"Crotchet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... another reason for withholding his sanction from the iron bridge; and as that reason shows how some wretched crotchet, springing from their miserable system, is sure to start up on all occasions, and defeat the most needed improvement, I shall here state what it was. At the point where it was wished to have the bridge erected, the ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... drink oatmeal-water unless they are paid to do it. If they are paid extra beer-money and oatmeal water is made for them gratis, some will, of course, imbibe it, especially if they see that thereby they may obtain little favours from their employer by yielding to his fad. By drinking the crotchet perhaps they may get a present now and then-food for themselves, cast-off clothes for their families, and so on. For it is a remarkable feature of human natural history, the desire to proselytise. The spectacle of John Bull—jovial John Bull—offering his men a bucket of oatmeal liquor is not ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... on 'er mind.' And I to him: 'Pooh! Isn't it enough that she's got to put up with the cranks and crotchets of one o' YOUR sect?'—Oh Mary, my dear, there's many a true word said in jest. Though little did I think what the crotchet would be." And slowly the rims of Tilly's eyes and the tip of her nose reddened ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... Uncle Frank learned to say, or rather to drawl his letters—gives, in his large dictionary, as one of the definitions of the word crotchet, this: "a peculiar turn of mind, a whim, a fancy." Here you have just that kind of crotchet that I am going to deal with. Mr. Webster could not have hit my crotchet more exactly, if he had taken aim at it on purpose. It is a peculiar turn of mind, or, if you prefer it, a whim, or a fancy, that I shall talk about, for an hour or so, perhaps longer. Indeed, I am not perfectly ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... tenderness to all created things which the good of the community does not require them to destroy. And though their notion of compensation to a tortured insect or a cankered flower may seem to some of us a very wild crotchet, yet, at least, is not a mischievous one; and it may furnish matter for no unpleasing reflection to think that within the abysses of earth, never lit by a ray from the material heavens, there should ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Theistical character, wrote and talked as though most blissfully ignorant of that rule. The passages given above from his 'Principia' palpably violate it. But Theists, however learned, pay little regard to any rules of philosophising, which put in peril their fundamental crotchet. If they did, Atheism would need no apologist, and Theism have no defenders; for Theism, in all its varieties, presupposes a supernatural Causer of ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... leads to the confusion of distinct ideas. An example of this is the recent use of the adverbial phrases in respect of, in regard of, for in or with respect to, or regard to. This innovation is without any syntactical ground, and ought to be condemned and avoided as a mere grammatical crotchet."—George P. Marsh, "Lectures on the English Language," ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... said Mr. Rolfe. "And now for my motive in reading these letters. Sir Charles may still have a crotchet, an inordinate desire for an heir; but, even if he has, the writer of these letters has nothing to fear from any jury; and, therefore, I am now ready to act. I propose to go down to the asylum to-morrow, and get him out as quickly as ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... accept any crotchet (pardon the word), however odd, rather than embrace at once the notion of ghosts and hobgoblins we imbibed in our nurseries. Still, to my unfortunate house, the evil is the same. What on earth can I ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... meet with. Every page, nay, every line is a satire upon the extravagance and precocity of what Vivian Grey calls our "artificial state;" and all the weak sides of our age are mercilessly dealt with by the coterie at Crotchet Castle. The book is altogether Shandean, and the satire shandied to and fro with great vivacity. We need not tell the reader what period or event of the last seven years is pointed to in the following extract. Mr. Touchandgo, it appears, was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... appointment of a Parliamentary head, connected by close ties with the present Ministry and the ruling party in Parliament The Parliamentary head is a protecting machine. He and the friends he brings stand between the department and the busybodies and crotchet-makers of the House and the country. So long as at any moment the policy of an office could be altered by chance votes in either House of Parliament, there is no security for any consistency. Our guns and our ships are not, perhaps, very good now. But they would be much worse if any thirty ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... them, or for Handel.