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More "Well-meaning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never have to re-live the horrors of the next hour. In spite of my bluff and hearty ways, in times of trouble I am as reticent as a clam. I was determined to hide my agony and anxiety from the well-meaning people of the Moose Hotel. I hurried to the railway station to send a telegram to the Professor's address in Brooklyn, but found the place closed. A boy told me it would not be open until the afternoon. From a drugstore I called "information" in Willdon, and finally got connected ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... poor, benighted creature, and I hope God will pity you on the score of your ignorance," said one of the well-meaning ladies. ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... own, and the heroine a terrific grandmother who are Miss MACNAMARA'S creations, and as she makes wife number one lie like a trooper in order to preserve the happiness of wife number two a soupcon of freshness is imparted to the rechauffe. Of course the well-meaning first wife is not allowed to succeed in her efforts, and Beau and Perry (you would never guess from that which was which, but in this case it doesn't matter) have a very bad time indeed until, reassured by a friendly barrister, they settle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... of course, the Lower Glen, which consisted of boggy places and endless mists in winter, and a small uninteresting village, where the barest necessaries of life could be bought, and where the folks were all of the humbler class, well-meaning, hard-working, but, alas! poor of the poor. When all was said and done, the Lower Glen was a poor place, meant ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... a man to read after fourteen hours' burning sun is indeed a mockery; darn his stockings would be better. There really is nothing whatsoever that the cleverest and most benevolent person could suggest. Before any benevolent or well-meaning suggestions could be effective the preceding circumstances must be changed—the hours and conditions of labour, everything; and can that be done? The world has been working these thousands of years, and still it is the same; with our engines, our electric ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... passengers wanted to shake hands with Tom and Larry, and for several minutes the boys were at the mercy of their well-meaning admirers. Again the sheriff ...
— Comrades of the Saddle - The Young Rough Riders of the Plains • Frank V. Webster
... wrongs have been done under that clause! The Bastille stormed; the Swiss Guard slaughtered; the Reign of Terror, with its daily procession of tumbrels through the streets of Paris; the murder of that amiable and well-meaning gentleman who did his best to atone for the sins of his ancestors; the fearful months of waiting suffered by his Queen before she, too, went to her death. Often as I lighted my candle of an evening in my little room to read of these things so far away, I would drop my ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... attempts, on the part of some well-meaning popes, to punish the confessors who destroy the purity of their penitents, have failed to touch the guilty parties, they are, in the good providence of God, infallible witnesses to tell to the world that auricular confession is nothing else than a snare to the confessor and his dupes. Yes, those ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... to this sort of friendship, and as soon as the intellectual zest is gone from absorbing companionship with one person, they turn to another. One such instance showed through twenty years a series of such friendships on the part of a well-meaning but foolish woman, in which her husband figured briefly, passing on and off the stage as violently as, and even more speedily ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... her life she saw herself clearly: a well-meaning woman, ambitious, but curiously narrow; not willing to work long for the Vision, but leaping at it rashly, blindly, with a deep-seated sense of duty which she made a source of offence by preening and parading it, and forcing it to ill-timed notice. She saw that she had looked on her husband ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... forget," said the Marquis impressively, "that he told Jost in apparently the most friendly and well-meaning manner possible, that the King had discovered the whole plan of our financial campaign. He even reported me as being ready to resign ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... showing greater energy, and the feeling against the unfortunate Trochu is growing stronger. He is held responsible for everything—the frost, the dearth of food, the ill-success of our sorties, and the defeats of the armies of succour. I am sorry for him, for he is a well-meaning man, although unfitted for such troubled waters. But to a great extent he has himself to thank for what is occurring. He has risked his all upon the success of his plan, and he has encouraged the notion that he could ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... pilgrim who never stuck in the Slough of Despond, nor met Apollyon in the Valley of the Shadow, nor was captive in Doubting Castle, nor stoned in Vanity Fair. And of Bunyan, Walton would have said that he was among those Nonconformists who 'might be sincere, well-meaning men, whose indiscreet zeal might be so like charity, as thereby to cover a multitude of errors.' To Walton there seemed spiritual solace in remembering 'that we have comforted and been helpful to a dejected or distressed family.' Bunyan would have regarded this ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... stupidity, and to outwit its contemptible cunning, are practices that have tickled my vanity; and have perhaps formed one of my chief sources of pleasure. But habit and pleasure led me to extend such projects; and to prey upon the well-meaning, and the kind, with almost as much avidity as on ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... flat on the earth along with one's generation. The moment an audacious head is lifted one inch above the general level, pop! goes the unerring rifle of some biographical sharp-shooter, and it is all over with the unhappy owner. A perfectly respectable and well-meaning man, suffering under the accumulated pains of Presidentship, has the additional and entirely undeserved ignominy of being hawked about the country as the "Pioneer Boy." A statesman whose reputation for integrity has been worth millions to the land, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... if you had a headache, because you seemed so dull and so unlike yourself? And did that person time after time return to the charge, till you would have liked to poison him? There is nothing more disagreeable, and few things more mischievous, than a well-meaning, meddling fool. And where there was no special intention, good or bad, towards yourself, you have known people make you uncomfortable through the simple exhibition to you, and pressure upon you, of their own inherent disagreeableness. You ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... insuperable obstacles. Born at Wesselburen in the present province of Schleswig-Holstein on March 18, 1813, he was the son of a poor stone mason—so poor that, as Hebbel said, poverty had taken the place of his soul. Though Klaus Hebbel was a well-meaning man, he was a slave to the inexorable non possumus of penury. In winter, especially, lack of work made even the provision of daily bread often difficult and sometimes impossible for him. But Friedrich Hebbel's childhood, full ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... not recall too many, lest you cry, "Hands off!" I cannot desist, however, from this word-game until I have set down a few. Whatever is not one's own by first possession is second-hand. That is what I am told my knowledge is. But my well-meaning friends come to my defence, and, not content with endowing me with natural first-hand knowledge which is rightfully mine, ascribe to me a preternatural sixth sense and credit to miracles and heaven-sent ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... no ear for music or time, silently but vigorously worked her jaws through the chorus, and affably ambled about, under everybody's feet, through the dance, displaying all the stiff-kneed grace of a young, well-meaning calf. ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... to secure honest elections," says a well-meaning reformer, "is the Clifford or the Myers voting machine." Why, truly, here is a hopeful spirit—a rare and radiant intelligence suffused with the conviction that men can be made honest by machinery—that human character is a matter of gearing, ratchets and ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... means they both cut off many delays, and find out truth more certainly: for after the parties have laid open the merits of the cause, without those artifices which lawyers are apt to suggest, the judge examines the whole matter, and supports the simplicity of such well-meaning persons, whom otherwise crafty men would be sure to run down: and thus they avoid those evils which appear very remarkably among all those nations that labour under a vast load of laws. Every one of them is skilled ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... The well-meaning letter, written by the kindly editor, and full of wholesome advice, cut like a surgeon's knife in some desperate case when it is a question whether the patient can endure the heroic treatment necessary. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... Etiquette, who draws the shades, who muffles the bell, who keeps the house quiet, who hushes voices and footsteps and sudden noises; who stands between well-meaning and importunate outsiders and the retirement of the bereaved; who decrees that the last rites shall be performed smoothly and with beauty and gravity, so that the poignancy of grief may in so ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... wrote Baron d'Estournelles de Constant inquiring what the French were fighting for, implying that to the reasonable onlooker there was no clear issue involved in the whole business, merely the passions of misguided patriotism. The well-meaning agitation for peace, which as I write has been lifted into the grotesque by the Ford peace ship, is based largely on this inability to realize the reality of the issue between the belligerents. And there is our national attitude of strict neutrality, which fairly represents the ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... generations up and down. There is one other phrase which will soon come to be decisive of a man's social STATUS, if it is not already: "That tells the whole story." It is an expression which vulgar and conceited people particularly affect, and which well-meaning ones, who know better, catch from them. It is intended to stop all debate, like the previous question in the General Court. Only it doesn't; simply because "that" does not usually tell the whole, nor one half ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his client as a simple-hearted, honest, well-meaning man, who, during a copartnership of twelve years, had gradually become impoverished, while his partner (his former clerk) having no funds but his share of the same business, into which he had been admitted without any advance ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... thus composed and surrounded, it is easy to foresee on which side the balance will turn.—Through the meshes of the electoral net which the Jacobins have spread over the whole country, about one hundred well-meaning individuals of the common run, tolerably sensible and sufficiently resolute, Mathieu Dumas, Dumolard, Becquet, Gorguereau, Vaublanc, Beugnot, Girardin, Ramond, Jaucourt, were able to pass and form the party of the "Right."[2224] They ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... it has been specially prepared for the ears of the sublime Emperor, who is at this moment awaiting this unseemly one's arrival in Peking with every mark of ill-restrained impatience, tempered only by his expectation of being the first to hear the story of the well-meaning but ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... I said, "is that you are naturally a hopelessly irresponsible, well-meaning ass. But," I continued quickly, seeing his hand reaching out towards a complete Shakespeare in one volume that lay upon the piano, "your mental capabilities are of such extraordinary power that you can disguise this fact, and make yourself appear a ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... but that which is in itself innocent and praiseworthy—namely, the enjoyment of the fruits of honest industry. And lo! in spite of ourselves, we are in reality engaged in an internecine struggle for existence with our presumably no less peaceful and well-meaning neighbours. We seek peace and we do not ensue it. The moral nature in us asks for no more than is compatible with the general good; the non-moral nature proclaims and acts upon that fine old Scottish ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... afterwards about Silla's behaviour—her having all at once turned crimson, and rushed away at a few innocent words from such a well-meaning and handsome man as Ludvig Veyergang—her son heard the same evening. A young girl ought to stand modestly, and not go on like that: if she did, it was a sure way of getting all that could be called man-folk at ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... draped, just a little. Elfrida found a bitter satisfaction in this simile, and elaborated it. The book would be one to be commended for jeunes filles, and her lips turned down mockingly in the shadow. She fancied some well-meaning critic saying, "It should be on every drawing-room table," and she almost laughed outright. She thought of a number of other little things that might be said, of the same nature and equally amusing. Her anger flamed up again at the thought ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... quite too masculine. I heard once of a lady who proposed to give a series of lectures on 'Astronomy from a Female Point of View'" (a laugh from two or three people only), "and I should prefer to entitle Mr. Quarrier's lecture, 'Woman from a Male Point of View.' However, it was certainly well-meaning, undoubtedly eloquent, and on the whole, in this time of small mercies, something for which a member of the struggling sex may reasonably be grateful. I wish, therefore, to add my voice to the proposal ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... would be full of capering lunatics whenever it rained. Stay at home, did you say? That is good advice for the woman who has nothing else to do, but in these latter days the right sort of husband don't go round. Either he died in the war or the stock has run low, so that more than half the well-meaning women have no homes to stay in. What Moses is going to lead the poor creatures to the commonsense suit that shall protect them from the inclement weather they are forced to meet as they go abroad to earn their bread and salt? It must ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... the importance of the 12th of October as an anniversary of our potential existence. If any one wants to see how vivid is the gratitude to Columbus, let him start out among our business-houses with a subscription-paper to raise money for powder to be exploded in his honor. And yet Columbus was a well-meaning man; and if he did not discover a perfect continent, he found the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... often fallen to the lot of a British official. A man of genius might possibly have managed the inhabitants of his Alsatia. But governments have no right to expect genius in unsupported officials—even when they pay them L300 a year. Mr. Busby was a well-meaning, small-minded person, anxious to justify his appointment. His Alsatians did not like him, and complained that his manners were exclusive and his wit caustic. Probably this meant nothing more than that he declined to join in their drinking-bouts. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... hatred which passes for friendship in public life. If he were naturally observant, he would see this; if he were given at all to self-doubt, he would feel it. But his way is to regard most men as ill-mannered and well-meaning. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... question whether a spice of frivolousness may not be a safeguard has often risen before me. The truth, I must learn to think, is, that my mental power is not the match for my ideal or sentimental apprehension and native tenacity of attachment. I have fallen into one of the pits of a well-meaning but idle man. The world discredits the existence of pure platonism in love. I myself can barely look back on those twenty years of amatory servility with a full comprehension of the part I have been playing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... me that one of our country neighbours was probably at this time in the city. He kept a store as well as cultivated a farm. He was a plain and well-meaning man, and, should I be so fortunate as to meet him, his superior knowledge of the city might be of essential benefit to me in my present forlorn circumstances. His generosity might likewise induce him to lend me so much as would purchase one meal. I ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... tongue; and where had Charles Kingsley been if the vision of a curate rampant had not rejoiced his heart? Still, I am not sorry that this novel is burned. Even now it was ridiculous, and the time might have come when this book, full of high, if foolish aims, and the vain vast promise of well-meaning youth, had been too keen a reproach to be endured. Three volumes of good intentions! It is too much. There was more than a novel burning just now. After this I shall be in a position to take a ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... arbitrary power by irresponsible authority in other lands—they would turn their eyes homeward and examine the treatment and the sufferings of their own political prisoners. I would in all sincerity suggest that humane and well-meaning men who exert themselves for the remission of the death-penalty as a mercy would rather implore that the doom of solitary and silent captivity should be remitted to the more merciful doom of an immediate relief from suffering ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... she had placed in my hands, and to change the whole into assignats to increase their amount. Her orders were executed, and the assignats were delivered to the King. The Queen informed me that Madame Elisabeth had found a well-meaning man who had engaged to gain over Petion by the bribe of a large sum of money, and that deputy would, by a preconcerted signal, inform the King of the success of the project. His Majesty soon had an opportunity of seeing Petion, ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... received a Parisian letter from W.W., which I prefer answering through you, if that worthy be still at Paris, and, as he says, an occasional visiter of yours. In November last he wrote to me a well-meaning letter, stating, for some reasons of his own, his belief that a re-union might be effected between Lady B. and myself. To this I answered as usual; and he sent me a second letter, repeating his notions, which letter I have never answered, having had ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... base towards those who had thrown in their lot with us and trusted us, that, if the British nation had only known what that policy really meant, they would have spat it out of their mouths. And I tremble every day lest, on the vital question of Defence, the pressure of well-meaning but ignorant idealists, or the meaner influence of vote-catching demagogues, should lead this Government or, indeed, any Government, to curtail the provisions, already none too ample, for the safety of the Empire, in order to pose as the friends of peace or as special adepts in economy. ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner
... of avoiding fallacies, a general increase of sincerity and candour amongst mankind may be freely recommended. With more honesty there would be fewer bad arguments; but there is such a thing as well-meaning incapacity that gets unaffectedly fogged in converting A., and regards the refractoriness of O., as more than flesh and blood can endure. Mere indulgence in figurative language, again, is a besetting snare. "One of the fathers, in great severity called poesy vinum daemonum," says Bacon: himself ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... God, then," exclaimed the well-meaning man, "we will rely upon the good sense and religious principle of our dear Jane, and tell her the ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... stood silently by his side. Taking note of her friendly presence, after awhile he put out his hand without looking up and took hers as it hung by her side. He had taken quite a liking to the sweet-tempered little lassie, and had felt particularly kindly towards her since her well-meaning, if rather inadequate effort to console him ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... children early learning the language of the country to which he has come, while it is to him a sealed book, are responsible for much juvenile delinquency. Jacob Riis has told us, in compelling description, the story of the evolution of the "gang" and of the "tough" from the children of parents who, well-meaning and in their own ancestral land capable of parental control, here lose command of the family life because the children have to become the interpreters and representatives of the family in the new country to a degree that ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... for she disliked some of these nautical images, though it was impossible not to smile in secret at the queer associations that so often led the well-meaning master's discursive discourse. His mind was a strange jumble of an early religious education,—religious as to externals and professions, at least,—with subsequent loose observation and much worldly experience, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... sentence which he had given, declaring it was "totally inadequate," had been condemned by a Royal Commission as "inhuman." He would willingly have pushed "inhumanity" to savagery, out of sheer bewigged stupidity, and that he was probably well-meaning only intensified the revolt one felt at ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... games; playing at war; "Captain George."—But young Washington was not always copying good sayings; for he was a tall, strong boy, fond of all out-door sports and games. He was a well-meaning boy, but he had a hot temper, and at times his blue eyes flashed fire. In all trials of strength and in all deeds of daring, George took the lead; he could run faster, jump further, and throw a stone higher than ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery
... to be dealt with also, in some fashion. In order to sustain the courage of the people Washington was obliged to give out, and to allow it to be supposed, that he had more men than was really the case, and so Congress and various wise and well-meaning persons grumbled because he did not do more and fight more battles. He never deceived Congress, but they either could not or would not understand the actual situation. In March he wrote to Robert Morris: ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... toasts was a fancy quite new, For we drank—and you'll own 'twas benevolent too— To those well-meaning husbands, cits, parsons or peers, Whom we've any time honored by courting their dears: This museum of wittols was comical rather; Old Headfort gave Massey, and I gave your father. In short, not a soul till this ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the particular matter in question, confess it, and change your conduct. But, if this review of the affair confirms you in the opinion that your course is right, pursue it with decision and firmness. There are some well-meaning people, of limited views, and excessive carefulness, who disapprove of the best of measures, if they happen to be at variance with their long-established customs; or, more frequently, if they were not consulted before the particular enterprise ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... ours. The child has a right to learn the best that it can know of God, since the happiness of its life, not only in eternity but even in time, is bound up in that knowledge. Most grievous wrong has been done, and is still done, to children by well-meaning but misguided efforts to "make them good" by dwelling on the vengeance taken by God upon the wicked, on the possibilities of wickedness in the youngest child. Their impressionable minds are quite ready to take alarm, they are so small, and every ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... sneers in the society-papers, from New York to San Francisco; and smooth-tongued gentlemen calling, to give us hints that we can stop these sneers by purchasing a de-luxe edition of a history of our ancestors for six thousand dollars. There will be well-meaning and beautiful-souled people who will try to get you to confide in them, and then use their knowledge of your domestic unhappiness to blackmail you; there will be threats of law-suits from people who ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... defend myself since, with my one arm, I could not hold my horse's bridle and at the same time use my sabre. He therefore urged me to remain behind on this occasion, with the reserve division of infantry. I did not think that I should accept this well-meaning advice, and I expressed so vehemently my wish not to be removed from the regiment that the General gave way, but he arranged for me to have behind me six of the best cavalrymen, led by Sergeant Prud'homme, ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... to receive his repeated expressions of gratitude for the route she had counselled. Without personal objections to a well-meaning orderly man, whose pardonable error it was to be aiming too considerably higher than his head, she did but show him the voluble muteness of a Frenchwoman's closed lips; not a smile at all, and certainly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be legally forced away against her will; but if under your roof, those whom Jasper has induced to institute a search, that he has no means to institute very actively himself, might make statements which (as you are already aware) might persuade others, though well-meaning, to assist him in separating her from you. He might publicly face even a police-court, if he thus hoped to shame the rich man into buying off an intolerable scandal. He might, in the first instance, and more probably, decoy her into his power through stealth; and what might become of her before ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... been reformed, and converted from evil-disposed boys into well-meaning ones. Shuffles and Pelham were not the only ones who had been turned aside from the error of their ways, though their individual experience has not been detailed. The moral results of the voyage were very good. If the discipline ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... Delabche and Phillips, Forbes and Jamieson, and the group of brave men who accompanied and followed them, will be looked back to as moral benefactors of their race; and almost as martyrs, also, when it is remembered how much misunderstanding, obloquy, and plausible folly they had to endure from well-meaning fanatics like Fairholme or Granville Penn, and the respectable mob at their heels who tried (as is the fashion in such cases) to make a hollow compromise between fact and the Bible, by twisting facts ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... said Adelaide amiably. "But he's a well-meaning, good-hearted little man, and, of course, he feels as at home in the surroundings he's had all his life as a bird on ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... afternoons the Vrouw Grobelaar's household gave itself up, unwillingly enough, to religious exercises. The girls retired to their rooms in company with the works of certain well-meaning but inexpressibly dreary authors, and it is to be inferred they read them with profit. The children sat around the big room with Bibles, their task being to learn by heart one of the eight-verse articulations of the 119th Psalm, while the old lady meditated ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... me with terror. Was it right to permit this well-meaning but over-zealous friend of my country, my people and myself to sound the depths of social degradation in the metropolis and lard an otherwise charming book with screed and sketches dragged from the slums? He was likely to mistake Donovan's Lane ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... a well-meaning Booke. It doth at the firth entrance forewarne thee, that in contriving the same I have proposed unto my selfe no other than a familiar and private end: I have no respect or consideration at all, either to thy service, or to my glory: my forces are not capable of any ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Jasper the Parable, with his cobbling-tools, his stories, and his gospel of universal love and good-will. The Tunkers welcomed him with delight, and the emigrants from New England looked upon him kindly as a good and well-meaning man. There were some fifteen or twenty children in the settlement, and here the peaceful disciple of Pestalozzi, and friend of Froebel, applied for a place to teach, and the school was by unanimous ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... clue in another direction—into the home and family and private life of the average up-to-date woman. And it is permitted us to imagine, if we choose, that I am such a woman, while you are my well-meaning, but ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... instructions had been faithfully carried out. I had found Ivery's post office. I had laid the lines of our own special communications with the enemy, and so far as I could see I had left no clue behind me. Ivery and Gresson took me for a well-meaning nincompoop. It was true that I had aroused profound suspicion in the breasts of the Scottish police. But that mattered nothing, for Cornelius Brand, the suspect, would presently disappear, and there was nothing ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... and frightened her. They would lead him into disputes and set him up in opposition to other people. His delight in the story of his father's encounter with Lord Castlederry troubled her, and she tried to convince her son that Lord Castlederry was a well-meaning man, but, as she knew, without success. She had delighted in her husband's great courage and self-sufficiency, his sureness, his strong decision and his unconquerable pride and independence ... but now, in contemplation, these things frightened her ... she wondered ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... very crestfallen at this reception of his well-meaning invitation. He turned about and stalked away towards his nest upon the roof, without so much as ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... occasionally. Not often. You see, I'm too well-meaning to go far astray," said Nick, with becoming modesty. "You must remember that I'm well-meaning, Wyndham. It accounts for a good many little eccentricities. I think you were quite right to make her extract that needle. I should ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... he regarded the effete aristocracies of the old world with abysmal contempt; he meant to put them out of business right off the bat. In vain the white angel pleaded that some of them might be useful people, or at any rate well-meaning: Jimmie pronounced them a bunch of parasites and grafters; the thing to do was to make a clean ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... A mistaken, but well-meaning man, although a tailor, meets his debtor in Bow-street. A slight quarrel ensues; whereupon, the debtor (to show that the days of chivalry are not gone) kicks his tailor into the gutter. Does the tailor take the offender before Mr. JARDINE? By no means. The tailor is a Christian; and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... who ever went through the old 53rd Stationary hospital will ever forget his homesickness and feeling of outrage at the treatment by the perhaps well-meaning but nevertheless callous and coarse British personnel. Think of tea, jam and bread for sick and wounded men. An American medical sergeant who has often eaten with the British sergeants at that hospital, Sergeant Glenn Winslow, who made out the medical record for every wounded and sick ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... and well-meaning prince, was too weak to carry his father's policy out. He tried to maintain peace, and did homage to his uncle, the King of England. But, as the head of the patriotic party, his more energetic brother, Griffith, opposed him. By guile he caught Griffith, ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... henceforth doomed to the scaffold. He came to the throne as little implicated in the acts of his predecessor as any nominal chief of a State could be; as fitting an instrument in the hands of Court and army as any reactionary faction could desire. Helpless and well-meaning, Francis Joseph, while his troops poured into Hungary, played for a while in Austria the part of a loyal observer of his Parliament; then, when the moment had come for its destruction, he obeyed his soldier-minister as Ferdinand had in earlier days obeyed the students, and ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... upon serious studies without injury to the brain, and the disarrangement of some of the most important organs of the body. Now, we think it could be satisfactorily proved, in spite of the stern crusade perpetually waged against works of fiction by a large portion of well-meaning people, that much good has been done in the ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... singular reverence of the Liturgy, now when there was a general expectation of a total subversion of the one, and abolition of the other, they thought only removing what was offensive, unnecessary, or burthensome, an easy composition. Thus the well-meaning were, by degrees, prevailed on, towards ends they extremely abhorred, and what, at first, seemed prophane and impious to them, in a little ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... not repress a shudder. Hitherto he had never been able to take Fakrash quite seriously, in spite of all his supernatural powers; he had treated him with a half-kindly, half-contemptuous tolerance, as a well-meaning, but hopelessly incompetent, old foozle. That the Jinnee should ever become malevolent towards him had never entered his head till now—and yet he undoubtedly had. How was he to cajole and disarm this formidable being? He must keep cool and ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... they wish to have in the author's own handwriting, or it will be too late; but I have never before been huddled out of the world in this way. I take this rather premature obituary as a hint that, unless I come to some arrangement with my well-meaning but insatiable correspondents, it would be as well to leave it in type, for I cannot bear much longer the load they lay upon me. I will explain myself on this point after I have told my readers ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... passage with James Columbus, who had now returned to the island and had resumed his. official duties at Isabella. Bartholomew, who was at another part of the coast collecting tribute, had sent a caravel laden with cotton to Isabella, and well-meaning James had her drawn up on the beach. Roldan took the opportunity to represent this innocent action as a sign of the intolerable autocracy of the Columbus family, who did not even wish a vessel to be in a condition to sail for Spain ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... families in town of her acquaintance, for the purpose of expressing her sympathy with "those poor dear Adamses, who were so proud, poor things, that really there was nothing hut starvation and the workhouse before them!" Another of those well-meaning persons—strong-minded and kind-hearted, but without a particle of delicacy—came to poor Mary, with all prestige of conferring ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... spending the winter quietly in Springfield, where he had been overrun by visitors, who wished to look at him, to advise him, and to secure promises of office; fortunately the tedious procession had lost part of its offensiveness by touching his sense of humor. Anxious people made well-meaning but useless efforts to induce him to say something for effect upon the popular mind; but he resolutely and wisely maintained silence. His position and opinions, he said, had already been declared in his speeches with all ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... [smiling] but I take the whole House.) It is a mass by no means pure; but neither is it wholly corrupt, though there is a large proportion of corruption in it. There are many members who generally go with the Minister, who will not go all lengths. There are many honest well-meaning country gentleman who are in parliament only to keep up the consequence of their families. Upon most of these a good speech will have influence.' JOHNSON. 'We are all more or less governed by interest. But interest will not make us do every thing. In a case which admits of doubt, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... and a respectable bag of captives brought over. But the element of surprise, upon which so much insistence was laid above, was visited upon both attackers and attacked. To the former the contribution came from that well-meaning but somewhat addlepated warrior, Private Nigg, who formed ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... on my mind today ... Look at me. I do not look immoderately cheerful, do I? A little old and sharp-featured and weary? Well, to come back to 'knowledge,' a man might be imagined, originally unsceptical, long-suffering, well-meaning, and a little sentimental, who would simply be ground to powder and wrecked by psychological clearness of vision. Not to let yourself be overcome by the sadness of the world; to observe, mark, and insert everything, even the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... his clothes, he was immediately consoled when he had observed that she was pretty. But, on the other hand, he is delighted to see Mrs. Pett upon her knees, and speaks thus of his Aunt James: "a poor, religious, well-meaning, good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty, and that with so much innocence that mightily pleased me." He is taken with Pen's merriment and loose songs, but not less taken with the sterling worth of Coventry. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dull, well-meaning man, who utterly failed to comprehend the real tendency of the age. He was the son of a commoner who had been raised to the peerage. He had always had a reputation for honest obstinacy, and for little else. After he became Premier, a ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... and fortune, and abilities, should endeavour in like manner to exhibit a similar example, and recommend it to the imitation of the circle in which he moves. It has been the opinion of some well-meaning people, that by giving, as far as they possibly could with innocence, into the customs and practices of irreligious men, they might soften the prejudices too frequently taken up against Religion, of its being ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... Daniel Webster appeared for the first time in his life as a leader, he was in reality still only a follower,—a follower, not of the public opinion of the North, but of the wishes of its capitalists. And probably many thousands of well-meaning men, not versed in the mysteries of politics, were secretly pleased to find themselves provided with an excuse for yielding once more to a faction, who had over us the immense advantage of having made up their minds to ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... only a good-natured, well-meaning lad; he had now right principles to help him behave well; nor has he in any way disappointed the hopes of those who have taken an ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... case silently for a few minutes. He was a well-meaning man, but a doctor of the old school. He believed that if medicine was a good thing, the more one took the better. Also, if dieting was ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine
... do, and if you encourage them they will go on talking in the same strain, totally forgetting that you may chance to be interested in other things. Such men, if they begin young, and are not checked, soon degenerate into "bores," and no bore, however well-meaning or even religious, ever succeeded in making the best of life. The cure for this is to be found—as usual—in the Scripture: "Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word." And what says the word? "Look not ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... great reserve, was utterly incapable of false pretense, deceit, or self-interested diplomacy. And what was impossible in himself he never suspected in other people. He thought his cousin shallow sometimes, but good-natured; a little worldly, perhaps, but always well-meaning. That Captain Bruce could have come to Cairnforth for any other purpose than mere curiosity, and remained there for any motive except idleness and the pursuit of health, did not occur ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Shaw play. His delight at the first performance he saw of John Bull's Other Island was boisterous. He loved to read that play as well as to see it performed. The glimpses of Ireland and the portraits of Irish character enchanted him. Broadbent—typifying the self-complacency of the well-meaning but Philistine Victorian who had solved to his own satisfaction all mysteries in earth and heaven—he regarded as a masterpiece of creative art. For Kipling his admiration was qualified; but he loved "M'Andrews' ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... scholars of his time. Among his friends he was witty and entertaining, but among strangers, quiet and reserved, almost timid. He loved his mother devotedly, and after her death he kept her dress neatly folded in his trunk, always by him. Innocent, well-meaning, gentle and retiring, he drew many warm friends to him, though his great learning and his fondness for giving information made many people think ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... well-remembered streets of Sequoia Bryce Cardigan and his father walked arm in arm, their progress continuously interrupted by well-meaning but impulsive Sequoians who insisted upon halting the pair to shake hands with Bryce and bid him welcome home. In the presence of those third parties the old man quickly conquered the agitation he ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... and irritable nature, and which had already exercised the wits of two redoubted champions of the church—but that our object, and the object of all rational and manly discussion, was to state opinions with frankness, without intending to wound the feelings, or call forth the animadversions, of well-meaning and respectable characters. "I know," continued he, "that you, Philemon, have been bred in one of these establishments, under a man as venerable for his years as he is eminent for his talents and worth; who ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of The Book of Sports, set forth by authority, and positively compelling such ways of spending the Sabbath evening, had blunted the perception of many well-meaning people. The idea was that people must amuse themselves, or they would spend their leisure time in plotting treason! and the rulers having been what we should call Ritualists, they considered that the holiness of the day ...
— The Gold that Glitters - The Mistakes of Jenny Lavender • Emily Sarah Holt
... fellow-creatures. Yet, human nature has not changed in the least, and where man has full sway, he is as much a tyrant to-day as he was five hundred years ago. Nations have been emancipated, but the kingdom of which the small boy is a subject remains what it always was. Nature, who is a well-meaning blunderer, has tried to set things right, first by planting some natural affection for his small boy into the stony heart of the parent, and, second, by making the small boy himself an optimist. Happily, there is always a silver lining to the cloud that hovers over the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... mad. The passion of collecting, which has proved the ruin of so many well-meaning people, drove him to his destruction. He bought pictures, marbles, bronzes, Etruscan vases. He heaped gallery on gallery. He bought at random everything that was offered to him. Rome never had such a terrible buyer. He bought as people drink, or ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... relation of classes to one another in an industrial district, and especially with the faults of the class that rose to power with the development of manufacturing. Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the well-meaning pedant and the offensive parvenu, preach the same gospel. Political economy, as they understand it, is to rule life, and this dismal science is not concerned with human well-being and happiness, but only with the profit and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... while holding a public reception at Buffalo, and died within the week. The years which have elapsed since his death enable us to view him more calmly than was possible while he lived, and the country has come to recognize in him an honest and well-meaning man, of more than ordinary ability, who might have risen to true statesmanship and won for himself a high place in the country's history had he ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... reputation for rebuking well-meaning disseminators of spice. This attitude discouraged several persons who would otherwise have told her all sorts of interesting things about Charity's ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... must, doubtless, be a great trial amid the hardships of military life, but when a soldier is kind-hearted, he is often a much more helpful and thoughtful and handy husband than any equally well-meaning civilian. Amid the ups and downs of their wanderings, the discomforts of shipboard and of stations in the colonies, bad servants, and unwonted sicknesses, the Captain's tenderness never failed. If the life ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... mode of life he adopted, and the silence or loss of contemporary writers, are circumstances sufficiently favourable, indeed, to romance, but altogether inimical to historical truth.' In these words Joseph Ritson, the first and most painstaking of those well-meaning scholars who have tried to associate the outlaw with 'historical truth,' begins his 'Life of Robin Hood,' an account which occupies ten pages of his book, and is annotated and illustrated through the following one hundred and five pages. The Dictionary of National Biography includes Robin ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... intellectual pursuit. So they took up this work for the pleasure of playing the grand lady and the superior person at a very small expense. Other of these visiting ladies were middle-aged, unmarried women with small private incomes—some of them well-meaning, compassionate, gentle creatures who did this work because they sincerely desired to help others, and they knew of no better way. These did not take much part in the business of the meetings; they paid their subscriptions and helped to distribute the cast-off clothing ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... have to pinch and save and his brothers bide at the plough-tail all their lives in consequence—a law whose chief merit lies in the splendid sacrifices which its faithful fulfilment involves, and whose vital principle well-meaning but misguided philanthropy is now endeavouring to dole out of existence—he had been sent to Edinburgh to make the most of this, his one chance ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... number usually present at the debates. The average attendance is less than fifty, and often one sees only fifteen or twenty peers in their seats. Two or three leading members of the Ministry, as many prominent members of the opposition, a bishop or two, a score of deluded, but well-meaning gentlemen, who obstinately adhere to the unfashionable notion, that, where great political powers are enjoyed, there are certain serious duties to the public closely connected therewith, a few prosy and pompous peers who ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... his adviser. Yet it was part of his weakness to be unwilling to believe himself under the guidance of any particular person; he set a high value on his own authority, and was inordinately jealous of it. No one, therefore, could acquire a permanent influence. Thus a well-meaning man became the worst of sovereigns; for the first virtue of a master is consistency, and no subordinate can follow out with intelligent zeal today a policy which he ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... will make thee good; though, doubtless, if thou be willing and try, these and all other best helps will be given thee. There is no clothing in a robe of imputed righteousness, that poorest of legal cobwebs spun by spiritual spiders. To me it seems like an invention of well-meaning dulness to soothe insanity; and indeed it has proved a door of escape out of worse imaginations. It is apparently an old 'doctrine;' for St. John seems to point at it where he says, 'Little children, let no man lead you astray; he that doeth righteousness ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... people.—I have no doubt in my own mind that the account of Damaris' illness is absurdly exaggerated. You know how Charles spoils her! She has very much too much freedom; and little Miss Bilson, though well-meaning, is incapable of coping with a headstrong girl like Damaris. She ought—Damaris ought I mean—to have been sent to a finishing school for another year at least. She might then have found her level. If Charles had consulted me, or shown the least willingness to accept my advice, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... were right," she sighed, her brows meeting thoughtfully, "such well-meaning persons as the Barnetts would not have to live as they do and bring ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... allegory farther, he says of the false humourists, "But since there is an impostor abroad, who takes upon him the name of this young gentleman, and would willingly pass for him in the world: to the end that well-meaning persons may not be imposed upon by cheats, I would desire my readers, when they meet with this pretender, to look into his parentage and examine him strictly, whether or no he be remotely allied to ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... sorry you showed that letter to Mr. Evans,' said Mr. Burke; 'I don't like to expose Lord Clonbrony; he is a well-meaning gentleman, misled by ignorant or designing people; at all events, it is not for ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... poets, Irish Catholics, who were glad to show themselves on a public platform without being the puppets or the opponents of their bishops, Irish Protestants, who were irritated at the desertion of the Irish Church, a number of well-meaning people who were attracted by the opportunity of talking eloquently and vaguely about nothing in particular. This Academic scheme of Home Rule found an admirable exponent in Mr. Butt, an able lawyer of ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... "I never was so insulted in my life. I am a man of wealth, traveling on business; I am worth a quarter of a million at least. To associate me with road agents, whom I have as much reason to fear as you, is most ridiculous. This young man may be well-meaning, but he is under a most extraordinary hallucination. It is my belief that he dreamed the nonsense he has been retailing ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... mind of the poet-philosopher were at length clearly revealed, and the uneasy swarm of imitators had shrunk out of sight. And as to slavery, the eyes of all men had been opened. Not only Holmes, but the majority of well-meaning men, hitherto standing aloof, were taught by great events. Many who admitted the wrong of slavery had believed themselves bound to inaction by the covenants inserted in the Federal Constitution. Some had felt the weight ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... shyness of temperament, a certain habitual timidity, slovenliness and insincerity of mind. It is a little distrustful of intellectual power and enterprise, a little awkward and ungracious to brave and beautiful things, a little too tolerant of dull, well-meaning and industrious men and arrogant old women. It suffers hypocrites gladly, because its criticism is poor, and it is wastefully harsh to frank unorthodoxy. But its heart is sound if its judgments fall short of acuteness and if its standards of achievement are low. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... through the smile, but there was something about her curiously casual and calm, something that hinted almost complacently at a little mystery somewhere, as if she had up her sleeve resources that we were not allowing for. But we caught the gist of it, that we, affectionate and well-meaning, but thoroughly unbusiness-like young men, were not to worry. Her evident conviction was that he had foreseen, he had provided ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... defeat at Fontenoy. There were very few troops in England to employ against an invasion, and the Scottish commander-in-chief, Sir John Cope, whose name lives in unenviable fame in the burden of many a Jacobite ballad, was as incapable a well-meaning general as ever was called upon to face a great unexpected emergency. It must be admitted that all these were excellent points in the prince's favor, and that they counted for much in ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... context casts great light—and I think by many people much-needed light—on what the resurrection of the dead means. That doctrine has been weighted with a great many incredibilities and I venture to say absurdities, by well-meaning misconceptions and exaggerations. We have heard grand platitudes about 'the scattered dust being gathered from the four winds of heaven,' and so on, but the teaching of my text is that the contrast between the present physical ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... that, my dear—once you get a girl away from her friends and relations. However, she has only her old grandmother to fall back on, and she seems a well-meaning girl enough, and perhaps she won't be considered so pretty in London as she has the name of being here. I hope she will keep straight, I'm sure; it would be such a worry to you, ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... its work. The instinct of domination is a weed that grows rank in the shadow of the temple, climbs over it, possesses it, covers its ruin, and feeds on its decay. The unchecked sway of priests has always been the most mischievous of tyrannies; and even were they all well-meaning and sincere, it would be ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... make them dry and warm and happy and comfortable in a chicken coop; but the kindest-hearted white man can always be depended on to prove himself inadequate when he deals with savages. He cannot turn the situation around and imagine how he would like it to have a well-meaning savage transfer him from his house and his church and his clothes and his books and his choice food to a hideous wilderness of sand and rocks and snow, and ice and sleet and storm and blistering sun, with no shelter, no bed, no covering for his and his family's naked bodies, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that there was no lack of well-meaning persons who were willing to assure me that the year's delay and Mr. Jesup's death were warnings indicating that I should never find ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... volunteer, the service is still an episode; to the regular, a permanent career. No doubt, if a man is thoroughly conscientious, or thoroughly ambitious, or thoroughly enthusiastic, a temporary pursuit may prove as absorbing as if it were taken up for life; but the majority of men, however well-meaning, are not thorough at all. How often one hears the apology made by volunteer officers, even those of high rank,—"Military life is not my profession; I entered the army from patriotism, willing to serve my country faithfully for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Parish of. Jaalam Point, lighthouse on, charge of, prospectively offered to Mr. H. Biglow. Jacobus, rex. Jakes, Captain, reproved for avarice. Jamaica. James the Fourth, of Scots, experiment by. Jarnagin, Mr., his opinion of the completeness of Northern education. Jefferson, Thomas, well-meaning, but injudicious. Jeremiah, hardly the best guide in modern politics. Jerome, Saint, his list of sacred writers. Jerusha, ex-Mrs. Sawin. Job, Book of, Chappelow on. Johnson, Andrew, as he used to be, as he ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... one evil, though, which I could not guard against, and this was the clumsy though well-meaning stupidity of a plantation negro. One afternoon the house became offensive with the odor of burning wool. I followed up the scent and, after opening several doors, I finally traced it to the dining-room. It was filled with smoke, and there, in front of an enormous fire, squatted ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... Well-meaning police officials had warned Mr. Briggerland that Faire had a bad character. Mr. Briggerland listened, was grateful for the warning, but explained that Faire had come under the influence of the new uplift movement, and from henceforward he ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... possessed a remarkable degree of reticence; and, owing to this blessed quality, no one but ourselves and Helen Legram ever knew of my share in that unfortunate accident. I felt rather guilty whenever allusion was made to it by some well-meaning person; but I noticed that Mr. Summers always turned the conversation as soon as possible. We were on more social terms after that disaster; and somehow the evenings spent over Latin and arithmetic became less practical, and decidedly more interesting. Mr. Summers, however, was ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... in all the well-meaning instructors of the adult—the Chautauquans, the educational extensionists, the lecturers, the correspondence schools, the advisers of reading, the makers of booklists, the devisers of "courses." They deepen the fleeting impression and increase its capacity for harm, while varying ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... so much moved by his wife's kindness, that he at the moment determined to give up his lottery scheme, of which, he knew, she did not approve. But, though a good-natured, well-meaning man, he was of an irresolute character; and even when he saw what was best to be done, had not courage to persist. As he was coming home from work, a few days after Ellen had given him the money, he saw, in one of the streets of Derby, a house with ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... picturesque confutation of Socialism than in the Second Canto of the Fifth Book. If I apprehend rightly his words and images, there is not only subtile but profound thinking here. The French Revolution is prefigured in the well-meaning but too theoretic giant, and Rousseau's fallacies exposed two centuries in advance. Spenser was a conscious Englishman to his inmost fibre, and did not lack the sound judgment in politics which belongs to his race. He was the more English for living in Ireland, and there is something ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... is but a tiny dot in the ocean, you may think it an insignificant spot to have been the scene of the most momentous event of the Renaissance; you may feel inclined to scold at that well-meaning Martin Pinzon for asking to have the rudders changed in order to find his Cipango. But it must be remembered that to have found anything at all was an unparalleled feat; and furthermore, that wee San Salvador was not the end of Columbus's expedition; ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... Nelson to become Bishop. It was refreshing to find the office seeking the man, especially a man who had never sought for himself positions of prestige, a man never found in the society of office seekers. Although he was gratefully aware of the well-meaning intentions of his friends, and felt in the proposed honor the warmth of their personal affection, he did not want it said that he had permitted the election and then declined it. In as tactful a manner as possible he labored to prevent ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... All that my well-meaning friend suggested made me, of course, only the more eager to go with Jones. Where I had once been interested in the old buffalo hunter, I was now fascinated. And now I was with him in the desert and seeing him as he was, a simple, quiet man, who fitted ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... own subconsciousness, or it is never his, it never acquires the necessary warmth to interest him, the color and light to make it real. This is a curious fact, and one which your modest writer shrinks from trying to explain to his well-meaning friend, lest he seem egotistical. Only the blessed publicity of print could draw him out. Yet the psychology involved perhaps ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... we saw a movie by the title of "Cluny Brown." The heroine was possessed with a passion for repairing plumbing, but was continually inhibited by well-meaning relatives who told her that she "didn't know her place." A scene early in the story shows Cluny on the floor under a stopped-up kitchen sink explaining her problem to a sympathetic professor who states a philosophy something like this. "To be happy, one should ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... make when we reason out our lives is this: we reason as though we were planning for reasonable creatures. It is a big mistake. Well-meaning ladies and gentlemen make it when they picture their ideal worlds. When marriage is reformed, and the social problem solved, when poverty and war have been abolished by acclamation, and sin and sorrow rescinded by an overwhelming parliamentary majority! ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... it has apparently come to be understood that we are bound to pay insincere compliments to a good man's understanding when he disagrees with our views. Now I am quite willing to admit that Manning was a most amiable and well-meaning person; but I am unable to consider him seriously as a reasoner. The spectacle which he presented on this occasion, at least, was that of a fluent popular preacher, clutched by a powerful logician, and put into a witness-box to be thoroughly cross-examined. The ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... (October 1821) to commit an outrage, yet more keenly resented, on the memory of their sainted king, the pattern of private virtue and public vice, George III. The perpetration of this occurred in the course of the last of his numerous literary duels, of which it was the close. That Mr. Southey was a well-meaning and independent man of letters, there can be no doubt. It does not require the conclusive testimony of the esteem of Savage Landor to compel our respect for the author of the Life of Nelson, and the ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... fled and dispersed at my eye, and I went home in triumph, escorted by my friend, and some well-meaning young Christians, who, however, had not learned to deport themselves with soberness and humility. But my ascendancy over my enemies was great indeed; for wherever I appeared I was hailed with approbation, and, wherever my guilty brother made his appearance, he was hooted and held in derision, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... the fern-hole, was in a fern thicket next the clover field. It was small and damp, and useless except as a last retreat. It also was the work of a woodchuck, a well-meaning, friendly neighbor, but a hare-brained youngster whose skin in the form of a whip-lash was now developing higher horse-power in ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... man," said the traveller, "true it is that I have never accepted charity, but I must admit, you have offered it to me in such a friendly, well-meaning manner that I would gladly accept it, if I could; I thank you heartily for it. May your kind thoughtfulness ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... Deuteronomy may foreshadow the final fall of Jerusalem; the Messianic prophecies are mere contemporaneous history; and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah is only a description of the sufferings of Jeremiah. Inspiration is too loftily conceived by "the well-meaning crowd," for whom we ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... street beggars, there are numbers of genteel, and doubtless well-meaning persons who make it their business to beg for others. They intrude upon you at the most inconvenient times, and venture into your private apartments with a freedom and assurance which positively amaze you. Refuse them, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... our well-meaning guide up the ladder to the quarter-deck, where we found Farmer apparently awaiting our appearance. He was standing or rather leaning in a wearied attitude against a gun on the starboard side of the deck; his cheeks were flushed and his ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... each other very much, and yet not enough to make joint-stock of all their ideas, plans, wishes, schemes, friendships. There are in every family-circle individuals whom a certain sensitiveness of nature inclines to quietness and reserve; and there are very well-meaning families where no such quietness or reserve is possible. Nobody can be let alone, nobody may have a secret, nobody can move in any direction, without a host of inquiries and comments. 'Who is your letter from? Let's see.'—'My letter is from So-and-So.'—'He writing to you? I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... nursery fashion, essaying at the same time the soothing influence of an infantine melody proper to the occasion; but, failing in his design, he soon lost all patience, and being, as we have before hinted, rather irritable, though extremely well-meaning, he lifted the unhappy bantling in the air, and shook him with so much good will, that he had well-nigh silenced him most effectually. A brief calm succeeded. But with returning breath came returning vociferations; and the carpenter, with a faint hope of ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... know whether to be glad or sorry. For myself, though I never quite liked Hawkesbury, I had always got on well with him, and been disposed to believe him a well-meaning fellow. ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... hurtled past us, striking the tower and falling at our feet. The king abruptly ceased his shouting and left the balcony. As he passed me and I glanced into his frightened face I felt a sudden sense of pity for this gentle, kindly old man, so well-meaning, but so utterly ineffective as ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... pick out the boys for the clubs that we are interested in. This is a serious mistake. It is this sort of thing that causes the failure of so many well-meaning attempts to redeem the children of the "slums" or of the street. We must let the groups form spontaneously; the boys' instincts are keener in detecting the sneak and the coward and the traitor than yours are, and if the club has the right start, the undesirable citizen ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... The same well-meaning Gentleman took occasion, at another time, to bring together such of his Friends as were addicted to a foolish habitual Custom of Swearing. In order to shew the Absurdity of the Practice, he had recourse to the Invention above mentioned, having placed an Amanuensis ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... their being habitually more highly prized than any others by all who are qualified to make the comparison. But why are they so prized? Not, as I am constrained, however reluctantly, to admit, on account of their greater keenness as pleasures. It would be at best but well-meaning cant to pretend that the self-approval, the sympathetic participation in other people's augmented welfare, the grateful consciousness of having done that which is pleasing in our Heavenly Father's sight, together with whatever else helps to compose the internal reward of virtue, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... patronizes Jesus as a teacher and rejects Christ as a Saviour, the theology, or sentiment, in these lines is not so much crude as grotesque. At the best it is but curiously reminiscent of the ignorance of a by-gone day. Doubtless this well-meaning man had much to say worth hearing; but he was talking in the name of religion, and to these villagers there was in it the lack of the one thing, which is the lack of all. Theology apart, these simple folk found in these crude lines the heart of ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... both more attractive and more available to large numbers of people whose pride keeps them away from the public provision for charity cases, and whose limited means leave them at the mercy either of quackery or of well-meaning but entirely inexperienced physicians. ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... the reader, are anything like me, the writer, it happens to you about every once in so long that some well-meaning but semi-witted friend rigs a dead-fall for you, and traps you and carries you off, a helpless captive, for an evening ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... evening Mrs. Osborn walked slowly down the Mall dressed in her best gown and hat, and bearing on her cheek a broad, purpling mark. When asked questions, she merely smiled and made no answer, which was extremely awkward for the well-meaning inquirer. ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... conditions under which it must be done were dishearteningly unfavorable. In the first place, the whole scheme of things was wrong. The Police Department was governed by one of those bi-partisan commissions which well-meaning theorists are wont sometimes to set up when they think that the important thing in government is to have things arranged so that nobody can do anything harmful. The result often is that nobody can do anything at all. There were four Commissioners, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... Nest Hunting.—A thoughtful person will, of course, be careful in approaching a wild bird's nest, otherwise much mischief may be done in a very short time. I have known "dainty eggs" and "darling baby-birds" to be literally visited to death by well-meaning people, with the best of intentions. The parents become discouraged by constantly recurring alarms and desert the nest, or a cat will follow the path made through the weeds and leave nothing in the nest worth observing. Even the bending of limbs, or the pushing aside of leaves, will produce ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... well-meaning friends appears to have been at fault for had Glazier followed the route they advised, instead of striking the railroad running from Charleston to Augusta, on the west side of Aiken, which would have enabled ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... called a rebellion in the older days, and I believe no such event has occurred for the last fifty years. The nearest to it was a case which arose in the senior class when I was a freshman. One of the seniors, who was a rather dull-witted but well-meaning youth, concluded that it was his duty to inform the Faculty of offences committed by his classmates, a proceeding it is needless to say contrary to all the boys' sentiments as to honorable conduct. Some windows had been broken, including his. He informed ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... it occurred to me that one of our country neighbours was probably at this time in the city. He kept a store as well as cultivated a farm. He was a plain and well-meaning man, and, should I be so fortunate as to meet him, his superior knowledge of the city might be of essential benefit to me in my present forlorn circumstances. His generosity might likewise induce him to lend me so much as would purchase one meal. I had formed the resolution to leave ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... for a few minutes. He was a well-meaning man, but a doctor of the old school. He believed that if medicine was a good thing, the more one took the better. Also, if dieting was good, ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine
... deny what they claimed as their heritage as Englishmen. Heavy as its expenses were, Great Britain could have afforded to take upon itself the sum required for the defence of the colonies. Grenville could not see the matter in this light. Well-meaning and wishing to act fairly both towards England and the colonies, he brought trouble on both alike by his insistence on legal right. His administration was fruitful in evil. He permitted parliament to enter on a disastrous struggle with Wilkes in order to gratify ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... Vice-President, entered on the unexpired term of the Presidency. He was a weak, well-meaning man, and he was jealous of the extraordinary popularity and personal influence of Richard Lincoln, the Secretary of State. When his cabinet was announced, Richard Lincoln, released from his long service in harness, with a ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... pure, [smiling] but I take the whole House.) It is a mass by no means pure; but neither is it wholly corrupt, though there is a large proportion of corruption in it. There are many members who generally go with the Minister, who will not go all lengths. There are many honest well-meaning country gentleman who are in parliament only to keep up the consequence of their families. Upon most of these a good speech will have influence.' JOHNSON. 'We are all more or less governed by interest. But interest will not make us do every thing. In a case which admits of doubt, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... that the spoils system with its frequent rotations in office is needed to promote among the people a useful understanding of the nature and workings of the Government, finds, amazing as it may seem, still serious adherents among well-meaning citizens. It is based upon the assumption that the public service which is instituted to do certain business for the people, should at the same time serve as a school in which ignorant persons are to learn something ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... Marshalsea condescended towards his brother as an amiable, well-meaning man; a private character, who had not arrived at distinction. 'Frederick,' said he, 'you and Fanny sup at your lodgings to-night, I know. What have you done with Fanny, Frederick?' 'She ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... dangers as they dismiss the possibility of bombs or microbes. Modern realists are indeed Terrorists, like the dynamiters; and they fail just as much in their effort to create a thrill. Both realists and dynamiters are well-meaning people engaged in the task, so obviously ultimately hopeless, of using ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... element in our little society that had been shipped off to the island, for, with the women and children, it was the men who were most womanlike in their noise, or most childlike in their fears, whose safety we had first ensured. From what our Captain knew of these people, well-meaning enough under ordinary conditions, but timorous and foolish under conditions such as we now were in, he guessed that disorganisation and disturbance might be likely enough. Therefore he resolved, and ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... overhear, "in dire peril I come to you for help. These men would make me their king. If such a thing befall me, all the great work I hoped to do must go undone, for who is there unfreer than a king? I pray you speak with them and persuade their kind well-meaning hearts that what they plan to do ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... been accepted with outward reluctance but inward joy. Had he refused to return a penny Kendrick would not have been surprised. But Egbert, after making up his mind, had paid the entire sum without a whimper, had paid it almost casually and with the air of one obliging a well-meaning, if somewhat annoying, inferior. Inspecting and pocketing Kent's power of attorney and the captain's receipt he had dismissed his visitor at the parsonage door as King Solomon in all his glory might have graciously dismissed a beggar whose ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... Marblehead, came out in a little boat to bring some of Clarendon's clothes, which had been left by accident. He is a clever fellow, for though Clarendon was not half civil to him, he was always polite in his way, and his frank, well-meaning civility so won upon brother, that when they parted he apologized for his rudeness, and told the Captain that he had shown himself the most of a gentleman ...
— Hurrah for New England! - The Virginia Boy's Vacation • Louisa C. Tuthill
... than pupils, have a heaven-ordained right to work so adjusted that the highest possible physical condition shall be maintained automatically." This declaration thundered out by an indignant physician startled a well-meaning board of school directors. The teacher's right to health was, of course, obvious when once mentioned, ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... hulking form? His brother Serjeant has the dried, "peaked" look of the overworked barrister, and though he is in his wig we recognize him at once, having seen him before at his chambers. Mr. Phunkey, behind, is the well-meaning but incapable performer to be exhibited in his examination of Winkle; and Mr. Skimpin is the alert, unscrupulous, wide- awake practitioner who "made such a hare" of Mr. Winkle. The composition of this picture is indeed a work of ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... so much to be gained by hitching your wagon to a star, that I tried to believe she deliberately intended it. I would have hitched up oftener to that same star, except for the fact that stars sometimes get hot and furious at too many liberties, and switch their tails and kick the wagons of well-meaning people to smithereens. That it may be better to have had a stellar joy-ride and be sent to hell for speeding than keep your boots forever in the clay, I will neither affirm nor deny; but the prudent man hitcheth to ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... remarked as they went on after one particularly pleasant encounter, "seem to belong to the class who possess brains. I wish it were a larger class. Every day I find some patient suffering from depression caused by fool comments from some well-meaning acquaintance." ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... was to me a very secondary person; however, I was close to him as he tottered, like a good old well-meaning man, to Mass. On his return he appeared, as I described last Sunday, in the balcony facing the gardens for a few minutes and was loudly cheered, and then he came back to the Salle des Marechaux and sat down in ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... by which a well-meaning student may unwarily be involved in diablerie. This philosophical inquirer observes:—'Those mystical students may, in their first address to the science [astrology], have no other design than the satisfaction of their curiosity to know remote and hidden things; yet that in the ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... what is the kind of training which makes the doing of these things most easy. It is often said that each of us can profit only by his own experience, but no one believes that. No one can see how many well-meaning persons mistake means for ends and drift into error and sin, simply because neither they nor their parents have known what course should be steered, and what equipment is needed, in the voyage of life,—no ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Bismarck appeared to be sincerely afflicted with regret for the rupture between the two countries, that he evidently saw, too late, his error in having secretly encouraged the Hohenzollern candidature, and that the result of all these unhappy complications had left the well-meaning chancellor inconsolable. Such a candid confession of remorse and regret moved the Frenchman's compassion to a degree ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... they recall the past, its losses and trials and misfortunes. They remember the children who are dead, or far away; or the prosperity once theirs, but now fled. Few old folks would care to celebrate their golden wedding; it is usually some well-meaning grandchild who sees in it "an occasion." Often, too, the excitement, the fatigue, the unusual strain on mind and body, result in illness which sometimes ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... take all the pains in the world with a well-meaning but slow workman, but he disposed of shirkers and double-dealers without needless words. Neither did he encourage discussion and idle talk ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... conceivable that the members of such a congregation might be less intolerable to each other than they seem to the foreign outsider, but the ameliorating effects of usage must needs be strong indeed to make them fit to live with. For the most part they are represented as well-meaning folk; but they are exasperatingly individual, all over sore corners, eager to be injured at their tenderest points, and implacable to the person who hurts them. In Pembroke a soreness of egotism afflicts everybody. Every creature in ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... her; and even when a lady by a mischance spat upon his clothes, he was immediately consoled when he had observed that she was pretty. But, on the other hand, he is delighted to see Mrs. Pett upon her knees, and speaks thus of his Aunt James: "a poor, religious, well-meaning, good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty, and that with so much innocence that mightily pleased me." He is taken with Pen's merriment and loose songs, but not less taken with the sterling worth of Coventry. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... most benevolent smile on his sagacious visage, all purple as it was with the cold, this very well-meaning gentleman took the snow-child by the hand and led her towards the house. She followed him, droopingly and reluctant; for all the glow and sparkle was gone out of her figure; and whereas just before she had resembled a bright, frosty, star-gemmed evening, with a crimson gleam on the cold horizon, ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Lord Falkland was a well-meaning young nobleman of great good looks and small political experience. His ruling characteristic was pride. Shortly before leaving Halifax he had his carriage-horses shot, lest on his departure they should fall into plebeian hands. His hauteur was fortified by his wife, {71} daughter by a morganatic ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... anxiously round at the wounded man. But his precautions were unavailing,—Van der Kemp had also heard a voice which he thought had long been silent in death. The girl's expression was almost repeated in his face. Before the well-meaning mariner could decide what to do, Kathleen brushed lightly past him, and stood in the cabin gazing as if spell-bound at ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... we carried our load of wounded to the base hospital. I wish some of those well-meaning enthusiasts in Trafalgar Square who clamoured for war could have viewed the interior of these hospital tents and seen the poor twisted forms lying on the ground in every direction. What a stupid and brutal thing war is! Certainly the alleged "bringing out of our nobler ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... Party the Foreign Office has directed British Consuls abroad to publish separately the returns of Irish imports, which have hitherto been lost by their inclusion in the returns under the one head "British," will do far more for the development of the Irish export trade than the well-meaning but academic resolutions of their critics; and in the matter of social reform I have yet to learn that any body of men have done such good work for their country as have the Irish members by the passing into law, on their initiative, of the Labourers Act, by which nearly half ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... battle against all but insuperable obstacles. Born at Wesselburen in the present province of Schleswig-Holstein on March 18, 1813, he was the son of a poor stone mason—so poor that, as Hebbel said, poverty had taken the place of his soul. Though Klaus Hebbel was a well-meaning man, he was a slave to the inexorable non possumus of penury. In winter, especially, lack of work made even the provision of daily bread often difficult and sometimes impossible for him. But Friedrich Hebbel's childhood, full of hardship as it was, was not cheerless. The ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... sakes of the wise Magistrates to whom they are made, but their own Honour, Harry.—And is't not much a greater crime to rob a gallant, hospitable Man of his Niece, who has treated you with Confidence and Friendship, than to keep touch with a well-meaning Whore, my ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... its full perfection till it is allowed to walk at liberty, and follow the course of all other productions, that of supply and demand, individual demand, and voluntary supply. It is not easy to tell how far back these well-meaning, zealous, deluded men who have managed these "encouragements," have put the progress of the nation in its power of knowing and feeling ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... said: "If only someone had the vision to see and the courage and ability to state the truth about these false theories which today are attracting our youth and confusing well-meaning people everywhere!" Well, here is the answer to your prayer—the everlasting truth upon the greatest of issues in social science stated for you by the master of them all in this field. If this edition calls this great work to the attention of any of ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... could not be impunged, she could not be legally forced away against her will; but if under your roof, those whom Jasper has induced to institute a search, that he has no means to institute very actively himself, might make statements which (as you are already aware) might persuade others, though well-meaning, to assist him in separating her from you. He might publicly face even a police-court, if he thus hoped to shame the rich man into buying off an intolerable scandal. He might, in the first instance, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... good intentions of the government, and took steps to test its honesty, which so angered Mr. Forster that he arrested Mr. Parnell and several other leaders and pronounced the Land League an illegal body. Forster was well-meaning but mistaken. He fancied that by locking up the ring-leaders he could bring quiet to the country. On the contrary, affairs were soon far worse than ever, crime and outrage spreading widely. In despair, Mr. Forster released Parnell and resigned. All now seemed hopeful; coercion had proved a failure; ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... showed that letter to Mr. Evans," said Mr. Burke; "I don't like to expose Lord Clonbrony; he is a well-meaning gentleman, misled by ignorant or designing people; at all events, it is not for us to ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... inferior in strength of will to his father, in ability to his eldest brother, and in the higher virtues of a constitutional sovereign to his niece, who succeeded him. But he was not only a kindly and well-meaning man, a good husband to Queen Adelaide and a good father to his natural children, faithful to his old friends, and bountiful in his charities; he was also a loyal servant of the state, with a genuine sense of public duty, a natural love of justice, an ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... had lately suffered heavily from the sudden defeat at Fontenoy. There were very few troops in England to employ against an invasion, and the Scottish commander-in-chief, Sir John Cope, whose name lives in unenviable fame in the burden of many a Jacobite ballad, was as incapable a well-meaning general as ever was called upon to face a great unexpected emergency. It must be admitted that all these were excellent points in the prince's favor, and that they counted for much in the conduct of ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... it is but a tiny dot in the ocean, you may think it an insignificant spot to have been the scene of the most momentous event of the Renaissance; you may feel inclined to scold at that well-meaning Martin Pinzon for asking to have the rudders changed in order to find his Cipango. But it must be remembered that to have found anything at all was an unparalleled feat; and furthermore, that wee San Salvador was not the end of Columbus's expedition; ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... men dislike. The world has a very keen eye for the inconsistencies and the faults of professing Christians, and it is a good thing that it has. The loftier your profession the sharper the judgment that is applied to you. Many well-meaning Christian people, by an injudicious use of Christian phraseology in the wrong place, and by the glaring contradiction between their prayers and their talks and their daily life, bring down a great deal of deserved hostility upon themselves and of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... and during the meal Mart revised his opinion of the mate to some extent. He saw that Swanson did not like him because he considered the wireless job a sinecure, and wanted to keep all the crew hard at work all the time. It was the usage of the sea, and the big mate himself was blunt and well-meaning. But Mart Judson had no mind to be ordered about by anyone, and he determined that if Swanson tried it, the mate would find ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... the hand of unscrupulous quacks; the suffering, dread, and remorse experienced in silence by many thousands of ignorant and often innocent young people may all be traced in large measure back to these four well-meaning, but ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... in the dark concerning the inexplicable taste for the sour, clotted product of a sweet, well-meaning cow and the buttery, but I have found out how it feels to be shot. I ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... more well-meaning than diplomatic, and who, besides (a rarer thing with old teachers than is generally supposed) was esteemed by his former pupils, went and took the student without ceremony by the arm, saying: 'Come, shall we two take ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... resumed Maximilian, "I can only say again that you are right. Truly, it is I who am mad, and you prove to me that passion blinds the most well-meaning. I appreciate your calm reasoning. It is then understood that to-morrow you will be irrevocably promised to M. Franz d'Epinay, not only by that theatrical formality invented to heighten the effect of a comedy called ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... [Footnote: Ibid., 355.] In reply to this evident invitation to a duel, Kremer avowed his authorship and his readiness to prove his charges. If Clay had known the identity of his traducer, he would hardly have summoned him to the field of honor, for Kremer was a well-meaning but credulous and thick-headed rustic noted solely for his leopard-skin overcoat. The speaker, therefore, abandoned his first idea, and asked of the House an investigation of the charges, which Kremer reiterated ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... supernatural—unions or combinations of animality and divinity. Such "solutions" contain no conception of natural law; scientifically judged, they are mythological absurdities—muddle-headed chattering of crude and irresponsible metaphysics—well-meaning no doubt, but silly, and deadly in their effects upon the interests of mankind, vitiating ethics, law, economics, politics ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... smooth over. We are all human and vulnerable"—up went Mr. Avery's lower lip covering the upper one, and then down again—"and it does not behoove any of us to be too severely ethical and self-righteous. Mr. Sluss is a well-meaning man, but a trifle sentimental, as ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... talks for the most part on the pavement and in public-houses, but there is every indication that we shall see before long a rapid growth of workmen's clubs—not the tea-and-coffee make-believes set up by the well-meaning, but honest, independent clubs, in every respect such as those in Pall Mall, managed by the workmen themselves, who are not, and never will become, total abstainers, but have shown themselves, up to the present moment, strangely tolerant of those weaker brethren who can only keep themselves ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... we had him in our synagogue," said Raphael. "Michaels is a well-meaning worthy man, but he ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... completely to his side, and to detach him from his nobility,—turbulent and self-willed, but fondly clinging to what remnants of liberty were still left to them,—and to alienate him from his uncle, not unfrequently well-meaning but always over-impetuous, and often in his later years selfish and untrustworthy. There was much in the king's character to encourage such efforts. With good natural abilities and a frank and amiable disposition, he had for their own selfish ends been encouraged by his early guardians in sensual ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... to sit down for life (or at least till Miss Jacky should be married) with the dubious character of "not wanting for sense either." With all these little peccadilloes the sisters possessed some good properties. They were well-meaning, kind-hearted, and, upon the whole, good-tempered they loved one another, revered their brother, doated upon their nephews and nieces, took a lively interest in the poorest of their poor cousins, a hundred degrees ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... with the same expectation, and that the rich and beneficent person who (according to the latest report) has come to the rescue of the one, and is an active agent in looking for the other, is in reality the foolish though well-meaning victim of ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... know whether the current rumours of the PRIME MINISTER'S delicacy are put about by malignant enemies who hope that Nature will accomplish what they have failed to achieve, or by well-meaning friends who desire to convince the Aberystwith Sabbatarians that Sunday golf is essential to his well-being. In his answers to Questions this afternoon he showed no signs of failing powers. When Mr. BILLING accused him of breaking his pledge that there should be no more secret ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... one hundred thousand francs she had placed in my hands, and to change the whole into assignats to increase their amount. Her orders were executed, and the assignats were delivered to the King. The Queen informed me that Madame Elisabeth had found a well-meaning man who had engaged to gain over Petion by the bribe of a large sum of money, and that deputy would, by a preconcerted signal, inform the King of the success of the project. His Majesty soon had an opportunity of seeing ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... hopes of victory, and who was the great cause of the hostility with the Pandavas! Pandu's son hath now accomplished that which at one time thou couldst not believe him capable of accomplishing, although, O monarch, well-meaning friends failed not to apprise thee of it. That calamity, fraught with great destruction, hath now come! Thou, O king wishing them well, hast heaped those evils on the heads of thy covetous sons! The fruit of those evils ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... she exclaimed, rising from her seat, and putting aside the well-meaning hand that strove to detain her. "Who has a better right to take the last look ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... afternoon when the ladies had left the studio and the dull mumble of the car and the tooting of the horn had died away, the master and his friend would talk of Lopez de Sosa. A good fellow, somewhat foolish, but well-meaning; this was the judgment of Renovales and his old friend. He was proud of his mustache that gave him a certain likeness to the German emperor, and when he sat down, he took care to show his hands, by placing ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... note or comment, the foul devil's lies about it, which make up the mass of the Latin poets—and then go, fresh from teaching Juvenal and Ovid, to declaim at Exeter Hall against poor Peter Dens's well-meaning prurience! Had we not better take the beam out of our own eye before we meddle with ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... then," exclaimed the well-meaning man, "we will rely upon the good sense and religious principle of our dear Jane, and ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... insisted the well-meaning woman. "He will know that you forgot it, and all will be well in ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... instinct, there would be few large families. The average mother of a baby every year or two has been forced into unwilling motherhood, so far as the later arrivals are concerned. It is not the less immoral when the power which compels enslavement is the church, state or the propaganda of well-meaning patriots clamoring against "race suicide." The wrong is as great as if the enslaving force were the unbridled passions of her husband. The wrong to the unwilling mother, deprived of her liberty, and all opportunity of self-development, is in itself enough to condemn ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... footing with those of any other nation. The queen made a favourable answer to all their remonstrances. Such were the steps taken by the parliament during this session with relation to the famous treaty of Utrecht, against which the whigs exclaimed so violently, that many well-meaning people believed it would be attended with the immediate ruin of the kingdom; yet under the shadow of this very treaty, Great Britain enjoyed a long term of peace and tranquillity. Bishop Burnet was heated with an enthusiastic terror of the house of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... not care, that the sentence which he had given, declaring it was "totally inadequate," had been condemned by a Royal Commission as "inhuman." He would willingly have pushed "inhumanity" to savagery, out of sheer bewigged stupidity, and that he was probably well-meaning only intensified the revolt one ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... other's eyes—there is nothing they like better. I feared The Guardian, The Record, The John Bull, etc., lest they should suggest that from a bear I now turned bull with a view to an eventual bishopric. Such insinuations would have impaired the value of The Fair Haven as an anchorage for well-meaning people. I therefore resolved to obey the injunction of the Gentile Apostle and avoid all appearance of evil, by dissociating myself from the author of Erewhon as completely as possible. At the moment of my resolution JOHN ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... Clodius, conspirators like Catiline, and military adventurers such as Marius and Sulla—for whose statue the Senate could find no more constitutional title than "The Lucky General" [Sullae Imperatori Felici] Well-meaning individuals, such as Cicero and Pompey, were still to be found, and even came to the front, but they all alike proved unequal to the crisis; which, in fact, threw up one man, and one only, of force to become a real maker of history—Caius Julius ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... cannot but advise my readers not to rely either on the prophylactic or the curative power of belladonna, when a safer and more reliable remedy is offered to them. A remedy may be excellent in certain cases and certain epidemics, and many an honest and well-meaning physician may be deceived into the belief that he has a general remedy in hand, whilst others, or himself, on future occasions discover that he has allowed himself to be taken in. Had not belladonna ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde
... angrily thrust into his pocket. A perusal of the letter will explain, if it does not go far to justify, the poet's irritation. It is a sleek, superior production, with the tone of a temperance tract, and the stilted diction of a dominie. The doctor is in it one of those well-meaning, meddlesome men, lavish of academic advice. Burns resented moral prescriptions at all times—more especially from one whose knowledge of men was severely scholastic; and we can well imagine that he quitted Edinburgh in ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... coffee escape from the mysteries of the pharmacopoeia and become "a simple and refreshing beverage" that any one might obtain for a penny in the coffee houses, or, if preferred, might prepare at home. In this they were aided and abetted by many well-meaning but misguided persons (some of them men of considerable intelligence) who seemed possessed of the idea that the coffee drink was an unpleasant medicine that needed something to take away its curse, or else ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Many well-meaning persons see in the words of the "good grey poet," only an immodest and brazen shamelessness. But these are mental perverts and are to be pitied; they see "through a glass darkly" and everything looks black with decay; they are trying to build an eternal future upon a foundation of tissue paper; ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... face, good to look at, with a certain ripple of dimples somewhere about the mouth, and eyes that laughed out the very sunniness of their owner's soul. There was not a severe nor yet a weak line anywhere. He was a well-meaning young fellow, happily dispositioned, and a great favorite with the tribe at Robinson's Post, whither he had gone in the service of the Department of Agriculture, to assist the local agent through the tedium of a ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... But the postilion either did not or would not hear, and some time elapsed before the painter could persuade his well-meaning companion of his peaceable intentions. At length he did so, and the carriage, which had meanwhile been going at full speed, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... which, under the title of "Literature and Art," included the Punch Staff, together with Charles Dickens, the members of the Royal Academy, and a few newspaper men. Dickens has left it upon record how his feelings were hurt at the tactless way in which the well-meaning Lord Mayor, Sir James Duke, Bart., M.P., imparted to his guests the pleasure it was to him to meet with mere talent after being satiated with blood and rank in the persons of Royalties, Dukes, and Cabinet Ministers. He made them feel, in fact—and resent ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... king's secret, Master Heriot," said Sir Mungo, throwing himself into a chair with an air of atrabilarious importance; "the other was a well-meaning hint to yourself, as the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... animals intrusted to his care should be treated with kindness and patience. But by degrees the young men became more reconciled to each other; and as Walter accustomed himself to the ungainly appearance of his companion, he came to the generous conclusion that Seppi had an honest and well-meaning heart in spite of his rough ...
— Harper's Young People, December 9, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... attributed to him, and there were well-meaning persons who whispered about that he had been heard to threaten that he would bury the friar-administrator in the furrows of his fields, whereat the friar was frightened at him in earnest. As a result of this, there came a decree from ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... to thank you for a kind, short note of the 27th inst., which I received on Sunday. I gave your kind message to the King of Prussia, who was much touche by it. He is a most amiable man, so kind and well-meaning, and seems so much beloved. He is so amusing too. He is very anxious that Belgium should become liee with Germany, and I think, dearest Uncle, that it would be for the real good of Belgium if it could be so. You will have heard how perfectly and splendidly everything ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... Some well-meaning Christians tremble for their salvation, because they have never gone through that valley of tears and of sorrow, which they have been taught to consider as an ordeal that must be passed through before they can arrive at ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... climes, despite coercion, despite law. This is the least of the negro's cares. His demand for civil rights is no demand for "social equality." This is a mistaken view of the subject. It is this dread of social equality, this fear of social contact with the negro that precludes many well-meaning people from securing accurate information in regard to the aims, and purposes, and capabilities of those whom they desire to help. But there is light ahead, dark as at times it now may seem, and erroneous as are the views in regard to the negro's ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... not know whether to be glad or sorry. For myself, though I never quite liked Hawkesbury, I had always got on well with him, and been disposed to believe him a well-meaning fellow. ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... who never stuck in the Slough of Despond, nor met Apollyon in the Valley of the Shadow, nor was captive in Doubting Castle, nor stoned in Vanity Fair. And of Bunyan, Walton would have said that he was among those Nonconformists who 'might be sincere, well-meaning men, whose indiscreet zeal might be so like charity, as thereby to cover a multitude of errors.' To Walton there seemed spiritual solace in remembering 'that we have comforted and been helpful to a dejected or distressed ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... insidious abuse from those who are prejudiced against his person or his birthplace, who are jealous of his success, envious of his position, hostile to his politics, dwarfed by his reputation, or hate him by the divine right of idiosyncrasy, always liable, too, to questioning comment from well-meaning friends who happen to be suspicious or sensitive in their political or ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... layman, land in the hands of a layman might be also tithe-free. So that there was an object which a layman might become seized of equitably and bona fide; there was something on which a prescription might attach, the end of which is, to secure the natural well-meaning ignorance of men, and to secure property by the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... only thing to regret—the fatal blemish in the tale—is the slaughter of the old king. Shabbar did right well to dash into the smallest pieces the wicked vazir and the foul witch and all who aided and abetted them, but "to kill a king!" and a well-meaning if soft-headed king, who was, like many better men, led astray ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... but they skulked in the desert, and hid in masquerade. But why should gentlemen in office, opulent and happy, set about worrying a handful of idiots, old, or poor, or boys, or women, or obscure, or amiable and well-meaning men, who were but a remnant of a former generation, and as little connected with the fanatics of Carthage, Alexandria, or Rome, as the English freemasons may seem to be with their namesakes on the continent? True, Christianity ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... not a tract to convert the wicked, who indeed are providing plenty of materials to effect their own conversion in ways very various and all very uncomfortable! I should like it rather to be read by well-meaning people, who share perhaps the same experience as myself—the experience, as I have said, of searching for something which I could not find. Sometimes in those days, I will make bold to confess, I read a book, or heard an address or sermon, or talked to ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a house under repair:—the white house opposite the collar-maker's shop, with four lime-trees before it, and a waggon-load of bricks at the door. That house is the plaything of a wealthy, well-meaning, whimsical person who lives about a mile off. He has a passion for brick and mortar, and, being too wise to meddle with his own residence, diverts himself with altering and re-altering, improving and re-improving, doing and undoing here. It is a perfect Penelope's web. Carpenters and bricklayers ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... to quarrel among themselves. The Rights of Man! How many wrongs have been done under that clause! The Bastille stormed; the Swiss Guard slaughtered; the Reign of Terror, with its daily procession of tumbrels through the streets of Paris; the murder of that amiable and well-meaning gentleman who did his best to atone for the sins of his ancestors; the fearful months of waiting suffered by his Queen before she, too, went to her death. Often as I lighted my candle of an evening in my little room to read of these things so far away, I would drop my Kentucky ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... visitors, who wished to look at him, to advise him, and to secure promises of office; fortunately the tedious procession had lost part of its offensiveness by touching his sense of humor. Anxious people made well-meaning but useless efforts to induce him to say something for effect upon the popular mind; but he resolutely and wisely maintained silence. His position and opinions, he said, had already been declared in his speeches with all the clearness he could give to them, and the people had ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... on the part of some well-meaning popes, to punish the confessors who destroy the purity of their penitents, have failed to touch the guilty parties, they are, in the good providence of God, infallible witnesses to tell to the world that auricular confession is nothing else than a snare to the confessor and his dupes. Yes, ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... in execution. Accurate information on this point can easily be obtained from the sheriffs and clerks of the peace for the different counties; those officers have been amongst the first witnesses examined before Lord Devon. We would only ask the public to suspend its judgment, and those well-meaning but mistaken individuals, who, though they reject Mr O'Connell and the priests as authorities on most other subjects, take their assertions on this as proven facts, to reserve their indignation and wrath until the result of this testimony can be known. Ejectment-processes are the most effective ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... horse should show any signs of actual misbehavior, you would find your master at your right hand, with fingers of steel to grasp your reins, and a voice accustomed to command obedience from quadrupeds, howsoever little of it he may be able to obtain at first from well-meaning bipeds. You are perfectly safe with him, Esmeralda, not only because he knows how to ride, but because the strongest of all human motives, self-interest, is enlisted to promote your safety. "She said she was afraid to risk her neck," said an exhausted teacher, speaking the words ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... just keeked in at the schoolroom to tell Dr. Colin and old Brooks he would be back in a minute to join the dregy, he went up the stairs with Gilian. "I'm going to leave you with my sister Mary," he explained. "You'll think her a droll woman, but all women have their tiravees, and my sister is a well-meaning creature." ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... his pipe savagely. Spike's words seemed to have touched a spring and let loose feelings which he had kept down for three years. Molly McEachern! So "they" used to say that he was engaged to Molly. He cursed Spike Mullins in his heart, well-meaning, blundering Spike, who was now sitting on the edge of his chair drawing sorrowfully at his cigar and wondering what he had done to give offense. The years fell away from Jimmy, and he was back in New York, standing at the corner of Forty-second ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... what I have written that our administration, in my opinion, suffers from two main defects. First, it is internally too bureaucratic and centralizing in its tendencies; and, secondly, it is liable to be forced by the external pressure of well-meaning but irresponsible politicians and philanthropists to adopt measures which may be disapproved of by the authorities on the spot, and opposed to the wishes, requirements, and interests of the people. It seems to me that for many years ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... the keenest interest and unbounded surprise. One very well-meaning person put down his knife and fork and said he was too surprised to eat any more breakfast; whereupon Hugh said, "You needn't be so very funny, because Sara doesn't understand those ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... quoth I, then I perceive you to be a well-meaning man; and so one that takes pleasure to hear and tell of that which is good. Pray, did you never hear what happened to a man some time ago in this town, whose name was Christian, that went on pilgrimage ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... our clue in another direction—into the home and family and private life of the average up-to-date woman. And it is permitted us to imagine, if we choose, that I am such a woman, while you are my well-meaning, but rather out-of-date, husband. ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... my walk alone up the road, and home by the shore. They are threatening to burn down all my woods to make grass land for the cattle, and I have terrified them by telling them that I will never come back if they destroy the woods. I went and paid a visit to Mrs. G——; poor little, well-meaning, helpless woman! what can she do for these poor people, where I who am supposed to own them can do nothing? and yet how much may be done, is done, by the brain and heart of one human being in contact with another! We are answerable for incalculable ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... stretch forth my arms and thunder invectives against well-meaning people with whom in my heart I secretly sympathise. Never again shall I plead passionately for principles which a horrible instinct tells me are fundamentally futile. Never again shall I attempt to make mountains out ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... beyond the pale of life and within sight of eternity. They had been strong, as those are strong who know neither doubts nor hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted, unruly and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to represent those men as whining over every mouthful of their food; as going about their work in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew toil, privation, violence, debauchery—but ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... while on a concert-tour from a case of sub-acute laryngitis, sought advice from a physician who honestly tried to aid him, but shot wide of the mark through injudicious use of a spray, in which he used menthol and eucalyptus, a combination much affected by a certain well-meaning class, and which for a time gives to the throat a delightful sense of coolness. The singer became afflicted with a violent, explosive cough, which caused the formation of a node. He gave up singing, losing nearly $1,000 in engagements. He went to his own room and to bed. He ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... make joint-stock of all their ideas, plans, wishes, schemes, friendships. There are in every family-circle individuals whom a certain sensitiveness of nature inclines to quietness and reserve; and there are very well-meaning families where no such quietness or reserve is possible. Nobody can be let alone, nobody may have a secret, nobody can move in any direction, without a host of inquiries and comments. 'Who is your letter from? Let's see.'—'My ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... period of Rome's history is sometimes complicated rather than helped by the statements of the generally well-meaning but often misguided historians of later times. Their real knowledge of the facts was in many cases no greater than ours, while they lacked what modern historians possess: a breadth of view and a knowledge of the phenomena of history in many periods and among many nations. ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... disliked some of these nautical images, though it was impossible not to smile in secret at the queer associations that so often led the well-meaning master's discursive discourse. His mind was a strange jumble of an early religious education,—religious as to externals and professions, at least,—with subsequent loose observation and much worldly experience, and he drew on his stock ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... children and children's children. There has been, of course, opposition to this work; opposition from some interested men who desire to exhaust the land for their own immediate profit without regard to the welfare of the next generation, and opposition from honest and well-meaning men who did not fully understand the subject or who did not look far enough ahead. This opposition is, I think, dying away, and our people are understanding that it would be utterly wrong to allow a few individuals to exhaust for their own temporary ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Cleomenes was not forgotten. If his popularity with the mercenaries could secure their allegiance, he could, when he chose, make them rebel; from that time he was treated rather as a prisoner than as a friend, and by his well-meaning but incautious observation he lost all chance of being helped to regain his kingdom. Nothing is known of the death of Euergetes, the late king, and there is no proof that it was by unfair means. But when his son began a cruel ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Gibellines, and France by those who were for and against the League: but it is very unhappy for a man to be born in such a stormy and tempestuous season. It is the restless ambition of artful men that thus breaks a people into factions, and draws several well-meaning persons to their interest, by a specious concern for their country. How many honest minds are filled with uncharitable and barbarous notions, out of their zeal for the publick good? What cruelties and outrages would ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... And thousands of honest, well-meaning men and women, who had seen, year after year, lie after lie, one stupendous story after another, punctured, riddled, and proved a vicious and malignant slander, swallowed this latest one whole, and marvelled that the American ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... was witty and entertaining, but among strangers, quiet and reserved, almost timid. He loved his mother devotedly, and after her death he kept her dress neatly folded in his trunk, always by him. Innocent, well-meaning, gentle and retiring, he drew many warm friends to him, though his great learning and his fondness for giving information made many people think him something ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... exactly a polished gentleman; he took no notice of me after the first searching glance. He made an unpleasant impression, but this wore off when I found that he was a well-meaning man, who had not cultivated fine manners. Why should he have cultivated what would have been of little or no use to him? These rural functionaries are just like the people with whom they live. The young sminariste ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... I knew that my method of playing the trill could be greatly improved and I also knew that I lacked force and endurance in certain passages. Fortunately, although a comparatively young man, I was not deceived by the flattery of well-meaning, but incapable critics, who were quite willing to convince me that my playing was as perfect as it was possible to make it. Every seeker of artistic truth is more widely awake to his own deficiencies than any of ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... deal of the state of society under the old regime. Curious to know his opinions of their private characters, I asked a good many questions concerning the royal family. Louis XVI. he described as a-well-meaning man, addicted a little too much to the pleasures of the table, but who would have done well enough had he not been surrounded by bad advisers. I was greatly surprised by one of his remarks. "Louis ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of social equality," said Dr. Latimer, "is only a bugbear which frightens well-meaning people from dealing justly with the negro. I know of no place on earth where there is perfect social equality, and I doubt if there is such a thing in heaven. The sinner who repents on his death-bed cannot be the equal of St. ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... Jarman down, or at least openly defy him; whereas he seemed to back him up, although much against his will. The net result to me was that I had three hundred lines to write on my third day at school, and that, for a well-meaning youth, ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... garments were entirely wanting in those of our worthy farmer. His hat was two inches too low in the crown, and two inches too broad in the brim, for the style; still it was a good-looking and a well-meaning hat, for it preserved the owner's phiz from the burning rays of the sun much better than the "mode" would have done. His boots, though round-toed and very wide, were nicely polished when he commenced the passage of the levee, ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... unusual warmth of the weather. For the same reason, probably, a neighbouring beehive had swarmed, and the new colony, pitching on the window-sill, was making its way into the room when the horrified nurse shut down the sash. If that well-meaning woman had only abstained from her ill-timed interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence which, in this country, leads far more surely than worth, capacity, or honest work, to the highest ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Polpier—Mrs Polsue, Miss Alma Trudgian (in Mrs Polsue's words, "a pitiful Ritualist, but well-meaning. She'll give no trouble"), the Vicar, ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... said she, instigated now by sheer opposition and determination not to succumb. 'You think Mr Slope is a messenger direct from Satan. I think he is an industrious, well-meaning clergyman. It's a pity that we differ as we do. But, as we do differ, we had probably better not ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... enemies the wiser. For we have done something, and this (which is purely a business letter) is to tell you that the credit does not all belong to Mr. Robbie, or to your Mr. Romaine (who by Mr. Robbie's account must be quite a tiresome old gentleman, though well-meaning, no doubt). But on the Tuesday after you left us I had a talk with Major Chevenix, and when I really felt quite sorry for him (though it was no use and I told him so), he turned round in a way I could not but admire ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... these pages begs to say here, most respectfully and emphatically, that he will not feel himself bound, in future, to reply to any inquiries, from however well-meaning correspondents, as to whether Charles Dickens was an "Unbeliever," or a "Unitarian," or an "Episcopalian," or whether "he ever went to church in his life," or "used improper language," or "drank enough to hurt him." He was human, very human, but he was no scoffer ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... who was at a distance,) he never said that anything which we were asking for, for him, appeared just to him. A bond for ten millions of sesterces was entered into in the women's apartment, (where many things have been sold, and are still being sold,) by his ambassadors, well-meaning men, but timid and inexperienced in business, without my advice or that of the rest of the hereditary friends of the monarch. And I advise you to consider carefully what you intend to do with reference to this bond. For the king himself, of his own accord, without waiting for any ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... have an operation performed upon my teeth. If I remember correctly, an ugly fang was to be removed,—at any rate, pain was involved in the matter; but no sooner was the dentist's arm around my head, and his instrument in my mouth, than the well-meaning and zealous operator began to question me upon the subject of personal religion. Now it seemed quite as bad to undertake to propagate Christianity at the point of a surgical instrument, as it would be to win proselytes by the sword; and the utter incongruity of the two operations disgusted ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... form of insincerity used by a class of well-meaning but injudicious persons, who, rather than wound the feelings of their friends, conceal the truth from them, sometimes by prevarication and sometimes by positive falsehood; doing wrong, that, as they imagine, good may come of it; as though ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... After such well-meaning mockery of our efforts, a route 'over the top' is tried. Soon we are outside Battalion Headquarters of the Berks. Whilst we are there, German gas shelling starts—a few rounds of phosgene—and helmets require to be adjusted. It ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... sweet sounds and odors now the whole barn is filled! How robust, clean, well-meaning are my thoughts! In what comfort of mind I can turn to my ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... danger, I should share his danger in receiving the news without flinching. If he were wounded, as I read the telegram I should receive a wound myself, and try to be as brave as he. All which came direct from the war, would unite me to Michael. But interfering friends, however well-meaning, would come between. If he had not been shielded from a bullet or a sword-thrust, why should I be shielded from the knowledge of ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... shortcomings that caused friction, kept up discontent, and prevented safe progress, and that would have been perfectly easy to correct. Directly as well as indirectly, the changes he proposed were calculated to benefit the homeland quite as much as the Philippines, but his well-meaning efforts brought him hatred and an undeserved death, thus proving once more how thankless is the task of telling unpleasant truths, no matter how necessary it may be to do so. Because Rizal spoke out boldly, while realizing what would probably be his fate, history holds him ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... the Doctor, "it is God's truth, and stands in no need of the endorsement of a set of well-meaning but purblind bigots and pedants, who presumed to set metes and bounds to Divine inspiration, and decide by vote what is God's truth and what is the Devil's falsehood. But, speaking of eagles, I never see one of these spiteful old sea-robbers without fancying ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
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