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More "Indolent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... trust you," Lord Henry replied. "That must be the reason. They have learned not to trust the mature adult. British parents are either too indolent, or too incompetent to do the thing properly. And the consequence is young people have been trained by tradition to believe that, in the matter of choosing their mates, concerning which they know literally nothing, and are taught less, they must be left ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... his father's fate and gain his co-operation. But after a few moments' consideration he dismissed this thought. Why should he seek his help? Courtenay Despard, if alive, might be very unfit for the purpose. He might be timid, or indifferent, or dull, or indolent. Why make any advances to one whom he did not know? Afterward it might be well to find him, and see what might be done with or through him; but as yet there could be no reason whatever why he should take up his time in searching for him or in ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... The Turks have their graveyards planted with trees, through which the sun looks in upon the turban stones of the faithful, and beneath which the relatives of the dead sit in cheerful converse through the long days of summer, in all the luxurious quiet and happy indifference of the indolent East. Most of the visitors whom I met at the Lowell cemetery wore cheerful faces; some sauntered laughingly along, apparently unaffected by the associations of the place; too full, perhaps, of life, and energy, and high hope to apply to themselves ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... many useful works will the busy, the indolent, and the less wealthy part of mankind be deprived of! How few will read or purchase forty-four large volumes of the transactions of the royal society, which, in abridgment, are generally read, to the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... his slouching attitude. It seemed more indolent on account of the loosely hanging strap that had once held his haversack, which was still worn in a slovenly fashion over his shoulder as a kind of lazy sling for his ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... in the use of the prepositions are very numerous. "The indolent child is one who [that?] has a strong aversion from action of any sort."—Graham's "English Synonymes," p. 236. The prevailing and best modern usage is in favor of to instead of from after averse and aversion, and before the object. "Clearness ... enables the reader to see thoughts ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... much more hopeful expression in her eyes, and far greater firmness and determination in all the lines of her face, so that, in spite of superficial dissimilarity, Bessie Harper really resembled her mother more nearly than either Camilla, calm, gentle, by nature possibly, a little indolent, ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... him in natural history, Buffon, when a youth, was regarded as of mediocre talents. His mind was slow in forming itself, and slow in reproducing what it had acquired. He was also constitutionally indolent; and being born to good estate, it might be supposed that he would indulge his liking for ease and luxury. Instead of which, he early formed the resolution of denying himself pleasure, and devoting himself to study and self-culture. Regarding time ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... be found or trained, need not expect to lead an easy, indolent, or wholly joyous life—to be blest by archbishops or followed by the approving shouts of ascendent majorities; but he might find some recompense for their loss in the calm verdict of an approving conscience; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... friend of the plotters. They next ventured on a military demonstration in front of the Khedive's palace, with a view to extorting the dismissal of the able and energetic Prime Minister, Riaz Pasha. Again Tewfik yielded, and consented to the appointment of the weak and indolent Sherif Pasha. To consolidate their triumph the mutineers now proposed measures which would please the populace. Chief among them was a plan for instituting a consultative National Assembly. This would serve as a check ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... once cunning and shallow, who encouraged his daughter in her pride and disingenuous habits; the imitation of city luxury, which seemed to him an offence against the dignity of country manners; the time wasted in indolent, foolish conversation, that household so different from his own, and, above all, the profound discomfort that the husbandman feels when he lays aside his laborious habits; all the ennui and annoyance ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... against the Germans is that they were not lazy enough. In the middle of Europe, a thoroughly disillusioned, indolent and delightful old continent, the Germans were a dangerous mass of energy and bumptious push. If the Germans had been as lazy, as indifferent, and as righteously laissez-fairish as their neighbours, the world would have been ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... precarious and vagabond existence. Poverty, repining and hopeless poverty, a canker of the mind unknown in savage life, corrodes their spirits and blights every free and noble quality of their natures. They become drunken, indolent, feeble, thievish, and pusillanimous. They loiter like vagrants about the settlements, among spacious dwellings replete with elaborate comforts which only render them sensible of the comparative wretchedness of their own condition. Luxury spreads its ample ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... cigarette, and Lorry squatted beside him. Presently Shoop's voice broke the indolent silence of noon: "Just why did you ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... the snow. He has a very sneaking, insinuating way, and goes creeping about the fields and woods, never once in a perceptible degree altering his gait, and, if a fence crosses his course, steers for a break or opening to avoid climbing. He is too indolent even to dig his own hole, but appropriates that of a woodchuck, or hunts out a crevice in the rocks, from which he extends his rambling in all directions, preferring damp, thawy weather. He has very little discretion or cunning, and holds a trap in utter contempt, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... helped to construct; he also helped to hew the trees and build the house. "What joy went into the building of this retreat! I never expect to be so well content again." Then, musing, he added: "It is a comfortable, indolent life I lead here; I read a little, write a little, and dream a good deal. Here the sun does not rise so early as it does down at Riverby. 'Tired nature's sweet restorer' is not put to rout so soon by the screaming ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... was a man of good intentions; and, having inherited an immense fortune from his uncle, Hakeem Mehndee, he cared little about money; but he was an indolent man, and indulged much in opiates, and his object was to reform the administration at the least possible cost of time and trouble to himself. He had, he thought, found the man who could efficiently supervise and control the administration in all its branches; and he invested him with plenary ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... with but a feeble muscular organisation, use a smaller proportion of their food for carrying on the functions of their relative life, consequently, the weight of their bodies is augmented by the surplus nutriment. It is clear, then, that an animal of a lymphatic temperament, an indolent disposition, a low degree of nervous power, and a tendency to rapid growth, is the beau ideal of a "meat-manufacturing machine." Now, as the larger the lungs of an animal are, the greater is its capacity for "burning," ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... Westminster with bad ones. I have also to thank you for your letter, which would have been answered sooner had I been alone; but just now I am enjoying the treat of my friend Ellen's society, and she makes me indolent and negligent—I am too busy talking to her all day to do anything else. You allude to the subject of female friendships, and express wonder at the infrequency of sincere attachments amongst women. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... the moment asked a butcher's boy with a shiny head of hair anointed with suet, who was also looking on, whether he didn't think he had better run for the doctor. To which, the butcher's boy: who appeared of a lounging, not to say indolent disposition: ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... the early part of his reign his subjects had affectionately called him the "Well-beloved," but long before he laid down the sceptre, all their early love and admiration had been turned into hatred and contempt. Besides being overbearing and despotic, the king was indolent, rapacious, and scandalously profligate. During twenty years of his reign the king was wholly under the influence of the notorious ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... mainly due to the action of natural selection, combined probably with disuse. For during many successive generations each individual beetle which flew least, either from its wings having been ever so little less perfectly developed or from indolent habit, will have had the best chance of surviving from not being blown out to sea; and, on the other hand, those beetles which most readily took to flight would oftenest have been blown ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... adapted as a receptacle for convict labour; it was not a populous place when we took it in 1685, nor, as far as we can gather, had the population much increased up to the year 1787, and the few Sumatrans and Malays that were its inhabitants were an indolent race, and preferred a life of ease to any kind of labour. They were content to get their livelihood from fishing, and they had no artificial wants. They would occasionally work upon pepper plantations, and would ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... permission to leave cards by proxy is often abused by selfish and indolent men is no doubt true. But the social advantage which it gives to a large class of men who are neither selfish nor indolent more than counterbalances any disadvantages, and saves to "society" a solid element that might be entirely given over to business, if it were not for judicious ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... and is not only so by hereditary descent, but he is one of the noted "mighty hunters" in the province to which he belongs. Far and wide is his name known—for Ossaroo possesses, what is somewhat rare among his indolent countrymen, an energy of mind, combined with strength and activity of body, that would have given him distinction anywhere; but among a people where such qualities are extremely rare, Ossaroo is of course a hunter-hero—the ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... a young West Indian, tall and delicately formed, with a clear olive complexion, languishing dark hazel eyes and dark, bright chestnut hair and beard. In temperament he was ardent as his clime. In character, indolent, careless and self-indulgent. In condition he was the bachelor heir of a sugar plantation of a thousand acres. He loved not the chase, nor any other amusement requiring exertion. He doted upon swansdown sofas with springs, French plays, cigars and chocolate. ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... as much as so indolent a man ever could, at Pembroke College, Oxford. His parents died when he was young, leaving to him a very considerable estate, which fortunately some relative administered for him, until, owing to this supervisor's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Jagellons commenced, and continued till 1572. Under the princes of this line, the government was arbitrary and oppressive. War was the great business and amusement of the princes, and success in it brought the highest honors. The kings were, however, weak, cruel, and capricious, ignorant, fierce, and indolent. The records of their reigns are the records of drunkenness, extortion, cruelty, lust, and violence—the common history of all barbarous kings. There were some of the Polish princes who were benignant and merciful, but the great majority of them, like ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... discouraging position. The only thing that his education has fitted him to do is, to teach school, and he may not be adapted to this, on account of some personal peculiarity. There was, and I suppose is still, a prejudice among mercantile men against college graduates, as a class of proud, indolent, neglectful persons, very difficult to instruct. Undoubtedly there are many such, but the innocent have to suffer with the guilty. It is natural that a man who has not had a liberal education should object to employing a subordinate ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... era churches were established in the principal cities of the empire, but more especially in Asia Minor; and the progress of Christianity, which had been at first disregarded, began to attract the notice of the ruling powers. Too indolent to investigate the claims of Christianity, and by no means pleased with a system which condemned their vices, the Roman rulers viewed the rapid progress of the new religion with undisguised alarm. The union of the sacerdotal and magisterial character in the Roman policy, added personal ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... but did not refuse the entreaties sometimes made to him that he would prepare a young man for college, by allowing the said young man to reside and read with him. "Ness's men" took rather high honours, for the tutor, too indolent to find out work for himself, had a certain pride in doing well the work that ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... such a term could be applied to Lincoln), one who did not know him might have called him indolent. He would pick up a book and run rapidly over the pages, pausing ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... smiling at him in conscious power, her violet eyes flashing with mystery and magic, the sunlight of Italy gleaming through her dark red hair, her full lips half parted with dreamy tenderness, and her sinuous body moving with indolent grace. ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... accounts of the extremities they were driven to; how sometimes they were many days without any food at all, the island they were upon being inhabited by a sort of savages that lived more indolent, and for that reason were less supplied with the necessaries of life than they had reason to believe others were in the same part of the world; and yet they found that these savages were less ravenous and voracious than those who had ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... arms and passed in the rakish, indolent manner of thorough men of the world who know that but to be seen is to conquer. To their discomfiture the young ladies failed to notice the extreme distinction of their manly appearance and ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... time some unusually turbulent spirit would rise against such paternal despotism, and break away to his old savage life. But these cases, we are told, were of rare occurrence. The California Indians were for the most part indolent, apathetic, and of low intelligence; and as, under domestication, they were clothed, housed and fed, while the labour demanded from them was rarely excessive, they were wont as a rule to accept the change from the hardships of their former ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... a deadly enemy to success; and the child who is indolent in the home, is likely to bring up the rear in the race of life. Laziness is no kin to true happiness. The lazy child is not the truly happy child. He lies in bed until late in the morning, is often ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... sort. Then there is the dreary old Bolkonsky mansion, with Andrew, generous and sceptical, and with poor plain Marya, ardent and repressed. And for quite another kind of youth, there is Peter Besukhov, master of millions, fat and good-natured and indolent, his brain a fever of faiths and aspirations which not he, but Andrew, so much more sparing in high hopes, has the tenacity to follow. These are in the foreground, and between and behind them are more and more, young men and women at ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... or less of the same defects, for certain it is that they everywhere attach paramount or undue importance to the conventional learning of the grammar-school and the drawing-room, and the ignorant and the indolent have everywhere the support of a great ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... wind, leaving three dismasted hulks between the lines. An isolated group of six ships in the center, including de Grasse's Ville de Paris, offered a target for attack, but the wind was light and Rodney indolent in pursuit. Of these, one small vessel was overhauled and the French flagship was taken after a heroic defense, that lasted until sunset, against overwhelming odds. De Grasse's efforts to reform his fleet after his line was broken had met with failure, for the van fled to the southwest ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... sermons our thoughts were directed to such subjects as the Housing of the Working Classes, Popular Education, and the contrast between the lot of the rich and the lot of the poor. "May God never allow us to grow proud, or to grow indolent, or to be deaf to the cry of human suffering." "Pray that God may count you worthy to be foremost in the truly holy and heroic work of bringing purity to the homes of the labouring classes, and so hastening the coming of the day when the longing of our ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... a year, so that I could afford to wait and look round. My only real taste was for literature. I wanted to write, but I had no very pressing aspirations or inspirations. I may confess that I was indolent, fond of company, but not afraid of comparative solitude, and I was moreover an entire dilettante. I read a good many books, and tried feverishly to write in the style of the authors who most attracted ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... been inured by this time to the consequences of editorial misjudgment, was disgruntled, vexed. He began to feel that the German public was an indolent, long-eared beast that needed the education of the scourge rather than of aesthetic letters. He made some effort, it is true, to enliven his columns with more entertaining matter, but the abstruse, in prose and verse, continued to preponderate. By autumn he was minded to give up the whole ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... lost to Kate and her debt-ridden father, Lord Claverley. How it is conserved at last, and gloomy apprehension chased away by dazzling visions of material splendor—that is the author's well-kept secret, not to be shared here with a careless and indolent ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... barbarism had come men fresh from the civilization of the Old World—men of learning, culture, and gentle birth, in whose veins flowed the proudest blood of France. To these savages, indolent, superstitious, and vicious, had come Brebeuf, Noue, and Daillon, with a message of ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... the oldest daughter to go with her sisters; but she was rather indolent, so she dressed herself in her best, and sat down on the bench beside the door, with a plate of honey-cakes of which she was very fond. She held up her parasol to shield her face, and also to display the parasol. ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... truth be affirmed,—that many a man fails for the want of courtesy, and for the want of that good-will to his fellows from which all real courtesy springs. There is small chance for any man to succeed who does not command his own spirit. There is no chance whatever for an indolent man; and, in the long run, little or no chance for the dishonest man. The same must be said for the timid and for the rash man. Nor can we offer any encouragement to the intermittent man. From year's end to year's end, the dry-goods jobber finds himself necessitated to be ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... caught the notion of a bad and good spirit, pitted one against the other in eternal warfare, and engrafted it on their ancient traditions. Writers anxious to discover Jewish or Christian analogies, forcibly construed myths to suit their pet theories, and for indolent observers it was convenient to catalogue their gods in antithetical classes. In Mexican and Peruvian mythology this is so plainly false that historians no longer insist upon it, but as a popular error it still holds its ground with reference to the ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... them; but (to do him justice) his ideal of the so-called "religious life" was more practical than those of the solitaries of Egypt, who had been his teachers. "It was the life" (says Dean Milman {163}) "of the industrious religious community, not of the indolent and solitary anchorite, which to Basil was the perfection of Christianity. . . . The indiscriminate charity of these institutions was to receive orphans" (of which there were but too many in those evil days) "of all classes, for education and maintenance: but other ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... no pain To hear them complain, Nor his own dirty clothes to survey; His indolent mind No pleasure could find In tidy ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... fear that he was not unlike to Ralph. The eyes were the same and the shape of the forehead, only this gentleman had a weak, uncertain mouth, and I judged that he was very good-humoured, but of an indolent mind. By his side rode another man of quite a different stamp, and middle-aged. "The lawyer," I said to myself as I looked at his weasel-like face, bushy eyebrows, and red hair. Indeed, that was an easy guess, for who can mistake a lawyer, whatever his ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... other candidate would go down without a considerable struggle. I expressed my own opinion of the insufficiency of the Speaker for a post of so much importance, and my fear that a man naturally indolent, would in so indolent a climate be wholly inefficient, and rather recommended Lord W. B——. C——, in reply, dwelt not on Sutton's fitness for India, but his unfitness for the Chair. Perceiving his drift, I suggested ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... choleric; if we are given to frequent fits of the "blues," if we usually look on the dark side of things and have a tendency toward moods of discouragement and the "dumps," the melancholic; if hard to rouse, and given to indolent and indifferent moods, the phlegmatic. Whatever be our temperament, it is one of the most important factors ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... seemed neither to increase nor diminish under his axe, a fact, doubtless, owing to the activity of Mammy, who was always at the same time making pies, seemed to give some credence to the story. Indeed, the wood-pile of Daddy Downey was a standing reproof to the indolent and sluggish miner. ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... impression. I like Mrs. Stanley much—a shrewd, sensible, observing woman. She told me much about her Bishop, how very trying his position was on first settling at Norwich; for his predecessor was an amiable, indolent old man, who let things take their course, and a very bad course too, all which the present man has to correct as way opens, and continually sacrifice popularity to ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... milk, butter, poultry, or eggs, and tasting fish but occasionally (more rarely in the interior of the island,) the non-azotised elements abound in every article he consumes with the exception of the bread-fruit, the jak, and some varieties of beans. In their indolent and feeble stomachs these are liable to degenerate into flatulent and acrid products; but, apparently by instinct, the whole population have adopted a simple prophylactic. Every Singhalese carries in his waistcloth an ornamented box of silver or brass, according ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... to the test when what we hoped, by its ruinous appearance, would turn out an antique church or tower was announced to be an infant brewery, in a very early stage of its existence. We stood by while our companions talked to a very pretty, indolent-looking woman, surrounded by black-eyed children, whose ages and habits were dilated on, and all of whom were scattered about the premises—sitting or lying on tubs and heaps of wood; while the husband and father sauntered through something like work, ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... "Uncle Ebenezer," no two brothers could be more different in nature or more united in affection. My grandfather was a man of great natural good sense, well read and well knowledged, easy but not indolent, never overflowing but never empty, homely but dignified, and fuller of love to all sentient creatures than any other human being I ever knew. I had, when a boy of ten, two rabbits, Oscar and Livia: why so named is a ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... it will tend to keep present to my mind a view of things which I ought to indulge. These six lines, too, have not, to a reader, a connectedness with the foregoing. Omit it if you like,—What a treasure it is to my poor, indolent, and unemployed mind thus to lay hold on a subject to talk about, though 'tis but a sonnet, and that of the lowest order! How mournfully inactive I ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... to the church and early settled in a good living, he led a life that was hardly edifying. He possessed brilliant talents, but failed to make the most of them. He was indolent and fond of good living, and was restive under discipline, as is evident in his work and in his irritation at Malherbe. He had a gift of keen observation, and his satires excelled in interest what he composed in the more lyrical forms ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... negroes of Sierra Leone are the most indolent, the most worthless, and the most insolent in all Africa. It is the last place in the world at which to hire followers. We must get them at the Gaboon itself, and at each place we arrive at afterwards we take on others, merely retaining one of the old lot to act as interpreter. The natives, although ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... Church makes itself felt everywhere, high and low; and by long habit the people have become indolent and supine. The splendid robes of ecclesiastical Rome have a draggled fringe of beggary and vice. What a change there might be, if the energies of the Italians, instead of rotting in idleness, could have a free scope! Industry is the only purification of a nation; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... all?" He spoke with the natural relief of an indolent young man spared an arduous job. Again she nodded. "Where is it?" She could make no movement with her bound hands, but with an eye-flash she indicated the side of her gown. "In your pocket? ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... reward of merit for efficiency and alertness on guard! The rapture the bit of paper brought, and the exultation with which the hero thus signalized went off to town for the day, wandered through the waste of streets, stood before Willard's and admired in awe and wonder the indolent groups from whose shoulders gleamed one and sometimes two stars! One day Jack and Barney, walking in Fifteenth Street, saw a stout man, with no insignia to indicate rank or station, coming out of the headquarters ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... scramble along together, he indolent at times and prone to lapse into his old habits of luxurious ease, for which she rates him sharply, though on the whole she pets him as she has never petted a human ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... a tall, slenderly-built lad of sixteen, speaking in a somewhat indolent way; then suddenly he paused to look down through the trees to ...
— The Boy Scouts Patrol • Ralph Victor
... a person more inclined to lenity, and one who, being unacquainted with the enemy's delinquency, could more easily accept their penitence. After having restored things to their former quiet state, he delivered the command to Trebellius Maximus. [76] Trebellius, indolent, and inexperienced in military affairs, maintained the tranquillity of the province by popular manners; for even the barbarians had now learned to pardon under the seductive influence of vices; and the intervention of the civil wars afforded a legitimate excuse for his ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... glimpses of Willie Beresford and his mother at Aix-les-Bains. At this distance, and in the dead of night, my sacrifice in coming here seemed fruitless. Why did I not allow myself to drift for ever on that pleasant sea which has been lapping me in sweet and indolent content these many weeks? Of what use to labour, to struggle, to deny myself, for an art to which I can never be more than the humblest handmaiden? I felt like crying out, as did once a braver woman's ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Alfred, there lived a poor woman, whose cottage was in a remote country village, many miles from London. She had been a widow some years, and had an only child named Jack, whom she indulged so much that he never paid the least attention to anything she said, but was indolent, careless, and extravagant. His follies were not owing to a bad disposition, but to his mother's foolish partiality. By degrees, he spent all that she had—scarcely anything remained but a cow. One day, for the first time in her life, she reproached him: "Cruel, cruel boy! you have at last brought ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... Southey's Joan of Arc, as we shall see later. The poem beginning "My Pensive Sara" was Effusion 35, afterwards called "The AEolian Harp," and the lines to which Lamb refers are these, following upon Coleridge's description of how flitting phantasies traverse his indolent and passive brain:— ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... the fact that out of shame she will allow no visitor to enter the apartment if she can help it. Concrete selfishness is her chief mark. She avoids responsibility; sidesteps every duty that calls for honest effort; is secretive, untruthful, indolent, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... manner which was calculated to ensure success in all games, especially as he was fleet of foot and muscular. Thus he was always giving promise of distinguishing himself, and dying away to nothing. The explanation is that he was very vain and very indolent, and his vanity induced him to engage in different pursuits which would excite admiration, while his indolence prevented him from persevering long enough for success. Directly anything bored him he dropped it. Self-indulgence seemed to him the only true wisdom. He never resisted ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... styled a pioneer in the system of dredging, by means of which all the lake harbors have been able to receive vessels of double the old tonnage. Although of a quiet, he is not by any means of an indolent temperament, and has exhibited business energy in a way that did not make much noise, but which led to sure results. Mr. Sims was one of the contractors and one of the proprietors of the Rocky River Rail Road and Hotel. He is also interested in the People's Gas Company ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... a more extended observation, it should be found that the same ominous groups of cases clustering about individual practitioners were observed in a remote country, at different times, and in widely separated regions, it would seem incredible that any should be found too prejudiced or indolent to accept the solemn truth knelled into their ears by the funeral bells from both sides of the ocean,—the plain conclusion that the physician and the disease entered, hand in hand, into the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in his bedroom; he was too indolent to move out of Escott's rooms, and by avoiding him he hoped to avert expulsion and angry altercations. The night he spent in gambling, the evening in dining; and some hours of each afternoon were devoted to the composition of his trilogy. Now he lay in his arm-chair smoking cigarettes, ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... enveloped in the absurd jargon of the anthropotomist, ever to hope to reveal any great truth for science, and dispel the mists which still hang over the phenomena of the nervous system. He is steeped too deeply in the base nomenclature of the antique school, and too indolent to question the import of Pons, Commissure, Island, Taenia, Nates, Testes, Cornu, Hippocamp, Thalamus, Vermes, Arbor Vitro, Respiratory Tract, Ganglia of Increase, and all such phrase of unmeaning sound, ever to be productive ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... maldiskreta. Indispensable necesega. Indisposed (ill) malsaneta. Indisposition malsaneto. Indisputable nedisputebla. Indissoluble nesolvebla. Indistinct malklara. Individual individuo. Individual individua. Indivisible nedividebla. Indolent senenergia. Indomitable nedresebla. Indorse dorseskribi. Indubitable neduba. Induce decidigi, alkonduki. Indulge indulgi. Indulge (one's self) indulgigxi. Indulgence indulgo. Industrious diligenta. Industry (business) industrio. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... flutter. Could it be doubted that the great elemental conflict so steadily prophesied by Barneveld and instinctively dreaded by all capable of feeling the signs of the time would now begin? It had begun. Of what avail would be Majesty-Letters and Compromises extorted by force from trembling or indolent emperors, now that a man who knew his own mind, and felt it to be a crime not to extirpate all religions but the one orthodox religion, had mounted the throne? It is true that he had sworn at his coronation to maintain the laws of Bohemia, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... haunts of fashion With an indolent, unused brain; But his sluggish heart feels a sudden start In the purpose of giving pain. And the fluttering flock of pigeons, As they rise on eager wings, From prison to death, bring a catch in his breath: OH, THE ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... for while contemning praise in almost the same words as Byron did, he loved it equally well. In 1840 he had crossed the Rubicon that lies between aspiration and attainment. The populace might be blind or dumb, the "rattlesnakes"—the "irresponsible indolent reviewers," who from behind a hedge pelt every wrestler till they found societies for the victor—might still obscurely hiss; but Carlyle was at length safe by the verdict ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... shoulders, the bear and the ram, was indeed nigh. The ram had two horns, because two nations were joined together, the Medes, who had revolted from Nineveh, and the Persians. The Medes lived in the slopes towards the Tigris, and had learnt to be luxurious and indolent from their Assyrian neighbours; but the Persians, who lived in the mountains to the eastward, were much more spirited and simpler, and purer in life. They are thought to be sons of Japhet, and their religion ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... a smile like the splendor Of the sun in the middle-day skies— That one with a spell that is tender— That one with a dream in her eyes— Cometh close, in her rare Southern beauty, Her languor, her indolent grace; And my soul turns its back on its duty, To live in ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Catholic religion, and a numerous priesthood is maintained largely by the contributions of this race. The control exercised by the clergy is very powerful, and their assistance is always sought by the whites in cases of controversy. The Indians are indolent and fond of spectacles, and the church offers them an opportunity of celebrating many feast days, of which they do not ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... is, from necessity, industrious, the upper classes, particularly the nobles, are effeminate, indolent, decadent, and servile. Their amusements are cock-fighting, dancing, shadow plays, and gambling, and they lead an utterly worthless existence which the Dutch do nothing to discourage. Their Mohammedanism ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... Mr. Braithwaite of the Post-office, that amiable and friendly man, who, with modest and unassuming manners, has associated with many of the wits of the age. Johnson was very quiescent to-day. Perhaps too I was indolent. I find nothing more of him in my notes, but that when I mentioned that I had seen in the King's library sixty-three editions of my favourite Thomas a Kempis, amongst which it was in eight languages, Latin, German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Arabick, and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... Oxford, much praise and very little blame have been recorded. He has been quaintly described as " indeed rich but thankful, charitable without ostentation, and that in so good-natured a way as never to give pain to the person whom he obliged in that respect." He was, in truth, indolent and extravagant, faults which did not, however, detract from his popularity. He was the prey of adventurers, and the providence of impecunious poets such as Pope and Swift. All the literati of the day were allowed access to his library. ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... a clergyman before me; one of those simple-hearted men who think that to be good and kind is the first step towards doing God's work; but who are too modest, too ignorant, and sometimes too indolent to aspire to any second step, or even to inquire what the second step may be. The poor in his parish loved him and preyed upon him. He gave and gave, even after he had no more that he had a right ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... whole forests of which may be seen in the western countries of tropical Africa, with the fallen nuts lying scattered over the ground as thick as pebbles; and, up to a late period, scarce cared for by the native inhabitants. The demand for palm-oil, however, has of late years stimulated even the indolent negroes to the manufacture of the article, and these immense palm-orchards are now carefully preserved, and their fruit gathered at the ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... young woman had just glided into the centre of the room with an indolent yet supple gracefulness that seemed familiar to him. A change in her position suddenly revealed her face. It was Miss Faulkner. Previously he had known her only in the riding habit of Confederate gray which she had at first affected, ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... "Come unto me all ye pleasure hunters, ye indolent and ye lazy;" but "Come all ye that labor and are ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... steal enter into your minds; neither be ye fowlers, which is not an occupation for gentlemen. As to land animals, the legislator will discourage hunting by night, and also the use of nets and snares by day; for these are indolent and unmanly methods. The only mode of hunting which he can praise is with horses and dogs, running, shooting, striking at close quarters. Enough of the prelude: the law shall be ...
— Laws • Plato
... all people living under a torrid zone and a despotic government, are of an indolent disposition, and, it is said, require great excitement to make them work; but the real secret of their idleness is the certainty that they will not be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labour. Possessing no certain property, they are satisfied with little. ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... Crown. But the cynicism of Charles enabled him to ride out storms which would have wrecked a better and a nobler king. He treated the Lords with an easy familiarity which robbed opposition of its seriousness. "Their debates amused him," he said in his indolent way; and he stood chatting before the fire while peer after peer poured invectives on his ministers, and laughed louder than the rest when Shaftesbury directed his coarsest taunts at the barrenness of the queen. Courtiers were entrusted with the secret ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... you believe in Nature—you're a friend of Nature?" asked Colville, following the lines of an oily swirl in the current with indolent eye. ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... material and regular line of conduct. Your very innocent card-parties at home—merely to kill TIME (what a murder!) explains all the apparent mystery! Something must be substituted to call forth the natural activity of the mind; and this is in no way more effectually accomplished, in all indolent pursuits, than by those EMOTIONS ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... should be very careful about even suspecting a wife unjustly, and thus make the first step towards rendering his baseless suspicions a reality, his unjust accusations justified. And, of course, what is true of the husband is also true of the wife. Many a wife has driven her indolent husband into the hands of prostitutes or mistresses by her incessant nagging, false accusations and vicious epithets applied to all his female friends ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... altogether that these men were indolent. Rudolph and Rudolph's peers had been reared in the belief that when any manual labor became inevitable, you as a matter of course entrusted its execution to a negro; and, forced themselves to labor, they ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... that better critics have erred with equal recklessness. De Quincey, who could be an admirable critic where his indolent prejudices were not concerned, is even more dead to the merits of Goethe. Byron's critical remarks are generally worth reading, in spite of his wilful eccentricity; and he spoke of Wordsworth and Southey still ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... devils that ruled over Tahiti. It was their own look out. Schemmer was their problem. They must avoid his wrath as they avoided the venom of the centipedes that lurked in the grass or crept into the sleeping quarters on rainy nights. The Chinagos—such they were called by the indolent, brown-skinned island folk—saw to it that they did not displease Schemmer too greatly. This was equivalent to rendering up to him a full measure of efficient toil. That blow of Schemmer's fist had been worth thousands of dollars to the Company, and ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... nurse looking on when Eve was created. Her words and manner, though, were translucent, as Bibb had said. She spoke, vaguely, of friends in California and some of the lower parishes in Louisiana. The tropical climate and indolent life suited her; she had thought of buying an orange grove later on; La Paz, all ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... here are so ill-educated, and so indolent, that a man is better without their society," ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... "another can make shoes; and all these are gifts of the Holy Ghost. I tell you, if I were not a priest, I should esteem it a great gift that I was able to make shoes, and would try to make them so well as to be a pattern to all." In a later Lecture I shall revert to the charge of indolent neglect of duties, so often ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... did; and very pleasant too, and with many little comforts for those who wish to be indolent, such as foot-rests, and low tables for holding decanter and glasses and a sheaf of long pipes and ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... was able to draw the horoscope of the House of Savoy with a correctness which seems almost startling. He was not helped by either sympathy or poetic imagination, but simply by political logic. Sardinia, he said, was the best governed state in Europe. Instead of yielding to the indolent apathy in which other reigning families were sunk, its princes sought to improve its laws and develop its resources according to the wants of the population and the exigences of the climate. Finance, police, the administration ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... this direction was seen in the age of Chivalry. Then woman was the idol of man. She was served with a sickly and sentimental devotion, through which its object became indolent, degraded, and lost to all moral and intellectual excellence. Then came the influence of those Political changes produced by Christianity, which, while they somewhat elevated the mental condition of this sex, left them still subordinate ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... the piled-up bundles of hay and straw, consisting of small tables with thread, wire, and leather, and who were busily engaged at their trade, repairing the coverings for the feet. I remarked at this time, as well as on several other occasions, that the natives are by no means so indolent as they are generally represented to be, but, on the contrary, that they avail themselves of every favourable opportunity of earning money. All the caravansaries at the entrance of the town were crowded, and there was no other ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... of Richard St—le, Esq.," was Dr. Wagstaffe, one of those careless wits[344] who lived to repent a crazy life of wit, fancy, and hope, and an easy, indolent one, whose genial hours force up friends like hot-house plants, that bloom and flower in the spot where they are raised, but will not endure the change of place and season—this wit caught the tone of Swift, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... opportunities. Such opportunities had formed for some time—that is, since his return from China, a year and a half before—the most active element in this gentleman's life, which had just now a rather indolent air. He was perfectly willing to get married. He was very fond of books, and he had a handsome library; that is, his books were much more numerous than Mr. Wentworth's. He was also very fond of pictures; ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... to believe is such a salutary discipline to the lower classes. That is the whole principle of religion, surely, Aphrodite? It is not for people like ourselves. You know how indolent Dionysus is, but he always attended the temple when ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... acacia avenues and white houses and full-bosomed abundant orange-trees hanging their golden fruits. Thus happily bowered, merchants and bankers pursue their avocations, and shopkeepers display their wares in a pleasant array of modern shops. On the streets walk leisurely an indolent and elegant people; the dark women are especially chic and it must be said refined and restrained, and not so seductive in appearance as the South would suggest. You see also at the many open-air cafes and in the street a very distinguished-looking type of man with ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... prose. The next series of works that issued from his pen were probably those known as Logistorici (about 56-50 B.C.). The model for these was furnished by Heraclides Ponticus, a friend and pupil of Plato, and after his death, of Aristotle. He was a voluminous and encyclopaedic writer, but too indolent to apply the vigorous method of his master. Hence his works, being discursive and easily understood, were well fitted for the comprehension of the Romans. Varro's histories were short, mostly taken from his own or his friends' experience, and ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... greatness and of their littleness. He did not at this time profess the austere devotion which, at a later period, gave to his court the aspect of a monastery. On the contrary, he was as licentious, though by no means as frivolous and indolent, as his brother of England. But he was a sincere Roman Catholic; and both his conscience and his vanity impelled him to use his power for the defence and propagation of the true faith, after ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... compulsory education, penalties being affixed to non-compliance with the law, and rewards decreed for those who voluntarily observe the same. Though shorn of so large a degree of its temporal powers, the church is still secretly active in its machinations for evil. The vast army of non-producing, indolent priests is active in one direction, namely, that for the suppression of all intelligent progress, and the complete subjugation of the common people through superstition and ignorance. A realization of ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... Geta, were the fruit of this marriage, and the destined heirs of the empire. The fond hopes of the father, and of the Roman world, were soon disappointed by these vain youths, who displayed the indolent security of hereditary princes; and a presumption that fortune would supply the place of merit and application. Without any emulation of virtue or talents, they discovered, almost from their infancy, a fixed and implacable antipathy ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... Brazilian gentlemen of high standing at Para, tried what he could do to induce the canoe-men of his neighbourhood to engage with us, but it was a vain endeavour. The people of these parts seemed to be above working for wages. They are naturally indolent, and besides, have all some little business or plantation of their own, which gives them a livelihood with independence. It is difficult to obtain hands under any circumstances, but it was particularly so in our case, from being foreigners, and suspected, as was natural amongst ignorant people, of ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... as at a market! The sweet words Of Christian promise, words that even yet Might stem destruction, were they wisely preached, Are muttered o'er by men, whose tones proclaim How flat and wearisome they feel their trade: Rank scoffers some, but most too indolent To deem them falsehoods or to know their truth. Oh! blasphemous! the book of life is made A superstitious instrument, on which We gabble o'er the oaths we mean to break; For all must swear—all and in every place, College and wharf, council and justice-court; All, ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... those lives whose bitter and sweet were distilled into this one, he had not done it. It had grown much easier not to do it. Sometimes it had been illusory love, sometimes ambition, sometimes towering pride and self-seeking, sometimes mere indolent unreadiness, dreamy self-will. On he had gone out of the lower end of the Valley of Decision, where the tendrils became arms of giants and decisions might no ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... blue eyes, and a somewhat unceremonious way of dealing with people and things. Eddie called him rough and boisterous, and gave way to him in everything, not at all because Bertie's will was the stronger, but that Eddie, unless very much interested, was too indolent to assert himself, and found it much easier to do just as he was asked on all occasions than argue ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... Meister and The Old Cattleman alike declare it. "There is no doubt about it," exclaims the sage of Wolfville, "woman is a refinin', an ennoblin' influence. * * * She subdooes the reckless, subjoogates the rebellious, sobers the friv'lous, burns the ground from onder the indolent moccasins of that male she's roped up in holy wedlock's bonds an' pints the way to a higher and happier life. And that's whatever!" And The Old Cattleman even includes the raucous "Missis Rucker—as troo a lady as ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... were thus left alone in this wide wilderness, the only white men west of the mountains; as they concluded the remainder of the original party had returned to North Carolina. But they were neither desponding nor indolent. They held pleasant communion together—hunted by day, cooked their game, sat by their bright fires, and sung the airs of their country by night, as though in the midst of the gayest society. They devoted, beside, much of their time and labor to preparing a comfortable cabin to shelter them ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... are not indolent. Of that there has been abundant proof. Give them a definite object, a fair chance of profit, and they will work as well as the people of this or any other country. Of this I have had ample opportunity of judging, on works where thousands have been employed, both here [England] and in Ireland."—A ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... Honey commented. But he smiled with the indolent amusement of the man who has always held ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... her with an expression of doubt and curiosity, that was almost amusing, on his stern, dark face. Nehushta was frightened, and sprang to her feet with the graceful quickness of a startled deer. She was indolent by nature, but as swift as light when she was ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... the other hand, while the nation stagnated and decayed in political nullity and indolent opulence, the theological monopoly of the nobility, stupid fatalism, wild and meaningless mysticism, the system of soothsaying and of mendicant prophecy gradually developed themselves, till they reached the height at which we afterwards ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... wife. She had married when young, had grown up into it, and supplemented it with a system of her own which took the form of a scrupulous and periodical attention to all little details of housekeeping. There was a constant friction, therefore, between the careless, indolent natures of the slaves and the precise, exacting requirements of both master and mistress. Miss Lou, as she was generally called on the plantation, had grown up into this routine as a flower blooms in a stiff old garden, and no amount of repression, admonition ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... December the toothpick point of a white-kid slipper protruded from the cage. An imitation Egyptian necklace called attention to the thin, powdered throat. The cashier was altogether a cheap copy of Beatrice's general appearance. She had the same tiny, nondescript features and indolent expression in her eyes; she was most superior in her fashion of dealing with the customers, never deigning to speak or be spoken to. As soon as she spied Steve, however, she smiled an invitation to enter and become owner of ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... if this is so, it is not improbable that many of the apparently forgotten images of persons and places which return with such vividness in dreams are excited by a mode of stimulation which is for the greater part confined to sleep. I say "for the greater part," because even in our indolent, listless moments of waking existence such seemingly forgotten ideas sometimes return as though by a spontaneous movement of their own and by no discoverable ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... once an Oxford fellow-student, was now his "chum"—the Pythias to his Damon, the fidus Achates of his closest confidence. Through the unexpected wakening up of energy in the latter young gentleman, who was usually of a most sleepy and indolent disposition, he happened to be quite alone on this particular occasion, though, as a general rule, he was accompanied in his rambles by one if not all three of his friends. Utter solitude was with him a rare occurrence, and his present experience of it had ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... and leave undisturbed friends who would feel in duty bound to pay fashionable court to a traveller due ten years. I was not familiar with La Favorita, and my ear took in the new music slowly. Great scores require of the indolent auditor a ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... wanting to talk about her as a human being rather than as a leader of women. Perhaps it is because she has such winning, lovable qualities. It was always difficult for her to give all of her energy and power to a movement. She yearned to play, to read, to study, to be luxuriously indolent, to revel in the companionship of her family, to which she is ardently devoted; to do any one of a hundred things more pleasant than trying to reason with a politician or an unawakened member of her own sex. But for these latter labors ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... a wonderful change in public sentiment. In the inland white communities throughout the Northern States Negroes were few, and the majority of them were servants; some of them indolent and vicious. From these few the moral and intellectual photograph of the entire race was taken. So it was meet that Negro orators of refinement should go from town to town. The North needed arousing and educating on the anti-slavery question, and no class did more practical ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... contradictions; or as if anything absurd and repugnant could have a necessary connexion with truth or flow from it. But, whoever considers the weakness of this pretence will think it was contrived on purpose to humour the laziness of the mind which had rather acquiesce in an indolent scepticism than be at the pains to go through with a severe examination of those principles it has ever embraced ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... long and narrow line of the Lizard, half lost in a silver haze. For the rest, a cool wind went this way and that through Mrs. Rosewarne's room, stirring the curtains. There was an odor of the sea in the air. It was a day for dreaming perhaps, but not for the gloom begotten of languor and an indolent pulse. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... deal of bustle in Coello's house that evening. The artist's indolent wife was unusually animated. She could not control her surprise and wrath. Isabella had been from childhood a great favorite of Herrera, the first architect in Spain, who had already expressed his love for the young girl, and now this vagabond pauper, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... had become more pronounced; but at this moment, when there shone forth the mother-instinct which had never come out or blossomed in her life, but had been overlaid completely with routine and conventionality, rendering it too indolent to put forth petals, Michael had no thought but for that which she had never given him yet, and which, now it began to expand before him, he knew he had ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... and in that character, as well as for his personal qualities, was much looked up to by the crew. Such indeed was the hardihood and romantic spirit of enterprise with which he conducted the difficult affairs sometimes confided to him—that Captain Donneraile, who was old and indolent, gradually allowed the command of the ship to devolve on him; and at the age of sixteen he was much more the commander of the vessel than the nominal captain. This habit of early command over a large and ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... had ransacked Europe to find a successor whose moral and intellectual character resembled his own, he could not have chosen better. Philip was not so sickly as his predecessor, but he was quite as weak, as indolent, and as superstitious; he very soon became quite as hypochondriacal and eccentric; and he was even more uxorious. He was indeed a husband of ten thousand. His first object, when he became King of Spain, was to procure ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... as sketched by poets, weary of the hollowness, the insincerity, and the meanness of artificial life, is really a very ignoble creature, when seen in the "open daylight" of truth. He is selfish, sensual, cruel, indolent, and impassive. The highest graces of character, the sweetest emotions, the finest sensibilities,—which make up the novelist's stock in trade,—are not and cannot be the growth of a so-called state of Nature, which is an essentially unnatural state. We no more believe that Logan ever made the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Addix. Mrs. Addix was of the poor-white race, like the Manns—in fact, she was distantly related to them. They were nearly all distantly related, which may have accounted for their partial degeneracy. Mrs. Addix, however, was a sort of anomaly. Coming, as she did, of a shiftless, indolent family, she was yet a splendid worker. She seemed tireless. She looked positively radiant while scrubbing, and also more intelligent. The moment she stopped work, she looked like an automatic doll which had run down: ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... his inclinations. [Footnote: Habit owes its charm to man's natural idleness, and this idleness grows upon us if indulged; it is easier to do what we have already done, there is a beaten path which is easily followed. Thus we may observe that habit is very strong in the aged and in the indolent, and very weak in the young and active. The rule of habit is only good for feeble hearts, and it makes them more and more feeble day by day. The only useful habit for children is to be accustomed to submit without difficulty to necessity, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... urgent for 'the soul of the world, clean from all vestige of tradition,' yet his work is full of literature. He at least lends no support to the comforting fallacy of the indolent, that originating power does not go with assimilating power. Few thinkers on his level display such breadth of literary reference. Unlike Wordsworth, who was content with a few tattered volumes on a kitchen shelf, Emerson worked among books. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... And the indolent animal received a tiny whack from the snowy missile projected by the chubby hand of the child. He seemed to think, however, that it was no more than a snowflake, for he did not give even an extra ...
— The Young Ranchers - or Fighting the Sioux • Edward S. Ellis
... young negro lad, fantastically dressed, and evidently very much in love with himself, strutted past. As he swaggered along the deck, rolling his jet black eyes from side to side, and showing his white teeth to the spectators, an indolent-looking young man, dressed in the extreme of fashion, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... good-natured, obliging set of men, very willing to give us any information in their power; by one of whom we were fortunate enough to be conducted through a convent of Augustine friars. Into their mode of living it is not to be supposed that we could obtain much insight. It seemed, however, to be less indolent than that of some convents which we had visited in the old country, and approached proportionably nearer to a college life among ourselves; though it must be admitted that the fellows and undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... thighs in long stripes, and shave most of the hair from their heads, but do not flatten the forehead, as is customary with the other tribes along the Orinoco. Columbia is a country of great natural riches, but suffered to lie for the most part waste, for the people are naturally indolent; and Captain Hall remarks, that the Columbian who can eat beef and plantains, and smoke cigars as he swings in his hammock, is possessed of almost everything his habits qualify him to enjoy, or which his ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... the way down upon the little arena of bottom-land already described, and which was found well sprinkled with savages. A few stood, or sat about in groups, earnestly conversing; but most lay extended at length on the green sward, in the indolent repose that is so grateful to an Indian warrior in his hours of inaction. The arrival of Peter, however, instantly put a new face on the appearance of matters. Every man started to his feet, and additions were made to those who were found in the arena by those who came out of the adjacent ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... writer. (Plate XIV, figs. 2 and 3.) When pus forms and points externally and can not find a free escape by the teat, the spot where it fluctuates must be opened freely with the knife and the cavity injected daily with the carbolic-acid lotion. When the gland becomes hard and indolent, it may be rubbed daily with iodin ointment 1 ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... this, his late father's place; scarcely yet thought of as his own. He was a tall slender man; in figure very much resembling Percival, but not in face: the one was dark, the other fair. There was also the same indolent sort of movement, a certain languid air discernible in both; proclaiming the undoubted fact, that both were idle in disposition and given to ennui. There the resemblance ended. Lord Hartledon had nothing of the irresolution ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... To be happy and useful in one's lot, one must know something of the sphere in which he lives and works, of its practical wisdom, and must be prepared to live, or glad to die for the cause he serves. No indolent, superstitious, or ignorant family need look for abiding happiness nor ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... Richard I, whose government was quite unimportant except for the romantic personal adventures of the king when on a crusade, and in his continental dominions. Henry's second son John reigned from 1199 to 1216. Although of good natural abilities, he was extraordinarily indolent, mean, treacherous, and obstinate. By his inactivity during a long quarrel with the king of France he lost all his provinces on the Continent, except those in the far south. His contest with the Pope had ended in failure and humiliation. He had angered the barons by arbitrary ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... he realized, was for weapons of offence and defence, for his encounter with the apes, and the distant notes of the savage voices of Numa the lion, and Sheeta, the panther, warned him that his was to be no life of indolent ease and security. ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... discusses types of music in relation to action, the Lydian which is sorrowful, and the Ionian which is indolent; showing that selection must be made if men are not to be at the mercy of random influences. It is not necessary, as Plato would have it, to banish Lydian and Ionian harmonies from society; but within one's personal economy, within the republic of one's own soul, one must prefer ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... a week, of the indolent, aimless life led by most of our youthful heirs expectant and apparent," returned Rosa. "I remember once telling you how I envied you for having work and a career. I was youthful then ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... consideration, Sire, there is nothing to be feared from these people. They are as heedless and as indolent as cats. The populace is restless in the provinces; it is not in Paris. These are very pretty men, Sire. It would take all of two of them to make one of your grenadiers. There is nothing to be feared on the part ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... impressed upon his Cain-like countenance. I was enabled to study his character on our way, but study was scarcely requisite to discover the mark of the first murderer stamped on his brow. When too indolent to beat his slaves he would throw stones at them; when flogging the female slaves, if he could not succeed in rousing their sensibilities as they dropped from exhaustion in The Desert, he would poke up their persons ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Mary who had brought these things about, and by design; for she was not a woman to act without reasons and an object. It is true that she liked a gay and pleasant life, for gaiety and pleasure were agreeable to her easy and somewhat indolent mind, also they gave her opportunities of exercising her faculties ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... pale rings of smoke and circled the atrium with an indolent glance which stopped as it rested upon the two veiled women sitting alone. Besides being bored and wanting amusement, a certain curiosity impelled him toward them, and he sank on the settle beside them, with perhaps half a dozen spans of the hand between. He smoked till the cigarette scorched ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... myself have visited the fleet With Anicetus: sullen droop the sails Or flap in mutiny against the mast. Burdened with barnacles the untarred keels Drowse on the tide with parching decks unswabbed, And anchors rusting on inglorious ooze. All 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. ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... ‘Roman Widow’ or a ‘Blessed Damozel’ in the near future. As a matter of fact, my brother painted very few things, at any stage of his career, as mere representations of reality, unimbued by some inventive or ideal meaning: in the rare instances when he did so, he naturally felt an indolent comfort, and made no scruple of putting the feeling into words—highly suitable for being taken cum grano salis. Nothing was more alien from his nature or habit than ‘tall talk’ of any kind about his ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... another compass—to-morrow," she said. Then it occurred to her that nobody could guess her decision in regard to Quarrier; and she partly raised her eyes, looking at him, indolent speculation under ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... my private life is concerned, one incident only on this expedition is of moment. We paid a visit to my father's cousins, the Bartensteins, who possessed a singularly charming place in Tirol. The Duke was moderately rich, very able, and very indolent. He was a connoisseur in music and the arts. His wife, my Cousin Elizabeth, was a very good-natured woman of seven or eight and thirty, noted for her dairy and fond of out-of-door pursuits; her devotion to these last had resulted in her complexion ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... Contrast are required in Art, because they are the natural springs that move the mind to attention from its indolent quiescence; but having moved, their duty is performed—the mind of itself will do the rest; they must not act prominent parts. In every work there must be a simplicity which binds the whole together, as a whole; and whatever comes not within that girdle of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... I have said, composed of large "beehive" houses thatched conically with straw. The roofs extend to form verandas beneath which sit indolent damsels, their hair divided in innumerable tiny parts running fore and aft like the stripes on a water melon; their figured 'Mericani garments draped gracefully. As befitted the women of plutocrats, they wore much jewellery, some of it set in their noses. Most of ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... feelings which make life amiable and indolent—those sensations which soften, and allure, and vulgarise—were unknown to him; no domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness reached him; but, aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied by its intercourse, he came occasionally ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... indolent man gets tired or afraid of putting the clear, sharp tints side by side to make new combinations ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... they can hold property in their own right and are entitled to their earnings. This causes them to be very industrious as well as executive. It is possible that the sunny aspect of Nature may partly be responsible for their joyous appearance, as it certainly causes the men to be very indolent and quite willing that their wives should carry on their business, provided they are left undisturbed to enjoy ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... those who set up for professors of this art are of mean ability, selfish, and pilfering every thing they can; others are indolent and insolent. Those who really understand their business (which are by far the smallest number), are too often either ridiculously saucy, or insatiably thirsty; in a word, a good subject of this class is a ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... contrived to gall the boy's proud spirit and render his position one of almost purgatorial severity. His eldest son was just Russell's age, had been sent to various schools from his infancy, was indolent, self-indulgent, and thoroughly dissipated. Having been a second time expelled from school for most disgraceful misdemeanours, he lounged away his time about the store, or passed it still more disreputably with ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... fortunes now began to be intertwined with ours, had his likeness, so far as went state and custom, to that Cuban chieftain whom Luis Torres and I had visited. But this was an easier, less strongly fibred person, a big, amiable, indolent man with some quality of a great dog who, accepting you and becoming your friend, may never be estranged. He was brave after his fashion, gifted enough in simple things. In Europe he would have been an easy, well-liked prince ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... a wasting hunger not of this world, and his hands were as small and slender as a woman's. But his eyes! They were cunning and trustless, narrow- slitted and heavy-lidded, at one and the same time as sharp as a ferret's and as indolent ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... his co-operation. But after a few moments' consideration he dismissed this thought. Why should he seek his help? Courtenay Despard, if alive, might be very unfit for the purpose. He might be timid, or indifferent, or dull, or indolent. Why make any advances to one whom he did not know? Afterward it might be well to find him, and see what might be done with or through him; but as yet there could be no reason whatever why he should take up his time in searching for him or ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... him?" said the old gentleman, with a smile; "why the newspapers, if you ever read them, will tell you enough of the elegant, the witty Lord Lilburne; a man of eminent talent, though indolent. He was wild in his youth, as clever men often are; but, on attaining his title and fortune, and marrying into the family of the then premier, he became more sedate. They say he might make a great figure in politics if he would. He has a very high reputation—very. People do say that he is still ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... colleague became less useful and less formidable. Every circumstance of his conduct was severely and suspiciously examined, and it was privately resolved, either to deprive Gallus of the purple, or at least to remove him from the indolent luxury of Asia to the hardships and dangers of a German war. The death of Theophilus, consular of the province of Syria, who in a time of scarcity had been massacred by the people of Antioch, with the connivance, and almost at the instigation, of Gallus, was justly resented, not ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Naples. In the time of Bomba's despotism the people really had little else to do than to amuse themselves, for they had then practically no voice or interest in the government of the two Sicilies, and so became careless, luxurious, and indolent—content to live idly on their hereditary means, smoke, gossip, sip their chocolate, eat their macaroni, roll about in their carriages, and wind up their monotonous and useless day at their earthly paradise, the opera, where they gossiped and flirted to their hearts' content. In consequence of this ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... the people was concentrated against one man, and he the highest in the land; to blame, of course, in a secondary degree, but not the one primarily at fault for this deplorable state of things. The Emperor, always indolent from the time he came to the throne, had grown old and crabbed and fat, caring for nothing but his flagon of wine that stood continually at his elbow. Laxity of rule in the beginning allowed his nobles to get the upper hand, and now it would require a civil ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... he, with an arrogant little air of satisfaction. "I was born under an indolent star, but I confess to you, privately, of the two I would rather gather my harvests with the sickle than the sword. How does your uncle ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... remark, that the women of the more fashionable and worldly class, in America, are indolent, idle, incapable, and live feeble and lazy lives. It has always seemed to me that, on the contrary, they are compelled, by the very circumstances of their situation, to lead very laborious lives, requiring great strength and energy. Whether many of their pursuits are frivolous, ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... singularly adapted as a receptacle for convict labour; it was not a populous place when we took it in 1685, nor, as far as we can gather, had the population much increased up to the year 1787, and the few Sumatrans and Malays that were its inhabitants were an indolent race, and preferred a life of ease to any kind of labour. They were content to get their livelihood from fishing, and they had no artificial wants. They would occasionally work upon pepper plantations, and would bring the berries to Bencoolen ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... all animation and good humour, but too unsettled to leave any memorable impression. I like Mrs. Stanley much—a shrewd, sensible, observing woman. She told me much about her Bishop, how very trying his position was on first settling at Norwich; for his predecessor was an amiable, indolent old man, who let things take their course, and a very bad course too, all which the present man has to correct as way opens, and continually sacrifice popularity to a ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... health, Scott returned to Edinburgh, and resumed his studies in the law, which had been interrupted by illness. He states his progress to have been neither slow nor unsatisfactory, though by others he is said to have been an indolent student. He speaks of his "severe studies" occupying the greater part of his time, and amidst their dulness he seems to have underrated the incidents of his private life, which he afterwards related to the world with some share ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... Austrian manner. The number of those who purge their quarantine is about fourteen thousand individuals per annum, being mostly Bulgarians who wander into Servia at harvest time, and place at the disposal of the haughty, warlike, and somewhat indolent Servians their more humble and laborious services. A village of three hundred houses, a church, and a national school, have sprung up within the last few years at this point. The imports from Roumelia and Bulgaria are mostly Cordovan leather; ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... suffered, starve as I starved, stray where I was driven to stray. The English boarding-school system is that of the straw-yard where colts are broken by routine, and again of the farmyard where pups are walked. Drill in school, laissez-faire out of it. It is at once too dull and too indolent to recognise character or even to look for it; it recks nothing of early development or late; it measures young humanity for its class-rooms like a tailor, with the yard measure. The discipline of boy over boy is, as might be expected, brutal or bestial. ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... manner of uttering these last words—a hopelessness of effort and a despairing sense of failure which he himself seemed conscious of, for, meeting the fixed and earnest gaze of Ileliobas, he quickly relapsed into his usual tone of indolent indifference. ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... upon him, his exertions will cease, and you will not see him at the polls during the election. The request was complied with. On proceeding with the examination, the name of another wealthy individual was presented; he was liberal, but indolent; he also was assessed one hundred dollars. Burr requested that this sum should be doubled, and that be should be informed that no labour would be expected from him except an occasional attendance at the committee-rooms to assist in folding tickets. He will ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... we imagine: many are too indolent to care at all about us, and if the stream of censure is running against us, the world is too careless to oppose it. If we could hear what is said of us in our absence we should torment ourselves without real cause, for we should seldom ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... reliance in mixing with men of my own age. Owing to the exceptional vivacity and innate susceptibility of my nature— qualities which were brought home to me in my relations with members of my circle—I gradually became conscious of a certain power of transporting or bewildering my more indolent companions. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... boated on the lake under the stars, and read Milly's literary efforts on the piazza of the Thornton cottage. Duncan told her much about his ranch on the slope of the Ventura hills above the Pacific, of the indolent California life in the sunshine, with an occasional excursion to Los Angeles or San Francisco. He was not exciting in any sense, not very energetic, like the Chicago men she had known, perhaps not very much alive; but he was gentle, and kindly, and thoughtful ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... always glad to listen to these products of my imagination, which were wholly original; for no stories were told me, nor had I any children's books. My heroes and heroines were generally distinguished for some mental peculiarity,—being kind or cruel, active or indolent,—which led them into all sorts of adventures till it suited my caprice to terminate their career. In all our little affairs, I took the lead, planning and directing every thing; while my playmates seemed to take ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... but I thought I saw the indolent Bimbo suddenly start at the word "bushrangers," and his apparently heavy-looking eyes were lighted up with an energetic look that I little expected from a man such as his outward appearance denoted. Whether my surmises were correct or not, the man resumed his ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... the world Let us revert, and place before our thoughts The face which rural solitude might wear To the unenlightened swains of pagan Greece. —In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched On the soft grass through half a summer's day, With music lulled his indolent repose: And, in some fit of weariness, if he, When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched, Even from the blazing chariot of the sun, A beardless Youth, who touched a ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... "History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church," "the Anglo-Saxon church presented a melancholy spectacle to the friends of religion: 1. The laity had resumed the ferocious manners of their pagan forefathers. 2. The clergy had grown indolent, dissolute and illiterate. 3. The monastic order had been apparently annihilated. It devolved on King Alfred, victorious over his enemies, to devise and apply the remedies for these evils." The good king endeavored to restore the monastic institution, but, ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected. Abraham, seated in his tent door in the heat of the day, would be to the philosophers of the nineteenth century an object for uplifted hands and pointed fingers. They would see in him only the indolent Arab, whom nothing but the foolish fancy that he saw his Maker in the distance, could rouse ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... to take the risk of moving farther up the hill-path to a less exposed lurking place, was hesitating only because his indolent soul rebelled at the thought of having to drag Ford's body so many added steps to its burial in the river, when the clink of shod hoofs upon stone warned him that the time for scene-shifting had passed. Pushing the mustang out of the line of ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... at him, scarce believing now that he was sane, and marvelling deeply whence had sprung this sudden martial fervour in one whose nature was more indolent than active, more timid than warlike. And yet the reason was not far to seek, had they but cared to follow the line of thought to which he, himself, had given them the clue when he referred to the voice he had heard, and the sights he had seen in the streets of Babbiano. The voice was the voice ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... thread, wire, and leather, and who were busily engaged at their trade, repairing the coverings for the feet. I remarked at this time, as well as on several other occasions, that the natives are by no means so indolent as they are generally represented to be, but, on the contrary, that they avail themselves of every favourable opportunity of earning money. All the caravansaries at the entrance of the town were crowded, and there was no other alternative except to pass through ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... young man of scientific training, indolent manners, effeminate appearance, hidden energy, and absolute courage, lounged through the doors of the Atlas Building. Since his rescue from the volcanic island that had witnessed the piratical murder of his old employer, Doctor ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... marries a deformed wife for the sake of a fortune, as with us; beauty and good sense, to their credit be it spoken, are the only inducements to matrimony among the Turks. But they are an indolent people, and are much averse to improving their country by commerce, planting, or building; appearing to take delight in letting their property run to ruin. Alexandria, Tyre, and Sidon, which once commanded the navigation ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... my head is seldom cool enough. I am dreadfully indolent. To have to do anything-to order me a new coat, for instance, tho' my old buttons are shelled ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... sort of fleecy, hairy goat, With an indolent expression and an undulating throat, Like an unsuccessful literary man. And I know the place he lives in (or at least I think I do) It is Ecuador, Brazil or Chile—possibly Peru; You must find it in the Atlas if ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... are victorious, and organized in their present formidable manner. Should anything happen to our present chief, an impulse may be given to the minds now sunk down, and raise our characters from their present torpid state. But until such an event, we shall remain as we are, indolent but submissive, sacrificing our children and treasures for a cause we detest, and for a man we abhor. I am sorry to say it, but it certainly does, no honour to my nation when one million desperados of civil and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... the brightest colors, which adorn the women, and the gayly-embroidered jackets of the men, make the eyes ache which gaze upon them. Almost every specimen of the Eastern races may be seen here—all taking their pleasure in the same indolent way which distinguishes Eastern enjoyment. The Circassian and Georgian women are certainly very beautiful, as far as regularity of features, bold flashing eyes and great symmetry of form can make them; but they lack expression, the highest feminine charm, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... messenger of her own. Here, indeed, was news. Here was a weapon by which the Queen might be destroyed. Richelieu considered. If he could but obtain possession of the studs, the rest would be easy. There would be an end—and such an end!—to the King's obstinate, indolent faith in his wife's indifference to that boastful, flamboyant English upstart. Richelieu held his peace for the time being, and ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... transplanted to a warm climate and turned slave-masters. They sustained their position by entails, and constantly undermined it by the reckless profusion which ruined them at last. Many of them were well born, with an immense pride of descent, increased by the habit of domination. Indolent and energetic by turns; rich in natural gifts and often poor in book-learning, though some, in the lack of good teaching at home, had been bred in the English universities; high-spirited, generous to a fault; keeping open house in ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... open gates they came, in two indolent yellow lines, male lions, female lions, half-grown lions, cub lions that cuffed each other in play, in all perhaps fifty or sixty of them. Of these only two or three looked towards the Professor, for none of them ran or galloped, while the rest spread over ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... the rate of increase been rapid, and the consequent struggle for existence extremely severe. It even appears from what we see, for instance, in parts of S. America, that a people which may be called civilised, such as the Spanish settlers, is liable to become indolent and to retrograde, when the conditions of life are very easy. With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... I am not indolent. I always have my music, embroidery, or reading to attend to. As to being chained down to household drudgery, I cannot think of it, and I am certain that it would be as much against ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... as a woman, rather pretty, somewhat regardless of morals and decidedly slovenly of person; craving admiration, but too indolent to earn it by keeping herself presentable; covering up the dirt on a piquant face with rice powder; wearing paste jewels in her earlobes in an effort to distract criticism from the fact that the ears themselves stand in need of soap and water. London, viewed in retrospect, seems a great, ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... is nothing to be deplored, scarcely to be feared, in this. It almost always wears off; but sometimes it happens, that they have not judicious friends by them to explain, that the habits which they think peculiar are universal, and, if unreasonably indulged, can ultimately only turn them into indolent, insignificant members of society, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... secured, and the gathering of cattle in Loving's brand began at once, continuing for six weeks. We combed the hills and valleys along the main Brazos, and then started west up the Clear Fork, carrying the beeves with us while gathering. The range was in prime condition, the cattle were fat and indolent, and with the exception of Indian rumors there was not a ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... successive generations each individual beetle which flew least, either from its wings having been ever so little less perfectly developed, or from indolent habit, will have had the best chance of surviving from not having been blown out to sea; and on the other hand those beetles which most readily took to flight would oftenest be blown ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... of the Philippines, the Igorrotes are indolent to the greatest degree. Their huts are built bee-hive fashion, and they creep into them like quadrupeds. Fields of sweet potatoes and sugar-cane are under cultivation by them. They cannot be forced or persuaded ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... by mood. Emerson is a pure intellectual to those who prefer to take him as literally as they can. There are reformers, and in "the form" lies their interest, who prefer to stand on the plain, and then insist they see from the summit. Indolent legs supply the strength of eye for their inspiration. The intellect is never a whole. It is where the soul finds things. It is often the only track to the over-values. It appears a whole—but never becomes one even in the stock exchange, or the convent, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... off his ragged jacket at once, dragging an even more tattered shirt over his head. But I noticed though, and so did the doctor too, who had pretty sharp eyes of his own in spite of his somewhat indolent demeanour, that, if poor Mick's garment was ragged, as indeed it was—aye, and 'holy' enough to have served his patriot saint, Saint Patrick, for a vestment—the shirt, or rather the remnant of the article, was scrupulously ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... are born here are so ill-educated, and so indolent, that a man is better without their ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... infinite. It is not morality, but that which deepens the moral impression, and sends the thrill of spiritual beauty throughout the whole being. But its appeals, says an eloquent writer, are mainly 'to those affections that are apt to become indolent and dormant amidst the commerce of the world;' and it aims at the 'revival of those purer and more enthusiastic feelings which are associated with the earlier and least selfish period of our existence. Immersed in business, which, if it sharpen the edge ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... is indolent enough by nature, and worse with gout; and I do not see what good I could do. I once offended the tenant, Nicolson, by fining him for cheating his unhappy labourers, on the abominable truck system; and he had rather poison me than do anything ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... there was the proud name of Senator; but, at the present time, the office was confined to one or to two persons, sometimes elected by the pope, sometimes by the nobles. The authority attached to the name seems to have had no definite limit; it was that of a stern dictator, or an indolent puppet, according as he who held it had the power to enforce the dignity he assumed. It was never conceded but to nobles, and it was by the nobles that all the outrages were committed. Private enmity alone was gratified whenever public justice was invoked: and the vindication ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... go. But I like the Scotch taste better; there is more matter, more information, above all, more spirit in it. Clerk will, I am afraid, leave the world little more than the report of his fame. He is too indolent to finish any considerable work.[2] Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe is another very remarkable man. He was bred a clergyman, but did not take orders, owing I believe to a peculiar effeminacy of voice which must have been unpleasant in reading prayers. Some family quarrels occasioned ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... for a log cabin tavern without a door or window (perhaps a log out to answer both purposes) to sup and lodge twenty persons, men women and children. A living is so easily obtained in this rich country that the most industrious of the inhabitants soon grow indolent. Perhaps the ague and fever unfits them for exertion or labor, but those things or something ...
— Narrative of Richard Lee Mason in the Pioneer West, 1819 • Richard Lee Mason
... we lived in were called cabins. The Negroes who were thrifty had nice well-kept homes; and it is thus now. The thrifty of the colored race live well; the others who are indolent live in hovels which smell foul ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... had discovered, to his surprise, that, indolent and silly as Mrs. Sankey was in many respects, she was not altogether a fool, and was keen enough where her own interests were concerned. He had suggested something about settlements, hoping that she would at ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... he passes his life in a hopeless and sluggish inaction, from a fear of drawing down upon himself reproaches to which he might have to make answer or of being compelled to take part in discussions which would involve the disturbing of his indolent repose. ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... parched plant. Deprived of his fortune, existence wasn't worth while. But with the certainty that his money would be restored to him, life regained all its roseate tints. As the future outlook cleared and he saw that he could return to his indolent mode of living, a sudden reaction took place within him, filling him with a sullen aversion for the detective who had so nearly beguiled him into committing an irreparable breach of faith—if nothing worse. And he ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... full upon them with all the splendor of the tropics, and lit the night with a brilliant, dazzling radiance. From where Miss Cameron sat on the veranda in the shadow, Sir Charles could see only the white outline of her figure and the indolent movement of her fan. Collier had left his wife and was returning slowly towards the step. Sir Charles felt that if he meant to speak he must speak now, and quickly. He rose and placed himself beside her in the shadow, and ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... cards by proxy is often abused by selfish and indolent men is no doubt true. But the social advantage which it gives to a large class of men who are neither selfish nor indolent more than counterbalances any disadvantages, and saves to "society" a solid element that might be entirely given ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... was a circumstance independent of the state of the surrounding atmosphere, and was what in the phraseology of prescientific times might well have been called providential. If Voltaire had seen all that he saw, and yet been indolent; or if he had been as clear-sighted and as active as he was, and yet had only lived fifty years, instead of eighty-four, Voltairism would never have struck root. As it was, with his genius, his industry, his longevity, and the conditions of the time ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... much of Sir Thomas Lucy's venison, that he narrowly escaped the fate of my two friends at Gibraltar. Poor Shakespeare was imprisoned, and my ancestor obtained his freedom in a very singular manner. Queen Elizabeth was then on the throne, but grown so indolent, that every trifling matter was a trouble to her; dressing, undressing, eating, drinking, and some other offices which shall be nameless, made life a burden to her; all these things he enabled her to do without, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... Anglo-Saxon. In spite of the dismal prognostications of Marcus Clarke regarding the future Australian, whom he describes as being "a tall, coarse, strong-jawed, greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship," it is more likely that he will be a cultured, indolent individual, with an intense appreciation of the arts and sciences, and a dislike to hard work and utilitarian principles. Climatic influence should be taken into account with regard to the future Australian, and our posterity will no more resemble ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... character to discover, and a bold one to display, every corruption and every error of government; these are the qualities which recommend a man to a seat in the House of Commons, in open and merely popular elections. An indolent and submissive disposition; a disposition to think charitably of all the actions of men in power, and to live in a mutual intercourse of favours with them; an inclination rather to countenance a strong ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... I have taken in the country. The ordinary ambitions and aims of men in my position seem to me dull and unattractive. I have little fancy for the whirl of society, and none for the jostle of politics. Lady Burlesdon utterly despairs of me; my neighbours think me an indolent, dreamy, unsociable fellow. Yet I am a young man; and sometimes I have a fancy—the superstitious would call it a presentiment—that my part in life is not yet altogether played; that, somehow and some day, I shall mix again in great affairs, ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... For instance, he had been to the Carmelite's school at ——, and instead of showing any aptitude for work, he had played truant with a keener delight than any of his school-fellows. His was an eminently contemplative nature, kindly and indolent, but proud and almost savage in its love of independence; religious, yet opposed to all authority; somewhat captious, very suspicious, and inexorable with hypocrites. The observances of the cloister inspired him with but little awe; ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... what struck Alcide, was that the Persians appeared rather indolent than fiery. Their passion had deserted them, and, by the kind of dances as well as by their execution, they recalled rather the calm and self-possessed nauch girls of India than the impassioned ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... am growing selfish, and I am sure that I have become shamefully indolent. I go on with certain occupations every day from habit, not from choice; my mind is not in them. I used to flatter myself that I did many things, from a sense of duty and of general benevolence, which I am convinced were done merely from a particular wish to ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... people are reduced to a condition of miserable slavery. Indeed, very few of them, in the course of ages, are capable of conceiving any other means of maintaining the ostentatious state, the luxurious and indolent pride, which they mistake for greatness. I heartily wish that this observation and censure may not, in some instances, be applicable to great landed proprietors in some parts of Britain."—Travelling Memorandums, vol. ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... gentleman, than either cultivation or association; for he had passed his entire life, with very immaterial exceptions, in the valley of Templeton, where, without being what could be called a student, or a scholar, he had dreamed away his existence in an indolent communication with the current literature of the day. He was fond of reading, and being indisposed to contention, or activity of any sort, his mind had admitted the impressions of what he perused, as the stone ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... the spirit of recent child-fiction are connected with a parallel folly of purpose. Parents who are too indolent and self-indulgent to form their children's characters by wholesome discipline, or in their own habits and principles of life are conscious of setting before them no faultless example, vainly endeavor to substitute the persuasive influence ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Doyle is perfectly right when he says that hatred "steels the mind and sets the resolution." If he had stopped there, I should not have questioned his theory. Again and again one has seen indolent, flabby, and irresolute natures stimulated to activity and "steeled" into hardness by the deep, though perhaps unuttered, desire to repay an insult or avenge an injury. It is in his superlative that Sir ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... the Indians as so naturally indolent that no wages could induce them to work. He represented them as flying from contact with the Spaniards, leaving Queen Isabella to suppose that their avoidance was due to a natural antipathy to white men. The Queen, in her zeal ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... on deck chairs in the veranda of the pavilion, smoked, drank whisky, and, the chalice disposed of, meditated. His temporary annoyance passed. It was an altogether splendid summer night, following a blazing, indolent day. Full moonlight brought out dimly the lines of the receding hills, one wave beyond another; far beyond were the pin-point lights of Leatherhead, and in the foreground the little stage from which I used to start upon my gliders gleamed like wet steel. The season must have ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... that his search was fruitless; for after a few moments of indolent and listless examination, he suffered his huge frame to descend the gentle declivity, in the same sluggish manner that an over fatted beast would have yielded ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... has commenced, writes at the foot that he bequeaths the continuation to his successor, and then goes into the church to die. Nowhere was monastic life to find such docile subjects. Credulous as a child, timid, indolent, inclined to submit and obey, the Irishman alone was capable of lending himself to that complete self-abdication in the hands of the abbot, which we find so deeply marked in the historical and legendary memorials of the Irish Church. One easily recognises the land where, in our ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... indeed : efektive, ja. independent : sendependa. index : nomaro; montra tabelo. india-rubber : kauxcxuko. indifferent : indiferenta. indigenous : indigxena, enlanda. indignant (to be) : indigni. indirect : malrekta, pera. indispensable : nepre necesa. individual : individuo. indolent : senenergia. indomitable : necedigebla. indorse : dorseskribi, gxiri. induce : decidigi, alkonduki. indulge : indulgi. industrious : diligenta, laborema industry : (business), industrio. infantry : infanterio. infect : infekti. infiltrate : ensorbigxi. infinite : senlima, sennombra, senfina. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... and the fury seemed so calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy and indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly gaped—open-mouthed at times—that the mere sight of such a yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew. Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity is sometimes so ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... did he misunderstand his indolent friend. Ponty's indolence wasn't all laziness. It was sometimes a cloak for perplexity; and the captain-to-be, as he said good-night, guessed shrewdly that not many pages of the novel would be skimmed ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... only is it of moment that the infant should at any rate make its start in life with every advantage, but the mother who nurses her little one even for a month avoids thereby almost half the risks which follow her confinement. For the indolent, among the wealthy, a numerous class who have but to form a wish in order to have it gratified, a wet-nurse for the baby suggests itself at once to the mother as a ready means of saving herself trouble, and of shirking responsibility. This course, to which love of pleasure ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... almost free of women in the morning. There were only the men, intent on their papers, and their eggs and the 8.40 I. C. train. It was like a men's club, except, perhaps, for an occasional business woman successful enough or indolent enough to do away with the cooking of the surreptitious matutinal egg in her own room. Sometimes, if they were to lunch at home, they carried in a bit of cold ham, or cheese, rolls, butter, or small dry groceries concealed in muffs or handbags. They even had diminutive ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... the whole of Peru, the free negroes are a plague to society. Too indolent to support themselves by laborious industry, they readily fall into any dishonest means of getting money. Almost all the robbers who infest the roads on the coast of Peru are free negroes. Dishonesty seems to be a part of their very nature; and moreover, all their tastes ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... interference with normal functions is so great that he lives the winter through in a sort of hibernation. He is nearly poisoned by lack of ventilation in the small living room, where the one stove makes living possible; he gets fat and indolent, and then with relaxed muscles plunges into furious labor again when spring ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... error of undertaking to supply Madrid with food, committed the still greater error of neglecting to perform what it had undertaken. The price of bread doubled. Complaints were made to the magistrates, and were heard with the indolent apathy characteristic of the Spanish administration from the highest to the lowest grade. Then the populace rose, attacked the house of Oropesa, poured by thousands into the great court of the palace, and insisted on seeing ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... dear fellow, why, how fare you?" said our old ship-mate, descending the steps, with an indolent, half-cordial, half-condescending manner; extending his hand at the same time, which Moses received and shook heartily.—"The sight of you reminds me of ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... September, 1680, when the Indians had generally returned from their hunting parties, and were loitering about in indolent groups, with nothing to do, an Indian, from an allied tribe, came rushing almost breathless into the village, with the tidings that a united army of the Iroquois and the Miamis from the north, five hundred in number, ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... cigar, smoked in Reed's room, lasted long, that night; above it, the doctor was silent, indolent, and yet alert to every change in the face before him. At nine o'clock, he rose, dived into his breast pocket and pulled out a little case. An instant later, he had ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... in his lot with these men. He felt that they would be loyal to each other, and he knew that the only traitors which this band had known were now no more. A bitter hatred of the Sheriff; of lying Carfax and of Royalty, as personified by the unjust, indolent Prince, had moulded Robin's character ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... with all a monarch's cares oppress'd, O Atreus' son! canst thou indulge the rest?(78) Ill fits a chief who mighty nations guides, Directs in council, and in war presides, To whom its safety a whole people owes, To waste long nights in indolent repose.(79) Monarch, awake! 'tis Jove's command I bear; Thou, and thy glory, claim his heavenly care. In just array draw forth the embattled train, Lead all thy Grecians to the dusty plain; E'en now, O king! 'tis given thee to destroy The lofty towers of wide-extended ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... standing about, more bored inactivity, during my tour than I have ever seen before in my life. Even the front line trenches seem to slumber; the Angel of Death drowses over them, and moves in his sleep to crush out men's lives. The gunfire has an indolent intermittence. But the munition factories grind on night and day, grinding against the factories in Central Europe, grinding out the slow and costly and necessary victory that should end aggressive warfare ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... Mrs. Sherwood, Nan Keith found her attitude very vague. There was no doubt that she liked her personally, admired her slow, purposeful, half- indolent movements, the poise of her small, patrician head, the unconscious, easy grace of her body, the direct commonsense quality of her mind. One met her face to face; there were no frills and furbelows of the spirit. Also, Nan was ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... descended briskly to meet the lounging heavy footfalls of her royal master, whom she loved for himself, and careless of her own future, as she was of her own person, cared more for the honor of the indolent Charles, than ever he cared for his own! In nature, in feeling, in all honors save the one, how superior was the poor orange-girl to her rivals; they envied and slandered each other, disdaining no article to fix the fancy of the king, who ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... possessed, but the upright endeavor he has made to arrive at truth, makes the worth of the man. For not by the possession, but by the investigation, of truth are his powers expanded, wherein alone his ever-growing perfection consists. Possession makes us easy, indolent, proud. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... introspective even then, with something of that rare and insatiable curiosity which we all now recognise as so distinctive of Sainte-Beuve. Again, the greatest creative literary artist of the century, in prose at any rate, was leading an apparently somewhat indolent schoolboy life at Tours, undreamful yet of enormous debts, colossal undertakings, gigantic failures, and the Comedie Humaine. In art, Sir Henry Raeburn, William Blake, Flaxman, Canova, Thorwaldsen, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... corresponding with his powers, neither having ever attained any object of ambition beyond that of fame. All their talents, therefore, and all their requirements, did not procure them content, and probably Burke was a very unhappy, and Mackintosh not a very happy, man. The suavity, the indolent temperament, the 'mitis sapientia' of Mackintosh may have warded off sorrow and mitigated disappointment, but the stern and vindictive energies of Burke must have kept up a storm of conflicting passions in his breast. But I turn from Mackintosh and Burke to all that is ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... that though social equality was a failure, community of property was not. Whether the law of mine and thine is natural or incidental in human character, it soon began to develop its sway. The industrious, the skilful and the strong saw the product of their labor enjoyed by the indolent, the unskilled and the improvident; and self-love rose against benevolence. A band of musicians thought their brassy harmony was as necessary to the common happiness as bread and meat, and declined to enter the harvest-field or the workshop. A lecturer upon natural science ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... but indolent Lord Harley, afterwards Earl of Oxford, had married Lady Henrietta Cavendish Holles, who brought him 500,000, most of which he dissipated. Their only child Margaret, "the noble, lovely little Peggy" of Prior, married William Bentinck, ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... to torture a prisoner till he confesses," observed some one in a quiet and rather indolent tone. "Strangle him quickly and throw him into the canal. It is ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... means of marking time by appointed days, because man, on one side of his nature so ardent and aspiring, is on the other so indolent and slippery a being, that he needs incessant admonitions to redeem the time. Time flows on steadily, whether he regards it or not; yet, unless he keep time, there is no music in that flow. The sands drop with inevitable speed; yet each waits ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... floor, two or three little lacquer screens with vague and capricious gilding, indicating, like the double doors and the carpets of thick wool, a fear of cold pushed even to excess, various seats, lounges, warmers, scattered about rather indiscriminately, all low, rounded, indolent, or voluptuous in shape, composed the furniture of this celebrated chamber in which the gravest questions and the most frivolous were wont to be treated alike with the same seriousness. On the wall was a handsome portrait of the duchess; ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... ourselves, the mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of setting it down as in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon into a misgrowth or lusus of the capricious and irregular genius of Shakespeare. The shallow and stupid arrogance of these vulgar and indolent decisions I would fain do my best to expose. I believe the character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakespeare's deep and accurate science in mental philosophy. Indeed, that this character must have some connection with the common fundamental laws of our nature ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... us into forest life, so full of mysterious visions. In opposition to the sedentary, stay-at-home life of the inhabitant of plains, with his indolent mind, we have the free-and-easy humour of the handsome and adventurous muleteer, Huriel, with his love of the road and of all that is unexpected. He is a cheminau before the ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... spur himself to the single activity of seeing. For this purpose I have taken the laziest person of my acquaintance, that is myself; and made an idle diary of such odd things as I have fallen over by accident, in walking in a very limited area at a very indolent pace. If anyone says that these are very small affairs talked about in very big language, I can only gracefully compliment him upon seeing the joke. If anyone says that I am making mountains out of molehills, I confess with pride that it is so. I can imagine no more successful and productive ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... evils, but in cultivating aimless contemplations of an imaginary ideal. Much of our popular religion seems to be expressly directed to deaden our sympathies with our fellow men by encouraging an indolent optimism; our thoughts of the other world are used in many forms as an opiate to drug our minds with indifference to the evils of this; and the last word of half of our preachers is, 'dream ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... Shoshokoes, or Root Diggers, from their subsisting, in a great measure, on the roots of the earth; though they likewise take fish in great quantities, and hunt, in a small way. They are, in general, very poor; destitute of most of the comforts of life, and extremely indolent: but a mild, inoffensive race. They differ, in many respects, from the other branch of the Snake tribe, the Shoshonies; who possess horses, are more roving and adventurous, and ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... saw a man afflicted with palsy in his head. He applied to me for a remedy, but I could only recommend him to bathe himself every day in warm water, which will never be done; for these people are too indolent to perform any labour of this kind, even if it be to save ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... adding the fillip of the unaccustomed to a jaded palate. But it was an appeal that must be constantly renewed, that would not outlast any continued absence. She believed that Channing, while he would accept with eagerness whatever good thing came to his hand, was too indolent and too self-centered to overcome many obstacles in the ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... temperament. The clear, decided, incisive manner commanded her respect, while the sunny gayety won her liking. Stephen had gentle, placid sweetness and much love of the beautiful; but his love of the beautiful was an indolent, and one might almost say a-haughty, demand in his nature. Mercy's was a bounding and delighted acceptance. She was cheery: he was only placid. She was full of delight; he, only of satisfaction. In her, joy was of the spirit, spiritual. Keen ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Let her sing!" entreated Foma, kindly, looking into his lady's face. He was pale some spark seemed to flash up in his eyes now and then, and an indefinite, indolent smile played about ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... whole known universe pay tribute, never did your far-famed banquet-halls witness the appearance of those succulent jellies, the delight of the indolent, nor those varied ices whose cold would brave the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... thread of a worthless life is soon snipped. I wish to God my fate had been true to its first destination, and made a parson of me;—I should have made an excellent country Joll. I think I can, with confidence, pronounce the character that would have been given of me:—He was an indolent good-humored man, civil at all times, and hospitable at others, namely, when he was able to be so, which, truth to say, happened but seldom. His sermons were better than his preaching, and his doctrine better than his life; though often grave, and sometimes melancholy, he nevertheless loved a ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
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