— Cannot a man live free and easy, Without admiring Pergolesi? Or through the world with comfort go, That never heard of Doctor Blow? So help me heaven, I hardly have; And yet I eat, and drink, and shave, Like other people, if you watch it, And know no more of stave or crotchet, Than did the primitive Peruvians; Or those old ante-queer-diluvians That lived in the unwash'd world with Jubal, Before that dirty blacksmith Tubal By stroke on anvil, or by summ'at, Found out, to his great surprise, the gamut. I care no more for Cimarosa, Than he did for Salvator ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... merely replied that 'he would shortly see his opinions in print;' and to Ellice's warm remonstrances and entreaties he only dryly said, 'I have made up my mind.' His nephew, Lord Russell,[12] who, from some extraordinary crotchet, has thought fit to embrace republican opinions, and is an ultra-movement man, but restrained in the manifestation of his opinions from personal deference to his father and his uncle, with whom he lives on excellent terms—said the other day to Lord Tavistock, 'Lord John has undertaken a great ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... men whom he had there. For he said that on t'other side the water lived friars who styled themselves her sweet ladyship's most humble servants. Item, the goodly Friar-minors, who are semibreves of bulls; the smoked-herring tribe of Minim Friars; then the Crotchet Friars. So that these diminutives could be no more than Semiquavers. By the statutes, bulls, and patents of Queen Whims, they were all dressed like so many house-burners, except that, as in Anjou your ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... perfume of yellow gorse in the air? A thrush on a bough below began to flute softly, trying its tones before it burst forth, giving full voice to its enthusiasm in one clear call, eloquent of life and love and longing, and all expressed in just three notes—crotchet, quaver, crotchet and rest—which shortly shaped themselves to a word in my heart, a word of just three syllables, the accent ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... he had educated for this purpose, because, within a few weeks of the time fixed for the wedding, she was guilty of the frivolity, while on a visit from home, of wearing thin sleeves. Yet Mr. Day and my aunt's relations were benevolent people, only strongly imbued with the crotchet that by a system of training might be educed the hardihood and simplicity of the ideal savage, forgetting the terrible isolation of feelings and habits which their pupils would experience in the future life which they must pass among the corruptions ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of Edison's masters, and perhaps his fellows, who appreciated him. Mediocrity had only seen the gawky stripling, with his moonstruck air, and pestilent habit of trying some new crotchet. Himself an inventor, Milliken recognised in his deep-set eye and musing brow the fire of a suppressed genius. He was then just twenty-one. The friendship of Mr. Milliken, and the opportunity for experiment, rendered the Boston office ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... tone of this note which gave me great uneasiness. Its whole style differed materially from that of Legrand. What could he be dreaming of? What new crotchet possessed his excitable brain? What "business of the highest importance" could he possibly have to transact? Jupiter's account of him boded no good. I dreaded lest the continued pressure of misfortune had, at length, fairly unsettled the reason of my ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... many cups; the tongue then speaketh more smoothly, and the ear listeneth more benignantly; but why do I attempt to reason with you? do I not know you for conceited creatures, with one idea—and that a foolish one—a crotchet, for the sake of which ye would sacrifice anything, religion if required—country? There, fling down my book, I do not wish ye to walk any farther in my company, unless you cast your nonsense away, which ye will never ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... principle that if we put down a healthy instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy insane attraction. For this reason, the most earnest truth-seeking men fall into the worst delusions. They will not let their mind alone; they force it toward some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a conceit of intellect recommends: and nature punishes their disregard of her warning by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so, the most industrious critics get the most admiration. They ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... any difference with Fanny," said he. "I was not able to explain all about it, nor can I now: it was a crotchet of the earl's—only some nonsense; however, I'm off now—I can't wait a day, for I mean to write to say I shall be at Grey Abbey the day after to-morrow, and I must go by Dublin. I shall be off in a couple of hours; so, for Heaven's sake, ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... 40 B) are [Greek: gen de trophon men hemeteran, eillomenen de peri ton dia pantos polon tetamenon]. Quid tu, Epicure: the connection is that Cic., having given the crotchets of other philosophers about [Greek: physike], proceeds to give the peculiar crotchet of Epic. Putas solem ... tantum: a hard passage. Egone? ne bis is the em. of Lamb. for MSS. egone vobis, and is approved by Madv., who thus explains it (Em. 185) "cum interrogatum esset num tantulum (quasi pedalem 82) solem esse putaret, ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... we must not let them spy for nothing. They shall see us all stand out to sea to catch them in the open, as I said in the town-hall of Scarborough yesterday, on purpose. Everybody laughed; but I stuck to it, knowing how far the tale would go. They take it for a crotchet of mine, and will expect it, especially after they have seen us standing out; and their ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... imitations. For instance, the North Americans express by "whip-poor-will" what the Brazilians call "Joao-corta-pao." The Guinea fowl may have been the "Afraa avis;"but that was a dear luxury amongst the Romans, though the Greek meleagris was cheap. The last crotchet about it is that of an African traveller, who holds it to be the peacock of Solomon's navies, completely ignoring the absolute certainty which the South-Indian ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton |
