Quotes About Physiognomy

This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial,—there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,—are useful. It is of the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is composed.

He sighed. 'Phrenology is where the size and shape of your skull determines whether you dunnit or not.

There is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science,is but a passing fable.

A strange and somewhat impassive physiognomy is often, perhaps, an advantage to an orator, or leader of any sort, because it helps to fix the eye and fascinate the mind.

The first couple of times she had come here, she had been sure that he changed overnight, that the shards of physiognomy that made up his whole reorganized when no one was looking. She became frightened of her commission. She wondered hysterically if it was like a task in a moral children's tale, if she was to be punished for some nebulous sin by striving to freeze in time a body in flux, forever too afraid to say anything, starting each day from the beginning all over again.

As for faces - you may look into them to know, whether a man's nose be a long or a short one.

Blimey, thought Kelvin, what an eye-to-face ratio. When you want to say something delicate, you don't want that eye-to-face ration staring up at you. Big eyes, like a child's or a baby seal's; the physiognomy of innocence--looking at Archie Jones is like looking at something that expects to be clubbed round the head any second.

Is not the forehead the most prophetic feature of a man?

N'était-ce pas le seul dieu moderne auquel on ait foi, l'Argent dans toute sa puissance, exprimé par une seule physionomie ? Les doux sentiments de la vie n'occupaient là qu'une place secondaire, ils animaient trois cœurs purs, ceux de Nanon, d'Eugénie et sa mère. Encore, combien d'ignorance dans leur naïveté !

the long, straight nose and firm chin

The eyes of some persons are large, others small, and others of a moderate size; the last-mentioned are the best. And some eyes are projecting, some deep-set, and some moderate, and those which are deep-set have the most acute vision in all animals; the middle position is a sign of the best disposition.

PHYSIOGNOMY, n. The art of determining the character of another by the resemblances and differences between his face and our own, which is the standard of excellence.

We are very slow to recognise in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the model which is labelled "great talent" in our museum of general ideas.

What is love at first sight but a proof of the powerful but silent language of physiognomy?

As the thing, as the other, the true dawns through an emotional and almost carnal experience, where the "ideas"—the other's and our own—are rather traits of his physiognomy and of our own, are less understood than welcomed or spurned in love or hatred.

In the old man's face there was nothing very special - save that the chin was so greatly projected that whenever he spoke he was forced to wipe it with a handkerchief to avoid dribbling.

His whole face tended towards the nose — it was what, in common parlance, is known as a "pitcher-mug.

BOBCHINSKY Not bad looking, in civilian dress, walking about the room, a reflective look on his face . . . his physiognomy . . . his behavior, and up here (He waves his hand around his forehead) a lot, a lot of everything.