"Tendency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is beneath the consideration of your honorable committee, and would never be tolerated by the American people. The tide of public opinion is setting to-day in the opposite direction; in all governments we see a steadily increasing tendency toward individual responsibilities—to the election of rulers by a direct voice of the people. In this general awakening, woman too has been roused to a sense not only of her own rights as a human being, but to her duties ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the same system was applied to the fore-and-aft balance. The main aeroplane was set at a positive angle, and a horizontal tail at a negative angle, while the center of gravity was placed far forward. As in the case of lateral control, there was a tendency to constant undulation, and the very forces which caused a restoration of balance in calms caused a disturbance of the balance in winds. Notwithstanding the known limitations of this principle, it had been embodied in ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... word "renaissance" has grown to cover a vaguer period, and there has been a constant tendency to push the date of its beginning ever backward, as we detect more and more the dimly dawning light amid the darkness of earlier ages. Of late, writers have fallen into the way of calling Dante the "morning ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... it is usually prepared, is disposed to undergo certain changes, which considerably impair its value. Of these the three following are the most important: its tendency to moulding, the liability of the black matter to separate from the fluid, the ink then becoming what is termed ropy, and its loss of colour, the black first changing to brown, and, at length, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... honorarium of a dollar a month, a constantly increasing percentage of criminal or semi-criminal cases came to the office. Of course there was no better criminal lawyer than Gottlieb in the city, and before long the criminals outnumbered our civil clients. At the same time I noticed a tendency on the part of the civil business to fall off, the reason for this probably being that my partner was known only as a criminal attorney. Now, I began to dislike the idea of paying a dollar a month to induce people to refer business to us, and indeed I found that ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... hear yesterday?" asked Delia, helping herself to some very cold coffee. Nothing was ever kept warm for her, the owner of the house; everything was always kept warm for Gertrude. Yet the fact arose from no Sybaritic tendency whatever on Gertrude's part. Food, clothing, sleep—no religious ascetic could have been more sparing than she, in her demands upon them. She took them as they came—well or ill supplied; too pre-occupied to be either grateful ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Sardanapalus, he would have been always glad to lie down again and loll in ease the moment the necessity for action had passed away. No doubt his daily allowance of Burgundy—a very liberal and generous allowance—had a good deal to do with his tendency to indolence. Whatever the reason, it is certain that, with all his magnificent gifts and his splendid chances, he did nothing great, and has left no abiding mark in history. Every one who came near him ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... written chronicle. He himself has sought to understand as zealously as his most eminent competitors. He gives, at least, no meager account of life, and he has done liberal justice to its infinite variety. This is his great merit; his great defect, roughly stated, is a tendency to the abuse of irony. He remains, nevertheless, to our sense, a very welcome mediator between the world and our curiosity. If we had space, we should like to set forth that he is by no means our ideal story-teller—this honorable genius possessing, attributively, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... air of towns has a tendency to plunge men into lethargy and indolence, and to precipitate the decadence of a constitution in which the seeds of disease have been sown; whilst, on the other hand, the pure air of the country braces the nerves, excites a healthy action in the system, and invigorates a shattered ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... lamb-like temper ensured in about twenty minutes, by a single dose of one of our spiritual indigestion tabloids. In cases of all the more ordinary moral ailments, from simple lying, to homicidal mania, in cases again of tendency to hatred, malice, and uncharitableness; of atrophy or hypertrophy of the conscience, of costiveness or diarrhoea of the sympathetic instincts, &c., &c., our spiritual indigestion tabloids will ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... transcript" as far as possible of the British system of government. In no better way could this be done, in the opinion of the framers of the Constitutional Act, than by creating a titled legislative council;[18] and though this effort came to naught, it is noteworthy as showing the tendency at that time of imperial legislation. If such a council could be established, then it was all important that there should be a religious body, supported by the state, to surround the political institutions of the country with the safeguards ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... some antique Moorish design falling in a triple row over her gay bodice. The men wear long hooded cloaks of brown homespun, which they sometimes retain for convenience after the rest of the peasant-dress has been thrown aside for the regulation coat and trousers. There is no tendency to eccentricity in the national costume of Portugal, but the Portuguese colony of Madeira have invented a singular head-gear in a tiny skull-cap surmounted by a steeple of tightly-wound cloth, which serves as a handle to lift it by. Like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... language, expresses himself in terms which, though short and pithy, are always precise and perspicuous, and is averse to the introduction of philosophical dogmas. Of the greater part of the writings collected under his name, on the contrary the general character is verboseness, prolixity and a great tendency to speculative opinions. For these reasons, as well as for others derived from internal evidence, while the Aphorisms, the Epidemics and the works above mentioned, bear distinct marks of being the genuine remains ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... win admiration on the right hand and on the left, and he does like the women on whom the world sets a signet of approval. No sweet domestic drudge for him, and if Violet has a fault, it is this tendency. When a man begins to discover flaws in his ideal the ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... mind was turned for a moment on Christopher, whose Idea had by this time invested him with a dignity which no amount of regal state could abash. There was very little time. The Queen heard what Columbus had to say, cutting him short, it is likely, with kindly tact, and suppressing his tendency to launch out into long-winded speeches. What she saw she liked; and, being too busy to give to this proposal the attention that it obviously merited, she told Columbus that the matter would be fully gone into and that in the meantime he must regard himself as the guest of the Court. And ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... like to see, in every school-room of our growing country, in every business office, at the railway stations, and on street corners, large placards placed with "Do not slouch" printed thereon in distinct and imposing characters. If ever there was a tendency that needed nipping in the bud (I fear the bud is fast becoming a full-blown flower), it is this discouraging ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... different classes of food. Animal food requires a considerable quantity of oxygen for its complete combustion. Meat in general has a more stimulating effect upon the system and is more strengthening than vegetable food. There is, however, a tendency to eat too much meat, and when its effects are not counter-balanced by free outdoor exercise, it causes biliousness and sometimes gout and other troubles. Albuminous foods can be eaten longer alone without exciting loathing than can fats, ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... young man now, and has outgrown his gloomy, brooding disposition. He is a clerk in the office of a rich corn merchant in Oxbridge, the nearest market to Wynne, and shows every tendency to become a successful ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... the path of liberty with shackles only less onerous than those which had been dashed from their limbs by red-handed war. As she thought of these things she read the following words from the pen of one who had carefully watched the process of "redemption," and had noted its results and tendency—not bitterly and angrily, as she had done, but coolly ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... occurred which clearly prove the ill effect of the policy which that Government has so long pursued on the friendly relations of the two countries, which it is presumed is at least of as much importance to Spain as to the United States to maintain. A state of things has existed in the Floridas the tendency of which has been obvious to all who have paid the slightest attention to the progress of affairs in that quarter. Throughout the whole of those Provinces to which the Spanish title extends the Government ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of religion in general, it is eminently true of the Christian religion. The characteristic note of Christianity is its emphasis on the social relations. In this it simply exhibits what we may call its scientific temper, its tendency to keep close to the facts of life, to give the right interpretation to nature and ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... Providence, may be the means of closing and healing all civil and religious dissensions among us, and that, instead of showing the superior purity of our faith, by persecuting those who think otherwise from ourselves on doctrinal points, we shall endeavour to show its real Christian tendency, by emulating each other in actions of good-will towards man, as the best way of showing ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... thoroughly furnished unto every good work." To be thorough one must know the old as well as the new. In all the sermons of Paul, Peter and the rest, they quote from old Scripture. So did Jesus. Read Peter's first sermon on the day of Pentecost. There is a tendency to study the New Testament more than the Old. It is not possible to understand the New, unless we first study the Old. One of my favorite books is Deuteronomy, the dying words of Moses. He here repeats the great mercy, consideration and power of God's dealings with his people. Tells the ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... not," laughed Tom. "Out there you would be the plaything of the winds. Your body would be exposed to the glaring sun, the full blast of every passing storm, and the bitter cold of winter, which would, unless you were very hardy, have a tendency to retard your growth and weaken your vigor. Trees, like humans, do not enjoy a lonely life, but when they get together they immediately enter into bitter competition. Isn't that ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... as an essay or first attempt only. It is not our intention here to undertake a complete monograph that would require a thick volume, but only to seek the underlying conditions of the creative imagination, showing that it has its beginning and principal source in the natural tendency of images to become objectified (or, more simply, in the motor elements inherent in the image), and then following it in its development under its manifold forms, whatever they may be. For I cannot but maintain that, at ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... vast, and by ingenuity and industry so comprehensive and so various in themselves and their results, that it must supersede all others, and be accepted in every country where there are people capable of understanding it. From the time of the first Crusade there has been a steady tendency to the unity of Christian countries; and notwithstanding all their conflicts with one another, and partly as one of the effects of those conflicts, they have "fraternized," until now there exists a mighty Christian ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... a good sauce; and we found—and others also have made the same discovery—that when the appetite fails and there is a tendency to criticise, or find fault with the food, or even with the cook, a voluntary abstinence for two or three meals will be most beneficial for mind and body, and bring back a very decided appreciation of some of God's good gifts which hitherto had ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... The tendency of his mind and character was wholly practical. Common sense was his polar star. He must be judged not as a scholar or a lawyer or a statesman merely, but as a man of business who was required to accomplish a given purpose. ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... of them under a glass, she was able to draw her figures of them by night. Whether the light of this and of other insects be caused by their amatorial passion, and thus assists them to find each other; or is caused by respiration, which is so analogous to combustion; or to a tendency to putridity, as in dead fish and rotten wood, is still to be investigated; see Botanic Garden, Vol. ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... flourished in about 150 before the common era. In his play, "The Exodus from Egypt," modelled after Euripides, Moses, as we know him in the Bible, is the hero. Otherwise the play is thoroughly Hellenic, showing the Greek tendency to become didactic and reflective and use the heroes of sacred legend as human types. Besides, two fragments of Jewish-Hellenic dramas, in trimeter verse, have come down to us, the one treating of the unity of God, the other of the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... their salaries; or their ports closed, or their commerce regulated by Parliament. It is interesting to observe how Franklin's experiments and speculations in natural science often had a favorable influence on freedom of thought. His studies in economics had a strong tendency in that direction. His views about religious toleration were founded on his intense faith in civil liberty; and even his demonstration that lightning was an electrical phenomenon brought deliverance for mankind from an ancient terror. ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... however, listened with a marked air of attention to my earnest request for the circumstantial details of the case, but finally referred me to a vast folio volume, in which were entered all the charges, of whatever nature, involving any serious tendency—in fact, all that exceeded a misdemeanor—in the regular chronological succession according to which they came before the magistrate. Here, in this vast calendar of guilt and misery, amidst the aliases ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... of ancient communities established on all sorts of principles, or even whim-principles, and yet managing to get on, and as these crude polities had been succeeded by other and better ones, to the latest known in the world, so these last need not look to be permanent. Of a tendency to this state of feeling Milton had given evidences from early youth; but I do not think I am wrong in fixing on the year 1643 as the time when it became chronic, nor in tracing the sudden enlargement of it then beyond its former bounds to ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... of nature makes the whole world kin,' says a great authority; and it is wonderful how useful a knowledge of the various touches of nature is in the art of war. It may not have occurred to Mr Montague that savages have a tendency to love and protect their wives and children as well as ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... The tendency to gnaw worriedly at a thousand disturbing possibilities drowned quickly in a rapidly rising sense of reckless abandon that possessed him. The prospect of positive action of any sort served to release any tension left in him ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... of modified untruthfulness, of which nobody ought to know better than FLICKERS the rapids, and shallows, and rocks on which the mariner's bark is apt to go to wreck. What is there in the pursuit of sport, I ask myself, that brings on this strange tendency to exaggeration? How few escape it. The excellent, the prosaic DUBSON, that broad-shouldered, whiskered, and eminently snub-nosed Nimrod, he too, gives way occasionally. FLICKERS'S, I own, is an extreme case. He has indulged ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... time that Jock McChesney began to carry a yellow walking-stick down to work each morning his mother noticed a growing tendency on his part to patronize her. Now Mrs. Emma McChesney, successful, capable business woman that she was, could afford to regard her young son's attitude with a quiet and deep amusement. In twelve years Emma McChesney had risen from the humble position ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... thing which has no reference at all to this, and you name a worthless trifle, however it may be gilded to allure the eye, however it may be sweetened to gratify the taste. Name a thing, which, instead of thus improving the soul, has a tendency to debase and pollute, to enslave and endanger it, and you name what is most unprofitable and mischievous, be the wages of iniquity ever so great; most foul and deformed, be it in the eyes of men ever so honorable, or in their customs ever ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... like Cupid, manage wily art? Whate'er stupidity we may discern, His pupils more within a day can learn, Than MASTERS knowledge in the schools can gain, Though they in study should ten years remain; The lowest clown he presently inspires, With ev'ry tendency that love requires; Of this our present tale's a proof direct, And none that feel—its truths ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... and charters, and dissolving all the bubble companies. The following copy of their lordships' order, containing a list of all these nefarious projects, will not be deemed uninteresting at the present time, when, at periodic intervals, there is but too much tendency in the public mind to indulge in ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... discoverer. Investigation found that many ideas and systems of ideas, supposed philosophies and sciences, were false and unsubstantial as the "baseless fabric of a vision." Things received as truths from time immemorial were shown to be untrue. The tendency of the human intellect is to generalize; and finding many previously received systems and facts to be without evidence sufficient to substantiate them, there arose the unwilled generalization that all these systems are likewise false. I do not say that man has ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... in that belief a tendency to express itself in certain ceremonial practices, which retain in a greater or less degree the character of the ritual observances of which they are the survival. Mr E. K. Chambers, in The Mediaeval Stage, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... member, was a very different person. He looked like a fat, white, pugnacious cat. His hair, which had turned white early, had a tendency to grow in a bang; his arms were short—so short that when he put his hands on the arms of his swing-chair he hardly bent his elbows. He had them there now as Pete entered, and was swinging through short arcs in rather a nervous rhythm. He was of Irish parentage, and was understood ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... iron law of wages; this meaning that wages are said to tend increasingly to a minimum which will give but a bare living. For skilled labor the law may be regarded as elastic rather than iron. For unskilled, it is as certainly the tendency, which, if constantly repeated and so intensified, would end as law. Many standard economists regard it as already fixed; and writers like Lasalle, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Marx heap every ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... clean manuscript. Again, it pays to get a pretty good grade of carbon paper; the best, in fact, is none too good for literary work of any kind. Cheap carbons smear the copy and stain the writer's fingers; besides, they have a tendency to make the copy look as if it were covered with a fine layer of soot or ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... The tendency of modern education is towards the discovery and perfection of methods. The thought of leading educators is turned from the what to the how; to the development of systems of progressive steps through which the pupil may be led to a realization ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... communities, and necessarily were forced to plan for the general rather than for the individual good. In such close quarters, where every angle made itself felt, and constant contact developed and implied criticism, law must work far more minutely than in less exacting communities. Every tendency to introspection and self-judging was strengthened to the utmost, and merciless condemnation for one's self came to mean a still sharper one for others. With every power of brain and soul they fought against what, to them, seemed the one evil for that or ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... have led me to observe, which perhaps it would be worth while to set down briefly here. It is this, that by a natural law the Sublime, besides receiving an acquisition of strength from figures, in its turn lends support in a remarkable manner to them. To explain: the use of figures has a peculiar tendency to rouse a suspicion of dishonesty, and to create an impression of treachery, scheming, and false reasoning; especially if the person addressed be a judge, who is master of the situation, and still more in the case of a despot, a king, a military potentate, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... became aware of a bird singing somewhere in advance, and as I listened again I said aloud, with full persuasion, "There! that's a thrasher!" There was a something of difference: a shade of coarseness in the voice, perhaps; a tendency to force the tone, as we say of human singers,—a something, at all events, and the longer I hearkened, the more confident I felt that the bird was a thrasher. And so it was,—the first one I had heard in Florida, although I had seen many. ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... its commission, if it be to be dreaded at all, is far more likely on the part of some recreant camp-follower of a scattered, disunited, and half-recognized profession, than when there is a public opinion established in it, by the union of all classes of its members for the common good: the tendency of which union must in the nature of things be to raise the lower members of the press towards the higher, and never to bring the higher members ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... things are very enjoyable, and in these times there is no lack of them. The tendency, I should say, is towards superfluity. But new places——! There are surely not many left except the North Pole and the South. Everybody goes everywhere nowadays, and you tumble over friends in Damascus and find your tailor picnicking ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... it) Spedding's Examiner. {266} I believe that I should be ashamed of his praise, if I did not desire to take any means to make my little book known for a good purpose. I think he over-praises it: but he cannot over-praise the design, and (as I believe) the tendency of it. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... religious life of ordinary men is the name not of the whole of things, heaven forbid, but only of the ideal tendency in things, believed in as a superhuman person who calls us to co-operate in His purposes, and who furthers ours if they are worthy. He works in an external environment, has limits, and has enemies. When ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... whether he was actuated by motives of misguided patriotism, or whether, like far greater men, he only wanted to make himself thoroughly heard in the world first, and when that object was satisfactorily attained, he would modify his tendency to rabid policies and prove himself a reliable statesman. In the meantime ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... although he called himself so, did not look much like a Quaker to Robert. He had a frank face and merry eyes, and manner and voice indicated a tendency to gayety. Judging from his words he had no cares and Indians and ambush were far from his thoughts. Proof of this was the absence of sentinels. The men, scattered about the fire, were eating their ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... mean not only perceivable motion, but an inherent tendency to change, or resist action. It matters not whether we speak of animals possessed of the power of locomotion; of vegetables, which send forth their branches, leaves, blossoms, and fruits; or of minerals, which retain their forms, positions, and properties. The same principles are concerned, the ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... rendering great services to humanity." Again, he says that "the Christian religion is the religion of a civilised people; it is entirely spiritual, and the reward which Jesus Christ promises to the elect is that they shall see God face to face; and its whole tendency is to subdue the passions; it ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... in those seedlings in some cases the tendency to vegetate very early and others very late. The most striking case that I know is an F-1 hybrid which is a very, very late starter in the spring. It is perfectly dormant when the other young walnuts are in practically full leaf. We do not ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... been urged with a warmth proportioned to the atrocity of the conduct which called them forth, by all the most respectable persons, and the senate having passed a decree to the effect that the violence offered was prejudicial to the state, and a precedent of pernicious tendency, immediately the Carvilii, tribunes of the people, giving up the action for a fine, appointed a day on which Posthumius should be tried capitally, and ordered, that unless he gave bail, he should ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... double, murmuring apology and compliment. Then Aoyama Shu[u]zen made his report. He made it as one sure to please his hearers, many of whom regarded him with no particular liking. In fact at the tale of his discomfiture there was some joy, and tendency to show it. "Then, as with us, Aoyama Uji meets Okumura Dono for the first time." Aoyama nodded an amused assent. Said one more malicious, "And the repast? Surely the hatamoto was as well entertained as the chu[u]gen?" Shu[u]zen skilfully dodged the issue. "The hour ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... into portions of three hours each: each portion had its own Service, named from its close, but said at a variable time according to the appointment of the Ordinary[2]. The tendency was to appoint an early part of the three hours for the Service; and this is visible in the word 'noon,' if it is true that 12 o'clock is so named from the custom of saying ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... of us quite knew what to make of the weather. The glass stood fairly high, with a rising rather than a falling tendency, yet the sky was hazy without being exactly overcast. Nor, considering where we were, was the weather particularly hot; the atmosphere, however, seemed surcharged with damp, although no rain fell. With the going down of the sun it fell exceedingly dark, for the moon was far advanced in her last ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... Barring a tendency to flash driving, and a delight in persecuting slow cars by driving just in front of them and letting them come up and enjoy his dust, and then shooting away again, he was a respectable member of society. When his boss was in the car he cloaked the natural ferocity of his ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... parallel with that which they had always known that they made no change in it. They introduced their own vocabulary in many cases in place of the Saxon; they identified in some cases practices which looked alike but which were not strictly identical; and they had a very decided tendency to treat the free members of the manorial population, strongly intrenched as they were in the popular courts, as belonging at the same time to both sides of feudalism, the economic and the political: but the confusion of language and ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... The tendency of the mind toward dissociation, a function limiting the indiscriminate recall of associated "groups," is also manifested in all of us in the transfer to ...
— The Trained Memory • Warren Hilton
... consult him on passages of French which she could not understand, though her mother was a Frenchwoman, and which he would construe to her satisfaction: and, besides giving her his aid in profane literature, he was kind enough to select for her books of a more serious tendency, and address to her much of his conversation. She admired, beyond measure, his speech at the Quashimaboo-Aid Society; took an interest in his pamphlet on malt: was often affected, even to tears, by his discourses ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... economics as well as in ethics. What we must now investigate is any vicious tendencies that may be found in the money-making aim when followed normally and according to its own accepted principles. Of such degenerative tendencies we seem to find two: first, the tendency to that excess which becomes a vice; and second, the tendency to a disregard of other considerations in life through too exclusive a devotion to acquisitiveness. But upon further thought we must see that these two tendencies flow together and become ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman
... other hand, had followed the hint of his father's figure in his make-up, and appeared as a rubicund old gentleman, large in the waist, bald, with an apoplectic tendency, a wheezy asthmatic voice, and a full ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... People, the deepening of custom into morals is indicated. Emphasis is also placed upon the development of law in connection with the rise of governing classes, and its tendency to dominate the standards previously taken as morals—in fact, that tendency of moral law to become static law, a process of which ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... equipment of the Greek infantry soldier consisted, besides his helmet and body-armour, of shield and lance, and in advancing to battle he had always a tendency to diverge towards the right, from a natural wish to keep his shielded side towards the enemy. This divergence from the forward direction was begun by the man posted on the extreme right; his comrade on the left followed his example, and the deflection was continued along the whole line. The ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... animal magnetism was becoming too strong for her there. The action brought by her son in Concord last summer she attributed entirely to the work of mesmerists who were supposed to be in control of her son's mind. Mrs. Eddy always believed that this strange miasma of evil had a curious tendency to become localized: that certain streets, mail-boxes, telegraph-offices, vehicles, could be totally suborned by these invisible currents of hatred and ill-will that had their source in the minds of her enemies and continually encircled her. She believed that ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... manhood, the important fates of life, the primary emotions in their normal course, that are in the foreground of thought, but the individual is more and more, the sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling. This tendency to detail, which is the hallmark of realism, constitutes decline. It arises partly from the exhaustion of general ideas, from the search for novelty of subject and sensation, from the special phenomena of a decaying society; but, however manifold may ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... process of scale. He was not good in a fight, and his nerves were more delicate than boys' nerves ought to be. He exaggerated these weaknesses as he grew older. The habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; the shirking of responsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the horror of ennui; the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... afterwards to change his opinion. He was able to throw a flood of new light on the characters of the men who took part in the struggle, and if the facts tended to darken the fair fame of some of them, the historian certainly ought not to be censured for it. The tendency of the book was decidedly in opposition to the ideas entertained to this day by the partizans of the "Old Family Compact" on the one side, and also to the friends and admirers of William ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... you of her mistress's serious illness. That circumstance, according to my view of it, laid the responsibility on the doctor's shoulders. The form taken by your aunt's delirium—I mean the apparent tendency of the words that escape her in that state—seems to excite some incomprehensible feeling in the mind of her crabbed servant. She wouldn't even let me go into the bedroom, if she could possibly help it. Did Mrs. Ellmother give you a warm ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... consisted of a few short words, possibly not over 200, since many now use only about 300. The Hebrew has only about 500 root words of 3 letters; the stagnant Chinese, 450; the Sanscrit, about the same. All the Semitic languages have tri-literal roots. As the tendency of all languages is to grow in the number and length of words, these consisting of a few small words must have been close to the original mother tongue. No language could have come down from the great antiquity required by evolution and have so few words. Johnson's ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... themselves to one or other of the courts of the chancery division. Business before the court of probate, divorce and admiralty, the privy council and parliamentary committees, exhibits, though in a less degree, the same tendency to specialization. In some of the larger provincial towns there are also local bars of considerable strength. The bar of Ireland exhibits in its general arrangements the same features as the bar of England. For the Scottish bar, see under ADVOCATES, FACULTY OF. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... year after the Professor's death. Six or seven years have passed since then, and you have gone on from adventure to adventure, all characterised by the same lamentable lack of discretion. The reason for this lies in your own tendency to self-deception. You want to make yourself and others believe that you are always looking for ideal love and constant ties. In reality your motives are quite different. You hug the traditional conviction that ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... was fond of good things. She was so by nature; but she became temperate by habit and now she is temperate by virtue. Little girls are not to be controlled, as little boys are, to some extent, through their greediness. This tendency may have ill effects on women and it is too dangerous to be left unchecked. When Sophy was little, she did not always return empty handed if she was sent to her mother's cupboard, and she was not quite to be trusted with sweets and sugar-almonds. Her mother caught her, took ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... If the busy rich people watched and rebuked the idle rich people, all would be right; and if the busy poor people watched and rebuked the idle poor people, all would be right. But each class has a tendency to look for the faults of the other. A hard-working man of property is particularly offended by an idle beggar; and an orderly, but poor, workman is naturally intolerant of the licentious luxury of the rich. And what is severe judgment ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... something of the sort, and had put himself as much in shelter as the nature of the porch admitted; but for all that he was deplorably drenched below the waist. His hose began to freeze almost at once. Death from cold and exposure stared him in the face; he remembered he was of phthisical tendency, and began coughing tentatively. But the gravity of the danger steadied his nerves. He stopped a few hundred yards from the door where he had been so rudely used, and reflected with his finger to his nose. He could ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... above mediocrity, had the wheels ever been put in motion; but, clogged by prejudices, they never turned quite round, and, whenever she considered a subject, she stopped before she came to a conclusion. Assuming a mask of propriety, she had banished nature; yet its tendency was only to be diverted, not stifled. Some lines, which took from the symmetry of the mouth, not very obvious to a superficial observer, struck Sagestus, and they appeared to him characters of indolent obstinacy. Not having courage to form an opinion of her own, she adhered, ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... prepossessed in his favor. They conversed frequently upon topics which Mr. Abbot had long been in the habit of scoffing at, but there was an element of reverence in Mr. Heath's nature that commanded his respect in spite of preconceived ideas and a tendency to skepticism. His arguments were always reasonable and convincing. He could not fail to feel this influence; and it was not long before Virgie could see that a great change had taken place in her father's feelings regarding his relations to an overruling ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... of this remedy render it of additional value, as it will certainly destroy the tendency to unhealthy suppuration, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... administered the comforts of religion to a dying sinner. His admiring wife awaits him at the Rectory, and assures him that never yet was clergyman so devoted to the welfare of his flock. He believes her; he has a natural tendency to believe everything that is told him, and who should know the facts of the case better than his wife? Poor fellow! He has done his best, but what does a fish's best come to when the fish is out of water? He has left meat and wine—that he ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... all find the generalization I made from the botanical books likely to have occurred to me from the real things. No moss leaves that I can find here give me the idea of resemblance to pineapple leaves; nor do I see any, through my weak lens, clearly serrated; but I do find a general tendency to run into a silky filamentous structure, and in some, especially on a small one gathered from the fissures in the marble of the cathedral, white threads of considerable length at the extremities of the leaves, of which threads I remember no drawing or notice in the botanical ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... beginning of Sturm und Drang; I am learning to walk. Moreover I have surprised in myself, during the day, a tendency to fall in love with my nurse. On the pretence that walking might give me bandy legs she caught me up and pressed me to her bosom. We have no affinities; indeed, beyond cleanliness and a certain unreasoning honesty, ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... ashes. Doesn't that seem something like war to you? Can't you see the waste of it— waste of labour, skill, cunning, waste of life in short? Well, you may say, but it cheapens the goods. In a sense it does; and yet only apparently, as wages have a tendency to sink for the ordinary worker in proportion as prices sink; and at what a cost do we gain this appearance of cheapness! Plainly speaking, at the cost of cheating the consumer and starving the real producer for the benefit of the gambler, who uses both ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... several peculiarities, all unreasonable, many ridiculous, attending the demeanour of a man in love. Not the least eccentric of these are his predatory instincts, his tendency to prowl, his preference for walking over other modes of conveyance, and inclination to subterfuge of every kind as to his ultimate destination. Tom Ryfe was going to Belgrave Square; why should he direct his driver to set him down a quarter of a ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... Here the fiction is puerile, and built on a system which is itself in danger of vanishing into air. At the end of the second canto, the Muse takes a dish of tea, which I think is the only thing of any consequence that is done throughout. The second part has been charged with an immoral tendency; but Miss Seward has observed, with much truth, that it is a burlesque upon morality to make the amours of the plants responsible at its tribunal; and that the impurity is in the imagination of the reader, not in the pages of the poet. For these ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... part of our tendency to keep things alive by hook or by crook ... not a spark but must be carefully blown upon. The world's old and tired; it dreads extinction. I think I disapprove ... I think ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... and the trio then parted company to carry these arrangements into effect, the first result of which was that everybody looked more cheerful than they had been since the completion of the house, after finishing which some dulness and lassitude had been observable in the men, coupled with a tendency to idle about ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... had a fault it was that when he decided to do a thing he wanted to do it at once. Having been a man of camps and considerable lonely wanderings about the world, he had been able to gratify this tendency to decide and act quickly. But it was not so simple with a party of women, and when he announced that they were to start next morning early there was some silent ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... was made President, with Kolettes, a politician of great influence in Central Greece, as his Minister. But in place of the earlier antagonism between soldier and civilian, a new and more dangerous antagonism, that of district against district, now threatened the existence of Greece. The tendency of the new government to sacrifice everything to the interest of the islands at once became evident. Konduriottes was a thoroughly incompetent man, and made himself ridiculous by appointing his friends, the Hydriote sea-captains, to the highest military and ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... retrospection and anticipation; morality must teach him the exact bounds, and different shades, of vice and virtue; from policy and the practice of life, he has to learn the discriminations of character, and the tendency of the passions, either single or combined; and physiology must supply him with illustrations and images. To put these materials to poetical use, is required an imagination capable of painting nature, and realizing ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... break. This will induce quick healing over and the sending out of other roots. Where there is only a bruise on one side, all the frayed edges of the wound should be cleanly cut back to sound bark, which will have a tendency to promote ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... writes Julius Ham, 'do esprit and spirituel express what the French deem the highest glory of the human mind! A large part of their literature is mousseux; and whatever is so, soon grows flat. Our national quality is sense, which may, perhaps, betray a tendency to materialism; but which, at all events, comprehends a greater body of thought, that has settled down and become substantiated in maxims.'[A] How far a Frenchman is from appreciating this distinction, as unfavorable to his own race, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... man already past his prime. His hair was slightly sprinkled with gray, and his form showed that tendency to fullness so frequently found in persons of sedentary habits. But in his fine, thoughtful eyes, and expansive brow, one saw evidence of that noble intellect for which he was distinguished, while his beaming smile and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that so far as I am able to understand the subject, the tendency of all Japanese poetry is to terse expression. Were it not well therefore to consider at least the possible result of a totally opposite tendency,—expansion of fancy, luxuriance of expression? Terseness of expression, pithiness, condensation, are of vast importance ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... its transformation into a beetle. An interesting thing in connection with these weevils is that each species confine its attacks to one particular kind of nut. Even those species that attack acorns show a decided tendency to distinguish between oak species and confine themselves as groups very largely to particular species or botanical groups of oaks. There is, therefore, no danger that any of these weevils will multiply, for example in an oak forest, and then migrate ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... an upward bearing, which had been accomplished by Cristofori a hundred years before, in 1808. A down-bearing bridge to the wrest-plank, with hammers striking upward, are clearly not in relation; the tendency of the hammer must be, if there is much force used, to lift the string from its bearing, to the detriment of the tone. Erard reversed the direction of the bearing of the front bridge, substituting for a long, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... counting-house, and —— [the editor] should have known better than to leave us at the mercy of this impudent cad,' convince me that my father's wrath was in great part directed less against an individual than a social movement or tendency. ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse-elementary. It will be said, I am aware, that when we persist in acts because we feel we should ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a gambler: he had not that specific disease in which the suspension of the whole nervous energy on a chance or risk becomes as necessary as the dram to the drunkard; he had only the tendency to that diffusive form of gambling which has no alcoholic intensity, but is carried on with the healthiest chyle-fed blood, keeping up a joyous imaginative activity which fashions events according to desire, and having no fears about its own weather, only sees the advantage ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... asked Tim, pointing to the region below his waistcoat, the twinkle returning to his eye. Molly sternly repressed a tendency ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... resumed and the northern kingdom, under Bruce, cut itself finally free by the stroke of Bannockburn. Otherwise the reign is a mere interlude, and it is with the succeeding one that we find the new national tendency yet further developed. The great French wars, in which England won so much glory, were opened by Edward III., and grew more and more nationalist. But even to feel the transition of the time we must first realize that the third Edward made ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... worshipful friend the canonico Andrea Paccone, who delighted in the guitar, played it skilfully, and was always fond of hearing it well accompanied by the voice. My own instrument I had brought with me, together with many gay Florentine songs, some of which were of such a turn and tendency, that the canonico thought they would sound better on water, and rather far from shore, than within the walls of the canonicate. He proposed then, one evening when there was little wind stirring, to exercise three young abbates[9] on their several parts, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... combination. At first sight, and stated in this manner, it would seem as if these conclusions, if justified by the facts, involved a serious and far-reaching criticism of the Socialist theory of a universal tendency toward the concentration of industry and commerce into units of ever ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... Sweden's tendency to support the Central European Powers is based primarily on its fear of and hatred for Russia. The former sentiment is due to Russia's well-known desire for a port which is ice-free all year around and which it could, of course, acquire by the conquest of Sweden. The latter ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... few that, perversely construing them, have brought themselves and others to perdition. Everything is in itself good for somewhat, and being put to a bad purpose, may work manifold mischief. And so, I say, it is with my stories. If any man shall be minded to draw from them matters of evil tendency or consequence, they will not gainsay him, if, perchance, such matters there be in them, nor will such matters fail to be found in them, if they be wrested and distorted. Nor, if any shall seek profit and reward in them, will they deny him the same; and censured or accounted ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... every deep emotion. He had the quiet, assured manner of a master; yet I was not so instantly conscious of that, as of an air of reverence and benignity, which, combined with the somewhat Oriental tendency of feature and colour, made his whole personality suggest that of ...
— A Day with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy • George Sampson
... principles, we shall find, that the general tendency of the operations of water upon the surface of this earth is to form plains of lakes, and not, contrarily, lakes of plains. For example, it was not the Rhone that formed the lake of Geneva; for, had the lake subsisted in ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... in general terms the tendency of these rockets of literature, or to arrive at the spirit which seems to pervade them, is not quite so easy as it would seem. They are written by authors of all party-colors, within certain impassable limits prescribed by the parental restrictions of Government. Still ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... not our purpose to consider here all Bruno's articles of faith or unfaith, but rather to show the general tendency of his teaching, in order to trace its effect upon his contemporaries in England. His philosophy, itself a travesty of various systems, was in its turn caricatured and vulgarised in a manner which would, perhaps, had he lived to see it, have gone far to persuade him of the risk to popular ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone |
