"By choice" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by choice, draw anything polished; especially if complicated in form. Avoid all brass rods and curtain ornaments, chandeliers, plate, glass, and fine steel. A shining knob of a piece of furniture does not matter if it comes in your way; but do not fret yourself if it will ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... ELLEN,—I should not have written to you to-day by choice. Lately I have again been harassed with headache—the heavy electric atmosphere oppresses me much, yet I am less miserable just now than I was a little while ago. A severe shock came upon me about papa. He was suddenly attacked with acute inflammation of the eye. Mr. Ruddock was sent for; and ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... whoe'er thou art, whose steps are led. By choice or fate, these lonely shores to tread, No greater wonders east or west can boast Than yon small island on the pleasing coast. If e'er thy sight would blissful scenes explore, The current pass, and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... hands of the Bulgarians who fed them decently, a task which their own commissariat had failed in: or were contented followers of menial occupations in Bulgarian towns. I can recall Turkish boot-blacks and Turkish porters, but no Turks who looked like warriors, and if they are cut-throats by choice (I do not believe they are) they are very mild-mannered ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... of Cicero and Plutarch. A Place is cited out of Cicero and Cato Major, and commended; dare omni petenti, give to every one that asketh, how it is to be understood. We ought to give to Christ's Poor, and not to Monasteries. The Custom of burying in Churches blam'd. That we ought to give by Choice, how much, to whom, and to what End. We ought to deny ourselves of something that we may give it to the Poor. No Body can serve two Masters, is explained. A Grace after Meat out ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... intelligent classes to-day, and the Catholic Church is making headway in certain sections. After Emancipation, and still earlier in the North, the Negro churches largely severed such affiliations as they had had with the white churches, either by choice or by compulsion. The Baptist churches became independent, but the Methodists were compelled early to unite for purposes of episcopal government. This gave rise to the great African Methodist Church, the greatest Negro organization in the world, to the Zion Church and the Colored ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... said Signor Bruno frankly, "it is different. If I were not an Italian (which God forbid!) I think—I think, yes, I am sure, I would by choice have ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... projectiles darted beside and above us, and the last of these seemed to pass so close that I could have reached and touched it. The panic took possession of me. I grasped my camp-bed, rather by instinct than by choice, and, holding it desperately under my ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... by choice," returned the child. "We don't know our way, and the two men were very kind to us, and let us travel with them. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the fate of this generation—of you in the Congress and of me as President—to live with a struggle we did not start, in a world we did not make. But the pressures of life are not always distributed by choice. And while no nation has ever faced such a challenge, no nation has ever been so ready to seize the burden and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John F. Kennedy • John F. Kennedy
... legion of Macedonians; then, leaving a moderate interval, he formed a reserve of Italian troops, consisting principally of Bruttians, more of whom had followed him on his departure from Italy by compulsion and necessity than by choice. His cavalry also he placed in the wings, the Carthaginian occupying the right, the Numidian the left. Various were the means of exhortation employed in an army consisting of a mixture of so many different kinds of men; men differing in language, customs, laws, arms, dress, and appearance, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... beside the way he looked to be sleepin'. 'N' he don't remember nothin' a tall to-day, not one livin' doughnut does that boy recolleck, 'n' she says 'f she didn't know it to be so on a'count o' the empty tin she'd doubt herself an' believe him by choice, he looks so truthful. But empty tins is empty tins, 'n' no one can ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... side of the island everything reminded me that we had been shipwrecked; and I could not help thinking of home and my own country; but here we appear as if we had been long settled, and as if we had come here by choice." ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the hidden feelings of my heart were not regulated by choice: whatever the Prince may be, there is nothing in him to make me prefer his love. Don Silvio shows, as well as he, all the qualities of a renowned hero. The same noble virtues and the same high birth made me hesitate whom to prefer. If aught but merit could gain my heart, ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... down-breaking sieges in them, must largely be left untold—Hilary's, Anna's, Flora's, all. Kincaid was in greater temptation than he knew. Many a battery boy, sick, sound or wounded—Charlie for one—saw it more plainly than he. Anna, supposed to be far away and away by choice, was still under the whole command's impeachment, while Flora, amid conditions that gave every week the passional value of a peacetime year, was here at hand, an ever-ministering angel to them and to ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... that we of a bygone age used to read surreptitiously in school hours, you will learn that "the Cougar is a fearsome beast of invincible prowess. He can kill a Buffalo or an ox with a blow of his paw, and run off with it at full speed or carry it up a tree to devour, and he is by choice a man-eater. Commonly uttering the cry of a woman in distress to decoy the gallant victim to his doom." If, on the other hand, you consult some careful natural histories, or one or two of the seasoned guides, you learn that the ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... motto,—and it is written on the stars and the sod alike,—starve mentally, starve morally, starve physically. It is an inexorable law of nature that whatever is not used, dies. "Nothing for nothing," is her maxim. If we are idle and shiftless by choice, we shall be ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... and not unwilling now to give A respite to this passion, I paced on 60 With brisk and eager steps; and came, at length, To a green shady place, [E] where down I sate Beneath a tree, slackening my thoughts by choice, And settling into gentler happiness. 'Twas autumn, and a clear and placid day, 65 With warmth, as much as needed, from a sun Two hours declined towards the west; a day With silver clouds, and sunshine on the grass, And in the sheltered ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... revealing a narrow interstice between the body of the trunk and the exterior. In this she dropped the will, and fastened it securely. What and who instigated her to evil? Shall any dare say it was religion? She was a Catholic by birthright—but an alien from the practices of her holy faith by choice, and through human pride and worldliness—did its spirit lead her into crime? Judge of its effects by May's humble and earnest life. She was true and practical in her character, and acted out the precepts of her faith. Judge it, by the wonderful ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... his shady walk, then came out a little into the sun, as though to partake of its warmth for a minute in memory of his absent child. And then the dismal monotonous walk recommenced, until, exhausted, he regained the chamber and his bed, his domicile by choice. For several days the comte did not speak a single word. He refused to receive the visits that were paid him, and during the night he was seen to relight his lamp and pass long hours in writing, ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... not by accident,—it is by choice that this seed of the word is sown on filthy ground: it is sown there, because it will grow best there. The experience of a righteous human tribunal does not supply the material of this lesson. Where the presiding judge is just, a poor injured widow ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... eminence (one of these was Chaucer's friend, "the philosophical Strode"), they in truth never played a more than secondary part in this country, to whose soil the delicate machinery of the Inquisition, of which they were by choice the managers, was never congenial. Of far greater importance for the population of England at large was the Order of the Franciscans or (as they were here wont to call themselves or to be called) Minorites or Grey Friars. To them the poor had ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... should have gradually ripened up to a moment when we should have become transfigured, and in the surpassing brilliance have been translated to higher planes of being. Perhaps our Lord had reached this material consummation, and was now on the wonderful border land, and could by choice slip into ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... Again, partly by choice and partly by environment, we find society drawn together in other groups, more or less influenced by those just enumerated. From the earliest forms of social existence we find men are grouped together on the basis of wealth. The interests of the rich are common, as are also the {453} interests ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... residence the rugged missionary of Otsego who came to report to him, but he was quite unable to enter into a missionary enthusiasm that appeared to him fanatical, or to understand the character of an educated man who lived by choice among the people of rude settlements and untamed forests. Nash was so indignant at the attitude of his chief that he resolved not to receive from his hands the ordination to the priesthood, and it was not until the autumn of 1801, shortly after the consecration of the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Moore as ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... arm seize the land from the rest, and make slaves of them, or bring desert land into cultivation, over which they have therefore, within certain limits, true personal right; or, by industry, accumulate other property, or by choice devote themselves to intellectual pursuits, and, though poor, obtain an acknowledged superiority of position, shown by benefits conferred in discovery, or in teaching, or in gifts of art. This is all in the simple course of the law of ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... liberty and our country should make no mistake: America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom. We will defend our allies and our interests. We will show purpose without arrogance. We will meet aggression and bad faith with resolve and strength. And to all ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... belong to the Arctic region, as naturally as the white bear and the walrus. At the early time we are considering in America, glaciers had not retreated very far. So his climatic surroundings must have been much the same as at present. But the Eskimo may not live where he does now by choice: we may behold in him a people driven from a fairer heritage, who found the ice-fields of the North more endurable than the savage enemy who envied him his possession. It seems very reasonable to suppose that the Eskimos long inhabited this country before the arrival ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... a great deal depends upon outlook. In some ways we recognize this fact. We do not by choice live in a house whose windows front a blank wall. A little patch of green grass, a tree, a peep of sky, or even the traffic of a busy street—anything rather than a blank wall. That is a sound instinct, but it ought ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... spike its first wavering tap, the president of the road drove it home, and "Susie" was bound in wedlock to the Age. Married for money, some might say. Yet married, bound—despite all incompatibilities—to be shaped—if not at once by choice, then at last by merciless necessity—to all that Age's lines and standards, to walk wherever it should lead, partner in all its ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... help harpooning him," confessed the skipper. "He's a darned old hypocrite, cheating widders and orphans by choice because they 'ain't got the spunk to razoo back, and I've allus enjoyed fighting such as him. Him and me is due for a row. But I'll hold off the best I can till we have ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... why do I try to give you this personal description of him? If you ever subscribed to a Ladies' Charity in London, you know Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite as well as I do. He was a barrister by profession; a ladies' man by temperament; and a good Samaritan by choice. Female benevolence and female destitution could do nothing without him. Maternal societies for confining poor women; Magdalen societies for rescuing poor women; strong-minded societies for putting ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... within the bounds of the mat. But it was too short, his curled up position too uncomfortable, and so he overflowed it and could scarcely be said to be sleeping on the mat. It was too late to arouse the landlady and although he was there by choice, it could ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... artistic shape, but clapping on a patch here and another there, and ultimately getting out what they want to say, and generally with a result of sufficiently good sense, but in some such disorganized mass as if they had thrown it up rather than spoken it. It seemed to me that this was almost as much by choice as necessity. An Englishman, ambitious of public favor, should not be too smooth. If an orator is glib, his countrymen distrust him. They dislike smartness. The stronger and heavier his thoughts, the better, provided there be an element of commonplace running ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bracelets linked together by a long, silver-gilt chain passed through a silken loop at her waist. From the loop swung a tiny golden padlock, but in the lock stood an even tinier key, signifying that she was a higher caste than her husband or consort, that her fettering was by choice and not command. ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... person, with long Roman nose, a high forehead, and lively prominent eye, beaming from under a green velvet travelling-cap with gold tassel. He was holding forth with all the fluency of a man who talks well and likes to exert his talent. He was of Rome; a surgeon by profession, a poet by choice, and one who was something of an improvvisatore. He soon gave the Englishman abundance ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... Republican, in theory at all events, and all his sympathies were engaged on the side of the oppressed nationalities of Europe. A man of culture, of commanding abilities, and of considerable wealth, he lived by choice in the plainest fashion, delighting to be known as one of the people. He dressed at all times in the kind of suit which a Northumbrian pitman wears when not actually at work. Years afterwards, when he had just thrilled all England by a great ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... Milton's prose is not poetical prose, but a different thing, the prose of a poet; not like Taylor's, loaded with imagery on the outside; but coloured by imagination from within. Milton is the first English writer who, possessing in the ancient models a standard of the effect which could be produced by choice of words, set himself to the conscious study of our native tongue with a firm faith in its as yet undeveloped powers as an instrument ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... therefore, whom frequent failures have made desperate, cease to form resolutions; and they who are become cunning, do not tell them. Those who do not make them are very few, but of their effect little is perceived; for scarcely any man persists in a course of life planned by choice, but as he is restrained from deviation by some external power. He who may live as he will, seldom lives long in the observation of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... who art thou, and from whence arrived? (For I remember not thy face in heaven) Or by command, or hither led by choice? Or wander'st thou within this lucid orb, And, strayed from those fair fields of light above, Amidst this new creation want'st a guide, To ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... enters not into the ordained system of Providence, and cannot be imputed to it. The Creator does not will the evil which man does, in abusing the liberty which He gives him. He has made him free in order that he may do not evil but good by choice. To murmur because God does not hinder him from doing evil, is to murmur because He made him of an excellent nature, attached to his actions the moral character which ennobles them, and gave him a right to virtue. What! in order to prevent man from being wicked, ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... House of Lords with reference to affairs which are the business of other people. According to him, the red cassocks of the acolytes at St. Margaret's are cut out of the very skirts of the Woman of Babylon, and Father Turney and his curates—they're all Fathers there, and celibates by choice—are wolves in wool, and Mephistophelean plotters against the liberties of the Church. Punch published a cartoon of the Bishop shutting his eyes and charging at a windmill in a cope and chasuble. He is sending out a string of Protestant-Church-Integrity vans all over England, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... have always remarked it as one of the austere Roman features in the mind of Wordsworth, that of all poets he has the least sympathy, effeminate or not effeminate, with romantic disinterestedness. He cannot bear to hear of a man working by choice for nothing, which certainly is an infirmity, where at all it arises from want of energy or of just self-appreciation, but still an amiable one, and in certain directions a sublime one. Walker had no such infirmity. He laboured ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... very monotonous. His life's happiness consisted in the acceptance of every misfortune without a murmur, and its wealth, in the total renunciation of life's joys and material benefits. He was a beggar by choice, a fantastic personage whose life was sacrificed to an idea of which he ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... yet, as I travel leisurely, and do not venture to fatigue myself. My voyage was but of four hours. I was sick only by choice and precaution, and find myself in perfect health. The enemy, I hope, has not returned to pinch you again, and that you defy the foul fiend. The weather is but lukewarm, and I should choose to have all ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... unlovely