"Fastidiousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... books in favor of that more enduring vernacular of the street, or who confused the table implements, or did the hundred and one other little things that are supposedly the indelible marks of an inferior culture. A most fastidious person himself, as was obvious, he looked in others for a fastidiousness of spirit rather than for a correct performance of the whims of refinement. For the one, as everybody knows but forgets, is eternal, and the other is merely transitory—the most transitory aspect ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... with any claims to such an honor was anxious to receive a ticket of admission;—it became the test for ascertaining a person's pretensions to mix in the first circles of society; and with this extraordinary zeal for obtaining an admission naturally increased the minister's rigor and fastidiousness in pressing the usual investigation of the claimant's qualifications. Much offence was given on both sides, and many sneers hazarded at the minister himself, whose pretensions were supposed to be of the lowest description. But the result was, that exactly twelve hundred cards were issued; ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... "I do not admire fastidiousness," I answered; "I do not like to have defects pointed out to me, which my own ignorance does not discover. There is more pleasure in imagining beauties than in finding ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... is the complex YOU I want to learn. Of course you're a specialized type, a product of artistic hothouse propagation. You're so exquisite in your fastidiousness that to be near you is a luxury. Simplicity and you have not a bowing acquaintance. One looks to see your most casual act freighted ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... frailty, refinement, fastidiousness, discrimination, sensitiveness; dainty, tidbit, junket. Antonyms: ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the immediate sense. True, The Bon Vivant had accepted the story which The Era rejected; but it had paid only seventy-five dollars. Banneker did not care to go farther on that path. Aside from the unsatisfactory return, his fastidiousness revolted from being identified with the output of a third-class and flashy publication. Whatever The Ledger's shortcomings, it at least stood first in its field. But was there any future for him there, other than as a conspicuously well-paid reporter? In spite of ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... conscience is even a paralysing thing, which by suggesting constant petty and ingenious scruples holds them back from useful action. It is a moral infirmity corresponding to that exaggerated intellectual fastidiousness which so often makes an intellectual life almost wholly barren, or to that excessive tendency to look on all sides of a question and to realise the dangers and drawbacks of any course which not unfrequently in moments ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... no exquisite [Footnote: Overelaborate.] eloquence in him: He was a good citizen, of an honest, gentle nature, as are commonly fat and burly men: for so was he: But to speake truly of thim? full of ambitious vanity and remisse niceness. [Footnote: Ineffectual fastidiousness.] And I know not well how to excuse him, in that he deemed his Poesie worthy to be published. It is no great imperfection to make bad verses, but it is an imperfection in him that he never perceived how unworthy they were of the glorie ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... intimacy with several of the most celebrated musical and dramatic artists of his day, passion for political and private gossip, easy and pleasant style of letter-writing, and general rather supercilious fastidiousness, used sometimes to remind me of Horace Walpole. He had a singularly kind heart and amiable nature, for a life of mere frivolous pleasure had not impaired the one or the other. His serviceableness to his friends was unwearied, and his generous liberality toward all whom he ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... affectation in speech. Some mince with their food as if they were ashamed of putting a morsel into their mouths before people. They ask for the least piece of this, and for an imaginary crumb of that; and make their entertainers uncomfortable by their ridiculous fastidiousness; while, if we could see these very delicate masticators in their own homes, perhaps we should find them grumbling for Benjamin's share of the daily meal. For my own part, I always eat in public as if no eye was upon me, and do it in a hearty, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... are great gifts but the correlative of great work? We are not born for ourselves, but for our kind, for our neighbours, for our country: it is but selfishness, indolence, a perverse fastidiousness, an unmanliness, and no virtue or praise, to bury our ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... made a hearty meal. Even Percy's fastidiousness did not prevent him from eating his full share. But he took no part in the jokes flying round the table. Jim's sermon had left him rather glum. Lane ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... exclaimed the public-school boy, with an impatient fastidiousness that was almost harsh. 'Surely you know that by ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... my best chance of obtaining it lay in securing his recommendation. This I knew could be had by asking for it; not to ask, because the request revolted my pride and contradicted my habits, would, I felt, be an indulgence of false and indolent fastidiousness. I might repent the omission all my life; I would not ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... faithfully portrayed the characters, even displaying a certain fastidiousness as to sundry local details; albeit in the scenic development of the opera they have followed Murger's method of dividing the libretto into four separate acts, in the dramatic and comic episodes they have claimed that ample and entire freedom of action, which, rightly or wrongly, they deemed necessary ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... and thus viewed, her domed forehead, small arched nose, and fastidious lip suggested a silhouette of Marie Antoinette. In the lady's dress and movements—in the very turn of her wrist as she poured out her coffee—Danyers thought he detected the same fastidiousness, the same air of tacitly excluding the obvious and unexceptional. Here was a woman who had been much bored and keenly interested. The waiter brought her a Secolo, and as she bent above it Danyers noticed that the hair rolled back from her forehead was ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... native utterance which was his greatest delight and which was to be rich material for his greatest work. He did not use this folk-language merely as he heard it. He was an artist first and last, and as an artist he bent and shaped the rough material, selecting with great fastidiousness, so that in his plays every speech is, as he himself declared all good speech should be, "as fully flavored as a nut or apple." Even in The Tinker's Wedding (1907), possibly the least important of his plays, one is arrested by ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... Only trash, and dear bought at that," said he, seeing his guest's boot-toe push the papers in with a dainty man's fastidiousness. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... my views to repeated revision during four years, it seems better to publish them than to withhold from students help they so greatly need. Moreover, it is a great gain, even at the cost of some errors, to throw off that intellectual disease of over-fastidiousness which is so prevalent in this University, and causes more than anything else the unproductiveness of English scholarship as compared with ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... tea-table; and, though he ate but sparingly of the supper, which always gave him indigestion, Grace was his only confidante in the matter. Mr. Drummond, indeed, looked at his son rather sharply once or twice, as though he suspected him of fastidiousness. "I cannot compliment you on your appetite," he would say, as he helped himself to cold meat; "but perhaps our home fare is not so tempting as ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... reasons than being an infidel or an opposer of religion. A ready return of cordial feeling was the result; and as Mr. James found himself treated with respect and confidence, he began to feel, notwithstanding his fastidiousness, that there were strong points of congeniality between all real and warm-hearted Christians, however different might be their intellectual culture, and in all simplicity united himself with the little church of Camden. A year from the time of his first residence there, every ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fastidiousness which had characterized his old life. A dainty eater, he found that his mates, finishing first, robbed him of his unfinished ration. There was no defending it. While he was fighting off two or three, it was disappearing down the throats of the ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... passing. I do not suppose that there are many of my hearers who are likely to commit overt breaches of the law. But there are a great many of us who are apt to neglect the obligations of citizenship. In a community like ours, laziness, fastidiousness, absorption in our own occupations, and a number of other more or less reputable reasons, tempt many to stand aloof from the plain imperative obligations of every citizen in a free country. Every man who thus neglects to do his part for the common weal does his part in handing over the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... carpenter's work of an ordinary kind, he would, under most circumstances, have completed in a day or two such an employment as he had now undertaken. But a strange fastidiousness, a most uncharacteristic anxiety about the smallest matters, delayed him through every stage of his present undertaking. Mrs. Peckover, who came every morning to see how he was getting on, was amazed at the slowness of his progress. He was, from the first, morbidly scrupulous in keeping ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... suddenly intent—this was Clarence Gladwyne! There was no doubt that he was a handsome man. He was tall and held himself finely; he had a light, springy figure, with dark eyes and hair. Besides, there was a certain stamp of refinement or fastidiousness upon him which was only slightly spoiled by the veiled hint of ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... wind. Mrs. Robson was a Cumberland woman, and as such, was a cleaner housewife than the farmers' wives of that north-eastern coast, and was often shocked at their ways, showing it more by her looks than by her words, for she was not a great talker. This fastidiousness in such matters made her own house extremely comfortable, but did not tend to render her popular among her neighbours. Indeed, Bell Robson piqued herself on her housekeeping generally, and once in-doors in the gray, bare stone house, there were plenty of comforts to be had besides cleanliness ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the crown of her carefully ordered hair to the tips of her white shoes—he could see them from his position at one side, and he observed that they were as white and as fresh as her gown. That was one of the things Julius heartily approved of in his pretty sister—her fastidiousness in such matters. He was fastidious himself to a degree; nothing more correct in its way than his own morning attire could have ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... a fortunate accident as you long for—and this fastidiousness may cost you the best years of your life—your attractions might work a miracle, for men often marry for love in these days. When experience lurks behind so sweet a face as yours it may achieve wonders. In the first place, have you not the gift ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... Coombe wished to see her on her return. He had in fact lain awake thinking of plans of defence but had so far been able to decide on none. If there had been anything to touch, to appeal to, there might have been some hope, but she had left taste and fastidiousness scattered in shreds behind her. The War, as she put it, had made her less afraid of life. She had in fact joined the army of women who could always live so long as their beauty lasted. At the beginning of her relations with Lord Coombe she had belonged in a sense to a world which now ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... some well-dressed persons when they walk past a file of them feel as if they were walking past a row of omniscient critics or judges with a power of life and death. Here and there only is some ordinary human custom, some natural human pleasure suppressed in deference to the fastidiousness of the rich. But all the rich tremble before the fastidiousness ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... the propriety of the liberties which have been taken with his name and standing. But with all his quickness of feeling, his manners were easy and courteous, simply because his nature was warm and kindly, and with all his natural fastidiousness there was nothing of the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the time," said Wilfred. And Bell added: "We should all act grown up, if she had her fastidiousness suited." ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous |
