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More "Idleness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... men and women led the simple life. Their chief vocation was idleness. When the weather was hot the man sat in the shade; as the sunshine crept to him he moved into the shade again. In winter he ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... author states facts which he could have observed, but to which he did not take the trouble to attend. From idleness or negligence he reported details which he has merely inferred, or even imagined at random, and which turn out to be false. This is a common source of error, though it does not readily occur to one, and is to be suspected wherever the author was obliged to procure information in which ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... society of his bride and the pleasures of a country life. But of the latter he soon grew weary. "Though I stay a few days here," he wrote to Queensberry on August 25th, "I hope none will reproach me of eating the bread of idleness." That, at least, is a reproach his worst enemies have never tried to fasten on him. To be doing something was, indeed, a necessity of his existence; and his duties as Constable soon furnished him ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... slowly in to Ram-tah. One of the idle rich! Well, that is what kings mostly were, if you came down to it. At least they had to be rich to buy all those palaces. But not necessarily idle. The renewed Ram-tah would not be idle. It was not idleness ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... could I live without service to the world? you ask. Why should the world have supported in utter idleness one who was able to render service? The answer is that my great-grandfather had accumulated a sum of money on which his descendants had ever since lived. The sum, you will naturally infer, must have been very large ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... of the high trust to which I have been called—always of grave importance—are augmented by the prevailing business conditions entailing idleness upon willing labor and loss to useful enterprises. The country is suffering from industrial disturbances from which speedy relief must be had. Our financial system needs some revision; our money is all good now, but its value must not further be threatened. ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... trouble once over some minin' ground, an' Mart kinda takes it out on all Moose's friends, even if they's only boys an' dogs, don't he, Baldy?" And Baldy wagged that he certainly did. "Now the cook says they've got work dogs enough belongin' ter the claim ter feed, without supportin' my mangy cur in idleness. Mr. Allan," earnestly, "he ain't mangy, an' he's the most willin' dog I ever seen fer any one that loves him. But he ain't sociable with every one, an' he don't like ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... beasts of prey, serpents, parasites (mosquitoes, fleas, bugs) and animals that live in dark holes—lizards, scorpions, toads, rats, ants. Likewise in the moral world life, purity, truth, work are good things and come from Ormuzd; death, filth, falsehood, idleness are bad, and issue ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... mid-afternoon when he emerged among those fellow passengers who had long ago claimed their steamer chairs and dedicated themselves to the idleness ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... meant by Daffydowndilly's finding Mr. Toil's ways more agreeable upon better acquaintance? When he grew accustomed to his work, he found that it was not so very unpleasant after all; "that diligence is not a whit more toilsome than sport or idleness". ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Sixty-Fourth and Sixty-Fifth Regiments, General Pomeroy continued the commander through the winter, and down to the month of May; and he made himself popular with the inhabitants. Still, the four regiments consisted, to a great degree, of such rough material, that they could not, in the idleness in which they were kept, be controlled. "The soldiers," Andrew Eliot writes, January 29, 1769, "were in raptures at the cheapness of spirituous liquors among us, and in some of their drunken hours have been insolent to some of the inhabitants"; and he further remarks that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... the thought of meeting them was the more repugnant to me that I could not, now, defy their seeming calumnies and triumph in my own convictions as before. But to-day I determined to make an effort to return to my duty. Though I found no pleasure in it, it would be less irksome than idleness—at all events it would be more profitable. If life promised no enjoyment within my vocation, at least it offered no allurements out of it; and henceforth I would put my shoulder to the wheel and toil away, like any poor drudge of a cart-horse that was fairly broken in to its labour, and ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... formerly renowned for their industry in cultivating the ground, for their trade, navigation, caravans and useful arts.—At present they are remarkable for their idleness, ignorance, superstition, treachery, and, above all, for their lawless methods of robbing and murdering all the ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... old men past that age in which may be expected the alertness and energy that must be possessed by Jack afloat. The lower grades were filled by boyish officers from the Naval Academy, who had never seen a gun fired in anger. The service was becoming rusty from long idleness. ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... parish is not very extensive, as you have doubtless noticed; my parishioners are in the best possible health, thank God! and they live to be very old. I have barely two or three marriages in a year, and as many burials, so that, you see, one must fill up one's time somehow to escape the sin of idleness. Every man must have a hobby. Mine is ornithology; and yours, Monsieur ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... into the prison yard, to be ready to prevent by her presence, or calm by her authority, any tumult or quarrels that might arise among the scholars, whose passions, restrained for some time by discipline and employment, only wanted the hour of idleness and recreation to be aroused and excited. Madame Armand had witnessed, in mournful silence, the cruel treatment of which Mont Saint Jean was a victim, and she had already advanced to snatch her from ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... I hailed the chance of getting free from idleness and the shackles of the Court. And moreover,' he said, 'it is a splendid venture, and my heart swelled with triumph as I saw that grand armament ready to sail from Plymouth. Methinks, even now, I feel a burning desire to be one of those brave men who are crossing ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... His opinion was constantly opposed by the other leaders, all jealous of his bravery and influence; and the army, instead of marching to Jerusalem, or even to Ascalon, as was first intended, proceeded to Jaffa, and remained in idleness until Saladin was again in a condition to wage ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... think once that if I could have a day of doing nothing, to rest me—a day in some quiet place like that yo' speak on—it would maybe set me up. But now I've had many days o' idleness, and I'm just as weary o' them as I was o' my work. Sometimes I'm so tired out I think I cannot enjoy heaven without a piece of rest first. I'm rather afeard o' going straight there without getting a good sleep in the grave to ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... portion of the world made no response to this invitation; he therefore next addressed himself to the operatives, declaring that the time was come to tear the crown from the brow of idleness, and establish the reign of labour. The king was now to be the chief of artisans, his ministers enlightened workmen; and the electoral right was to be so placed as to transfer all power from the proprietor of the soil to the cultivator, from the capitalist to the journeyman. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... little purpose. "Where in some towns,'' says the statute 4th Henry VII. (1488), "two hundred persons were occupied and lived of their lawful labours. now there are occupied two or three herdsmen, and the residue fall into idleness''; therefore it is ordained that houses which within three years have been let for farms, with twenty acres of land lying in tillage or husbandry, shall be upheld, under the penalty of half the profits, to be forfeited to the king or the lord of the fee. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... always been rather proud of my constitution.' Her eyes dropped. 'But then I have led a life of idleness. Couldn't you make me useful in some way? Set me to work! I am convinced I should be so much happier. Let me help you, Mr. Crewe. I write a ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... thrill of indignation at that accusation of idleness. Had she not made two whole beds, and even stooped to pick stray pins off the carpet? She pushed the door open and ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... was liable to evaporate;"—whoever would study the great, as well as the small, peculiarities of the painter who converted his thumb-nail into a palette, and while transcribing characters and events both rapidly and faithfully, complained of his "constitutional idleness:"—whenever, we say, our readers feel desirous of revelling in the biography of so diligent, so observing, so faithful, so brave a spirit, we should send them to our old friend Allan Cunningham's most interesting ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Lisbon when he quitted Ternicore, and, tired of idleness, had again volunteered to proceed as a missionary to India. He had arrived at Formosa, and, shortly after his arrival, had received directions from his superior to return, on important business, to Goa; and thus it was that he fell in with Amine ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... when sleep had dulled somewhat his reasoning faculties, Tex began to vision himself in Tucson—well, perhaps in Los Angeles, that Mecca of pleasure lovers—spending money freely, living for a little while the life of ease and idleness gemmed with the smiles of those beautiful women who hover gaily around the money pots in any country, in ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... reaction to his shock there began to assert itself in him that capacity for profound indolence inherent in his negro blood. To a white man time is a cumulative excitant. Continuous and absolute idleness is impossible; he must work, hunt, fish, play, gamble, or dissipate,—do something to burn up the accumulating sugar in his muscles. But to a negro idleness is an increasing balm; it is a stretching of his legs in the sunshine, a cat-like ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... statistics. And the fourth articulate utterance in the message of Tolstoy is his merciless distinction between the money of the poor, which they have earned by their toil, and the money of the rich, which they have forfeited by their idleness. ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... trouble. You have seen a good deal of this in your occasional visits to the North. In Washington, since the Abolitionists have intermeddled there, the free blacks have become intolerable; they live from day to day in discomfort and idleness. I mean as a general thing; there are, of course, occasional exceptions. Bacchus is too old to take care of himself; he would not be happy away from Exeter. Consider what I say to you, and I will be guided by your wishes as regards ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... Urquhart. "Most men are like that at bottom—only some of us can impose ourselves upon our neighbours more easily than he can. Half the marriages of the world break on that rock, and the other half on idleness." ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... an acquisition, but in a little time taxed her with ungrateful insensibility to so prodigious a blessing. She continually criticized her economy, accusing her of indolence; representing, how she used every morning to rouse the servants from their idleness, by giving each such a scold, as quickened their diligence for the whole day; nor could a family be well managed by any one who omitted this necessary duty. Mrs Morgan's desire that her servants should enjoy the comforts of plenty, ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... conduct of Omai to that which was expected! Abandoning his European dress, he quickly sank into idleness, barbarously employing his firearms either to assist the chief in his wars or to shoot those of his countrymen who had offended him. In three years he died, despised even by the savages it was supposed that ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... but slowly, having to open for themselves a way through the forest. Too many of those composing this little army were deficient in soldier-like qualities. They had been recruited from the off- scourings of large towns and cities, enervated by idleness, debauchery, and every species of vice, which unfitted them for the arduous service of Indian warfare. Hence insubordination, and frequent desertion, were among the ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... was sadly out of practice, and feared that this, with her youth, and her want of experience, would be a hindrance to her success; and so she found it. Yet something must be done; for Mary's humility of heart was not that inert apathy of idleness, that is sometimes by foolish, unthinking people mistaken for it; and I suppose, in the eyes of the vain and worldly, there was some degradation in Mary Mannering employing several hours of the day in needlework, for which, at the end of the week, she ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... wide, blue sea Far out of sight of land, his mind intent Upon the sailing of his little boat, On tightening ropes and shaping fair his course, Hears suddenly, across the restless sea, The rhythmic striking of some towered clock, And wakes from thoughtless idleness to time: Time, the slow pulse which beats eternity! So through the vacancy of busy life At intervals you cross my path and bring The deep solemnity of passing years. For you I have shed bitter tears, ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... which could forbid or discourage the reading of the blessed word of God. He soon resolved to forsake the priesthood. But when he had done so, he knew not what to turn his hand to. He had no one like-minded to consult with, and he felt that it was wrong to eat the bread of idleness. Being thus uncertain what to do, he resolved in the meantime to carry goods into the interior of the country, and offer them for sale. The land round his dwelling and his own gun would supply him with food; and for the rest, he would spend his time in the study of the ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... to feel at ease; he had a love of pleasure, too, of freedom, of idleness; and the sort of talent that consists in brilliantly describing what one could do and what one would like to do: in sketching schemes, verbally—literary, financial, artistic, no matter what—with so much charm, such aplomb ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... advanced along the footpath, my hands in my pockets. Yet my mind leaped from point to point in eager speculation. The whole thing was puzzling. I had come expecting a mere bit of play-acting, with all details left in the control of others. I anticipated no more than a few weeks of idleness, with, perhaps, the overseeing of a plantation, to partially keep my time occupied. Instead I found myself instantly involved in a network of mystery where even murder was part of the play. Little as I liked Coombs, this Creole was even more ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... suffice for recreation unless they are wisely used. Mere idleness is not recreation; and many people use their leisure in DISSIPATION instead of in recreation. "Dissipation" is the opposite of thrift. It means to "throw away," or to be wasteful. A person may "dissipate" his income. We have come to understand ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... year 1788. He was the only child of a reckless and unprincipled father and a passionate mother. He was educated at Harrow School, and afterwards at Trinity College, Cambridge. His first volume— Hours of Idleness— was published in 1807, before he was nineteen. A critique of this juvenile work which appeared in the 'Edinburgh Review' stung him to passion; and he produced a very vigorous poetical reply in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. After the publication of this book, Byron travelled ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... avoid that combination and stick to his own profession. He had been mate of the Gregg, when that ancient ark foundered off Kebatu, and also held a clean master's ticket; but somehow he found that masters and mates were a drug on the Batavian market just then; hence his three barren weeks of idleness. ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of tautology, that there can no longer be any wage-labor when there is no ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... martial fervour. Elderly laggards enrolled themselves in the Volunteer Training Corps. Young married men who had not attested under the Derby Scheme rushed out to enlist. The Tribunal languished in idleness for lack of claimants for exemption. Exempted men, with the enthusiastic backing of employers, lost the sense of their indispensability and joined the colours. An energetic lady who had met the Serbian Minister in London ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... little cry of impatience: she had held her peace so long that even her slow Indian nature could endure no more. "What will my father Athabasca do?" she asked. "With idleness the flesh grows soft, and the iron ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... real granaries of Rome. Thus were all the best interests of the country sacrificed to the unproductive population of the city. Such was the golden age of the republic—a state of utter misery and hardship among the productive classes, and idleness among the Roman people—a state of society which could but lead to ruin. The farmers, without substantial returns, lost energy and spirit, and dwindled away. Their estates fell into the hands of great proprietors, who owned great numbers of slaves. They themselves ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... time. The yacht is delicious idleness, but it is idleness. I am longing for it now, I am still so very weak. My dear Sibley has left me to be married. She marries a Hanoverian officer. We change countries—I mean,' the princess caught back her tongue, 'she will ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he annually diverts from wholesome and useful purposes in the United Kingdom, would be a set-off against the Window Tax. He is one of the most shameless frauds and impositions of this time. In his idleness, his mendacity, and the immeasurable harm he does to the deserving, - dirtying the stream of true benevolence, and muddling the brains of foolish justices, with inability to distinguish between the base coin of distress, and the true currency we have always among us, - he is ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... the one hand is the outcry against the cruelty and heartlessness manifested in not making better provision for the people in the concentration camps: on the other, the equally loud outcry against our injustice in leaving the British refugees in idleness and poverty at the coast, in order to keep the people in the concentration camps supplied with every luxury and comfort. I have even frequently heard the expression that we are 'spoiling' the people in the Boer camps. We are, alas, not in a position to spoil anybody, ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... Mr. Lind left the room. Soon after, Douglas, whose self-respect, annihilated by Conolly, had at first been thoroughly restored by Mr. Lind, felt upset again by the conclusion of the interview. Finding solitude and idleness intolerable, he went into the streets, though he no longer felt any desire to meet his acquaintances, and twice crossed the Haymarket to avoid them. As he strolled about, thinking of all that had been said to ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... dignity are her clothing; And she laugheth at the time to come. She openeth her mouth with wisdom, And the law of kindness is on her tongue, She looketh well to the ways of her household, And eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed, Her husband also, and he praiseth her, saying, Many daughters have done virtuously, But thou excellest them all, Give her the fruit of her hand, And let her works ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... should not have been asked for them at all, had not one of the officials, who chanced to be less wilted by the intense heat than his fellows,—they had been gazing lazily at us, singly and in battalions, in the intervals of their rigorous idleness, for the last four and twenty hours,—suddenly taken a languid interest in us about one hour before our departure. The landlord said he was "simply ridiculous." On another occasion, a waiter in a hotel recognized the Russians who were with us ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... society, which distinguish these dreary meetings, have been long unfortunately notorious. No nation is so careful of the great, or so indifferent to the lesser, moralities of life as the English; and in no country is society, indebted, perhaps, to polished idleness for its greatest charms, more completely misunderstood. Too busy to watch the feelings of others, and too earnest to moderate our own, that true politeness which pays respect to age, which strives ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... slaves, it would overwhelm every compassionate heart—it would move even the obdurate to sympathy. There is also a vast sum of suffering inflicted upon the slave by humane masters, as a punishment for that idleness and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... glanced rapidly and keenly at the marquis; but whether or not in these words he had sought to sound Montagu, and that glance sufficed to show him it were bootless or dangerous to speak more plainly, he resumed with an altered voice, "Enough of this: Warwick will discover the idleness of such design; and if he land, his trumpets must ring to a more kindling measure. John Montagu, thinkest thou that Margaret of Anjou and the Lancastrians will not rather win thy brother to their side? There is the true ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... left him by an old maiden aunt with whom he had been a favorite, which had hitherto seemed to do him nothing but harm, enabling him to alternate fits of comparative diligence with fits of positive idleness. I have said also, I believe, that, although he could do nothing thoroughly, application alone was wanted to enable him to distinguish himself in more than one thing. His forte was engraving on wood; and my husband said, that, if he could do so well with so little practice ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... meant by Death that day, when lo, to thee 1050 Pains onely in Child-bearing were foretold, And bringing forth, soon recompenc't with joy, Fruit of thy Womb: On mee the Curse aslope Glanc'd on the ground, with labour I must earne My bread; what harm? Idleness had bin worse; My labour will sustain me; and least Cold Or Heat should injure us, his timely care Hath unbesaught provided, and his hands Cloath'd us unworthie, pitying while he judg'd; How much more, if we pray him, will his ear 1060 Be open, and his heart to pitie incline, And teach ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... reader often becomes aware of that composed, sagacious, half-droll, quizzical mind that indicates, with grave gentleness, the folly of ambition, the vanity of riches, the value of the present hour, the idleness of borrowing trouble, the blessing of the golden medium in fortune, the absurdity of flatterers, and the comfort of keeping a steadfast spirit amid the inevitable ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... them, taught 'em thrift. While you are promoting idleness and loose-living.... But this is only an opening for what I wanted to say.—I had a letter last week from the Tennessee and Northern people, the Buffalo plan has matured, they're pushing the construction ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... call?—oh, yes; he 'make himself,' you say: that is it. My frien', he was abominable! He brag'; he talk' through the nose; yes, and he was niggardly, rich as he was! But you, you yo'ng men of the new generation, you are gentlemen of the idleness; you are aristocrats, with polish an' with culture. An' yet you throw your money away—yes, you throw it to poor Europe ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... young clergyman, who had set to work among them with so much energy and zeal, was the son of a dishonest rogue, who ought to have been sent to jail as many of them had been. Felix had not failed to make enemies in the Brickfields by his youthful intolerance of idleness, beggary, and drunkenness. The owners of the gin-palaces hated him, and not a few of the rival religious sects were, to say the least, uncharitably disposed towards one who had drawn so many of their followers ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... week, or less than an eighth of what she made easily a few years ago. The tide of prosperity came and went, as with our northern pitmen, and left nobody the richer. The women bravely squandered their gains, kept the men in idleness, and gave themselves up, as I was told, to sweethearting and a merry life. From week's end to week's end it was one continuous gala in Monastier; people spent the day in the wine-shops, and the drum or the bagpipes led on the bourrees up to ten at night. Now these dancing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the family were reduced to that terrorizing state of idleness which comes to those who stand about their dead, Elizabeth took Jack and wandered out of the house to where she could see Joe standing near the well. Together they glanced across to the men standing around ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... celibate monks. Here, in the Holy Mountain, as the Slavs call it, there are monasteries representing all the various denominations of the Greek Orthodox Church: Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Russian, each swarming with hundreds of monks, who pass their time in idleness. Not only are women forbidden to enter this domain, but even female dogs or ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... the evening papers, but spent his time loafing around the busiest corners and watching all that went on about the streets. This unusual conduct attracted the attention of his cronies, and a number of newsboys gathered about him trying to find out the reason of his strange idleness. ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... cried Roderick. "My work 's over. I can't work—I have n't worked all winter. If I were fit for anything, this sentimental collapse would have been just the thing to cure me of my apathy and break the spell of my idleness. But there 's a perfect vacuum here!" And he tapped his forehead. "It 's bigger than ever; it grows ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... are very right, for Idleness is the Root of all Evil; but as the World goes now, he must live by himself that would keep out ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... the coulter rusts That should deracinate such savagery; The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover, Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank, Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems But hateful docks, rough thistles, kexes, burs, Losing both beauty and utility; And as our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges, Defective in their natures, grow to wildness. Even so our houses and ourselves and children ...
— The Life of King Henry V • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]
... possible," thought the pharaoh, "to build a temple for such childish amusements, and besides to engrave the results on golden tablets? These holy men do not know what to snatch at from idleness." ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... deadly power of the evil angels, there is no one more distinct in its gratuitous, and unreconcilable sin, than that this—of all the living creatures between earth and sky—should be the one chosen to amuse the apathy of our murderous idleness, with skill-less, effortless, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... any system except as he permitted. His position developed arbitrary power and made him proud and aristocratic. With a few members of his family, he lived in his castle, far removed from serfs and vassals. He spent his life alternately in feats of arms or in systematic idleness. Away from home much of the time, fighting to defend his castle or obtain new territory, or engaging in hunting, while the wife and mother cared for the home, he developed strength ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... with urgent entreaties, and pitiful stories, and my conscience forbids my ever postponing their business for any other matter; for, with shame and grief of heart I say it, by their unpaid labour I live—their nakedness clothes me, and their heavy toil maintains me in luxurious idleness. Surely the least I can do is to hear these, my most injured benefactors; and, indeed, so intense in me is the sense of the injury they receive from me and mine, that I should scarce dare refuse them the very clothes from my back, or food from my plate, ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... that a young member of Parliament should bear this in his mind, and especially a member who has not worked his way up to notoriety outside the House, because to him there will be great facility for idleness and neglect. ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... narrowly escaped extinction in the winter of 1609. The colonists found none among their number to fill Smith's place, and soon relapsed into the idleness and improvidence which he had so resolutely counteracted. They ate all the food which he had laid up for them, and when it was gone the Indians would sell them no more. Squads of hungry men began to wander about the country, and many ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... Work.—Labor is a social blessing rather than a curse. There can be no doubt that habits of industry are desirable for the child as well as for the adult. Idleness is the forerunner of ignorance, laziness, and general incapacity. It is no kindness to a child to permit him to spend all his time out of school in play. It gives him skill, a new respect for labor, and a new conception of the value of money, if he has a paper route, mows ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... sixty-four notes in a bar in four-time (adagio), they produce only thirty-two, or even sixteen. The action of the arm necessary for producing a true tremolo, demands from them too great an effort. This idleness is intolerable. ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... the master spinners had failed before the close of 1842; dwelling houses to the number of 3,000, were shut up; and the occupiers of many hundreds more were unable to pay rates at all. Five thousand persons were walking the streets in compulsory idleness, and the Burnley guardians wrote to the Secretary of State that the distress was far beyond their management; so that a government commissioner and government funds were sent down without delay. At a meeting in ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... and disgust; but, with a word of thanks, Mackenzie had returned to his window-sill, and we sauntered unwatched through the folding-doors into the adjoining room. Here the window looked down into the courtyard; it was still open; and as we gazed out in apparent idleness, Raffles reassured me. ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... difficulties to me. The matter, of course, isn't one of money, which I'd always find for her; but, then, to compel her to eat, drink, and with all that to do nothing—that would mean to condemn her to idleness, indifference, apathy; and you know what the end will be then. Therefore, we must think of some occupation for her. And that's the very matter which we must exert our brains about. Make ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... old, intending to have him educated as a lawyer. But Hernando cared nothing for books, and after wasting two years at college returned home, to the great annoyance of his parents, who were glad enough when, after another year of idleness, he proposed to go and seek his fortune in the New World so lately discovered by Columbus. An exploring expedition was just being fitted out, and Hernando Cortes had quite made up his mind to join it, when he unluckily fell from a high wall which he was ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... curious piece of antiquity near this which he called a temple of the goddess Anaitis. Having often talked of going to see it, he and I set out after breakfast, attended by his servant, a fellow quite like a savage. I must observe here, that in Sky there seems to be much idleness; for men and boys follow you, as colts follow passengers upon a road. The usual figure of a Sky boy, is a lown with bare legs and feet, a dirty kilt, ragged coat and waistcoat, a bare head, and a stick ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... as only a poor student knows how to find. Wasted time he called it; for he took little interest in college discipline or college fun and was given to haphazard reading, "sinfully strolling from book to book, from care to idleness," as he said. Later he declared that the only good thing he found in Harvard was a ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... would have left her to long hours of idleness, with only books for companions (and Alexina cared little for novels lacking in psychology, or in revelations of the many phases of life of which she was personally so ignorant); and only his ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... all shouted, "Carcassonne!" And at that word their idleness was gone as a dream is gone from a dreamer waked with a shout. And soon the great march began that faltered no more nor wavered. Unchecked by battles, undaunted in lonesome spaces, ever unwearied by the vulturous years, the warriors of Camorak held on; and Arleon's ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... be thought that the outcast spent his time in sheer idleness. St. George would often find him tucked away in one of his big chairs devouring some book he had culled from the old general's library in the basement—a room adjoining the one occupied by a firm of young ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... sport had Natty driven the plough, not in idleness had he hollowed the sand. He sought his food in the furrow, and dug ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... excellence to many, at the same time that adequate progress was made in the study of the sciences we have named, should be deemed unfit for his profession, and not be allowed to relieve himself from disgrace by magnifying the difficulties of his task or by complaints of the idleness or want of capacity of his pupils. As children will take interest in what they learn in proportion to their understanding of its bearing upon their own happiness, and upon their actual life and surroundings, the knowledge of ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... peasants, in holiday costume, talking and laughing together, with Miss Gwynne's school children in their scarlet cloak and best frocks. They all seem to be lingering about, with nothing to do, and enjoying their idleness and June holiday as thoroughly as the greatest philanthropist in the world could desire. As we approach the entrance of the Park, we see another magnificent arch spanning the road. We turn to the large iron gates, and they, too, are circled ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... interests attended to, and from thence they unite in placing a confidence in their representatives, as well as in those in whose hands the execution of the laws is placed. Industry has there taken place of idleness, and economy of dissipation. Two or three years of good crops, and a ready market for the produce of their lands, have put everyone in good humor, and, in some instances, they even impute to the government what is due only to ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... to be got from books and the learning to be got from experience," said I sententiously. "If you have less of your share of the one, perhaps you have more of the other. I cannot believe you have spent all your life in mere idleness and pleasure." ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Vanity a less Motive than Idleness to this kind of Mercenary Pursuit. A Fop who admires his Person in a Glass, soon enters into a Resolution of making his Fortune by it, not questioning but every Woman that falls in his way will do him as much Justice as he does himself. When an Heiress sees a ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... looked again at the verses, clearing his eyes with his hand, as if he might happily be mistaken. But no, there were the foolish lines, and some sentiments most unmanly frank of love and idleness among the moor and heather. He growled; he frowned below his shaggy brows: "Come down this instant and put an end to ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... We may all be out of the house before another month, and I am not going to leave the servants here in idleness, with no master ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... It means working with God to produce the results. We can not sit down and fold our hands in idleness and expect things to work themselves out. We must be workers, not shirkers. The man who prays for a bountiful harvest but prepares no ground and plants no seed will pray in vain. Faith and works must go together. We must permit God ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... by name, who was said to be the most unoccupied man in London, who was administering food and drink to himself with a serious air of delicate zest, as though he were presiding benevolently at some work of charity and mercy. He had certainly flourished on his idleness like a green bay tree! Hugh was inclined to believe in the necessity to happiness of the observance of some primal laws, like the law of labour, but here was a contradiction to all his theories. He sighed ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... been unfortunate in her parents, for both drank, and she had grown up without care or supervision. She had neither brother nor sister. At school she was always either at the top or bottom of her class according as a fit of diligence or idleness seized her. She was a wild passionate child, feeling bitterly the neglect with which she was treated, her ragged clothes, her unkempt appearance. She was feared and yet liked by the girls of her ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... anxiety, and probably affected his health. She did not long survive him, but died on February 4, 1887, at Mentone in her fifty-fifth year. Count du Moncel was an indefatigable worker, who, instead of abandoning himself to idleness and pleasure like many of his order, believed it his duty to be active and useful in his own day, as his ancestors had been ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... on the work of others after one has become an able-bodied man or woman is to live the life of a perpetual baby. No life so little justifies itself as that of the idle rich. The idle poor man suffers the penalty of idleness in his own person. He gives little to the world; and he gets little in return. The idle rich man gives nothing, and gets much in return. And while he lives, someone has to work the harder for his being in the world; and when he dies the world is left poorer than it would have been had he never been ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... miss excellent opportunities of making themselves independent, by their idleness, in refusing any place, however profitable, &c. if there is not a kitchen maid kept to wait ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... thereabouts burned, I did now offer 20s., and he demands 50s., and I think I shall give it him, though it be only as a monument of the fire. So to the New Exchange, where I find my wife, and so took her to Unthanke's, and left her there, and I to White Hall, and thence to Westminster, only out of idleness, and to get some little pleasure to my 'mauvais flammes', but sped not, so back and took up my wife; and to Polichinelli at Charing Crosse, which is prettier and prettier, and so full of variety that ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... he is always liable to be surpassed. He is in daily danger of being out-bidden; his very bread depends upon caprice; and he lives in a state of uncertainty and never-ceasing fear. His is not, indeed, the dog's life, 'hunger and idleness;' but it is worse; for it is 'idleness with slavery,' the latter being the just price of the former. Slaves frequently are well fed and well clad; but slaves dare not speak; they dare not ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... our Relicthood en bloc was its idleness. I never saw one of them with a piece of knitting or any other work in her hands during all the weeks we were there. In fine weather they loitered and basked in the garden, gossiping or amusing themselves with novelettes cut from the penny papers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... Manley, who was a friend of Swift. Manley incurred the Dean's resentment in 1718 by opening letters addressed to him. The postal arrangements were, as may be imagined, miserably defective. Owing to the carelessness of postmasters, the idleness of post-boys, bad horses, and sometimes the want of horses, much time was ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Oxford with intense regret. It was the Holy City of the Tractarian Movement; and at this moment the progress of that Movement was the one thing worth living for, if live indeed he must. He went forth bewailing his exile and enforced idleness, as a man bewails the loss of the love of his youth. For a time he traveled in Italy and in the south of France. On his return to England he went to stay with his friend and cousin, Sir Richard Calmady. Brockhurst ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... dragoon said, an accident had lost him the first game, it soon became evident that the superior activity and endurance of his antagonist were equally certain to make him lose the second. The idleness of a garrison life, fat feeding, and soft lying, had disqualified the soldier to compete for any length of time with a man like the Navarrese, accustomed to the severest hardships, whose most luxurious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... originate a novel, as with the Meunier d'Angibault, which she ascribes to "a walk, a discovery, a day of leisure, an hour of idleness." On a ramble with her children she came upon what she calls "a nook in a wild paradise;" a mill, whose owner had allowed everything to grow around the sluices that chose to spring up, briar and alder, oaks and rushes. The ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... this duty of hers by strictly keeping Silla from passing her leisure time in idleness, which was dangerous for young people. Sewing and darning and patching all the evening—there could be no better way of being ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... exposed to the chance of circumstance, and, in consequence, to the unbiassed sway of my natural disposition, which was restless in the extreme. For this there is no alternative—for good or bad, work it will, and in such a case idleness is indeed the root of ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... heart," replied Sparkle—"Hell is the general title now given to any well-known gaming-house, and really appears to be well chosen; for all the miseries that can fall to the lot of human nature, are to be found in those receptacles of idleness, duplicity, and villany. Gaming is an estate to which all the world has a pretence, though few espouse it who are willing to secure either their estates or reputations: and these Hells may fairly be considered as so many half-way houses to the Fleet or King's Bench Prisons, or some ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... now and then to look out of the window, where nothing much was to be seen except the orchard, at a little distance from the house, and Claudius Tiberius, sunning himself pleasantly upon the porch. Four weeks had been a pleasant vacation, but two weeks of comparative idleness, added to it, were too much for an active mind and body to endure. Three or four times he had tried to begin the book that was to bring fame and fortune, and as many times had failed. Hitherto Harlan's work had not been obliged to wait for inspiration, and it was ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... steady and radical reduction of loans and discounts, following a panic and extending until new enterprises are very scarce, till prices are very low, till there is wide-spread idleness among workmen, a decrease in salaries and in interest rates, when the public is wary and speculation dead, and expenditures are cut down as far as possible, may be taken to mean a rapid and continued resumption of every prosperous business: but if the above process is only ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... people adown the Mississippi. The animals had never been saved in an overflow; and besides the cruelty of letting them starve by thousands, the loss to the people was irreparable, as the following year must inevitably be replete with idleness and poverty till more stock could be obtained to ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... could be more amusing than a collection of poems that represented a different poetic ideal—a collection of verse with none of the pretensions to artistic merit claimed by the superstars of the poetic world—the spontaneous productions of nonpoets in moments of idleness or desperation. Apparently some of the inscribers in the bog-houses used excrement as a medium for—as well as a subject of—their inscriptions. The Merry-Thought, then, is not even the kind of art that Dryden attacked in MacFlecknoe and Pope in his Dunciad—the work ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... would yield only 33 lbs. avoirdupois of wheat, and 99 of potatoes. The immediate effect of this facility of supplying the wants of nature is, that the man who can, by labouring two days in the week, maintain himself and family, will devote the remaining five to idleness or dissipation. The same regions that produce the banana, also yield the two species of manioc, the bitter and the sweet: both of which appear to have been cultivated before the conquest.—Foreign ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... desire, to do her duty. She wished to serve God, obey her parents, and do any good work that might be in her power. And who does not see how much better she was than a useless fine lady, who could do nothing but pass her life in idleness? Who will not own that King Solomon was right when he said that the price of a virtuous woman is far above rubies? Gold and gems shine, but the pure light of a good woman's life sheds a better and more enduring radiance on the world than any jewels could do. And her value no one can estimate. ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... may turn men into machines—all clatter and monotony; or it may make them fussy nuisances. "A soulless activity," says Canon Ainger, "may save a man from vagrancy only by turning him into a thing; or it may keep him from idleness by making him an egotist." There is the man who, to use the common phrase, "sticks at it" with scarcely a competing thought or interest. He scorns ease, and lives laborious days. For what? I once heard it said, and ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... neighbourhood there hangs, like some great veil of rust or gigantic cobweb, the idleness and pensiveness of the long vacation. Mr. Snagsby, law-stationer of Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, is sensible of the influence not only in his mind as a sympathetic and contemplative man, but ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... on the main land, the same fact has brought about a similar result. The emancipated negro could not be depended upon for regular work. He established himself on his small freehold, and lived, like Theodore Hook's club-man, "in idleness and ease." But for some years past laborers have been brought in freely from India and China, and the fertile colony is now in a state of abundant prosperity. Mr. Trollope seems to us to refute effectually ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... answered fiercely, flinging out an arm to drag forward her son. "Is he to waste his youth here in softness and idleness? But yesternight that ribald mocked him with his lack of scars. Shall he take scars in the orchard of the Kasbah here? Is he to be content with those that come from the scratch of a bramble, or is he to learn to be a fighter and leader of the Children of the ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... more than your share, in making America great, because you neither preach nor practise such a doctrine. You work, yourselves, and you bring up your sons to work. If you are rich and are worth your salt you will teach your sons that tho they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical research—work of the type ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... found out that he had seen all that was worth seeing in the Lake country, and that there was nothing so enjoyable as the placid idleness of Fellside; and at Fellside Lady Lesbia could not always avoid him without a too-marked intention, so he tasted the sweetness of her society to a much greater extent than was good for his peace, if the case were indeed as hopeless as Lady Mary declared. He strolled about the grounds with her; he ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... six months he tarried in the enchanted land in one long round of merry-making and gay enjoyment. But his thoughts were ever turned toward his father's home in the Lowlands across the sea, and he longed to behold again his gentle mother Sigelind. Then he grew tired of his life of idleness and ease, and he wished that he might go out again into the busy world of manly action and worthy deeds. And day by day this feeling grew stronger, and ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... be ten days going to Quebec. I propose visiting the priests at every village, and endeavouring to get some knowledge of the nature of the country, in order to my intended settlement. Idleness being the root of all evil, and the nurse of love, I am determin'd to keep myself employed; nothing can be better suited to my temper than my present design; the pleasure of cultivating lands here is as much superior to what can be found in the same employment in England, as watching the expanding ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... wondering where the ravens, which frequented the neighbourhood of the river and its mountainous cliffs, built their nests; but wondering did not help him, and he gave up the riddle, and began, in his pleasant holiday idleness, to look about at other things in the unfrequented wilderness through which the river ran. To trace the raven by following it home seemed too difficult, but it was easy to follow a great bumble-bee, which went blundering by, alighting upon a block of stone, took flight ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... idleness and the lone company of my own thoughts no longer, my daughter, and I sets off to travel on my own account, taking money at back-doors, and living on broken meats I begged into the bargain, and working at nights instead of thinking. I knows a few arts, my daughter, ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... had been obliged to look about him for some remunerative occupation. Hunger is a hard taskmaster, and hard as it seemed to this man who had been reared and had lived till then virtually in idleness, he had now to turn his hands to useful work; but the employment he had been able to secure had not lasted long. Without a word of warning, he had been dismissed as incapable of the work demanded, and he was just now returning from a last vain effort to ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... called upon to draw a picture of the times and of men from what I have seen, heard, and in part known, I should in one word say that idleness, dissipation, and extravagance seem to have laid fast hold of them; that speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration and of every order of men; that party ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... gruesome place was Elvidner (misery), the hall of the goddess Hel, whose dish was Hunger. Her knife was Greed. "Idleness was the name of her man, Sloth of her maid, Ruin of her threshold, Sorrow of her bed, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... second time in my life that I had enjoyed what might be properly called idleness. The first was during my short stay with Aunt Bretta, and then I confess that I often did at times feel weary from not knowing what to do with myself. Now I never felt anything like weariness, I was too happy to spend the greater part of the day in ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... thousand years to live; and as you would if you knew you must die to-morrow." "You can never enter the kingdom of God with hardness against any one, for God is love, and if you love God you will love one another." "Be diligent with your hands, for godliness does not lead to idleness." "You ought not to cross your children unnecessarily, for it makes them ill-natured." To a woman: "You ought to dress yourself in modest apparel, such as becomes the people of God, and teach your family to ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... is, and one that leaves little of profit behind it. I am sick to death of my office,—brutal captains and brutal sailors; continual complaints of mutual wrong, which I have no power to set right, and which, indeed, seem to have no right on either side; calls of idleness or ceremony from my travelling countrymen, who seldom know what they are in search of at the commencement of their tour, and never have attained any desirable end at the close of it; beggars, cheats, simpletons, unfortunates, so mixed up that it is impossible to distinguish one from another, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... But, surrounded by the vapid jealousies of the most useless people who had ever tried to rule a country, he, no more than his father, had the faintest chance to show the Conde quality in war. Adrift as a comparatively young man, his world about his ears, with no occupation, small wonder that in idleness he fell into the pursuit of satisfactions for his baser appetites. He would have been, there is good reason to believe, a happy man and a busy one in a camp. There is this to be said for him: that alone among the spineless crowd of ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... sums of money necessary to finance our allies as well as ourselves were promptly oversubscribed in a series of loans, the first and least of which ran into three billion dollars, the fourth into six billions, a sum larger than any single loan ever floated by any other nation. Idleness was abolished. The order to "work or fight" was strictly enforced upon all the people, rich and poor alike, for any attempt to except any one or any class would have been blown away in a gale of laughter. In a space ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... are the work of the philosopher, nor is the testimony of antiquity really ambiguous on the point. [82] When he wrote them is uncertain; but they bear every mark of being an early exercise of his pen. Perhaps they were begun during his exile in Corsica, when enforced idleness must have tasked the resources of his busy mind, and continued after his return to Rome, when he found that Nero was addicted to the same pursuit. There are eight complete tragedies and one praetexta, the Octavia, which is generally supposed to be by a later hand, as well as considerable fragments ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... it. The spell of the syren was over me. I went out, hypocritically persuading myself, that I was only animated by a capricious curiosity to know the girl's name, which once satisfied, would leave me at rest on the matter, and free to laugh at my own idleness and folly as soon ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... the youth confer with Francois Ribaut. The priest is dependent on his patron. The Church fabric is swept away, for Church and state went down together. With only one friend in the State, Valois must now quit his place of enforced idleness. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... and letters, and am alone, which Locke says, is bad company. 'Be not solitary, be not idle.'—Um!—the idleness is troublesome; but I can't see so much to regret in the solitude. The more I see of men, the less I like them. If I could but say so of women too, all would be well. Why can't I? I am now six-and-twenty; ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... become sufficiently familiar with the process, and then directed me by gestures to take his place, and I soon found myself busily engaged reducing the bark to powder. At first the change from my hitherto enforced idleness was a pleasant relief, but I soon found that it was hard and exhausting labor; the perspiration rolled down my face in streams, and I felt a strong inclination to cease operations. My new master, however, plainly looked with disfavor upon such an intention, for the ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... east of the Park. Beautiful dwellings may also be found on Lake avenue and Franklin street. The streets are thronged with a gay and brilliant multitude, engaged in riding, driving, walking, each enjoying to the utmost a facinating kind of busy idleness. But by the time the tourist has glanced at all this he will be thinking of clean napkins, and will be interested to know what may be afforded in ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... think what would happen to her when she left the convent. There would not be money enough left her to sit down in a small flat and do nothing; she would have to work. Well, she would have to do that in any case, for idleness was not natural to her, and she would have to work for somebody besides herself—for her poor people—and this she could do by giving singing lessons. Where? In Dulwich? But to go back to the house in which she lived her life, to the room which used to be hung with ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... content. For that day at least, there was a pleasant idleness ahead of him, nothing but his own wants to attend to. The morrow would see him armed with spade and rake, probably wrestling with weeds, digging deep in the good brown earth, possibly mowing the grass, and such like jobs as fall to the lot of an under-gardener. Antony smiled to ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... among the artisans. These artisans, however, unreasonably ascribed this reduction, not to the necessities of trade, but to the avarice of their employers; and they still more unreasonably proceeded to their usual correctives—voluntary idleness, and the destruction of property. The example was set by the silk-weavers of Spitalfields and Bethnal-Green, who refused to work except at an increased rate of wages, and made their way by night into the shops of workmen possessed of materials belonging to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... not be thought that the outcast spent his time in sheer idleness. St. George would often find him tucked away in one of his big chairs devouring some book he had culled from the old general's library in the basement—a room adjoining the one occupied by a firm of young lawyers—Pawson & Pawson (only one brother was ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... progress whatever was made toward a permanent establishment. During the intense cold, the scurvy caused fearful mischief among the French; no fewer than fifty perished from that dreadful malady during the winter. Demoralized by misery and idleness, the little colony became turbulent and lawless, and Roberval was obliged to resort to extreme severity of punishment before ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... race-courses at the North. True, there are a few, and they are thronged chiefly by Southerners, and 'Northern men with Southern principles,' and supported mainly by the patronage of slaveholders who summer at the North. Cock-fighting and horse-racing are "Southern institutions." The idleness, contempt of labor, dissipation, sensuality, brutality, cruelty, and meanness, engendered by the habit of making men and women work without pay, and flogging them if they demur at it, constitutes a congenial soil out ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... will be more prosperous if hunger joins battle first. Let hunger captain us, and so let us take the first chance of conflict. Let it decide the day in our stead, and let our camp remain free from the stir of war; if hunger retreat beaten, we must break off idleness. He who is fresh easily overpowers him who is shaken with languor. The hand that is flaccid and withered will come fainter to the battle. He whom any hardship has first wearied, will bring slacker hands to the steel. When he that is wasted with sickness engages with the sturdy, the ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... we are beginning to do it, too. Now you will find me just as practical as anybody. Nine months in the year I teach,—moral and mental philosophy are my special branches,—and during vacation I am not going to wear out my brain in a summer school, nor empty my purse by lounging about in idleness. Now what could be better than for me to come to a perfectly lovely place like this, which I fancy more and more every minute, and take care of a nice little child, which, I am sure, will be a pleasure in itself, and give me a lot of time to read besides? However, I wish you to ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... business is so slack in Baltimore just at present, almost every male resident, not engaged in law or physic, has, or supposes himself to have, something to do. Instances of absolute idleness are very rare. So, by ten, A. M., all the men betake themselves to their offices, and there busy themselves about their affairs, after a fashion, energetic or desultory, till after two o'clock. The dinner hour varies from three to half-past five. Post-prandial ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... passed by Chuntche all the descendants of that prince's father were declared entitled to wear a yellow girdle and to receive a pension from the state; while, with a view to prevent their becoming a danger to the dynasty, they were excluded from civil or military employment, and assigned to a life of idleness. This imperial colony was, and is still, one of the most peculiar and least understood of the departments of the Tartar government; and although it has served its purpose in preventing dynastic squabbles, there must always remain the doubt as to how far the dynasty has been injured by the ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, and had seen Provence to their entire edification while he was merely peering about Notre-Dame-des-Doms and the Fort Saint-Andre. Of a more indolent and leisurely turn of mind, he suffers—and perhaps justly—the penalty of his joyous idleness, for even lawyers and good ladies with hidden papers are rare. Revolutionary sieges, fires, and a wise discretion have led to the destroying of many a fine old page, and it is often in vain one goes to these decaying cities of Provence. "We see," he said, gesticulating dejectedly, ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... the crouching team of dogs. There were five of them; great huskies, shaggy of coat and fiercely wolfish. They were fat and soft from idleness. But they would serve, for the sled was light, and a few days' run would ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... may be true; but it would be an injustice to human nature to suppose that man, in any country, would prefer dirt, poverty, and idleness, to comfort, activity, and employment, where he could be sure of possessing the fruits of his labours. But where the unfortunate peasant is liable to see his whole crop carried off the land at the pleasure of one of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... sober and hardworking. He was quite clear in his mind that all nobility should be put down, and that all property in land should be taken away from men who were enabled by such property to live in idleness. What should be done with the land when so taken away was a question which he had not yet learnt to answer. At the present moment he was accustomed to say very hard words of Mr. Slide behind his back, because of the change which had been effected in the ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... peasantry of Russia is not simply material. It is also moral. In the language of a recent traveller, "they are the drunkenest people in Europe." The principal intoxicant is a sort of whisky called "vodka." With drunkenness exist also dirtiness, idleness, dishonesty, and untruthfulness. And as yet little has been done to ameliorate this degradation. Ignorance prevails everywhere. Even of the young people of the peasant class more than eighty per cent. can neither read nor write. There ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... that it is very possible for people to like the country, and be happy in it. But as to the fine young ladies you talk of, the truth is, that they neither love, nor would be long contented in any place; their whole happiness consists in idleness and finery; they have neither learned to employ themselves in anything useful, nor to improve their minds. As to every kind of natural exercise, they are brought up with too much delicacy to be able to bear it, and from the improper indulgences they meet with, they learn to tremble ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... as he opened it, for Dr. Livesey had kindly motioned me to come round from the side-table, where I had been eating, to enjoy the sport of the search. On the first page there were only some scraps of writing, such as a man with a pen in his hand might make for idleness or practice. One was the same as the tattoo mark, "Billy Bones his fancy"; then there was "Mr. W. Bones, mate," "No more rum," "Off Palm Key he got itt," and some other snatches, mostly single words and unintelligible. I could not help ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... him through the doorway with affectionately mocking eyes, while the summer sun, forcing its way through the sturdy leafage of the chestnuts that grew in front of the windows, filled the whole room with the greenish-gold of the midday light and shade, and the heart grew soft in the sweet languor of idleness, carelessness, ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... to breathe the scented air of Sennaar saloons, and to lounge in listless idleness with young Sennaar, I am weary of the simple purity of manners that distinguishes this people, and long for the pleasing, if pointless frivolities ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... a thrill of indignation at that accusation of idleness. Had she not made two whole beds, and even stooped to pick stray pins off the carpet? She pushed the door open and walked ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... what I am in her eyes? What does she feel towards me? Love? That is inadmissible. Pity, perhaps? This then, is the end of my grand dreams—to be an object of pity? I have just answered her letter to say that I am settled here with the fixed intention of ending my useless existence in quiet and idleness. Do you remember a scene in Henry Heine's 'Reisebilder,' when a young student kisses a pretty girl, who lets him have his own way and makes no great resistance, because he has told her, 'I will be gone to-morrow at dawn, and I will never see you ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... green and warm that presently she lay down upon it, her head pillowed upon her arm, her eyes gazing through the fountain mist and down the emerald slopes to where ran the elmwood avenue. She gazed in idleness, through half-shut eyelids, wrapped in lullabies and drowsy warmth. Hoof-beats between the elms troubled her not. When through the mist of falling water and the veil of drooping leaves she saw riding towards the house a youth clad in blue, the horse and rider seemed but figures in ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... offered prayers and supplications for the averting of this plague. This order consisted chiefly of persons of the lower class, who were either actuated by sincere contrition or who joyfully availed themselves of this pretext for idleness and were hurried along with the tide of distracting frenzy. But as these brotherhoods gained in repute, and were welcomed by the people with veneration and enthusiasm, many nobles and ecclesiastics ranged ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... husband much anxiety, and probably affected his health. She did not long survive him, but died on February 4, 1887, at Mentone in her fifty-fifth year. Count du Moncel was an indefatigable worker, who, instead of abandoning himself to idleness and pleasure like many of his order, believed it his duty to be active and useful in his own day, as his ancestors had been in ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... in idleness—a delay due to England's scruples. But at last all was ready; and on the morning of 1 September the Allied Fleet stood out to sea: seventy-three units of every description, the big ships in single file, flanked by torpedo-boats, steaming ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... opportunity as possible for any attempt at rescue; knowing that it must lead to bloodshed and loss of life, and that if the civil authorities by whom he was accompanied, empowered him to order his men to fire, many innocent persons would probably fall, whom curiosity or idleness had attracted to the spot. He therefore led the party briskly on, avoiding with a merciful prudence the more public and crowded thoroughfares, and pursuing those which he deemed least likely to be infested by disorderly persons. This wise proceeding ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... particular value—a value which, rightly or wrongly, I can't help feeling inestimable—in a modern play of reflecting absolutely and truthfully the life and environment about us; every class, every kind, every emotion, every motive, every occupation, every business, every idleness! Never was life so varied, so complex; what a choice, then! Take what strikes you most, in the hope it will interest others. Take what suits you most to do—what perhaps you can do best—and then do it better. Be truthful, and then nothing ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... you are right, and I am wrong. Certainly, there is no disguising the fact that my life has become a real burden to me, and that business would be far preferable to a state of idleness." ...
— The Last Penny and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... I have never eaten the bread of idleness. I cannot reconcile to my mind a state of inactivity which might even now impose upon the Chilian Republic an annual pension for past services; especially as an Admiral of Peru is actually in command of a portion of the Chilian squadron, whilst other vessels are sent ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... in the streets, women tripping along consciously, men—flaneurs—strolling with their well-known look of watchful idleness, and she felt herself to be one of life's prisoners. And she knew she would never again take hands with the Paris she had once known so well. Why was that? Because of something in herself, something irrevocable which had ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... small lives filled with idleness, though some useful objects could oft be reached. Yours is largely among these. Yet I am pleased to state you could yet become a fine mind and life trainer by the age of forty, if wise enough to select your true helpers—good books. No one can work effectively alone. My mind has traveled ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... Schiller's occupations while at Dresden; their extent and variety are proof enough that idleness was not among his vices. It was, in truth, the opposite extreme in which he erred. He wrote and thought with an impetuosity beyond what nature always could endure. His intolerance of interruptions first put him on the plan of studying by night; an alluring but pernicious ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... that the natural good sense of the true American woman will finally triumph over the extravagant and unnatural living of the present day and that the handicap of false standards, superficiality, display idleness, and wild pursuit of exotic pleasures shall be lifted from the girls now held prisoners by the tyranny of money and ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... say that. But I think it might lead me into wild extravagance, or into complete idleness. And I think, I know, that I might be tempted irresistibly to give an audience what it wanted. There's something in me which is ready to rush out to satisfy expectation. I hate it, but ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... labour—positive, that which produces life; negative, that which produces death; the most directly negative labour being murder, and the most directly positive the bearing and rearing of children; so that in the precise degree in which murder is hateful on the negative side of idleness, in that exact degree child-rearing is admirable, on ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... noticeable that the depth of recess which I have observed to be essential to nobility of external effect has also a certain dignity of expression, as appearing to be intended rather to admit light to persons quietly occupied in their homes, than to stimulate or favor the curiosity of idleness. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... to break an additional hundred acres for wheat. A little opposition is shown to dividing the land, but only a few Indians oppose. It is a great step, and one that many are prepared for; but it must be executed by a wise and good man. It is the death-blow to heathenism, barbarism, and idleness, and therefore a medicine absolutely necessary to restore health and quicken life; but yet it must be administered by a brave and judicious physician. It is a revolution of habit and of manner of life to the Indian. ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... even then I don't believe you will tell my plans. It will be too late. We are going to tame these nice little girls, and make beggars of them. Something useful, you see, instead of letting them grow up in idleness as they would if they stayed with you. We will go to Prague from here and I will give the little one to my sister. Then we will get out of this accursed country soon as we can, and get away where money comes easy to the poor war refugees. ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... over to his tobacco jar, which stood upon his desk, and leisurely proceeded to fill his pipe. It was rarely he indulged himself in an idle evening, but to-night he somehow felt that idleness would be good. He was beginning to feel the weight ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... "Trois Folies," and by waiting till mid-evening for dinner, we could find the cafe well-nigh empty. The truth was I went there often alone when a fit of depression was on me, and it was no wonder these fits came. A week of idleness, taken by a person who comes from my class, and should be working eight and ten hours a day, is a misfortune often longed for and seldom ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... The vessel was at anchor; she lay, a thing of idleness, quiet and peaceful enough, in a sheltered cove, wherein, I saw at a glance, she was lost to sight from the open sea outside the bar at its entrance, and hid from all but the actual coastline of the land. And all was quiet on her ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... approbation of the men, who soon disposed themselves in careless groups about the ship. They knew it would be a day of idleness; because there were no forays to be made upon the land, for the reason that there wore no human habitations in those parts. To the buccaneers the locality was well known as furnishing a safe retreat when retirement from ...
— Money Island • Andrew Jackson Howell, Jr.
... In England we had cherished the illusion that life abroad would be an easy business, merely consisting of firing practices in the trenches, followed by intervals of idleness in rest-camps, where cigarettes could be obtained for the asking, and tots of rum would be served out ad infinitum. This rum would have a certain charm of its own, make everybody merry, and banish all discomforts due to frost and cold for ever. ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... restless temperament, fed with the infinite varieties of Europe, had seldom given way to the pleasures of indolence. Even satiety had not meant rest. But California—as distinct from San Francisco—with her traditions of luxurious idleness, the low languid murmur of her woods, her soft voluptuous air, her remoteness from the shrieking nerve centres of the United States, the sublime indifference of her people to the racing hours, drew ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... of wonder, idleness, and folly!" said Mr. Gradgrind, leading each away by a hand; ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Cortlandt, "that no paradise or heaven described in anything but the Bible compares with this. According to Virgil's description, the joys on the banks of his river Lethe must have been most sad and dreary, the general idleness and monotony apparently being broken only by wrestling matches between the children, while the rest strolled about with laurel wreaths or rested in the shade. The pilot Palinurus, who had been drowned by falling ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... indicating the young women. He was an epigrammatic and terse speaker. When I reflected aloud upon the order and discipline of service which was necessary to maintain more than a thousand roughish persons in idleness, cleanliness, health, peace, and content, in the inelastic forward spaces of the ship, he said with a certain grimness: "Everything has to be screwed up as tight as you can screw it. And you must keep to the round. What you do to-day you must do to-morrow. But what you don't ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... Court,— In that most pompous room called Paradise,— Whoever pleases thither to resort, May see some works of hers of wondrous price. Her greatness held it no disreputation To hold the needle in her royal hand, Which was a good example to our nation To banish idleness throughout the land. And thus this queen in wisdom thought it fit; The needle's work pleased her, and she ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... rocking in the cradle of the wind, And it's bye, my little wee one, bye; The harvest all is gathered and the pippins all are binned; Bye, my little wee one, bye; The little rabbit's hiding in the golden shock of corn, The thrifty squirrel's laughing bunny's idleness to scorn; You are smiling with the angels in your slumber, smile till morn; So it's bye, my ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Thou didst love me then, but evil men accused me to thee and I was banished. For seven years I have lived in a strange land; but now that I have returned, I have won thy fair daughter as my bride. But I cannot dwell here in idleness while the heathen hold my father's land. I vow by the Holy Rood that I will not rest, and will not claim my wife, until I have purified Suddene from the infidel invaders, and can lay its crown at Rymenhild's feet. Do thou, O King, guard well ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... as they took in the religious teachings of the early missionaries. If they could be made to realize that foul air, insufficient dress, putrid food, alternations of feast and famine, and long bouts of sedulous idleness are destroying them as a people and need not do so, then their decay might be arrested and the fair hopes of the missionary pioneers yet be justified. So long as they soak maize in the streams until it is rotten and eat it together with dried shark—food the merest whiff of which will make a white ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... term of reproach for idleness, and is here quoted only as bearing upon the nautical lubber. In the "Burnynge of Paule's Church, 1563," it is thus explained—"An Abbey-lubber, that was idle, well-fed, a long lewd lither loiterer, that might worke, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... of his life was given to idleness and horses and battles of beasts and of men. Aside from his performances at home he despatched many beasts in public and many men on many occasions. With his own hands and without assistance he gave the finishing stroke to five hippopotami ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... to be spent in idleness," remarked George the next morning, after the four campers had ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... desperation of the rebels, and of the idleness of expecting from them any peaceable compromise. Those who, in the South, will take the oath of allegiance, and who have probably acted only under compulsion, should be spared. But there is a vast number who are as yet ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... thirst for discovery, could not remain long in repose, far removed from idleness though it was. In April, 1809, he finally left the capital of Egypt, and directed his course towards Suez and the peninsula of Sinai, which he resolved to explore before proceeding to Arabia. At this time Arabia was a little-known country, frequented only ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... the prisoners' life must tend to produce the maximum degree of mutual friction. There is absolutely no privacy for the prisoner of war. To be forced to remain, day and night, for months and years in idleness, with a crowd of others, not of one's own choice is, I believe, one of the psychological factors which make internment (especially to many civilians) decidedly worse than imprisonment in a ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... prospect of one day becoming a beadle, to make his debut among the supernumeraries of the Cirque-Olympique; he was leading a wild life, breaking his mother's heart and draining her purse by frequent forced loans. Cantinet senior, much addicted to spirituous liquors and idleness, had, in fact, been driven to retire from business by those two failings. So far from reforming, the incorrigible offender had found scope in his new occupation for the indulgence of both cravings; ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... things. I think I can assess him rightly, for I know something of the soul of the East, but it would be too long a story to tell now. The West knows nothing of the true Oriental. It pictures him as lapped in colour and idleness and luxury and gorgeous dreams. But it is all wrong. The Kaf he yearns for is an austere thing. It is the austerity of the East that is its beauty and its terror ... It always wants the same things at the back ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... with an airy appeal to Madame Idleness—in order to forget. Then, the war seemed a sacred duty, an heroic endeavor, an inevitable trial, according as Southerners chose to take it; but the prevailing opinion was that the solution would come in victory ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... circumstances in which he places them, was mere reminiscence and association. For although the sullen tone of his mind was not fully brought out until he wrote Childe Harold, it is yet evident from his Hours of Idleness that he was tuned to that key before he went abroad. The dark colouring of his mind was plainly imbibed in a mountainous region, from sombre heaths, and in the midst of rudeness and grandeur. He had no taste for more cheerful images, and ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... as keeping a look-out, taking a trick at the wheel, and so on, but, excepting myself, were scarcely fit to go aloft just yet. But I did not think it right or desirable that those of us who were in a fit state to work should eat the bread of idleness. I had therefore seized the opportunity afforded by my talk with the skipper that morning to suggest that my four unwounded and two slightly-wounded men should assist in the working of the ship; as for myself, I said that I should be very pleased ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... all matters of peace and war that the ablest philosophers and generals of the age could bestow. Peter was brought up among barbarians, and in barbaric ignorance. He strove to remedy this when a grown man, by leaving all the temptations to idleness and sensuality, which his court offered, and by seeking instruction abroad. He laboured with his own hands as a common artisan in Holland and in England, that he might return and teach his subjects how ships, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... either did not think of or did not care to advocate such a radical remedy as Mr. George proposed. They saw clearly enough that, apart from the unequal distribution of wealth, which may perhaps have been the prime cause of the trouble, idleness and thriftlessness are acquired habits, just as industry and thrift are acquired habits, and it seemed to them better to cure the ill habit rather than to upset society and then to rebuild it again for the sake ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... despair and rebellion. Driven from their native villages, the Donatist peasants assembled in formidable gangs on the edge of the Getulian desert; and readily exchanged the habits of labor for a life of idleness and rapine, which was consecrated by the name of religion, and faintly condemned by the doctors of the sect. The leaders of the Circumcellions assumed the title of captains of the saints; their principal weapon, as they were indifferently provided with swords ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... blessed relief to them at the end of their troubled week. Finding her father so much better, Mrs. Burton betook herself to bed at noon for the first real untroubled rest she had enjoyed for many days. The boys were stretched in luxurious idleness before the glowing fire in the kitchen, and Katherine was in charge of the sickroom. She was half-asleep herself; the place was so warm and her father lay in such a restful quiet. It had been so terrible all the week because no rest had seemed possible to him. ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... James Digweed; but our tete-a-tete was cruelly reduced by the non-attendance of the two latter. We had a very quiet evening. I believe Mary found it dull, but I thought it very pleasant. To sit in idleness over a good fire in a well-proportioned room is a luxurious sensation. Sometimes we talked, and sometimes we were quite silent; I said two or three amusing things, and Mr. Holder made ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... to the kind of winter he has to fight against. That winter cuts his earnings more than half, for, during the months the land is frozen he is unable to do any kind of profitable farm work, indeed has spells of enforced idleness. The Old Country farmer can keep hired help the year round, for he has employment for them; the Canadian farmer needs extra hands only during summer. The result is that his margin of profits is so narrow that he can never pay such taxes as are collected from the agricultural class ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... time are much more severe than had been found necessary in the Plantagenet period. They not only carried criminals in shameful procession through the City, but they flogged girls for idleness, apprentices for immorality, and rogues for selling goods falsely described. A 'pillar of reformation' was set up at the Standard in Cheap; here on Sunday morning the mayor superintended the flogging of young servants. When Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen a young fellow, for speaking ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... corporal's guard of willing and well managed men. The mere economic waste of such material was criminal, without regard to the evil effect of inadequate or misapplied labor upon the men's moral and mental state. Can it be, I asked myself, that this extravagant idleness is forced upon the prisoners as part, and not the least evil part of their punishment? Or is it the result of ignorance, incompetence, or indifference on the part of those appointed and paid to take care of men sentenced ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... state that obeyed them the most famous in Greece. He then went home, where he had been much missed, for his young nephew Charilaus, though grown to man's estate, was too weak and good-natured to be much obeyed, and there was a great deal of idleness, and gluttony, and evil ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... And it came to pass that I beheld, after they had dwindled in unbelief they became a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... "Friends of all degrees, says the book of extracts, are advised to take due care to breed up their children in some useful and necessary employment, that they may not spend their precious time in idleness, which is of evil example, and ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... that uses shall even so much as keep. Unemployed strength steadily diminishes. The sluggard's arm grows soft and flabby. So, even in this lowest sphere, the law is inexorable. Having is using. Not using is losing. Idleness is paralysis. New triumphs must only dictate new struggles. If it be Alexander of Macedon, the Orontes must suggest the Euphrates, and the Euphrates the Indus. Always it must be on and on. One night of rioting in Babylon may arrest the conquering march. Genius is essentially athletic, resolute, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... by since the assault: a fortnight of idleness for the troops, embittered almost intolerably by a sense that the Fifth Division had disgraced itself. One regiment blamed another, and all conspired to curse the artillery—whose practice, by the way, had been brilliant throughout the siege. Nor did the gunners fail to retort; but they were in ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... them believed that freedom meant idleness, such as they had seen white folks indulge in. The country negroes flocked to the towns and cities in great numbers, and the freedmen's bureau, active as its agents were, had a great deal more than it could attend to. Such peace and order as existed was not maintained by ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... to Africa and quietly sitting down in utter idleness, in anticipation waiting in anxious expectation for the fever to come—in which cases the person becomes much more susceptible—did they go directly about some active employment, to keep both mind and body properly exercised, ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... of the session came nigh. Ericson passed his examinations with honour. Robert gained the first Greek and third Latin prize. The evening of the last day arrived, and on the morrow the students would be gone—some to their homes of comfort and idleness, others to hard labour in the fields; some to steady reading, perhaps to school again to prepare for the next session, and others to be tutors all the summer months, and return to the wintry city as to freedom and life. Shargar was to ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... secularism, like other religions, needs an eschatology, and has produced one. A more energetic generation than ours looked forward to a gradual extension of busy industrialism over the whole planet; the present ideal of the masses seems to be the greatest idleness of the greatest number, or a Fabian farm-yard of tame fowls, or (in America) an ice-water-drinking gynaecocracy. But the superstition cannot flourish much longer. The period of expansion is over, and we must adjust our view of earthly providence ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... about making my escape as soon as I felt sufficiently strong, when the heat and my weakness combined to send me off into a heavy sleep, one of the many that I indulged in during those days, not from idleness, for I suppose it was natural while my nerves and muscles were slowly building themselves up ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... supposeth that great idleness is natural to professors; they think to get to heaven by lying, as it were, on their elbows. It also suggesteth that many will be the difficulties that professors will meet with, before they get to heaven. It also concludeth that only the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... saw old 'Rastus setting out with his fishing tackle for a day on the river, and she deemed it a fitting time to rebuke him for his notorious idleness, since she and everybody else knew that the entire family was supported by the industry of 'Rastus' old ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... right to live upon their earnings, or enjoy his pleasure or power at the expense of their labor and their freedom. The same condition of things, with some variation, of course, arising from differences of climate and races, exists in Russia, and the results are not altogether dissimilar. We find idleness, lack of principle, overbearing manners, ignorance, and sensualism a very common characteristic of the superior classes, mingled though it may be with a show of fine manners, and such trivial and superficial ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... before the hour at which the city gates would be opened. Sir Ralph and his dame rode first, Aline took her place between her brother and Edgar, the latter keeping a watchful eye over her horse, which was fresh after six or seven days' idleness. The two retainers rode behind, having the ladies' valises strapped behind them. The city churches rang out the hour when they were within a hundred yards of the gate, and as this opened, Van Voorden, with his daughter behind him on a pillion, rode out to meet ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... best sense. The reason is not far to seek. Under the old American system the whole body of students at a university were confined to a single course, for which the majority cared little and very many cared nothing, and, as a result, widespread idleness and dissipation were inevitable. Under the new system, presenting various courses, and especially courses in various sciences, appealing to different tastes and aims, the great majority of students are interested, and consequently indolence and dissipation have steadily ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... for it, knee-deep, as she said. She was not excessively astonished: it was the inevitable end! Not that she disliked to work: her idleness, on the contrary, was beginning to pall upon her; but it was the humiliation of going back to it after putting on so much side and posing as the lady. She had worked for Pa; now she would work for Trampy; it was natural and proper. There were exceptions—the wife at ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... depends primarily upon the amount and condition of the blood supplied to the coronary cushion. Thus, fluctuations in temperature during a long-continued fever, or the effects of alternate heat and cold, or of healthy exercise alternated with comparative idleness, will each rib the foot in much ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... more gold and silver plastered on their doublets than would have kept an honest family in butchers' meat and flannel from year's end to year's end! I am informed, (now mind, I do not vouch for the fact), but I am informed that all such extravagant idleness is to be done away with here. Lady Macbeth is to have a plain quilted petticoat, a cotton gown, and a MOB CAP (as the court parasites call it;—it will be well for them if, one of these days, they don't wear a mob cap—I mean a WHITE CAP, with a MOB to look at them); and Macbeth ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... yourselves. The same shirking, idle, rebellious spirit which distinguished them is conspicuous in every one of you. It is little more than a couple of hours ago that your officers waited upon me in a body to make formal complaint of your idleness and insubordinate conduct. There was no necessity for them to do any such thing, for I am not altogether lacking in powers of observation, and I have not failed to notice that for some time past there has been a general disposition on ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... from Berlin all unemployed workmen, quite regardless of the cause of their temporary or continuous idleness. He sends them back to their native parishes, without caring in the least whether they will find there the work which they are unable to secure at the capital. The "Workmen's Emperor" compels an emigration into the interior ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... of this volume of the series needs some explanation. Portions of the book have been written at intervals; but it is only the enforced idleness of a long convalescence after illness which has given me the requisite ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... great demi-god of Hawaii, was restless. Time hung heavy on his hands. Uneventful days of quiet had fallen upon the land. Adventure seemed to be in hiding, and no exploit invited to service this active youngster's shining spear or magic club. Idleness grew ...
— Legends of Wailuku • Charlotte Hapai
... books, and in my idleness I set work to read, so that a taste for literature awoke within me. I read every morning, and essayed some translations, even metrical compositions. Almost every day I dined at the Commandant's, where, as a general thing, I spent the rest of the day. In the evening, ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... Love and idleness induced in him such a violent desire to see the Princess de Montpensier that without considering the risks to her and to himself he made some excuse to travel and leaving his suite in a small town he ...
— The Princess of Montpensier • Madame de La Fayette
... 'The tools to the hands that can use them' is the ideal for both. God's dealings follow the same law, both in withdrawing opportunities of service and in giving more of such. The reward for work is more work, and the punishment for sloth is compulsory idleness. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... indolent the vast armada tilts, A leafless resurrection of dead trees. The sailors in a dream do go about Or at the fo'c's'le ominously meet. Should any foe upon the sea-line loom They'll light with ease upon an idle prey. And yet I felt the grandeur of stagnation And the magnificence of idleness. ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
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