night for long and arduous travel. There were few pleasure-passengers on the express, and if one could have looked through the carriage windows, blurred with damp mist, one would have seen upon almost every face the look—resigned or resolute—of those who fare forth by necessity rather than by choice. In the sleeping-cars all the berths were occupied, but here and them throughout the length of the train an occasional traveller slept on the seat of his carriage, wrapped in coats and rugs, while in the dining-saloon a couple of sleepy waiters ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... Petersburg does not know or appreciate. The fact that I am at present an expatriate, as you have so aptly stated, is due to reasons which I need not explain, and which do not concern us just now. The fact that I am one, has stationed me in New York by choice, and not by direction; but I thank God that I am here to greet you upon your arrival because I hope by very plain speaking to change a course you have determined upon, ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... brilliant part in the military activities which marked the winning of Mexican Independence from Spain in the eighteen-twenties, and also in the incessant Indian wars. He was a fighter by necessity, but also by choice. They shed blood with grace and nonchalance in those days, and the Delcasars were always ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... his gentle shade takes any satisfaction in the discovery? His was by choice a vita fallens. Early in life he made, as we learn from a passage in Centuries of Meditations, his election between worldly prosperity and the life of the Spirit, between the chase of fleeting phenomena and rest ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... substance, an agent, or at least to suppose it, since freedom can properly be attributed to nothing else. If freedom can with any propriety of speech be applied to power, it may be attributed to the power that is in a man to produce, or forbear producing, motion in parts of his body, by choice or preference; which is that which denominates him free, and is freedom itself. But if any one should ask, whether freedom were free, he would be suspected not to understand well what he said; and he would be thought to deserve Midas's ears, who, knowing that ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... irregular principles and irregular defects—and is the same in conscience as deformity is in the body, or peevishness in the affections. It is not enough that the conscience be taught by nature; but it must be taught by God, conducted by reason, made operative by discourse, assisted by choice, instructed by laws and sober principles; and then it is right, and it may be sure. All the general measures of justice, are the laws of God, and therefore they constitute the general rules of government for the conscience; but necessity also ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... "He lives the life of a martyr by choice! Some men do—and like it! They need not do it;—there is not the least necessity in the world for their deliberately sticking a knife into their hearts and walking about with it in a kind of idiot rapture. It must hurt;—but they seem to ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... be seen that in committing this sin a man by choice wilfully places himself in such a position, in reference to the inner dictations of the Spirit, that the latter is killed or destroyed. He can blaspheme God, and the convictions of the Spirit in him be unaffected, save that continual so doing might lessen them; but when ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... to deliver us, since not in binding only but in loosing those long bound the power has been given to thee; for you know the mind of Christ who are daily taught by your sacred teacher Peter to feed Christ's sheep entrusted to you through the whole habitable world, collected not by force, but by choice, and with the great doctor Paul cry to us your subjects 'not because we exercise dominion over your faith, but we are helpers in your joy'. 'Hasten then to help that east from which the Saviour sent to you the two great lights of day, Peter and ...
— 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
... to recognise how much baseness and brutality there is in mere libertinism,—how poor and paltry an animal man becomes when he serves himself and his passions only, my attraction for him diminished,—I grew to realise that I could never raise him out of the mud, because he had lived by choice too long in it,—I could never persuade him to be true, even to himself, because he found the ways of falsehood and deceit more amusing. He did unworthy things, which I could not, with all my admiration for him, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... their pupil any marks of genius for which he merited reward, or no vacancy at Oxford offered them an opportunity to bestow upon him the reward provided for merit by William of Wykeham; certain it is, that to an Oxford fellowship our poet did not succeed. By chance, or by choice, New College cannot claim the honour of numbering among its fellows him who wrote ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... should, I believe, myself long ago have been a Christian. I daily pray to the Supreme Power that my stubborn nature may yet so far yield, that I may be able, with a free and full assent, to call myself a follower of Christ. A Greek by birth, a Palmyrene by choice and adoption, a Roman by necessity—and these are all honorable names—I would yet rather be a Christian than either. Strange that, with so strong desires after a greater good, I should remain fixed where I have ever been! Stranger still, seeing I have moved ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... He was born in America, educated there and elsewhere, a little while in Paris, a little while at Bonn, and, like all Irishmen, he was baned with the wandering foot; for the man who is homeless by choice has a subtle poison in his blood. He was at Bonn when the Civil War came. He went back to America and threw himself into the fight with all the ardor that had made his forebears famous in the service of the worthless Stuarts. It wasn't a question ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... voluntary and innocuous retreat. The safety of the majority had to be bought at a heavy price in casualties, in loss of guns and material, in suffering for the troops and civilians, and in national dejection. What might have been cheerfully done by choice was despondently done ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... variety; that to the end of his life, though ignorant of what literary men regard as the a-b-c of knowledge, he was supremely well satisfied with himself; that till he was past forty he worked irregularly at odd jobs, but was by choice a loafer; that he was a man of superb physical health and gloried in his body, without much regard for moral standards; that his strength was broken by nursing wounded soldiers during the war, a beautiful and unselfish service; that he was then a government clerk in Washington ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... come, by choice or chance, To Modena, where still religiously Among her ancient trophies is preserved Bologna's bucket (in its chain it hangs Within that reverend tower, the Guirlandine), Stop at a Palace near the Reggio-gate. Dwelt in of ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... pleasant English village was now a happy fete of summer joys and occupations. Oh! the hill prospects and the shady gardens around the coasts. And when he went inland he would return by choice across the Downs, and in the patriarchal valleys where nothing is heard but the bell-wether he would stand in the great, lonely darkness, and see the lights of Brighton brighten the sky above the ridges, and climbing up the ridges, he gazed ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... by the physical and mathematical law of production, before they are voluntarily associated by choice. Therefore, equality of conditions is demanded by justice; that is, by strict social law: esteem, friendship, gratitude, admiration, all fall within the domain of EQUITABLE or ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... of the hill on which Asisi is built a farm-school was established a few years ago, the first director being the Benedictine abate Lisi, a nobleman by birth and a farmer-monk by choice. His death a year or two ago was deeply regretted. To this establishment boys are sent, instead of to prison, after their first conviction for an offence against the law. We saw this school on a former visit to Asisi, and were much amused to see the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... men who did not hold fiefs was extremely delicate and often painful, for they were by natural right dependent upon those on whose domain they resided. In fact, the greater part of these nobles without lands became by choice the King's men, and remained attached to his service. If this failed them, they took lands on lease, so as to support themselves and their families, and to avoid falling into absolute servitude. In the event of a change of proprietor, they changed with the land into new hands. Nevertheless, ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... things, the Church's abolition. He had power of utterance. Roused to combat by the proletarian challenge, he could make his voice ring in the ears of men, even though he used a symbolism which he would not by choice have adopted. ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... thee! Give thou proof Thou'rt the daughter of the mighty—his Who where he moves creates the wonderful. Not to herself the woman must belong, Annexed and bound to alien destinies. But she performs the best part, she the wisest, Who can transmute the alien into self, Meet and disarm necessity by choice; And what must be, take freely to her heart, And bear and foster it ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... with his parties of pleasure the most impious discourses, and as a precious refinement, to hold the most outrageous orgies on the most holy days, as he did several times during his Regency on Good Friday, by choice, and on other similar days. The more debauched a man was, the more he esteemed him; and I have unceasingly seen him in admiration, that reached almost to veneration for the Grand Prieur,—because for forty years he had always gone to bed drunk, and had never ceased to keep ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the use of spirited beverages, usually implies abstinence, which is certainly not democratic if it is applied in a formally imposed prohibition without any local option. Abstinence by choice, however, is purely a matter of self-determination. But in an area where drinking was a commonly accepted practice, such as the frontier, the term signifies moderation. In the Fair Play territory drinking, but not drunkenness, was condoned. ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... that he was bold to act but timid to speak. He had no fear of death. When the ponds were first frozen, or when the bogs were most dangerous in the spring, when the quagmires were hidden under richly flowering grasses and cloudberry, he took his way over them by choice. He seemed to feel the need of exposing himself to danger as a compensation for the storms and terrors of the ocean, which he had no longer to meet. At night he was afraid in the woods, and even ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... eyes," said Dean boldly, that is boldly for a chauffeur, but he knew that Jane knew he wasn't a chauffeur except by choice, so ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... from the crime of a thief, flying from a friendly pursuit with a notorious reprobate; afterwards implicated in some discreditable transaction about a horse, rejecting all—every hand that could save him, clinging by choice to the lowest companions and the meanest-habits, disappearing from the country, and last seen, ten years ago—the beard not yet on his chin—with that same reprobate of whom I have spoken, in Paris; a day or so only before his companion, a coiner—a ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... to pick up a living; indeed with his sensitive bill I do not believe a Snipe, if he found anything eatable, could pick it off the hard ground. Probably the Snipes I have found in these unlikely places were not there by choice, but because driven from their more favourite places by the continual gunning going on in ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... main purpose in this book is to teach precision in writing; and of good writing (which, essentially, is clear thinking made visible) precision is the point of capital concern. It is attained by choice of the word that accurately and adequately expresses what the writer has in mind, and by exclusion of that which either denotes or connotes something else. As Quintilian puts it, the writer should so write that his reader not only ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... Life has Duties which are proper to it. Those who are determined by Choice to any particular kind of Business, are indeed more happy than those who are determined by Necessity, but both are under an equal Obligation of fixing on Employments, which may be either useful to themselves ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... melancholy and with a distracted air, as one whose life had met some fatal cross or blight. He saluted hardly anybody except his entertainers and the Doctor. One would have said, to look at him, that he was not at the party by choice; and it was natural enough to think, with Susy Pettingill, that it must have been a freak of the dark girl's which brought him there, for he had the air of a shy ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Jew by choice," he said; "after much prayer and study of Scripture, I have come to the conclusion that, as Judaism was the first religion, so it's to be the last. Christianity I consider an episode ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... that men's characters and habits are formed in the earliest years of their lives. Froude was by profession and by choice a man of letters. He loved writing, and whatever he read, or heard, or saw, turned itself without effort into literary shape. The occupations and amusements of his life can be traced in his Short Studies. But he had not been reared in a literary atmosphere. He had been brought ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... never shivering after his bath, perhaps because he avoided the shade and always ran into the sunshine, Louis was like one of those cautious blossoms that close their petals to the blast and refuse to open unless to a clear sky. He ate little, and drank water only; either by instinct or by choice he was averse to any exertion that made a demand on his strength; his movements were few and simple, like those of Orientals or of savages, with whom gravity seems ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... understand the essentials of good breeding. Hence it came that the other rooms of the house were by degrees almost neglected. Both the dining-room and drawing-room grew very cold, cold as with the coldness of what is dead; and though he slept in the same part of the house by choice, not often did the young laird enter either. But he had concerning them, the latter in particular, a notion of vastness and grandeur; and along with that, a vague sense of sanctity, which it is not quite easy to define or ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... seventy Years Continuance, have never failed, or forsaken, or given us Cause of Offence, surely merit some Consideration, some grateful and chearing Ray to warm them to a Sense that Protestants are not, by Choice, of a ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... always say, "You know—sandy-haired fellow." This described him—hair, beard, moustache. Sandy-haired men have no age until they are fifty-five, and Axon was not fifty-five. He was a pigeon-flyer by choice, and a clerk in order that he might be a pigeon-flyer. His fault was that, with no moral right whatever to do so, he would treat Louis Fores as a business equal in the office and as a social equal ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... John Silence was regarded as an eccentric, because he was rich by accident, and by choice—a doctor. That a man of independent means should devote his time to doctoring, chiefly doctoring folk who could not pay, passed their comprehension entirely. The native nobility of a soul whose first desire was to help those who could not help themselves, ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... By choice cookery is meant exactly what the words imply. There will be no attempt to teach family or inexpensive cooking, those branches of domestic economy having been so excellently treated by capable hands already. It may be said en passant, however, that even choice cooking is not ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... effects are produced on the minds of the men engaged in such a contest as this, or, indeed, in any contest of arms whatever, when it assumes the proportions of a regular war. The volunteering of our young men of all classes, in numbers so immense, is an extraordinary phenomenon. These soldiers by choice, many of them educated and intelligent, and impelled by deliberate considerations of principle, willingly undergo the hard labor of military training, of marches and campaigns, and the still more trying inactivity of life in camps and fortresses, in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... be found, and where, one May morning, as I was higgling over the purchase of a fine Virgil, I made the acquaintance of a remarkable young gentleman, Mr. Sam Adams, a genius by birth, a maltster by trade, and a politician by choice. We would discuss books together in Master Wilkins', or slip out to a retired inn called "The Two Palaverers" and discuss politics over a glass of wine and a pipe of tobacco. I liked him so much that I was afraid to tell him I had ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... repugnance for their horrid work, but who kill without horror, and even without excitement. Again, the nature of the wound shows that the murderer is a strong man; you no doubt know that weak men with feeble muscles strike 'deep' by choice, that is to say with a pointed weapon and aiming at a vital organ, whereas powerful murderers have a predilection for blows dealt 'superficially,' and for broad, ghastly wounds. Besides, that is only following a natural law; a weak man finesses with death, tries to make ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... of a select set of young men in his own rank, by choice and necessity integer vitae, he divided his time between the seclusion of study and writing letters, in which kind of literature he was perhaps the most prolific writer of his time. In 1814 Carlyle completed his course ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... A vegetarian by choice and usually by necessity, Bruin is accused of anthropophagy, and every child is taught that the depths of the woodland are infested by ravening bears with a morbid taste for tender youth. Poor, harried, timid Ursus, nosing ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... these things? Was the world cruel by choice to a girl against whom nothing more serious could be charged than that she ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... witness to the artistic popularity of this quiet spot. The panels of the parlour are covered with sketches, some in oil, some in water-colour, souvenirs with which visitors have memorialized their stay. Some of these hasty effects are very good, and the general effect is heightened by choice old pottery, tastefully arranged above. Villiers-sur-Morin would be an admirable summer resort for an artist fond of hanging woods, running streams, and green pastures, and a dozen more possessing the same ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... in this place at ease and by choice, and had no evils to suffer or to fear; yet the imaginations excited by the view of an unknown and untravelled wilderness are not such as arise in the artificial solitude of parks and gardens, a flattering notion of self-sufficiency, a placid indulgence ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... was very simple: coffee in the morning, tea in the evening, animal food by choice only once a day, wine only when with others using it, but always pie at breakfast. "It stood before him and was the first thing eaten." Ten o'clock was his bed-time, six his hour of rising until the last ten years of his life, when he rose at seven. Work or company sometimes led ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... only one definite picture. The Moon-being is therefore in a position to regulate his conduct by means of these pictures, as present-day man does by means of his perceptions. We must nevertheless be careful to notice that conduct, regulated by perception, is governed by choice whereas action, under the influence of the pictures we have described, takes place as if ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... which will effectively antidote the effect of the poison. In practically all cases, however, poisoning may be avoided if care is taken to prevent animals from being closely confined where this plant is abundant, as they never eat the plant by choice. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... the majority of the Assembly, was now displayed in a manner that penetrated the dullest imagination, and the coldest heart; and it was found, that, armed with decrees, aided by revolutionary committees, revolutionary troops, and revolutionary vehicles of destruction,* missionaries selected by choice from the whole representation, had, in the city of Nantes alone, and under the mask of enthusiastic patriotism, sacrificed thirty ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... of the composer is to bring about these repetitions in such a way that the ear will recognize them as being the same material and will nevertheless not grow weary of them. This is accomplished by varying the material (cf. thematic development), by introducing contrasting material, and by choice of key. ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... of dreamers in the South by choice and because of climatic conditions," said Mrs. Guilford Dudley in an eloquent address. After a keenly sarcastic comparison between southern chivalry and the unjust laws for women, and the observation that "the only business a southern ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... scarcely ever devour a plant or root, wherein we do not destroy innumerable animalculae. But, besides what I have said of nature's being quite altered and changed from what was originally intended, there is a great difference between destroying and extinguishing animal life by choice and election, to gratify our appetites, and indulge concupiscence, and the casual and unavoidable crushing of those who, perhaps, otherwise would die within the day, or at most the year, and who obtain but an inferior kind of existence and ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... begins that melancholy strain in his correspondence which marks the disappointment of the man who had staked too great a quantity of his happiness on the poetical die. This is the critical moment of life when our character is formed by habit, and our fate is decided by choice. Was Shenstone to become an active or contemplative ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... rate Aunt Jen suspected this Mr. Poole at once. But so she would the Lord Chancellor of England himself, for the good reason that by choice and custom he ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... I ran across an acquaintance I had met for the first time on the Valdez trail some years earlier. His name was Samuel Blythe. By birth he was English, by choice cosmopolitan. Possessed of more money than he knew what to do with, he spent a great deal of time exploring unknown corners of the earth. He was as well known at Hong-Kong and Simla as in Paris and Vienna. Within the ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... different. I am, from my unhappy fate, obliged to move by the will of others, and to be in places which I would by my own will gladly avoid. Besides, I am, except for these few minutes, no participator of the revels—a spectator only, and attended by my servants. Your situation is different—you are here by choice, the partaker and minister of the pleasures of a class below you in education, birth, and fortunes. If I speak harshly, Mr. Latimer,' she added, with much sweetness of ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... simple act enough; but to do so delicately, reverently, without forcing one's preferences on those of another, may not always be so simple. Thane was not a Goth nor a Vandal; by choice he would have sought to preserve the amenities of life; but a meek man he was not, and the thing he now desired was, he considered, well worth the sacrifice of such small pretensions as his ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... unconsciously, they have (except in the case of a great genius here and there) imitated, and because as a necessary consequence they fall into the numerus—into the gross as they would themselves have said—who must be represented only by choice examples and not enumerated or criticised ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... one Who takes love in, like some sweet bird, and holds The winged fluttering stranger to his breast, Till, after transient stay, all unaware It leaves him: it has flown. No; this may live In memory,—loved till death. He was not vile; For who by choice would part with that pure bird, And lose the exaltation of its song? He had not strength of will to keep it fast, Nor warmth of heart to keep it warm, nor life Of thought to make the echo sound for him After the ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... stupidity has allowed the joy of life which, as Epikuros and Platina believe, may be indulged in with perfect virtue and honesty to become a byword among all good people who are not gastronomers either by birth, by choice or by training. ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... what is generally called a smug, but he was not one by choice but by compulsion, which is the best kind I should think. He was so totally different from any other kind of friend I have ever had that I sometimes caught myself wondering whether I really liked him. But I could always satisfy myself about ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... There are no marriageable girls in any of these three ato now, and the small girls occupy near-by o'-lag. These three o'-lag will be rebuilt when the girls are large enough to cook food for the men who build. The o'-lag of Amkawa is in Buyayyeng near the o'-lag of the latter; it is there by choice of the occupants. ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... stranger. This degree of seclusion does not prevail in China, as we had opportunities of observing at several places never before visited by Europeans. The Chinese account quoted in the Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses, vol. 23, states that the young men and women marry on this island by choice, and not, as in China, by a contract made without any personal knowledge of each other. We took every opportunity of interrogating them on this subject, but as the question was always evaded, we fear that their practice in this respect is not so praiseworthy ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... that Philip, either if he was forced into his former measures, or if he were now giving up the Thebans, would pertinaciously oppose their enemies; his present conduct rather shows that he adopted those measures by choice. All things prove to a correct observer that his whole plan of action is against our state. And this has now become to him a sort of necessity. Consider. He desires empire; he conceives you to be his only opponents. He has been for some ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... the changes that they brought were few. The descendants of the ancient criminals remained in the ruined city, at first of necessity, afterwards by choice, finding there fuel and shelter in abundance besides large stores of non-perishable food supplies. When, in the next generation, these provisions became exhausted it was inevitable that the refugees should fix covetous eyes upon the threshing-floors and herd-stalls of their ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... worst had fall'n which could befall, He stood, a stranger in this breathing world, An erring spirit from another hurled; A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped By choice the perils he by chance escaped; But ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... ventures far from its home during the daytime, it easily escapes the attacks of its foes, with the exception of man. It readily takes to the water when pursued, and swims well, but does not enter it by choice. The Indian hunter, however, attacks the creature with a skill it ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... more than sufficient to keep herself in positive luxury if she chose,—but for this she had no taste. Her little rooms in Miss Leigh's house satisfied all her ideas of rest and comfort, and she stayed on with the kind old lady by choice and affection, helping her in many ways, and submitting to her guidance in every little social matter with the charming humility of a docile and obedient spirit all too rare in these days when youth is more full of effrontery than modesty. She had ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... have no sort of doubt in my own mind that the soul of your child was a living thing, a spirit which has lived before, and will live again. Souls, I believe, come to the brink of life, out of some unknown place, and by choice or impelled by some need for experience, take shape. I don't know how or why this is—I only believe that it is so. If your child had lived, you would have become aware of its soul; you would have found it to have perfectly distinct qualities ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... William M. Tweed, and his name will always be associated in the public mind with political bossdom. This is his immortality. He was a chairmaker by trade, a vulgar good fellow by nature, a politician by circumstances, a boss by evolution, and a grafter by choice. He became grand sachem of Tammany and chairman of the general committee. This committee he ruled with blunt directness. When he wanted a question carried, he failed to ask for the negative votes; and ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... proper means for the desired activities, such as hunting, fishing, tramping, and boating. It does not provide experiences with animals, such as boys have on the farm. Much of the boy's day is spent in school in a kind of work not at all like what he would do by choice. There is not much home life. Usually there is not the proper parental control. Seldom do the parents interest themselves in planning for the activities of their children. The result is that the boys come together on the streets and form a ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... you hear a still small voice Under your waistcoat, where your heart is: "We fought by contract, not by choice, Ay, and the spoils are not our party's; The Tories may be beat, but we know This is not ASQUITH'S, it is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... hat, sauntered into the cul-de-sac to which Sapps Court was an appendix. He appeared to be unconcerned in human affairs, and indeed independent of Time, Space, and Circumstance. He addressed a creature that was hanging upside down on some railings, apparently by choice. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... put up with a cold refusal, but that her haughtiness resented a criticism of her conduct ending in a rebuke. By this, Manston's discreditable object, which had been made hers by compulsion only, was now adopted by choice. She flung herself into ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy |
