"Inbred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ear the verses and cadences of others which were the veils of his own longing and dejection, the rude Firbolg mind of his listener had drawn his mind towards it and flung it back again, drawing it by a quiet inbred courtesy of attention or by a quaint turn of old English speech or by the force of its delight in rude bodily skill—for Davin had sat at the feet of Michael Cusack, the Gael—repelling swiftly and suddenly ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... Not even the inbred decorum of the church was sufficient to restrain the involuntary expressions of admiration of the saint by the seventy youngsters. They oh-ed and ah-ed and pointed, but they enjoyed it not a whit more than did the other children ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... they talked about was very young—under twenty, one would say. He was blue-eyed and fair-haired, with thin, delicate features, which showed good blood long inbred to the loss of vigor. He had the fine, open, generous face of one who takes the world as in a fairy story. But now there was care and anxiety in it, and a furtive shadow, as though the lad's dream of life had ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... remaining among them, whom they leave to their own religion. Which they may the better do, because they are of a far differing disposition from the Jews in other parts. For whereas they hate the name of Christ, and have a secret inbred rancour against the people amongst whom they live; these, contrariwise, give unto our Saviour many high attributes, and love the nation of Bensalem extremely. Surely this man of whom I speak would ever acknowledge that Christ was born of a Virgin; and that ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... beneficial; for whereas Diana awakened Meryl from too much dreaminess, Meryl's quiet dignity had a softening effect upon Diana's too great exuberance of spirits and occasional boyish lack of refinement, which was more the result of a boisterous capacity for enjoyment than inbred. ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... masquerader, mountebank, deceiver, humbug, cheat, quack, shyster, empiric. Imprison, incarcerate, immure. Improper, indecent, indecorous, unseemly, unbecoming, indelicate. Impure, tainted, contaminated, polluted, defiled, vitiated. Inborn, innate, inbred, congenital. Incite, instigate, stimulate, impel, arouse, goad, spur, promote. Inclose, surround, encircle, circumscribe, encompass. Increase, grow, enlarge, magnify, amplify, swell, augment. Indecent, indelicate, immodest, shameless, ribald, lewd, lustful, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... in God. God is a good and just being, and he trusts him accordingly; and that very discovery of the goodness, not the sternness of God, is the bitterest pang, the deepest shame to David's spirit. Therefore he can face without despair the discovery of a more deep, radical inbred evil in himself than he ever expected before. 'Behold, I was shapen in wickedness: and in sin hath my mother conceived me;' because he could say also, 'Thou requirest truth in the inward parts; ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... the other hand, their public spirit, the connection of large classes with national affairs, and their habit of compromise, had predisposed the leading minds towards cautious views in philosophy and in politics; and at the century's end their inbred distrust of abstract propositions as a basis for social reconstruction received startling confirmation from the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... and exultant Mr. Savage his exasperating situation is his excuse. For, with the inbred and lethal instinct of a Theolog he was put upon the trail of a brother Theolog to bring in his scalp. To return without some scalp would be a disgrace. But on coming up with his reverend brother Bellamy, instead of finding him ready for ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... to strive to protect that which they loved best from the stroke of the warring gods. In the case of Seti and Merapi this was their son, now a beautiful little lad who could run and prattle, one too of a strange health and vigour for a child of the inbred race of the Ramessids. Never for a minute was this boy allowed to be out of the sight of one or other of his parents; indeed I saw little of Seti in those days and all our learned studies came to nothing, because he was ever concerned with Merapi in playing nurse to this ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... for they have some few stirps of Jews yet remaining among them, whom they leave to their own religion. Which they may the better do, because they are of a far differing disposition from the Jews in other parts. For whereas they hate the name of Christ; and have a secret inbred rancour against the people among whom they live: these (contrariwise) give unto our Saviour many high attributes, and love the nation of Bensalem extremely. Surely this man of whom I speak would ever acknowledge ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon
... be a Fire. Which is not unlike the Old Tyrannical Axiom; Let my Friends perish, so my Enemies fall along with them. [Footnote: Me mortuo terra misceatur incendio. Pereant amici dum una inimici intercidant.] But in gentle Dispositions, there is a certain inbred Love of their Country, which they can no more divest themselves of, than of Humanity it self. Such a Love as Homer describes in Ulysses, who preferred Ithaca, tho' no better than a Bird's Nest ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... inbred sins require Our flesh to see the dust! Yet as the Lord our Saviour rose, So ...
— Hymns and Spiritual Songs • Isaac Watts
... this nation," concluded his lordship, "ever experience a state similar to that from which it has been recently extricated, I have not the slightest doubt, from the result of my observations during this tour, that the native, the inbred spirit of Britons, whilst it continues as firmly united as at present, is fully adequate successfully to repel any attack, either foreign or domestic, which our enemies may dare to make. You have but to ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... preacher to half-sole his shoes. This would be illogical, and men are nothing if not logical. Yet a woman who enters upon any line of achievement is invariably hampered, for at least the early years, with the inbred desire to add to the labor of her profession all the so-called feminine duties, which, fulfilled to-day, are yet to be done to-morrow, which bring to her neither comfort, gain nor reputation, and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... five dollars that the law requires shall be given to a freed felon. He took them without a word and, still without a word, stepped out of the gate that swung open for him and into a light, spitty snowstorm. With the inbred instinct of the hillsman he swung about and headed for the little, light-blue station at the head of the crooked street. He went slowly, coughing often as the cold air struck into his wasted lungs, and sometimes staggering up against the fences. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... from the privileged eminence of the pulpit, or in any way sanctioned by his religious teacher. It is nearly two hundred years since a Boston layman wrote these words: "I am not ignorant that the pious frauds of the ancient, and the inbred fire (I do not call it pride) of many of our modern divines, have precipitated them to propagate and maintain truth as well as falsehoods, in such an unfair manner as has given advantage to the enemy to suspect the whole doctrine these men have profest to ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Your title to my heart-felt respect is now complete. The slanders which I have disgraced myself by believing would never have found their way to my credulity, if they had not first declared you to have ruined your husband by your debts. I own that I have never been able to divest myself of my inbred dislike and distrust of people who contract debts which they are not able to pay. The light manner in which the world is apt to view the relative positions of debtor and creditor is abhorrent to me. If I promise to pay a man money, ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... Alister especially was quite an extraordinary stud dog. His progeny were legion, and some very good terriers of to-day own him as progenitor in nearly every line. The best descendants of Alister were Kildee, Tiree, Whinstone, Prince Alexander, and Heather Prince. He was apparently too much inbred to, and though he produced or was responsible for several beautiful terriers, it is much to be doubted whether in a breed which is suffering from the ill-effects of too much inbreeding, he was not ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... sanctification. This commandment was given during the old dispensation; but it was not possible then that it could be kept perfectly, for there was no provision then made to destroy the power of, and cleanse the heart from, inbred depravity. The blood of those sacrifices could do no more than sanctify "to the purifying of the flesh." The inward condition of the heart could not be changed. Thus we see clearly that this commandment could not be kept in the ...
— Sanctification • J. W. Byers
... with the stain Sheila Macklin bore upon her name. Tunis remembered clearly how scornfully Cap'n Ira had spoken of the possibility of their taking in a girl from the poor farm. Pride of family and of name is inbred in their ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... vague sense of personality as inhering in the heavenly powers, in comparison with the creeds in vogue among heathen nations generally. Another fact to be noted is, that, in Chinese worship, the veneration for ancestors, a feeling inbred in the Chinese mind, is a ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... simple for many words. We were ambushed, and the Sergeant got a bad hurt, and would have lost his scalp, but for a sort of inbred turn I took to the weapon. We brought him off, however, and a handsomer head of hair, for his time of life, is not to be found in the rijiment than the Sergeant carries about ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... measure —the very air and tone of the actual slaveholder; and behind these are the slaveholder's spirit, the slaveholder's blunted feeling. They are the result of the same cause in both cases: the possessor's old and inbred custom of regarding himself as a superior being. The king's judgments wrought frequent injustices, but it was merely the fault of his training, his natural and unalterable sympathies. He was as unfitted for a judgeship as would be the average mother for ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... every bitter cup of trial and tribulation that we have to encounter here below. It will distil a desire and a loftiness of aim in life, that we may at last reach the rest that remains for the people of God. The struggle with inbred sin will be more easily overcome, and every lust and evil passion will be completely conquered by keeping the eye steadily ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... doing, nor where standing; but we cannot help observing, that, just as in the Greek Renaissance, worn-out Pagan orthodoxy was penetrated by new philosophy; just as in the Italian Renaissance, Pagan philosophy, reasserting itself, fertilised again an already too inbred Christian creed; so now Orthodoxy fertilised by Science is producing a fresh and fuller conception of life—a, love of Perfection, not for hope of reward, not for fear of punishment, but for Perfection's sake. Slowly, under our feet, beneath our consciousness, is forming that new philosophy, and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... himself, and with that inbred antipathy of temperament which seemed to paralyse both will and judgment. Was the secret of it that in their profound unlikeness they were yet so ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... euer bene the custome of nations, in searching out the infancie and first beginnings of their estate, to ascribe the same vnto such authors as liued among men in great honour and endued mankinde with some one or other excellent benefite. Nowe, this inbred desire of all nations to blaze and set foorth their owne petigree hath so much preuayled with the greater part, that leauing the vndoubted trueth, they haue betaken themselues vnto meere fables and fictions. Yea and the Chronicles of many nations written in diuers ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... the character of men fashioned by a very old tradition, there is no doubt that it will endure. Such changes as came into the sea life have been for the main part mechanical and affecting only the material conditions of that inbred consistency. That men don't change is a profound truth. They don't change because it is not necessary for them to change even if they could accomplish that miracle. It is enough for them to be infinitely adaptable—as the last four ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... her. His mother, his family would think it madness. No doubt it was madness. Yet, as far as he could explain his impulse himself, it depended on certain fundamental facts in his own nature—it was in keeping with his deepest character. He had an inbred love of the difficult, the unconventional in life, of all that piqued and stimulated his own superabundant consciousness of resource and power. And he had a tenderness of feeling, a gift of chivalrous pity, only known to the few, which was in truth always hungrily on the watch, like some starved ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... delicious languor in her eyes, and an utter inability to devote herself to anything which took the shape of a serious occupation. As she sat at the cabin breakfast-table that morning, in her quaintly-made sailing dress of old-fashioned nankeen—her inbred childishness of manner contrasting delightfully with the blooming maturity of her form—the man must have been trebly armed indeed in the modern philosophy who could have denied that the first of a woman's rights is the right of being beautiful; and the foremost of a woman's merits, the merit ...
— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins
... man to shreds, so be thou not * Of those whom lure of rank and title draws: Nay; 'ware of slips and turn from sin aside * And ken that bane and bale are worldly laws: How oft high Fortune falls by least mishap * And all things bear inbred of change ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... tendency toward crime into the less strenuous channel of pauperism, but I cannot find in Mr. Dugdale's charts any sufficient basis for the induction. It is true that the most distinctively pauper line is consanguineous, but it is less closely inbred than the "semi-successful" branch. As to the fifth induction, a close examination of the data shows clearly that in nearly every case where an X marriage occurred, it was with a person of a distinctly immoral or criminal type. Cousin marriage has also been frequent in the middle western ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... Hubbard, Abner, Peleg, Meshech, and the rest, had been like Perez in the army, and yet the democratic impressions they had there received, now that they had returned home, served only to exasperate them against the pretensions of the superior class, without availing to eradicate their inbred instincts of servility in the presence of the very men they hated. Precisely this self-contemptuous recognition of his own servile feeling, operating on a morose temper, was the key to Hubbard's special bitterness toward the silk stockings. ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... children of clay in their ignorance," said: the Dwarf, smiling maliciously, "and thus they speak in their folly. Have you marked the young cub of a wild cat that has been domesticated, how sportive, how playful, how gentle,—but trust him with your game, your lambs, your poultry, his inbred ferocity breaks forth; he gripes, tears, ravages, ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... meekness, pliability, softness, and sweetness of the obstinate man. Till when long enough time has elapsed you find him all the obstinate and mulish man he ever was. It is not that he has ceased to love his wife and his children. It is not that. But there is this in all genuine and inbred obstinacy, that after a time it often comes out worst beside those we love best. A man will be affable, accessible, entertaining, the best of company, and the soul of it abroad, and, then, instantly he turns the latch-key in his own door he will ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... the table beside his plate, and began to drink his tea, his eyes gleaming with a strange light, lan kept silence also. Mrs. Macruadh cast a quick glance, now at the one, now at the other. She was in great anxiety, and could scarce restrain herself. She knew her boys full of inbred dignity and strong conscience, but was nevertheless doubtful how they would act. They could not feel as she felt, else would the hot blood of their race have at once boiled over! Had she searched herself ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... elder of his brothers having then already died and the younger being destined to fall in battle at the allied Front, shortly after he himself had succumbed; but the circumstance I speak of gives a peculiar and an especially welcome consecration to that perceptible play in him of the inbred "public school" character the bloom of which his short life had too little time to remove and which one wouldn't for the world not have been disposed to note, with everything else, in the beautiful complexity of his attributes. The fact was that if one liked him—and I may as well say at once ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... the common garden plant called four o'clock (Mirabilis jalapa) with red flowers is crossed to one having white flowers, the offspring are pink (fig. 13). The hybrid, then, is intermediate in the color of its flowers between the two parents. If these hybrids are inbred the offspring are white, pink and red, in the proportion of 1:2:1. All of these had the same ancestry, yet they are of three different kinds. If we did not know their history it would be quite impossible to state what the ancestry of the white or of the red had been, for they ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... rise from Mr. Conrad's books purged and, for the moment, strengthened. Apparent in him are that manly and honourable virtue, that strict saline truth and scrupulous regard for life, that liberation from cant, which seem to be inbred in those who have suffered the exacting discipline of the hostile sea. Certainly Conrad cannot be called a writer who has neglected the tragic side of things. Yet in his "Notes on Life and Letters," ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... Lenox was abundantly grateful. All the Scot in him asserted itself in a fierce reticence, an inbred sense of privacy where a man's deepest feelings were concerned: and now, as he stood battling with his impatience to be gone, he was suffering acute discomfiture from the demonstrative leave-taking in progress between Maurice ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... you can buy a handsomer dog in any shop than this one. He had neither a graceful exterior nor an engaging address. On the contrary, his exceptional plainness had passed into a local proverb; and such was the inbred coarseness of his demeanour, that in the dark you might ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... Lady Janet's inbred sense of justice admitted not over willingly—the reasonableness as well as the humanity of the view expressed in those words. "There is some truth in that, Julian," she said, shifting her position uneasily in ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... a king covenanted with God should be much respected by his subjects. They should love him. There is an inbred affection in the hearts of the people to their king. In the 12th verse it is said, that "the people clapped their hands for joy, and said, God save the king." They had no sooner seen their native king installed in his kingdom, but they ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... in the survival of the human soul after death exercises on the life and conduct of the Central Melanesian savage. To him the belief is no mere abstract theological dogma or speculative tenet, the occasional theme of edifying homilies and pious meditation; it is an inbred, unquestioning, omnipresent conviction which affects his thoughts and actions daily and at every turn; it guides his fortunes as an individual and controls his behaviour as a member of a community, by inculcating a respect for the rights of others and enforcing ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... happiness that morning,—unbelievably near. By nature unsocial, by habit, city inbred, artificially taciturn, there came with the primitive happiness of the moment the concomitant primitive desire for companionship. He smiled self-tolerantly when, obeying an instinct, he wound the lines around the seat, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... upon British aid. All these circumstances combined to render the new regime weak and unpopular, since there was no force at the ruler's command except foreign troops to put down disorder or to protect those who submitted, while the discontented nobles fomented disaffection and the inbred hatred of strangers in race and religion among the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... this, he had dishonoured the Guard, brought the first blot of treachery upon its long and unblemished traditions. Hereditary instincts inbred and powerful were arrayed against him in the hearts of six of his judges; in the seventh, Count Sagan, he had to encounter the ill-blood of a profoundly vindictive nature whose purposes he had crossed and baffled, and who harboured towards him ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... penetrates these works, a nature out of sympathy with struggle and strenuous action. Burne-Jones's men and women are dreamers too. It was this which, more than anything else, estranged him from the age into which he was born. But he had an inbred "revolt from fact" which would have estranged him from the actualities of any age. That criticism seems to be more justified which has found in him a lack of such victorious energy and mastery over his materials as would have enabled him to carry out his conceptions ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... to hear Catherine's accusing tones, and the fanatical strain inbred in him answered like a boat to its helm. There must be no more compromise, no longer any evasion of the issues of right and wrong. He had sinned, and both he and the woman for whose sake he had defied his own creed, and that of his fathers before him, must make atonement. He drew himself ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... The children of the "adulteress" are successful men and women, aids in the progress of the world; those of the blood royal, in double or single doses, a menace to public morality. This much for your royal inbred custom. ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... of centuries, it became an inbred tradition with the Japanese that they must seize Korea. Hideyoshi, the famous Japanese Regent, made a tremendous effort in 1582. Three hundred thousand troops swept over Korea, capturing city after city, and driving the Korean forces to the north. Korea appealed to ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... grandee; sure there was never a duke welcomed from a stranger place of exile. Half-way between Orkney and Shetland there lies a certain isle; on the one hand the Atlantic, on the other the North Sea, bombard its pillared cliffs; sore-eyed, short-living, inbred fishers and their families herd in its few huts; in the graveyard pieces of wreck-wood stand for monuments; there is nowhere a more inhospitable spot. Belle-Isle-en-Mer—Fair-Isle-at-Sea—that is a name that has always rung in my mind's ear like music; but the only "Fair Isle" on which ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one for bringing forward his young children, the other for prostrating himself in a shower of rain to kiss the judges' feet and rising up with a countenance bedaubed with mud! Facts like these, and they are innumerable, compel us to believe that the reverence for justice as a sacred thing, so inbred in Christian civilization, was foreign to the people of Rome. It is a gloomy spectacle to see a mighty nation deliberately giving the rein to passion and excitement heedless of the miscarriage of justice. The celebrated law, re-enacted by Gracchus, "That no citizen should be ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... up suddenly. The inbred honesty of the man rose in protest against the housekeeper's last words. His mind seemed to steady itself, for the moment, under the shock ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... free to the native inhabitants, began, as he was now growing old, to find his eyes fail, and awhile after became perfectly blind. Not that he had done anything himself which might occasion this defect, or was deprived of his sight by any outrage of fortune; it seems rather to have been some inbred and hereditary weakness that was founded in natural causes, which by length of time came to discover itself. For it is said, that several of his kindred and family were subject to the like gradual decay, and lost all use of their eyes, as he did, in their ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... for the fate of vast territories, with their increasing population, and of numerous Indian tribes. Among the component states, there is the greatest variety of customs, institutions, and religions. Then we have the deeper inbred differences of language and ancestry among us, our population being made up of the lineage of all nations. Our industrial pursuits, also, are various; and, with a great natural diversity of soil and climate, they must always continue ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew |
