"Climacteric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a fourth abused the fire-engine, and a fifth inquired where he got his glazed hat. He had an answer for them all, and a nod or a wink for every pretty maid that showed at the windows; for though past the grand climacteric, he still has a spice of the devil in him—and, as he says, "there is no harm in looking." The "Red Lion" at Smitham Bottom was the rendezvous of the day. It is a small inn on the Brighton road, some three or four miles below Croydon. ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... a future life because of Christ's return from the grave? Is his established resurrection at Jerusalem the climacteric proof for immortality? The problem is inescapable. Every man is himself a judge; before every man the accumulated evidence passes; for every man it is doomsday when he stands ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford
... his carriage he continued to me: "O yes, a nurse or patient may break that rule, or almost any rule, and the patient may live. I had a patient, left alone for a moment on the climacteric day, who was found standing at her mirror combing her hair, and to-day she's as well as you or I. I had another who got out of bed, walked down a corridor, fell face downward and lay insensible at the crack ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... 1830 has given its name to that brilliant generation of poets, novelists, painters and philosophers which, as Theophile Gautier says with just pride, "will make its mark on the future and be spoken of as one of the climacteric epochs of the human mind." The revolution of July inspired Delacroix with one of his most interesting pictures. Le 28 Juillet is the only one of his works in which he depicts modern life, and was a striking ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... was kicked and cursed with entire unanimity. It is difficult to say just when his dogship began to stand up on his hind legs in literature. He has little or no classical standing. The dog of Ulysses is, I believe, a solitary instance. Shakespeare's "view" comes out in Lear's climacteric execration of his "dog-hearted daughters." Sir Henry Holland once lost a bet of a guinea owing to his failure to find a dog kindly spoken of by Shakespeare. Milton for the most part sublimely passes them by, except to embellish his "portress at hell's gate" with a canine appendix. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... the sex glands themselves fail, as occurs usually in most women sometime in the forties, the thyroid-pituitary-adrenal association must readjust itself to the new development. The adaptation evokes the phenomena of the transition to a new life, the climacteric. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... of Swedenborg's speculations are proof in themselves that his entire life was absolutely above reproach. Swedenborg's bridal-chamber is the dream of a school-girl, presented by a scientific analyst, a man well past his grand climacteric, who imagined that the perpetuation of sexual ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... steadily on the piece he had singled out, tucked up his sleeves, as for a surgical operation, and bone after bone was picked, and thrown over the rock; and when all were satisfied, the clerk was evidently at the climacteric of his powers of mastication. After reposing a little, we ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... wisdom, I would at least preserve something of the stiff and peremptory dignity of age. These gentlemen deal in regeneration: but at any price I should hardly yield my rigid fibres to be regenerated by them,—nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall in their new accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental sounds of their barbarous metaphysics.[128] Si isti mihi largiantur ut repuerascam, et in eorum ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... "it made one long to grow old";[1] but Montaigne was a Frenchman, and such sentiment was quite in his way. The dialogue, whether it produce this effect on many readers or not, is very pleasant reading: and when we remember that the author wrote it when he was exactly in his grand climacteric, and addressed it to his friend Atticus, who was within a year of the same age, we get that element of personal interest which makes all writings of the kind more attractive. The argument in defence of the ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... movement, the firm sold their store at an enormous advance, and purchased the corner of Broadway and Pearl streets, thus indicating that trade had advanced a mile up town. The palatial store which they erected on this spot will long mark the climacteric point in mercantile architecture. It was supposed at the time of its erection to be the finest jobbing store in existence, and although since then both Mr. Astor and James E. Whiting have each put up a splendid ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... straddle who has just sworn by his infernal den. The defence will not be long against such vice, such flames, such red-hot nether energy. And in the fourth cut, to be sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and pinion, and roaring as he leaps. The fifth shows the climacteric of the battle; Christian has reached nimbly out and got his sword, and dealt that deadly home-thrust, the fiend still stretched upon him, but "giving back, as one that had received his mortal wound." The raised head, the bellowing mouth, the paw clapped upon ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chaotic climacteric, begun and ended in the same instant, as the crust of the chamber, no longer supported by the in-pent air, dissolved under the ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... reached its grand climacteric; yet its earliest beginnings already seem centuries behind its present performances. The details of its gradual yet rapid improvement are of too technical a nature to find a place in these pages. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... all my actions, and bore me everlastingly with her intolerable company. It was but the blessed morning of yesterday that she took a fancy to exhibit her beautiful person at the lounge in Bond-street;—by-the-bye, this same paragon of perfection has passed her grand climacteric, being on the wrong side of sixty;—is as thin as a lath and as tall as a May-pole;—speaks an indescribable language of the mongrel kind, between Irish and Scotch, of which she is profuse to admiration; and forgetting the antiquity of her person, prides ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... in London had been obtained through the Earl of Oxford, a distant cousin of her husband, in whose household her son Walter had long before taken unwholesome lessons in fashion and extravagance. The Earl, now in his grand climacteric, had outlived his youthful frivolity, and though he had become a hard and austere man, was yet willing to do a kindness to his kinsman's widow by engaging a house for her, and offering for her grandson ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... centre of life in the "Tatler," designed, as Sir Roger and his friends were designed, to carry the human interest of a distinct personality through the whole series of papers. The "Tatler's" personality was Isaac Bickerstaff, Physician and Astrologer; as to years, just over the grand climacteric, sixty-three, mystical multiple of nine and seven; dispensing counsel from his lodgings at Shire Lane, and seeking occasional rest in the vacuity of thought proper to his ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... first battle of the Somme, launched some days past, was at its very climacteric. The casualties had been and were terrible. Even at this moment of night the fury of the attack was not relaxed. All through the day reports, exasperating in their brevity, had been streaming into Paris, and rumour, as of old, circled swift-winged ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... those thoughts which were to him too deep for prose expression. Oliver Wendell Holmes in speaking of this says: "Emerson wrote occasionally in verse from his school-days until he had reached the age which used to be known as the grand climacteric, sixty-three.... His poems are not and hardly can become popular; they are not meant to be liked by the many, but to be dearly loved and cherished by the few.... His occasional lawlessness in technical ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... been in Ditmar's life certain events which, in his anecdotal moods, were magnified into matters of climacteric importance; high, festal occasions on which it was sweet to reminisce, such as his visit as Delegate at Large to that Chicago Convention. He had travelled on a special train stocked with cigars and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... fashion the Holy Spirit affirms the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ is not only the climacteric of our avouchment as sons of God, but, when held as a hope in the heart, will keep us pure and clean as ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... dangerously powerful narcotic. Something like this is that potent drug in Nature's pharmacopoeia which she reserves for the time of need,—the later stages of life. She commonly begins administering it at about the time of the "grand climacteric," the ninth septennial period, the sixty-third year. More and more freely she gives it, as the years go on, to her grey-haired children, until, if they last long enough, every faculty is benumbed, and they drop off quietly into sleep ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... itself felt, and M. de Chatillon, ranking next to him. It was my ill-fortune, however, to be equally unknown to all three leaders, and as the month of December which saw me thus miserably straitened saw me reach the age of forty, which I regard, differing in that from many, as the grand climacteric of a man's life, it will be believed that I had need of all the courage which religion and a ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... turned of my great Climacteric, and am naturally a Man of a meek Temper. About a dozen Years ago I was married, for my Sins, to a young Woman of a good Family, and of an high Spirit; but could not bring her to close with me, before I had entered into a Treaty with her longer than that of the Grand Alliance. Among ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... old, nor is either often shocked by his visible preference of the other. I have seen a youthful beau kiss, with perfect devotion, a ball of cotton dropped from the hand of a lady who was knitting stockings for her grand-children. Another pays his court to a belle in her climacteric, by bringing gimblettes [A sort of gingerbread.] to the favourite lap-dog, or attending, with great assiduity, the egresses and regresses of her angola, who paces slowly out of the room ten times in an hour, while ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... his gratification. Actuated by a noble self-abnegation, she derives a melancholy pleasure from the knowledge that she has utterly given up all she had formerly so zealously guarded, and she feels that her love has reached its grand climacteric when she abandons herself, without redemption, to the idol she has set up in the highest place in her soul. This heroic martyrdom is one of the recognizable causes of the immorality that insidiously permeates our ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... scale or ladder, and implies a critical year, or a period in a man's age, wherein, according Ficinusological juggling, there is some notable alteration to arise in the body, and a person stands in great danger of death. The first climacteric is the seventh year of a man's life; the others are multiples of the first, as 21, 49, 56, 63, and 84, which two last are called the grand climacterics and the danger more certain. The foundation ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... now sixty-two years of age, within a year of his grand climacteric. He had succeeded in divesting himself by degrees of all his property, with the exception of what afforded him a very bare subsistence; and his relatives, incensed at a conduct which their ignorance of science prevented them from appreciating, had turned their backs upon him. Poor, friendless, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... of a visit to Fox How; while much the same may be said of those, also few, from the early months of 1888. The last of all contains a reference to Robert Elsmere. Five days later, on April 15, a sudden exertion, it seems, brought on the fatal attack, and he died. He had outlived his grand climacteric of sixty-three (which he had thought would be "the end as well as the climax") by two years ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... shades began to deepen; and by the light of the first stars Walter beheld a small, spare gentleman riding before him on an ambling nag, with cropped ears and mane. The rider, as he now came up to him, seemed to have passed the grand climacteric, but looked hale and vigorous; and there was a certain air of staid and sober aristocracy about him, which ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Athens, in the close of this brilliant period of Greek philosophy, now assumes an aspect of deeper interest and profounder significance. It was a grand climacteric in the life of humanity—an epoch in the moral and religious history of the world. It marked the consummation of a periodic dispensation, and it opened a new era in that wonderful progression through which an overruling Providence is carrying the human race. As the coming of the Son of God to Judea ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... of development' has not destined the peoples of the earth to the melancholy fate of China. The climacteric of the present stage of progress is rapidly approaching, is even now touching with its finger the startled nations. When it shall have passed, the world will enter upon the third and final stage of civil progress, in which the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... respectively protected and harried to the best of their abilities the advancing wave of infantry down to within a hundred yards or so of the Greek trenches—"lifted" almost simultaneously on to "communications," and that lifting was the signal for the opening of the climacteric stage of the action. Without an instant's delay, a solid wave of Greeks in brown—lightly fringed in front with the figures of a few of the more active or impetuous who had outdistanced their comrades in the scramble over the top—rose up out of the ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... were true, the proofs were open to all, and no response was needed from him. He may have been sorely tempted to reply, but I am apt to believe that the rumors that reached him from abroad and at home did not then affect him as they might have done earlier. He was at his grand climacteric, he had passed his sixty-third year, his temper was less hasty than it had been in his youth, and his nerves had not yet received the severe strain from whose effects he suffered during the last years ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... not? Putnam himself might have asked this question, for he had by no means reached his "grand climacteric," and was still ready, willing—and able, as well—to fight the enemies of his country. He was zealous in behalf of his fellow patriots, but during this visit to Boston he found almost as many friends on the British side as on the Colonial, including Governor ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... life there is the same matter for astonishment as in Napoleon's; there is the vast disproportion between beginnings and climax, between the relative modesty of early aims and the stupendous magnitude of the climacteric result. One asks how in a few years the impecunious son of the Corsican notary became the world's despot, and how the fashionable young spendthrift lawyer of Rome, dabbling in politics and almost ignorant of warfare, rose in a quarter of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... as one came up with it. In nine instances out of ten there was nothing to put in its place; and you began to ask yourself in a kind of horrific amaze: "Can this be all? ... THIS? For this the pother of growth, the struggles, and the sufferings?" The soul's climacteric, if you would, from which a mortal came forth dulled to resignation; or greedy for the few physical pleasures left him; or prone to that tragic clinging to youth's skirts, which made the later years of many women and not a few men ridiculous. In each ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... which Cato came upon the stage, was the grand climacteric of Addison's reputation. Upon the death of Cato he had, as is said, planned a tragedy in the time of his travels, and had for several years the four first acts finished, which were shown to such as were likely ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... be fully accepted by the author himself, still only thirty-eight, and so Kareno steps down into the respectable and honoured sloth of age only to be succeeded, by another hero who has not yet passed the climacteric twenty-ninth year. Even Telegraph-Rolandsen in "Dreamers" retains the youthful glow and charm and irresponsibility that used to be thought inseparable from ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... without surprise that we hear of him in 1840 as taking drawing lessons from Signor F. Meli, at Rome. During these early travels the boy's sketch books were full (we are told) of precociously clever things. The climacteric moment came early in his career. At Florence, in 1844, when he was fourteen, he delivered himself of a sort of boyish ultimatum to his father, who, after taking counsel of Hiram Powers, the American sculptor, wisely gave the boy his wish, and decided to let him be an artist. Powers when ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... been found out. I have too much gallantry left to suppose that my Breton had betrayed me; though a dagger at her heart and a purse in her hand might be powerful arguments against saving the life of an old soldier who had reached his grand climacteric. At all events, as I saw torch after torch rising along the roofs, I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... reached the age which used to be spoken of as the "grand climacteric." In that year Harvard University conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws, the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... unknown: I groped about the streets of London in all but the utter darkness of a twinkling oil lamp, under the protection of watchmen in their grand climacteric, and exposed to every species ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... not overworked, and if he is not rich, or socially sought after, he can find, as I did, plenty of time in which to look around him and enjoy the scene. That exhilaration, that luxury of leisurely circumspection may never return, or only, as happily in my own case, with the grand climacteric. Once more I see and enjoy the gorgeous ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... stoop prematurely. If indeed we could put young hearts into old bodies occasionally, we might do some good; or if there could ever be combined in some fortunate individual, throughout his life, the good qualities peculiar to each successive climacteric; if we could mix just enough of the acid and the bitter, which are apt to predominate so unhappily after a long rubbing through the world, to qualify the fiery spirit of youth, and prevent its sweetness from cloying, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... referring to the infinite power of Allah, in the compass of which nothing is impossible. And with these mystical circumlocutions of ceremony, they plunge into an intimacy which is bordered by the metaphysical on one side, and the physical on the other. For though the Medium is at the threshold of her climacteric, Khalid afterwards tells Shakib that there be something in her eyes and limbs which always seem to be waxing young. And of a truth, the American woman, of all others, knows best how to preserve her beauty from the ravages of sorrow and the years. That is why, we presume, in calling him, "child," ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... at Munich, in this climacteric stage of his career, dreaming of wonderful things and doing nothing, there came to him, in the early months of 1875, two new plays by his chief rival. These were The Editor and A Bankruptcy, in which Bjoernson suddenly swooped from his ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... on some of the back benches, where they had already taken up their positions for the evening, were divers unmarried ladies past their grand climacteric, who, not dancing because there were no partners for them, and not playing cards lest they should be set down as irretrievably single, were in the favourable situation of being able to abuse everybody without reflecting on themselves. In short, they could abuse everybody, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... nor introspective. How it came about he never quite knew. He felt, after his blind and inarticulate fashion, that this scene of theirs, that this official assault and surrender, was in some way associated with the climacteric transports of camp-meeting evangelism, that it involved strange nerve-centers touched on in rhapsodic religions, that it might even resemble the final emotional surrender of reluctant love itself to the first aggressive tides of passion. What it was based on, what it arose from, he could not ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... Reveries, which are mellow with the golden calm of his discovered peace, he tells how, having reached the climacteric which he had set at forty years, he went apart into the solitude of the Ermitage to inquire into the configuration of his own soul, and to fix once for all his opinions and his principles. In the exquisite third Reverie ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... students about him, and presently he came out and greeted me. I told him I was an American physician, who wished to look in his face and take his hand,—nothing more. I looked in his face, which was that of a thoughtful, hard-worked student, a little past the grand climacteric,—he was born in 1822. I took his hand, which has performed some of the most delicate and daring experiments ever ventured upon, with results of almost incalculable benefit to human industries, and the promise ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... hired man must have been touching up mean whiskey himself. Meanwhile, Mart seemed to be having spells of troubled slumber. He would snore gently, accentuate said snore with a sudden quiver of his body and then wake up with a climacteric snort and start that would shake the bed. This was repeated several times, and I began to think of the unfortunate Tom who was "fitified." Mart seemed on the verge of a fit himself, and I waited apprehensively for each snorting climax to see if fits were a ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... angry with me, Philidor. You couldn't be. It isn't my fault if I stumbled into the climacteric of your interesting romance. I wouldn't willingly have done it for worlds. But I couldn't help seeing, could I? And Olga was so self-possessed! Only a woman terribly disconcerted could be quite so self-possessed as ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs |
