"Capricious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very sorry for Oddo's trick,—your master and I," said Madame Erlingsen; "but we are not in the least afraid of any further harm happening. You know we do not believe that God permits his children to be at the mercy of evil or capricious spirits. Indeed, Erica, we could not love God as we should wish to love Him, if we could not trust in Him as a just and kind protector. Go to rest now, Erica. You have done quite enough since you left your bed. Go to rest now. Rest your heart upon Him who has blessed you exceedingly ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... the marchesa's gratitude," continued Trenta; "an excellent lady, and my oldest friend, but proud and capricious. You must take her like the wind when it blows—ha! ha! like the wind. I am come here ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... because she cannot help it. False as she is to husband and to lover, to her court and her country,[41] it can hardly be said that any act of hers, except the love itself and its irresistible consequences, is faulty. She is not capricious, extravagant, or tyrannical; in her very jealousy she is not cruel or revengeful (the original Iseult would certainly have had Elaine poisoned or poniarded, for which there was ample opportunity). If she torments her lover, that ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Spaniard; the supicious Jealousy of the Italian; the forbidding Haughtiness of the German; the saturnine Gloominess of the Flandrican, nor the sordid Parsimony of the Dutchman: In short, they are neither whimsical, splenetic, sullen or capricious:—And, as for Cunning, Craft, or Dissimulation, these are such sorry Guests as never found Shelter in the generous Breast of an Irish Noble or Gentleman; so that, if we consider this Country, with regard to its military Fame, ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... best linen, the richest ornaments, are lavished; garlands are placed on the head; the hands crossed, with a crucifix between them, on the bosom, and the face and feet left quite bare. Sometimes, through a capricious fit of piety, all this is studiously dispensed with, and the body appears clad in the habit of some religious order, to which the deceased was especially addicted during life. In this manner the procession begins to move after ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various
... lines would leave her face and the sweeter, softer expression that she had worn in September would come back. But though Eleanor professed the greatest pleasure in the election, it did not seem to make her any less haughty or capricious, or any better content with life. She still snubbed or patronized her train of adoring freshmen by turns, according to her mood. She was still a devoted admirer of Beatrice Egerton, and a member of her very exclusive set. She received ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... for the dauphin, when he became King Henry II., to recall him to his side and restore to him the power which Francis I., on his very death-bed, had dissuaded his son from giving back. The ungratefulnesses of kings are sometimes as capricious as ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... do," said the pastor, genially, "I think her a very capricious girl; a little spoilt by her parents, who turned her head with the religious ideas I have just revealed ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... all-absorbing pursuit of those around me. Then I played myself, first taking a hand at ecarte with some of the younger guests, half in sport, and then venturing a small golden coin at the rouge et noir table, while my admirers praised my daring, as if I had been some capricious child. In those assemblies I was always the only woman, except Matilda Brewer, who was then my governess. My father would have no female guests at these nightly orgies. The presence of women would have been a hindrance to the delights of the gaming-table. ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... race will be liable to crop up in the next generation, diversely intermixed in every variety of degree with the inherited and developed qualities of the other. The children may take after either parent in any combination of qualities whatsoever. You have admitted an apparently capricious element of individuality: a power on the part of the half-breeds of differing from one another to an extent quite impossible in the two original homogeneous societies. In one word, you have made possible the future existence of diversity ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... these dames call "taking the dress" attracted the entire Court to their church. The Queen herself desired to be present at so harrowing a spectacle, and by a curious contradiction, of which her capricious nature is capable, she shed floods of tears. La Valliere seemed gentler, lovelier, more modest and more seductive than ever. In the midst of the grief and tears which her courageous sacrifice provoked, she never uttered a single ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... Public is impertinent, Maltravers scorned and resisted its interference as haughtily as he would the interference of any insolent member of the insolent whole. It was this mixture of deep love and profound respect for the eternal PEOPLE, and of calm, passionless disdain for that capricious charlatan, the momentary PUBLIC, which made Ernest Maltravers an original and solitary thinker; and an actor, in reality modest and benevolent, in appearance arrogant and unsocial. "Pauperism, in contradistinction to poverty," he was wont to say, "is the dependence upon other people ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... often sought God and been heard and helped, and why not now? As he made diligent search among the records of his experience and recollected all God's manifest and manifold interpositions, he began to ask whether God could be fickle and capricious, whether His mercy was exhausted and His promise withdrawn, whether He had forgotten His covenant of grace, and shut up ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... one: Georgie in particular never had a moment to himself. The Hurst, so lately a desert, suddenly began to rejoice with joy and singing and broke out into all manner of edifying gaieties. Lucia, capricious queen, quite forgot all the vitriolic things she had said to him, and gave him to understand that he was just as high in favour as ever before, and he was as busy with his duties as ever he had been. Whether he would have fallen into his old place so readily if he had been a free ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... "Yes, I'm somewhat capricious by nature. As to the horse, as you say, my dear Patout, he wants nothing. You need only remove his bridle; leave him saddled. Oh, wait; put this pistol back in the holsters and take care of these other two for me." And the young man removed the two from ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... his friend. He was funny, he was pathetic, so prone to be cast down one moment and the next raised aloft to the skies, according to the whim of the capricious young lady. Many times Pan had ridden and worked with a boy afflicted ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... is at first only vague, capricious, and unprincipled. It grows by becoming definite, self-controlled, and conscientious; that is, more regardful both of its own higher self and of others. It thus develops into moral character, which we call personality. Personality is the final outcome of social selection. When ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... commonly precede and produce the great emotions of the heart. It is true they attach great importance to procuring for themselves that sort of deep, regular, and quiet affection which constitutes the charm and safeguard of life, but they are not apt to run after those violent and capricious sources of excitement ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... influence of true science God will be no longer looked upon, as He was in those superstitions which we well call dark, as a proud, angry, capricious being, as a stern taskmaster, as one far removed from the sympathy of men: but as one of whom we may cheerfully say, Thy name be hallowed, for Thy name is Father; Thy kingdom come, for it is a Father's kingdom; Thy will be done, for it is a Father's will; and in doing ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... thick, starch-like, and generally irritating. The patient becomes irascible, capricious, querulous, and sometimes moody and hysterical. She is easily discouraged, her appetite and digestion become impaired, and she grows thin and does not look or act ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... philosophical-grammatical talent, would soon have gained influence enough on the Illyrico-Dalmatian literature to mend the imperfections of their orthography, and to induce the Croats and Servians to give up their capricious varieties. The many detached parts of the products of Illyrico-Servian intellect would have grown into one great whole; and would have become at least accessible to foreigners; who, puzzled by all these varieties of letters and forms of writing, ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... Bruce had been greatly depressed, his temper more variable than ever, and he had managed to collect a quite extraordinary number of entirely new imaginary illnesses. He was very capricious about them and never carried one completely through, but abandoned it almost as soon as he had proved to Edith that he really had the symptoms. Until she was convinced he never gave it up; but the moment she appeared suitably anxious about ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... made rashly lets you into a very uncomfortable and perilous place. Therefore expeditions to Tweedside were apt to end in a ducking. It was often hard to reach the water where trout were rising, and the rise was always capricious. There might not be a stir on the water for hours, and suddenly it would be all boiling with heads and tails for twenty minutes, after which nothing was to be done. To miss "the take" was to waste the day, at least in fly-fishing. From a high ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... Blazes! how the sun poured down! Guard got round in the thin shadow of the mainsail, and actually lolled among icebergs. There we were stuck. That is one of the disadvantages of a sailing-vessel: you have to depend on the wind,—the most capricious thing in the universe. I suppose the air-current had veered about from north-east to north, so that the ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... which he reckoned not by tens, but by hundreds of crowns. He was a great connoisseur in the arts of design. Chancing to pass one day before my shop, he saw a lot of drawings which I had laid upon the counter, and among these were several designs for little vases in a capricious style, which I had sketched for my amusement. These vases were in quite a different fashion from any which had been seen up to that date. He was anxious that I should finish one or two of them for him in silver; and this I did with the fullest satisfaction, seeing ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... produced no effect. On two occasions the terminal branches became slightly curved in 10 m. after they had touched a stick; and in 30 m. the tips were curled quite round it. The basal part is less sensitive. The tendrils revolved in an apparently capricious manner, sometimes very slightly or not at all; at other times they described large regular ellipses. I could detect no spontaneous movement in the petioles of ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... never seemed to me so charming. It stretched away into the light haze of the horizon, with such lovely violet spots in its caves and hollows, and such soft white gleams on its short headlands—such exquisite gradations of distance and such capricious interruptions of perspective—that one could only say that the land was really trying to smile as hard as the sea. The smile of the sea was a positive simper. Such a glittering and twinkling, such a softness and blueness, such tiny little ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... behavior, offerings, etc., is to fall back into the childhood stage of the race thought. The Yogis teach that the sorrow, suffering and affliction witnessed on all sides of us, as well as the joy, happiness and blessings also in evidence, are not caused by the will or whim of some capricious deity to reward his friends and punish his enemies—but by the working of an invariable Law which metes out to each his measure of good and ill according to his ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... carefully planned, and was successfully carried out. The day was beautiful, and the party was of the choicest. After reaching the little cove of Canty Bay, overlooked by the gigantic ruins of Tantallon Castle, we were ferried across to the Bass; through a few miles of that capricious sea, the Firth of Forth, near to where it joins the German Ocean. We were piloted by that fine old British tar, Admiral Malcolm, while the commissariat was ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... created Celebes in a capricious moment, such a medley of bold promontories, jutting peninsulas, deep gulfs and curving bays does its outline present. Indeed, its coast line is so irregular and so deeply indented by the three great gulfs or bays of Tomini, Tolo, and Boni that it is small wonder ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... a government should become tyrannical, as that a people should become capricious. You have simply chosen an unfair word. For caprice substitute will, and you have my ideal ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... gradually rise to worlds of truth and beauty of which the common man does not dream. And it will frequently happen that there will be permanent value in what is written not to please the crowd or to flatter a capricious public opinion, or to win gold or applause, but simply in the presence of God and one's own soul to bear witness to truth. As the painter takes pallet and brush, the musician his instrument, each to perfect himself in his art, so he who desires to learn how to think should take the pen, ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... undigested food in the intestinal canal. Attacks of indigestion are also known to produce temporary amaurosis [blindness], double vision, strabismus, and even hemiplegia. Nausea, and a diminished or capricious appetite, are often prominent symptoms of early pregnancy, induced by the peculiar condition ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... dialogue (which had reached Somerset's ears through the open windows) that young man's feelings had flown hither and thither between minister and lady in a most capricious manner: it had seemed at one moment a rather uncivil thing of her, charming as she was, to give the minister and the water-bearers so much trouble for nothing; the next, it seemed like reviving the ancient cruelties of the ducking-stool ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... power of removal by the President was further maintained by arguments drawn from the danger of the abuse of the power; from the supposed tendency of an exposure of public officers to capricious removal to impair the efficiency of the civil service; from the alleged injustice and hardship of displacing incumbents dependent upon their official stations without sufficient consideration; from ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... youth were dreams, but the waking was more glorious than they. They were only dreams,—fitful, flitting, fragmentary visions of the coming day. The shallow joys, the capricious pleasures, the wavering sunshine of infancy have deepened into virtues, graces, heroisms. We have the bold outlook of calm, self-confident courage, the strong fortitude of endurance, the imperial magnificence of self-denial. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... hindered her, roaring with laughter when a hen flew shrieking over their heads, and then abusing my aunt. They were quickly caught and plucked, and set, some to roast, some to broil, according to their capricious mandates; and then, when everything was in as fair train for their disorderly feast as it well could be (two or three additional fires having been kindled), one of them said, "Let us divert the time with a little good music;" and ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... an opening in the leaves, within reach of Deerslayer's paddle. Its owner smiled graciously on the young man; and the frown that she cast on Hurry, though simulated and pettish, had the effect to render her beauty more striking, by exhibiting the play of an expressive but capricious countenance; one that seemed to change from the soft to the severe, the mirthful to the reproving, with ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... word or a look from this woman could make or mar the day for him. He gave her a sidelong look, and saw she was angry by a certain hardness in her profile, and, as he stared moodily at the water, he wondered if all women were as mutable and capricious. In his dealings with women—shop-hands who moved at his bidding like machines—he had never suspected these gusts of emotion that ended as suddenly as they began. Ada had the ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... as might be expected, swayed by the capricious impulse of his unhappy derangement, did not accompany her to his father's cabin. When within a few hundred yards of it, he changed his intention, and struck across the country like one who seemed uncertain as to the course ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... where he lived. It was their dinner-hour, and Rebecca was in the kitchen. He was thus able to take his mother quietly into the parlor, and then prepare his wife for the interview. She had fortunately drunk but little at that early hour, and she was less sullen and capricious than usual. ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... still caused intense anxiety or annoyance.[682] Scarcely a day passed without a lapse into incoherence or violence. Moreover, his conversation often showed a lack of discrimination, being the same to the Queen, the physicians, or the servants. He made the most capricious changes, turning off the Queen's favourite coachman, and making grooms footmen, and footmen grooms, to the distraction of the household. On assuming office, Pitt consulted the royal physicians and received a reply, dated Queen's Palace, 16th May 1804, stating that the King was equal to the discharge ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the king was rather the keystone of an arch. But to this tradition of a level of dignity was added something unearthly that was from Rome, but not of it; the privilege that inverted all privileges; the glimpse of heaven which seemed almost as capricious as fairyland; the flying chalice which was veiled from the highest of all the heroes, and which appeared to one knight who was ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... injurious, pressed upon the person and property of the Canadian. Every avenue to wealth and influence was closed to him and thrown open to the children of Old France. He saw whole tracts of the magnificent country lavished upon the favorites and military followers of the court, and, through corrupt or capricious influences, the privilege of exclusive trade granted for the aggrandizement of ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... two more singularities of the Roman Criminal System which were produced by the same theory of judicial authority. They are, the extreme multiplicity of the Roman criminal tribunals, and the capricious and anomalous classification of crimes which characterised Roman penal jurisprudence throughout its entire history. Every Quaestio, it has been said, whether Perpetual or otherwise, had its origin in a distinct statute. ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... L140,000,000, near $700,000,000. Even in the midst of the struggle, in the success of which they had so direct an interest, the military contributions of the colonial assemblies had been sometimes reluctant and capricious, and always irregular and unequal. They might, perhaps, refuse to contribute at all towards a standing army in time of peace, of which they would naturally soon become jealous. It seemed necessary, therefore, by some exertion ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... any recessionary benefit." His sensitive disposition dictated the ignoring in his writings of traits merely personal to himself, as well as his ever-recurrent resort to opium as a doorway of escape from present ill; and prompted those habits of seclusion, and that apparently capricious abstraction of himself from the society not only of his friends, but of his own family, in which he from time to time persisted. He confessed to occasional accesses of an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinthine ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... than in all Beyle's three hundred pages of disquisition; but what is absorbing is the sense that comes to one, as one reads it, of the presence, running through it all, of a restless and problematical spirit. 'Le Beylisme' is certainly not susceptible of any exact definition; its author was too capricious, too unmethodical, in spite of his lo-gique, ever to have framed a coherent philosophy; it is essentially a thing of shreds and patches, of hints, suggestions, and quick visions of flying thoughts. M. Barres says that what lies ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... had happened, effusive as always and with the same ingenuous face. She never did mention the incident to her father or to anybody else. But from that day a change took place in her, as if the springs of her pride were relaxed. She became capricious, had fits of lassitude, a curl of disgust in her smile, and sometimes she yielded to sudden outbursts of wrath against her father, and cast scornful glances upon him, rebuking him for his failure ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... studies the news in the papers While you are preparing the tea, If he talks of the damps or the vapors While moonlight lies soft on the sea, If he's sleepy while you are capricious, If he has not a musical "Oh!" If he does not call Werther delicious,— My own Araminta, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... thousand waves of white flame flowing and following along the branches. It was a revelation and swift effluence of life, perplexing and full of charm. The brush was laid down, the moment of inspiration gone, before the capricious leaves ceased their quivering to be robed once more in grey, casting on the ground that translucent shadow which tempers the sunlight only, and does not spoil it of its gold. In the end the canvas was covered, but with a sketch far less true and beautiful than the painter's first happy ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... granted, I hold, throughout the Bible. I cannot see how our Lord's parables, drawn from the birds and the flowers, the seasons and the weather, have any logical weight, or can be considered as aught but capricious and fanciful "illustrations"—which God forbid—unless we look at them as instances of laws of the natural world, which find their analogues in the laws of the spiritual world, the kingdom of God. I cannot conceive a man's writing that 104th Psalm who ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... Union suffices to convince one, that in America the activity of the legislator never slackens. Not that the American democracy is naturally less stable than any other, but that it is allowed to follow its capricious propensities in the ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... Painted Lady On the Marriage of the Dwarfs Epigrams of Matthew Prior A Simile The Flies Phillis's Age To the Duke de Noailles On Bishop Atterbury Forma Bonum Fragile Earning a Dinner Bibo and Charon The Pedant Epigrams of Joseph Addison The Countess of Manchester To an Ill-favored Lady To a Capricious Friend To a Rogue Epigrams of Alexander Pope On Mrs. Tofts To a Blockhead The Fool and the Poet Epigrams of Dean Swift On Burning a Dull Poem To a Lady The Cudgeled Husband On seeing Verses written upon Windows at Inns On seeing the Busts of Newton, Looke, etc. ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the line of retreat Drew had stopped worrying about Boyd. And now, with the youngster already appointed horse holder for the day's battle, he need not think of him engulfed in action. Though any fighting future was decided mainly by the capricious chance which struck one man down and allowed his neighbor to ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... too, was the way in which he showed what a shock and amazement her conduct would occasion in that world of her acquaintances—that world which had hitherto regarded her as essentially a pleasure-seeker, self-indulgent and capricious. '"Which of us all," will they say, "could have done what that girl has done? Which of us, having the world at her feet, her destiny at her very bidding, would go off and brave the storms of life out of the heroism of her own nature? How we all misread her nature! how wrongfully ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... in Chicopee that spring was as capricious as the smiles of the most spoiled coquette could ever be. The first days of April were warm, and balmy, and placid, without a cloud upon the sky or a token of storm in the air. The crocuses and daffodils showed their heads in the little borders by Aunt Barbara's door, ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... Government has its good side, Prince Louis Napoleon must acknowledge that it has its bad, and it is for this that the civilized world is compelled to substitute for it something more orderly and less capricious. Good as the Imperial Government might have been, it must be recollected, too, that since its first fall, both the Emperor and his admirer and would-be successor have had their chance of re-establishing it. "Fly from steeple to steeple" the eagles of the former did ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Europe." Near Kirkmichael there was a fountain dedicated to St. Michael, and once celebrated for its cures. "Many a patient have its waters restored to health, and many more have attested the efficacy of their virtues. But, as the presiding power is sometimes capricious, and apt to desert his charge, it now lies neglected, choked with weeds, unhonored ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... spoke by a warrant higher than his own. But the indiscreet latitude he had just given to his own passion, and the levity in which he had been detected, were very unfavourable to his assuming that superiority, to which so uncontrollable a spirit as that of Charles, wilful as a prince, and capricious as a wit, was at all likely to submit. The Doctor did, however, endeavour to rally his dignity, and replied, with the gravest, and at the same time the most respectful, tone he could assume, that ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... had invested her sex with every charm calculated to render them ministering angels to ruder and sterner man, no sooner finds herself addressed as the possessor of a talent, implying responsibility, and imposing self-exertion and self-denial in its exercise, than she instantly disclaims, with capricious diffidence, all pretensions to influence over others. But we cannot avert accountability by disclaiming its existence; neither will the disavowal of the possession of a talent alter the constitution of our nature, which God has so formed and so fitted to produce impressions in, and receive them ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... deplorable success of this abuse [of power] often crushes the innocent and shields the guilty. From this [ordeal] I release Rodrigo; he is too precious to me to expose him to the [death] blows of capricious fate; and whatever (offence) a heart so magnanimous could commit, the Moors, in retreating, ...
— The Cid • Pierre Corneille
... never heard of a woman putting away her husband, although the contrary frequently happens; and it has not yet reached my understanding why I should be the only true believer who is called into the house, and thrust out of it again, in a manner that would even disgrace a dog, merely because it suits a capricious woman one morning to like, and the evening after to dislike, me. Cadies, mufties, sheikh-el-islams, abound here as well as in other Mohamedan cities, and why should I not have recourse to them? They are paid to administer justice, and wherefore should they sit, with their hands across, counting ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... when the slave is protected from wanton abuse by those who have no power over him, for it cannot be disputed that a slave is rendered less capable of performing his master's service when he finds himself exposed by law to the capricious violence of every turbulent man in the community. Mitigated as slavery is by the humanity of our laws, the refinement of manners, and by public opinion which revolts at every instance of cruelty towards them, it would be an anomaly in the system of police which affects them if ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... a mere capricious change of fate, that the exiled governor of the land whose name, four years ago, was scarcely known on your glorious shores, and which now (oh, let me have the blessings of this belief!) is dear to the generous heart of America. It is not a ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... complied, and stopped beside his companion, who was very intent upon the matter at hand. It took some figuring to make a hit when the range was so great and the sun so blinding and the wind so capricious. He lowered the rifle and peered through the smoke at the confusion he had caused by dropping the nearest warrior. He was said to be the best rifle shot in the Southwest, which means a great deal, and his enemies did not deny it. But ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... the long hours, when he had abandoned hope, that he amused himself with the panther. He had come to learn the different inflections of her voice, the expressions of her eyes; he had studied the capricious patterns of all the rosettes which marked the gold of her robe. Mignonne was not even angry when he took hold of the tuft at the end of her tail to count her rings, those graceful ornaments which glittered in the sun like jewelry. It gave him ...
— A Passion in the Desert • Honore de Balzac
... you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this. She is a vast plenum in which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things "unadapted" to each other in ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... only three rooms, besides the veranda; his study, where a few books, two or three casts from antique bas reliefs, and some maps and prints, indicate the retirement of a gentleman; his bedroom, the walls of which, with a capricious taste, are painted black, and on that sombre ground, skeletons of the natural size, in every attitude of glee, remind one of Holbein's Dance of Death; and a third room occupied by barrels of orange wine, and jars of ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... aggravated by the knowledge that with proper care it might have been cured. After the departure of his f. his mother went to Aberdeen, where she lived on a small salvage from her fortune. She was a capricious woman of violent temper, with no fitness for guiding her volcanic son, and altogether the circumstances of his early life explain, if they do not excuse, the spirit of revolt which was his lifelong characteristic. In 1794, on the death of a cousin, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... however, who have ever floated on even the most quiet ocean, must have experienced more or less of this helpless dependence, the stoutest boat, impelled by the lustiest crews, appearing half the time like a feather floating in capricious currents of ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Creator, Anyambia ( good spirit?), is good, but capricious. He has a good deputy, Ombwiri (spelled 'Mbuiri' by Miss Kingsley); he alone has no priests, but communicates directly with men. The neighbouring Shekuni have mysteries of the Great Spirit. No details ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... anticipation what was to be one of the most admirable traits in the mighty parliamentarian to whom it was written. 'It seems to me,' says Stephen, 'that this part of your speech establishes nothing more than the fact that your opponents are capricious in the distribution of their sympathy, which is, after all, a reproach and nothing more. Now, reproach is not only not your strength, but it is the very thing in the disuse of which your strength consists; and indulging as I do the hope that you will one day occupy one of ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... had several, and that she would see all the other little girls with the same cloaks; but I got only the same answer, adding that Madame would see—no child would wear such a cloak. I was much disgusted—thought the woman was capricious; but she was perfectly right; not a single mother, and Heaven knows they were poor enough, would take a red cloak, and they all had to be transformed into red flannel petticoats. Every woman made me the same answer: "Every one on the road would ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... and uncivilized nations have uniformly adored, under various names, a God of which themselves were the model: revengeful, blood-thirsty, groveling and capricious. The idol of a savage is a demon that delights in carnage. The steam of slaughter, the dissonance of groans, the flames of a desolated land, are the offerings which he deems acceptable, and his innumerable votaries throughout the world have made it a point of duty to worship ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... Corriewater, in Annandale, is regarded by the inhabitants, a pastoral and unmingled people, as the last border refuge of those beautiful and capricious beings, the fairies. Many old people yet living imagine they have had intercourse of good words and good deeds with the 'good folk'; and continue to tell that in the ancient days the fairies danced on the hill, and revelled in the glen, and showed themselves, ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... into herself, as though her poor little flicker of consciousness were wholly centred in the contemplation of its pain. It was not that her mind was clouded—only that it was immersed, absorbed, in that dread mystery of disproportionate anguish which a capricious fate had laid on it.... And what if she recovered, as they called it? If the flood-tide of pain should ebb, leaving her stranded, a helpless wreck on the desert shores of inactivity? What would life be to Bessy without movement? ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... of a confirmed age at his entrance into the Society, so he had not soon enough endeavoured to get the mastery of those headstrong passions which ran away with his understanding. And when he had once taken upon him the charge of rector, he began to govern by the dictates of his own capricious humour, even before the face of Xavier, ere he departed from the Indies for Japan; and the Father, who easily perceived that the government of Gomez was not in the least conformable to the spirit of their Institute, would at that time have withdrawn him from Goa, and sent him to Ormuz: but the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... whole style and atmosphere did its last heroic service. And even the "Kammersymphonie," despite all the signs of transition to a more personal manner, despite the increased scholasticism of tone, despite the more acidulous coloration, despite the distinctly novel scherzo, with its capricious and fawn-like leaping, is not ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... chowder. And never does one enjoy a fish dinner so much as under these circumstances. The exercise, the fresh air, the motion over the water, the deliciousness and delicate flavor of the fish, all conspire to tempt the most capricious appetite. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... art is unmistakably Sicilian. At the end of the thirteenth century and beginning of the fourteenth, Palermo struck out her own line. The Greek cross appears in various forms. The designs are of a wonderful richness and capricious ingenuity. They show alike Asiatic, African, and European animals, and every kind of mythological creature—griffins, dragons, dogs, and harts, with large wings; swans, pheasants, and eagles, single or double-headed, often pecking at the sun's rays; beautifully drawn foliage and flowers, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... spirit of a new discovery broods over the world like a capricious being, animating one investigator here, another there; partially revealing itself in this continent, disclosing another of its secrets in that, until all the fragments when fitted together make up the whole wonder. It seems that my discovery, coupled with the ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... ignores the colonel, but that veteran is not crushed by any means. He watches the capricious maiden with a quizzical light in his eye, which shows that he has not yet lost confidence in the kindness of fate, or his own charms ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... contention. With him peace and harmony rank above all other considerations, and he confesses them to be the guiding principles of his actions. He would, if it might be, have all the world as a friend. 'Wittingly I discharge no one from my friendship,' he says. And though he was sometimes capricious and exacting towards his friends, yet a truly great friend he was: witness the many who never forsook him, or whom he, after a temporary estrangement, always won back—More, Peter Gilles, Fisher, Ammonius, Budaeus, and others too ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... the Sand.... The sail of the receding yacht gleamed now against the Sand, and its flashing broke her heart; for it was the flashing of freedom. She thought of the yachtsman; he was very courteous and deferential; a mild creature; he had behaved to her as to a woman.... Oh! To be the petted and capricious wife of such a man, to nod commands, to enslave with a smile, to want a thing and instantly to have it, to be consulted and to decide, to spend with large gestures, to be charitable, to be adored by those whom you had saved from ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... weighing only four and a half stones. His mother, who came with him, stated that he had always been nervous, and that lately, after receiving a call to join the army as a recruit, his appetite, which had for some time been capricious, had completely disappeared. In spite of coaxing he resolutely refused all food, or took it only in the tiniest morsels, although at the same time it was thought that he sometimes took food "on the ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... Blantyre. Mr. James Ferrier was the third son of his parents, and was born 1744. [3] Miss Ferrier was in the habit of frequently visiting at Inveraray Castle in company with her father, and while there had ample opportunity afforded her of studying fashionable life in all its varied and capricious moods, and which have been preserved to posterity in her admirable delineations of character. Her reason for becoming an authoress is from her own pen, as follows, and is entitled ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... say, assume a proud, rude, overbearing tone to all around you— toward your friends, your servants, the court circle, yes, even toward the members of your family. Particularly in the presence of this Swedish ambassador, show yourself to be a capricious, nervous, and haughty princess, who scarcely thinks it worth the trouble to speak a word, or give a friendly glance, to a man in his position. When you speak to him and he attempts to answer, cut short his replies, and ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... to some command of hers, for the incident and this custom were never told out of school, and the master did not consider it his duty to inform Mr. or Mrs. Hoover. If the child could recognize some check—even if it were deemed by some a superstitious one—over her capricious and precocious nature, why should ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... inadequacy of the result. It was, in short, the old tragedy of the discrepancy between a man's wants and his power to gratify them. Neave's taste was too exquisite for his means—was like some strange, delicate, capricious animal, that he cherished ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... begin upbraiding him for capricious folly and expatiating upon the fragility of his health. But you never know where you are with an Eve. Eves have the most disconcerting gleams ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... He tried his best to preserve the peace between his wife and mother; and when he failed, not understanding all that Emily really endured at the elder woman's merciless hands, he grew to think her capricious and easily irritated—a spoiled child whose whims must not be taken ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... study to any kind of amusement, delighting in good authors, diligent in the abstract sciences, caring little for the others,[11] thoroughly trained in mathematics and geography; quiet, fond of solitude, capricious, haughty, extremely inclined to egotism, speaking little, energetic in his replies, prompt and severe in repartee; having much self-esteem; ambitious and aspiring to any height: "the youth is worthy of protection." There ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... irrevocably disabled. The vessel, just before in full sail, and almost formidable in her speed, was now helpless. All her evolutions were uncertain and executed at random. She yielded passively and like a log to the capricious fury of the waves. That in a few minutes there should be in place of an eagle a useless cripple, such a transformation is to be ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... of Roman princes in any age of the empire Hannibalianus alone was distinguished by the title of king, a name which the subjects of Tiberius would have detested as the profane and cruel insult of capricious tyranny."—Gibbon, cxviii. The editor of Bohn's edition adds in a note: "The title given to Hannibalianus did not apply to him as a Roman prince, but as king of a territory assigned to him in Asia. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... gives a very interesting account of the fishery, and of the Sea-dogs. "This animal is as fond of the legs of Hindoos, as Hindoos are of the pearls of oysters; and as one appetite appears to him much more natural and less capricious' than the other, he ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... her nature sometimes rebelled against these dictates of reason, and that she grew yearly more capricious and impatient; but having a respectful and well-disciplined husband under her thumb at all times, she found it possible, as a rule, to empty any little accumulations of spleen upon his head, and therefore the harmony of the family was kept duly balanced, and things ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... but she knew—I should rather have said she was aware; for it was a matter more of sensation than thought—a conviction that had grown up in her mind without reflection—she was aware that her mother was somewhat capricious in her friendships. She had seen it in the case of servants and of some of the governesses she had had when she was quite young. One day they would be all that was estimable and charming in Lady Hastings' eyes, and another, from some slight offence—some point of demeanor ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the right of experiment in love." Its hero, who is "a modern gentleman, a refined, cultured, musical, artistic and philosophic person, of high attainments, lofty aspirations, strong emotions, and capricious will," produces arguments "wide in range, of profound significance and infinite ingenuity," to defend and justify immoral intercourse with a gipsy trull. The poem consists of the speculations of a libertine, who coerces into his service truth ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... by the world's conceptions of Godhead, and the reality as unveiled in Christ! On the one hand you have gods lustful, selfish, passionate, capricious, cruel, angry, vile; or gods remote, indifferent, not only passionless, but heartless, inexorable, unapproachable, whom no man can know, whom no man can love, whom no man can trust. On the other hand, if you look at Christ's tears ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... am afraid I have shown a wretched temper, Pa. I am afraid I have been very complaining, and very capricious. I seldom or never thought of it before. But when I sat in the carriage just now and saw you coming along the pavement, I ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... savage selfishness of the animal nature stronger. Diana Paget had discovered some of her father's weaknesses during her miserable childhood; and in the days of her unpaid-for schooling she had known that his most solemn promises were no more to be relied on than the capricious breath of a summer breeze. So the revelations which awaited her under the paternal roof were not utterly strange or entirely unexpected. Day by day she grew more accustomed to that atmosphere of fraud and falsehood. The sense of shame never left her; for there is a pride that thrives amidst ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... ten years ago, I remembered her ... ah, in a very different plight indeed. True, she has got no more than her deserts; she has paid for her success, every pennyweight of it, in hard work and self-denial. But one is so expectant, here below, to see Fortune capricious, that, when for once in a way she bestows her favours where they are merited, one can't help feeling rather dazed. One is so inured to seeing honest Effort turn empty-handed from ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... suppose some folks will now have discovered what reliance there is to be placed on a capricious and absolute man. It was clear from the first that he had resolved upon this Italian speculation, and that as soon as he could mitigate the universal feeling and opinion against him, he would have his way. The congress, whether suggested by him ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... Syrian character in excess; vain, susceptible, endowed with a brilliant though frothy imagination, and a love of action so unrestrained that restlessness deprived it of energy, with so fine a taste that he was always capricious, and so ingenious that he seemed ever inconsistent. His ambition was as high as his apprehension was quick. He saw everything and understood everybody in a flash; and believed that everything that was said or done ought to be made ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... habits and instincts, yet the birds sometimes seem as whimsical and capricious as superior beings. One is not safe, for instance, in making any absolute assertion as to their place or mode of building. Ground builders often get up into a bush, and tree builders sometimes get upon the ground ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... shall tell Boges to keep you twelve days in confinement. Remember this, thoughtless child, and tell our mother, Bartja and I are coming to visit her. Now give me a kiss. You will not? We shall see, capricious little one!" And so saying the king sprang towards his refractory little sister, and seizing both her hands in one of his own, bent back her charming head with the other and kissed her in spite of her resistance. She screamed from the violence of his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the capricious breeze died out entirely. The heat was intense, and the water glittered like a sheet of molten glass. The boys looked longingly at the bay, however. The idea of a cool swim seemed very attractive just then. Captain Simms had left them to their own devices ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... question (evidently to her) of importance. I instantly decided to do my best for the edification of my fair correspondent (for no doubt entered my head that she was both young and fair), the more readily because that very question had frequently presented itself to my own mind on observing the very capricious choice of Dame "Fashion" in ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... a coronet, in the land where logic is a foundling and compromise a darling, writes: "A weak government throws power to something which usurps the name of public opinion, and public opinion as expressed by the ventriloquists of the newspapers is at once more capricious and more vociferous than it ever was." This, strange to say, is exactly the opinion of the German autocrats, who maintain that no democracy can be a strong military power. It remains for England, and perhaps later America, to ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... eminently suited to the spirit of the English people, although forced upon them in the first instance by the absolute power of a capricious king, and unaccompanied by any acknowledgment of those rights of toleration and individual judgment upon which its strength seemed mainly to depend. The monarch, when constituted the head of the Church, exacted ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... of the farmer's hand-to-hand grapple with a capricious and at times frustrating Nature. This emphasis is deserved, for the farmer is out upon the frontier of human control of natural forces. Even modern science, great as is its service, cannot protect him from the unexpected and the disappointing. Insects and weather sport with his purposes and give ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... a sensitive and capricious creature, is, oftentimes so easily offended that if the maid rise from her before the milk is all withdrawn, the chances are that she will not again stand quietly at that milking; or, if the vessel used in milking ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... the garnishings that glorify the most insignificant concoctions into objects of appetising beauty and in the sauces that elevate indifferent dishes into the realm of creations and enable a French cook to turn out a dinner fit for capricious young gods from what an American ...
— Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them • Cora Moore
... protracted and tedious voyage in a large East Indiaman, he had, with the rest of the crew, been subjected to harsh usage by a stern, capricious captain; but, secure of relief on reaching port, he had borne uncomplainingly with it all. His comrade and quondam teacher, the Irishman, was, however, less patient; and for remonstrating with the tyrant, as one of a deputation of the seamen, in what was deemed a mutinous ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... most casual female society, he found a great charm in this familiarity, and, without thinking how lately it had begun or how soon it must cease, he yielded himself to its presence. At one hour she seemed to him an impetuous and capricious thing, for whose better protection the accident of his companionship was extremely fortunate,—at another hour, a woman too strangely sweet to part with; and then Mr. Raleigh remembered that in all his years he had really known but two women, and one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... degrees at the time the storm sets in, the perspiration is checked, and the system receives an instantaneous shock, against which it requires great vital energy to bear up. Men and animals are not, in this mild climate, prepared for these capricious meteoric revolutions, and they not unfrequently perish under ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... and all of us happy, by weaning yourself from the memory of one who was undeserving of you, and fixing your affections upon her who will be as steadfast and as true to you as the other was false and capricious." ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... Becket 'may have been too idealistic: he wished to protect the Church as a sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules might seem to him as paternal as those of heaven, but might well seem to the king as capricious as those of Fairyland.' The tremendously suggestive thing of the whole story of Becket is that Henry II submitted to being thrashed at Becket's tomb. It was like 'Cecil Rhodes submitting to be horsewhipped by a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... cipher is, as we guessed, arbitrary and stupidly capricious. Phonetic spelling is indulged in occasionally—I should almost say humorously—were it not a Teuton mind which evolved the phonetic combinations which represent proper names not found in that dictionary—names like Holzminden ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... himself before the capricious damsel, he was disguised as a dashing warrior, for, thought he, a young soldier might perchance touch the maiden's heart; but when he again attempted to kiss her, she pushed him back so suddenly that he stumbled and fell upon ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... elate, that as we read we catch the energy and elation. The reading of the riddle is this: the religion against which Lucretius made his attack was not the soaring idealism of Plato, nor the inspiring and consolatory faith of Christianity, but an outworn mythology in which this world was ruled by capricious and unworthy despots, and the next world was gloomy with terrors and almost unlighted by hopes. Such had become the popular mythology in its later day, and as contrasted with this the view and temper of Lucretius are rational and manly. His message went far beyond a negation; he announced one of ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... "things,"—that is to say in the Bibliomania itself—have been equally capricious and unaccountable: our countrymen being, in these days, to the full as fond of novelty and variety as in those of Henry the Eighth. Dr. Board, who wrote his Introduction of Knowledge in the year 1542, and dedicated it to the Princess ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the rage for mere numerical conquest, that a line of pipes would be often driven down a long street, to serve one new customer at the end. Arrears remained uncollected, lest offence should be given and influence impaired. Capricious tenants amused themselves by changing from one main to another, as they might taste this or that tap of beer. The more credulous citizens, relying on the good faith of the "public servants"—as these once powerful water-lords now ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... of contemporary documents as good as those which our publications present. These documents all relate to real experiences of persons. These experiences have three characters in common: They are capricious, discontinuous, and not easily controlled; they require peculiar persons for their production; their significance seems to be wholly for personal life. Those who preferentially attend to them, and still more those who are ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... new channel can now be expected, and the present one is every day becoming more easy and frequented, yet the capricious shiftings of the India trade were not ended ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... will connive at, or overlook in them, abuses of trust, will be deluded by their false pretenses, or will withhold support from those who endeavour to fulfill their trust conscientiously; it will countenance or impose a selfish, a capricious and impulsive, a short-sighted, ignorant, and prejudiced general policy, foreign and domestic; it will abrogate good laws, or enact bad ones; let in new evils, or cling with perverse obstinacy to old; it will even, perhaps, under misleading impulses, momentary ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... fire with branches of juniper, accumulated by the hunter who most frequented the retreat, the ice shone with a myriad diamond tints; everything seemed to assume an extraordinary form and life. The fantastically carved walls of rock sparkled with capricious gleams. From the sides of black granite hung pendent icicles, sometimes slender and isolated, sometimes grouped in fanciful clusters. In the hollows, where damp and darkness for ever reign, climbed a bluish-grey moss, a melancholy and incomplete manifestation ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... many years without having any children, and they longed for them like the countryman for rain in the month of May, and at last her hour of bliss came to the mayoress, to the great content of her husband. Now, it was whispered that the said lady had always been somewhat capricious; judge for yourselves what she would be now in the time of her pregnancy! And as she was already on the way to fifty, she was more than mediocrely bald and hairless, and on these very same days had commissioned a woman barber, who lived in the odor of witchcraft, to prepare for ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... Thursday. If the rains should ever cease, and the weather settle to fine, I shall pay you my visit at Wentworth Castle; but hitherto the damps have affected me so much, that I am more disposed to return to London and light my fire, than brave the humours of a climate so capricious and uncertain, in the country. I cannot help thinking it grows worse; I certainly remember such a thing as dust: nay, I still have a clear idea of it, though I have seen none for some years, and should put some grains in a bottle for a curiosity, if it should ever ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... fates decree, Take a few precepts from the gods and me! "Be not too eager in the arduous chase; Who pants for triumph seldom wins the race: Venture not all, but wisely hoard thy worth, And let thy labours one by one go forth: Some happier scrap capricious wits may find On a fair day, and be profusely kind; Which, buried in the rubbish of a throng, Had pleased as little as a new-year's song, Or lover's verse, that cloy'd with nauseous sweet, Or birth-day ode, that ran on ill-pair'd feet. Merit not always—Fortune feeds the bard, ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... journey, the guide passed to the left of the line where the railway was still in process of being built. This line, owing to the capricious turnings of the Vindhia Mountains, did not pursue a straight course. The Parsee, who was quite familiar with the roads and paths in the district, declared that they would gain twenty miles by striking ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... "a compound of savage virtue and more than savage ambition and cruelty," who, imagining himself wronged and slighted by England, had seized a number of British subjects, held them in hard captivity, and treated them with such capricious cruelty as made it very manifest that their lives were not worth an hour's purchase. It fell to the Ministry of Mr. Disraeli, Premier on the resignation of his colleague Lord Derby, who had displaced Earl Russell in that ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... have let yourselves become his slaves. There are limits to this sort of thing, Esther. I come here as a stranger, and I see nothing more in Mr. Fentolin than a very selfish, irritable, domineering, and capricious old man. Humour him, by all means. I am willing to do the same myself. But when it comes to the great things in life, neither he nor any living person is going to keep from me the woman ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... by their Latin names. The old Greek tales were not known to the Latins in their first times, but only afterwards learnt from the Greeks. They seem to have thought of their gods as graver, higher beings, further off, and less capricious and fanciful than the legends about the weather had made them seem to the Greeks. Indeed, these Latins were a harder, tougher, graver, fiercer, more business-like race altogether than the Greeks; not so clever, thoughtful, ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and soured, do we meet in the world, who but for one shock to the heart and form might have erred on the side of meekness! Whether it come from woe or disease, the stroke which mars a single fibre plays strange havoc with the mind. Slaves we are to our muscles, and puppets to the spring of the capricious blood; and the great soul, with all its capacities, its solemn attributes, and sounding claims, is, while on earth, but a jest to this mountebank,—the body,—from the dream which toys with it for an hour, to the lunacy which shivers it into a driveller, laughing ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... account of the Lambs' visit to Winterslow, but the passage belongs probably to the year following. In his essay "On the Conversation of Authors" he likens Lamb in the country to "the most capricious poet Ovid among the Goths." "The country people thought him an oddity, and did not understand his jokes. It would be strange if they had, for he did not make any, while he stayed. But when he crossed the country to Oxford, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... d'Artagnan, who knows everything, shall have given me fresh strength and courage. Madame, a coquette, I fear, and yet a coquette who is herself in love, has her moments of kindness; a coquette who is as capricious and uncertain as life or death, but who tells De Guiche that he is the happiest of men. He at least is lying on roses." And so he hastily quitted the comte's apartments, and reproaching himself as he went for having talked of nothing but his own affairs to De Guiche, he arrived ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... fluctuation of spirits incident to one doomed to labour incessantly in the feverish exercise of the imagination. Unintentional neglect, and the inevitable relaxation, or rather sinking of spirit, which follows violent mental exertion, are easily misconstrued into capricious rudeness, or intentional offence; and life is embittered by mutual accusation, not the less intolerable because reciprocally just. The wife of one who is to gain his livelihood by poetry, or by any labour (if any there be) equally ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... an immediate Payment of five Pounds, with a conditional Expectance of fifteen Pounds more on the three following Editions, should the Public ever call for 'em. And truly, when one considers how much Meat and Drink One may buy for Twenty Pounds, and how capricious is the Taste of the critikal World, 'tis no mean Venture of a Bookseller on a Manuscript of which he knows the actual value as little as a Salvage of the Gold-dust he parts with for a Handful of old Nails. At all events, the Sale of the Work gave Father no Reason to suppose he ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... age and in your position, especially as you now seem to have entirely given up your former mode of life. Do you not every day become more convinced of the truth of the little lectures I used to inflict on you? Are not the pleasures of a transient, capricious passion widely different from the happiness produced by rational and true love? I feel sure that you often in your heart thank me for my admonitions. I shall feel quite proud if you do. But, jesting apart, you do really owe me some little gratitude if you are become worthy of Fraeulein N———, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... once used the word prospecting, which, we believe, is peculiar to this kind of mining. The deposits of gold are so capricious, that the adventurers, in order to lose as little time as possible in removing from place to place, detach one of their number on the hunt for a mine—and this is called prospecting. He sets out with a few provisions, a rifle, a pick and shovel, at all events, with a pan and large knife; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... theologic system has reached the highest state of perfection of which it is susceptible, when it has substituted the providential action of one only being for the capricious agency of the numerous independent divinities who had previously been imagined. In like manner, the last term of the metaphysic system consists in conceiving, instead of the different special entities, one great general entity, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... her little marvel with that rare poetic discrimination which neither exhausts it of its simple wonders by pushing symbolism too far, nor keeps those wonders in the merely fabulous and capricious stage. In fact she has produced a true children's poem, which is far more delightful to the mature than to children, though it would be ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... found myself much at a loss what to say; yet, after a short silence, assuming all the courage in my power, "Will you not, my Lord," said I, "think me trifling and capricious, should I own I have repented the promise I made, and should I entreat your Lordship not to insist upon my strict performance of it?"-I spoke so hastily, that I did not, at the time, consider the impropriety ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... very silence portentous and terrifying. With dress slashed and laced, rich in jewelry and precious stones, he remained motionless, regarding the motley gathering, while an ominous half-smile played about his features. He said nothing, but his reserve was more sinister than language. Capricious, cruel was his face; in his eyes shone ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... from causes so incompetent, as they will appear to those who have not had the experience which I have had of the quick sensibility which influences the habits of men placed in a state of polity so loose, and subject to the continual variations of capricious and despotic authority, will be deemed overcharged, or perhaps void of foundation; nor, if they should come to pass, will it be easy to trace them with any positive evidence to their connection: ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... through it to consciousness. What if the effect of the drug should gradually fail, as all narcotics were said to fail? She remembered the chemist's warning against increasing the dose; and she had heard before of the capricious and incalculable action of the drug. Her dread of returning to a sleepless night was so great that she lingered on, hoping that excessive weariness would reinforce the waning power ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... the records of the Scottish Covenanters prove incontestably that those long-tried men and women submitted with unexampled patience for full eight-and-twenty years to the spoiling of their goods and the ruin of their prospects; but when it came to be a question of submission to the capricious will of the King or loyalty to Jesus Christ, thousands of them chose the latter alternative, and many hundreds sealed their ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... who would gladly have wedded the pretty princess for her own sweet sake alone, to say nothing of the prospect of being king some day, but she wouldn't have one of them. There was not a man in the kingdom nor in any of the surrounding kingdoms who suited her capricious fancy. Princes of haughty mien, princes of gentle manner, handsome princes, ugly princes, tall princes, short princes, fat princes, lean princes, had been introduced at the court, had been encouraged by the king and queen, and had sought to gain her favor. She had been showered with gifts ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... nineteen when he was made master of the wardrobe and grand equerry of France. Brilliant and witty, he amused the king and occupied the leisure which peace gave him. The passion Louis XIII. felt for his favorite was jealous and capricious. He upbraided the young man for his flights to Paris to see his friends and the elegant society of the Marais, and sometimes also Mary di Gonzaga, daughter of the Duke of Mantua, wooed but lately by the Duke ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... difference, that whereas in the Engis cave there were several human crania and very few other bones, in Engihoul there occurred numerous bones of the extremities belonging to at least three human individuals, and only two small fragments of a cranium. The like capricious distribution held good in other caverns, especially with reference to the cave-bear, the most frequent of the extinct mammalia. Thus, for example in the cave of Chokier, skulls of the bear were few, and other parts of the skeleton abundant, whereas in several other ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell |
