"Irascibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... surplice, but with a hasty step, like one who arrives too late at an appointment, and bustles forward to make the best use of his time. He was a tall thin man, with an adust complexion, and the vivacity of his eye indicated some irascibility of temperament. His dress was brown, not black, and over his other vestments he wore, in honour of Calvin, a Geneva cloak of a blue colour, which fell backwards from his shoulders as he posted on to the pulpit. His grizzled hair was cut as short as shears could perform ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... proprietor. If the Rothschilds blacked your boots or shaved your chin, your emotions might be akin to mine. When this man, who had an interest in the India traders, brought the hot water into my dressing-room, of a morning, the Antipodes were tributary to me; to what extent might any little irascibility of mine drive a depression in the market! and I knew, as he brushed my hat, whether stocks rose or fell. In one respect, I was essentially like our Saxon ancestors,—my servant was a villain. If I had been merely a civilian, in any purely private capacity, having leisure ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... of my stay, while I studied to understand the count, was a period of painful impressions to me. I found him a man of extreme irascibility without adequate cause; hasty in action in hazardous cases to a degree that alarmed me. Sometimes he showed glimpses of the brave gentleman of Conde's army, parabolic flashes of will such as may, in times of emergency, tear through politics like bomb-shells, and may also, by virtue of honesty ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... just the opposite of "Save the working-classes." They have all their sympathies with Shylock, and not with Antonio and Portia. They are plutocrats, and their feelings are infernal. They are filled with irritation and irascibility on this subject. To stop this awful imbroglio between capital and labor they will lift not so much as the tip end of the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... Pope had exhausted all his malignity upon him, he would rise in the esteem both of his friends and his enemies. Silence only could have made him despicable; the blow which did not appear to be felt would have been struck in vain. But Pope's irascibility prevailed, and he resolved to tell the whole English world that he was at war with Cibber; and, to show that he thought him to common adversary, he prepared no common vengeance. He published a new ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... morally efficient nation. They have the national pride and the national egotism which rests on the consciousness of this efficiency. In fact, it is not too much to say that national egotism, if one pleases to call it such, is essential to national efficiency, just as a certain irascibility of temper seems to be essential to ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... that in a life at first hand there is something sacred is perhaps the most characteristic note in Emerson's writings. The hottest side of him is this non-conformist persuasion, and if his temper could ever verge on common irascibility, it would be by reason of the passionate character of his feelings on this point. The world is still new and untried. In seeing freshly, and not in hearing of what others saw, shall a man find what truth is. "Each one of us can bask in ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... experience, to which I am indebted for most of my little pretensions to wisdom. I have met with few who understood men, their manners, and their ways, equal to him; but stubborn, ungainly integrity, and headlong, ungovernable irascibility are disqualifying circumstances; consequently, I was born a very poor man's son. For the first six or seven years of my life, my father was gardener to a worthy gentleman of small estate in the neighbourhood of Ayr. Had he continued in that station, I must have marched off ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns |
