"Physiognomist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Min Jacky was all over sense. A skilful physiognomist would at a single glance have detected the sensible woman in the erect head, the compressed lips, square elbows, and firm, judicious step. Even her very garments seemed to partake of the prevailing character of their mistress. Her ruff always looked ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... uplifted eyebrows, we irresistibly tend to see a face in which this is a constant feature as expressing this particular shade of emotion. In this way we sometimes fall into grotesque errors as to mental traits. And the most practised physiognomist may not unfrequently err by importing the results of his special circle of experiences ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... brilliant, restless, dark eyes; thick brown hair and moustache; a well-knit, vigorous frame, which gave no sign as yet of the stoutness to which it inclined in later years, these were points that made his appearance undeniably striking and attractive. A physiognomist might, however, have found something to blame as well as to praise in his features. There was an ominous upright line between the dark brows, which surely told of a variable temper; the curl of the ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... of this Nature. There chanced to be a great Physiognomist in his Time at Athens, [9] who had made strange Discoveries of Mens Tempers and Inclinations by their outward Appearances. Socrates's Disciples, that they might put this Artist to the Trial, carried him to their Master, whom he had never seen before, and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... in the company of a man so well known to him that to see a young girl in his society he knew could mean no good, came to me this morning with a brief account of your meeting of last night. He is too good a physiognomist not to have discovered, readily, that you were not such a woman as could receive no contamination from such as Lucian Davlin. He feared for you, believing you to be another victim of his treachery. Your coming to this hotel assured him that you were safe for ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... trouble ourselves to repeat. It is enough to know its effect on St. Eval was to turn him from the room, his sensitive feelings wrought almost to madness by malignant bitterness. Lord Alphingham looked after him, and then turned his glance on Caroline, and an acute physiognomist might easily have read his ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... town-hall tower struck ten. In the chapel, near the statue of St. Nepomucenus, upon a stone bench, sat a large-sized man, with the pale serious face of Germanic type. Every physiognomist, looking at him, would have said that this man had devoted his youth to serious scientific work and that he had spent many sleepless ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... educated in the palace with Britannicus, and instructed in the same branches of learning, and under the same masters. During this time, they say, that a physiognomist being introduced by Narcissus, the freedman of Claudius, to examine the features of Britannicus [778], positively affirmed that he would never become emperor, but that Titus, who stood by, would. They were so familiar, that ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... a host but a hostess who received him. d'Artagnan was a physiognomist. His eye took in at a glance the plump, cheerful countenance of the mistress of the place, and he at once perceived there was no occasion for dissembling with her, or of fearing anything from one blessed ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to take a hurried departure, when her husband came out upon the steps to bid me welcome. There is no physiognomist like your father of a family, or your mother with marriageable daughters. Lavater was nothing to them, in reading the secret springs of action, the hidden sources of all character. Had there been a good respectable ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... neither too much nor too little of anything—a man notably moderate in all respects, whose invariable slowness of motion, slightly hanging lower jaw, prominent eyebrows, massive forehead, smooth as a copper plate and without a wrinkle, would at once have betrayed to a physiognomist that the burgomaster Van Tricasse was phlegm personified. Never, either from anger or passion, had any emotion whatever hastened the beating of this man's heart, or flushed his face; never had his pupils contracted under the influence of any irritation, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... grave—for trifling on love was heresy, in her estimation; but Emily laughed, with an expression in which a skilful physiognomist might have read—if he means me, he ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... Mussulmans. But among the multitude of inferior castes who do come there is a greater variety of feature and shape of skull than in an average multitude, as far as I have seen, of any European nation. Caste, the physiognomist soon sees, began in a natural fact. It meant difference, not of rank, but of tribe and language; and India is not, as we are apt to fancy, a nation: it is a world. One must therefore regard this emigration of the Coolies, like anything else which tends to break down caste, as a probable ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... eyelids, and a long but not hooked nose, were relieved by a moustache, and a beard square and slightly forked in the midst. This moustache hid a mouth which was the characteristic feature of the face. No physiognomist would have placed the slightest confidence in the owner of that mouth. It was at once sanctimonious and unstable. The manners of its possessor might be suave or severe; his reputation might be excellent or execrable; but with that mouth, a Pharisee and a hypocrite ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... having anything remarkable either in dress or appearance, was yet a noticeable person, if only for the indescribable expression of cunning pervading his countenance. His eyes were small and grey; as far apart and as sly-looking as those of a fox. A physiognomist, indeed, would have likened him to that crafty animal, and it must be owned the general formation of his features favoured such a comparison. The nose was long and sharp, the chin pointed, the forehead ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... calmness, and, so to speak, profundity, of thought, eloquent upon its clear expanse, which suggested the idea of one who had passed his life rather in contemplation than emotion. It was a face that a physiognomist would have loved to look upon, so much did it speak both of the refinement and ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... great Hoangti, two of his generals fought for the throne of China,—Lieou Pang, who represents, in the Chinese annals, intellect, and Pa Wang, representing brute force, uninspired by thought. Destiny, if we can credit the following tale, had chosen the former for the throne. "A noted physiognomist once met him on the high-road, and, throwing himself down before him, said, 'I see by the expression of your features that you are destined to be emperor, and I offer you in anticipation the tribute of respect that a subject owes his sovereign. I have a daughter, the fairest and ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... portion varieth of the small of the legs unto the calf, or the compass of the neck unto the circumference of the head; but all these, with many more, were so drowned in a mortal visage, and last face of Hippocra- tes, that a weak physiognomist might say at first eye, this was a face of earth, and that Morta$ had set her hard seal upon his temples, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... teeth while the monk was saying all these noble things about the countenance of the Devil, who turning coolly to the physiognomist, said, ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... explain the distinctive formation of foliage belonging to every species. 'Trees,' he said, 'are as deceptive in their likeness to one another as are certain classes of men, amongst whom none but a physiognomist's eye can detect dissimilar moral features until events have developed them. Do you know it would be a good thing if in all the schools proposed and carried out by the improvement of modern thinkers, we could have a school of events?' 'A school ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... crafty, leering person, with a quick, intelligent, practical eye—a man who was evidently conversant with the world; and to judge from the sensual expression of his mouth and the protuberance at the nape of the neck, whose world was of the worst description—a phrenologist or physiognomist would have hung him at once. It is fortunate for some men that these sciences are not more extensively understood, or a great many persons would suffer for their ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... league distant. Coming and going he had time to make friends with Aubertin, and this was the easier that the old gentleman, who was a physiognomist as well as ologist, had seen goodness and sensibility in Edouard's face. At the end of the walk he begged the doctor to accept the chrysalis. The doctor coquetted. "That would be a robbery. You take an interest in these things ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... benefactor, and as having spoken for him when he was seeking his present engagement. But Mr Burke did not like the look of him. He was prejudiced, however, against all foreigners, especially Greeks and Egyptians, so that his dislike did not go for much. But certainly an acute physiognomist would have said that ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... was wanting to it. "Animation," the physiognomist would have said. "Vitality, mobility." "Health," might have thought the ordinary observer, mistaking the bluish shadows under the drooped eyelids and about the mouth and nostrils for the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... army, home on leave of absence; the other an Oxonian, just from the university. The Squire was a fine, healthy-looking old gentleman, with silver hair curling lightly round an open florid countenance; in which a physiognomist, with the advantage, like myself, of a previous hint or two, might discover a singular mixture of ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... physiognomist, but he could read what was obvious in the faces he encountered; and the more he looked at this girl, the less he was able to understand the scene which had just occurred. The thing mystified him completely. For all her good-humour, there ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... took to be friendly; and their smart uniforms. She would liked to have shaken hands with them all. And there was more still in her mind when Captain Belliot asked her if she thought the place "pretty," yet all she found for answer was the one word, "Yes"; and he, being no physiognomist, rashly concluded that was all ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... more concrete, or at least more personal, than a star led to the god's being represented as an old man. Connected with this is a long legend which turns on the point that after the father of Chao Yen had been told by the celebrated physiognomist Kuan Lo that his son would not live beyond the age of nineteen, the transposition from shih-chiu, nineteen, to chiu-shih, ninety, was made by one of two gamblers, who turned out to be the Spirit of the North Pole, who fixes the time of decease, as the Spirit of the South Pole does ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner |
