perverseness

How To Use perverseness In A Sentence

• Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term. The Imp of the Perverse
• But there still clung to her what I fear we must call a perverseness of obstinacy, a desire to maintain the resolution she had made -- a wish that she might be allowed to undergo the punishment she had deserved. Can You Forgive Her?
• By this perverseness of integrity he was driven out a commoner of nature, excluded from the regular modes of profit and prosperity, and reduced to pick up a livelihood uncertain and fortuitous; but it must be remembered that he kept his name unsullied, and never suffered himself to be reduced, like too many of the same sect, to mean arts and dishonourable shifts. The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II
• The blatancy of its rhetorical devices and the perverseness of its address create discomfort for serious theorists.
• It follows, that the desire to be well must be excited simultaneously with any principle which shall be merely a modification of combativeness, but in the case of that something which I term perverseness, the desire to be well is not only not aroused, but a strongly antagonistical sentiment exists. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2
• It is submitted that there has been no perverseness here.
• But there still clung to her what I fear we must call a perverseness of obstinacy, Can you forgive her?
• With a similar perverseness, the potatoes crumble off forks in the process of peeling, upheaving from their centres in every direction, as if they were subject to earthquakes. Bleak House
• What distinguishes his recent work is an almost maternal sympathy for the perverseness of the human animal - and the twists in its fate.
• It follows, that the desire to be well must be excited simultaneously with any principle which shall be merely a modification of combativeness, but in the case of that something which I term perverseness, the desire to be well is not only aroused, but a strongly antagonistical sentiment exists. The Imp of the Perverse