"Grand climacteric" Quotes from Famous Books
... 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 ... — Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... am 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 ... — The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... and imperceptibly, to so terrible a leaping-place in the dark, for more perhaps than life or death. At last, the great act, the critical moment itself comes, easily, almost unconsciously. Another motion of the clock, and our fatal line—the "great climacteric point"—has been passed, which changes ourselves or our lives. In one quarter of an hour, under a sudden, uncontrollable impulse, hardly weighing what he did, almost as a matter of course and as lightly as one hires ... — Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater |