"Wilfulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Southend would have expected from his observation of him) it was a titillating evidence of great opportunities, stirring his mind to a busy consideration of chances. Thus then it seemed as though Blent might fall into the background, his loved Blent. Perhaps his not thinking of it had begun in wilfulness, or even in fear; but he found the rule he had made far easier to keep than he had ever expected. There had been a sort of release for his mind; he had not foreseen this as a possible result of his great sacrifice. He ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... them into the drawing-room afterward, and asked his sister to sing, but, to Bessie's vexation, Edna declined under the pretext of fatigue, and could not be induced to open the piano. Bessie felt provoked by her wilfulness, and she was so sorry to see the cloud on Richard's face, for he was passionately fond of music, as he had informed Bessie at dinner-time, that she ventured ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... temporary, but with no indication of dissatisfaction or resistance. In truth she was not sorry that Jacqueline, whose companionship became more and more embarrassing every day, had cut the knot of a difficult position by a piece of wilfulness and perversity which seemed to put her in the wrong. The necessity she would have been under of crushing such a girl, who was now eighteen, would have been distasteful and unprofitable; she was very glad to get ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... disorder in the makeup of man is wilfulness. The child kicks and scratches in his cradle. It wants to have its own small will. The first lesson it has to learn is the lesson of submission, that the untried world, into which it is thrust, is not a place of self-pleasing but of law. It takes parents and teachers years to get ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the mission-field with the firm resolve to do the work in only one way. Such a resolve has ever seemed to me most unwise, savouring more of wilfulness than of holy steady purpose to do the Master's work. The missionary ought to go out ready to part with every preconceived notion at the call of providential direction and the Spirit's guidance, prepared to do with all his might whatever he may ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... her for the position she might one day enjoy through her dead uncle's will. They did not remain long. She showed either marked incapacity to acquire the slightest veneer of culture—else it was pure wilfulness. ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... falsi (well-known gods against whom they often offended); further, that they were malignant in their dispositions, untrustworthy in their characters, pernicious and revolutionary in their influences, abandoned to the devils of wilfulness, pride, and a most intolerable conceit. Ninthly, and lastly, they were to have a care and ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... painted out by the white moonshine! Let me hold you under my chin, to see whether I love blood, you tiger-lily!" Then he laughed Gearson's laugh, and released her, scared and giddy. Within her wilfulness she had been frightened by a sense of subtler force in him, and mystically mastered as she had never ...
— Different Girls • Various
... the new West, at once startlingly and attractively true. * * * The heroine is a strange, sweet mixture of pride, wilfulness and lovable courage. The characters are superbly drawn; the atmosphere is convincing. There is about it a sweetness, a wholesomeness and a sturdiness that commends it to earnest, kindly and wholesome ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... wantonness, very capable of such liberties and levities as those of Lesbia's sparrow with the lip or bosom of his mistress; as notably in the parts of Boyet and Mercutio: and indeed there is a bright vein of mere wordy wilfulness running throughout the golden youth of the two plays which connects Love's Labour's Lost with Romeo and Juliet as by a thread of floss silk not always "most excellently ravelled," nor often unspotted or unentangled. In the second period this gaiety was replaced by the utmost frankness ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... headstrong a thing as a girl could well do. And yet Polly had originally no actual intention or desire to do wrong. Simply she had yielded to a sudden impulse, to an intense curiosity. But now things were different; for Polly was realizing her wilfulness completely, and instead of repenting and turning back to confess her folly, was every moment trying to plan by what method her ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... should die, what would become of you? I have no son; your Uncle Franz, who is but a year or two younger than I am, would reign, and he would not tolerate your madcap ways. You must marry at once. I love you in spite of your wilfulness. But you have shown yourself incapable of loving. Doppelkinn is ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... brink of the swollen stream, and saw in the moonlight how it had taken its wild course directly in front of the haunted forest, so as to change the peninsula into an island. "Oh God!" he thought to himself, "if Undine has ventured a step into that fearful forest, perhaps in her charming wilfulness, just because I was not allowed to tell her about it; and now the stream may be rolling between us, and she may be weeping on the other side alone, among phantoms ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... that he thereby longs for deliverance from the sin which causes the pain, and for the possession of the good which alone can remove it. It is certainly not the case in this world, that bad men are always disposed to repent and turn to God in proportion as they suffer from their own wilfulness, and become poor from idleness, broken in health from dissipation, alienated from human hearts by their selfishness, or pass, with a constantly increasing anguish, through all the stages of outcasts from the family; dwellers among ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... which a perfect knowledge of his disposition, and of his preceding history, too well authorised her to entertain. Whatever was in other respects the nobleness of his disposition, he had never been known to resist the wilfulness of passion,—he walked in the house, and in the country of his fathers, like a tamed lion, whom no one dared to contradict, lest they should awaken his natural vehemence of passion. So many years had elapsed ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... passions, and lends impetus to daring ambition, if it does not always purify the motives which prompt its exercise. This genius divorced from wisdom, scornful of moral obligations, and ravenous for notoriety, is especially marked by wilfulness, presumptuous self-assertion, the curse and plague-spot of the perverted soul. Alcibiades in politics and Byron in literature are among its most conspicuous examples. Their defiance of rule was not the confident daring which comes from the vision of genius, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... in connection with feelings and intentions so malignant, and so contrary to those which the qualities expressed would naturally have called forth. But I dare not say that this seeming unnaturalness is not in the nature of an abused wilfulness, when united with a strong intellect. In such characters there is sometimes a gloomy self-gratification in making the absoluteness of the will ('sit pro ratione voluntas!') evident to themselves by setting the reason and the conscience in full ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... as old as papa, do you?" said grandmamma. "Ah, it is trouble that has aged her. You would not wonder at all those lines and wrinkles if you knew all the sorrow and grief her own poor boys have given her through their sin and wilfulness!" ...
— My Young Days • Anonymous
... for them, which had included an interview with Madame Cervin, he had become tolerably well acquainted with Montjoie's public character and career. Incidentally parts of the story of Louie's behaviour came in, and for one who knew her as Dora did, her madness and wilfulness emerged, could be guessed at, little as the brother intended to excuse himself thereby. How, indeed, should he excuse himself? Louie's character was a fixed quantity to be reckoned on by all who had dealings ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Conscience, the Recorder, and Lord Understanding, the Lord Mayor, came to the gate to see what he wanted. Lord 'Will be Will' plays a prominent part in the drama both for good and evil. He is neither Free Will, nor Wilfulness, nor Inclination, but the quality which metaphysicians and theologians agree in describing as 'the Will.' 'The Will' simply—a subtle something of great importance; but what it is they have never ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... like his cloak, his manners want the nap And gloss of court; but of this fire he says. Nay swears, it was no wicked wilfulness, Only a ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... inalienable aspect of what we call "the soul" wherever the soul exists, feels no sort of shock or surprise when we appeal to its own "conscience," or when it appeals to the "conscience" of its child or its dog or even of its cat, or when it displays anger with its trees or its flowers for their apparent wilfulness and errancy. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Louise better than this change of arena for the exercise of her wilfulness and witchery. Before she had been many days in the French capital she was able to twist her aunt round her little finger—indeed her power of captivating was, to the end of her life, her chief dower—and to obtain all the freedom ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... caustic, and uninspiring style; and penned by one who seems to have desired to do justice, but whose personal dislike to the young Chevalier over-masters his inclination to the cause. Notwithstanding a plain disapproval of many measures, and a marked conviction of the wilfulness of his young leader, Lord Elcho was true to the cause which he had adopted. His account of the manner in which the council of the Regent, as he was styled, was conducted, is so characteristic, not ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... Clements, the builder at Norwich, and said, "Well, Clements, you have built a machine to surprise all the world, and I am come to surprise you by paying you for it." And to show his early quick perception, ready reply, wilfulness, and precocity, I must here relate two well-attested anecdotes: the first, when quite a child, and at his lessons in the nursery, on his mother's running up to dispel the noise and disturbance he was making, she exclaimed in anger, after in some ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... guardians, and had been so from the first moment of her widowhood, the truth being that she was jealous of their legal powers over Aileen's fortune and destiny, and determined, notwithstanding, to have her own way with her own child. The wilfulness and caprice of the father, which had taken such strange and desperate forms in Rose Delaney, appeared shorn of all its attraction and romance in the smaller, more conventional, and meaner egotisms of ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... General Zeal without knowledge, obstinacy, superstition, strange devotion, stupidity, confidence, stiff defence of their tenets, mutual love and hate of other sects, belief of incredibilities, impossibilities. or Particular. Of heretics, pride, contumacy, contempt of others, wilfulness, vainglory, singularity, prodigious paradoxes. In superstitious blind zeal, obedience, strange works, fasting, sacrifices, oblations, prayers, vows, pseudomartyrdom, mad and ridiculous customs, ceremonies, observations. In pseudoprophets, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... was almost shaken by the girl's firmness,—by that, and by her own true affection for the sinner. In her bosom, what remained of the softness of womanhood was struggling with the hardness of the religious martinet, and with the wilfulness of the domestic tyrant. She had promised to Steinmarc that she would be very stern. Steinmarc had pointed out to her that nothing but the hardest severity could be of avail. He, in telling his story, had taken it for granted that Linda had expected her lover, had remained ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... was near to surrender. Had it not been for the persistent fear that her proud old father might suffer from her wilfulness, she would have thrown down the barrier and risked everything in the choice. Her heart was crying out hungrily for the love of this tall, mysterious ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... what God layeth upon you, bear it willingly and humbly. But you will say, "I pray you, tell me what is my cross?" Answer: This that God layeth upon you, that same is your cross; not that which you of your own wilfulness lay upon yourselves: as there was a certain sect which were called Flagellarii, which scourged themselves with whips till the blood ran from their bodies; this was a cross, but it was not the cross of God. No, no: he laid not that upon them, they did it of ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... presents insuperable difficulties of articulation, then he moves tongue and lips in a marvelous fashion, and often says ptoe-ptoe, pt-pt, and verlapp, also dla-dla, without meaning, no matter what was the form of the word pronounced to him. In such practice there often appears likewise a wilfulness, showing itself in inarticulate sounds and the shaking of the head, even when it is merely the repetition of easy like-syllabled words that is desired. Hence, in the case of new words, it is more ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... into the ears of the Lord God of Sabaoth; the creature groaneth and travaileth; all men unconsciously pray this prayer when they weep and when they hope. Christian men pray it when they mourn their rebellious wilfulness and when they feel the weight of all this anarchic world, or when their work in bringing it back to its King seems almost vain, the souls underneath the altar pray it when they cry, 'How long, O ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... her foot on the ground, while a hot flush arose in her cheeks. Her sisters, young girls as they were, could not understand her moods, either of wild mirth, eager delight in poetry and music, childish wilfulness and petulant temper or deep melancholy, all coming in turn with feverish alternation and vehemence. As the ladies approached the castle they were met by various gentlemen, among whom was Maitre Alain ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... healing of the nations.[42] Life itself is with thee there, for thou art life; and all kinds of health, wrought upon us here by thine instruments, descend from thence. Thou wouldst have healed Babylon, but she is not healed.[43] Take from me, O Lord, her perverseness, her wilfulness, her refractoriness, and hear thy Spirit saying in my soul: Heal me, O Lord, for I would be healed. Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah his wound; then went Ephraim to the Assyrian, and sent to King Jareb, yet could not he heal ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... with a feeble voice, "My lord and king, I know well my death is come, and through my own wilfulness, for I am smitten in the wound Sir Lancelot gave me. Alas! that I have been the cause of all this war, for but for me thou hadst been now at peace with Lancelot, and then had Modred never done this treason. I pray ye, therefore, my dear lord, be now agreed ...
— The Legends Of King Arthur And His Knights • James Knowles
... I thought, as we passed on—the very embodiment of a certain kind of wilfulness. She would not resist or chafe at authority, but, with an easy, good-natured, don't-care expression, would do as she pleased, "though the heavens fell." A little later there was a heavy rumble of thunder in the ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... connection with any common-place dramatic waiting-woman?—even with Portia's adroit Nerissa, or Desdemona's Emilia? By giving her the Nurse for her confidante, the sweetness and dignity of Juliet's character are preserved inviolate to the fancy, even in the midst of all the romance and wilfulness of passion. ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... mountain-peaks, where the vulture ever devours his fair heart, which sympathises continually with the follies and the sorrows of mankind? Of what punishment, then, must not those be worthy, who by their own wilfulness and self-confidence bind again to Caucasus the fair Titan, ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... almost with fear, that I began with Gwen; but even had I been able to foresee the endless series of exasperations through which she was destined to conduct me, still would I have undertaken my task. For the child, with all her wilfulness, her tempers and her pride, made me, as she did all others, her ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... he said, suddenly seizing her hand, and drawing her to his side, "why will you not give up this strange wilfulness, and let your papa have his own darling again? I love you dearly, my child, and it pains me more than I can express to see you so unhappy," he added, gently pushing back the curls from the little tear-stained face upturned ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... frustrated their intentions. The elder Clegg, too, was induced to aid the design, hoping that, should a union take place, the inheritance might revert into the old channel. We have seen the result: the wilfulness and obduracy of Alice, and the infatuation of the lover, who had thought to dazzle her with the riches he purposely spread before her, prevented the success of their schemes. She peremptorily refused and repulsed him, accusing him of a gross and wanton outrage. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... the thought of this; For I did fright thee when I fleck'd a kiss With too much heat. I should have bow'd to thee, And left unsaid the word, deception-free, Which, like a flash, illumed the love within, My wilfulness was much to blame therein; But thou wilt shrive me, Sweet! of mine offence If passion-pangs be deem'd so ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... were wont to pass over to Epidauros to have their disputes with one another settled by law: 71 but after this time they built for themselves ships and made revolt from the Epidaurians, moved thereto by wilfulness. So as they were at variance with them, they continued to inflict damage on them, since in fact they had command of the sea, and especially they stole away from them these images of Damia and Auxesia, ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... individual. We must not think that no price will have to be paid for so good a result, both by whole communions, and by the members composing them; and that the whole force of inherited prejudice, past history, and present wilfulness, ignorance, and sincere conviction will not arise in opposition. The difficulty even of approaching Rome illustrates vividly our task. The Unity of Christendom is a meaningless expression without that vast international ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... was false she felt in giving this speech to a broken woman. Such things are not said by broken women. Broken women do no more than cheat and lie. But so a woman might speak out of her unconquered wilfulness, as a queen might give her lover a kingdom out of the ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... sobered by the catastrophe, which he felt had been occasioned by his own wilfulness, ran aft to the taffrail; and when he saw the poor sailor struggling in the waves, impelled by his really fine nature, he darted overboard to save him; but he was not by any means a powerful swimmer, and, encumbered with ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... of tender remonstrance; but the slightest insinuation of a difference of opinion was sufficient to fan the embers of Henrietta's distemperature into a conflagration. The blaze was not strong, indeed; for the lady had always been accustomed to find a fit of wilfulness, or of affected despondency, more available and becoming than one of hasty anger. But she was tolerably expert in those piquant flippancies of speech which harass the enemy like a straggling fire; and could ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... restless, unhappy. He fancied Zora cared less for his company, and he gave her less, and then was puzzled to find time hanging so empty, so wretchedly empty, on his hands. When they were together in these days they found less to talk about, and had it not been for the Silver Fleece which in magic wilfulness opened both their mouths, they would have found their companionship little more than a series of awkward silences. Yet in their silences, their walks, and their sittings there was a companionship, a glow, a satisfaction, as came to them nowhere else on earth, and ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... modern, premature Spring, followed by an interval of doubtful weather. Sidney is the very Spring—the later May. And in prose he is the authentic, only Spring. It is a prose full of young joy, and young power, and young inexperience, and young melancholy, which is the wilfulness of joy; ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... made her confession and her petition to the Lord. Her ringing voice intoned the phrases of the Bible as if they had been music and bore the burden of her deepest soul. She said she had been sinful in imputing unrighteousness to others, and that she had been blinded by her own wilfulness. She prayed for the stranger within her gates, for the sick man over yonder, and implored God's blessing on the work of her hands; and praise should ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... exists, and to whom the Christian doctrine of love is but the expression of his own experience. For a century or more our world, confident in its strength, its reason, its knowledge, has been undermining that doctrine with every possible heresy. In sheer wilfulness it has tried to empty life of all its values. It has made us ashamed of loving anything; for all love, it has told us, is illusion produced by the will to live, or the will to power, or some other figment of its own perverse thought. And now, as a result of that perversity, ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... vehemence and impatience she rebutted every reason Job adduced for his plan; and of course, thus opposed, by what appeared to him wilfulness, he became more resolute, and angry words were exchanged, and a feeling of estrangement rose up between them, for a ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... physiology? from an ignorance of which I shall mention no other case here save one—that too often from ignorance of signs of approaching disease, a child is punished for what is called idleness, listlessness, wilfulness, sulkiness; and punished, too, in the unwisest way—by an increase of tasks and confinement to the house, thus overtasking still more a brain already overtasked, and depressing still more, by robbing it of oxygen and of exercise, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... remunerative. Judge Clemens ran for the office of justice of the peace and was elected, but fees were neither large nor frequent. By the end of the year it became necessary to part with Jennie, the slave-girl—a grief to all of them, for they were fond of her in spite of her wilfulness, and she regarded them as "her family." She was tall, well formed, nearly black, and brought a good price. A Methodist minister in Hannibal sold a negro child at the same time to another minister who took it to his ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... it covers and includes. Reason, conscience, understanding, have no impersonality to him. When he uses the words, he uses them as synonymes of his determinations, or as decorative terms into which it pleases him to translate the rough vernacular of his wilfulness and caprices. The "Constitution," also, a word constantly profaned by his lips, is not so much, as he uses it, the Constitution of the United States as the moral and mental constitution of Andrew Johnson, which, in his view, is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... could not and would not go without her remaining Tintoret, and the others yielded to her at once, with that indulgent tenderness one shows to the wilfulness of a sick child. She and Margaret followed the sacristan. Ashe lingered behind in a passage of the church, surreptitiously reading an Italian newspaper. He had the ordinary cultivated pleasure in pictures; but this ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stubborn wilfulness and unfeeling carelessness of consequences that characterized his temper, he plunged into all manner of vicious indulgences; but what seemed to attract him the most irresistibly, and fix him the most firmly, was a fondness for gambling. ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... obviously; other people would have made two rooms sufficient for all, and many such families would have put up with one. But Hewett had his ideas of decency, and stuck to them with characteristic wilfulness. ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... sole object. And such a man, too! so good! so generous! If it was jealousy that roused the young man's heart to his father, the better part of love was also revived in it. He thought of old days: of his father's forbearance, his own wilfulness. He looked on himself, and what he had done, with the eyes of such a man. He determined to do all he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... wash and dress the children of a morning; she took a turn at cooking in the middle of the day; she helped to detain Master Ward at the tea-table, and to keep his wig and knee-buckles from too early an appearance and too thorough a soaking of his self-conceit and wilfulness at his tavern; and she heard the lads their lessons, while she darned their ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... hero and title of a novel by Smollett (1751). Peregrine Pickle is a savage, ungrateful spendthrift, fond of practical jokes, and suffering with evil temper the misfortunes brought on himself by his own wilfulness. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the early period shows Debussy developing freely and naturally. The independence of his thinking is unmistakable, but it does not run into wilfulness. There is no violent break with the past, but simply the quickening of certain French qualities by the infusion of a new personality. It seemed as if a new and charming miniaturist had appeared, who was doing both for piano and song what ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... extent than the dead father whose hard, silent life had showed forth little of the proper attributes of fatherhood? Or did the sin for which he was now being punished lie in the fact that, in spite of her constant wilfulness and frequent stupidity, he still felt such affection for his pupil as made him unwilling, as he phrased it, to seek a wife elsewhere and thus thrust her from her place in the household. Bates had a certain latent contempt for women; wives he thought were easily found and not altogether ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... Being quite dispirited with toil, and wholly overcome by grief and despair, I lay down between two ridges, and heartily wished I might there end my days. I bemoaned my desolate widow and fatherless children. I lamented my own folly and wilfulness, in attempting a second voyage, against the advice of all my friends and relations. In this terrible agitation of mind, I could not forbear thinking of Lilliput, whose inhabitants looked upon me as the greatest prodigy that ever appeared in the world; where I was able to draw an imperial ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... walk up the path, she drew forth Almira's letter, not without a momentary pang of remorse. With the letter in her hand she paused again, and looked and listened as though she would drink in the whole of Colorado at one draught. Suddenly a gleam of roguish wilfulness came into the sweet old face, and speaking half aloud, ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... his books. There is no purity or grace or feeling or spotless charm in his verse which did not belong to the man. There was never an explanation to be offered for him; no allowance was necessary for the eccentricity or grotesqueness or wilfulness or humor of genius. Simple, modest, frank, manly, he was the good citizen, the self-respecting ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... know how long I stood looking at the victims of my presumptuous wilfulness; but at last I heard a footstep in the passage, and fearing to be caught, I tore out of the house, and down to my old seat near the holly-bush, where I flung myself on the ground, and "wept bitterly." At last I heard the well-known sound of some one climbing over the wall; and then the curate ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... have been all very well, if he had not added to such kindly and unobtrusive evidence a certain wilfulness in discharging what he called debts. When his mother worked for him, he paid her by showering about her his bright animal spirits, with even more affluence than his gay, taunting, teasing, loving wont. If Lucy Snowe were discovered to have put ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... As the clouds and Kasoro's wilfulness were still against me, and the weather did not give hopes of a change, I sacrificed the taking of the latitude to gain time. I sent Bombay with Kasoro to the palace, asking for the Sakibobo himself to be sent with an order for five boats, five cows, and ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... wilfulness, but my great love," said the broken, gentle voice, "that made the condition. All of you I cannot extol, knowing what I have known. But you are an honest gentleman and a true, my brave; and you shall make ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... the sorrowful change which comes to strong natures when they wrong themselves through ignorance or wilfulness. ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... she tried to make him violate the duties of examination and candour which he had learnt too thoroughly to unlearn. Thereon came pain and an estrangement which was none the less profound for being mutually concealed. It seemed to my mother that he would not give up the wilfulness of his own opinions for her and for his Redeemer's sake. To him it seemed that he was ready to give up not only his mother but Christ Himself ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... bright, eager eyes into the kind face of Mr. Wilfred Vaughn, who was relating a marvellous story of such absorbing interest, that the elder of the children, a dark-eyed girl, who inherited somewhat of her mother's beauty and wilfulness, had insisted that her pet teacher should stay and hear. There was a moment of embarrassed silence, as Mrs. Vaughn appeared in the doorway, but the gentleman rose to offer her a chair, without appearing to notice the astonishment depicted in her countenance, or the half repressed sneer ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... suppose that if anything could, the approach and contemplation of death might bring men to a sense of reason and self-knowledge. On the contrary, it seems only to deprive them of the little wit they had, and to make them even more the sport of their wilfulness and shortsightedness. Some men think that because they are going to be hanged, they are fully authorised to declare a future state of rewards and punishments. All either indulge their caprices or cling to their prejudices. They ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... hindrance from without. There is very little action or intrigue. The dialogue, witty, brilliant, and ingenious, is all-important, and the denouement often depends upon a misunderstanding, so easy to explain that one sometimes wonders at the wilfulness of the characters in failing to set the matter right until the end.[105] As in all of his plays, marriage follows closely upon the solution of the difficulty; it has been said that his lovers "s'aiment le plus tard qu'ils peuvent, et se marient le plus tot qu'il est possible." [106] With the ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... my confession be public, that warning may be taken from my example; and may the sincerity with which I acknowledge my offence, and the tears which I have shed, efface it from the accumulated records of the wilfulness and disobedience of man! ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the earl, and letting steel decide their cause. But King Olaf replies, that he would first see what the earl intended doing—whether he would keep his force together or discharge his fleet. Sigurd Syr said, "It is for thee, king, to command; but," he adds, "I fear, from thy disposition and wilfulness, that thou wilt some day be betrayed by trusting to those great people, for they are accustomed of old to bid defiance to their sovereigns." There was no attack made, for it was soon seen that the earl's fleet was dispersing. Then King ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... and she knew she must bear them alone. She had been too young then to understand half the possibilities of mental pain, and also there was no finality about anything—all might develop into sunshine again. Now she had the most cruel torture of all, the knowledge that she herself by her wilfulness and pride had pulled down the blinds and brought herself into darkness, and that there was ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... nor pine, that was not her way; but she became possessed with a spirit of restless petulance, which at first, indeed, was only another phase of unhappiness, but which, not being recognized as such, presently developed into a most decided wilfulness. She turned impatiently from the nun's well-meant kindness and efforts to console her, which somehow were not what she wanted—not that, but something so different, poor child!—she was cross, peevish, fractious without intending it, scarcely knowing why; the nuns set her ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... simplicity she had continued, partly because she had been too industrious and too earnest for luxurious caprices, partly because she had never been accustomed to anything else but simplicity, and partly from wilfulness. It had pleased her to think that she was piling tens of thousands upon tens of ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... unchangeableness of Law makes it certain that no amount of past opposition to it, whether from ignorance or wilfulness, will prevent it from working in accordance with its own beneficent and life-giving character as soon as we quit our inverted position and place ourselves in our true relation towards it. The laws of Nature do not harbour revenge; and once we adapt our methods ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... love, which is the will to experience in a certain way; and out of that will to love right action will naturally ensue. Is this a platitude? If it is, it is flatly contradicted by the German doctrine of wilfulness. For the Germanic hero exercises his will always upon other men and things, not upon himself; and we all admire this Germanic hero, when he is not an obvious danger to us all, and when he is not made ridiculous ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... whose knowledge of other women has been mainly immoral, her innocence and wilfulness, and her instinctive dislike of him, serve as a strong attraction. Though he becomes her husband by means of a cruel fraud, he never fully gains her trust, and the estrangement so tragically sealed in the last chapter of the novel comes almost as a relief ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... observe such uncharitable expressions and uncomely reflections tossed to and fro as look like the effects of settled prejudice and resolved animosity, though we are much rather willing to account them the product of weakness than wilfulness: however, we must needs say, that, come whence they will, they have a tendency to make such a gap as we fear, if not timely prevented, will let out peace and order, and let in confusion ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Christ. In the old days we punished drastically and killed quickly. We did it because we so desired, because of whim, if you so please. But we were not hypocrites. We did not call upon press, and pulpit, and university to sanction us in our wilfulness of savagery. What we wanted to do we went and did, on our legs upstanding, and we faced all reproof and censure on our legs upstanding, and did not hide behind the skirts of classical economists and bourgeois philosophers, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... therefore, of limitations in the sacrifice she was making; she was even aware that, in the true sense, it was no sacrifice whatever. She was offering herself up because she chose to—in a kind of wilfulness—but a passionate wilfulness which claimed that for her at least there was no other way. Other women, wiser women, women behind whom there was a long, moderation-loving past, might obey the laws that prompt to the economy of one's self; she could only ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... as those 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 ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... when she was in the mood—delicious scraps of letters, broad-margined, fantastic, each, so far as charm went, a little literary gem disguised in wilfulness, in a picture, in a diamond-cut cynicism that shone sharper and clearer for the "dainty affectation of its setting." When she was not in the mood she did not write at all. With an instinctive recognition ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... to sum up as to a garden. Large or small, it should look both orderly and rich. It should be well fenced from the outside world. It should by no means imitate either the wilfulness or the wildness of Nature, but should look like a thing never to be seen except near a house. It should, in fact, look like a part of the house. It follows from this that no private pleasure-garden ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... the same time she was never one of those who cannot be convinced that some particular course is not the wisest and most just to adopt without at once rushing to the conclusion that the leader who makes any mistakes must be in the wrong because of wilfulness or mere incapacity, and is therefore not worthy any ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... upright and impartial jury. Any man with a heart in his breast, and a sense of honour in his soul, can understand why this man—whatever his record, and however impervious he may have seemed in the days of his prosperity and the wilfulness of his youth—should recoil from revelations which would attack the honour, if not the life, of a young and beautiful sister, sole remnant of a family eminent in station, and in all those moral and civic attributes which make for the honour of ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... would find the trial. The morbid sensitiveness of Carlyle to his own pains and troubles, so often imaginary, joined with his inconsiderate blindness to his wife's real sufferings, led to many heart-burnings. If she contributed to them, in some degree, by her wilfulness, jealous temper, and sharpness of tongue, ill-health and solitude may well ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... hue was unchanged. The shoulders were exactly the same in contour, on a slightly larger scale; and the manner of carrying her head—a manner peculiarly her own, and suggestive of a certain gentle wilfulness—was unaltered. ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... knowledge of the peculiarities of the Messianic age in the lapse of the ages since; by the almost universal change in our associations, modes of feeling and thought, and styles of speech; and by the gradual accretion and hardening of false doctrines and sectarian biases and wilfulness. As we examine the words of Christ to find their real meaning, there are four prominent considerations to be especially weighed ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... And if they perish it will be like unto the Jaredites, because of the wilfulness of their hearts, ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... I had a thousand times sooner hear you say that you cannot mend than that you can. For those who really feel they cannot mend—those who are really weary and worn out with the burden of their sins—those who are tired out with their own wilfulness, and feel ready to lie down and die, like a spent horse, and say, "God take me away, no matter to what place; I am not fit to live here on earth, a shame and a torment to myself day and night"—those who are in that state of mind are very ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... It is not so with men. But by degrees she grew more and more familiar with her stern friend; and in that familiarity there was perilous fascination to Maltravers. She could laugh him at any moment out of his most moody reveries; contradict with a pretty wilfulness his most favourite dogmas; nay, even scold him, with bewitching gravity, if he was not always at the command of her wishes—or caprice. At this time it seemed certain that Maltravers would fall in love with Evelyn; but it rested ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the window, he paced the floor with anguish keen as though she had gone from him for ever. What obstinacy, what unreasoning wilfulness—and what would come of it? He spent the long night brooding over his great sorrow, the root of which was the fear that his dear wife did not belong to Christ, for beloved her through all her unloveliness. ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... and carry, just as you please? I could find in my heart—But you know my mind. I insist upon it that you let Grimes court you, and that you lay aside your sulks, and give him a fair hearing. Will you do that? If then you persist in your wilfulness, why there, I suppose, is an end of the matter. Do not think that any body is going to marry you, whether you will or no. You are no such mighty prize, I assure you. If you knew your own interest, you would be glad to take the young fellow ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... scientific leading which my Father had enjoyed at the British Museum and at the Royal Society came to an end. His next act was to burn his ships down to the last beam and log out of which a raft could have been made. By a strange act of wilfulness, he closed the doors upon ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... of contemporary instances to prove it. Then, having got that fixed in your head by blow after blow, he passes on to another phase of his character, his coldhearted amorousness, his power of work, his spoiled child wilfulness, or some other quality, and piles up his illustrations of that. Instead, for example, of saying that the Emperor had a marvellous memory for detail, we have the account of the head of Artillery laying the list of all the guns in France before his master, who looked ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thee go until thou dost consent," she cried with some of her old wilfulness. "Oh, ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... considered as the presentations of a certain phase of life which nations in their onward course sooner or later assume. In the individual, how well we know that a sober moderation of action, an appropriate gravity of demeanour, belong to the mature period of life; a change from the wanton wilfulness of youth, which may be ushered in, or its beginning marked, by many accidental incidents: in one perhaps by domestic bereavements, in another by the loss of fortune, in a third by ill health. We are correct ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... expectation I had formed, and proved yourself of a character the very reverse of what I had supposed. For I had, Fanny, as I think my behaviour must have shewn, formed a very favourable opinion of you from the period of my return to England. I had thought you peculiarly free from wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence. But you have now shewn me that you can be wilful ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Vidas, and tell them to come hither privately; for I cannot take my treasures with me because of their weight, and will pledge them in their hands. Let them come for the chests at night, that no man may see them. God knows that I do this thing more of necessity than of wilfulness; but by God's good help I shall redeem all. Now Rachel and Vidas were rich Jews, from whom the Cid used to receive money for his spoils. And Martin Antolinez went in quest of them, and he passed through Burgos and entered ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... cities. The impossibility of securing even the simplest cooeperation from such patients is scarcely realized by any one who is not called upon to deal with them face to face. Even with an interpreter, they display the wilfulness of irresponsibility. One Italian woman wiped her chancre, which was on her lip, with her fingers at every other shake of the head. She was cooking for two boarders and had two children. She did not like hospitals and was homesick and pettish. ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... comes out with things that never suggest themselves to the imagination of grown-up people, and that he does everything that takes one by surprise. The result is that his father and mother are driven to their wits' ends. But wilfulness is natural to young children. Reckless expenditure is a common characteristic of young men. Antipathy to school is a common feeling with young people. Yet there are ways and means to bring him round. The worse with him is that his disposition ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the table set over by the window, and his wife beating up the batter for the buckwheat pancakes that she was about to griddle for breakfast. Lidey, still in her little blue flannel nightgown, but with beaded deerskin moccasins on her tiny feet, and the golden wilfulness of her hair tied back demurely with a blue ribbon, was seated at one end of the table, her eager face half buried in a sheet of paper. She was laboriously inditing, for perhaps the twentieth time, an epistle to "Sandy Claus," ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... as you know; and I am here tonight to make a final plea, so that they may escape the consequences of their wilfulness." ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... for it, not venturing on words, for fear of disturbing the patient; but Jeffy, with unpardonable wilfulness, danced out of my circuit, and at the same instant the sick man turned his head, and beheld Jeffy in the possession of his property. Jeffy looked very repentant, said in low, deprecatory tones, "I'm sorry," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... the work of years into hours. He did it with the dying thief. If the man who has set out early may take his time, it certainly cannot be so with us who have lost our time. If we have lost God's bright and happy presence by our wilfulness, what then? Unrelieved sadness? Nay, brethren, calmness, purity, may have gone from our heart; but all is not gone yet. Just as sweetness comes from the bark of the cinnamon when it is bruised, so can the spirit of the Cross of Christ ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... ago, would have given any one the impression of something still unfledged—a tall, slim, overgrown girl of sixteen, and somewhat spoiled. This was indeed only natural, for her immediate world of father, aunt, and relations had circled ever since her birth in the orbit of her charming wilfulness. Champney acknowledged to himself that he had done her bidding a little too frequently ever since the first yachting trip, when as a little girl she attached herself to him, or rather him to her as a part of her special goods and chattels. At that time their common ground ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... to shut up here. For here have I meditated the spot, and the manner, and every thing, as well of the minutest as of the highest consequence, that can attend the solemn moments. So, Doctor, tell me truly, may I stay here, and be clear of any imputations of curtailing, through wilfulness or impatiency, or through resentments which I hope I am got above, a life that might otherwise be prolonged?—Tell me, Sir; you are not talking to a coward in this respect; indeed you ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... sweetness of ideal womanhood, and her repentance is without remorse. His Achilles is youth itself, glorious, cruel, pitiful, splendid, and sad, ardent and loving, and conscious of its doom. Homer, in truth, is to be matched only with Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare he has not the occasional wilfulness, freakishness, and modish obscurity. He is a poet all of gold, universal as humanity, simple as childhood, musical now as the flow of his own rivers, now as the heavy plunging ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... honest Tom Tusher never permitted his mind to stray out of the prescribed University path, accepted the Thirty-nine Articles with all his heart, and would have signed and sworn to other nine-and-thirty with entire obedience. Harry's wilfulness in this matter, and disorderly thoughts and conversation, so shocked and afflicted his senior, that there grew up a coldness and estrangement between them, so that they became scarce more than mere acquaintances, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... Etherege records in verse when the monarch was "dumpish" Nell would "chuck the royal chin;" and it is stated that, mindful of her former conquests over Charles Hart and Charles Lord Buckley, it was her habit to playfully style his majesty "Charles the Third." Her wilfulness, wit, and beauty enabled her to maintain such a strong hold upon the king's heart, that he shared his time equally between her and the Duchess of Portsmouth. Indignant that a woman from the playhouse should receive such evidences of the royal affection, her grace lost no opportunity ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... followed by weakness of her disused body. She also surrendered to the weakness of self-pity, that craven mocker of self-respect. She was not a will-less girl, but life had brought her small chance to develop that will which masters, while wilfulness, that will which demands selfishly for self, grew out of the soil so largely of her mother's preparing. This wilfulness, first asserted in small things, grew ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... of "A Narrow Vessel," has left us in prose a description of human weakness and wilfulness reluctant of its true bliss. The following passage is an excellent commentary on the "Hound of Heaven." "Though God," he says, "asks of the soul but to love Him what it may, and is ready to give an increased love for a poor ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... the controversy comes round, as controversies often do, to the point whence it started, and the "party of order" repeat their charge against the rebel, that he is sacrificing the feelings of others to the gratification of his own wilfulness, he replies once for all that they cheat themselves by misstatements. He accuses them of being so despotic, that, not content with being masters over their own ways and habits, they would be masters over his also; and grumble because he will not let them. He merely asks the same freedom ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... original and inevitable evil of man's nature, which fill your streets with lamentation, and your graves with prey. It is only that, when there should have been providence, there has been waste; when there should have been labour, there has been lasciviousness; and wilfulness, when there should ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin |
