What is "capricious"

Usage examples of "capricious".

Sunbright had clamped down on his stomach as the air-boat lifted into the night sky, drifted, tacked, dropped and lurched in capricious air pockets, and finally docked, a mile in the air, at the spidery airdocks of Ioulaum.

Spalato, rendered tedious by capricious winds varying from a furious bora, shrieking down from the north and blowing the foretopmast staysail from its boltrope to very gentle breezes right aft that often died away to a flat calm, and by the hazardous nature of the Dalmatian coast with its many islands, not to say vile reefs, Stephen spent much of his time aloft, at the topmast cross-trees.

There were no longer high cliffs as at Prospect Heights, but a strange and capricious border which surrounded the narrow gulf between the two capes, formed of mineral matter, thrown up by the volcano.

The truth was that Meander had seen through the bluff, but had instead elected--thanks to one of his legendarily capricious whims--to do nothing about it.

Woodwork devoid of paint or varnish, but carved in most elaborate and capricious openwork, the whiteness of the pinewood being preserved by constant scrubbing with soap and water.

To the enormous lava rocks succeeded soon those capricious sand dunes, among which the engineer had been so singularly recovered, and which seabirds frequented in thousands.

Thou saidst the truth to her, that she is capricious for she imposeth conditions that man cannot fulfill, and delinquency is punished by desertion.

The husbands of these most lovely and womanly of women try their temper, and their subjectedness, by the most capricious, and the most cruel, tests.

He reminded the assembly of the evils which Rome had endured from the vices of headstrong and capricious youths, congratulated them on the election of a virtuous and experienced senator, and, with a manly, though perhaps a selfish, freedom, exhorted Tacitus to remember the reasons of his elevation, and to seek a successor, not in his own family, but in the republic.

Florence and cannot help presenting the most serious matters in a boisterous allegrissimo, perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of the contrast he risks - long, difficult, hard, dangerous thoughts and the tempo of the gallop and the very best, most capricious humor?

After its novelty has worn out, the ardent and capricious individuals who constitute the most prominent class of its patrons will return to visible doses, were it only for the sake of a change.

Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works.

Often some capricious winding would bring the column in two parallel lines, and the CATAPEZ could speak to his PEONS across a crevasse not two fathoms wide, though two hundred deep, which made between them an inseparable gulf.

It is a series of shallow fiords as irregular and capricious as the fiords of Norway.

Nobody was troubled, for he was like most inventors and other kinds of poets, and went and came in a capricious way, and often without notice.