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More "Eccentricity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... loud bellowing reverberations and blinding flashes of lightning, such as the wildest stage effects of the tempest in the Catskills when Rip Van Winkle is lost would have been nothing to. Foreboding the inner chill of a Spanish hotel on such a day, we had telegraphed for a fire in our rooms, and our eccentricity had been interpreted in spirit as well as in letter. It was not the habitual hotel omnibus which met us at the station, but a luxurious closed carriage commanded by an interpreter who intuitively opened our compartment door, and conveyed us dry and warm to our hotel, in every ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... friends, and country, for my sake, and come with me to some southern isle—or say South America—where we can be all in all to one another. Or you can tell your husband and let him jolly well punch my head if he can. But I'm damned if I'm going to stand any eccentricity. It's not respectable. ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself.—I really do not know where my head can have been. I seem to have forgotten all that makes it glorious to be man.—'Tis an omission that renders the book philosophically unimportant; but I am in hopes the eccentricity may please ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it ever become habitual. He affected to be much more so than he was: his pretensions were moderated by constitutional incapacity. His health was not vigorous; and his delicacy defeated his endeavours to show that he inherited the recklessness of his father. He affected extravagance and eccentricity of conduct, without yielding much to the one, or practising a great deal of the other. He was seeking notoriety; and his attempts to obtain it gave more method to his pranks and follies than belonged to the results of natural impulse and passion. He evinced occasional instances of the generous ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... of it by persons of genius and talent: but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge of the preposterous, if not over it. The eighteenth century was indeed almost the capital time of English eccentricity: and it was also a time of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness. But its eccentricities were not at this special period romantic: and its lawlessness was rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it. A rascally attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict great hardship ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... in the weird grivoiserie Affected by VERLAINE, And charmed by the chinoiserie Of MARINETTI'S strain, In all its multiplicity He worshipped eccentricity, And found his chief felicity In aping ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... thick, yellow coat and long, sharp teeth, a half-savage beast, bearing the name of Ortog (Satan), were Marsa's companions in her walks; and their submission to their young mistress, whom they could have knocked down with one pat of their paws, gave the Tzigana reputation for eccentricity; which, however, neither pleased nor displeased her, as she was perfectly indifferent to the opinion of ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... idea not savagely in works, but very wildly indeed in words, had several results; the most important of which was this. It started English literature after the Revolution with a sort of bent towards independence and eccentricity, which in the brighter wits became individuality, and in the duller ones, Individualism. English Romantics, English Liberals, were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision. The lonelier version of liberty was a sort of aristocratic ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the sum, it occurred to Birt, growing more familiar with the eccentricity of his companion, that he ought not in sheer silliness to throw away a chance ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... and there people, even American people, are so placed that they take from the situation a color of eccentricity, if they impart none to it, and the old, old story, which we all wish to have end well, zigzags to a fortunate close past juts and angles of individuality which the heroes and heroines have not willingly or wittingly thrown out. They would have chosen to arrive smoothly and uneventfully ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... understood by my tone when I understood what I read and when I did not, and accordingly would stop me, examine me, and open the most difficult passages to me." Milton must have felt a special tenderness for the Quakers, whose religious opinions, divested of the shell of eccentricity which the vulgar have always mistaken for the kernel, had become substantially his own. He had outgrown Independency as formerly Presbyterianism. His blindness served to excuse his absence from public worship; to which, so long at least as Clarendon's intolerance prevailed ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... there is no eccentricity of man in any part of the world for which a close parallel shall not be found in some other part. Such strange probation as is here spoken of, appears to have had too close a parallel in the old Celtic Church, and perhaps even, at ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Keene's middle-class protagonists are peculiar and exceptional, and much of their humour lies in their eccentricity, they are characters themselves, rather than types of English characters. Are they really observed and drawn from life, do they really exist just as they are, or are they partly evolved from the depths of an inner consciousness that is not quite satisfied with ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... boorish squires for understanding their real interests so imperfectly. In short, she talked a good deal of nonsense, which would have let the light into heads less dense, but left her audience agape at her eccentricity. And in these ways she conjured away the storm with her ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... her little fists and looked round for the means of vengeance. David went down on his knees. La Bazalgette glared through the crack, and wondered what on earth he was at now. Oh! he was praying. "He loves her: he is eccentricity itself; so he is praying for her, and on my doorsteps" (the householder wounded as well as the flirt). It was lucky she had not "a thunderbolt in her eye"—Shakespeare, or a celestial messenger of the wrong sort would have descended on the devout mariner. ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... eccentricity of the flood may be gathered from the fact that houses that were situated at Woodvale and points above Johnstown are piled at the lower end of the town, while some massive houses have been lifted and carried from the lower end as far as the cemetery at the extreme upper portion ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... discord that fell upon his sensitive ear made itself felt in his dauntless comment upon social shams and falsehoods.... But he was a lover of peace, and, ... as he was the ideal gentleman, the ideal citizen, he was also the ideal reformer, without eccentricity or exaggeration. However high his ideal, it never parted company with good sense. He never wanted better bread than could be made of wheat, but the wheat must be kept good and sound,' and I may add," the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... and is content to make them his own, to set his stamp upon them, by imparting to them a more meretricious gloss, a higher relief, a greater loftiness of tone, and a characteristic inveteracy of purpose. Even in those collateral ornaments of modern style, slovenliness, abruptness, and eccentricity (as well as in terseness and significance), Lord Byron, when he pleases, defies competition and surpasses all his contemporaries. Whatever he does, he must do in a more decided and daring manner than any one else—he lounges with extravagance, and yawns so as to ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... our winter by its turning that much from it. In one case the sun's rays are caused to shine more perpendicularly, and in the other more obliquely. This wabbling, like that of a top, is the sole cause of the seasons; since, owing to the eccentricity of our orbit, the earth is actually fifteen hundred thousand miles nearer the sun during our winter, in the northern hemisphere, than in summer. That there is no limit to a planet's inclination, and that inclination is not essential, we have astronomical proof. Venus's axis is inclined ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... mire.—Plain common sense has long pointed out a rule of action, from which all deviation is fatal, both to nations and individuals. England, as well as France, has furnished its examples; and the annals of genius in all countries are replete with the miseries of eccentricity.—Whoever has followed the course of the French revolution, will, I believe, be convinced, that the greatest evils attending on it have been occasioned by an affected contempt for received maxims. A common banditti, acting ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... respect for chastity—in other people Scenery in California requires distance Slept, if one might call such a condition by so strong a name Useful information and entertaining nonsense Virtuous to the verge of eccentricity ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger
... somewhat abruptly, as is his wont; for we grant him a license, in virtue of his eccentricity, which we should hardly expect to be claimed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the centres of the two planets is 59.9643 of the earth's equatorial radii, or only about 237,000 miles. I say the mean or average interval. But it must be borne in mind that the form of the moon's orbit being an ellipse of eccentricity amounting to no less than 0.05484 of the major semi-axis of the ellipse itself, and the earth's centre being situated in its focus, if I could, in any manner, contrive to meet the moon, as it were, in its perigee, the above mentioned distance would be materially diminished. But, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... impulse, goads humanity on to achievements. Every age, every person, and every art obeys the wand of the enchanter. History moves by indirections. The first historic tendency is likely to be slightly askew; there follows then an historic triumph, then an historic eccentricity, then an historic folly, then an explosion; and then the series begins again. In the grade of folly, hard upon an explosion, lies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... walk arm in arm with a young man if she was engaged to him." Lydia blushed darkly red, and then turned paler than usual, while her aunt went on. "You might do it, perhaps, and have it set down to American eccentricity or under-breeding, but I'm not going to have that. I intend you to be just as dull and diffident in society as if you were an Italian, and more than if you were English. Your voice, of course, is a difficulty. If you sing, ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... sprang up for these indispensable articles of dress. Or if the fashion had so changed that men had taken to wearing two shirts instead of one, that also might account for it,—though the wearing of two would be considered as great an eccentricity as the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... once hideous and grotesque in the appearance of the pile. The monstrous figures of the idols, with their rude carved draperies and symbolic weapons, lay in every wild variety of position, and presented every startling eccentricity of line, more especially towards the higher portions of the mass, where they had evidently been flung up from the ground by the hand ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... were thus confided to silence and darkness, there was, in other parts of his conduct more open to observation, a degree of eccentricity and indecorum which, with superficial observers, might well bring the sensibility of his nature into question. On the morning of the funeral, having declined following the remains himself, he stood looking, from the abbey door, at the procession, till the whole had moved off;—then, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... adventurer, the concubine of a king, and the paramour of every daring lover - a Welshwoman whose passions embroiled all Wales, and England too, in war, and the mother of heroes - Fitz-Geralds, Fitz-Stephens, and Fitz-Henries, and others - who, regardless of their mother's eccentricity in the choice of their fathers, united like brothers in the most adventurous undertaking of that age, the ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... Schiller which almost anyone might have written, Carlyle retired for some years to Craigenputtoch, and then brought forth Sartor Resartus, which was personal and soul-revealing to the verge of eccentricity. In the same way Wagner was a mere continuator of Weber in Lohengrin and Tannhaeuser, and first came to his own in the Meistersinger and Tristan, after years of meditation ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... union with the fantastic and the fanciful. His fertility in the most unexpected analogies becomes to the reader of his works a matter of continual wonder. Strange and curious contrasts and likenesses, both mental and. verbal, which might never once occur even to a mind of more than common eccentricity and invention, seem to have been in his mind with the ordinary flow of thinking. Plenteous and sustained, therefore, as his wit is, it never fails to startle. We have no doubt of his endless resources, and yet each new instance becomes a new marvel. His ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... was an old bachelor, very rich, and some people said very eccentric, though, in truth, his eccentricity was only indiscriminate generosity. He was very fond of children, boys especially; he often spoke of adopting some promising lad to inherit a portion of his great fortune, and continue the grand old firm in the City that had flourished for over a hundred years ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the softer feelings of the heart. They would as soon thought of attributing sentiment to one of the japanned deed-boxes. But they would have accepted the surprising revelation with well-bred English tolerance for eccentricity, not allowing it to affect their judgment that Mr. Brimsdown was one of the soundest and safest lawyers ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... strange sort of eccentricity: to the day of his death he never liked to tell the same thing twice. There were times when, if you asked him to relate a thing afresh, behold, he would interpolate new matter, or alter it so that it was impossible to recognize it. Once on a time, one of those gentlemen (it is ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... been one of the greatest ordeals she had ever faced, but she had endured it unflinchingly, and had found that London had already almost forgotten the eccentricity of her marriage. In the height of the ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... inherit his father's talents and his father's inability to make the best use of them; he possessed in a no less remarkable degree his father's independence of mind. In both cases, this quality was coupled with a corresponding eccentricity of conduct, which occasionally, to puzzled onlookers, wore the appearance of something very near insanity. Many stories are related of the queer behaviour of Dr. Beddoes. One day he astonished the ladies of ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... hospitality on the impulse would be as strange here as offering it without some special inducement for its acceptance. The inducement is, as often as can be, a celebrity or eccentricity of some sort, or some visiting foreigner; and I suppose that I have been a good deal used myself in one quality or the other. But when the thing has been done, fully and guardedly at all points, it does not seem to have been done for pleasure, ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... method identical with that which would be employed by modern astronomers. They ascertained the position of the stars by right ascension and declination. They knew the obliquity of the ecliptic, and determined the place of the sun's apogee as well as its mean motion. Their calculations on the eccentricity of the moon prove that they had a rectilinear trigonometry and tables of chords. They had an approximate knowledge of parallax. [Footnote: Delambre, Hist. d'Astr. Anc., tom. 1, p. 184.] They could calculate eclipses of the moon, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... his claim to celebrity upon this "difference"; an effect usually achieved by the adoption of a harsh, amorphous style, and a tone of analytical, introspective subjectivity so individual that all the common and universal elements of beauty and poetry are excluded. Indeed, eccentricity has come so completely into fashion, that he who follows up the wildest vagaries is actually the least different from the hectic scribbling ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... me the flying female wants?" he exclaimed, at last. "You'd better stop, perhaps" he added, to the flyman. "It is an age of eccentricity, an abnormal era of the world's history. She may want me. Very likely I left my pocket-handkerchief behind me, and Mr. Talboys has sent this person with it. Perhaps I'd better get out and go and meet her. It's ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... who had a graceful way of handing dishes and a dignified deference in his bow which in his own opinion excused certain attacks of solemn speechlessness and eccentricity of gait that occasionally ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... improved,—rather perhaps that the setting of fine clothes, cleanliness, and the absence of petty worries, made his characteristics respectable. That which is ill breeding in homespun, is apt to become mere eccentricity in purple and fine linen; Grant felt that Harcourt jarred on him less than he did before, and was grateful without superciliousness. Harcourt, relieved to find that Grant was neither critical nor aggressively ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... over him until he revived. It is a curious fact that this act of common humanity was regarded as something remarkable in the neighborhood; the grateful sot himself always said "it was mighty clever of Abe to tote me so far that cold night." It was also considered an eccentricity that he hated and preached against cruelty to animals. Some of his comrades remember still his bursts of righteous wrath, when a boy, against the wanton murder of turtles and other creatures. He ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... their fancy led them, eating when they felt inclined, sleeping when and where they pleased. And, in order to see if I were really established in my original rights, I gave myself up to a thousand acts of eccentricity, which enraged the tall Dutchman who was my guide, and who, in his heart, thought ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... letters, which were directed in a feigned handwriting, seemed sane and sensible enough, although they showed signs of eccentricity of character. ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... with smiles, but his friends came to the rescue, and proved that he was in the habit of writing names on every bit of paper which came to hand. That this eccentricity was well known, and his explanation should be received with favor. The grand jury, however, found an indictment against him, and he was held as ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... she declared, "I have an idea. It is the most charming and flattering thing, and it never occurred to me before. After all, it was not eccentricity which caused you to throw up your work at the Bar—and disappear. It was your hopeless devotion to me. Don't disappoint me now by denying it. Please don't! It was the announcement of my ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as a man have exerted a pernicious influence on many since, is, we fear, undeniable. He had been taught, by the lives of the "wits," to consider aberration, eccentricity, and "devil-may-careism" as prime badges of genius, and he proceeded accordingly to astonish the natives, many of whom, in their turn, set themselves to copy his faults. But when we subtract some half-dozen pieces, either coarse in language or equivocal in purpose, the influence ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... were cases here and there of whipping by the hangman, and other more ferocious cruelties. For among the Quakers themselves there were varieties of milder and wilder, less provoking and more provoking. The Quakerism of men like Fox and Dewsbury was, at worst, but an obdurate and irritating eccentricity, in comparison, for example, with the Quakerism run mad of James Nayler. This enthusiast, once quarter-master in a horse troop under Lambert, and regarded as "a man of excellent natural parts," had for three or four years kept himself within bounds, and been known only as one of the ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... those who, on the strength of what slanderers and plagiarists say, imagine that Rousseau embraced his theory only from a vain love of eccentricity, to read "Emile" and the "Social Contract" once more. That admirable dialectician was led to deny society from the standpoint of justice, although he was forced to admit it as necessary; just as we, who believe in an indefinite progress, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... been a reporter, Anne. Why are n't you more careful! There may come a time when your efforts to uphold your reputation for eccentricity and for doing the cleverly ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... stretched full length across their bosoms, not many can live down a turquoise ring set with pearls, and very few can bear the handicap of a bright gold front tooth. Artists, alone, may gratify their taste for velvet jackets, Tam-o'-Shanters, and Windsor ties, but the privilege is denied business men. Eccentricity of dress usually indicates eccentricity of temper, and we do not want temperamental business men. It is hard enough to get along with authors and artists and musicians. The business man who is wise wears conventional clothes ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... measurably enhanced his attractiveness; making him "different" and lending him a distinction which, without it, he might have lacked. And yet, patent as this singularity must have been to the dullest, it was something quite apart from any eccentricity of manner, though, heaven knows, I was soon to think ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... sentiment, but in something more fundamental and primitive which draw many, if not most, of the young men and young women from the security of their homes in the country into the big, booming confusion and excitement of city life. In a small community it is the normal man, the man without eccentricity or genius, who seems most likely to succeed. The small community often tolerates eccentricity. The city, on the contrary, rewards it. Neither the criminal, the defective, nor the genius has the same opportunity to develop ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... appearance and habits, I mean. You see, Wigan, your own idea of him is not sufficient. He may have deceived you entirely regarding his character, assuming eccentricity for some purpose. Think the affair out from that point of view, and when you have been to the Yard, come to Chelsea. If you do not mind I will take these two unopened letters. We will look at them ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... am getting cranky and diffident. I am beginning to get nervous about people's opinion and sensitive to my own eccentricity. It is a sad case for a man who never used to care a straw for ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... son—thus, the inheritance may be pardoned; and when they quarrelled it was not to be expected the son would relinquish the traits so paternally bestowed. Now the parent is obstinate and the son 'cute; but the son has an eccentricity that prompts him to outwit. Not unfrequently the father lets the son—just for peace sake—have his own way; but this letting him have his own way has inclined his heart rather to the ungrateful than otherwise. His demands are at times somewhat funny, and when ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... this kingdom in a cursory manner will imagine, that he beholds a solid, compacted, uniform system of monarchy; in which all inferior jurisdictions are but as rays diverging from one centre. But on examining it more nearly, you find much eccentricity and confusion. It is not a monarchy in strictness. But, as in the Saxon times this country was an heptarchy, it is now a strange sort of PENTARCHY. It is divided into five several distinct principalities, besides the supreme. There is indeed this difference from the Saxon times, that ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... structures have been erected, and French architecture has shown a remarkable vitality and flexibility under new conditions. Its productions have in general been marked by a refined taste and a conspicuous absence of eccentricity and excess; but it has for the most part trodden in well-worn paths. The most notable recent monuments are, in church architecture, the Sacr-Coeur, at Montmartre, by Abadie, avotive church inspired from the Franco-Byzantine style of Aquitania; in civil architecture ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... being extinguished—poetry is extinct. To talk of poetry now is eccentricity—to write it is absurdity—to publish it is moonstruck madness." So the changes are rung. Now, it is impossible to deny that what is called poetry has become a drug, a bore, and nuisance, and that the name "Poet," as commonly applied, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... another illustrious master, inundate their canvasses with violet shades do not see in nature more violet than was detected there fifty years ago; but they are influenced, "suggestioned," by the personal and special impressions of a painter who, in spite of this eccentricity, was successful in acquiring great prestige. Similar examples might be brought forward in connection with ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... also very prominent in the same line—Together with a fund of humour he possesses a whimsical eccentricity of character which is always diverting; his voice however, is frequently too weak to be heard in the remote ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... "I will not disguise that there was a time about a year ago when I felt very anxious in regard to you. Eccentricity, as I have often told you before, is all very well when one has nothing to lose and everything to gain by it. I can understand how a young person with no antecedents or opportunities for getting on in society might secure a temporary advantage by making herself an ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... after the interment of his second Duchess, Maria, that great and gifted lady. I know not whether it was that her bonny mien fanned in him some embers of his youth, or that he was loth to be outdone in gracious eccentricity by his crony the Duke of Dewlap, who himself had just taken a bride from a dairy. (You have read Meredith's account of that affair? No? You should.) Whether it was veritable love or mere modishness that formed my ancestor's resolve, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... to an eccentricity, engendered of loneliness, that altered the whole course of his life. Want had battered down his door. Truth had been evolved from despair. He was at last to ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... intercommunion, which seems rather a national characteristic, we need not be surprised to find in quiet Scottish families a sort of intercourse with old domestics which can hardly be looked for at a time when habits are so changed, and where much of the quiet eccentricity belonging to us as a national characteristic is almost necessarily softened down or driven out. Many circumstances conspired to promote familiarity with old domestics, which are now entirely changed. We ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... lives as heroic a life as can be attained by playing golf and shooting pheasants is more trusted and respected than a rich man who paints or composes music for his amusement. Field sports are intelligible enough; the pursuit of art requires some explanation, and incurs a suspicion of effeminacy or eccentricity. Only when authorship becomes a source of profit is it ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... His eccentricity had no apparent harmony with anything else nor any especial sensibility about it. The boys hooted his hat, and the little girls often joined in, crying "Steeple-top! He's got it on! Meshach's loose!" But he paid no attention to anybody, until once, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... rarely sees, her complexion was clear and bright, her figure extremely small and trim. Without being exactly pretty, she was very agreeable to the eye, and also had the attraction of looking remarkably different from other people. Indeed her costume was so uncommon as to be on the verge of eccentricity. Her face had a slightly Japanese look, and she increased this effect by wearing a gown of which a part was decidedly Japanese. In fact it was a kimono covered with embroidery in designs consisting of a flight of storks, some chrysanthemums, and a few butterflies, ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... I read again, as I approached the Plaza. "Can this man be Spanish, then? Surely not;—how could he have acquired his excellent English, without a trace of foreign accent, or the least eccentricity of idiom? His child, too, said nothing of that. English, no doubt, of Spanish parentage; or,—oh, patience! I shall know by-and-by, thanks to my merry Virginia jade, who shall be arrayed in resplendent hues, and throned in a golden ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... your mother had been brought up in solitude, and without having seen the face of another man than her father. Such was the case;—Colonel Beverley, of English name, but Scottish connections, was an old gentleman of considerable eccentricity of character. He had taken a part in the rebellion of 1715; but sick and disgusted with an issue by which his fortunes had been affected, and heart-broken by the loss of a beloved wife, whose death had been accelerated by circumstances connected ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... and cornices to discover all the gold, hoarded with such passionate greed by a Dutch miser worthy of a Rembrandt's brush. In all the course of my professional career I have never seen such impressive signs of the eccentricity of avarice. ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... Thomas Marvel as a person of copious, flexible visage, a nose of cylindrical protrusion, a liquorish, ample, fluctuating mouth, and a beard of bristling eccentricity. His figure inclined to embonpoint; his short limbs accentuated this inclination. He wore a furry silk hat, and the frequent substitution of twine and shoe-laces for buttons, apparent at critical points of his costume, ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... harmony with the frankness of her speech and the directness of her gaze, hung around her. She was a large-hearted girl and no one but her banker knew of the thousands of pounds that were quietly distributed amongst the charities of the city every year: a decided eccentricity, and most directly opposed to the current method, which consists in having the name of the donor published in the leading papers, to be cabled over to England and brought at any cost under the notice of Her Majesty, in case there ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... the figures comprising the principal zone of ornament departs somewhat from the four ruling directions of the textile combination. This was accomplished by increasing the width of the steps in the outline as the dark rays progressed, resulting in curved outlines of eccentric character. This eccentricity, coupled with the very unusual character of the details at the outer extremities of the figures, leads to the surmise that each part of the design is a conventional representation of some life form, a bird, an insect, ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... it now seems to us, the botanist of the past has been content with the simple technical description of the feature, without the slightest conception of its meaning, dismissing it, perhaps, with passing comment upon its "eccentricity" or "curious shape." Indeed, prior to Darwin's time it might be said that the flower was as a voice in the wilderness. In 1735, it is true, faint premonitions of its present message began to be heard through their first though faltering interpreter, ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... climax came. Some smiled indulgently and called it an artistic eccentricity, others looked upon it as a wise provision, in view of the many events which were crowding thick and fast in Paris just then, but to all, the real motive of that climax remained a puzzle and a mystery. Anyway, ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... everything, extended his, her, or its hand to this cub, who, quite puzzled, but too brutal to be confused, kept driving on the red van, and each day perpetrating some new act of profligacy, some new instance of coarse profusion, tasteless extravagance, and inelegant eccentricity. ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... circumstances, might have been of great importance to him; my father, though himself of a very sweet disposition, was most unhappy. His parents looked upon him as moonstruck, while he himself, whatever his aspirations, was conscious that he had done nothing to justify the eccentricity of his course, or the violation of all prudential considerations in which he daily indulged. In these perplexities, the usual alternative was again had recourse to—absence; he was sent abroad, to travel in France, which the peace then permitted, visit some friends, see Paris, and then proceed ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... traveler heard Don Quixote speak in so wise and discerning manner, he was aghast; and he was entirely at a loss to know how to judge him. He was inclined to think that what he had taken for madness in him was nothing but eccentricity. ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... It is a great consumer of fuel, and radiates but little heat. By dint of constant wooding I contrived to warm mine; but my Italian friends always avoided its vicinity when they came to see me, and most amusingly regarded my determination to be comfortable as part of the eccentricity inseparable ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... to caricature a bluestocking, but to point out one or two real dangers. Education is good; but perfect sanity is better still. Sanity is the most excellent of all women's excellences. We forgive eccentricity and one-sidedness—the want of perfect sanity—in men, and especially men of genius; and we rather reluctantly forgive it in women of genius; but in ordinary folk, no. These are the strong-minded women; ordinary folk, who make a vigorous protest against one or two of the minor mistakes of society, ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... sufficiently remote township as in realms unnamed on any map. It will be seen that the sober stripling was reduced to arguing with himself, and that his main argument was not to be admitted in his own heart. The mysterious eccentricity of his employer, coupled with the adventurous character of his alleged prospects, was what induced the lad to embrace both in defiance of an unimaginative hard-headedness which he aimed at rather ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... made too much of the savanna sparrow's innocent eccentricity. He fills his place, and fills it well; and who knows but that he may yet outshine the skylark? There is a promise, I believe, for those who humble themselves. But what shall be said of species which do not even try to sing, and ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... chubby little eccentricity revolved in his humble orbit among the castor-oil bushes and in the dust; always fashioning magnificent palaces from stale flowers thrown away by the bearer, smooth water-worn pebbles, bits of broken glass, and feathers pulled, I fancy, from my fowls—always ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... way, for his vision is not very distinct;—his head is delightfully buoyant, his optics inclined to multiply, and his legs very refractory, having a great desire to dance or go sideways, but obstinately refusing, in their eccentricity, to proceed in a straight line; for Mr. Brown is more merry than particular—taking Newgate Market in his way home to Mizzlington from the 'Change. Having a great veneration for old customs, he buys ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... character is only the heroic way of understanding it. When we love, by some noble method of our own or some nobility of mien or nature in the other, we apprehend the loved one by what is noblest in ourselves. When we are merely studying an eccentricity, the method of our study is but a series of allowances. To begin to understand is to begin to sympathise; for comprehension comes only when we have stated another's faults and virtues in terms of our own. Hence the proverbial ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of his own. This was mid-winter, two years after the end of the War, where Dick and his uncle had worked in the Ambulance Corps to the limit of their capacities—Dick, no soldier, because of what seemed to him a diabolic eccentricity of imperfect sight, and Raven, blocked by what he felt to be the negligible disability of age. John Raven had, with the beginning of the War—which, as early as 1914 he had decided to be his war—made up his mind that although he was over forty and of a business training with inconsiderable ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... nostalgia seizes him amid the fairy scenes of Orient that have seduced his senses. More weary than he had ever yet been, Wilfrid dropped into a chair and looked about him for a time, like a man who awakens from sleep. Monsieur Becker and his daughter accustomed, perhaps, to the apparent eccentricity of their guest, continued the employments in ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... hurry to the Gardens, so sure was he of the success of his undertaking. The frowsy black coat, in which he made his bow to the millionaire, had not seen the light for many years—his hat was a wide-brimmed eccentricity in soft felt which greatly delighted the nursemaids who passed him by. Gessner would never have recognized, in the hollow-cheeked, pale-faced, humble creature the sturdy young Pole who had come to him nearly ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... for reform, to a small eccentricity in costume, the English are the most intolerant people in the world, in their reception of anything which presents itself to them under the form of a perfect novelty. Let any man display a new project before the Parliament of England, or a new ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... This eccentricity was the source of much worry to Breed. Shady could see no good reason why she should not revisit Collins when the mood so moved her. One night she turned abruptly from her course and headed for the twinkling lights of ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... this day, and may be seen on the right-hand of the broad walk on the north side of the spacious churchyard. His coffin was constructed at the same time; and, until it should be required for other and personal purposes, was used as a wine-bin. But, to carry his eccentricity even to the grave, he left strict orders that he should be buried in an erect posture: and "tradition" (of course) says that his request was complied with. Your correspondent says that tradition "assigns no reason for the peculiarity" of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... are more disturbing to the functioning of a staff than undue eccentricity on the part of the commander or of senior members of the staff. For instance, a personal habit to be rigorously suppressed—a habit not infrequently in evidence, especially under strain of active operations—is that of absent-mindedly pocketing documents needed in the work ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... habit of especially asserting itself in the midst of these youthful orgies, a curious sense of waiting for something to happen, a sensation which had been responsible very often for what his friends had looked upon as eccentricity. He knew now that this thing had arrived, and everything else in life seemed to pale by the side of it. Hunterleys' words had thrown him temporarily into a strange turmoil. Solitude for a few moments he had felt to be entirely necessary. ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... belong to these descriptions of men. It formed a majestic pile, the effect of which was not inspired, but improved, by order and symmetry. There was nothing in it to dazzle by wildness, and surprise by eccentricity. It was of a higher species of moral beauty. It contained everything great and elevated, but it had no false or trivial ornament. It was not the model cried up by fashion and circumstance: its excellence was adapted to the true and just moral taste, incapable of change from the varying accidents ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... her indignation the absurd Fyne dog began to bark in the porch. It might have been at a trespassing bumble-bee however. That animal was capable of any eccentricity. Fyne got up quickly and went out to him. I think he was glad to leave us alone to discuss that matter of his journey to London. A sort of anti-sentimental journey. He, too, apparently, had confidence in my sagacity. It was touching, this confidence. It ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... Proportional Representation is not a faddist proposal, not a perplexing ingenious complication of a simple business; it is the carefully worked out right way to do something that hitherto we have been doing in the wrong way. It is no more an eccentricity than is proper baking in the place of baking amidst dirt and with unlimited adulteration, or the running of trains to their destinations instead of running them without notice into casually selected sidings and branch lines. It is not the substitution of something ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... first, in some way, having discovered old Max Diestricht's hiding place; and, if I had given him time enough, he would probably have stuck one of these seals, in clumsy imitation of that little eccentricity of mine, on the wall over there to stamp the job as genuine. You begin to get it, don't you Lannigan? Pretty sure-fire as an alibi, eh? And he'd have got away with it, too, as far as you were concerned. He had only to fire that shot, smash the window, tuck his false beard, mustache, and peaked ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... which at such a moment the grave dignity of Kilmarnock, contrasted with the lofty indifference of Balmerino, might excite, there was some diversion among the Peers, owing to the eccentricity of several of their body. Of these, one, Lord Windsor, affectedly said when asked for his vote, "I am sorry I must say, guilty upon my honour." Another nobleman, Lord Stamford, refused to answer to the name of Henry, having been christened Harry. "What a great way of thinking," ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... rest and think. After she married she would be taken from the quiet Quaker society in Philadelphia, in which she always had moved, to one that would put her personal and mental powers to a sharp proof; for Birkenshead, by right of his professional fame, and a curiously attractive personal eccentricity, had gradually become the nucleus of one of the best and most brilliant circles in the country, men and women alike distinguished for their wit and skill in extracting the finest tones from life while they lived. The quiet Quaker girl was secretly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... other—sometimes two at a time—might be seen staggering about the raft, or crawling over its planks, as if unconscious of what they were doing. It seemed a wonder that some of them—semi-somnambulists in a double sense—did not fall overboard into the water. But they did not. Notwithstanding the eccentricity of their movements, they all succeeded in maintaining their position on the raft. To tumble over the edge would have been tantamount to toppling into the jaws of an expectant shark, and getting "scrunched" ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... whether "Norbert Franks" was the son of an old friend of whom he had lost sight for many years. By way of answer, Franks called upon his correspondent, who lived in a pleasant little house at Ashtead, in Surrey; he found a man of something less than sixty, with a touch of eccentricity in his thoughts and ways, by whom he was hospitably received, and invited to return whenever it pleased him. It was not very long before Franks asked permission to make the Pomfrets acquainted with his friend Warburton, a step which proved entirely justifiable. Together or separately, ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... where his eccentricity became the most dangerous to the peace of mind of our family," continued Mrs. Selwyn. "My father seemed never able to discover that he was doing the lad harm by all sorts of indulgence and familiarity with him, a sort of hail-fellow-well-met way that surprised me more than I can express, when ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... insularity, and an overweening estimate of themselves and their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honore—if he would have the full aroma of British conceit. The most surprising feature of the English quarter of the French capital is the eccentricity of the English visitors, as it strikes their own countrymen. I cannot find it in me to blame Gallican caricaturists. The statuettes which enliven the bronze shops; the gaunt figures which are in the chocolate establishments; the prints in the ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... what conditions you must fulfill to gain that! You must lead a life like that of the cloister, and sacrifice all your dearest habits. The Englishman, though he invented the word eccentric, does not tolerate eccentricity in a foreigner. And, on the whole, the bourgeoise hospitality is not worth ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... is this?" said the Vicar, raising his glasses to his eyes, but knowing perfectly well all the time, he having been one of the first to learn of the doctor's eccentricity. "Ah, to be sure; Doctor Grayson's protege. Yes, I remember him perfectly well, and I suppose ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... easy to help you to understand a woman who doesn't understand herself," he answered. "But I will try. The key to my poor dear mother's character is, in one word—Eccentricity." ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... I kept my purpose a secret from every one, because I wished to contemplate the treasures of art there quite after my own way, and, as I thought, to allow no one to perplex me. Besides this, so simple a matter became more complicated by still another eccentricity. ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... with violet shades do not see in nature more violet than was detected there fifty years ago; but they are influenced, "suggestioned," by the personal and special impressions of a painter who, in spite of this eccentricity, was successful in acquiring great prestige. Similar examples might be brought forward in connection with ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... Cicero writes as though his friend had despised them. Cicero himself, having been in Rome, had of course witnessed them. To have been in Rome and not to have seen them would have been quite out of the question. Not to come to Rome from a distance was an eccentricity. He congratulated Marius for not having come, whether it was that he was ill, or that the whole thing was too despicable: "You in the early morning have been looking out upon your view over the bay while we have been staring at puppets half asleep. Most costly games, but ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... only he knew how much. Generally grave and dreamy; when quiet as calm as a dove, as fierce as a hawk when aroused; moving always in an eccentric orbit, which few understood; flashing out now and then gleams which some said were sparks of genius but which most people said were mere eccentricity, he had sunk into a recluse. He was in this state when he met HER. He always afterward referred to her so. He was at a reception when he came upon her on a stairway. A casual word about his life, a smile flashed from her large, dark, luminous eyes, lighting up her face, and Henry Floyd awoke. She ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... possibly excuse such eccentricity of conduct at such a time. Salome is moving somewhere about the house, according to her crazy custom," said ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... girls, for they seemed, incomprehensibly, to like it. Their liking it, their businesslike assumption of equality, their incessant appearance (authorized, it is true, by business) at the railings of his pen, the peculiar disenchanting promiscuity of it all, preserved young Ransome in his eccentricity of indifference to their sex. In fact, if you tried to talk about sex to young Ransome (and Mercier did try) he would denounce it as "silly goat's talk," and your absorption in it as "the most mutton-headed form of ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... him to stay the night. Fortunately, Bezobiedoff declined the invitation, and departed. Having seen him off, Dimitri returned, and, smiling a faintly complacent smile as he did so, and rubbing his hands together (in all probability partly because he had sustained his character for eccentricity, and partly because he had got rid of a bore), started to pace the room, with an occasional glance at myself. I felt more offended with him than ever. "How can he go on walking about the room and grinning like that?" was ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... over his head, and unwound it, glancing to right and left. Now Jim amid ordinary events was an acknowledged fool, and had a wife to remind him of it; but perch him out of female criticism, on a dizzy foothold such as this, and set him a desperate job, and you clarified his wits at once. This eccentricity was so notorious that the two men above halted in silence, ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... character, they choose the latter, and prefer champagne to freedom. And they are consistent in their choice; for, to them, every exertion of the mind which does not serve the aims of the will is folly. Intellectual effort for its own sake, they call eccentricity. Therefore, persistence in the aims of the will and the belly will be concentricity; and, to be sure, the will is the centre, the kernel of ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... carefully where he placed his feet. As everywhere else, the woodwork was worm-eaten, and the timbers set up a dismal creaking under the weight of his body, but he had undertaken to investigate the meaning of this architectural eccentricity, and would not now turn back. On he crept, noiselessly as possible, adown the twisting stairs, carefully looking ahead for pitfalls and unsuspected developments. Once he paused, thinking he heard the distant tread of a foot, but the sound died away, and he resumed his course. Some of the steps were ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... and, I, much pleased with his eccentricity, began to coax him. He was the tutor of a young boy of twelve or thirteen years who was seated near him. I made him give me during the journey lessons in French politeness, and when we parted he took me apart ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Irish of "Henry V.," and Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade "the humour" into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later, "The Humourous Lieutenant," and Jonson, besides "Every Man Out of His Humour," returned to the title in closing ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... him with distinction, if not eccentricity. He walked always with a quick, springing step. He didn't swing his foot. It worked on springs. And the spring in it had a furtive action not unlike the movement of a leopard. His muscles, in spite of ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... it. His children, as almost every writer on him, from Grellmann down to the present day, has observed, are more thoroughly indulged and spoiled than any non-gipsy can conceive; and despite all the apparent contradictions caused by the selfishness born of poverty, irritable Eastern blood, and the eccentricity of semi-civilisation, I doubt if any man, on the whole, in the world, is more ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... were not only great artists but great humanists. As a purely descriptive poet, he can take his place with the masters of sea and landscape. As an imaginative realist, he showed those who were stumbling from one wild eccentricity to another to thrill them, that they themselves were wilder, stranger, far more thrilling than anything in the world—or out of it. Few things in contemporary poetry are as powerful as the regeneration of Saul Kane (in The Everlasting ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... Court is just a little eccentricity of mine," explained Dr. Mundson. "I need people in my work, people whom I must select through swift, sure tests. The apartment ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... dress, which his high bearing and intellectual countenance redeemed from coxcombry; all, united, gave something remarkable and distinguished to his appearance; and the interest attached to his fortunes, and to his social reputation for genius and eccentricity, could not fail of increasing the effect he produced ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it is not; but a sort of recital of the preamble of a bill, or a collection of grave arguments for a man's being of opinion with himself. It would be well if there was anything of character, of eccentricity in all this; but that is not the case. It is a political homily personified, a walking common-place we have to encounter and listen to. It is just as if a man was to insist on your hearing him go through the fifth chapter of the Book of Judges every time you meet, or like the story ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... offering hospitality on the impulse would be as strange here as offering it without some special inducement for its acceptance. The inducement is, as often as can be, a celebrity or eccentricity of some sort, or some visiting foreigner; and I suppose that I have been a good deal used myself in one quality or the other. But when the thing has been done, fully and guardedly at all points, it does not seem to have been ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... Devizes, and is said to have made no fewer than one hundred and seventy ascents in the course of last year. He was a retiring man with dark moods, in which he would avoid the society of his fellows. Captain Dangerfield, who knew him better than any one, says that there were times when his eccentricity threatened to develop into something more serious. His habit of carrying a shot-gun with him in his aeroplane was one manifestation ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to make acquaintances, yet he did not refuse the invitations that were pressed upon him, lest he should be accused of eccentricity and rudeness; and so he found himself soon entangled in all sorts of engagements with the neighboring gentry and nobility. If these so-called gayeties gave him no particular pleasure, at least for the time they diverted his ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... affected to be much more so than he was: his pretensions were moderated by constitutional incapacity. His health was not vigorous; and his delicacy defeated his endeavours to show that he inherited the recklessness of his father. He affected extravagance and eccentricity of conduct, without yielding much to the one, or practising a great deal of the other. He was seeking notoriety; and his attempts to obtain it gave more method to his pranks and follies than belonged to the results of natural impulse and ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... appeared on the stage as singer, and in one of his own operas, after singing his role upon the stage, came back into the orchestra in order to conduct from the harpsichord the performance, until his role required him again upon the stage. Indeed, it was this eccentricity which occasioned a quarrel between him and Haendel, who resented the implication that he himself was incapable of carrying on the performance. Mattheson composed a large number of works, including many church cantatas of the style made more celebrated in the works of Sebastian Bach, later, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... an effect in France, felt no particular animosity against the "Debats," for instance; his particular Catholic enthusiasm recognized itself as exceptional, and was content to accept the humble or, at any rate, inferior position, which admitted eccentricity connotes. "Later," these founders of the Free Press seemed to say, "we may convert the mass to our views, but, for the moment, we are admittedly a clique: an exceptional body with the penalties attaching to such." They said this although the whole ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... final act, for which no explanation, beyond that of sudden mental derangement, had been offered. This explanation did not seem to me wholly adequate, although it had been accepted, I believe, both by his friends and the general public—and with the more apparent reason on account of a strain of eccentricity, amounting in some cases almost to insanity, which could be traced, it was said, ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... were—snatched from her in the moment of triumph was annoying. But whatever her faults, Mrs. Millard was a lady, and as such she accepted the situation. She said little, but what she said was graceful and to the point. The eccentricity of the whole thing was, it seemed to her, sufficient excuse for her attitude, which, now she ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... difficult to appreciate the difference for a great artist in having the general taste with rather than against the purer tendencies of his art. Probably the Greeks and certain Italians owe their freedom from eccentricity, in a very large measure, to this cause. But I intend to treat these questions more at length in dealing with Duerer's character as an artist and creator. It was necessary to touch on the subject ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... He had a heart after all, and daughters of his own; and he was troubled more than he could say. He stood bare-headed and saw her drive away, with a look of anxiety upon his face. Was it the same bee in her bonnet which old Trevor had shown so conspicuously? was it eccentricity verging upon madness? He went back to his office and wrote to Sir Tom, enclosing a copy of Lucy's list. "I must ask your advice in the matter instead of offering you mine," he wrote. "Lady Randolph has a right, of course, ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... this woman will doubtless appear very extraordinary and unaccountable to those who have not studied human nature very deeply; while the eccentricity of her passion, and the singular object of her desires, will excite disgust. But to the shrewd and intelligent observer of the female heart and its many impulses, the preferences of this frail lady are devoid of mystery. They are readily accounted for—pampered with luxury, ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... indiscriminately into the shirt drawer, the underwear drawer, and even into no drawer at all. It was not uncommon in his new carelessness to let many of his clean clothes go directly back to the laundry without having ever been worn, a common eccentricity of impoverished bachelors. And this in the face of his favorite magazines, which at that time were fairly staggering with articles by successful authors against the frightful impudence of the condemned ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... and well-bred, we need scarcely have recommended them to the peculiar consideration of the young ladies, if it were not that some of the gentle creatures whom we hold in such high respect, are perhaps a little too apt to confound a great many heavier terms with the light word eccentricity, which we beg them henceforth to take in a strictly Johnsonian sense, without any liberality or latitude ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the population, since mental defectives may be the offspring of apparently normal stocks, or may be descended from stock in which only minor manifestations of impaired nervous vitality, such as instability, eccentricity, &c., have hitherto been evident, and in a large proportion of cases they are no doubt the progeny of persons belonging to the higher grade of distinctly degenerate stock—persons who have not themselves necessarily shown any marked traits of instability ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... tour, to deter him from relinquishing all effort! The times, mon ami, are "out of joint:" we must not by exigeance precipitate him to his ruin, but try patiently and prudently, every possible means, to rescue him from the effects of his own wilful blindness and unthinking, idle eccentricity. If we succeed, how will he bless us when his maturer judgment opens his eyes to the evils he will have escaped! but if we fail why should we lie down ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... puzzled by the receipt of a fifty-dollar bill "for the relief of the depraved." His office was constantly thronged with outcasts, who were generally relieved by small sums. In his relations with these people, his simplicity and eccentricity were noted by all who knew him. Among many stories which I know to be true, I select ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... too refined for the general ear;—for all which only a shilling is paid; and, though last, not least, good eating and drinking for those who choose to purchase that regale. Mr. Thomas Tyers was bred to the law; but having a handsome fortune, vivacity of temper, and eccentricity of mind, he could not confine himself to the regularity of practice. He therefore ran about the world with a pleasant carelessness, amusing everybody by his desultory conversation. He abounded in anecdote, but was not sufficiently attentive to accuracy. I therefore cannot ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... puts any two people at once upon equal terms as nothing else can do it. Would it were possible to present the phrase to English readers in all its own helpless good-humour. The excellent woman who uses it is practising no eccentricity thereby, and raises no smile. It is only in another climate, and amid other manners, that one cannot recall it without a smile. To a mind having a lively sense of contrast it is not a little pleasant to imagine an elderly lady of corresponding station in England replying so to importunities for ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... self-respect nor position to maintain, who break the City's law. Stockbrokers are, of course, men apart from the rest. They draw most of their customers from a class which knows nothing of business; and must therefore be humoured; moreover, a little eccentricity, a lightheartedness, verging at times on the clownish, is useful, for, if duly reported, it procures the Stock Exchange a free advertisement in the Press. Even Mr. Marlow had been known to play football with a silk hat and wave a little Union Jack, when the news of ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... was, as I said, old, and a gentleman, but he was tall, robust, broad-shouldered, with eagle-like beak, and keen gray eyes that were fitting accompaniments to so distinguished a feature. His dress was rather careless, but his air and the expression of his face evinced a mixture of eccentricity and a sense of superiority. At least, it had evinced this until the singing of Tara. Then he broke down. First he bowed his head down, resting his forehead upon his hands, which were supported by his cane, and several ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... been thinking that, if he were the obstacle that prevented my speaking (and there were many ways in which he might be that obstacle), my position would be such a hard one that it would excuse some wildness of speech and eccentricity of manner. I saw, too, that the warmth of my partial explanations had had some effect on her, and I began to believe that it might be a good thing for me to speak my mind without delay. No matter how she should receive my ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... the Seasons; a Poet's Dream The Two Pointers; a Tale Eccentricity The Paint King Myrtilla: addressed to a Lady, who lamented that she had never been in love To a Lady who spoke slightingly of Poets Sonnet on a Falling Group in the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo, in the Cappella Sistina Sonnet on the Group of the Three Angels ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... proposal for reform, to a small eccentricity in costume, the English are the most intolerant people in the world, in their reception of anything which presents itself to them under the form of a perfect novelty. Let any man display a new project ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... in matters of tone and taste. To it he attributes in a great measure that thoroughness, that openness of mind, that absence of vulgarity which he finds everywhere in French literature; and to the want of a similar institution in England he traces that eccentricity, that provincial spirit, that coarseness which, as he thinks, are barely compensated by English genius. Thus, too, Renan, one of its most distinguished members, says that it is owing to the academy "qu'on peut tout dire sans appareil ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... individuality of other men; he has been knocked about by passion and circumstance. All his life he has had a dislike for iron rules and common-place maxims. There is something of the gipsy in his nature. He is to some extent eccentric, and he indulges his eccentricity. And the misfortunes of men of letters—the vulgar and patent misfortunes, I mean—arise mainly from the want of harmony between their impulsiveness and volatility, and the staid unmercurial world with which they are brought into conflict. They are unconventional in ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... some conditions of structure. Any pathological result may be expected, not incompatible with the structure of the organ. And thus it is that the cerebral affection which fell upon the parent is represented in one child by insanity, in another by idiocy, in another by epilepsy, in another by gross eccentricity, in another by moral perversities, in another by ill-balanced intellect,—each and all implying a brain more or less vitiated by the parental infirmity. There is nothing strange in all this diversity of result. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... explained diffidently, not wanting to enlarge on his mother's eccentricity. "She said good-bye and went out and shut the door. Then in a minute or two I looked up and saw her face against the glass.... I offered to open the door, but she shook her head ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... fourteen. She was taller, with a well-trained figure that showed the efforts of all the deft maids and skillful dressmakers through which it had passed. She was dressed in the very height of the prevailing fashions—a high-water mark of eccentricity that Judge Orcutt rarely encountered in the staid circles of the good city of B——. Her skirt was slit so as to accentuate all there was of hips, and the bodice did the same for the bust. And the hat—well, even in New York ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... Pintal," I read again, as I approached the Plaza. "Can this man be Spanish, then? Surely not;—how could he have acquired his excellent English, without a trace of foreign accent, or the least eccentricity of idiom? His child, too, said nothing of that. English, no doubt, of Spanish parentage; or,—oh, patience! I shall know by-and-by, thanks to my merry Virginia jade, who shall be arrayed in resplendent hues, and throned in a golden frame, if she but feed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... armies are always marking time, and they do not prize the most the man who marks time best, but the man who can bring some humour or touch of romance into the dullness of routine, and they prefer the humour to be led up to by the winding road of eccentricity. It was never dull with the Guard. They possessed officers who kept their ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... you," he said. "You were asking about my father, you know, and I told you I hadn't a respectable photograph of him. That was true; I haven't. Dad has another eccentricity besides his dislike of the East and Eastern ways of living; he has a perfect horror of having his photograph taken. Don't ask me why, because I can't tell you. It isn't because he is ugly; he's a mighty good-looking man for ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... my sweet Lady Binks," said Lady Penelope, "spare my poor favourite! You, surely, of all others, should forgive the excesses of an amiable eccentricity of temper.—Forgive me, my love, but I must defend an absent friend—My Lady Binks, I am very sure, is too ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... a knight, and George I, raised the painter's rank to that of a baronet. Sir Godfrey was notorious for his conceit, irritability, and eccentricity, and for the wit which sparkled more in his conversation than in any originality of observation displayed in his painting. Walpole attributes to Kneller the opposite qualities of great negligence and great love of money. The ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... of Harvard. He has travelled extensively in nearly all parts of the world and has access to the best society of Europe and America. He has a reputation for eccentricity, has won numerous sporting events as a gentleman rider; was the first airman to fly over the Rockies; took part in the Uruguay rebellion of 1904, and held the rank of lieutenant colonel of field artillery with the American ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... be wrong," said the lawyer, blandly. "He was eccentric, my dear sir, very eccentric; but eccentricity is not insanity, and you will find that the will ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... he fell in love at first sight with Mrs. Austin and the life, and atmosphere of the house. There was in the society of the Austins, outward, stoical conformers to the world, something gravely suggestive of essential eccentricity, something unpretentiously breathing of intellectual effort, that could not fail to hit the fancy of this hot-brained boy. The unbroken enamel of courtesy, the self-restraint, the dignified kindness of these married folk, had besides a particular attraction for their ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that "the fit only shall live." This does not mean that the unfit must die, but that only the fit shall be born. Occasionally, as a product of bad environment, or faulty training, or eccentricity, a horse gives evidence of vicious traits, but the scientific breeder never mates him. He is allowed to die out. If he were permitted to father a race, his progeny would develop murderous characteristics that would retard the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... this last extension, will show himself conscious of his paradox. So also he will shun the grossness that employs the epithet "quaint" to put upon subtlety and the devices of a studied workmanship an imputation of eccentricity; or, if he falls in with the populace in this regard, he will be careful to justify his innuendo. The slipshod use of "nice" to connote any sort of pleasurable emotion he will take care, in his writings at least, utterly to abhor. From the daintiness of elegance ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... extreme mutual attachment, and were possessed with an ardent desire to forsake the world, and devote their lives to each other. Taking measures accordingly, they departed to an obscure retreat in the country. Their relatives frowned on this eccentricity, traced them out in their hiding-place, and, despite their protestations, separated them, and brought them back. But they soon effected a second elopement, which proved a successful and permanent one. Confiding the place of their flight only to a single faithful servant, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... distress her. But his sense of her inconsistency with British institutions —at least he fancied it was that—led him to discourage somewhat, in the lightest way, Miss Halifax's interested inquiries about her. The inquiries suggested dimly that eccentricity and obscurity might be overlooked in any one whose personality really had a value for Mr. Kendal, and made an attempt, which was heroic considering the delicacy of Miss Halifax's scruples, to measure his appreciation of Miss Bell as a writer—to Miss Halifax ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... longer wildness in his actions; but in his thoughts and language, was developed a poetical eccentricity—a morbid sympathy with surrounding scenes and impressions, which kept Sir Henry Delme in a constant state of alarm,—and ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... was instituted, but none was found. He had no enemies, he had no debts, there was no woman. There were several thousand dollars in his bank to his credit. He had never showed any tendency toward mental eccentricity; in fact, he was of a particularly calm and well-balanced temperament. Every means of tracing the vanished man was made use of, but without avail. It was one of those cases—more numerous in late years—where men seem to have gone out like ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... creamy curves of shoulder and limbs, he sought diversion in the treetops. She spoke, and at the sound of the clear little voice he looked at her, and in looking forgot the eccentricity of her frank costume. Her dark eyes held him: he knew that he was gazing at the only wholly ingenuous being he had ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... such as the crown of a little boy's head, or the shoulders of a by-stander who had no business there except to taste the brew; a proceeding which would have been deemed humorous but for the air of stern rigidity which that auctioneer's face preserved, tending to show that the eccentricity was a result of that absence of mind which is engendered by the press of affairs, and no freak of ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... influence their own manners, conduct, morals or sympathies. Indeed, some of them are so confident of the unreality of novels that when they are confronted with their own counterparts in fictitious personality they feel a certain sense of humiliation as of being convicted of eccentricity, of an unlikeness to actual persons, which must be concealed as branding them "fit to be put into a novel." To such persons novel-reading is a vice, because it is an indolent excitement, a mental opium-eating; the useless butting—against an unscalable wall—of ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... hint a little doubt about a man's parts, and to damn him with faint praise); and so he looks on the world and plays with the ceaseless humours of all of us—laughs the kindest laugh—points our neighbour's foible or eccentricity out to us with the most good-natured, smiling confidence; and then, turning over his shoulder, whispers our foibles to our neighbour. What would Sir Roger de Coverley be without his follies and his charming little brain-cracks?(93) If the good ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... smiles, but his friends came to the rescue, and proved that he was in the habit of writing names on every bit of paper which came to hand. That this eccentricity was well known, and his explanation should be received with favor. The grand jury, however, found an indictment against him, and he was held as an ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... Marvel as a person of copious, flexible visage, a nose of cylindrical protrusion, a liquorish, ample, fluctuating mouth, and a beard of bristling eccentricity. His figure inclined to embonpoint; his short limbs accentuated this inclination. He wore a furry silk hat, and the frequent substitution of twine and shoe-laces for buttons, apparent at critical points of his costume, marked a ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... than double their own. The presumption was not unreasonable, for the French had the advantage of the English in ships, guns, and men, but they had omitted to take into their calculations the fact that the English fleet was commanded by one whose promptitude in action, readiness and eccentricity of resource, and utter disregard of consequences when what he deemed the path to victory lay before him, might have been equalled; but certainly could not have been surpassed, by ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... liked him really. Everyone who got to know him said that he improved on acquaintance. His eccentricity increased as he grew older, but particularly after he ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... eccentricity becomes very great, the beauty of the curve is destroyed, and ultimately the ellipse is merged into one straight line. Most learned Professors, here we have a terrible warning of the awful result of too much eccentricity. Whether we regard the life of the nation or of the individual, let all bear in mind this alarming fact, that eccentricity of thought, habit, or behaviour may result, as in the case of this unfortunate ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... Then, with the relic in my hand, a waiter and myself began a systematic search. My hat was nowhere to be found. How the deuce was I to get up town to the club? I couldn't wear the old plug; I wasn't rich enough for such an eccentricity. I had nothing but a silk hat at the apartment, and I hated it because it was always in the way when I ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... has carried off the prize awarded by the Jockey Club. I therefore maintain, in spite of Morcerf, that not only is the count the object of interest at this present moment, but also that he will continue to be so for a month longer if he pleases to exhibit an eccentricity of conduct which, after all, may be ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... The next eccentricity consisted in the sudden idea that suggested itself to somebody, that all energy should be devoted to saving the jewels, which were not in the smallest danger, and even if they had been, there was nobody knew how to get at them, the key being some miles ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... discovery. Eight men of the adventurous disposition implied by their engaging in such an expedition, could hardly be thrown together for a year or more without displaying flashes of character, and greater or less eccentricity, the result of their exceptional position, of the many shifts and devices they had to resort to. Of characteristic traits, however, we obtain few hints from Dr Leichhardt, the most amiable, but the most matter-of-fact of travellers. His sympathies and attention are engrossed by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... who have mastered the secrets of a serious art, with deliberate subordination of themselves to the great end and motive of the play, spending themselves like good servants, indulging no wilfulness, obtruding no eccentricity, lending heart and tone and gesture to the perfect progress of the action. These have "found themselves," and have all the ease ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson
... some with the soup," blandly replied her escort, who seemed to enjoy the Italian's excitement as a national eccentricity; "but hurry up and ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... no doubt," said Mrs. Nickleby, "that he is a gentleman, and has the manners of a gentleman, and the appearance of a gentleman, although he does wear smalls, and gray worsted stockings. That may be eccentricity, or he may be proud of his legs. I don't see why he shouldn't be. The Prince Regent was proud of his legs, and so was Daniel Lambert, who was also a fat man; he was proud of his legs. So was Miss Biffin: she was—no, "added Mrs. Nickleby, correcting herself, ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... Fortunately, after a few minutes' conversation with the miller, the hunters withdrew, not without giving me to understand that, if they had formed a better opinion of my character, they went away with a most amusing idea of the eccentricity of ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... a large bunch of violets in her waistband. The horses were beautiful in the sunshine, and their red hides glistened in the long, slanting rays. She put up her parasol and tried to understand, but she could only see the angles of houses, and the eccentricity of every passer-by. She saw very clearly the thin, facial line, and her eyes rested on the touch of purple at the throat to mark his Roman dignity. Father Daly sat opposite, rubbing his thumbs like one in the ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... thinking that you and I between us could found a school of our own this year. I've got the eccentricity, and you've got the cheek. We should ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... to its form; and yet, incredible as it now seems to us, the botanist of the past has been content with the simple technical description of the feature, without the slightest conception of its meaning, dismissing it, perhaps, with passing comment upon its "eccentricity" or "curious shape." Indeed, prior to Darwin's time it might be said that the flower was as a voice in the wilderness. In 1735, it is true, faint premonitions of its present message began to be heard ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... married, his brothers were both single men. The elder, Frederick, took to himself soon after a wife of rank and fortune; but there was no living issue of the marriage; and the lady, after a few years of eccentricity, went abroad for her health—that is, her husband was obliged to place her under restraint. Her malady was pronounced incurable, though her life might be prolonged. The second son, Laurence, had distinguished himself at Oxford, and ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... apt to be loud in their lamentations, and to regard themselves as eminently and tragically unhappy. This arises from the intensity and inconstancy of their emotions, from their improvidence, and from the eccentricity of their social habits. While among them the sensuous and vital functions have the upper hand, the gregarious and social instincts are subordinated and often deranged; and their unhappiness consists in the sense of their unfitness to live ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... the crew open to pressing, pipers and fiddlers, etc., impressed, ridiculous reasons given for impressing, unsuspecting passenger in a smuggler declared owner of contraband and pressed, tattoo marks and bandy legs lead to pressing, any eccentricity sufficient to ensure the attention of the press-gang, used by trustees to keep heirs from their money, and by parents to rid them of incorrigible sons, used for purposes of retaliation, used by strikers to get rid ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... 1202 A.D. The Fairs of Champaign in France, and the cities of the Rhine and Antwerp were the glory of the Middle Ages, but these great markets faded when the discovery of the long sea voyage to India threw the route by the Red Sea and Cairo into eccentricity, and caused Spain and Portugal to bloom. Spain's prosperity did not, however, last long. England used war during the sixteenth century as an economic weapon, pretty easily conquering. And since the opening of the Industrial Revolution, at least, London, with the exception of the few years ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... ridiculousness &c. adj.; comicality, oddity &c. adj.; extravagance, drollery. farce, comedy; burlesque &c. (ridicule) 856; buffoonery &c. (fun) 840; frippery; doggerel verses; absurdity &c. 497; bombast &c. (unmeaning) 517; anticlimax, bathos; eccentricity, monstrosity &c. (unconformity) 83; laughingstock &c. 857. V. be ridiculous &c. adj.; pass from the sublime to the ridiculous; make one laugh; play the fool, make a fool of oneself, commit an absurdity. Adj. ridiculous, ludicrous; comical; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Shackford had not been a popular man; he had been a hard, avaricious, passionate man, holding his own way remorselessly. He had been the reverse of popular, but he had long been a prominent character in Stillwater, because of his wealth, his endless lawsuits, and his eccentricity, an illustration of which was his persistence in living entirely alone in the isolated and dreary old house, that was henceforth to be inhabited by his shadow. Not his shadow alone, however, for it ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... object was to get them to go. Sometimes I think that he must have a peculiar sense of humour, which it gives him great gratification to indulge, as others do good, by stealth. He makes questionable jests for himself only, and enjoys them alone. But apart from this eccentricity, he is a kind and generous man, always ready to help with time and money when there is any good to ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... inconsistency Mr. Gladstone issued, in 1868, "A Chapter of Autobiography." The author's motives in putting forth this chapter of autobiography were two—first, there was "the great and glaring change" in his course of action with respect to the Established Church of Ireland, which was not due to the eccentricity or perversion of an individual mind, but to the silent changes going on at the very basis of modern society. Secondly, there was danger that a great cause then in progress might suffer in point of credit, if not of energy and ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... concealed from Sir Francis his design of going round the world, nor the circumstances under which he set out; and the general only saw in the wager a useless eccentricity and a lack of sound common sense. In the way this strange gentleman was going on, he would leave the world without having done any good ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... leaning at that angle towards the sun, and our winter by its turning that much from it. In one case the sun's rays are caused to shine more perpendicularly, and in the other more obliquely. This wabbling, like that of a top, is the sole cause of the seasons; since, owing to the eccentricity of our orbit, the earth is actually fifteen hundred thousand miles nearer the sun during our winter, in the northern hemisphere, than in summer. That there is no limit to a planet's inclination, and that inclination is not essential, we have ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... prodigious rapidity, detached one of her garters from a lissome limb adjacent to her quivering thigh (innocent of lingerie) and flung it to the occupants of the front row of the orchestra.... Notwithstanding the effect produced by this piquant eccentricity, Mile Lola has not met with the reception she anticipated; and it has been deemed proper by the management to ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... his respect for letters, and his masterpiece is no less pompous in manner than it is estimable in tone and sound in reflection. He handled slang as one who knew its limits and possibilities, employing it not for the sake of eccentricity, but to give the proper colour and sparkle to his page; indeed, his intimate acquaintance with the vagabonds of speech enabled him to compile a dictionary of Pedlar's French, which has been pilfered by a whole battalion ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... He shared, however, the eccentricity of Louis XI. in keeping himself out of sight when he attended the religious services in his chapel. In the vaulting near the entrance is a small opening communicating with a narrow passage, by means of which Montaigne could ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... of getting up early in the morning and going out, and in such a village this was an eccentricity bordering almost on lunacy. At five o'clock she was often wandering about her garden. She was a great lover of order in the house, and kept it well under control, but I do not think I ever surprised her ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... political compass, and still feels the wind of popularity in his tail. He too, like a portentous comet, has risen again above the court-horizon; but how long he will continue to ascend, it is not easy to foretell, considering his great eccentricity — Who are those two satellites that attend his motions?' When Barton told him their names, 'To their characters (said Mr Bramble) I am no stranger. One of them, without a drop of red blood in his veins, has a cold intoxicating ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... conventional dress that he was obliged to wear a touch of strangeness, with an enormous flowing tie of delicate pink, a velvet waistcoat, and broad-brimmed hat. The clothes and the full beard, the rippling chestnut hair and pointed mustache, showed a desire for eccentricity on the part of the young man that distinguished him from all the other well-dressed young Americans. He carried a thin cane and balanced ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... pick up acquaintances, here and there, about town, I sometimes made Mr. Beasley the subject of inquiry. Everybody knew him. "Oh yes, I know Dave BEASLEY!" would come the reply, nearly always with a chuckling sort of laugh. I gathered that he had a name for "easy-going" which amounted to eccentricity. It was said that what the ward-heelers and camp-followers got out of him in campaign times made the political managers cry. He was the first and readiest prey for every fraud and swindler that came to Wainwright, I heard, and yet, in ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... times in which he travelled were troublous, for, besides having a brace of large pistols in his belt, he wore a cavalry sabre at his side. As if to increase the eccentricity of his appearance, he carried a heavy cudgel, by way of riding-whip; but it might have been observed that, however much he flourished this whip about, he never actually applied ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... feet on the soft black margin of the pool—a huge beast, unmarked by any toe scar or eccentricity. Long body, heavy, a perfect thing of his kind. It was as if the tiger had stood some moments listening. Yet the natives declared that only the mated pair operated in this range and the hunter was said to have killed the ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... famous personage, better known as the Duke of Queensberry, was the 'observed of all observers' almost from his boyhood to extreme old age. His passions were for women and the turf; and the sensual devotedness with which he pursued the one, and the eccentricity which he displayed in the enjoyment of both, added to the observation which he attracted from his position as a man of high rank and princely fortune, rendered him an object of unceasing curiosity. He was deeply versed in the mysteries of the turf, and in all practical and theoretical ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... attempt to find any one is a harder task than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. A person who had been asked to call upon us, and who afterward became a valued friend, tried three times in vain to find us by this means, and was informed that we did not exist. This was owing to some eccentricity in the official spelling of our name. An application to the American Legation, as a desperate final resort, served the purpose at last. The same thing happened when the telegraph messenger tried to find us, to deliver an important cablegram. Still, in spite of this ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... special object of the General's regard; for owing to his peculiar visual organs, that distinguished individual seems to possess the Argus like faculty of looking steadily at several persons at one and the same time. With the pride that apes humility, or perhaps with the eccentricity of genius, he affected, upon the occasion, a rough costume; wearing a slouch hat, and having his trowsers tucked inside of his soiled boots; and he carried in his hand a long stick like a pilgrim's staff. ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... rooted in other soil it shoots up into obscurity, masquerading as profundity, or pure silliness without reason or a smile. The whimsies of one language become amazing contortions in another. The humor of Shandy, though deep-dyed in Sterne's own eccentricity, is still essentially British and demands for its appreciation a more extensive knowledge of British life in its narrowest, most individual phases, amore intensive sympathy with British attitudes of mind than the German of the eighteenth century, save in rare ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... was attributable to the fact that he was, in many ways, very eccentric both in manner and dress. Now, everyone who knows the average English boy at all, knows that if there is one thing he cannot stand it is eccentricity. To be eccentric is to be taboo. As regards the "correct" thing to wear, and the "correct" thing to do and how to do it, he is generally quite as particular as the average young woman over fashion. And anyone who offends in these ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... which asked whether "Norbert Franks" was the son of an old friend of whom he had lost sight for many years. By way of answer, Franks called upon his correspondent, who lived in a pleasant little house at Ashtead, in Surrey; he found a man of something less than sixty, with a touch of eccentricity in his thoughts and ways, by whom he was hospitably received, and invited to return whenever it pleased him. It was not very long before Franks asked permission to make the Pomfrets acquainted with his friend Warburton, ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... observed for some centuries the forms of the orbits in which the heavenly bodies move, and we had found these to be ellipses with a very small eccentricity. But why this was the form of those orbits no one could even conjecture. If any person, the most deeply skilled in mathematical science, and the most internally convinced of the universal prevalence of design and contrivance in the structure ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... said to the contrary, women are capable of learning how to conduct meetings and manage affairs. Even the least friendly spectator was compelled to admit it, that the delegates to the Convention were as free from eccentricity in dress and manner as the most fastidious taste could demand; that they were remarkable only for the comprehensive range of thought, indicated in their utterances, and the earnestness with which they advocate principles which they evidently ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... banking houses at which his money was deposited. The check for seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds fourteen shillings was drawn upon the London and Western Counties Bank, and that would have afforded the manager some clew even if he had not been well acquainted with John Minute's eccentricity. ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... holds his present post of tutor to the heir, which post he will retain only during Mrs Ingleton's pleasure. It is also provided that, in the event of any difference of opinion among the trustees, Mrs Ingleton (as is most proper) shall be permitted to decide; and lastly—a curious eccentricity on our dear friend's part, which was perhaps hardly necessary to insert—in the event of Roger Ingleton, previous to his attaining his majority, becoming a felon, a lunatic, or marrying, he is to be regarded as dead, and the property thereby passes to the next heir, Captain Oliphant. ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... complications was this part of the process completed. This was, after all, the real tug of war. Many unknown quantities existed: its mass, its distance, its eccentricity, the obliquity of its orbit, its position—nothing was known, in fact, about the planet except the microscopic disturbance it caused in Uranus, several thousand million miles away from it. Without going into further detail, suffice it to say that in June, 1846, he published his last paper, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... select the election which took place in the great American State of California in October, 1911. Other States had given women votes before, but they were smaller communities, where the movement could still be regarded as an eccentricity, a mere whimsicality. When, however, California in 1911 granted full suffrage to her women, almost half a million in number, the movement became obviously important. The vote of California might ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... eager conversation of the old gentleman. He was acquainted in his earlier days with my predecessor, of twenty-five years previous date, Dr. West, himself a remarkable man in his day, [72] and almost equally so, both for his eccentricity and his sense. An eccentric clergyman, by the by, is rarely seen now; but in former times it was a character as common as now it is rare. The commanding position of the clergy the freedom they felt to say and do what they pleased brought ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... an introspective view of our sane personality, we shudder to see how near it is to the borderlands of insanity and the bizarre and eccentric world of crankdom. There hardly lives a man who does not possess some eccentricity, or who does not cherish, hidden, perhaps, deep within himself, some small delusion, which he is ashamed to acknowledge to the outside world. Social relations and the iron rules of custom hold in place the balance-wheel ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... to me; I do not think so—i.e., as far as eccentricity. I suppose that I have shown originality in science, as I have made discoveries with regard to common objects. R.D.—Original character, had great personal influence and power of producing fear of himself ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... Christy their "professor of equitation," and in accounting for the appellation, they let me into some particulars of the squire's mode of bringing up his children. There is an odd mixture of eccentricity and good sense in all the opinions of my worthy host. His mind is like modern Gothic, where plain brick-work is set off with pointed arches and plain tracery. Though the main groundwork of his opinions is correct, yet he has a thousand ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... the captain noted the grammatical eccentricity. What was surprising was that even there he made no comment thereon. He was silent. Ray had spoken truth. There was no one whom he could order to risk death in breaking his way out since the scout had said 'twas useless. There were brave men there who would gladly try it ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... enunciated by Watts-Dunton, everything except the perfect average is absolutely funny, and the perfect average, of course, is generally an incommensurable quantity. Chesterton carefully made it his business to present the eccentricity—I use the word in its literal sense—of most things, and the humour followed in accordance with the above definition. The method was simple. Chesterton invented some grotesque situation, some hypothesis which was glaringly absurd. He then placed it in an abrupt ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... housetop my gaze wanders out over acres of roofs—the leaded coverings of hotels, apartment-houses, and office buildings. They rear themselves beneath and around me as the lesser peaks of the Himalayas seen from Mount Everest. My eyes ache with the diversity of their shapes, the eccentricity of their styles, the irregularity of their altitudes. No man viewing them can continue blind to the independence of the American citizen, to the ostentation of his right of personal selection, to his individual caprice. They stand, a brick-and-iron commentary ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... instead of printing his select hymns had seen fit to exemplify their beauties with his own voice from the stall of a church-singer, the piety of his conduct would have scarcely reconciled Lord Palmerston to its dangerous eccentricity. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... "peculiar institution," than was the Roman government; yet the Quakers have caused no political convulsion. I confess, to me it seems, that if Paul, and John, and Peter, and James, had done as these Quakers, the imperial administration would have looked on it as a harmless eccentricity of the sect, and not as an incentive[16] to sedition. But be this as it may, I did not say what else the apostles might have succeeded to enforce; I merely pointed out what it was that they actually taught, and that, as a fact, they did not declare slavery to be an immorality and ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... of his mind, and he had, it is certain, many peculiarities. One was, that he never left his house, or ventured into the streets, save "like a but, in the dusk of the evening." He was, in short, what is called a "crank," and he gloried in his eccentricity. He desired that it might be written on his tombstone, "Here lies an Odd Man." For sixty years he had made no effort to attract popular attention, but in 1755 he had published a sort of romance, called Memoirs of Several Ladies of ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... a young man, warm with every notion that by nature or accident had been connected with the sound of liberty, and, by an eccentricity which such dispositions do not easily avoid, a lover of contradiction, and no friend to any thing established. He adopted Shaftesbury's foolish assertion of the efficacy of ridicule for the discovery of truth. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Mrs. Fox-Moore up to thinking even this non-committal measure a possible one to pursue. 'What would anybody think,' she had asked Vida, 'to see them lending even the casual support of a presence (however ironic) to so reprehensible a spectacle!' Had it not been for very faith in the eccentricity of the proceeding—one wildly unlikely to be adopted, Mrs. Fox-Moore felt, by any one else of 'their kind'—she would never have consented to be drawn into ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... the satellites of Saturn are revolved about this planet with motions nearly circular and equable, scarcely disturbed by any eccentricity hitherto observed. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... somewhat from the four ruling directions of the textile combination. This was accomplished by increasing the width of the steps in the outline as the dark rays progressed, resulting in curved outlines of eccentric character. This eccentricity, coupled with the very unusual character of the details at the outer extremities of the figures, leads to the surmise that each part of the design is a conventional representation of some life form, a bird, an insect, ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... channels of healthy assimilation, and duly correlated growth, but in the forced discharges of violent emotion, followed by conditions of melancholy and by certain unsocial tendencies, then the promise of genius ripens into eccentricity, and ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... and that he would have been regarded by the literary world as no contemptible rival of Vossius and Casaubon. But fortune placed him in a situation in which his weakness covered him with disgrace, and in which his accomplishments brought him no honour. In a college, much eccentricity and childishness would have been readily pardoned in so learned a man. But all that learning could do for him on the throne was to make people think him a pedant ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and began to pull it with an energy foreign to the measured millhorse manner of the accustomed laborer. Miss Wilson looked doubtfully at him, but, being in haste, went indoors without further comment. The girls mistrusting his eccentricity, kept aloof. Agatha determined to have another and better look at him. Racket in hand, she walked slowly across the grass and came close to him just as he, unaware of her approach, uttered a groan of exhaustion and sat down ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... "piety" from a thousand different reasons—from imitation or from eccentricity, from bravado or from reverence, from shame of the past or from terror of the future, from weakness and from pride, for pleasure's sake or for punishment's sake, in order to be able to judge, or in order to escape being judged, and for a thousand ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and science were invulnerable, his enemies attacked his odd moods and his temper, whereas, in fact, he was simply characterized by what the English call eccentricity. Sometimes very handsomely dressed, like Crebillon the tragical, he would suddenly affect extreme indifference as to what he wore; he was sometimes seen in a carriage, and sometimes on foot. By turns rough ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... extremes. It was due to Gnosticism that art and science found an entrance into the Church. It preserved the Church from becoming stereotyped in form; but, built up entirely on ideas and not on historical facts, it died from its own hollowness and eccentricity. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... the victim driven to frenzy by individual oppression, and tempers the sternest despotism; but Demos wields opinion and defies the dagger. By general confession life is far less free, individual taste, caprice or eccentricity is kept under far sharper restraint by fashion and feeling, in America than in aristocratic England. At every epoch of American history, the freedom of opinion has been curtailed at certain points within strict if ill-defined ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... passively in the hand of her companion, while she gazed wonderingly at the delicate, half-averted face, serious, lit up by the eagerness of a vital enthusiasm. And, having a somewhat sorrowful fund of learning to draw upon in respect of the dangers all eccentricity, either of character or development, inevitably brings along with it, she trembled, divining that noble and strong and pure though it was, that face, and the temperament disclosed by it, might work sorrow, both to its possessor and to others, unless the enthusiasm animating it should find some ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... achieved by the adoption of a harsh, amorphous style, and a tone of analytical, introspective subjectivity so individual that all the common and universal elements of beauty and poetry are excluded. Indeed, eccentricity has come so completely into fashion, that he who follows up the wildest vagaries is actually the least different from the ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... of nature, and dispose of my client with equiponderating concatenation, in reference to his future velocity and reverberating momentum. Such is your sedative and stimulating character. My client is only a man of domestic eccentricity and matrimonial configuration, not permitted, as you are, gentlemen, to walk in the primeval and lowest vales of society, but he has to endure the red-hot sun of the universe, on the heights of nobility and feudal eminence. He has a beautiful wife of horticultural ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... daring, the clear-headed excitement, that impelled, at once, and guided them over the world. In the center, the silent and patient firmness of the Breton [Headnote 2], who yet, in the hour of danger, could display a quite sublime eccentricity. And, lastly, the Norman [Headnote 3] wariness, considerately courageous; daring all, but daring all for success. Such was the beauty of man, in that sovereign ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... the irremoveable hat and the singular pronoun, and to the civil eccentricity of the refused oath, George Fox and his disciples added a series of protests against the most venerable customs of Christianity. They did away with all the forms and ceremonies of Churchman and of Puritan alike. Not even baptism, ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... and more sweetly than before, though it was not really the lieutenant's fault, for Dick kept on throwing out a few clear notes—additional to his part—when some of his companion's threatened to die away, and these grace notes came in with such delicious, florid eccentricity that a hearer would have taken them for intentional variations cleverly composed ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... certainly proclaiming his own gross incompetence. Or, again, Jeffrey writes about 'Wilhelm Meister' (in 1824), knowing its high reputation in Germany, and finds in it nothing but a text for a dissertation upon the amazing eccentricity of national taste which can admire 'sheer nonsense,' and at length proclaims himself tired of extracting 'so much trash.' There is a kind of indecency, a wanton disregard of the general consensus of opinion, in such treatment ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... o'clock he expired. He is a great loss to his family, of which he was by much the cleverest member, and he was well calculated to fill the situation in which fortune had placed him. His talents were certainly of a superior description, but their efficacy was counteracted by the eccentricity of his habits, the indolence of his mind, and his vacillating and uncertain disposition. He was, however, occasionally capable of intense application, and competent to make himself master of any subject he thought fit to grapple with; his mind was reflecting, combining, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
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