"Drudgery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine; Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws Makes that and ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... frank admission. "I like the excitement attending a case, and the fight to win, but it's drudgery between times—like soldiering ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... equal temperament of the pianoforte, and play every interval except the octave out of tune. When this modification had taken hold all music in the pure scale would be distorted and destroyed, unless string players were to face the practically impossible drudgery of studying both the equal temperament and the pure scale from the start, and were able to tackle either form at a moment's notice. A thorough knowledge of the natural genesis of the scale of western nations will be the best antidote to fads founded upon ignorance of it. It is ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... disconsolate, discouraged—a mere heap, it seemed to herself, weak, purposeless, a soul who had made a failure of life, with no power to alter it. If she might but slip out of the world entirely; it was all turned to ashes. How small and mean her ambitions all seemed now. She had given years of drudgery and this was the ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... Parload I felt always a disposition to the heroic note. "I'm tired," I said, "of humdrum drudgery for other men. One may as well starve one's body out of a place as to ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... second, from understanding herself sufficiently to aim at something within her power; but happily it was also the highest thing within her power. She was both humble and aspiring. She showed her humility in shrinking from no drudgery, and satisfied her cravings for the ideal by doing the smallest thing in the best way possible to her. She enjoyed even her drudgery because she put the best of herself into it, but, more than that, she knew it was leading her exactly in the direction ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... escaped the blight, butter, new milk, and a slice of the flesh of fried badger. He then proposed to accompany us with his son, aged about thirteen, who by some inexplicable privilege seemed exempt from any portion of the drudgery which was the lot of the family. The other man who brought the baggage was persuaded to leave his horse and car, and accompany us with my bundle, as far as the summit of the hill. To climb the steepest mountain side had become ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... hastily replied the other, with a wink, when he believed neither of the Hosmers was looking at him. "You see, this happens to be Tilly's birthday. She hasn't had a real one for ever so long, and Andrew and me, why, we've fixed it that she should take a holiday from her drudgery and we'd all go off for a little lark. Now, perhaps you two would like to keep us company. How about that, boys? You've been pretty kind to my sister, and we all feel that you're our good friends. What do you say about tagging along? In my walks ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... naturally, it had not been entirely reserved for him, had accumulated in a supreme delight, been kept back, like the best of all presents, for the last. He was glad that it wasn't too late for him to enjoy it. Here, suddenly, intervening in the midst of a prosaic drudgery, a tepid and meaningless period, was a magnificent relief. By God, would he take advantage of it! Would he! There was a knock at the door, and the hotel valet hung a freshly pressed suit in the closet; the shoes into which he intended to change were in a perfection of ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... which they prefer to live rather than do anything themselves that they consider menial; as if an untidy house, slovenly servants, badly cooked and coarsely served food, are not likely to do much more to lower their self-respect than any amount of so-called drudgery. 'A gentlewoman,' it has been said, 'never lowers herself by doing that which would make her feel less a gentlewoman ...
— The Skilful Cook - A Practical Manual of Modern Experience • Mary Harrison
... reasoning, he misses his way by strewing it with flowers. All that he has done of moment, he had done twenty years ago: since then, he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice. Mr. Coleridge is too rich in intellectual wealth, to need to task himself to any drudgery: he has only to draw the sliders of his imagination, and a thousand subjects expand before him, startling him with their brilliancy, or ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... but any sort of work that is slighted becomes drudgery; poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, acting, architecture, if you do not do your best by them, turn to drudgery sore as digging ditches, hewing wood, or drawing water; and these, by the same blessings of God, become arts if they are done with ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... so hard and dreary," they say. "The wheels of drudgery are for ever turning and grinding; let us sit in the sun a little and float our fairy balls. What if they are dreams and never come to anything; the dreams and the sunlight have made us happy; there is plenty of time in which to do ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Those wives shall soon In Grecian barks capacious hence be borne, 920 And I among the rest. But thee, my child! Either thy fate shall with thy mother send Captive into a land where thou shalt serve In sordid drudgery some cruel lord, Or haply some Achaian here, thy hand 925 Seizing, shall hurl thee from a turret-top To a sad death, avenging brother, son, Or father by the hands of Hector slain; For he made many a Grecian bite the ground. Thy father, boy, bore never ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... She was a widow, living, I afterwards learnt, in an almshouse hard by. She was old and feeble, very poor, and her life had been a series of calamities, relieved upon a background of the hardest and humblest drudgery. She had lost her husband years ago by a painful and terrible illness. She had lost her children one by one; she was alone in the world, save for a few distant and indifferent relatives. To get into the almshouse had been for her a stroke of incredible ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... has been and is a failure. And I am sorry you have come to me to remind me that the aim of my young life was within my reach, when I have no means to grasp it, and, now that I am miserable, to show me what I might have been. No, my friend, I must go on with the drudgery of the law, to earn my bread, and thus eke out a miserable future. I am grateful to you and my other friends, who have delegated you to this mission. Say so to them, if you please. I must go to court. The ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... all quite willing that women should join their societies and churches to do the drudgery; to work up the enthusiasm in fairs and revivals, conventions and flag presentations; to pay a dollar apiece into their treasury for the honor of being members of their various organizations; to beg ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... bitterness of knowing that in their chosen walk of life they were failures. The results as far as work goes might not be so bad if the passions, as in men, were occasionally gratified. It is the constant drudgery combined with the disappointment and finding that art alone does not satisfy which is so paralyzing. Besides, sexual gratification is always followed by exaltation of the mental faculties, with, in my experience, no depressing reaction such as follows pleasure ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... horses, and so on, soon showed a great liking and aptitude for partisan warfare. At night he would go out for booty and always brought back French clothing and weapons, and when told to would bring in French captives also. Denisov then relieved him from drudgery and began taking him with him when he went out on expeditions and had ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... poor Genius has labour'd much, he judges well not to expect the Encomiums of the Publick: for these are not his due. Yet for fear his drudgery shou'd have no recompense, God (of his goodness) has given him a personal Satisfaction. To envy him in this wou'd be injustice beyond barbarity itself: Thus the same Deity (who is equally just in all points) has given Frogs the ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... much more practical standard for our boys, has always puzzled me. If an excellent opening offered itself to one of our sons at a bank, we should agree with his father in expecting him to take it, though it would involve the drudgery of sitting in a cramped attitude on a tall stool for hours and hours every day. Why should we accept life's necessary drudgery for our boys and refuse it for our girls? No life worth living can be had without drudgery,—the most brilliant ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... going on in it without reward or hope; unfitting themselves, many of them utterly, by the very mode of their careless, rootless existence,—all of them, more or less, by the narrow specialty of their monotonous drudgery,—for the bright, capable, adaptive many-sidedness of a happy woman's living in the love and use and beauty ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... a much better test of character than any one act of heroism, however noble. It was many years of drudgery, and reading a thousand volumes, that enabled George Eliot to get fifty thousand ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... to know their shallowness. How much better, I say, it is for the active and thoughtful intellect, where such is to be found, to eschew the college and the university altogether, than to submit to a drudgery so ignoble, a mockery so contumelious! How much more profitable for the independent mind, after the mere rudiments of education, to range through a library at random, taking down books as they meet him, and pursuing the trains of thought which his ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... that was very dear to him, even in failure; how dear, he had not known until he had resigned it, as he thought, forever. He had taken unto himself a master and a task that to his cast of mind could never be aught but drudgery. It was no easy thing he had done. But he had not whimpered, he had made an effort, none the less brave because so boyishly obvious, to keep up a smiling front. He had sought to offer his gift from the heart, ungrudgingly, because he had loved her, ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... dream of the drudgery inseparable from the duties of a lad of his age, in a country where the old and young, the master and the servant, are alike obliged to labour for a livelihood, without respect ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... and the popular translations of the Greek text and upon these two Champollion centered his attack. He collected every piece of Egyptian script which he could get and together with the Rosetta stone he compared and studied them until after twenty years of patient drudgery he understood the ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... no small advance in the science, let me tell you," returned Barret, who was stirred up to defend his co-scientist. "No one can succeed in anything who does not take the first steps, and undergo the drudgery manfully." ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... inferior rank of yeomen; while the mass of the people— was at once plunged to the dead level of common peasants and laborers. If some of the former class still retained a few faithful servants, their help was required for the drudgery about the farm or the miserable dwelling. None of them could be spared to keep up "the glory of the house." Would it not have been bitter irony to talk to this remnant of pedigree and their long line of ancestors? And would their ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... enmesh Your goings in and out, I know the way the zephyrs took Who brought the breath of spring, I guide to shores of regions blest Where white, uncaught Ideas nest And Thought is strong o' wing! Within the Hours that I unlock All customed fetters fall; The chains of drudgery release; Set limits fade; horizons cease For you who hear the call No trumpet note—no roll of drums, But quiet, sure and sweet— The self-same voice that summoned Drake, The whisper for whose siren sake They manned the Devon fleet, More lawless than the gray gull's wait, More ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... would undertake it as much for the love of the work as for the small salary to which a private librarian would be entitled. Now you see the selfish reason I have for mentioning the matter to you, Mr Jeffreys. I offer you nothing to jump at; for it will need sheer hard work and a lot of drudgery to overtake the arrears of work, and after that I doubt if the keeping up of the library will leave you much leisure. You would incur no little responsibility either, for if I handed the care of the library to you, I should hold you responsible ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... bodily exertion. It transports him into a livelier, and gayer, and more diversified and interesting scene, and while he enjoys himself there he may forget the evils of the present moment. Nay, it accompanies him to his next day's work, and gives him something to think of besides the mere mechanical drudgery of his every-day occupation—something he can enjoy while absent, and look forward with ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... enabled Tom to be independent of the shop, as far as liquorice was concerned, and to cut a very smart figure among the young men about Greenwich; for on Tom's promotion another boy was appointed to the carrying out of the medicine as well as the drudgery, and Tom took good care that this lad should clean his boots as well as the doctor's, and not make quite so free with the liquorice as he had done himself. I found out also that he ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... make myself a name in the world of posterity, without being pestered by the small but countless botherments, which, like mosquitoes, sting us in the world of work-day toil. That hope and herself are gone—she to wither into patiently pining decline—it to make room for drudgery." It is all sordid as well as terrible. We have no right to know these things. Mrs. Oliphant is almost justified in her protest against Charlotte as the ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... them, but lived on for years a living corpse; and the burden of his illness lay heavily on Christopher's young shoulders. Life was specially dark to poor Christopher just then. His uncle's utter break-down effectually closed the door on all chances of escape from the drudgery of the Osierfield to a higher and wider sphere; for, until now, he had continued to hope against hope that he might induce that uncle to start him in some other walk of life, where the winning of ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... Parker, "I first condemned myself to the drudgery of this Reply, I intended nothing but a serious prosecution of my Argument, and to let the World see that it is not reading Histories or Plays or Gazettes, nor going on pilgrimage to Geneva, nor learning French and Italian, nor passing the ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... the child's interest in that work which in some form or other he will have with him always, is the quickening of the mother's own interest in what may have come to seem to her mere daily drudgery. Any woman who undertakes to perform so simple an operation as dish-washing with the help of a bright happy child, asking sixteen questions to the minute, will find that common-place operation full of possibilities; and if she will answer all the questions she will probably find her ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... the only one; nor is there any other circumstance in the conduct of life, where they are upon an equal footing. Business, books, conversation; for all of these, a fool is totally incapacitated, and except condemned by his station to the coarsest drudgery, remains a useless burthen upon the earth. Accordingly, it is found, that men are extremely jealous of their character in this particular; and many instances are seen of profligacy and treachery, the most avowed and unreserved; none of bearing patiently the imputation ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... boarding-house had the value of distracting Dave's attention from the unpleasantness of his work. Mrs. Metford, handicapped by her numerous offspring, embittered by the regular recurrence of her contributions to the State, and disheartened by drudgery and overwork, had long ago ceased to place any store on personal appearance or even cleanliness. As Dave watched her slovenly shuffle to and from the kitchen, preceded and pursued by young Metfords in all degrees of childish innocence, his mind flew ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... Laura Waynefleet toiled late and early at the lonely ranch. Again, he seemed to see her steady eyes with the quiet courage in them, and the gleam of her red-gold hair. Even then she was, he reflected, in all probability occupied with some severe drudgery. It was a thing he did not like to contemplate, and he almost resented the fact that Gordon should have brought such thoughts into his mind. His comrade had broken in upon his contentment like a frosty wind that stung him to action. Still, ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... did all the heavy work and drudgery about camp, and it troubled Bob not a little to see them working while the men were idle. Several times he attempted to help them, but his efforts were met with such a storm of protestations and disapproval, not only from the men, but the women ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... heaped-up desk. He laid upon himself the burden of labor, examining and cross-examining men for hours upon a single point of essential fact—quick to detect fraud and intolerant of humbug,— but infinitely patient with those who were merely dull, evading no drudgery, and, above all, never evading the dear pains ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... my health was greatly improved and a small advancement in my position in the office made the rest of my time at Derby more agreeable, though, to tell the truth, I often jibbed at the drudgery of the desk and the monotony of writing pencilled-out letters which was now my daily task. Set tasks, dull routine, monotonous ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... education as she had the opportunity of acquiring. True, the girl learned right from wrong, also her religion was very clear on the point, but she could not then believe it was wrong to fly from the horrors of mill drudgery, made unbearable by the more intimate environment ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... are everywhere scrambling for themselves, and trying to manage their own undertakings, instead of falling into harmony with God, and through Him, with all that is. What wears the soul out is not the work of life itself—it is its drudgery, its monotony, its blind vagueness, its apparent purposelessness. We do not wish to scatter our lives and spend our years ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... Shakespeare may balance a lost aptitude for playing at soldiers. Terror is gone out of our lives, moreover; we no longer see the devil in the bed-curtains nor lie awake to listen to the wind. We go to school no more; and if we have only exchanged one drudgery for another (which is by no means sure), we are set free for ever from the daily fear of chastisement. And yet a great change has overtaken us; and although we do not enjoy ourselves less, at least ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... husband acted as became him; and that, in general, the labour of the man was appointed to make the woman live quiet and unconcerned in the world; that they had the name of subjection without the thing; and if in inferior families they had the drudgery of the house and care of the provisions upon them, yet they had indeed much the easier part; for, in general, the women had only the care of managing—that is, spending what their husbands get; and that a woman had the name of subjection, indeed, ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... machine has taken away much of the drudgery of home sewing, but its use does not lessen the need of skill in hand work. No machine can finish ends of belts, collars, sew on trimmings, fastenings, and like work and the finish has much to do with the ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... since I joined the standard, could not be called in question. I mentioned several particulars, wherein I showed that I had no authority in the station I was in, and that others acted as General who had not any call, but used his Royal Highness's name. That in the drudgery, I was employed, but anything of moment was done without my participation. That, in short, I had ventured my all—life, fortune, family—every thing, my honour; which last I had some to lose, but none to gain, in the way things were ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... to cut each other; and there for a good hour the sun flashed on the blades, as the sword exercise was gone through, with its cuts, points, and guards, the men taking to it eagerly as a pleasant change from the drudgery of the mine, and showing no ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... lay for years, heaped up at random, a mine of treasures which made the mouths of scholars water, but appalled them by the amount of labor, nay, actual drudgery, needful only to sift and sort them, even before any study of their contents could be begun. At length a young and ambitious archaeologist, attached to the British Museum, George Smith, undertook the long and wearisome task. He was not originally ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... seasin, wage and waif? It will be said, however, that, whatever the learning of Spenser may have gleaned, the law-books of that age were impervious to the illiterature of Shakespeare. No: such an intellect, when employed on the drudgery of a wool-stapler, who had been high-bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon, might have derived all that was necessary from a very few books; from Totell's 'Presidents,' 1572; from Pulton's 'Statutes,' 1578; and from the 'Lawier's Logike,' 1588. It is one of the axioms of the 'Flores ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... of you. I'm sure Jean should be very grateful to you. You're a kind of fairy godmother to this little Cinderella. Only Jean must remember that it isn't very nice to come back to drudgery after an hour or two at the ball," and she ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... that he doesn't want to do. Then, too, there are certain allurements and distractions in school life which are a hindrance to our joy in an intellectual task. And there is the very natural disinclination to the drudgery involved in all hard labour. No work that is worth while is without drudgery. Lack of encouragement from older people is one serious difficulty some girls have to meet. There is a type of older person who is sure that using the mind will harm ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... reflex of Renown or Notoriety, so as to be the observed of innumerable observers. To no one of whom, however, though otherwise a most diligent solicitor and purveyor, did he so attach himself: such vulgar courtierships were his paid drudgery, or leisure-amusement; the worship of Johnson was his grand, ideal, voluntary business. Does not the frothy-hearted yet enthusiastic man, doffing his Advocate's wig, regularly take post, and hurry up to London, for the sake of his Sage chiefly; as to a Feast of Tabernacles, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... The drudgery, indeed, of the office I disliked, and the confinement {p.037} I altogether detested; but I loved my father, and I felt the rational pride and pleasure of rendering myself useful to him. I was ambitious also; and among my companions in labor, the only way to gratify ambition was to labor ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... month; for which sum she came every morning to make my bed, clean my shoes, brush my clothes, sweep the room, and make ready my breakfast, before going to her day's work of turning the handle of a machine, at which hard drudgery she earned five-pence. Her husband, a cabinetmaker, made four francs a day at his trade; but as they had three children, it was all that they could do to gain an honest living. Yet I have never met with more sterling honesty than in this man and ...
— Facino Cane • Honore de Balzac
... placed, par force of poverty, in this avocation, unsuited to their abilities, their hearts, their habits, or their former expectations. The government of their young flock is odious to them, and although they may go through the duties of their situation with apparent patience, it is in fact a drudgery almost insupportable; and the objects nearest the governess's heart—are the arrival of the vacation, the entrance-money, the quarter's schooling, and a lengthy list of items: the arrival of Black Monday, or a cessation of holidays, brings depressed spirits, and she ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... me make it up to you! We care so much! Suppose we aren't always happy. Oh, my love, a month of life with you would make me willing to bear all the spiritual drudgery ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... opinion prevails in the community in regard to the pleasantness of the business of teaching. Some teachers go to their daily task merely upon compulsion; they regard it as intolerable drudgery. Others love the work: they hover around the school-room as long as they can, and never cease to think, and seldom to talk, of ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... to his political transactions, he has by his side, as a secretary, a man of the name of Petry, who has received a diplomatic education, and does not want either subtlety or parts; and on him, no doubt, is thrown the drudgery of business. During a European war, Turreaux's post is of little relative consequence; but should Napoleon live to dictate another general pacification, the United States will be exposed, on their frontiers, or in their interior, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... incredible that, of these Indians, ten were women, and three were children. But Father Zenobe, who accompanied the expedition, mentions that the Indians insisted upon taking the women, as servants, to cook their food, and to perform the drudgery at their several encampments. Some of these women had children whom ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... to work in the kitchen and go to market from time to time, performing this menial drudgery under the personal inspection of the warrior who governed the garrison and fortress, but who in vain attempted to make Maria van Reigersbergen ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... refusing any alteration. I laughed and Wordsworth smiled; but my tragedy will remain at Keswick, and Wordsworth's is not likely to emigrate from Grasmere. Wordsworth's drama is, in its present state, not fit for the stage, and he is not well enough to submit to the drudgery of making it so. Mine is fit for nothing, except to excite in the minds of good men the hope "that the young man is likely to do better." In the first moments I thought of re-writing it, and sent to Lamb for the copy with this ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... legitimate effect, that of abridging labor. Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... youngster, and you may fancy that a rich galleon wouldn't be an unacceptable prize, to save the poor girl from the drudgery she has to go through. It wasn't the way her poor father expected me to treat her, but I have done my best; what can a man ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... I had been at a probe. The 'Tower of Babel' and the 'Lenore' Symphony were among the things we had practiced. Both of them, the 'Lenore' particularly, had got into my head. I broke lose for one day from routine, from drudgery and harness. It was a mistake. Friedhelm went off, shrugging his dear old shoulders, and I at last turned up, mooning at the Koelner Bahnof. Well—you know the rest. Nay, do not turn so angrily away. Try to forgive a fallen man one little indiscretion. When I saw you I can not tell what ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... some cases this mental chlorosis reached such a height as almost to nauseate one with Nature, when in the society of the victims; and surfeited companions felt inclined to rush to the treadmill immediately, or get chosen on the Board of Selectmen, or plunge into any conceivable drudgery, in order to feel that there was still work enough in the universe to keep it sound and healthy. But this, after all, was exceptional and transitory, and our American life still needs, beyond all things else, the more habitual cultivation of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... was not yet done with my adventuring of this eventful day. And in spite of my father setting me, like a misbehaving bairn, to the drudgery of the water-carrying, there was more in life for me that day than merely hauling upon a handle. For that is a thing which galls an aspiring youth worse than any other labor, being so ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... did not make much difference to him whether he became a soldier or a sailor. He had longed to see the world, to share in deeds of adventure, and, above all, to escape from the dreary drudgery of the clothier's shop. These objects would be attained as well in the army as in the navy; and, indeed, now that he thought of it, he preferred the active service which he would see under Marlborough or Peterborough to the monotony ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... the provision which his father had in view for him in the church, he was bound to exert himself to obtain an independent maintenance in another line of life; that he had talents which would succeed at the bar, if he had application and perseverance sufficient to go through the necessary drudgery at the commencement of the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... delight, the most entertaining thing that happens; it should be interesting. It is astonishing how interesting a dull piece of work may become if one sets one's self to doing it well. That which one subconsciously knows one is doing badly is drudgery. The real pleasure in life comes not from so-called amusements—things done by other people to make one laugh; to "take one's mind off"—but from seeing the work of one's own hand and brain prosper. The work of creation, of transformation to desirable result, is the purest joy the human mind can ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... the common worldling to see these gentle beings thus living entirely for others, seeking no reward but that inspired by Christian promises and hopes. Nor is it mere drudgery and self-denial which constitute their great merit. When humanity calls from the midst of danger, whether in the shape of pestilence or of war, they are equally unfailing. It has been our lot to see a city taken by storm, the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... the case with Arden. Farm work, as he had learned it from his father, was coarse, heavy drudgery, with small and uncertain returns, and these were largely spent at the village rum shops in purchasing slow perdition for the husband, and misery and shame for his wife and children. In respectable Pushton, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... prevented from producing the food they need. And you, as an artist, can tell me that at present great artists invariably do starve, except when they are kept alive by charity, private fortune, or some drudgery which hinders them in the pursuit of ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... earl performed not, at all times, in person, the obligations of his office. The enjoyment of ease and of pleasure, to which in Germany he had delivered himself over, when disengaged from war, and the mean idea he conceived of the drudgery of civil affairs, made him often delegate to an inferior person the distribution of justice in his district. The same sentiments were experienced by the Saxon nobility; and the service which they owed by their tenures, and the high employments they sustained, called them often from the management ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... been a far-sighted man. Benis had always cherished a warm admiration for the commercial astuteness which he conceived himself to have inherited. He would have been, he thought, exactly like his father—if he had cared for the drudgery of business. So it was a habit of his, when in a quandary, to consider what his parent would have done and then to do likewise—an excellent rule if he had ever succeeded in applying it properly. But there were always so many intruding details. Take the present predicament, for instance. He ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... Terrace the little Charles Dickens lived from 1817 to 1821, and at No. 18 St. Mary's Place from 1821 to 1823, the financial troubles, which eventually drove the family into the Marshalsea debtors' prison, and Charles himself into the sordid drudgery of the blacking-shop by Hungerford Stairs, having already enforced a migration to a cheaper and meaner house. In Clover Street (then Clover Lane) the little Dickens went to a school kept by a Mr. William Giles, who years afterwards sent to him, when ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... the United States and in several of the appellate courts of the larger States each judge is provided with a clerk at public expense. While this is a means of relief from much which is in the nature of drudgery, it sometimes leads to a deterioration in the quality of the judicial opinions. A dictated opinion is apt to be unnecessarily long, and when a clerk is set to looking up authorities, although he can hardly be expected always to select the most ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... James, as he finished. 'Thirty years of drudgery! When shall I be able to relieve her? Ha! O. J. F. Dynevor, Esquire, if it were you who were coming from Peru, you would ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... eminently scientific profession, it requires to make it interesting that it shall be thoroughly understood, and conducted upon a proper scale; but at that time it was commonly a mere routine of dull drudgery, and nowhere more so than in the west of Cornwall. To have an object in view, yet be unable to advance it by any exertions of his own, was to him a source of constant irritation. He was wearied with the imperceptible growth of his crops, and complained that he made his eyes ache by ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... to protest against the evangelistic services of Sankey and Moody. At the age of twenty he turned his back upon Ireland, and started a literary career in London. In the first nine years of "consistent literary drudgery" he succeeded in earning ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... much time over it, and have passed the worst of the drudgery; it would be folly to lose all you have learnt," he said. "You may not wish to perform in public, but there are many other ways in which your music may be useful. In time to come you would be sorry if you could not read an accompaniment to a song, play bright airs to amuse children, ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... a satirical article upon the title of that newspaper, likens the writers to caterpillars and grubs, etc., 'deriving their origin from Egyptian locusts;' and, in another article, accuses them of 'having undertaken the drudgery of invective under pretence of being champions of politeness.' The other papers summarized are the Free Briton, a violent opponent of the Craftsman, the British Journal, and the Universal Spectator, the forte of the last two lying in essays ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... the winter of 1867-68, was a small manufacturing town, with all the crudeness of a new industrial order and without any of the refinement to which Lanier had been accustomed in Macon and elsewhere. Perhaps there was never a time when drudgery so weighed upon him, although his usual playfulness is seen in the remark: "There is but one man in my school who could lick me in a fair fight, and he thinks me at once a Samson and a Solomon." He worked for people ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... procuring a temporary post in a lawyer's office as a clerk. The drudgery was terrible. Daily, from nine in the morning to six in the evening, he found himself chained to the desk, and obliged to go through the dullest and most mechanical routine, the only respite being half an hour in the middle of the day, which he spent in dining ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... about joining their fortune with hers, in preference to remaining with Waally any longer. Freedom possesses a charm for which no other advantage can compensate, and those two old sea-dogs, who had worked like horses all their lives, in their original calling, preferred returning to the ancient drudgery rather than live with Waally, in the rude abundance of savage chiefs. The escape was easily enough made, as soon, as it was dark, Brown and Wattles being on shore most of the time, under the pretence that it was necessary, ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... refuge of a fool. Some of the advocates of birth control who have never thought the matter out, either passionately or dispassionately, claim to speak on behalf of women. They protest that "many women of the educated classes revolt against the drudgery, anxieties, inconveniences, disease, and disfigurements which attend the yearly child-bearing ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... them for him in that wonderful singing voice of hers that had made her the idol of half of France. And she had made a game of their poverty in the wee white cottage with the roses—until her child was born and poverty could no longer be played at. Then work became drudgery, and love naught. The woman went back to her theater—and another man, a man who had gold a-plenty. And the child grew up playing alone ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... well aware that he could not live long. At any time a cold or a chill might hasten the end, yet the knowledge caused him no real regret. During his years of loneliness and privation he had learned to regard death as an open door through which he should escape from drudgery, ill-treatment, desolation, into the rest, the love, the happiness that remain to the children of God in that home where there is no death, "neither sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain: for the former ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... it would have been to the apprentice lad, could he have known how all his daily drudgery was fitting him to understand, to comfort, and to help the toiling masses of every race ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... loving son sitting at her side in one of his rare hours of pleasure, half- beguiled, half-amused, wholly admiring, as he listens. But as he goes home, and the fancy pictures fade, and Stowting is once more burthened with debt, and the noisy companions and the long hours of drudgery once more approach, no wonder if the dirty green seems all the dirtier or if Atlas ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... labor beyond her strength and sphere of life. Such taxation is barbarism and savageness. This heathenism always destroys home. The American Indian has no home; he lives an idle, lazy, good-for-nothing life, while his wife, or woman, as the case may be, does all the drudgery. For this very reason he was never elevated, as a general rule, above a shot-gun and a hound dog, and never had a home superior to Doolittle's birth-place, which, he said, was "at Cape Cod, Nantucket, and all along up and ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... art, as the disinterested cognition devoid of Will, can afford an interval of rest from the drudgery of Will service. But esthetic beatitude can be obtained only by a few; it is not for the hoi polloi. And then, art can give ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... walk to Mr. Ferguson's office. There, week after week, he toiled with dull industry. He could not believe that his drudgery would last: something—death perhaps—must come to break the monotony of that slowly unwinding chain of days, which was like a grotesquely dreary dream. To have flung himself heart and soul into his work not only demanded an effort of which he felt himself ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... sent to the kitchen, where in future, we were to be employed in cleaning sauce, scouring knives and forks, and such work as we were able to do. As we grew older, our tasks were increased with our strength. I had no regular employment, but was called upon to do any of the drudgery that was to be done about the house. The Superior came to the kitchen every morning after prayers and told us what to do through the day. Then, in her presence we were allowed five minutes conversation, a priest also being ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... Mary ... toward vaster victories. To me a certain memory lives clear in every detail. I see a small girl with her thin little body shaking with sobs ... because her life seemed doomed to drudgery and emptiness. I see my mother and my aunt and my father suffering like beasts of burden under the goad and yoke of poverty. I see a boy, ragged and rebellious, declaring war on the world and swearing to wrest from it every good thing that those he loved might ever covet—and for ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... practical morality, it was regarded by the higher order of "merchant-voyageurs" as something spoken of in books, but not worth the while of a bon vivant. The common hands, who paddled canoes and underwent the drudgery of the trade (who were exclusively of the lower order of Canadian peasantry), squared their moral accounts once a year with a well-conducted confessional interview and a crown, and felt as happy as the "Christian Pilgrim" when he had been relieved ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... corrected. I think Johnes would be driven into most deserved disgrace, and I can get the use of a most curious MS. of the French Froissart in the Newbattle Library, probably the finest in existence after that of Berlin. I am an enthusiast about Berners' Froissart, and though I could not undertake the drudgery of preparing the whole for the press, yet Weber [Footnote: Henry Weber, Scott's amanuensis.] would do it under my eye upon the most reasonable terms. I would revise every part relating to ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... was great at a reply, and greater in proportion to the pressure which was bearing upon him. The resources of his mind and of his eloquence were equal to any drafts which could be made upon them. He took but short notes of what fell from his adversaries, and disliked the drudgery of composition; yet it is a mistake to say that he ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... and an incubus upon the spirits of her pupils. To such a teacher mathematics is a lifeless thing, without hope or potency, the school is a mere convenience for the earning of a livelihood, the work is the drudgery of bondage, and the children are little less than an impertinence. The vitalized teacher is different. To her the multiplication table pulsates with life. It stretches forth its beneficent hand to give employment to a million workers, ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... brightly written story of a girl of twelve, who, when the mystery of her birth is solved, like Cinderella, passes from drudgery to better circumstances. There is nothing strained or unnatural at any point. All descriptions or portrayals of character are life-like, and the book has an indescribable appealing quality which wins ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... the professions formerly monopolized by men, they are actively and successfully engaged. Every law put upon the statute books affects their interests directly and indirectly—undreamed of in a social order where household drudgery and motherhood limited a ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... hat won her the respect of her aunt, who no longer dared to offer her work as a washerwoman, considering her present position far above it. The question of working in the laundry did not even occur to Maslova now. She looked with compassion on the life of drudgery led by these pale, emaciated washerwomen, some of whom showed symptoms of consumption, washing and ironing in a stifling, steam-laden atmosphere with the windows open summer and winter, and she was horrified at the thought that she, too, might be ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... was indeed an indefatigable teacher, and had a real ambition for the success of her pupils, which, in the drudgery of her life, ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... plentiful supply of oats in time of war, and tended him with the utmost care, for he wished him to be strong to endure the hardships of the field, and swift to bear his master, when need arose, out of the reach of danger. But when the war was over he employed him on all sorts of drudgery, bestowing but little attention upon him, and giving him, moreover, nothing but chaff to eat. The time came when war broke out again, and the Soldier saddled and bridled his Horse, and, having put on his heavy coat ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... lacked at an earlier period; for I see little prospect but that I shall have to scribble for a living. But this troubles me much less than you would suppose. I can turn my pen to all sorts of drudgery, such as children's books, etc., and by and by I shall get some editorship that will answer my purpose. Frank Pierce, who was with us at college, offered me his influence to obtain an office in the Exploring Expedition [Commodore Wilkes's]; but I believe that he ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... years of scientific occupation, thus trying whether his arms retained their strength and skill for the labors of his youth,—mindful of the day when he wore striped trousers, and toiled in his shirt-sleeves,—and now tasting again, for pastime, this drudgery beneath a fervid sun. He stood awhile, looking at the workmen, and then went to oversee the laborers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... becomes an interesting thing. Lend the child his books, pencils, and other apparatus: then give them to him, make them his own, and notice the new light with which they instantly shine in his eyes. He takes a new kind of care of them altogether. In mature life, all the drudgery of a man's business or profession, intolerable in itself, is shot through with engrossing significance because he knows it to be associated with his personal fortunes. What more deadly uninteresting object can there ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... large orphan family, living on Port Royal Island, S.C. When her mother died, she went to live with a colored woman who made her work very hard, 'tote' wood and water, hoe cotton and corn, do all manner of drudgery, rise at daybreak, and live on scanty food. Laura suffered from want, exposure and abuse. The freed-women of the plantation looked with pity into her eyes, and desired her to run away. But she replied, 'Aunt Dora will run after me, and ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... beams, as if the lively scoundrel was some metamorphosed imp mocking at me. "Sarve you right—what did you list for?"—Very true—Why did I?—Well, anxious as I am to close this chapter, and to close my eyes, I will tell you, reader, what it was that induced me to go to sea. It was not to escape the drudgery and confinement of a school, or the admonitions received at home. The battle of Trafalgar had been fought—I recollect the news being brought down by the dancing-master when I was at school; but although I knew that eighteen or twenty sail of the line had been captured, yet never having ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... red spots gone from her cheek bones, and with tanned skin and freckles on her nose and a laugh on her lips, coming up at a gallop with the sun behind her, and something more; with sickness behind her and the drudgery of eight hours in an office, and poverty and unhappiness. And Vic—yes, Vic in overalls and a straw hat, growing up to be the strong man he never ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... without, and the coarse pleasures of the club or the tavern? Is it better that a woman, whom choice or necessity has deprived of every probability of governing a home of her own, should struggle against the chances and temptations of city life, or the constant drudgery of spinsterhood in the country; or that she should find the stupefying protection of a convent? These questions have seldom been answered entirely on their own merits. They have presented themselves in company with others even more important; with questions of freedom ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... at by my womenkind, and I knew also that if the matter reached the ear of our only servant she would immediately take her departure. Help is not easy to obtain in A——, and if it were known that our home was haunted we would be obliged to do all our own drudgery in future. ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... intellect, to seek knowledge rather than attempt any laborious application of it. We love to add to our stock of ideas, facts, or even notions of things, provided moderate pains will suffice; but to put our knowledge in practice is too often esteemed servile, or eschewed as mere drudgery. Useful activities flatter pride, and gratify the imagination, too little. But of what avail, ordinarily, is the possession of truth, unless as light to direct us in the ways of beneficent labor, for ourselves and for our fellow men? There are, indeed, objects of knowledge which elevate the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Ellisland, and once more tried farming for three years. Continued ill-success, however, led him, in 1791, to abandon Ellisland, and he moved to Dumfries, where he had obtained a position in the Excise. But he was now thoroughly discouraged; his work was mere drudgery; his tendency to take his relaxation in debauchery increased the weakness of a constitution early undermined; and he died at Dumfries ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... newspaper; not that he knew anything about news paper work, or had the least idea of journalism; he knew he was not fitted for the technicalities of the subordinate departments, but he could write leaders with perfect ease, he was sure. The drudgery of the newspaper office was too distaste ful, and besides it would be beneath the dignity of a graduate and a successful magazine writer. He wanted to begin at the top ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... light, respectable, and yet fairly remunerative, which our country lassies can carry on at home. School teaching is possible, but teaching country district schools is the most thankless of all drudgery, and, besides, a majority of our young women are not able to endure the worry and close confinement. If it can be made successful, sericulture offers by far the best opportunity to country girls to earn their own pin ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... Crape Petticoat, a White Shift and also a blue with her, and a mixt Blue and White Linsey Woolsey Apron." In 1728 the News Letter published an advertisement of a runaway Indian servant who, wearied by the round of domestic drudgery, adorned herself in borrowed finery and fled: "She wore off a Narrow Stript pinck cherredary Gown turned up with a little floured red and white Callico. A Stript Home-spun quilted petticoat, a plain muslin Apron, a suit of ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... disagreeable so that we loathe its performance, then there must be some ultimate end for which the task is being performed, and in which there is a strong interest, else the whole process will be the veriest drudgery. If the end is sufficiently interesting it may serve to throw a halo of interest over the whole process connected with it. The ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... over a brilliant assembly of people of fashion[4108]. Whilst in England they bury themselves morosely in their books, living amongst themselves and appearing in society only on condition of "doing some political drudgery," that of journalist or pamphleteer in the service of a party, in France they dine out every evening, and constitute the ornaments and amusement of the drawing-rooms to which they resort to converse[4109]. There is not a house in which ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the first victim. She was too ladylike in her deportment, too quiet and silent in her ways. She was ousted from her low rocker and favorite window, deprived of her needle, which had in some sort become a life-companion, and made to do all sorts of drudgery; no settled work, but hurried from that, this, and the other; never knowing what was coming next—the hardest ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee |
