Tall man

“ Almost everything seemed to be horizontal, but such things as stood perpendicular in this flat world gained a gigantic height. The two human beings looked at each other in amazement that such a tall man and woman existed. ”

“ He was a tall man, with a brown, angular face, and deep-set, rather melancholy, blue eyes. His black hair was just beginning to gray above his temples, and several lines, caused more by thought than age, scored his lean face. ”

“ His were good looks of the best fashion of men's good looks; not a tall man, he yet gave the effect of tallness, so perfect was his carriage, so handsome his address. And he was as clever as charming; cultured as the world knows culture ”

“ If a child catches sight of a very tall man, about seven foot or so, and rushes home screaming that he has met a giant at least four yards high, he will probably be spanked for letting his idle fancies make such a commotion; yet he will be justified by all the canons of good art and talk, for while seven feet sounds to be nothing out of the way, only a few inches above the ordinary run of men, a man actually seven foot tall does look four yards high, and it is only some such figure that will reproduce something like the original experience to persons who were not present. ”

“ It loosens what ought to be tight, it contracts the nerves, and so shortens the limbs that a tall man finds all the comeliness of his stature taken from him while he is still unmutilated. It is in truth a living death ”

“ I felt a shock of surprise on seeing a person so little corresponding to the one I had at first half-consciously prefigured. Figure to yourself a tall man about six feet high, within half an inch or so, built with tolerable appearance of strength ”

“ With these words he hailed a tall man sauntering past, who, dressed in the height of the reigning race-course fashion, in no respect diverging from the canon of ‘good form’ in raiment or otherwise, bore yet an exceptional and striking personality. ”

“ The tall man of bean-pole build is not considered attractive. Yet, a positive element of height can outweight a considerable element of disproportion, and a taller man, whose proportions are in themselves worse than those of a shorter man, is usually considered the handsomer. ”

“ Though a pretty tall man, he appears, on horseback, broad and round in proportion to his height. I looked at him with a certain sort of interest, and a feeling of kindness; for one does feel kindly to whatever human being is anywise marked out from the rest, unless it be by his disagreeable qualities. ”

“ I think one would describe him as a tall, though not as a very tall man. He is broad shouldered, but slender. Despite his sixty-two years—and it is almost impossible to believe in his age when one sees him—there is hardly a grey hair in his head. ”

“ I have heard many disputes on the comparative campaigning powers of tall and short men, but as far as my own experience goes I have never seen any difference. If a tall man happens87 to break down it is immediately noticed to the disadvantage of his class, but if the same misfortune befals a short one, it is not looked upon as being anything remarkable. ”

“ When a tall man and a little boy are both dressed in a suit of the same precious cloth, each is suited and fitted to his satisfaction. The little boy is neither envious nor unhappy because the tall man has more cloth than he ”

“ The tall man may wear whatever he pleases—as long as it is not conspicuous. He almost invariably presents an imposing and dignified appearance if he is well dressed.
Short people, especially short women, must exert special care in the selection of their wardrobes. The short woman must select only those gowns that have long lines, long-waisted effects. ”

“ Do we not ourselves sometimes speak figuratively of a tall, fat man as a mountain of flesh? And, among a people prone to speak in still more concrete terms, would it not happen that a chief, remarkable for his great bulk, would be nicknamed after the highest mountain within sight, because he towered above other men as this did above surrounding hills? ”

“ How should he know the height of my stature? A thousand fathoms! My very dimensions to a hair. What, measured by a mite! This atom, forsooth, is a geometrician, and knows exactly how tall I am; while I, who can scarce perceive him through a microscope, am utterly ignorant of his extent!"
"Yes, I have taken your measure," answered the philosopher, "and I will now do the same by your tall companion."
The proposal was embraced: his excellency reclined upon his side; for, had he stood upright, his head would have reached too far above the clouds. ”

“ Or if it be only meant that we think of a particular height, which must be a precise, positive, determinate idea, even this supposition may in the same way be shewn to be exceedingly fallacious, and an inversion of the natural order of our ideas. For take any given height of a man, whether tall, short, or middle-sized, and let that height be as visible as you please, yet the actual height to which it amounts must be made up of the length of the different parts, the head, the face, the neck, the body, limbs, &c. ”

“ Here it is seen that the mean man is a little under 5 ft. 8 in. in height, the numbers of men shorter and taller diminishing with evident regularity, down to the few representatives of the very short men of 5 ft. and under, and the very tall men of 6 ft. 4 in. and over. The law of relation of height to numerical strength is shown graphically by the binomial curve figured above, where the abscissæ (measured from an origin on the left) represent the heights of the men, and the ordinates the relative numbers of men corresponding to each height. ”

“ Well, in appearance he might be described as tall, though you must not run away with the idea that he's what you would call a big man. On the contrary, he is most slenderly built. Anything like the symmetry of his figure, however, I don't remember to have met with before. ”

“ Without being tall, there was height enough, one would say, to insure the eyes a good view of golden horizons and near heavens, and the arms an easy reach to the honeysuckle clusters or the ripe purple plum hanging low by its own weight. ”

“ We've always thought progress meant bigness. The ideal man was six feet tall and all that. But it's bunk. Even when our standard of living was at record high, that ideal was still the exception. And since our time of trouble began, the average height has actually decreased by three inches. ”

“ Tall—at least six feet-with a well-shaped head set on square shoulders, brown hair inclined to curl, large blue eyes which could be merry or exceedingly grave, I thought him a picture of manly beauty. Good-natured, clever, prosperous, and not yet thirty. ”

“ All this utterly unconscious of the fact that most tall men have no ever present-sense of their height as an advantage. Yet on the whole one agrees with Montaigne that height is the chief beauty of a man: it gives presence.
Oscar never learned anything from criticism ”

“ However, when a man is built as I am, it is worth three inches of height. I certainly wouldn’t change figures with that tall, lanky man in front of us. Those tall fellows are always awkward. Have you seen Madame de Beausire? ”

“ However, if our bodies today cannot be more than nine feet tall at the uttermost—there is no limit on our minds. They can scale the heavens where the giant brood failed. They can be as lofty as we really desire. ”

“ He appears about thirty years of age, is tall, but loses something of his real height by a student’s stoop about the shoulders. Those decided almost shaggy eyebrows he has would lead you to expect quick, piercing eyes,—the eyes of the observant man of action. ”

“ A very good way to stand tall and sit tall is to imagine a string tied to your scalp lock, drawing you up to the ceiling or the sky, and all the rest of you, both inside and out, will fall into good position. ”

“ In the days of his early manhood he spent much time in devising ways to deceive people into thinking him taller. He surrounded himself with big things, had a big bed made, wore high-heeled boots, and the crown of his hat was so tall that he was almost overbalanced. ”

“ He was not as tall as any of the others if you came to measure by inches, but his figure had a strong, careless air, and the distinction of his head appeared to give him an advantage of about thirty inches over every other man in sight. ”

“ And it is meet philosophical, accordant with the principles of adaptation, that this should be thus; and renders observations on character easy and correct. In [Pg 17] general, too, tall persons have high heads, and are more aspiring, aim high, and seek conspicuosity, while short ones have flat heads, and seek worldly pleasures. Tall persons are rarely mean, though often grasping; but very penurious persons are often broad built. Small persons generally have exquisite mentalities, yet less power; while great men are rarely dwarfs, though great size often co-exists with sluggishness. ”

“ The very fact that no man in these initial announcements ventures to set himself down as short (although a considerable proportion describe themselves as tall) indicates a consciousness that shortness is undesirable, as also does the fact that the women very frequently describe themselves as tall. ”

“ To be tall of stature, and corpulent with it, denotes him to be not only handsome but valiant also, but of no extraordinary understanding, and which is worst of all, ungrateful and trepanning. He who is extremely tall, and very lean and thin, is a projecting man, that designs no good to himself, importunate to obtain what he desires, and extremely wedded to 303his own humour. ”

“ He was more than disunited,
He’d been simply dynamited
In the fervor of the fray.
And THE MORAL of the verses
Is: That short men can’t be tall.
Nothing sillier or worse is
Than a jay upon a mall. ”

“ The hat cuts her height, and the heels give her a tilted appearance.
Whether you are tall or short, stout or slender, you have some particular attractiveness, and you should not allow the knowledge of your imperfections to make you timid or awkward. It needs only the correct dress and the proper spirit of pride and dignity to accentuate your personal charms. Remember that it is personality that counts—personality and character—and while some of the world's greatest personalities have been exceptionally tall, just as many of them have been extremely short! ”

“ His tall figure hemmed in by a group detaches itself, grows bigger, and becomes more recognizable step by step. I go to meet him, slowly, smiling despite myself as he hurries, and when our hands touch, my heart breaks into bloom.... ”

“ One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. ”

“ If we had eyes a hundred times more piercing to examine the things that surround us, men would seem to us to be enormously tall; we can even imagine organs by means of which men would appear to us to be of immeasurable stature. ”

“ Everything was so absolutely real in her setting that the ideal girl walked, a definite embodiment of his fancy, night after night by his side, and whether it was from his life habit or an intuitive fancy, he looked upward into her face. He had always liked tall women. ”

“ Into this room, all through the afternoon, streamed a curious medley of people. Tall men, small men, rough men, dapper men, and loudly dressed women, who for the most part seemed inclined to corpulence. ”

“ Though yesterday he tried and failed
To-day they welcome him with thanks.
Apparently he's just as small,
But, since his size no more impedes him,
In spirit he is six foot tall—
Because his country needs him. ”

“ Why, there is one who has reached the top; he is not to be compared with a fly so much as a midge—who would have thought it? We are close under now and I find that the block by which I am standing is the height of my shoulder, and I am fairly tall. ”

“ Taller than most women, as I knew by comparison, for I am an inch above the American "six-foot," and her eyes were but little below the level of mine. A man who is above normal height never fails to note, with a little of surprise, when he meets eyes so nearly level with his own. ”

“ Each one of us has from the moment of his existence a certain stature allotted, as it were, to which he will attain. In this way some will be tall, others will be short, so that the height of the body is something quite beyond our control, as we know by the interrogation, "Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?" But in contradistinction to height, we know that the muscles of the body can be developed and increased in size by use. ”

“ I'd never been a tall guy, and the girls I'd dated had all been my height -- teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature. ”

“ He would be a handsome man if he were not ugly; he is tall and strongly built, but his dark complexion and his glittering eyes give him a fierce expression. He is easier to annoy than amuse; he laughs little but makes others laugh by the peculiar turn he gives to his conversation. ”

“ You see, we are not very large, either in our bodies or in our thoughts, and we try to make ourselves several feet taller, tall enough to put our heads on a level with the trees, tall enough to imagine that the wind respects us. ”

“ WHY MEN GROW SHORT OR TALL Fig. 4.—Pedigree charts of the two men shown in the preceding illustration. Squares represent men and circles women; figures underlined denote measurement in stocking feet. It is obvious from a comparison of the ancestry of the two men that the short one comes from a predominantly short family, while the tall one gains his height likewise from heredity. The shortest individual in the right-hand chart would have been accounted tall in the family represented on the left. ”