"Idiosyncrasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to a metaphysical practice; mesmerism, its very antipodes, is one of them. Hitherto we have never, in a single instance of our discovery, found the slightest resemblance between mesmerism and metaphysics. No especial idiosyncrasy is requisite to acquire a knowledge of metaphysical healing; spiritual sense is more important to its discernment than the intellect; and those who would learn this science without a high moral standard of thought and action, will fail to understand it ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... models, and who have, therefore, possessed it only by right of appropriation. Boswell has a discussion as to the writers who may have served Johnson in this capacity. But, in fact, Johnson, like all other men of strong idiosyncrasy, formed his style as he formed his legs. The peculiarities of his limbs were in some degree the result of conscious efforts in walking, swimming, and 'buffeting with his books.' This development was doubtless more fully determined by the constitution which he brought into ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... are overwhelmed with a whole van of furniture. Now the mechanical or non-human object, beginning with the engine in the second chapter, is apt to be the hero in most any sort of photoplay while the producer remains utterly unconscious of the fact. Why not face this idiosyncrasy of the camera and make the non-human object the hero indeed? Not by filling the story with ropes, buckets, fire-brands, and sticks, but by having these four unique. Make the fire the loveliest of torches, the water the most graceful of springs. Let the ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... tendency to brood on horrors was no result of calculation. It belonged to his idiosyncrasy. He seems to have been suckled from birth at the breast of that Mater Tenebrarum, our Lady of Darkness, whom De Quincey in one of his 'Suspiria de Profundis' describes among the Semnai Theai, the august goddesses, the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... sight-seers, she falls into the following vein of well-rounded remark: "Truth can only be pure objectively, for even in the creeds where it predominates, being subjective, and parcelled out into portions, each of these necessarily receives a hue of idiosyncrasy, that is, a taint of superstition more or less strong; while in such creeds as the Roman Catholic, ignorance, interest, the basis of ancient idolatries, and the force of authority, have gradually accumulated on the pure ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... be fully frank. I even told you what was an absurdity, so absurd that I should far rather not have told you at all, only that I felt the need of telling you all: and no mystery is involved in that, except as an 'idiosyncrasy' is a mystery. But the 'insurmountable' difficulty is for you and everybody to see; and for me to feel, who have been a very byword among the talkers, for a confirmed invalid through months and years, and who, even if ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... no more engaging figure in American history, none more entirely free from disfiguring idiosyncrasy, than the ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... into his frozen face all the character and idiosyncrasy of life. He has not changed one line of his grave, grotesque countenance, nor smoothed out a single feature. The hue is rather bloodless and leaden; but he was alway sallow. The dark eyebrows seem abruptly arched; the beard, which will grow no more, is shaved ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... the written and prescribed laws of charity: and if I hold the true anatomy of myself, I am delineated and naturally framed to such a piece of virtue; for I am of a constitution so general that it consorts and sympathizeth with all things: I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in diet, humor, air, anything. I wonder not at the French for their dishes of frogs, snails, and toadstools; nor at the Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst them, make them my common viands, and I find they agree with ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... learned water-color with two masters, but had never liked it or felt the slightest impulse to continue it. One man is naturally constituted for one process, another for another. There is something in my idiosyncrasy repugnant to the practice of water-color and favorable to oil, and this in spite of the greater convenience of water-color, and the facility with which it may be left off and instantaneously resumed. In after-life I learned water-color a third time with a very able ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... shaking the nerves themselves, and in impairing digestion, are too familiar to need description. Yet even here abuse is not followed by those terrible penalties which await the drunkard or the opium-eater. Idiosyncrasy, too, may forbid their use; and this is not very rare. As strengtheners and comforters of the average human system, however, they have no superiors, and none others ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... satisfactorily accounted, and concerning which he hated to be questioned on his return. Well might the servant say his master was 'very close.' But why this strange reserve to me? Partly, from that remarkable idiosyncrasy to which I have before alluded; partly, perhaps, from tenderness to my feelings, or fear to disturb my philosophy by touching upon the ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless. He who daily hears and reads well-framed sentences, will naturally more or less tend to use similar ones. And where there exists any mental idiosyncrasy—where there is a deficient verbal memory, or an inadequate sense of logical dependence, or but little perception of order, or a lack of constructive ingenuity; no amount of instruction will remedy ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... divaricating ways of the new life, it grew ever more evident, there were for every one certain persons, mysteriously and indescribably in the key of one's self, whose mere presence gave pleasure, whose mere existence was interest, whose idiosyncrasy blended with accident to make a completing and predominant harmony for their predestined lovers. They were the essential thing in life. Without them the fine brave show of the rejuvenated world was a caparisoned steed without a rider, a bowl without a flower, a theater without a play. . . . And ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Morgan in her fragment of autobiography, 'what has a woman to do with dates? Cold, false, erroneous dates! Her poetical idiosyncrasy, calculated by epochs, would make the most natural points of reference in a woman's autobiography.' The matter-of-fact Saxon would hardly know how to set about calculating a poetical idiosyncrasy by epochs, but our Celtic heroine was equal to the task; at any rate, she abstained so carefully ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... almost have been believed that a transmutation had taken place in Cytherea's idiosyncrasy, that ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... its origin on one side, no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy; he has an affinity to it; he is not far from its secret. Again, his sensibility gives him a peculiarly near and intimate feeling of nature and the life of nature; here, too, he seems in a special way attracted by the secret before him, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... the question is always pertinent, so here we may ask whether it be not best in all cases to some extent, and in some cases almost exclusively, to develop in the direction in which we most excel, to emphasize physical individuality and even idiosyncrasy, rather than to strive for monotonous uniformity. Weaknesses and parts that lag behind are the most easily overworked to the point of reaction and perhaps permanent injury. Again, work for curative purposes lacks the exuberance ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... But did he? Was it not Mr. Gosse who early in the war glorified the blood that was being shed as a cleansing stream of Condy's Fluid? The truth is, apart from his thoughts about literature, Mr. Gosse thinks much as the leader-writers tell him. He is sensitive to beauty of style and to idiosyncrasy of character, but he lacks philosophy and that tragic sense that gives the deepest sympathy. That, we fancy, is why we would rather read him on Catherine Trotter, the precursor of the bluestockings, than on any subject ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... passed at least twenty years in a district where people dine at one o'clock, and dining after dark is regarded as a wild idiosyncrasy of earls, can appreciate the effect of ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... The idiosyncrasy of Lyons is silk. There are two schools of introduction in the art of silk weaving, one of them free to any lad in the city, the other requiring a trifle of matriculation. The first of these witnesses the whole ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... way; but her patient face wore a constant expression of suppressed terror, as if she expected every moment to be the victim of some terrible and unexplained exposure. And that feature at least in her idiosyncrasy could hardly be put down to Gilbert Gildersleeve's account; for hectoring and strong-minded as the successful Q.C. was known to be, nobody could for a moment accuse him in any definite way of deliberate unkindness to his wife or daughter. On the contrary, he was tender and indulgent to them to the ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... Malincourt temperament, of which he had recognized the share she had inherited. And she realized that her guardian and Miles Herrick had been equally discerning. Though differing in its effect upon each of them, consequent upon individual idiosyncrasy, the fact remained that she and Garth were both "breaking" beneath the strain which ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... characters and the mise en scene of his novels, however, Broadstairs appears to have contributed nothing, except that the lady whose aversion to donkeys furnished so strong an idiosyncrasy to Miss Betsy Trotwood's character was a native, not of Dover, as in the ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... watch it, he generally ends either in an asylum or on the throne of an Emperor. Of these men Strafford was one, and we cannot but feel that Browning somewhat narrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by making him merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a great public demand. Strafford was something greater than this; if indeed, when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than the friend of another man. But the whole question ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... declared that she delights in them; but can we trust her declaration? True, hers a strange spirit—tinged, no doubt, with the moral tendencies of her mother's race—in which the love of solitude is almost an idiosyncrasy. But with her this forest-ranging is almost a new practice: only for a month or so has she been indulging in this romantic habit—so incomprehensible to the home-loving Lilian. Her father puts no check upon such inclinations: on the contrary, ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... sort of aggregation to which men and women will refer themselves is determined partly by the strength and idiosyncrasy of the individual imagination, and partly by the reek of ideas that chances to be in the air at the time. Men and women may vary greatly both in their innate and their acquired disposition towards this sort of larger body or that, to which their social reference can be made. The "natural" social ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... heard her surname—came straight into the bedroom, and beheld the scene with astonishment in her dark twinkling eyes. She was usually dressed in black, because people said that black suited her, and because black was never out of fashion; black was an expression of her idiosyncrasy. She showed a certain elegance, and by comparison with the extreme disorder of Madame Foucault and the deshabille of Sophia her appearance, all fresh from a modish restaurant, was brilliant; it gave her an advantage over the other ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... disappearance was spread about that same evening, and created no surprise whatever. Foreigners had a knack of coming to the island and mysteriously vanishing again; it was quite the regular thing to run up accounts all around and then clear out. Hotel-keepers, aware of this idiosyncrasy on the part of distinguished guests, arranged their scale of charges accordingly; they made the prices so high that the honest paid for the dishonest, as with English tailors. The other tradespeople of the place—the smiling confectioner, the simple-minded bootmaker and good-natured stationer, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... knowledge, which would sustain stronger expressions of opinion than any which I have given. But he went on to say, that it would be a sad thing, if no fools could get to heaven,—nor any unamiable, narrow-minded, sour, and stupid people. Now, said he, with great force of reason, religion does not alter idiosyncrasy. When a fool becomes a Christian, he will be a foolish Christian; a narrow-minded man will be a narrow-minded Christian; a stupid man, a stupid Christian. And though a malignant man will have his malignity much diminished, it by no means follows that it will ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... intestines and cannot enter the milk. With certain persons some varieties of fruit invariably cause indigestion. Lactation does not correct such an individual peculiarity, and a nursing mother who knows she possesses it will act accordingly. Occasionally those who have no such idiosyncrasy worry after they have eaten something which contains an acid because they have heard it will do harm. In such cases it is the mental state of the woman which disturbs her milk and upsets the baby. ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... hem and haw and say: "Seven tums eight? Why—ah, lemme see now. Seven tums—what was it you said? Oh, seven tums eight. Why—ah, seven tums eight is sixty-three—fifty-six I mean." There's nothing really to spelling. It's just an idiosyncrasy. If there was really anything useful in it, you could do it by machinery—just the same as you can add by machinery, or write with a typewriter, or play the piano with one of these things with cut paper in it. Spelling is an old-fashioned, hand-powered process, and as such doomed to disappear ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... least of all among the sons of the Brahmans. If you continue to live as you do now, you would everywhere miss England,—perhaps also Oxford, if you went to London. Of this I am not clear: in general a German lives far more freely in the World-city than in the Don-city, where every English idiosyncrasy strengthens itself, and buries itself in coteries. Unfortunately I have neither read "Indophilus" nor "Philindus:" please tell me the numbers of the "Times." I can get a copy of the "Times" here from the library from month to month. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... idiosyncrasy, its constitution, often its own code of morality. The levity of some of the younger women in and about Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the choice spirit who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity. The place had also a more abiding defect; it drank hard. The ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... science.[351] He writes, however, with enough vivacity and fervour of belief in his creed to redeem him from the charge of absolute dulness. An abler thinker was Colonel (Robert) Torrens (1780-1864).[352] He had served with distinction in the war; but retired on half-pay, and was drawn by some natural idiosyncrasy into the dry paths of economic discussion. He was already confuting the French economists in 1808; and was writing upon the Bank-charter Act and the Ten Hours' Bill in 1844. Torrens held himself, apparently with justice, to be rather an independent ally than a disciple of Ricardo. His ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... admiration and the envy of less favored rivals, has been a certain ambulatory spot upon the earth's surface, at a point where the lines of trade from east to west have converged. And always the marked idiosyncrasy of this spot has been its unrest. It has constantly oscillated from east to west according as the fortunes of war have prevailed, or as the march of applied science has made one or another route of ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... "Idiosyncrasy," said Mrs. Thornton. "For five or six years I have been on the look-out for an opportunity to use that word, and thus far I have been unsuccessful. I fear that if the opportunity did occur I would call it 'idiocracy.' In fact, I know ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... aim is not a moral one; and we, furthermore, believe that, within their own scope and province, they may at least be serviceable in training and developing the understanding. Not to dwell longer on this little eccentricity of opinion, which is simply one of idiosyncrasy, let us follow the author into some of the more congenial sections of his dissertation. The following passage, on 'The three essential qualities of an author,' seems not unsuitable ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... a time when Alice overlooked this idiosyncrasy upon my part; that was before I achieved what Alice terms a national reputation by my discovery of a satellite to the star Gamma in the tail of the constellation Leo. Alice does not stop to consider that our ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... of these fourteen years it had occasionally flashed upon my Father, as he overheard some speech of mine, or detected some idiosyncrasy, that I was not one of those whose temperament points them out as ultimately fitted for an austere life of religion. What he hoped, however, was that when the little roughnesses of childhood were rubbed away, there would pass a deep mellowness over my soul. He had a touching ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... overdose, or by that only less terrible opium-delirium belonging to the same general class as mania potu—then his case admits of not a moment's delay. Opium-eaters differ so widely—every new case furnishing some marked idiosyncrasy which may demand an entirely different management and list of remedies from those required by the last one—that for any general scheme of treatment a week's study of the patient will be necessary. During that week our attitude will be simply tentative and expectant, and at its ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... that this is in great part idiosyncrasy; and that I must not trust to my own feelings, in this respect, as representative of the modern landscape instinct; yet I know it is not idiosyncrasy, in so far as there may be proved to be indeed an increase of the absolute ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... as he said this the rancher made a gesture as of warning, though this, no doubt, could be attributed to his wish to silently explain away the idiosyncrasy of Terry in using his first name only. He was presented in turn to the four men, and thought them the oddest collection he ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... Necker, and ask him to take the necessary measures against these anonymous publications this was appealing to the very man who secretly encouraged them.. Although Madame Necker had plenty of wits, she, bred in the mountains of Switzerland, had no conception of such an idiosyncrasy as that of M. de Maurepas, a man who saw in an outspoken expression of feeling only an opportunity of discovering the vulnerable point. As soon as he knew M. Necker's susceptibility he flattered himself that, by irritating it, he would drive him to give ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... overlaid by the acquisitions of the man, emotions that jar with physical impulses, inexplicable pains and diseases. And not only have we to remember that we are dealing with disharmonies that may at the very best be only patched together, but we are dealing with matters in which the element of idiosyncrasy is essential, insisting upon an incalculable flexibility in any rule we make, unless we are to take types and indeed whole classes of personality and write them down as absolutely bad and fit only for suppression and restraint. ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... has become the very essence of his volition. For a person is a specific existence—not man in general (a term to which no real existence corresponds); but a particular human being. The term "character" likewise expresses this idiosyncrasy of will and intelligence. But character comprehends all peculiarities whatever, the way in which a person conducts himself in private relations, etc., and is not limited to his idiosyncrasy in its practical and active phase. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... to contrast those fair, large parchments in which he has stated his results with those tattered and filthy papers which the latter- day literary rag-picker exists but to grope out from kennel and sewer is to know the difference between the artist in health and the artist possessed by an idiosyncrasy as ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... difference between golden and black hair lies in that there is in the one case an excess of sulphur and oxygen with a deficiency of carbon, and in the other an excess of carbon and a deficiency of sulphur and oxygen, it can easily be seen why such deficiency or excess, if arising from idiosyncrasy of the system, should predispose to dissimilar diseases. But here a wide field yet lies open ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... find out, on examination, that De Foe had discovered in 'Robinson Crusoe' precisely the field in which his talents could be most effectually applied; and that a very slight alteration in the subject-matter might change the merit of his work to a disproportionate extent. The more special the idiosyncrasy upon which a man's literary success is founded, the greater, of course, the probability that a small change will disconcert him. A man who can only perform upon the drum will have to wait for certain combinations of other instruments ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... of cowardice; navigation in unknown waters and with armed vessels requires brave hearts, and that such were to be found among the Phoenicians, they often showed. Still less was it the result of any lack of tenacity and idiosyncrasy of national feeling; on the contrary the Aramaeans defended their nationality with the weapons of intellect as well as with their blood against all the allurements of Greek civilization and all the coercive measures of eastern and western despots, and that ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... country, a circumstance which must make it an uncomfortable residence for individuals of a poetical temperament, if love of solitude be, as immemorial tradition asserts, a necessary part of their idiosyncrasy. ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Alan loved this idiosyncrasy of the Alaskan coast. The phantom mystery of it was stimulating, and in the peril of it was a challenging lure. He could feel the care with which the Nome was picking her way northward. Her engines were thrumming softly, and her movement was a slow ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... and methods of instruction shall be carefully adjusted to their organization. If it were possible, they should be adjusted to the organization of each individual. None doubt the importance of age, acquirement, idiosyncrasy, and probable career in life, as factors in classification. Sex goes deeper than any or all of these. To neglect this is to neglect the chief factor of the problem. Rightly interpreted and followed, it will yield the grandest results. Disregarded, it will balk the best methods of teaching ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... as they might be expected to talk in life; each in his own idiom, class and idiosyncrasy. And in the descriptions which furnish atmosphere, in which his creatures may live and breathe and have their being, the hand of the artist of words is equally revealed. Both for dialogue and narration the gift is valid, at times superb. It would be going too ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... indeed, are not so impressed with their idiosyncrasy as the countrymen of Pericles and Phidias. They do not fully comprehend the position which they occupy. It is the philosopher alone who can conceive the grandeur of Manchester, and the immensity of its future. There are yet great truths to tell, if we had either the courage to announce ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... had grown indignant at Miss Daggett's conversation, but soon she felt rather amused at what was doubtless the idiosyncrasy of an eccentric ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... soundly, secure in that stodgy immobility that takes no risks. Oblivious, apparently, of all secret warnings of excitement or alarm, she lay in a tight round ball, inactive, undisturbed. Even her breathing revealed her peculiar idiosyncrasy: no actual movement on her surface was discernible. Her breathing involved the least possible disturbance of the pink and white contours that bulged the sheets and counterpane. Her face was calm, expressionless, and even dull, yet wore a certain ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... or perhaps listless, towards all within the domestic circle, they look outside for inspiring intercourse and thrilling attachments, and for calls to lofty sacrifice and delight. This is too often the case. Identity of inheritance and situation, sameness of idiosyncrasy, and habitude of union, squeeze poppies into the household cup, and clothe in dull gray the familiar landscape around; and yet, happily, in numerous instances it is not so. The confidential intimacies, the incessant dependencies, duties, and favors of near relatives, instead of engendering ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... could do something to help. He was roused at last by the intrusion of a bird into his domain, and his discomfiture of this foe seemed to dispel his unhappy state of mind, for he at once broke out in joyous song, to our great relief. That was not the last exhibition of the wren's idiosyncrasy; he repeated it day after day, and finally he went so far as to interpolate low "dear-r-r's" into his sweetest songs. Perhaps that was his conception of his duty as protector to the family; if so, he was certainly faithful in doing it. It was ludicrously ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... friends, and friends whom he holds in deep affection, among the adherents of opinions most entirely antagonistic to his own. Hazlet's repulsiveness was due to a very mistaken education, developing a very foolish idiosyncrasy, and especially to the pernicious system of encouraging sentiments and expressions which in a boy's mind could not be other than sickly exotics. He had to be taught his own hypocrisy by the painful progress of events, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... of the idiosyncrasy referred to. There was in Johannesburg a man who, having arrived there with twenty-five pounds in his pockets—as he liked to relate with evident pride in the fact—had, in the course of two years, amassed together a fortune of two millions ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... playful criticism of her occasionally flamboyant taste in mind, and that she had over-revised, as it were. She had, like a literary artist, polished and refined and stippled the effect, till something of personal touch had gone, and there remained classic elegance without the sting of life and the idiosyncrasy of its creator's imperfections. No, the drawing-room would not quite do, though it was near the perfect thing. His judgment was not yet complete, however. When he was shown into Jasmine's sitting-room his breath came a little quicker, for here would be the real test; and curiosity ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker |
