"Predisposition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... positive things. To this opinion the brigadier very readily assented, remarking, at the same time, that a well-wrought theory had generally more effect on opinion than fifty facts; a result that he attributed to the circumstance of monikins having a besetting predisposition to save themselves ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of her predisposition to be pleased, the prospect was depressing. The season was late and patches of discolored snow lay here and there, and were piled up along the fences. The garden and trees had a neglected look. The vines that clambered up the porch had been untrimmed of the last year's growth, and sprawled ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... offence, called on her patroness. Both parties meant well, but from the constitution of the human mind, it was hardly possible for one who had greatly obliged another in a subordinate station to experience the least opposition without at least an uncomfortable feeling. There must have existed a predisposition to misconstrue motives, as well as a susceptibility, in the closest alliance with offence. And now the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... predecessor, a Mr. P., a Harvard man, who until his departure from Vingt-et-Un succeeded in making life absolutely miserable for B. and myself. Before leaving this painful subject I beg to state that, at least as far as I was concerned, the tradition had a firm foundation in my own predisposition for uncouthness plus what Le Matin (if we remember correctly) cleverly nicknamed ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... child withdrawn from the school. The reports suggest that a wider investigation would increase the number of defective children, for the method chosen could hardly be expected to discern all the seriously neurotic children. The information gathered indicates that epilepsy and the neurotic predisposition to insanity need to be investigated as well as amentia,[5] and that the epileptics and neurotics, even among rural children, are more numerous than is usually supposed. Of course an investigation of the adults would still more increase the amount ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... days of summer; and any particular death, if not actually more affecting, at least haunts my mind more obstinately and besiegingly in that season. Perhaps this cause, and a slight incident which I omit, might have been the immediate occasions of the following dream, to which, however, a predisposition must always have existed in my mind; but, having been once roused, it never left me, and split into a thousand fantastic variations, which often suddenly recombined, locked back into a startling unity, and restored ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... Every moment increased this predisposition in her favor. She must have known that she was very attractive, for few girls reach her age without attaining such knowledge; but her observer, and in a certain sense her critic, could not detect the faintest trace of affectation or self-consciousness. Her manner, her words, and ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... facts. There isn't, and there never has been, one word to say for it or any excuse, except morbid predisposition or self-inculcated inclination, to offer for swallowing it. Now go to your brewers, your wine merchants, your champagne touts, your fool undergraduates, your clubmen, your guzzling viveurs—and they'll all tell you the contrary. So will some physicians. And you can ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... of his wife's infidelity. The jealousy which in Othello and Posthumus is an error of judgment, in Leontes is a vice of the blood; he suspects without cause, condemns without proof; he is without excuse—unless the mixture of pride, passion, and imagination, and the predisposition to jealousy with which Shakspeare has portrayed him, be considered as an excuse. Hermione has been openly insulted: he to whom she gave herself, her heart, her soul, has stooped to the weakness and baseness of ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... cause of her insanity was not certainly known. Some suspicion of the worthlessness of her lover, some enlightenment as to his perfidy, or his unaccountable disappearance alone, may have occasioned its manifestation. But there is great reason to believe that she had a natural predisposition to it. And having never been taught to provide for her own mental sustenance, and so nourish a necessary independence, she had been too ready to squander the wealth of a rich and lovely nature upon an unworthy person, and the reaction had been ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... bitch. As a companion the female is to be preferred to the male; she is not less affectionate and faithful, and she is usually much cleaner in her habits in the house. If it is intended to breed by her, she should be very carefully chosen and proved to be free from any serious fault or predisposition to disease. Not only should her written pedigree be scrupulously scrutinised, but her own constitution and that of her parents on both sides should ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... but take note that the mistake can only arise in the first category, that is among the ordinary people (as I perhaps unfortunately called them). In spite of their predisposition to obedience very many of them, through a playfulness of nature, sometimes vouchsafed even to the cow, like to imagine themselves advanced people, 'destroyers,' and to push themselves into the 'new movement,' and this ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... sides, the children got a Celtic strain; and this is a matter of significance, meaning a predisposition to the superstition, imagination and horror that is a strand in all their work. Their mother, Maria Branwell, was of a good middle-class Cornish family, long established as merchants in Penzance. Their father was the son of an Irish peasant, Hugh ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... feverish. She would put a certain amount of passion into everything, I should say, into her friendship, her games, her likes and dislikes; am I not right? Oh yes, this is generally the way with children in whom this organ predominates and who have an unfortunate predisposition to hypertrophy. Tell me now, has she lately had any great emotion—any ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... defect has repeatedly made an antisocial person normal in his conduct, and it seems plain, especially from the investigations of European criminologists, that certain individuals are born with a predisposition to crime, like the alcoholic inheriting a weak will, or with insane or epileptic tendencies that may lead early to criminal conduct; but it is not yet proven that a majority of offenders are hereditary perverts. A stronger reason for crime is the unsatisfied ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... description, he had been restored by the surgeons, much to the chagrin of a young anatomist who was to have had the honour of cutting him up). The boy did not seem likely to merit the distinguished appellation he bore, for he testified no remarkable predisposition to the property of other people. Nay, although he sometimes emptied the pockets of any stray visitor to the coffee-room of Mrs. Lobkins, it appeared an act originating rather in a love of the frolic than a desire of the profit; for after the plundered person had been ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had long since failed to disturb my peace of mind, causing me no anxiety, much less pain. Sic transit was the epitaph, if any. Acute sensation I had none at all. This, then, plainly argues against the slightest predisposition on my part to imagine that the loving guidance so strangely given owned a personal origin I could recognize. That it involved a "personal ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... When philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project its own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work without a theory: and what is a theory but an imperfect generalisation caught up by a predisposition? What is Comte's great division of the eras but a theory, and facts are but as clay in his hands, which he can mould to illustrate it, as every clever man will find facts to be, let his theory be what ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... officer and actually accompanied a battalion of French soldiers, during the whole time receiving the utmost civility from the unsuspecting officers and men. But all studiously avoided Naval disguises, for the French believed that there was some peculiar predisposition in English blood to the Naval Service; indeed, on this account, all English foundlings were sent to Marseilles or Toulon to be ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... from hereditary predisposition, as e.g. the impulse to drink, but only through strengthening inhibition can these impulses be ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... Gout.—Some have a predisposition to this most painful disease, and require to keep a strict watch on their diet. Meat, specially the internal organs, meat extracts, alcohol, tea, and coffee must be avoided, and milk, buttermilk and porridge, cheese, eggs, and vegetables, especially green vegetables, made ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... "Some strange psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one of your former lives, has favoured the development of your 'disease'; and the fact that you had no normal training at school or college, no leading by the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge, ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... this predisposition to looseness and license a thing to be condoned, to be mixed with the blood of one's own posterity? Eben, I've never seen you make excuses for ungodliness before." The fierce old face suddenly cleared. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... Veronica was thinking a very great deal about love. A dozen shynesses and intellectual barriers were being outflanked or broken down in her mind. All the influences about her worked with her own predisposition and against all the traditions of her home and upbringing to deal with the facts of life in an unabashed manner. Ramage, by a hundred skilful hints had led her to realize that the problem of her own life was inseparably associated with, and indeed only one special case of, the problems of any ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... the divinity; the absolute manifestation of power—the reality of all the possible—and the absolute unity of the manifestation (the necessity of all reality). It cannot be disputed that man bears within himself, in his personality, a predisposition for divinity. The way to divinity—if the word "way" can be applied to what never leads to its end-is open to him in ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Strasburg, and became Abbot of Noirmoutiers and La Chaise. He led a gay, luxurious, and extravagant life rather than performed his clerical duties; he had political ambitions, but he was never able to overcome the predisposition against him with which Marie Antoinette had come to France. He was a dupe of Cagliostro, and of Mme. de Lamotte-Valois, the adventuress who, in 1782, drew him into the intrigue of the diamond necklace, for which he was sent to the Bastille, and which gave him ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... development of her imagination, in case indeed she possessed that terrible and fatal gift. She passed her days in unbroken solitude, or broken only by affections which softened her heart, and in a scene which itself might well promote any predisposition of the kind; beautiful and picturesque objects surrounded her on all sides; she wandered, at it were, in an enchanted wilderness, and watched the deer reposing under the green shadow of stately trees; the old hall itself was calculated to excite mysterious ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... it. It may be hereditary or acquired like any other disease. One man may have a pulmonary, another a bilious and another a dypso-maniac diathesis, and an exposure to exciting causes in one case is as fatal to health as in the other. If there exist a predisposition to consumption, the disease will be developed under peculiar morbific influences which would have no deleterious effect upon a subject not so predisposed. The same law operates as unerringly in the inherited predisposition to intemperance. ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... large in an appendix to the present volume. In this place I will barely remark, that I have sometimes noticed in the unlanguaged prattlings of infants a fondness for alliteration, assonance, and even rhyme, in which natural predisposition we may trace the three degrees through which our Anglo-Saxon verse rose to its culmination in the poetry of Pope. I would not be understood as questioning in these remarks that pious theory which supposes that children, if left entirely to themselves, would naturally discourse in ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... observed this peculiar predisposition to a military life in his subjects, and took advantage of it to fool them to the top of their bent. The victories achieved beneath his banner reflect scarcely less honour on them than on him, and the memory of them associates his name in their hearts by the strongest ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... themselves.[52] And, indeed, M. Maury is the first to allow that there is a fundamental opposition between the Biblical tradition and the legend of Brahminical India or of Hesiod. In this last, as he himself remarks, we see "no trace of a predisposition to sin transmitted by inheritance from the first man to his descendants, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... added Gabriel, "for every minute of his life, but no amount of gold can procure him a drop of fresh blood to cure the hereditary poison in his veins. He is surrounded by beautiful women, but if he feels arising the happy tremors of youth, the sap of the spring of life, the predisposition of a family who have only been notable for the victories won in love's battles, he must remain cold and austere, under his mother's vigilant eye, who knows that carnal passion would rapidly end a life so weak and uncertain. And the end of all these sad-and painful privations—inevitable ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a slap in the face. With every possible predisposition to look favorably on its teachings, I was unable to find anything in them but the prejudiced judgments of a one-sided thinker, fond of brilliant general propositions which really had nothing serious to rest ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... the great thoroughfares, they are often narrow and in a way ill kept, but this is due more to their confined area than to any carelessness or predisposition on the part of the authorities to ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... resulting from accident. And yet even there it does apply, for the condition of the mind may predispose to infection, and to recovery or collapse in the instance of the sufferer from injuries. But these questions of predisposition and consequence are too great to argue here, though even the most rule-of-thumb village practitioner, with a black draught in one hand and a pot of ointment in the other, will agree that they admit of ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... fault to use one arm exclusively, and to give that a uniform movement. Such movement may, sometimes, have become habitual from one's profession or employment; but in learners, also, there is often a predisposition to ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed. Not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort was to be exposed—in the absence I mean of some fairly abnormal predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure, sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... assured that the "ex-Emperor" was pre-disposed to the "cruel complaint of which his father died." "The progress of the disease is slow and insidious," says he, which may be true enough, but predisposition can be either checked or accelerated, and the course adopted towards Napoleon was not calculated to retard, but encourage it. But in order to palliate the actions of the British Government and their blindly devoted adherents at St. Helena, ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... born with a predisposition to one or the other of these sides of nature; and it will easily happen that men will be found devoted to one or the other. One class has the perception of difference, and is conversant with facts and surfaces; ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Dr. Caldwell observes: "Every constitutional quality, whether good or bad, may descend, by inheritance, from parent to child. And a long-continued habit of drunkenness becomes as essentially constitutional as a predisposition to gout or pulmonary consumption. This increases, in a manifold degree, the responsibility of parents in relation to temperance. By habits of intemperance, they not only degrade and ruin themselves, but ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... conceptions of diabolical presence; all that predisposition toward the miraculous, which acted so fearfully upon the imaginations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, existed; but the implicit faith, the boundless and triumphant credulity with which the virtue of ecclesiastical ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... doctor said it was a kind of nondescript fever with cerebral and typhoid symptoms, to which young people not acclimatized to Marseilles were very liable on settling there. In Richard's case there had been a predisposition on account of the hard work he had gone through for the Agregation. He had looked as if he bore it easily while it lasted; but the strain had been more severe than he was aware of; and two years after his recovery ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... frequency. In Lord Londonderry it attracted notice for reasons of obvious personal interest, as well as its tragical catastrophe. But the complaint, though one of modern growth, is well known, and comes forward under a most determinate type as to symptoms, among the mercantile class. The original predisposition to it, lies permanently in the condition of London life, especially as it exists for public men. But the immediate existing cause, which fires the train always ready for explosion, is invariably some combination of perplexities, such as are continually ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... man's experiences, changing as his experiences change. In the two years following the publication of the first volume, Strindberg's experiences were such as to exercise a decisive influence on his views on the woman question and to transmute his early predisposition to woman-hating from a passive tendency to a positive, active force in ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... Incarnacion's implied suspicions that Pedro was concerned in Peyton's death, than of this sentimental possibility. He knew that Pedro had been hated by the others on account of his position; he knew the instinctive jealousies of the race and their predisposition to extravagant misconstruction. From what he had gathered, and particularly from the voices he had overheard on the Fair Plains Road, it seemed to him that Pedro was more capable of mercenary intrigue than physical revenge. He was not aware of the irrevocable ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... voting should be by ballot instead of show of hands. Taxation was restricted; and in 1635 there was agitation for a written constitution; and the relative authority of the deputies and the assistants was in debate. Our national predisposition to "talk politics" ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne |
