"Irritant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that led her to spend long hours of the day and even of the night, when by rights she should have been asleep, immersed in endless mathematical studies, and in solving, or attempting to solve, almost impossible problems. She found that the strenuous effort of the brain acted as a counter-irritant to the fretting of her troubles, and though it may seem an odd thing to say, mathematics alone, owing to the intense application they required, exercised a soothing effect upon her. But, as one cannot constantly ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... Great War," said Brown, "I went down with pneumonia. They painted my chest yellow, and, when I asked the Sister why, she said it was a counter-irritant. That's what you want to use now, my lad. Stand up to your little friend and beat him at his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... had so complained of when we first came—that they weren't "feminine," they lacked "charm," now became a great comfort. Their vigorous beauty was an aesthetic pleasure, not an irritant. Their dress and ornaments had not a touch of ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... joy of art. He could not, however, altogether blot out the shadows of the sorrowful dream in which he had been cradled. He would not look behind him, but he well knew that the shadow was there. He was too healthy to seek a counter-irritant to his uneasiness in the lazy skepticism of the preceding epoch: he detested the dilettantism of men like Renan and Anatole France, with their degradation of the free intellect, their joyless mirth, their irony without greatness: ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... long as that branch [the Steward's Branch] is composed entirely of nonwhite personnel, the Navy is apt to be held by some to be violating its own stated policy."[16-87] To Kimball's successor, Robert B. Anderson,[16-88] Granger was even more blunt. The Steward's Branch, he declared, was "a constant irritant to the Negro public." He saw some logical reason for the continued concentration of Negroes in the branch but added "logic does not necessarily imply wisdom and I sincerely believe that it is unwise from the standpoint of efficiency and public relations to continue ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... recipients. She had no home people of her own, and she pressed her nearest friends to make her "one of the family." "If," she would say, "you would let me share in any disappointments or troubles, I would feel more worthy of your love—I will tell you some of mine as a counter-irritant!" Many followed her behest with good result. "I'm cross this morning," wrote a young missionary at the beginning of a long letter, "and I know it is all my own fault, but I am sure that writing to you will put me in a better ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... believe it. She felt that he was in great pain, both of body and mind. His fall had hurt him. She knew that by the way he moved his right arm. The unaccustomed exercise had made him stiff. Probably the physical discomfort he was silently enduring had acted as an irritant to the mind. She remembered that it was caused by his determination to be her companion, and the ice in her melted away. She longed to make him calmer, happier. Secretly she touched the little cross that lay under her habit. He had ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... pleasant-odored terpene ketone, C10H16O, obtained from the camphor tree. Used in medicine as a counter-irritant for infections and to treat pain ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... cajuputene having a hyacinthine odour can be obtained by distillation with phosphorus pentoxide. The drug is a typical volatile oil, and is used internally in doses of 1/2 to 3 minims, for the same purposes as, say, clove oil. It is frequently employed externally as a counter-irritant. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... is not discernible, may quell for the moment, but it does not moralise, nor abidingly deter. There must be an apparent proportion between the offence and the punishment. A Draconian code, visiting petty offences with the severity due to high misdemeanours, is more of an irritant than a represser of crime, because it goes beyond ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... abroad. In reality, he was studying the great drama with an interest that was not wholly patriotic or scientific. He had found an antidote. The war, dreaded so unspeakably by many, was a boon to him; and the fierce excitement of the hour a counter-irritant to the pain at heart which he believed had ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... going?" Jude broke in with an eagerness that intensified the smile on Gaston's face, and bade the devil in him awake. The same devil that in boyhood days had made him such an irritant to the bullies of ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... evil has been said of the stitch in the side; but it is nothing to the stitch to which we now refer, which the pleasures of the matrimonial second crop are everlastingly reviving, like the hammer of a note in the piano. This constitutes an irritant, which never flourishes except at the period when the young wife's timidity gives place to that fatal equality of rights which is at once devastating France and the conjugal relation. Every season has its ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... the remaining five nights in bed. I am all right to-day—except my ribs—having had a good sleep. I could not consult any one with any good while travelling, but as soon as I got here I sent for Dr. Campbell, and he prescribed for me, and I am now wearing, a belladonna and irritant plaster, and a flannel bandage. He says the pleura is badly bruised, and that there is some inflammation, but that if I keep quiet, and do not catch cold, I shall soon be right. I assure you it does not affect my appetite, which is a good one—very different from home—needing substantial carrion, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... goaded in various parts of the body with stones, hammers, swords, clubs, &c., of which treatment the defenders of this extraordinary sect relate the most astonishing examples in proof that severe pain is imperatively demanded by nature in this disorder as an effectual counter-irritant. The Secourists used wooden clubs in the same manner as paviors use their mallets, and it is stated that some Convulsionnaires have borne daily from six to eight thousand blows thus inflicted without danger. One Secourist administered to ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... PARIS: "Ce livre n'est pas seulement stupide, mais c'est excessivement irritant, et absolument sans humeur." (Translation: "This book is not only charming, but it is excessively entertaining ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... of contests in which they will not be candidates. I cannot tell how the British in the Transvaal will vote. There are a great many new questions, social and economic, which are beginning to apply a salutary counter-irritant to old racial sores. The division between the two races, thank God, is not quite so clear-cut as it used to be. But this I know—that as there are undoubtedly more British voters in the Transvaal than there ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... were Democritus and Heraclitus, which last, in those days less the slave of tradition, I called Heraclitus—an error which my excellent schoolmaster (I thank him for it) would have expelled from my head by the judicious application of a counter-irritant; for he regarded the birth as a kind of usher to the laurel, as indeed the true tree of knowledge, whose advantages could Adam have enjoyed during early life, he had known better than to have yielded to ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... life, so inexplicable are its contradictions, there were times when Oliver's ideal appeared almost to betray him, and the intellectual limitations of Virginia bored rather than delighted him. Habit, which is a sedative to a phlegmatic nature, acts not infrequently as a positive irritant upon the temperament of the artist; and since he had turned from his work in a passion of disgust at the dramatic obtuseness of his generation, he had felt more than ever the need of some intellectual outlet for the torrent ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow |
