"Willful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was stern and significant. 'It was a grave and most painful task which devolved upon him to instruct the jurors that one of the parties before them must be guilty of deliberate and willful perjury. Their statements were wholly irreconcilable with each other; nay more, were diametrically opposite; and that either were innocently mistaken in their ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... side with this older and apparently ruder art, in the cabinets of men of real judgment? The reason is precisely the same as in the case of the Tenniel woodcut. This modern line engraving is alloyed gold. Rich in capacity, astonishing in attainment, it nevertheless admits willful fault, and misses what it ought first to have attained. It is therefore, to a certain measure, vile in its perfection; while the older work is noble even in its failure, and classic no less in what it deliberately refuses, ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... departure he threw into the air a parachute with which he had provided himself. It is supposed that the oscillations consequent on the throwing off of the parachute were the cause of they aeronaut's fall. Some pretend that Mosment had foretold his death, and that it was caused by a willful carelessness. However this may be, the balloon continued its flight alone, and the body of the aeronaut was found partly buried in the sand of the ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... that," he answered sternly. "It would indeed be a clouded mind which could mistake mere disordered fancies for willful offenses against the truth. I have no doubt that when you have recovered from the effects of your late accident these vain thoughts and imaginations will ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... her agitation. Men of Lord Dreever's type appeal to the motherly instinct of women. As a man, his lordship was a negligible quantity. He did not count. But as a willful child, to be kept out of trouble, he had ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... would be able to cross the logs and jump the rocks which would bar her way by the water-passage. But that obstinate little personage, who has always been haunted with a passionate desire to do everything which people said she could not do, made up her willful mind immediately to go by the river. Behold, then, the "Dame" on her winding way, escorted by a deputation of Indian Barians, which had come up for ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... not here! He had yielded too easily to the spell of the woods and the call of the old primeval nature. He might have escaped long ago, there had been many opportunities, but he could not see them. His blindness had been willful, the child of his own desires. He knew it too well now. He saw himself guilty and ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... The hue and cry had been given by apparently the only one of the travelers who escaped, but as he was hastening to take the overland coach to the East at the time, his testimony could not be submitted to the coroner's deliberation. The facts, however, were sufficiently plain for a verdict of willful murder against the highwayman, although it was believed that the absent witness had basely deserted his companion and left him to his fate, or, as was suggested by others, that he might even have been an accomplice. ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... of his injustice will suffice for all. It is of ludicrous enormity; nor do I believe any thing more flagrantly willful was ever done by himself. I heard Mr. C——, the sufferer, now a most respectable person in a government office, relate it with a due relish, long after quitting the school. The master was in the habit of "spiting" C——; that is to say, of taking every opportunity ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... Mr. Fields remind me of my too long silence. Rest assured that you and yours are never long out of our thoughts, and we only wish you were here in our peaceful country, far removed from the terrible anxieties caused by wicked and willful men on one side, and on the other permitted by the incompetents set over you. How little you thought, when you suggested to me the propriety of old soldiers only going into battle, that you should have been absolutely predicting the unhappy course of events! Do you remember adding that "a premium ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... father's son; you will belong, of course, to the Barcine party, but there is no occasion to draw enmity and hate upon yourself before you are in a position to do real service to the cause. And now ride off with you; I know all our words are falling on deaf ears, and that willful lads will go their ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... disabled by dissoluteness and rapine, and the Fimbrians, as they were called, utterly unmanageable by long want of any sort of discipline. For these were they who under Fimbria had slain Flaccus, the consul and general, and afterwards betrayed Fimbria to Sylla; a willful and lawless set of men, but warlike, expert, and hardy in the field. Lucullus in a short time took down the courage of these, and disciplined the others, who then first, in all probability, knew what a true commander and governor was; whereas in former times they had been courted to service, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Six months' confinement at hard involving willful defiance labor and forfeiture of $10 per of the authority of a month for the same period; for noncommissioned officer in noncommissioned officer, reduction charge of a guard or party ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... the Council passed an ordinance prohibiting, under severe pains and penalties, the willful destruction of property, and consequently the Chinamen were left to pursue their work. The dam proved an immense benefit to the city and surrounding country, and other people began mining their lots, and using the water that had collected during the night and saving it over, ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... not yet grasped it. I'm mighty proud of my country, Mary Louise, and I believe this war is going to give us Americans a distinction that will set us up in our own opinion and in the eyes of the world. But always there is a willful objection, on the part of some, toward any good and noble action, and we must deal charitably with these deluded ones and strive to win them to an ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... upon the shelves of public libraries. These MS. collections furnish a mine of inexhaustible riches to the student of manners. When checked by legal documents, they frequently reveal carelessness, inaccuracy, or even willful distortion of facts. The genius of the Novella, so paramount in popular Italian literature of that epoch, presided over their composition, adding intreccio to disconnected facts, heightening sympathy by ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... withdrew: For now no longer Truth supports thy cause; No longer Glory prompts thee to applause; No longer Virtue breathing in thy breast, With all her conscious majesty confest, Still bright and brighter wakes the almighty flame, To rouse the feeble, and the willful tame, And where she sees the catching glimpses roll, Spreads the strong blaze, and all involves the soul; But cold restraints thy conscious fancy chill, And formal passions mock thy struggling will; Or, if thy Genius e'er forget his ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... child of this training was as great a failure as the child of austerity and gloom. He was capricious, lawless, willful, disobedient, passionate; he thought of no one's pleasure save his own; he cared for his parents only in so far as they could be of use to him; and like a wild beast of the jungle he preyed upon the life around him, and cared not whom he destroyed ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... before, twisted it into a low knot slightly eccentric in shape, and recut a bang. Lavinia's eyes seemed bluer, her delicate flush more elusive; the shape of her face appeared changed, it was more pointed and had a new willful charm. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... has little intuition, but a world of good intentions. Men blunder woefully in their relations with women, not because of innate boorishness in the sex, not because of willful brashness, but because of lack of understanding. They mean well, but their performance is deplorable.... In that moment Bonbright's most valuable possession was a certain intuition, a fineness, a decency, a reserve, a natural modesty. As he sat there alone ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... constitute with absolute certainty what may be clearly termed crimes, omitting those the proofs of which were, in our view, insufficient, or which, however destructive or cruel they were, might have been the result of acts of war properly so-called, rather than of willful ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... but the warmest love was certainly for the child who had the Earle face. She was imperious and willful, generous to a fault, impatient of all control; but her greatest fault, Mrs. Vyvian said, was a constant craving for excitement; a distaste for and dislike of quiet and retirement. She would ride the most restive horse, she would do anything to break the ennui and ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... shoulders of an all-wise Providence and let it go with the consoling assurance that, as to a solution, "the Lord will provide." But the echoes of recriminations shouted by each side against the other; the cries of foul play; the accusations of willful injustice; the threats of complete annihilation of capital by organized labor, of organized labor by capital—must reach to heaven itself, and Providence might well pause in dismay. Constructive good ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... the town, and in so doing recognized her father's tall, bending figure on the centre cliff, holding up his hand in an authoritative manner, as if to interdict her voyage. It was her first act of willful disobedience, and her heart sank within her; and though she had triumphed over her bold rival, by securing the company and attentions of Arthur Blackbourne for the day, she felt more dejected than if she had been left alone ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the white men? She was, indeed, ignorant of the peculiar vengeance that they desired to wreak on her husband and all his race; but the malevolent character of the Nausetts had been sufficiently manifested in their repeated and destructive attacks on the settlement, and their willful desecration of the graves of the exiles, to awaken the most poignant fears in her breast. Rodolph, too, was absent, and Brewster was still at the Wampanoge village; and where should she seek for succor ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... overcome, he continued: "I tried to explain the mistake before, but your kindness cut me off. I can only say that, though you have given me a mother's care and a Christian's consideration under a misunderstanding, I trust you will not blame me for willful deception nor regret the goodness you have shown the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... a bough above, screamed in mocking laughter at the dreamer beneath; an old drake, leading his family in a waddling row to the open stream below the little house, solemnly quacked his protest against such a willful waste of time; and a spotted calf thrust its head through the barn-yard fence to gaze at ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... case, of course, was a homicide. It usually was. From Beta, Constabulary Fifteen, Lieutenant George Lunt. Jack Holloway—so old Jack had cut another notch on his gun—Cold Creek Valley, Federation citizen, race Terran human; willful killing of a sapient being, to wit Kurt Borch, Mallorysport, Federation citizen, race Terran human. Complainant, Leonard Kellogg, the same. Attorney of record for the defendant, Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard. The last time Jack Holloway had killed anybody, it had been a couple ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... "I am a ne'er-do-well by nature. I was an idle boy, an idle youth, and an idle man. I poached when I had a chance. I lived on my wife's earnings. I went to the bad as deliberately as any one in the world did, but I do not remember that I ever told a willful lie." ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... by rewards more than by penalties. Such faults as willful disobedience, lying, dishonesty, and indecent or profane language, should be punished with severe penalties, after a child has been fully instructed in the evil of such practices. But all the constantly recurring faults of the nursery, such as ill-humor, quarreling, carelessness, ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Eugene; the fact of Kate having some money seemed to her, as it does to most people, a reason for her marrying somebody who had more, instead of aiding in the beneficent work of a more equal distribution of wealth. But Kate was undeniably willful. She treated her engagement, indeed, as an absolutely binding and unbreakable tie—a fact so conclusively accomplished that it could almost be ignored. But she received any suggestion of a possible excess in her graciousness toward ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... things are entirely unnecessary. I'm going to have old Mother Nature indicted by the Grand jury for willful, wasteful, wanton extravagance unless—unless—" ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... says. "It's some of mine. You've saved me thirty pounds, Master Dawe, and you've given me good arguments to use against a willful woman that wants my fine new ship for her own toy. We'll not have any scroll-work." His face ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... slipped into the apartment of the hen and chickens. They cried out loudly, and came fluttering down from their perches, and ran about in dismay, and the little girl ran after them. I saw it quite plainly, for I looked through a hole in the hen-house wall. I was angry with the willful child, and felt glad when her father came out and scolded her more violently than yesterday, holding her roughly by the arm; she held down her head, and her blue eyes were full of large tears. 'What are you about here?' he asked. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... was in my power to escape a moral penalty, by willful ignorance, was revealed to me, that I could continue the privilege of sinning with impunity. His answer was complicated, and he quoted several passages from the Scriptures. Presently he began to sing, and I grew lonesome; the life within me seemed ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... they will indeed pay no regard to the ancient friendship between their people and our own or to the solemn obligations which have been exchanged between them and destroy American ships and take the lives of American citizens in the willful prosecution of the ruthless naval program they have announced their intention to adopt. Only actual overt acts on their part can make me believe ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... a slow growth. Evils in one age painfully sow the seed that is to come up good in another. The historian, and still more the critical commentator on his own times, needs to be patient, calm, judicial, hopeful. Mr. Carlyle is impatient, fervid, willful, nay, despotic, and he is not hopeful, not hopeful enough. One healthily hopeful, and genuinely faithful, would not be ever betaking him to the past as a refuge from the present; would not tauntingly throw into the face of ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... is shown by the fact that the highest crime one can commit is the pet- chi-e-ri, the mere mention of the dead relative's name. It is a deadly insult to the survivors and can be atoned for only by the same amount of blood money paid for willful murder. In default of that they will have the villain's blood.... At the mention of his name the moldering skeleton turns in his grave and groans. They do not like stragglers even to inspect the burial place.... They ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... there was a child who was willful, and would not do at her mother wished. For this reason God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed. When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth was spread ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... gin-and-beer mixed—liking to get his quick—his name was naked 'John' with never a Saint to it, which his widow tacked on a dozen years later. And speaking of names, Mrs. McDonald, I sorely regret you didn't name your own son after your first willful fancy. It was no good day for his father when you put my own ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... faith and congresses of every kind of economic folly; yet in a single century America has risen from the poorest of nations to the wealthiest in all the world. True it is that wealth is congested—that willful Waste and woeful Want go hand in hand—that the land is filled with plutocrats and paupers; but this distressing fact is due to the faults of our industrial system itself, and can never be reformed ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... to rain it back on him some day," cried Don Ippolito with willful levity, and the stream leaped into the moonlight and seemed to hang there like a tangled skein of silver. "But how shall I shut it off when you are gone?" asked the young girl, looking ruefully at the ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... attention to the other." I let the palm leaf slip back, and drew down a fresh one, Phyllis watching me with interest. "The child the fairy left was still a child, for all her womanhood. She was willful and capricious; she rode, she fenced, she hunted; she was as unlike other women as could be. At last the King, who was her guardian, grew weary of her caprices. So he commanded that she marry. But what had the fairy done with the ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... this stalk it is difficult to say. A bright-eyed, sunshiny, willful baby, she had grown into an unaffected, attractive, breezy young woman, outwardly obedient, inwardly mutinous. She was generally calm in her mother's presence, never criticizing her openly, and her merry heart kept her from being really unhappy in a relationship that ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... over the word "lover," and changed it, for to her Octavia still seemed a child, and though anxious for the alliance, she forbore to speak openly, lest the girl should turn willful, as she inherited her mother's ...
— The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation • A. M. Barnard
... gained in that way, quite as we do upon treasure taken in fair fight. In the one case we traffic with the Spaniards, who are our natural enemies; and it is repugnant, to a Christian man, to hand over even these poor negroes to such willful masters as these; in the other we are fighting for our queen and country. The Spaniards are the natural enemies of all good Protestants, and every ship we see, and every treasure bag we capture, does something to pare the nails of ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... very well," he said. "It was eight years ago, and she was only a child. Even then she was very proud and willful, and the loveliest girl I ever laid ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... English language to have been enriched with a national poetry which was not English but American, would have been a treasure beyond price." With which, as whet and foil, we shall proceed to ventilate more definitely certain no doubt willful opinions. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... after listening to a report of the Minister of the Interior concerning the willful opening of the Moscow Synagogue by Rabbi Minor and Warden Schneider, was graciously pleased ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... been born at the White Farm; father and mother had been taken from there to the old country churchyard, and "Martha, aged 17," poor, pretty, willful Martha, the greatest pride and greatest sorrow of the family, was lying under the apple trees in ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... I am so willful that I could have entertained such feelings toward one whose mother I am, if this match had ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... and whose ideal of excellence found expression in a readiness to fight upon any and all occasions in defense of what they considered to be their personal honor. In young Andrew Jackson these characteristics appeared in a superlative degree. He was mischievous, willful, daring, reckless. Hardly an escapade took place in the community in which he did not share; and his sensitiveness and quick temper led him continually into trouble. In his early teens he swore like a trooper, chewed ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg |
