"Aimless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an aimless man. He was a brilliant sailor, not because he set himself to the task, but merely because seamanship was born in him, together with a dogged steadiness of nerve and a complete fearlessness. It was so easy to be a good sailor that he ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk—play, beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat- lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of the advantages of a flat that they could leave the children there whenever they liked without anxiety. They liked better staying there than wandering about in the evening with their parents, whose excursions seemed to them somewhat aimless, and their pleasures insipid. They studied, or read, or looked out of the window at the street sights; and their mother always came back to them with a pang for their lonesomeness. Bella knew some little girls in the house, but in a ceremonious way; Tom had formed no friendships ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... so loved, yet so mistaken! What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... single women is much on Herr Riehl's mind. What are we to do with them? he asks despairingly. "What is to become of the army of innocent creatures, without means, without a craft, doomed to an aimless, disappointed life. Shall we shut them up in convents? Shall we buy them into Stifts? Shall we send them to Australia? Shall we put an end to them?" Quite in the manner of Dogberry, he answers his own questions. Let them go their ways as before, he says. He knows there is no short ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... out good material. That is 'padding,' a device as dangerous as it is unworthy; it is much better to make your story a pollard—to cut it down to a mere anecdote—than to get it lost in a forest of verbiage. No line of it, however seemingly discursive, should be aimless, but should have some relation to the matter in hand; and if you find the story interesting to yourself notwithstanding that you know the end of it, it ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... Then he thought of the fair girl whom he had seen in the garden shedding tears on roses, and strove to weave a chaplet of verse which should be more unfading than flowers. What a strange destiny was his! The victim of untoward accidents, persecuted by some evil spirit, and leading an aimless, desultory life, which he yet feared would lead on to lunacy. What should he do in the present instance? Be patient? Yes, he would be calm, forgiving, philosophical as ever. Footsteps are approaching; the door of his cell opens; perhaps it is already ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... excellent opinion of our sex, Mr. Rolleston," said Madge, with a wicked glance at the wife of that gentleman, who was listening complacently to her husband's aimless chatter. ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... that trace Their lineage through the royal race, And all her wealth is theirs—and more; But one with cunning hand controls The portions that his brothers fed, While thousands—just and worthy souls— In aimless anguish cry ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... tower was clinging to his window. On the deck below our turret a member of the crew appeared, stood lurching for a moment, then shouted, and turned and ran, swaying, aimless. From the lower hull-corridors our grids sounded with the tramping of running steps. Panic among the crew was spreading over the ship. A chaos ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... him. My conversation with her was not as confidential as I had anticipated, owing to there being some eighty other people present in a room intended for the accommodation of eight; but after surging round for an hour in hot and aimless misery—as very young men at such gatherings do, knowing as a rule only the man who has brought them, and being unable to find him—I contrived to get a few ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... he learnt by grim experience. When first he moved it, it drove him headlong into inky darkness. His gills crumpled in the rough embrace of the mud, and his eyes and sucker were choked with slime. It was only a desperate, convulsive, aimless wriggle that freed him. The next time he cleared his immediate surroundings, and shot a full six inches upwards, only to sink slowly to the ooze again, motionless, and exhausted. He ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... int'rested in either Snick or me that I wa'n't sure but he just wandered in because he saw the door open. He's a high, well built, fairly good lookin' chap, dressed neat and quiet in black; and if it wa'n't for the sort of aimless, wanderin' look in his eyes, you might have suspected he was ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... could hardly let it pass without remonstrance. There exists in his hand the draft of a letter of reply to the verbal admonition of some well-wisher, to whom he evidently feels that he owes deference. His friend seems to have thought that he was yielding to the allurements of aimless study, neglecting to return as service what he had absorbed as knowledge. Milton pleads that his motive must be higher than the love of lettered ease, for that alone could never overcome the incentives that urge him to action. "Why should ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... the spectacle with smiling eyes. As always, in the aimless din and multiplicity of streets he felt himself most securely at home. The smear of gestures, the elastic distortion of crowds winding and unwinding under the tumult of windows, gave him the feeling of a geometrical emptiness ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... to go at all. My enforced breakfast over, I went to look for Rubens. Ever since the day when it was first settled that I should go, the dear dog had kept close, very close at my heels. That depressed and aimless wandering about which always afflicts the dogs of the household when any of the family are going away from home was strong upon him. After the new trunk came into my room, Rubens took into his head a fancy for lying upon it; and though the brass ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... came along scout pace. The scene of the pleasant little scout camp was presently overrun by aimless sojourners in private cars, who gathered about awaiting the actions of the ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... burden of perception, and wastes himself in aimless impulses of emotion and reverie, until finally the method of some art offers a vent to his inspiration, or to such part of it as can survive the test of time and the discipline of expression.... Wealth ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... stifled existences; without any contact with the world outside, without any charm of domestic life, without books or culture of any kind, the Brazilian senhora in this part of the country either sinks contentedly into a vapid, empty, aimless life, or frets against her chains, and is as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... strolling in an aimless kind of way on the hillside, when suddenly a party of hunters from the neighbouring city of Eternal Spring came dashing into view. They were a merry group and full of excitement, for they had just sighted a fox which Chan ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... up his mind which turn to take. In his youth a girl had jilted him, or a bank had failed on him, or a horse had kicked him in the head—or maybe it was all three of these things that had addled his poor brains. Anyhow he went his pitiable, aimless way for years, taunted daily by small boys who were more cruel than jungle beasts. How he lived nobody knew, but when he died some of the men who as boys had jeered him turned out ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... ear,—a perfection only exercised in the enjoyment and appreciation of the most perfect musical performances. How, then, could either the minute incipient stages, or the final perfecting touches of this admirable structure, have been brought about by vague, aimless, and indefinite variations in all conceivable directions of an organ, suitable to enable the rudest savage to minister to his necessities, but ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... extent changed by the arrival of tents and by the systematic military care for the suffering. But the daily life of a Johnstown man who is a refugee in his own city is still aimless and wandering. His property, his home, in nine cases out of ten, his wife and children, are gone. The chances are that he has hard work to find the spot where he and his family once lived and were happy. He meditates suicide, and even looks on the strangers who have flocked in to help ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... of legerdemain; but the follies which it portrays belong to a circle, and, with the imitations of the officers of court and advocates, form a complete whole. Many lines are at once witty sallies and characteristic traits; and some of the jokes have that apparently aimless drollery, which genuine comic inspiration can alone inspire. Racine would have become a dangerous rival of Moliere, if he had continued to exercise the talent which he has ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... expected from such a train? The chances are that it comes to a bad end. I expect it is recognised afterwards, a broken-down, unloved, friendless, old train, wandering aimless and despised in some far-off country, musing with bitter regret upon the day when, full of foolish pride and ambition, it started from Munich, with its boiler nicely oiled, ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... yourself. And you don't want to be canned, either." With the pointer Marion drew aimless little invisible volutes upon the map, connecting the two spruce cones with an imaginary scroll design. "How ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... couple of regiments go by. Out of the hundreds of regiments in the French Army, just two! But whence they had come, what they had done, whither they were travelling, what they were intended to do—nobody could tell me. They had an air as casual and vague and aimless as a flight of ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... not married by the time I am twenty-seven, I am determined to go into a convent or our Red Cross. I may change my mind many times but this is my last word for the present. I have a contempt, when not pity, for the lives of most of the people I see around me and mine is among the most selfish and aimless. I do not wish to read or think or study. And as for 'consciously living for a true world view,' I want to run away from ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... command. Our work in this country is grandly constructive. Some races have come into this world and overthrown and destroyed. But if it is glory to destroy, it is happiness to save; and Oh! what a noble work there is before our nation! Where is there a young man who would consent to lead an aimless life when there are such glorious opportunities before him? Before our young men is another battle—not a battle of flashing swords and clashing steel—but a moral warfare, a battle against ignorance, poverty, and low social condition. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... once the young man and Mademoiselle de Fontaine walked, tete-a-tete, in the avenues of the garden, where nature was dressed like a woman going to a ball. More than once they had those conversations, aimless and meaningless, in which the emptiest phrases are those which cover the deepest feelings. They often admired together the setting sun and its gorgeous coloring. They gathered daisies to pull the petals off, and sang the most impassioned duets, using the notes set ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... write a book." A wise man in the past hath shrewdly said, Knowing full well that when one's thoughts are paged They like foul spirits menace peace of mind. Alas! 'tis so, when tongue shall like a bird Take wing, soaring aloft, and as the wind Fly aimless over mountain, hill and dale, Until tired nature doth demand repose, Why did I Roosevelt as a pattern take And boast his doctrines as the wisdom's fount From which I drank as a disciple might Who worships blindly at his idol's shrine? And now these varlets point with taunting ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... me," said Mr. Layton, as the party came to a halt, "that we are not likely to accomplish anything by hunting in this aimless fashion." ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... was bustling about the room in aimless delight. "Dear, dear, you must be having your supper, lad!" he cried; "you will ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... the more successful classes, or labouring, at something less than a regular bare subsistence wage, in a finally hopeless competition against machinery that is as yet not so cheap as their toil. It is, to borrow a popular phrase, the "submerged" portion of the social body, a leaderless, aimless multitude, a multitude of people drifting down towards the abyss. Essentially it consists of people who have failed to "catch on" to the altered necessities the development of mechanism has brought about, they are people thrown out of employment by machinery, thrown out of employment ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... nonentity and art admired decay; The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay. Round us in antic order their crippled vices came— Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame. Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom, Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume. Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung; The world was very old indeed when you and I were young. They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named: ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... monotonous gray with hues of yellow and red. Finally, a great deal of shrubbery clusters along the base of the stone wall, and takes away the hardness of its outline; and in due time, as the upshot of these apparently aimless or sportive touches, we recognize that the beneficent Creator of all things, working through His handmaiden whom we call Nature, has deigned to mingle a charm of divine gracefulness even with so earthly an institution as a boundary-fence. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... idealised her; they had not seen her since she was twenty, and perhaps they still thought of her as a young girl. It now seemed to her as if she had left her youth in Rome, as in Rome it had seemed to her that she should find it again in Hatboro'. A pang of aimless, unlocalised homesickness passed through her; she realised that she was alone in the world. She rose to escape the pang, and went to the window of the parlour which looked toward the street, where she saw the figure of a young man draped in a long indiarubber ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... shall have the full advantages of regular college-training; and so for years he battles with a boy abhorring study, and fitted only for a life of out-door energy and bold adventure,—on whom Latin forms and Greek quantities fall and melt aimless and useless, as snow-flakes on the hide of a buffalo. Then the secret agonies,—the long years of sorrowful watchings of those gentler nurses of humanity who receive the infant into their bosom out of the void unknown, and strive to read its horoscope through the mists of their prayers and tears!—what ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... when most children draw in an aimless way, her father guided his little girl's efforts with his own experienced hand. He taught her to study and sketch from nature instead ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... of all my efforts, I could not get to sleep: aimless and vague thoughts kept persistently and monotonously dragging one after another on an endless chain, like the buckets of a ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... and stars did he send me out to Kingston Heights for?" cried Cyrus aloud. He caught the next train, thinking longingly of his broken engagement with Harold Dunning, and of certain plans for the afternoon which he was beginning to fear might be thwarted if this seemingly endless and aimless excursion continued. He looked at the packet of ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... doctors and merchants, actors and newspaper-men who met by chance and the one common instinct of book-loving at McClurg's, albeit "the greatest aggregation of liars" one of them had ever "met up with," were a simple, ingenuous, and aimless lot compared to the group which Field assembled in his corner in the "Sharps and Flats" column. Only quotations from some of his reports of their imaginary meetings can do justice to these children of his brain. These I should preface with the explanation that Field always sought ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... We've tried aimless charity too lang in Britain, as a nation. We did in other times, after other wars than this one. We've let the men who fought for us, and were wounded, depend on charity. And then, we've forgotten the way they served us, and we've become impatient with them. We've seen them ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... his last year's straw hat and went into the street, taking his pensiveness with him. Warm. Rows of arc lights. A shifting crowd. There are some streets that draw aimless feet. The blazing store fronts, clothes shops, candy shops, drug-stores, Victrola shops, movie theatres invite with the promise of a saturnalia ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Under some foolish, aimless impulse, he took a few quick steps towards the door. Then he turned, and throwing himself into his study-chair he plunged back into ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... great offices of religion is to help men to begin at the beginning. If you wish to straighten out a tangle of string, you know that it is worth your while to look patiently for one of the ends. If you make an aimless dash at it the result is confusion worse confounded, and by-and-by the tangle is thrown down in despair, its worst knots made by the hands that tried in a haphazard way to simplify it. Life is that tangle; and religion, if it does not loosen all the knots ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... Street he had struck into Madison Avenue, and was striding onward with the fixed eye and aimless haste of the man who has empty hours to fill, when a hansom drew up ahead of him and Justine Brent sprang out. She was trimly dressed, as if for travel, with a small bag in her hand; but at sight of him she paused with ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... but it was the place and the time for foolish talk. After a little more of it they drifted apart, wandering this way and that in a delightful, aimless way. So little of their four lives had been aimless or especially delightful that they reveled in the sweet opportunity. Loraine wandered farthest. She came after awhile to a clearing where a small pond glimmered redly with the parting rays of the sun. A great boy lounged beside ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... life—a little, confused, aimless, uncomfortable body—stepped into the box. She answered to the name of Drayton. Her husband was a hotel porter. She had a house in Pimlico. A month ago one of her rooms on the first floor back had been to ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... and found ourselves in the noise and tumult of that tremendous life, where the selfish seeking of the few is by a secret and uncomprehended power forced together into a mysterious and curious order, - as out of the seemingly aimless and orderless agitation of ants or bees one sees a well-planned structure arise, - amid the rattling of the trucks, the shuffling of thousands of feet upon the worn and ill-kept pavement, the ceaseless thunder of the elevated trains running between ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... three years previous to the day when Edward Lynde set forth on his aimless pilgrimage, Mr. Jenness Bowlsby, the president of the Nautilus Bank at Rivermouth, received the following letter from his wife's nephew, Mr. John Flemming, a young ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... good fortune of the being who has attained to human form and the critical issues which depend on his using it rightly are dwelt on with an earnestness not surpassed in Christian homiletics. He who acts ill as a man may fall back into the dreary cycles of inferior births, among beasts and blind aimless beings who cannot understand the truth, even if they hear it. From this point of view human life is happiness, only like every form of existence it ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... and his men had swept through half their camp, leaving a long litter of the dead and the dying to mark their course. Uncertain who were their attackers, and unable to tell their English enemies from their newly-arrived Breton allies, the Spanish knights rode wildly hither and thither in aimless fury. The mad turmoil, the mixture of races, and the fading light, were all in favor of the four who alone knew their own purpose among the vast uncertain multitude. Twice ere they reached open ground they had to break their way through small bodies of horses, and once ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... somethin' in it for 'em; an' I reckons, rightly saveyed, thar is. However, the profits to Road Runners of them excursions ain't obvious, none whatever; so I won't try to set 'em forth. Them journeys they makes up an' down the trail shorely seems aimless to me. ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... comparatively a friend's! Thus must he, in the temper of ancient Cain, or of the modern Wandering Jew,—save only that he feels himself not guilty and but suffering the pains of guilt,—wend to and fro with aimless speed. Thus must he, over the whole surface of the Earth (by footprints), write his Sorrows of Teufelsdroeckh; even as the great Goethe, in passionate words, had to write his Sorrows of Werter, before ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Roesselmann at the Ruetli meeting,—all their troubles would end forthwith; the cruel governors would deal kindly with them, would 'fondle' them. If this is so,—and other passages confirm the saying of the priest Roesselmann,—then it is patent that the conduct of Gessler is not the aimless brutality of a brute, but a policy deliberately pursued for the purpose of terrorizing the cantons into an acceptance of Hapsburg overlordship. And this in turn throws its own light on the character of ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... little. Good pictures do not teach a nation; they are the signs of its having been taught. Good thoughts do not form a nation; it must be formed before it can think them. Let it once decay at the heart, and its good work and good thoughts will become subtle luxury and aimless sophism; and it and they will ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... These acts are not the result of a stupid instinct which the Hymenoptera obey without understanding. If we place a swarm, as Huber did, in a roomy position where there is plenty of air, they do not devote themselves to an aimless exercise. This only takes place in the narrow dwellings which Man grants to ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... remarked that, with all the giddy whirl of previous winters in the outer circle, none had approached in mad rapidity that of 1860-61. The rush of aimless visiting, matinees and dinners, balls and suppers, followed each other without cessation; dress and diamonds, equipage and cards, all cost more than ever before. This might be the last of it, said an uneasy sense of ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... Week and the pictures were veiled; we had to leave Venice at last without a sight of San Giobbe's three Saints by Bordone, and Madonna by Bellini, which, unseen, outvalue all the other Saints and Madonnas that we looked at; and I am sure that life can never become so aimless, but we shall still have the desire of some day going to see the church of San Giobbe. If we read some famous episode of Venetian history, we made it the immediate care of our lives to visit the scene of its occurrence; ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... was on the trail again. It was the afternoon of the second day of his quest. He was saddle-sore and weary, but his purpose knew no weakening. Gipsy was going fresh and strong, and though she had already traveled probably a hundred miles in her rider's aimless wanderings, she moved as though she was out for a morning's exercise on a liberal diet ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... was merely one of the aimless remarks that such folks indulge in. The hope of freedom filled him with such joy that he could not be troubled to consider the words of a man who was no more than a better sort of peasant. He set to work at once, and had filed the bars through in the course of the day. Fearing a visit from the ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... eat our grandfathers like the merry cannibals that we are." The oyster is one of the primitive manifestations of life on the planet—one of the earlier forms of organic matter, still resting, uncertain and aimless in its evolution in the immensity of the waters. The sympathetic and slandered monkey only has the importance of a first cousin who has failed to make a career for himself, of an unfortunate and absurd relative whom one leaves outside the door, feigning ignorance of his family ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... rally of the citizens less expeditious and formidable when the alarm had been spread. By sunrise the rebels numbered fifteen, part of whom were mounted, and their outfit comprised a few firearms. Throughout the morning they continued their somewhat aimless roving, slaughtering such white households as they reached, enlisting recruits by persuasion or coercion, and heightening their courage by draughts upon the apple-brandy in which the county, by virtue of its many orchards and ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... is done at present by the teachers in the playground to encourage the simpler playground games, and "to replace the disorganised rough and tumble exercises which characterise the activities of so many of our poorer population by some form of organised activity."[30] The aimless parading of our streets by the sons and daughters of the working and lower middle classes in their leisure time, the rough horseplay of the youth of the lowest classes, are due in large measure to the fact ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to establish aimless truths: it is rather to fulfil a function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take on ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... England. The history becomes a shifting chaos marked by no definite policy, and the ship of State is being steered at random as one or other of the competitors for rule manages to grasp the helm for a moment. Then after another period of aimless intrigues the nation seems to rouse itself; and finding at last a statesman who has a distinct purpose and can appeal to a great patriotic sentiment, takes the leading part in Europe, wins a series of victories, and lays the foundation of the British Empire in America and India. Under Walpole's ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... satisfied if you'll only tell me one thing.' She put her hands to her head with a rapid, aimless movement that showed the extremity of her agitation. 'Oh, what has love done with me?' she cried desperately. 'I was so proud of my brother and so utterly devoted to him. But I loved you so much that there wasn't any room in my heart for ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... end of three months, he was shipped to France. There his seemingly aimless studies at the training camp ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... were alert to the sounds and appearances about him, and at the same time his mind was busy with the perplexities of that riddle. Was the jungle just an aimless pool of life that man must drain and clear away? Or is it to have a use in the greater life of our race that now begins? Will man value the jungle as he values the precipice, for the sake of his manhood? ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... out-lying, neglected, yet vitally-momentous province; the hidden treasures of which he first discovered, and kept proclaiming till the general eye and effort were directed thither, and the conquest was completed;—thereby, in these his seemingly so aimless rambles, planting new standards, founding new habitable colonies, in the immeasurable circumambient realm of Nothingness and Night! Wise man was he who counselled that Speculation should have free course, and look fearlessly towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... years are fixed in my memory, isolated, but clear and distinct, making the sense of that silent, aimless, dayless life all ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... a still earlier hour the Latimer girls had been flying in and out of their respective rooms in a perfectly aimless, joyous, childishly happy fashion, like a flock of white pigeons. And the sum of their conversation was simply this: "Oh, what a day! what a glorious day!" Yet it sufficed for a Babel of bird-like voices. At last one more energetic than the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... the time it seemed little more than aimless chatter. She was interested when her hostess explained that Howards End was her own property. She was bored when too minute an account was given of the Fussell family, of the anxieties of Charles concerning Naples, of the movements of Mr. Wilcox and Evie, who were motoring ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... for writing innumerable letters, especially on stamped paper, in exaggeratedly large writing very different from his usual style. These letters, which were full of absurdities, were posted by the writer from the different towns he passed through on his aimless journeyings, which lasted a whole fortnight. During one of these seizures, he was arrested as a deserter and was unable to give any ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... setting off after the others, he arrived at the scene of strife just as the combatants were closing with each other. Duncan Macrae (for such was his name), from his stupid and ungainly appearance, was taken little notice of, and was wandering about in an aimless, vacant, half-idiotic manner. Hector Roy, Alexander's third son, and progenitor of the Gairloch Mackenzies, observing him, asked why he was not taking part in the fight, and supporting his chief and clan. Duncan replied - "Mar a faigh mi miabh duine, cha dean mi gniomh duine." (Unless I get a man's ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... nevertheless she had accepted and submitted to it, and become accustomed to the thought of it. Now repugnance started up anew and with fresh energy. She could hardly understand herself; her thoughts were a great turmoil; they went over and over some of the experiences of the day, with an aimless dwelling upon them; yet Eleanor was in general no dreamer. The words of Mr. Rhys, that had pierced her with a sense of duty and need—the looks, that even in the remembrance wrung her heart with their silent lesson-bearing—the sympathy ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... the freedom of the Saturnalia with a higher meaning. The mystery of the Incarnation, or the deification of human nature, put an end to slavery through all the year, as well as on this single day. What had been a kind of aimless licence became the most ennobling principle by which men are exalted to a state of self-respect and mutual reverence. Still in the Saturnalia was found, ready-made, an easy symbol of unselfish enjoyment. It is, however, dangerous to push ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... then, Holmes drove the car in what Bessie soon saw to be an aimless fashion. The morning was nearly done, and Bessie, used to guessing at the time from the sun, knew that it was very near noon. Holmes seemed to be doubling on his tracks, and to be driving in what resembled a circle, as if he were chasing his own tail, and at last Bessie determined ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the Farm - Or, Bessie King's New Chum • Jane L. Stewart
... look at him blankly for a moment. Then she drew a long breath and took an aimless step away from the table. "Well, if that isn't too ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... of the monotonous song that had accompanied the opening dance I had seen at the He-dhu'-shka Society, where the dancer, with body bent and with short rhythmic steps, had kept time to the dramatic laugh of the song,—a song that had seemed so aimless to ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... frame was much weakened and little fitted to bear the cold of winter, which had already begun to come on. But I had no means of protecting myself against the bitter blast, and, as I anticipated my coming misery, I staggered along, houseless, aimless, and ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... oftenest the language of bitterness, violence, and execration was on her lips. With the never-ceasing complaints of want—want of position, want of friends, but, most of all, want of money—sounding in his ears, Andrew grew up a poet. The unsettled and aimless mind of his mother, shadowed as it was with perpetual blackness, prevented her from calmly and wisely striving to place her son in some position by which he could have aided in supporting himself and her. As a child, Andrew was shy and solitary, caring little for the society ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... of the rash resolution, the unsettled life, the neglect of the father's wishes, the grievous remorse, the broken health, and restless aimless wanderings, ending at last in loving tendance of the bereaved rival. It had been a life never wanting in generosity or benevolence, yet falling far short of what it might have been—a gallant voyage made ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... contributed to augment the discord prevailing, and to weaken the party of the Princes by dividing it. The Duchess de Longueville, when no longer guided by La Rochefoucauld, did not fail to lose herself in aimless projects, and to compromise herself in intrigues without result. On Nemours being wounded, his wife repaired to the army to tend him, and the Duchess de Chatillon, under pretext of visiting one of her ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... long-lived of pioneers, had but lately died, aged one hundred and five years. There was where the little school-house stood in which she once taught school in 1836. There was where she, riding horseback with a sweetheart who later became governor of the state, once joined with him in a riotous and aimless chase after a black bear which had crossed the road. Her cheeks, upon which there were not many wrinkles, glowed as she told the story of her youth to the man beside her. He looked upon her with the full intelligence of a great ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... place in a cold hotel, in an eternal Swiss rain, and they had a flat echo in the transalpine valleys, as the lonely ladies went vaguely down to the Italian lakes and cities. Rose guided their course, at moments, with a kind of aimless ferocity; she moved abruptly, feeling vulgar and hating their life, though destitute of any definite vision of another life that would have been open to her. She had set herself a task and she clung to it; but she appeared to herself despicably idle. ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... well for you to preach contentment,' it pertly replied, turning up its point with contempt. 'I am a leaf of intellect. I hate this aimless, monotonous life; it does very well for such silly, trembling things as ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... the cottontail while foraging appear aimless; typical behavior consists of progression with a hesitant gait of two or three hops, a stop to eat, another series of hops and another stop. Footprints made by this movement are about 12 inches apart. With occasional spurts of hopping the individual moves perhaps ten to twelve ...
— Home Range and Movements of the Eastern Cottontail in Kansas • Donald W. Janes
... where the mountains are nameless, And the rivers all run God knows where; There are lives that are erring and aimless, And deaths that just hang by a hair; There are hardships that nobody reckons; There are valleys unpeopled and still; There's a land — oh, it beckons and beckons, And I want to go back ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... aimless feet That not one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... November twilight, as Morrow was returning to his own door after shadowing Brunell on an aimless and chilly walk, he saw the kitten lying curled up just outside its own gate, and an inspiration sprang to his ingenious mind. He seated himself upon the steps of Mrs. Quinlan's front porch and waited until the darkness had deepened sufficiently to cloak his nefarious scheme. Then, with ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... went soon to bed. None of us slept well. We agreed in the morning that the noise of the stream had been too much for us all, and that the place felt close and torpid. Andrew complained that the ceaseless sound wearied him, and Robert that he felt the aimless endlessness of it more than was good for him. I confess it irritated me like an anodyne unable to soothe. We were clearly all in want of something different. The air between the hills clung to them, hot and moveless. We would climb those hills, and breathe the air that flitted ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... task of establishing the supremacy of the white man in South Africa infinitely more costly both in blood and treasure. The British nation accepted the task, which fell to it as paramount power, with the greatest reluctance. The endless and apparently aimless Kafir wars exhausted the patience of the country, and the destruction of an entire British regiment by Ketshwayo's[4] impis created a feeling of deep resentment against the great High Commissioner, whose policy was held—unreasonably enough—responsible for ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... dead faint now and again with a momentary smash that was swallowed to silence immediately. Underneath the sulky, heaving water lurked death, silent and sharp, from which the shoals of flying fishes escaped for the moment by soundless, silvery, aimless poising in the blue air, only to fall back exhausted again into the green water and the waiting white jaws. Some of the fishes flopped on board, and were put out of life by the blows of the sailors who dried and stuffed them and sold them afterwards to the ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... medical people well know, frequently follows some terrible shock to the spirits. Constance is frantic; Lear is mad; Ophelia is insane. Her sweet mind lies in fragments before us—a pitiful spectacle! Her wild, rambling fancies; her aimless, broken speeches; her quick transitions from gayety to sadness—each equally purposeless and causeless; her snatches of old ballads, such as perhaps her nurse sung her to sleep with in her infancy—are all so true to the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... Harry hurried away, Madison, seemingly as aimless, as hysterical as the hundreds about him, moved here and there, but unostentatiously he kept nearing the upper end of the lawn, and, finally, hidden by the woodshed at the further end of the cottage, he slipped quickly around to the rear. Here the garden stretched ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... footstep, and the door opened. Mr. Widemann was a very handsome young man, of thirty or thirty-two, with black whiskers entirely surrounding his manly and expressive face; his morning dress showed a certain rural elegance. He seemed at first not only embarrassed but pained by our visit. The aimless curiosity of which he seemed to be the object was indeed odd. I hastened to give him Mr. G——'s letter and to tell him what reason brought me. Then he gradually recovered himself, and at last showed himself no less hospitable ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... meandering through the streets of the city, in the aimless patterns of youth, while keeping an eye open for parked automobiles with the ignition keys still ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... aimless, idle, and useless brain, emergencies often call out powers and virtues before unknown and suspected. How often we see a young man develop astounding ability and energy after the death of a parent, or the loss of a fortune, or after some other calamity has knocked the props and crutches from ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... on this and other things might be called a prejudice; but it could not possibly be called a fad, still less an affectation. She really had an obstinate objection to all those natural forces that seemed to be sterile or aimless; she disliked loud winds that seemed to be going nowhere; she did not care much for the sea, a spectacle of which I was very fond; and by the same instinct she was up against the moon, which she said looked like an imbecile. On the other hand, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Whither am I borne? Into what region are these wavering sounds Wafted on aimless wings? O ruthless Fate! To what a ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... let the believer in annihilation place before him, instead of a life of sixty years, one of sixty minutes; then let him look on the face of a beloved being, or upon a noble or wise man, as upon an aimless hour-long appearance; as a thin shadow that melts into light and leaves no trace; can he bear the thought? No! the supposition of imperishableness is always with him; else there would hang always before his soul, as before Mahomet's ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... master great rivers and endless plains; but, as their labors are judged today, the greater service which these men rendered appears in its true light. They stifled provincialism; they battered down Chinese Walls of prejudice and separatism; they reduced the aimless rivalry of bickering provinces to a businesslike common denominator; and, perhaps more than any class of men, they made possible the wide-spreading and yet united Republic that ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... from it to Bethel could not have been called a going down (v. 2). It probably lay to the north of Bethel, which would then be between it and Jericho, where the Jordan was to be passed. Elijah was not sent on an aimless round of farewell visits, but by the direct road to his destination. Note that he and Elisha and the 'sons of the prophets' all know that he is near his end. How this came about we are not told, and need not speculate; but though all knew, none ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and the old mare went round to begin another of those endless journeys through London streets which horses, if they reason at all, must find so utterly incomprehensible and aimless. ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... lavishly displayed in the fashionable quarter of the capital, was a meager affair, just enough for comfort; it was far too small for the new style of wholesale entertainment which the plutocracy has introduced from England, where the lunacy for aimless and extravagant display rages and ravages in its full horror of witless vulgarity. Thus, the Severences from being leaders twenty years before, had shrunk into "quiet people," were saved from downright obscurity and social neglect only by the ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... their souls an insupportable wretchedness. The richest became libertines; those of moderate fortune followed some profession and resigned themselves to the sword or to the church. The poorest gave themselves up with cold enthusiasm to great thoughts, plunged into the frightful sea of aimless effort. As human weakness seeks association and as men are gregarious by nature, politics became mingled with it. There were struggles with the 'garde du corps' on the steps of the legislative assembly; at the theatre Talma wore a wig which made ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... miserable of my life. Early in the sultry mornings, for the heat at this season of the year was great, the soldier servants—prisoners like ourselves—would bring us a cup of coffee, and sitting up in bed we began to smoke the cigarettes and cigars of another idle, aimless day. Breakfast was at nine: a nasty uncomfortable meal. The room was stuffy, and there are more enlivening spectacles than seventy British officers caught by Dutch farmers and penned together in confinement. Then came the long morning, to be killed somehow by reading, chess, ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... iridescence. Nursemaids were leading children, bits of muffled wealth, along the alleys. Horses pounded on the bridle paths. Automobiles and taxis, that must have looked to the airman above like aimless black planes drifting in a crystal sea, were carrying people to a thousand destinies. Towering on all sides was the irregular concrete mass of New York. As dusk fell, lights in those high buildings began ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... events, hither I came, and wandered about for some years, with that aimless indifference to the future which is but too characteristic of youth—content to eat and sleep and toil, so that I might enjoy life, and get plenty of excitement! I went to Peru first, and of course I joined in the fights that were so frequently stirred up ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... no more aimless sauntering after they had slipped round a corner and eluded Kate Gardiner's curious eyes. Had their business not been of life-and-death importance, they would have felt like children escaped from school; since the least imprudence might lose ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... Greeks life was so bright and joyous a thing that they looked upon death as a great calamity. They therefore pictured life after death, except in the case of a favored few, as being hopeless and aimless. [Footnote: Homer makes the shade of the great Achilles in Hades to say:— "I would be A laborer on earth, and serve for hire Some man of mean estate, who makes scant cheer, Rather than reign o'er all who have gone down To death."—Od. XI. 489-90 [Bryant's Trans.].] The Elysian ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... unintelligent, even the not being beautiful, and sometimes one finds oneself called upon passionately to resist a temptation to listen to an internal hint that the whole thing is aimless. Upon this tendency one may as well put one's foot firmly, as it leads nowhere. At such times it is supporting to call to mind a certain undeniable fact which ought to loom up much larger in our philosophical ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... profound to have one thought beyond their friends, whom they exploit; then of evenings, when they lay their heads on their pillows, they weigh men as a miser weighs his gold pieces. The one are vexed at an aimless impertinence, and allow themselves to be ridiculed by the diplomatic, who make them dance for them by pulling what is the main string of these puppets—their vanity. Thus, a day comes when those who had nothing ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... complaint do not realize their condition. They find it on the whole less trouble not to feel themselves live, and they are most uneasy when chance forces them to spend a few days (on shipboard, for instance) where they are not protected by ceaseless and aimless activity from the consciousness that they are themselves. They cannot even conceive the bitter-sweet, vital taste of that consciousness as we villagers have it, and they cannot understand how arid their existence seems to us without this unhurried, ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield |
