"Dissipation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but he had the bowed and shrunken look of an invalid, and from time to time he coughed terribly, the ominous cough of a person with lungs half consumed by tubercle. He had not the air of a man who gambles for pleasure; nor, I thought, that of a spendthrift or a "ne'er-do-weel;" disease, not dissipation, had hollowed his cheeks and set his hands trembling, and the unnatural light in his eyes was born of fever rather than of greed. He played anxiously but not excitedly, seldom venturing on a heavy stake, and watching the game with an intentness ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... regularly and attentively at the studio, but now Marshall's society was an attraction I could not resist. For the sake of his talent, which I religiously believed in, I regretted he was so idle; but his dissipation was winning, and his delight was thorough, and his gay, dashing manner made me feel happy, and his experience opened to me new avenues for enjoyment and knowledge of life. On my arrival in Paris I had visited, in the company of my taciturn valet, the Mabille and the Valentino, and I had dined ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... pool has not been stirred or ruffled by a single thought; the days that we have gladly got rid of, to attain some real or fancied object that lay beyond, in the way between us and which stood irksomely the intervening days; the hours worse than wasted in follies and dissipation, or misspent in useless and unprofitable studies; and we acknowledge, with a sigh, that we could have learned and done, in half a score of years well spent, more than we have done in all our forty years ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... you know full well that the promises of their parents do not bind youthful hearts. My Philip is inclined to dissipation, and it would be an unfortunate match ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... addition to such powerful inducements, they imagined it in their power to fix themselves in the midst of plenty on one of the finest islands in the world, where they need not labour, and where the allurements of dissipation are beyond anything that can be conceived. The utmost however that any commander could have supposed to have happened is that some of the people would have been tempted to desert. But, if it should ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... feel right, and they have notions that our society don't respect 'um because they must mix with the black rascals in following their trades; and this works its way into their feelings so, that the best on 'um from the north soon give themselves up to the worst dissipation. Ah! our white mechanics are poor wretches; there isn't twenty in the city you can depend on ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... for long. As he approached one was struck at once by the immaculate efficiency that followed him like a protecting shadow. In himself he was a scrupulously neat old man with weary and dissipated eyes, but behind the weariness, the neatness, and dissipation was a spirit of indomitable determination and resolution. He wore a little white Imperial and a long white moustache. His hair was brushed back and his forehead shone like marble. He wore a black suit, white spats, and long, pointed, black patent-leather shoes. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... temperament, divided the property into building lots, staked off the hillside, and projected the map of a new metropolis. Failing, however, to convince the citizens of San Francisco that they had mistaken the site of their city, he presently fell into dissipation and despondency. He was frequently observed haunting the narrow strip of beach at low tide or perched upon the cliff at high water. In the latter position a sheep-tender one day found him, cold and pulseless, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... will so far assume responsibility as to say that amusement is not the highest object of a single lecture, and when sought by managers as the desirable object of a whole course, the lecture-room becomes a theatre of dissipation; surely not so bad as other forms of dissipation, but yet so distinctly marked, and so pernicious in its influence, as to be comparatively unworthy of general support. Let it not, however, be inferred that wit, humor, and drollery even, are to be excluded ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... and with scarcely a failure during the whole time. This employment threw me into rough associations in the city every week. Many engaged in like business from Kentucky and Indiana stopped at the same tavern, and most of them were given to dissipation. At home it was predicted that with my inclination to wildness this would finish me; and while truth compels me to confess that I often had "a jolly good time" with "the boys," the excess of wickedness I saw had an opposite effect, and I came ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... the increased range of his faculties of observation, which yield him points of interest wherever fresh objects meet his eyes. The pastoral nations were needy and hungry to desperation; and this intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects. The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, is that continence or content which finds all the elements of life in its own soil; and which has its own perils of monotony and deterioration, if not ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that you, Professor Sharpe?" demands the doctor, amazed, delighted, not because he has a companion in misfortune, but on account of the dissipation of his fears respecting ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... have seen their several interests attended to, and from thence they unite in placing a confidence in their representatives, as well as in those in whose hands the execution of the laws is placed. Industry has there taken place of idleness, and economy of dissipation. Two or three years of good crops, and a ready market for the produce of their lands, have put every one in good humour; and, in some instances, they even impute to the government what is due only to the goodness ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... is sickening work to think of your cushioned seats, your chants, your anthems, your choirs, your organs, your gowns, and your bands, and I know not what besides, all made to be instruments of religious luxury, if not of pious dissipation, while ye need far more to be stirred up and incited to holy ardor for the propagation of the truth as it ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... that the situation of an actor is a state of licentiousness and bad morals; that the men are abandoned to disorder; that the women lead a scandalous life; that the one and the other, at once avaricious and profane, ever overwhelmed with debt, and ever prodigal, are as unrestrained in their dissipation as they are void of scruple in respect to the means of providing for it. In all countries their profession is dishonorable; those who ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... still here but shall probably leave in a week or two. I long to get home, or, at least, as far on my way as Concord. I think I shall be tempted to stay a week or two there.... I do not like Windsor very much. It is a very dissipated place, and dissipation, too, of the lowest sort. There is very little ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... their peasant costume. I often met such people. Some of them have fallen ill here, and on leaving the hospital they can neither support themselves here, nor get away from Moscow. Some of them, moreover, have indulged in dissipation (such was probably the case of the dropsical man); some have not been ill, but are people who have been burnt out of their houses, or old people, or women with children; some, too, were perfectly healthy and ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... the Earl of Strafford, Nov. 27.-Surrender of the British forces at York Town. Gloomy forebodings of the consequences. General spirit of dissipation—296 ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... instance, our main effort is to drive the Germans out of France and Belgium, and then to attack them in their own territory. Anything which interferes with this or throws it, however temporarily, into the background, is held to be unwise, because it leads to the most dangerous of results in warfare—the dissipation of forces, which, if united, would win the desired success, but if disunited will probably fail. Thus we are told that we must not fritter away our energies in enterprises which, however important in themselves, are not comparable with the one unique preoccupation of our ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... it to account. He had brought also to the city the stamina of three generations of plain living—a splendid capital, by which the city is constantly reinforced, and which one generation does not exhaust, except by the aid of extreme dissipation. With sound health, good ability, and fair education, he had the cheerful temperament which makes friends, and does not allow their misfortunes to injure his career. Generous by impulse, he would rather do a favor than not, and yet he would be likely to let nothing interfere with any ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... encouraging one of the most heinous crimes or practices with which our country is disgraced.[7] Yes, and afterwards we find him rioting at the Wine Table, the whole livelong night. Is it to be wondered that there are such vast numbers of our population who are the votaries of Vice and Dissipation? No, certainly not, and I do not believe there ever will be less of this wickedness while a man practising these abominable vices (in what is called a gentlemanly manner) is suffered to sit at the head of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... defect of ability or fidelity, or both, were unequal to the wants of a kingdom: A great genius, infinite knowledge and infinite care, says he, are requisite to form a prime minister; but youth and dissipation, with the trainings of the turf and the gaming table, will now suffice to make a man master of the most difficult trade in the world, without learning it"—Such were the men, under whose Influence Attorneys and Sollicitors General, within these ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... Weatherby: her form lovely as nature could make it, but her mind uncultivated, her heart unfeeling, her passions impetuous, and her brain almost turned with flattery, dissipation, and pleasure; and such was the girl, whom a partial grandfather left independent mistress of the fortune ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... definition of disability adopted. The Iron Molders' Union, which took the initiative in adopting a national disability benefit, undertook to pay benefits to all disabled members, with two exceptions. First, the disability must not have been caused by dissipation, and secondly, the member must not have been disabled before joining the Association.[107] The Granite Cutters' Union, however, when establishing their voluntary insurance association in 1877, limited the benefit to members disabled for life by any real accident suffered while following employment ...
— Beneficiary Features of American Trade Unions • James B. Kennedy
... dined at his club, where he usually passed the evenings at chess with some brother antediluvian. A visit to the theatre, when some old English comedy or some new English ballet happened to be on the boards, was the periphery of his dissipation. What is called society saw nothing of him. He was a rough, breezy, thickset old gentleman, betrothed from his birth to apoplexy, enjoying life in his own secluded manner, and insisting on having everybody about ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... and insolent to his inferiors: to insinuate himself into the favour of young men of rank and fortune, he affected to admire extravagance; but his secret maxims of parsimony operated even in the midst of dissipation. Meanness and pride usually go together. It is not to be supposed that young Forester had such quick penetration, that he could discover the whole of the artful Archibald's character in the course of a few days' ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... was a matter never to be forgotten by the two men. Their muscles were soft from dissipation and long years of idleness. In particular did Hapgood suffer. He was a slight man to whom nature had given none of the bigness of body which she had bestowed upon Conniston. His luxury-loving disposition had made him abjure the sports which the other at one time and another had enjoyed. He ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... the public mind, and all good influences followed. But the tree was not yet deeply enough rooted to resist accidents, and all his wise arrangements were suddenly overthrown by the caprice of the monarch, who, tired of the austere virtue of Confucius, suddenly plunged into a career of dissipation. Confucius resigned his office, and again became a wanderer, but now with a new motive. He had before travelled to learn, now he travelled to teach. He collected disciples around him, and, no longer ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... of this sort [he is referring to social dissipation, romances, and playhouses] to keep up our spirits; our various pleasing pursuits were quite sufficient for that; and the book-learning came amongst the rest of the pleasures, to which it was, in some sort, necessary. I remember that, one year, I raised a prodigious crop of fine melons, under ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... youth, Mr. Vere of Ellieslaw had been remarkable for a career of dissipation, which, in advanced life, he had exchanged for the no less destructive career of dark and turbulent ambition. In both cases, he had gratified the predominant passion without respect to the diminution of ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... neither knew, nor wished to know, the art of pleasing courtiers. Of good nature he had indeed a considerable fund, but he showed it, not so much by the endless little attentions of a gentleman, as by scattered acts of princely beneficence. For dissipation he had no taste; his professional cares and duties, which, during twenty-five years, had left him no respite, had engrossed his attention too much to allow room for the passions, vices, or follies of society to obtain any empire ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 405, December 19, 1829 • Various
... Renovales with almost paternal solicitude. The Bohemian showed great sympathy for him. It was the same old story: "He who does not do it at the beginning does it at the end," and Renovales, after a life of hard work, was rushing into a life of dissipation with the blindness of a youth, admiring vulgar pleasures, clothing them with ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... way, for you see the fellow on the shutter was dirty, not "dressed" at all, though it was Sunday, poor folks' ball-day; a dirty, rough fellow, with a short clay pipe in his mouth, a chalky-white face—apparently from low dissipation—a disreputable rascal, a monstrously impudent "chap," a true London mongrel. He "cheeked" her; she tossed her head, and looked the other way. But by-and-by she could not help a sly glance at him, not an angry glance—a look as much ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... was, however, beyond his influence, being recognized as chief of the tribe, by the government of the United States. He unquestionably possesses talents of the first order, excels as an orator, but his authority will probably be short-lived on account of his dissipation, and his profligacy in spending the money paid him for the benefit of his tribe; and which he squanders upon himself and a few favorites, through whose influence he seeks to maintain ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... means. "Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die." The popularity of Omar Khayyam rests upon the aptness of his statement of this side of the case of Man vs. Death, and many a man who never heard of him has recklessly plunged into dissipation on the theory, "a short life and a merry one." This is more truly a pessimism than is the ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... they were delivered in, tied with the same twine; men who fulfilled their trusts to the letter, drew honest inventories, took fatherly interest in their clients, often barring the way to extravagance and dissipation,—men to whom families confided their secrets, and who felt so responsible for any error in their deeds that they meditated long and carefully over them. Never during his whole notarial life, had any client found reason to complain of a bad ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... Friends in Council says, a human being, like a tree, if it is to attain to perfect symmetry, must have light and air given to it from all quarters. This may be done without making men superficial—without sanctioning the dissipation of mere desultory reading. One or two great branches of science may be systematically prosecuted, and others used in a more supplementary and illustrative form. 'A number of one-sided men,' observes the same writer, 'may make a great nation, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... he die. The wave rises, but falls again; the state waxes to greatness, wanes, and the map knows it no more; each epoch of human history arises out of dim beginnings, magnifies itself in glory, and then yields to internal corruption, dilution and adulteration of blood, or prodigal dissipation of spiritual force, and takes its place in the annals of ancient history. Without recognition of this implacable, unescapable fact of degradation sequent on evolution, the later becomes a delusion and an instrument of death, for the eyes of man are blind to incipient ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... her future work for the press, copying a bit here and a bit there, inventing historical details, dovetailing her chronicle, her head would sometimes seem to be going round as she remembered the unpaid baker, and her son's horses, and his unmeaning dissipation, and all her doubts about the marriage. As regarded herself, Mr Broune would have made her secure,—but that now was all over. Poor woman! This at any rate may be said for her,—that had she accepted the man her regrets would ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... the guise of amusement, young people will soon reject that which is presented to them under the aspect of study and labor. Learning their knowledge and science in sport, they will be too apt to make sport of both; while the habit of intellectual dissipation, thus engendered, cannot fail, in course of time, to produce a thoroughly emasculating effect both upon their mind and character. "Multifarious reading," said Robertson, of Brighton, "weakens the mind like smoking, and is an excuse for its lying dormant. It ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... position of his will illustrate my point. He was constantly inveighing in his seminary against desultory reading. Homer, Plutarch, Racine, Bossuet, and a few other books, are all he wishes a man to have read. He calls miscellaneous reading a subtle dissipation, ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... table, five on a side, the Director—looking red-eyed and weary from the evening's unaccustomed dissipation—sitting at the head. Below us stood Brother Albert, reading from Tertullian in a dry, monotonous chant. I recall, as I write, how I found a certain comfort in those splendid, sonorous Latin sentences, though I was conscious of not comprehending ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... ballast, persistently giving away things that were presented to him, satisfied if he had a chair, a bed, and a table upon which to write; getting his own breakfast, dining at the table d'hote of the nearest inn, with supper at a "Gast-Haus"—so passed his days. He had no intimate friends, and his chief dissipation was playing the flute. His black poodle, named "Homo" in a subtle mood of irony, accompanied him everywhere, and on this dog he lavished what he was pleased to call his love. He anticipated Rip Van Winkle concerning ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... first a chair, then a creepie, and one thing after another, to learn from what point to start the barrel. Seeing and recognizing them from above, Mistress Mac Pholp raised a terrible outcry. In the very presence of her drowning husband, such a wanton dissipation of her property roused her to fiercest wrath, for she imagined Gibbie was emptying her house with leisurely revenge. Satisfied at length, he floated out his barrel, and followed with the line in his hand, to aid its direction if necessary. It struck the tree. With a yell of joy Angus laid hold of ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... mensuration and surveying from the schoolmaster there, who was famous as a teacher of these things. Griswold, on the Carrick coast, was a village full of smugglers and adventurers, in whose society Burns was introduced to scenes of what he calls "swaggering riot and roaring dissipation." It may readily be believed that with his strong love of sociality and excitement he was an apt pupil in that school. Still the mensuration went on till one day, when in the kail-yard behind the teachers house, Burns met a ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... had passed, and still no news from the prince royal. King Frederick William still lived, and the little court of Rheinsberg was consumed with impatience and expectation. All means of dissipation were exhausted. Time had laid aside its wing, and put on shoes of lead. She flew no longer, but walked like an aged woman. How long an hour seems, when you count the seconds! How terribly a day stretches out when, with wakeful but wearied eyes, ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... it; reviewing my most wicked ways in the very bitterness of my remembrance, that Thou mayest grow sweet unto me (Thou sweetness never failing, Thou blissful and assured sweetness); and gathering me again out of that my dissipation, wherein I was torn piecemeal, while turned from Thee, the One Good, I lost myself among a multiplicity of things. For I even burnt in my youth heretofore, to be satiated in things below; and I dared to grow wild again, with these various and shadowy loves: my beauty consumed away, and I ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... those days. Besides, when Adam first made his appearance, in 1833, on the boulevard des Italiens, at Frascati, and at the Jockey-Club, he was leading the life of a young man who, having lost his political prospects, was taking his pleasure in Parisian dissipation. At first he was thought to be ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... proceeded to efface the marks of dissipation, and set his disordered dress to rights, saying as he finished, "I must to my appointment with Garnet. Marry," he added, donning hat and mantle, "I hope he is safely housed, and that my letter to Giles Martin, which the worthy prelate was to present, did insure ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... the cure in his beautiful robes, and all the companies of heaven looking on—and only us four! This shows the neglect of all sacred ordinances that was in Semur. While, on the other hand, what grasping there was for money; what fraud and deceit; what foolishness and dissipation! Even the Mere Julie herself, though a devout person, the pears she sold to us on the last market day before these events, were far, very far, as she must have known, from being satisfactory. In the same way Gros-Jean, though a peasant from ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... especially the Cantonese, is more irresponsible and hot-blooded than the Celestial of the north, though the bitter struggle for existence in the over-crowded Kwangtung province has made him quite as industrious; but on his holidays he takes his pleasure in singing, gambling, and various forms of dissipation. The southern Russian is described as more light-hearted than his kinsman of the bleaker north, though both are touched with the melancholy of the Slav. In this case, however, the question immediately arises, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... stealing out of Margot's kingdom. It was a standing rule that this meal was to be taken together on Sunday and the visit prolonged far into the night—until old Pierre came with the worn-looking buggy and carried his master off about half-past ten. "Grand Dieu. Quelle dissipation!" Only on this night did either one stay ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... the liberal hospitality, that wealth can command; the other in a stile of tinsel show, without the real appropriate distinctions belonging to rank and fortune. They are lavish, but not liberal, often sacrificing independence to support dissipation, and betraying the dearest interests of society for the sake of personal vanity, and gratifying what is significantly ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... cold, and free from enthusiasms and follies alike. But at times he appeared to be taken with moods of strong feeling. Then he would speak freely to the first person who might be by, was eager for merriment and dissipation, not fastidious as to how he came by what he wanted, seeming forgetful of the sterner rule by which his daily life was governed. A reaction would generally follow, and the King would appear to take a revenge on himself by acid and ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... progression, the meeting between the two extremes of life seemed to become more apparent. The children of the night—the weary, unwholesome products of dissipation, rubbed shoulders with the children of the morning—girls, hatless, in simple clothes, walking with brisk footsteps to their work; market women, brown-cheeked and hearty, setting out their wares upon the stalls; the youth of Paris, blithe ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was pouring out some tea, my hand trembled—Mrs. Middleton observed it, and said with a smile, "The effects of dissipation, Ellen. We really must pull up, or we shall have you ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... asking, George and Kate Vavasor to join the dinner-party. "What an auspicious omen for the future nuptials!" said Kate, with her little sarcastic smile. "Uncle John dines at home, and Mr Grey joins in the dissipation of a dinner-party. We shall all be changed soon, I suppose, and George and I will take to keeping a little ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... neutralized by the fact of his wealth. Indeed, society concluded that it had much more occasion to smile than to frown upon him, and his increasing fondness for society and its approval in some degree curbed his tendencies to dissipation. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... that he bears. Even the friendship which existed for many, many years between his deceased father and myself, shall no longer induce me to receive at this house a young man whose reputation is all but tainted, even in a city of dissipation and debauchery, such as, alas! the once glorious Florence has become! For his immorality is not confined to gaming and wanton extravagance," continued the count, his glance becoming more keen, as his words fell like drops of molten lead upon the heart ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... youth, George Legard had many high and generous qualities. Society had done its best to spoil a fine and candid disposition, with abilities far above mediocrity; but society had only partially succeeded. Still, unhappily, dissipation had grown a habit with him; all his talents were of a nature that brought a ready return. At his age, it was but natural that the praise of salons should retain ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... been unworthily excited. Several other kings followed and carried on this imposture, each building his palace and tomb in this untruthful way. What could we expect from kings content to lie in such tombs but lives of disgusting dissipation? A simple marble slab were surely better than these pretentious lies: anything so it be genuine. However, retribution came, and the dynasty is extinct, the present king living as a ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... large, had been shattered by early dissipation. Naturally of a proud and somewhat exacting temper, he actively felt the mortifying consequences of his poverty. The want of what he felt ought to have been his position and influence in the county in which he resided, fretted ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... pair spent several days after the wedding under the paternal roof, and joyful days they were, only rather too much given up to dissipation, for all friends and acquaintance would see and entertain the two young people. Mrs. Gunilla gave them a dinner, in which she communicated to them that she should, at the same time with them, journey to Stockholm, where important affairs would ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... he plunged into frivolous pleasure or dissipation while his father lay on his death-bed," the Colonel ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... rabble of which it was composed—a distinction which only she and the Colonel seemed able to divine, for had it been a garlic-tainted Egyptian or Neapolitan mob, little objection would have been raised to their going. The sights amused and interested them, and after an hour's mild dissipation, they returned to the Posada in time to meet a few of the Senora's guests in the garden, among whom was Padre Antonio. The quaint, inborn courtesy of the well-bred Spaniard was a revelation to them; something they imagined did not ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... dwelt not at all on these scenes of dissipation. It is enough to mention them. My father was wrapped up in his business, and full of cares both worldly and spiritual; for now Friends were becoming politically divided, and the meetings ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... in the storekeeper's book, and each miner retaining enough to cover his evening's expenses. After that, all restraint was at an end, and each set to work to get rid of his surplus dust with the greatest rapidity possible. The focus of dissipation was the rough bar, formed by a couple of hogsheads spanned by planks, which was dignified by the name of the "Britannia Drinking Saloon." Here Nat Adams, the burly bar-keeper, dispensed bad whisky at the rate of two shillings a ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his old age, a little gold honestly earned. HIS Monday is on Sunday, his rest a drive in a hired carriage—a country excursion during which his wife and children glut themselves merrily with dust or bask in the sun; his dissipation is at the restaurateur's, whose poisonous dinner has won renown, or at some family ball, where he suffocates till midnight. Some fools are surprised at the phantasmagoria of the monads which they see with the aid of the microscope in a drop of water; but what would Rabelais' ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... some truth in what I had heard, mixed up with a great deal of exaggeration; and justified his conduct by saying that it was the fashion, and he could not keep out of it if he would. His good health and naturally high spirits did not appear to be in the least affected by dissipation, and I gladly allowed myself to believe that many of the reports about him ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... useful to its prosperity and preservation. The united pair are attached to, and seldom quit their home; they superintend each particular direction of it; they attend to the education of their children; they maintain the respect and fidelity of domestics; they prevent all disorder and dissipation; and from the whole of their good conduct, they live in ease and consideration; while married persons who do not love one another, fill their house with quarrels and troubles, create dissension between their children ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... any sense of grim, sardonic humor, we would appreciate how ridiculous is the life we lead, how utterly absurd is our waste of time, our dissipation of the few days and hours vouchsafed us. We are just so many cicadas drumming out the hours and disappearing. We have abundance of wit, and a good deal of humor of a superficial kind, but the penetrating vision of a Socrates, a Voltaire, a Carlyle is denied the most of us, and we take ourselves ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... than a fortnight since I had set eyes on him, and the lapse of time had worked so great a change for the worse in him that, forgetting my own shabbiness, I looked at him askance, as doubting the wisdom of enlisting one who bore so plainly the marks of poverty and dissipation. His great face—he was a large man—had suffered recent ill-usage, and was swollen and discoloured, one eye being as good as closed. He was unshaven, his hair was ill-kempt, his doublet unfastened at the throat, ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... lessor of the plaintiff (i. e. Tittlebat Titmouse) will be able to prove that Dreddlington (the common ancestor) was seised of the estate at Yatton in the year 1740; that he had two sons, Harry and Charles, the former of whom, after a life of dissipation, appears to have died without issue; and that from the latter (Charles) are descended Stephen, the ancestor of the lessor of the plaintiff, and Geoffrey, the ancestor of the defendant. Assuming, therefore, that the descent of the lessor of the ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... tea, and ate roasted nuts, probably to facilitate digestion. The young men conversed with them, or roasted their nuts for them, while perhaps a dandy would perform a Siberian dance to the music of the violin or gousli, a kind of guitar. Ivan joined heartily in all this dissipation: he smoked with the old men; he drank their punch; he roasted nuts for the ladies, and told them wonderful stories which were always readily listened to, except when some new fashion, which for several years before ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... department was lax. Insurance was easy. Statistics were not in demand. History was dead. Old Kauffman, the efficient and perpetual clerk, had requested an infrequent half-holiday, incited to the unusual dissipation by the joy of having successfully twisted the tail of a Connecticut insurance company that was trying to do business contrary to the edicts of the great ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... long-continued success, our champion gradually permits himself to drift into a weakened physical condition. He omits his regular training and indulges in all kinds of dissipation. ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... — N. {opp. 72} dispersion; disjunction &c 44; divergence &c 291; aspersion; scattering &c v.; dissemination, diffusion, dissipation, distribution; apportionment &c 786; spread, respersion^, circumfusion^, interspersion, spargefaction^; affusion^. waifs and estrays^, flotsam and jetsam, disjecta membra [Lat.], [Horace]; waveson^. V. disperse, scatter, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... lame and stiff, after their hundred-mile tramp. Numbers of Indians had come in to trade, and the ceaseless "tom-tom" from the wigwam on the opposite bank told how they were gambling away their earnings. They kept up this dissipation until daylight, when they went away in canoes. The way-house being full when we arrived, the Hudson Bay Company's officer very kindly vacated his quarters for us, and paid us every attention in his power, even robbing his tiny garden of ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... was capable of managing his affairs shrewdly and wisely,—that he possessed the ability to add to the fortune through his own enterprise; that he should come to his twenty-sixth anniversary with a fair name and a record free from anything worse than mild forms of dissipation; that his habits be temperate; that he possess nothing at the end of the year which might be regarded as a "visible or invisible asset"; that he make no endowments; that he give sparingly to charity; that he neither ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... the universal dissipation which had attended our departure, and wholly unaccustomed to such reckless drinking, were reduced by this time to a comical state of happy imbecility, in which they sang Kamchadal songs, blessed the Americans, and fell overboard alternately, without contributing in any marked ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... was 98, and lamp black no less than 100. He further says: "A silver pot will emit scarcely half as much heat as one of porcelain. The addition of a flannel, though indeed a slow conductor, far from checking the dissipation of heat, has directly a contrary tendency, for it presents to the atmosphere a surface of much greater propulsive energy, which would require a thickness of no less than ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... know," answered the detective, coolly; "I went to the Salvation Army headquarters and made enquiries about her. It appears that she had been in the Army as a hallelujah lass, but got tired of it in a week, and went off with a friend of hers to Sydney. She carried on her old life of dissipation, but, ultimately, her friend got sick of her, and the last thing they heard about her was that she had taken up with a Chinaman in one of the Sydney slums. I telegraphed at once to Sydney, and got a reply that there was no person ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... vary from the one thousand, five hundred dollar touring car to the five hundred dollar little fellows; and since they have come, life in Homeburg is twice as interesting. They are our dissipation, our excitement, our amusement, and the focus of our town pride. The Checker Club disbanded last winter because the members got to quarreling over self-starters, and I understand that in the Women's Missionary ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... lover of wisdom then strive to live in a healthy body that his senses may report truly of the universe in which he dwells. But this is not easy; for mental labor exhausts, and if the vital forces are still further diminished by dissipation, disease and premature decay of the intellectual faculties will be the result. The ideal of culture embraces the whole man, physical, moral, religious, and intellectual; and the loss of health or morality or faith cannot but impede the harmonious development ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... poor man was smitten with a raging fever. From the first the doctor had little hope of his recovery. With a constitution fatally injured by dissipation and drink, his chance was very small; but of course every effort was made to save him. He was laid on a soft bed of moss in the warmest corner of the hut, and the women took their turn in nursing him, night and day—the coxswain's wife, however, being the chief nurse; for, besides being sympathetic ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... an arbitrary standard for that dignity which Parliament had defined and limited to a legal standard. They gave themselves, under the lax and indeterminate idea of the honor of the crown, a full loose for all manner of dissipation, and all manner of corruption. This arbitrary standard they were not afraid to hold out to both Houses; while an idle and unoperative act of Parliament, estimating the dignity of the crown at 800,000l. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Russian patronage a local fame which stood him well with the picture dealers,—in spite of the excitement of the war. But his heart was no longer in his work; a fever of unrest seized him, which at another time might have wasted itself in mere dissipation. Some of his fellow artists had already gone into the army. After the first great reverses he offered his one arm and his military experience to that Paris which had given him a home. The old fighting instinct returned ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... burning presence through the arrow-flights of battle:—measure the compass of that field of creation, weigh the value of the inheritance that Venice thus left to the nations of Europe, and then judge if so vast, so beneficent a power could indeed have been rooted in dissipation or decay. It was when she wore the ephod of the priest, not the motley of the masquer, that the fire fell upon her from heaven; and she saw the first rays of it through the rain of her own tears, when, as the barbaric deluge ebbed from the hills of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... a little astonished. That Gorman should propose an evening out was natural enough. I should not call him a dissipated man, but he has a great deal of vitality and he likes what he calls "a racket" occasionally. What surprised me was that a circus should be his idea of dissipation. A circus is the sort of entertainment to which I send my nephew—a boy of eleven—when he spends the night with me in London on his way to school. My servant, a thoroughly trustworthy man, takes him there. I pay for the tickets. ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... whether it were so or not, he did not doubt that what Mendez had once asserted he would adhere to. On receiving his dismissal, he had gone to some distance from the scene of his crime; but having, whilst the money lasted, acquired habits of idleness and dissipation that could not be maintained without a further supply, these necessities ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... may be made as to the course of events very distant from us in space, it appears certain that dissipation of energy is at present actively progressing throughout our sphere of observation in inanimate nature. It follows, in fact, from the second law of thermodynamics, that whenever work is derived from heat, a certain quantity of heat falls in potential ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... sneeze and blew the gold piece into the river. After that he used to say that he had sneezed himself poor and that if he had a million dollars it wouldn't bother him to sneeze 'em away. Sneezing is a form of dissipation which has not cost me a cent so far and I don't ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... unrelenting hatred. Keokuk was, however, beyond his influence, being recognized as chief of the tribe by the government of the United States. He unquestionably possessed talents of the first order, excelled as an orator, but his authority will probably be short-lived, on account of his dissipation and his profligacy in spending the money paid him for the benefit of his tribe, and which he squanders upon himself and a few favorites, through whose influence he seeks to ...
— Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk • Black Hawk
... he closes the noble eloge on his lost friend.[18] Voltaire had been dead these five years, and Turgot, too, was gone. Society offered the survivor no recompense. He found the great world tiresome and frivolous, and he described its pursuits in phrases that are still too faithful to the fact, as 'dissipation without pleasure, vanity without meaning, and idleness without repose.' It was perhaps to soften the oppression of these cruel and tender regrets that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... indicated, and observed a person whom I supposed to be twenty-five years of age, and whose face bore the marks of dissipation. I signified, by a single word, that I ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... wandering instinct. He quits work not because he wants to loaf, but because he wants to go somewhere else. He is always on the road travelling, travelling, travelling. It is not hope of gain that takes him, for in the scarcity of labour wages are as high here as there. It is not desire for dissipation that lures him from labour; he drinks hard enough, but the liquor is as potent here as two hundred miles away. He looks you steadily enough in the eye; and he begs his bread and commits his depredations half humorously, as though all this were fooling that both you and he understood. ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... and addicted to pleasure and dissipation; my tutors found this last defect most difficult to overcome; happily, they were aided by a love of knowledge inherent in me, an emulative spirit, and a thirst for fame, which disposition it was my father's care to ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... though her Majesty, since her widowhood, has ceased to attend them. The Queen's place and that of Prince Albert in these social gaieties, have been naturally taken by the Prince and Princess of Wales.) We are hardly ever later than twelve o'clock at night, and our only dissipation is going three or four times a week to the play or opera, which is a great amusement and relaxation to us both. As for going out as people do here every night, to balls and parties, and to breakfasts and teas all day long besides, I am sure ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... home read the minutes of the Governor-General and Council on the college at Calcutta. There is nothing so important as to preserve young men, who are to govern an Empire, from idleness, dissipation, and debt. This must be done. The Governor-General's own superintendence may effect much. The suspension of the incompetent may do more; but while the habits of expense are given at Hayleybury, and continued by their residence without any control in the midst of a dissipated capital, nothing ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... nor the place and time of his death, we have reliable information on these points regarding Augustine. He was born at Tagaste, a town in north Africa, on 13th Nov., A.D. 354. He was the child of many prayers by his devoted mother Monica. The early portion of his life was spent in idleness and dissipation, but he was at last converted in a somewhat remarkable manner. He turned over a new leaf in his moral life, and became a most devoted Christian. Although considered inferior to Jerome (his contemporary) ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... imprison a stormy sea in a granite basin, and give the French navy a halting place in the channel. Here he passed fifteen years in domestic life, much troubled by the ill humour and ascetic devotion of his wife; in military studies constant, but without application, and in the dissipation of the philosophic and voluptuous society ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... not Vigour enough to be earnest to do a kind Thing, much less to do a harsh one; but if a hard thing was done to another Man, he did not eat his Supper the worse for it. It was rather a Deadness than Severity of Nature, whether it proceeded from a Dissipation of Spirits, or by the Habit of Living in which he ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... education has secured from licentious indulgences, the passion of love, when once it has seized him, is exceedingly strong; being unimpaired by dissipation, and totally concentrated in one object. This was experienced by Johnson, when he became the fervent admirer of Mrs. Porter, after her first husband's death[285]. Miss Porter told me, that when he was first introduced to her mother, his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... realizing that she loved him—she followed him out. On her way, she is captured by a bandit band, and trouble begins when she shoots Kells, the leader—and nurses him to health again. Here enters another romance—when Joan, disguised as an outlaw, observes Jim, in the throes of dissipation. A gold strike, a thrilling robbery—gambling and ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... friend of Lawson, was a young attorney, who had fallen into rather wild company, and strayed to some distance along the paths of dissipation. But, he had a young and lovely-minded sister, who possessed much influence over him. The very sphere of her purity kept him from debasing himself to any great extent, and ever drew him back from a total abandonment of ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... insulting and misusing this boy, he often retired and vented his grief in tears. But a few years changed the aspect of things. As they grew up, and entered upon the world for themselves, all the older apprentices fell into habits of dissipation, and finally sunk into the drunkard's grave. But the little boy, at whose abstinence they used to scoff, grew up a sober and respectable man, engaged in business for himself, and a few years ago, was worth a hundred thousand dollars, ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... De Gasparin on the "Family Life, its Organization and Duties." In addition to these, there were lectures on detached subjects, such as religious prejudices, the study of the Bible by simple-hearted believers, drunkenness, the religious education of children, the instruction of catechumens, the dissipation of cities, and the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... red as his beard, with features swollen and blurred by dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye. His face was strained—that of a man who is controlling himself with difficulty—and he kept plucking at his beard with a sort of fierce resentment. Steavens, sitting by the window, watched ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... "doughfaces;" and it had not yet built up a strong, vigorous, and aggressive party in the North. The lack of proper social opportunities, and this deterioration among men in public life, led to an increasing violence and roughness in debate, and to a good deal of coarse dissipation in private. There was undoubtedly a brighter side, but it was limited, and the surroundings of the distinguished men who led our political parties in 1841 at the national capital, do not present a very ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Limited.—While emphasizing the importance of establishing a wide range of interests when educating a child, the teacher must remember that there is danger in a child acquiring too wide a range. This can result only in a dissipation of effort over many fields. While this prevents narrowness of vision and gives versatility of disposition, it may prevent the attainment of efficiency in any department, and make of the ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... little arts of love with patience.... He began life full of hopes, fiery, impetuous, ungovernable, expecting the world to fall at once beneath his powers. Unable to bear the sneers of ignorance or the attacks of envy, he began to despond, and flew to dissipation as a relief. For six weeks he was scarcely sober, and to show what a man does to gratify his appetites when once they get the better of him, he once covered his tongue and throat, as far as he could reach, with Cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... was," said the general, drily. "He had plenty of dash and go, but no moral courage. He came home after the wars were over, and broke his mother's heart by becoming a drunkard and a gambler; and he died an early death from drink and dissipation." ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... along the same Quai which he had trodden but a few hours since —he passed the same splendid bridge on which he had stood despairing, to quit it revived—he gained the Rue Faubourg St. Honore. A young man in a cabriolet, on whose fair cheek burned the hectic of late vigils and lavish dissipation, was rolling leisurely home from the gaming-house, at which he had been more than usually fortunate—his pockets were laden with notes and gold. He bent forwards as Morton passed him. Philip, absorbed in his reverie, perceived him not, and ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a lunatic's grave six months earlier. Inasmuch as there is a certain family likeness among men of genius with disordered minds and instincts, several comparisons might be made between Meryon and Baudelaire. Both were great artists and both were born with flawed, neurotic systems. Dissipation and misery followed as a matter ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Soldiers and stragglers passed down the street near by, and a few starved peasants crept about the cathedral with downcast eyes, eager for crumbs that a well-fed soldier might cast aside. Yet I knew that in the Intendant's Palace and among the officers of the army there was abundance, with revelry and dissipation. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and tastes he was always simple, quiet, regular, and he was strictly temperate. He had no liking for dissipation of any kind. He found his pleasure in his work, as all true workers in the pursuit for which they are best fitted always do. The proper care he took of himself accounted in part for his well-developed muscular system and his good health until ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... also a great place for cock-fighting, gambling of all sorts, fandangos, and every kind of amusement and knavery. Trappers and hunters, who occasionally arrive here from over the Rocky mountains, with their valuable skins and furs, are often entertained with every sort of amusement and dissipation, until they have wasted their time and their money, and ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... arrived for a full and frank discussion of those things which affect the personal purity. Thousands are suffering to-day from various weaknesses, the causes of which they have never learned. Manly vigor is not increasing with that rapidity which a Christian age demands. Means of dissipation are on the increase. It is high time, therefore, that every lover of the race should call a halt, and inquire into the condition of things. Excessive modesty on this subject is not virtue. Timidity in presenting ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... was changed. He was no longer the frank, the loving Edoardo of former times. A residence of five months in Venice, without being subjected to restraint, or having means to elude it; the company of other young men, familiar with vice and dissipation; above all, a fatal inclination had depraved and ruined him! He had suffered himself to be fascinated by the fierce delight which is found in gaming; play had become his occupation, his chief need. ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... paid him in their coin, which, although it answered his purpose, would neither buy him goods or pay his rent, and he found his stock rapidly dwindling away without his receiving any cash to replenish it. By dissipation and inattention his new business proved unsuccessful to him. He resolved to abandon it and again try the sea for a subsistence. With a hundred dollars in his pocket, the remnant of his property, he embarked in the ship John, for Buenos ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... Woman Suffrage Society was formed, which has done most efficient service, holding conventions in many of our large cities, and awakening thought and action. In Saratoga and Newport a new class was reached. Wearied with the monotony of fashionable dissipation and the driveling idiocy of flirtations, women were glad to hear a few ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... poverty; but then, his ideas and Blake's were very different about life. Blake's idea of happiness was, the concentrating of every thing into a focus for his own enjoyment; whereas he, Frank, had only had recourse to dissipation and extravagance, because he had nothing to make home pleasant to him. If he once had Fanny Wyndham installed as Lady Ballindine, at Kelly's Court, he was sure he could do his duty as a country ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... decoys; others, again, young and inexperienced; and even ladies, pale, unhappy-looking,—were all represented. The men for the most part hardened and merciless, and many careless young gentlemen, some of them innocent-looking lads enough, but others, alas! showing painfully their habits of dissipation, in spite of their youth,—all waiting eagerly to clutch their winnings or silently lose ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... place in society and her actor too." And so when they met they passed her by, she not having the wisdom of the world. And Lady Esmondet from the corner of the carriage thought on; of how Lionel's father on his wife's desertion of him had gone to the dogs, rushing into all kinds of mad dissipation up to the time of his wife's death, when he became a confirmed misanthrope, living in absolute seclusion until his own death some two years agone; while going to destruction for distraction's sake, poor man, he had reduced his ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... the attendants. Several days passed on, and as no improvement took place, the earl, who began to find the stings of conscience too sharp for further endurance, resolved to try to deaden the pangs by again plunging into the dissipation of the court. Prudence had been seized by the plague, and removed to the pest-house, and not knowing to whom to entrust Amabel, it at last occurred to him that Judith Malmayns would be a fitting person, and he accordingly sent for her from ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... might have been handsome at one time, but it was now marred and brutalized by a life of dissipation. His nose and cheeks were purple, his eyes bloodshot, and a matted growth of brown hair strayed from beneath ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... century, a man of the first quality made it his constant practice to pass his time without shaking his arm at a gaming-table, associating with jockeys at Newmarket, or murdering time by a constant round of giddy dissipation, if not of criminal indulgence. Diaries were not uncommon in the last age: Lord Anglesea, who made so great a figure in the reign of Charles the Second, left one behind him; and one said to have been written by the Duke of Shrewsbury ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Christmas Day! and he would go out and leave his nervous, invalid wife to count her fingers in solitude; not even waiting till Dolly should be at home again. Are all men like that? Mr. Shubrick, for instance? But what was to be done? If Mr. Copley had found places and means of dissipation in Rome, then Rome was a safe abode for him no longer. Where would be a safe abode? Dolly's heart was bitter in its sorrow for a moment; then she gathered ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... to the unwritten usage of mariners, he had first to dissipate his wages. "Guess I'll have to paint this town red," was his hyperbolical expression; for sure no man ever embarked upon a milder course of dissipation, most of his days being passed in the little parlour behind Black Tom's public house, with a select corps of old particular acquaintances, all from the South Seas, and all patrons of a long yarn, a short ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... their own self-respect as well as the regards of their relatives, occasionally even troubled with qualms of conscience, they mostly dread thinking of their future, and seek oblivion in excesses of boisterous dissipation. The Chinese prostitutes of Hong Kong are an entirely different set of people.... Very few of them can be called fallen women; scarcely any of them are the victims of seduction, according to the English sense of the term, refined or unrefined. The great majority of ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... indignant that he should bring all this misery upon me—the poverty and disgrace that I felt sure must follow such a course. Then in a moment of tenderness I would plead and expostulate with him, begging him with tears to leave his habits of dissipation for my sake, for his own sake, for the sake of my dead mother; while he would talk and weep, telling me that he could not break away; there was something continually drawing him to the gaming-house—he knew it was ruining him, but he must go, while the bitter, burning ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... fondness for her petulant ways as well as because of that quality of leadership which made Sissy her fellows' spokeswoman. Hers was the privilege of using the master's pencils, sharpened to a fineness that made neatness a dissipation instead of a task. It was she, of course, who originated the decorative style of arithmetic-paper much in vogue, on which each example was penned off in an inclosure fenced by alternating ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... Regent, was now thirty-two, and had spent those years of his life in acquiring the honorary title of the 'first gentleman of Europe' by every act of folly, debauch, dissipation, and degradation which a prince can conveniently perpetrate. He was the hero of London society, which adored and backbit him alternately, and he was precisely the man whom the boy Brummell would worship. ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... replying, and looked the young man over with care. The clean-cut features showed not a sign of dissipation, and the expression was honesty itself. Certainly the young man had not gotten into trouble ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... is prepared to put his hand to anything he finds to do, and can be trusted, there is always employment and promotion waiting; but for him who is too proud or too lazy to work, or who prefers to fritter his time in dissipation and amusement, there is nothing but failure ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... midst of temptations, that we show forth, even to the thoughtless, the spirit that actuates us, and by example may do good. Besides, remember, dearest, we are not about to enter into continued and incessant dissipation, which occupies the existence of so many; we have drawn a line, and Caroline loves her parents too well to expect or wish to pass its boundary. Remember, too, the anxious fears which were yours when Percy was about to enter into scenes of even stronger temptation than those ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... so sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his air and bearing. He might have been, I thought, the son of some good family who had fallen early into dissipation and run from home. But, making every allowance, how admirable was his talk! I wish you could have heard him tell his own stories. They were so swingingly set forth, in such dramatic language, and illustrated ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... relaxed by indulgence, and duty tightened into tyranny; but mainly and generally attributable to the non-assertion or other abuse of parental authority. The spoiled child, and his progress of indulgence, unchecked passions, dissipation, crime, and ruin. Interested interlopers, as former friends, relatives, flatterers, and busy parasites, undermining that bond of confidence without which home falls to pieces; the gloomy spirit of reserve, discouraging every thing like generous open-heartedness; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... was great! How could she ever have dreamt of setting up her will against his wisdom, her ignorance against his knowledge, her fancies against his perfect taste? Had she really once loved London and late hours and dissipation? She who now was only happy in the country, she who jumped out of bed every morning—oh, so early!—with Albert, to take a walk, before breakfast, with Albert alone! How wonderful it was to be taught ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... rope over his right shoulder; a short-helved ax was thrust within his belt. He wore only a cotton shirt open at the neck, dirty throughout, patched jeans trousers, and a soft hat, green from long use. Beneath the shading brim showed a loutish face, the coarse features swollen from dissipation, the small black eyes bleared, yet alert and penetrating in their darting, furtive glances. It was Dan Hodges, a man of unsavory repute. The girl, though unafraid, blessed the instinct that had guided ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... wine cup, the glitter of the ball room, the pomp and vanities of this wicked world. But they do not see the other side of the picture. They do not see the grey, cold morning of sorrow which follows the night of dissipation and sin. The young woman looks on the tempting dress, the flash of jewels, the gay company. She does not see the price she must pay. She cannot see herself disgraced and ruined, and cast aside like a broken toy. She can hear the music of the revel, but not ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... less young, with a genial air of dissipation about their eyes and a varied degree of recklessness lurking at the corners of their mouths; seven men sat round a table in a house in the Rue St. Charles. They had been eating and drinking rather luxuriously for Ajaccio. The Rue St. Charles ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... periods in which he seemed to try vaguely to retrieve himself from dissipation, and to acquire self-mastery by what he ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... not over thirty. He was thin, and looked pale from dissipation. His face was covered with spots, his eyes were gray, his eyelashes white. He was smoking a very large pipe, and a tumbler of some kind of drink stood on the stone pavement at his feet. He stared at me between the puffs of his pipe, and neither ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... proper symbol of divine affection in a bosom racked with pain or oppressed with weakness. The divine energies of humanity can never urge the soul to a realization of its highest ideals of excellency in a frame overcome with disease, relaxed with dissipation, or oppressed with unnatural burdens. Yes, the body must be sound, healthy, perfect, to realize the highest mental states of which we are capable. Feeble and sickly is the best culture we can give to a mind locked in a feeble and tormented body. No proposition ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... first at the Court of Provence and later at the Court of France. The grandfather and father of the present Marquis lived to see the end of this proverbial opulence. They both led careers of extravagance and dissipation, taking part in all the gayeties and follies of the court. The grandfather was one of the favorite companions of Philippe d'Orleans; and wine, cards and women killed him when he should have been still ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... in the office bedroom. This was the safest way—for both of us. When he was ready, he called me in, and I inspected him. It was extraordinary how well he looked the part. I suppose that the signs of his dissipation had already marked themselves on, his face, but had been concealed hitherto by his moustache and beard; for now that he was clean-shaven they lay open to the world from which we had so carefully hidden them, and he was indeed the wastrel which ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... it might still help to express the fact that the moral degeneracy of Spain in her new career of wantonness was at least shared by the women. At the court, the king, who was in many ways what might be termed a mystic voluptuary, spent his time in alternate fits of dissipation and devotion, wasted his time in gallantry, and neglected his royal duties; and the all-powerful Lerma was the centre of a world of graft, where the highest offices in the land were bartered for gold, and every noble had an itching palm. ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... every one. Mrs. Jones declared there was no reason for the disappearance of Tom; his aunt Quincy said her flightiness had driven him to it; and Cousin Jack, Mrs. Tom's adviser, thought it just a freak after much dissipation, for Tom had been acting queerly for months before he did the vanishing act. The three were talking either from spleen or the wish to hide the truth. When there was no trace of Tom after a month of ordinary searching much of the truth came out, and I discovered the rest. Plain speech with Mrs. ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... came into the drawing-room and began to arrange some music on the top of the piano. Lady Vandeleur, at the other end of the apartment, was speaking somewhat eagerly with her brother, Charlie Pendragon, an elderly young man, much broken with dissipation and very lame of one foot. The private secretary, to whose entrance they paid no regard, could not avoid overhearing a ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... IMMENSE!" It literally knocked him up. He had "bad nights," was "sick and giddy," desponding over his book, more than half inclined to abandon the Christmas story altogether for that year. However, a short trip to Geneva, and the dissipation of a stroll or so in its thoroughfares, to remind him, as it were, of what streets were like, and a week of "idleness" "rusting and devouring," "complete and unbroken," set him comparatively on his legs again, and before he left Lausanne for Paris on the 16th of ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... friend, that I returned to society for the purpose of excitement and I may say of notoriety. I felt that I must conquer my independence. I led a life of dissipation. To divert my mind, to forget my real life in fictitious enjoyments I was gay, I shone, I gave fetes, I played the princess, and I ran in debt. At home I could forget myself in the sleep of weariness, able to ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... joined in prayer and praise, and listened to much that was of interest to us as the Elder told of early years spent in dissipation, opium smoking, and gambling; of his conversion through Pastor Hsi, and of first efforts to preach the Gospel. Meanwhile, the shepherd folded his sheep, carefully counting them lest one should be missing, and the women prepared the millstones ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... day, drinking and carousing, visiting and feasting, idleness and dissipation, continue for weeks. All shops are shut, and workmen idle, for a longer or shorter period, according to the necessities, or the habits, of the several parties. It is, in Canton, generally a month before the business of life ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... the sneer, the truculent attempts to browbeat, the pitiful swagger, the cynical justification, all were gone. It was really the man himself now, normally scared and repentant; the frightened, overfed pensioner on his wife's bounty; not the human beast maddened by fear and dissipation, half stunned, half panic-stricken, driven by sheer terror into a role which even he shrank from—had shrunk from all these years. For, leech and parasite that he was, Mortimer, however much the dirty acquisition ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... society. If any analogy whatever existed between the human mind, on one side, and the laws of motion, on the other, the mind had already entered a field of attraction so violent that it must immediately pass beyond, into new equilibrium, like the Comet of Newton, to suffer dissipation altogether, like meteoroids in the earth's atmosphere. If it behaved like an explosive, it must rapidly recover equilibrium; if it behaved like a vegetable, it must reach its limits of growth; and even if it acted like the earlier creations of energy — the saurians and sharks — it must have ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... minerals aragonite (q.v.) and calcite (q.v.). Tuff (q.v.) and travertine are calcareous deposits found in volcanic districts. Most natural waters contain it dissolved in carbonic acid; this confers "temporary hardness" on the water. The dissipation of the dissolved carbon dioxide results in the formation of "fur" in kettles or boilers, and if the solution is falling, as from the roof of a cave, in the formation of stalactites and stalagmites. In the animal kingdom it occurs as both calcite and aragonite in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... their hair. Powder, paint, gold-dust and silver-dust, pomatums, cosmetics, are all perfectly appropriate where the ideal of life is to keep up a false show of beauty after the true bloom is wasted by dissipation. The woman who never goes to bed till morning, who never even dresses herself, who never takes a needle in her hand, who never goes to church, and never entertains one serious idea of duty of any kind, when got up ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... were a little more of this freedom of intercourse between our girls and young men, we would have a considerably less number of sour, disappointed virgins in our annual census; and, less vice and dissipation on the part of hot-brained youths, who, frequently, only give way to "fast life," through feeling a void in their daily routine of existence that stereotyped fashion is unable to fill. Besides, it would be a perfect godsend to thousands of unhappy bachelors, who sigh for the realities ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... think so, Sidney; for she seems a being expressly fashioned by nature to figure in these days of levity and dissipation:— her spirits are inexhaustible: her parts strong and lively; with a sagacity that discerns, and a talent not unhappy in painting out the weak side of whatever comes before her:—but what raises her merit to the highest pitch in the laughing ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... tranquil the words and the deeds, of him who is thus set at rest and made free by wisdom." "The heart, scrupulously avoiding all idle dissipation, diligently applying itself to the holy law of Buddha, letting go all lust, and consequent disappointment, fixed and unchangeable, ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... think, and he loved you with his whole heart. You were to be married, and the large property of your father would thus be kept in the family. A few months ago he ceased coming here any more, and you heard of him as plunged into riot and dissipation. Then you heard of him as sick, and that his sickness was the result of the foulest excesses, that had broken down his constitution and made him unfit for the society of any true woman. You began to answer his letters ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... formerly large possessions in Cranbrook, but in the reign of Edward VI. great misfortunes fell on them; by extravagance and dissipation, they gradually lost all their lands, until an old house in the village (now used as the poor-house) was all that remained to them. The sole representative of the family remaining at the accession of Queen Mary, was Sir Richard Baker. He had spent some years abroad in consequence ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... fathers migrated from an ISLAND in a distant part of the world, the inhabitants of which had long been revered for wisdom and valour. They grew rich and powerful; these emigrants increased in numbers and strength. But they were at last absorbed in luxury and dissipation; and to support themselves in their vanity and extravagance they coveted and seized the honest earnings of those industrious emigrants. This laid a foundation of distrust, animosity and hatred, till the emigrants, feeling ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... weary of itself, in the gesture. He looked about the room and scanned the faces of the men, most of them older than he, many of them men whose histories were well known to him. They were the usual hangers on about newspaper offices; men who, for one reason or other—age, dissipation, antiquated methods—had been pitched over, men for whom such work as this came as a godsend. They were the men of yesterday—men whom the world had rushed past. She was the only one there, this girl who would probably sit here beside him for many months, with whom the ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... ineffectively, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the first act of a romantic drama, The Fires of Fate; but it is very difficult to find any dramatic sequel to a peripety involving mere physical disaster.[2] The moral peripety—the sudden dissipation of some illusion, or defeat of some imposture, or crumbling of some castle in the air—is a no less characteristic incident of real life, and much more amenable to the playwright's uses. Certainly there are few things more impressive in drama than to see a man or ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... the presence of a "merry go round" that relieved them of their nickels, and a platform, where promiscuous dancing was sure to be continued through most of the night, and be accompanied with considerable dissipation and immorality. ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... frenzied beating of drums. Around and through all this, listening with confused ears, gazing with wide, solemn eyes, were hundreds of young men from the middle East, farmers' sons, cowboys, mountaineers, and miners. To them it was an awesome city, this lurid camp, a wonder and an allurement to dissipation. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... settled it. I went down to the parsonage with him before dinner and looked the place over. There's an awful lot of sweepin' and dustin' to be done afore it's fit for a body to live in. I did think that when I'd finished with this house I could swear off on that kind of dissipation for a while, but I guess, judgin' by the looks of that parsonage, what I've done so far is only practice." She paused, glanced keenly at her friend and asked: "Why! what's the matter? You don't act nigh so glad as I thought ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln |
