. His temperamental friendliness had carried him through college, winning for him a warm group of friends and the genuine regard of his professors. It was helping him to make his way in the place he had chosen for his field of action. He had not gone into the more fashionable part of town, but far over on the West ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... people should be put together. Often they should, but with discretion. If both are voluble or nervous or "temperamental," you may create a situation like putting two operatic sopranos in the same part and expecting them to ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... dangerous for the interviewer, since Americans were being murdered rather profusely in Mexico at the time in spite of the astute assurances of Mr. Bryan, and no matter how substantial his references the correspondent was likely to meet some temperamental and touchy soldier with a loaded rifle who would shoot first and afterward carry his papers to some ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... fault and proceed to apologize for him and find plausible reasons for extenuating his indiscretions in speech and his temperamental faults? We shall do neither. We shall let this "foul-mouthed," coarse Luther stand before the bar of public opinion just as he is. His way cannot be our way, but ultimately none of us will be his final judges. The character of the duties which Luther was sent to perform ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... proofreader that the letter r has never been popular in the South since the war. There is hauteur in my omission of it, and it is a fact that we can express ourselves with far more vigour without g's or r's than you of the North can with them. For expression with us is not scholastic, but temperamental! Where is Jack? ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... cover the same period and were fought broadly for the same causes. But the French Radical extremist could never see his way to subscribe to the Socialist creed. His stalwart individualism, in part temperamental, was also as a political working faith the result of a distrust of logic divorced from the experience and responsibility of actual administration. Somewhat similarly the English Socialist refused to let logic press him into the premature Internationalism of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... was a trifle temperamental, had fallen before the charms of one Lawrence Hastings. The manner of Hastings's advent in Montgomery is perhaps worthy of a few words, inasmuch as he came to stay. Hastings was an actor, who visited Montgomery one winter as a member of a company that ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... absolutely and almost plaintively simple, but that of no diplomat or courtier could be more polished in what was at once its weighty and its winning dignity. Such was his charm for the elect; but here again comes the question of temperament. Between Ruskin and Jowett there was a temperamental antipathy. An antipathy of this kind is a very different thing from any reasoned dislike, and of this general fact Ruskin and Jowett were types. I was myself another. Just as Jowett repelled so Ruskin attracted me. During my later days at Oxford I grew to know Ruskin ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... pleasant word and act, the disagreeable episode of the afternoon had completely evacuated that cell which in one second can raise us through the bluest ether to the heaven as understood by the prayer-book, or send us diving to the mud flats of the ocean bed to co-habit for a time with wingless and non-temperamental oddities. ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... was temperamental, Lanier had ideas. He was alive to the problems of his age and to the beauties of nature. One has only to think of the names of his poems to realize how many themes occupied his attention. He wrote of religion, social questions, science, philosophy, nature, love. "My head and my heart ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... triumph of happiness in your love, for you are not of those who cheat themselves. You choose rigorously, straining for the heart of the end as do all rigorists who are also hedonists. Because we are in possession of this bit of data as to your temperamental cosmos we can congratulate you with the more abandon. Oh, Herbert, do you know that this is a rampant spring, and that on leaving Barbara I tramped out of the confines into the green, happier, it almost seems, than I have ever been? Do you know that because you love a woman and she loves you, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... thing," said Hugh, lightly. He shoved the papers into the drawers and swung it shut. His heart was beating quite ridiculously. He would know at last—What wouldn't he know? "Uncle Hugh's girl, Uncle Hugh's girl," he told himself, and his temperamental responsiveness to the interest and the mystery of life expanded like a sea-anemone in ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... it across. "Heydenreich thought of that, too. He got this up for me, about five years ago. The intelligence test is based on the new French Surete test for mentally deficient criminals. Then there's a memory test, and tests for judgment and discrimination, semantic reactions, temperamental and emotional makeup, ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... learn to fly—numbering as they do thousands nowadays—cannot be endowed specially by nature for their task. There is indeed a wide latitude for temperamental differences—always provided that nothing more is required of a man than a certain average of skill. But if a man is to become a first-class pilot, one distinctly above the average, then the question of his temperament, as it influences ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... shabbiness of American fiction? We say that we have no faith in it, and we judge it by the books and stories that we casually read. If we are writers of fiction ourselves, perhaps we judge it by personal and temperamental methods and preferences, just as certain groups of American poets of widely different sympathies judge the poetry of their contemporaries to-day. Let us affirm our faith anyhow in our own spiritual substance. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... not take me over three or four weeks and he had agreed to pay me $2,500, aside from the bonus always attached to successful and quick work. Still, I wasn't sure that I wanted to go. I knew there was the danger of recognition, and I knew the kind of irresponsible, hotheaded, temperamental people I was going among. It was far more difficult, far more hazardous, than any mission I had ever undertaken, in England or France; even the tremendous responsibilities of the affair in the Black Forest carried with them none of the personal dangers that this did. When he ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... it best to ignore the untimely attempt at wit. "The difficulty in this case with both the father and the children was largely temperamental; but it was chiefly because of a defect in their way of thinking about Christmas. It was a very ancient error, by no means peculiar to this amiable family, and it consisted in thinking about Christmas with reference to one's self instead ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... was to be a dinner, the first since the move. Beside the household Mark was coming, and Crowder was expected on a later train with Pancha Lopez and her father—eight people, quite an affair. Fong had been marketing half the morning, and was now in the kitchen in a state of temperamental irritation, having even swept Lorry from his presence with a commanding, "Go away, Miss Lolly. I get clazy ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... pursued evenly, bent on choosing her words, "that I cannot personally understand your emancipation, that mine is different. I can only see the preponderance of evil, of deception, of injustice—it is that which shuts out everything else. And it's temperamental, I suppose. By looking at you, as I told you, I can see that your emancipation is positive, while mine remains negative. You have somehow regained a conviction that the good is predominant, that there is some ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... happy, my dear, and you can't make him happy. Bertram never was—and never will be—a marrying man. He's too temperamental—too thoroughly wrapped up in his Art. Girls have never meant anything to him but a beautiful picture to paint. And they never will. They can't. He's made that way. Listen! I can prove it to you. Up to this winter he's always been a care-free, happy, ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... issues, the going forth of the popular mind to decide between programs presented to it by circumstances, receives a brilliant refutation in the course of the powerful minority that was concentrating around the three great "Jacobins." The subjective side of politics, also the temperamental side, here found expression. Statecraft is an art; creative statesmen are like other artists. Just as the painter or the poet, seizing upon old subjects, uses them as outlets for his particular temper, his particular emotion, and as the temper, the emotion are what ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... potency he might as yet scarcely imagine. For, in an environment which for dearth of mental stimulus and incentive could scarcely be matched; amid poverty but slightly raised above actual want; untouched by the temperamental hopelessness which lies just beneath the surface of these dull, simple folk, this child lived a life of such ecstasy as might well excite the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... nothing good in the West and its ways? To affirm that the difference is due to the environment alone is impossible, for the environment seems to be essentially the same. This difference of attitude and action must be traced, it would seem, to differences of mental and temperamental characteristics. Those who seek to understand the secret of Japan's newly won power and reputation by looking simply at her newly acquired forms of government, her reconstructed national social structure, her recently constructed roads and railroads, telegraphs, representative government, etc., ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... at this crucial moment that Wilson's peculiar temperamental faults asserted themselves. Sorely he needed the sane advice of Colonel House, who would doubtless have found ways of placating the opposition. But that practical statesman was in London and the President lacked the capacity to arrange the ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... His temperamental instability may have been such that the desire for a change—the "wanderlust"—was driving him to distraction. Or perhaps, under the urge of his own subconscious feeling of failure, he may have convinced himself that if he could "shake" the old environment and all in it that hampered him, he ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... outward manner, in a world through which the artist is bound to go on a wholly 'secret errand,' as bad form, which shocked him as much in persons as bad style did in books. He hated every form of extravagance, noise, mental or physical, with a temperamental hatred: he suffered from it, in his nerves and in his mind. And he had no less dislike of whatever seemed to him either morbid or sordid, two words which he often used to express his distaste for things and people. He never would ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... and in the face of the tremendous barriers that shut me out. The repeated insistence upon the fact that Sally was a Bland aroused in me, whenever I met it, an irritation which I tried in vain to dispel. To be a Bland meant, after all, simply to be removed as far as possible from any temperamental relation ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... convicts would say, it had a "grouch" against the world. He never played with the other flies either. He was strong and healthy, too; for I studied him long to find out. His indisposition for play was temperamental, not physical. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... individuality. As a result of my close acquaintance with this band of primates, I feel more keenly than ever before the necessity of taking into account, in connection with all experimental analyses of behavior, the temperamental characteristics, experience, and ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... of subtle attractions and repulsions between men and women; of deep temperamental conflicts, accentuated and made dramatic by the tense atmosphere of the Arizona desert. The action of the story passes in a little Spanish mission town, where the hero, Lispenard, is settled as an Episcopal ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... attitude given by Chancellor von Buelow when discussing the conference in Parliament next year. The impression is general, both in and out of Germany, that Italy is only a half-hearted political ally. It is based on the temperamental difference between the Latin and the Teutonic races, on the popular sympathy between the French and Italian peoples, and to the supposedly reluctant support lent by Italy to Germany during the critical time of the conference, the extra-tour, as Prince Buelow, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... Enmities he has none. Enemy of him you may be,—if so you shall teach him aught which your good-will cannot,—were it only what experience will accrue from your ruin. Enemy and welcome, but enemy on high terms. He cannot hate anybody; his time is worth too much. Temperamental antagonisms may be suffered, but like feuds of emperors, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... one of the few Newport villas bordering on the sea, whose owners and architects had been sufficiently temperamental to take advantage of the natural beauties of its site. Upon huge black rocks, rising twenty-five or thirty feet, the house had been built. Windows on either side looked down upon the waters, ever shattering into white ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... audience, often lasting until midnight, and were charged with animosity which might flame into violence. All of the speakers lived under a strain, and under emotional pressure. Consequently they were not always easy to handle. Some of them were temperamental, a bit jealous of each other, and not always satisfied with the tours Susan mapped out for them. She expected of her colleagues what she herself could endure, but they often complained and sometimes refused ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... opens the double doors, looks in, and then enters. She is an adorable little human being, pretty, high-strung, temperamental, full of certain feminine fascination that defies analysis, which is partly due to the few faults she possesses. She is, of course, dressed in the conventional wedding-dress, a tulle veil thrown over ...
— The Girl with the Green Eyes - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... all the strain, and Constance had been once again mistress in Constance's house. Constance would never have admitted these facts, even to herself; and no one would ever have dared to suggest them to her. For with all her temperamental mildness she had her ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... to her breast. It was a recognized gesture with her, a physical holding of herself together in the last minute that preceded her temperamental ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... exactly as you liked, if you did not like it? Oh, Michael! Michael! Michael! He forgot that he had often been nearly as miserable as this when Michael had been free and happy. Not quite, but nearly. Now he attributed the whole of his recurrent wretchedness, which was largely temperamental, to his ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... said, "that my greatest drawback is a habit of excitement and temper. Excitable I shall probably be all my life. It's temperamental. But I'm learning ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... subjective, historic and ultimately, perhaps, racial and temperamental factor in the lives of peoples which makes it difficult, though not impossible, perhaps, to transmit political and religious institutions to people of a different racial type and a different social tradition. William James' essay, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... published on this important and interesting subject. The author made it the special subject of study and was thoroughly familiar with all temperamental questions. ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... senators representing a decadent New England state, himself master of the state political machine. Also, he is nobody's fool. He possesses the brain and strength of character to play his part. His most distinctive feature is his temperamental opportunism. ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... people are overborne by their own undirected and misguided energies. A mere temperamental outbreak in a brief period of obstreperousness exposes a promising boy to arrest and imprisonment, an accidental combination of circumstances too complicated and overwhelming to be coped with by an immature mind, condemns a growing lad ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... light task for a nation to achieve the temperamental qualities without which the institutions of free government are but an empty mockery. Our people are now successfully governing themselves, because for more than a thousand years they have been slowly fitting themselves, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... period dates that intense national antipathy felt by the English for the Irish race which has darkened all subsequent history. It was not originally a temperamental antipathy, or it would be impossible to explain the powerful attraction of Irish character, manners, and laws for the great bulk of the Anglo-Norman colonists. Nor within Ireland, even after the Reformation, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... at Home." The scene through which she had gone with the Captain had awakened deep emotions, and her voice was in the temperamental condition to give a sadly-weird effect to the lines of the chorus. When ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... for nervousness, illness, or temperamental conditions, but the same measuring-rod is applied to all with no discrimination, and she has the marks on the papers to prove her infallibility. If a pupil should dare to question the correctness of her grades, he would be punished or penalized for impertinence. Her grades ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... to be seeking sociability by bellowing ferociously, thudding his hard fist on the counter. Mayo was not easily surprised by the temperamental vagaries of queer old 'longcoast crabs like Captain Candage, but this sudden conversion did ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... which Theodore Roosevelt was now and again involved were largely temperamental. His mind was of that order which is prone to believe what it wants to believe. He did not take much time to think. He leaped at conclusions, and from his premise his conclusion was usually sound. His tastes ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... of the Italian Renaissance, with traces of Byzantine influence, and while a superficial view might pronounce them almost identical, a further study reveals marked individuality in conception and development. In each, the note of emphasis and the temperamental appeal are entirely distinct. The Court of Palms is simpler, more dignified, more conventional. The Court of Flowers is richer in ornament and suggestion, more softly brilliant in atmosphere. The prevailing color ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... a being who said "Yea" to life, accepted it as a glorious gift, and was determined to live it with all his might, it was Alan Seeger. Such a frame of mind is too instinctive and temperamental to be called optimism. It is not the result of a balancing of good and ill, and a reasoned decision that good preponderates. Rather it is a direct perception, an intuition, of the beauty and wonder of the universe—an intuition too overpowering to ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... he put as much of it in as possible in ordering a carefully chosen dinner, taking an incredible time over it, for, as the fever of his anticipation ran high, his manner became the more cool and leisurely, a temperamental trait ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... inconvenient articles of the Covenant, and treating Germany as a dog. To both it was, in one word, Poppycock. Sincerely, honestly, and ardently, both these journals thought like that. They could not help it; it was temperamental, and the ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... united to a nobleman of high degree. They have also come because in a music-drama action is demanded and choruses are desirable; being noisy, impressive, popular, comparatively cheap, and the participants less temperamental in character than soloists, therefore ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Temperamental elements enter here very largely. But we might at least take the whole matter out of the hands of charlatans and the half-informed and establish it upon a sound scientific basis. There is, beyond debate, a real place ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... view of life, or evolution,—the view which Herbert Spencer built into such a ponderous system of philosophy, and which such men as Huxley, Tyndall, Gifford, Haeckel, Verworn, and others, have upheld and illustrated,—is temperamental rather than logical. The view is distasteful to a certain type of mind—the flexible, imaginative, artistic, and literary type—the type that loves to see itself reflected in nature or that reads its own thoughts and emotions into nature. In a few eminent ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... The temperamental differences in successful speakers have been very great. One eminent speaker used practically no gesture; another was in almost constant action. One was quiet, modest, and conversational in his speaking style; another was impulsive and resistless ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... quite long enough to know your type. I see now you are quite what I thought you would be. I say you are entirely ineffective, and must leave your father alone. You do not understand him. You do not even know him. With me it is different. I have seen the world. He is temperamental, your father, a genius in his way, and a little mad, perhaps. Leave him to me, Monsieur, and it will be quite all right. Last night, it was so sudden, that I was frightened for a moment. I should have remembered he is erratic and apt to change ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... the change was in himself, and was merely the outcropping of the morbid vein which persists, with more or less continuity, in all the temperamental workings of the human mind. When the dinner was over and there was an adjournment to the sitting-room, little Miss Gilman presently found her reading-glasses and a book; and the doctor, in the act of filling two long-stemmed pipes ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... on the first day out, had told him that this stateroom was occupied by an invalid gentleman travelling alone, who preferred to remain there instead of trusting to his crutches on a temperamental deck. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers |
