"Haphazard" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been suspected by certain wise men of ancient times, but their full, broad, luminous revelation dates from the Gospels. The pagan schools walked in darkness, feeling their way, clinging to falsehoods as well as to truths in their haphazard journeying. Some of their philosophers occasionally cast upon certain subjects feeble gleams which illuminated but one side and made the darkness of the other side more profound. Hence all the phantoms created by ancient philosophy. None but divine wisdom was capable of substituting ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... your second is association of the things perceived, a grouping of them to fit in with each other, and with what is already in the mind. And both imply the third—concentration, aided by emotion and will. For passive attention and haphazard associations assure ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... whither he resorted in quest of prey—of the romances in folio in the virgin stamped Spanish bindings, which they might have worn since they lay on the shelves of Don Quixote or the Licentiate, brought for sale, as it were haphazard, to some market-place in Seville or Valladolid in wine-skins. But the contents of the above-mentioned Bibliotheca were purely English. It was a small but choice assemblage of old poetry formed by Mr. Thomas Hill, otherwise Tommy Hill, otherwise Paul Pry, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... we went to was in a small village to the north of Verdun, not far from the enemy's lines at Cosenvoye, and was fairly representative of all the others. The dreary muddy village was crammed with troops, and the ambulance had been installed at haphazard in such houses as the military authorities could spare. The arrangements were primitive but clean, and even the dentist had set up his apparatus in one of the rooms. The men lay on mattresses or in wooden cots, and the rooms were heated by ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... house which appeared the longest inhabited. There was no end to the ringing for some months, and we had three servants who absolutely refused to stay in so bad a place. We had also to contend with letters and notes in the same way, brought to us at haphazard: "Does Mr So-and-so live here?"—"No, he does not."—"Then pray where does he?" This was interminable, and not five minutes in the day passed without the door-bell being rung. For the sake of not changing my servants I was at last put to the expense of an extra boy for no other ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... north,—hanging to the tangle of spar and cordage which had once been the foremast and its gear. It made a fairly good sea-anchor, with the forestay—strong as any chain—for a cable, and she lay snug under the haphazard breakwater and benefited by the protection, as the seas must first break their heads over the wreckage before reaching her. The mainmast was far away, with all that pertained to it; but the solid, hard-pine jib-boom was still intact, and not one of the sixteen dories piled spoon-fashion in the ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... until he had left it behind and had settled in Orange, New Jersey, that he can be said to have given definite shape to his life. He was only forty in 1887, and all that he had done up to that time, tremendous as much of it was, had worn a haphazard, Bohemian air, with all the inconsequential freedom and crudeness somehow attaching to pioneer life. The development of the new laboratory in West Orange, just at the foot of Llewellyn Park, on the Orange Mountains, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... complicated mechanism. And thereupon, while he sat, enjoying the sense of well-being that follows a substantial meal, between the lines of that triumphant apology he evoked, by way of contrast, the panorama of his own life, his wretched childhood, his haphazard youth, no less distressing to recall, the days without food, the nights without a place to lay his head. And suddenly, when the reading was at an end, in the midst of a veritable overflow of joy, of one of those outbursts of Southern effusiveness which compel one to think aloud, he cried, protruding ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... rather haphazard, as the boys, carried away by the excitement of their new flight, had neglected to eat when it was light. But water and hardtack were easily accessible, and Alan, taking the first two cans at hand, found happily that they ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... small wooden mallet. If we observe this rod by means of a direction needle at all parts, and successively during its gradual passage from one polarity to the other, there will be no sudden break into a haphazard arrangement, but a gradual and perfectly symmetrical rotation from one direction to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... army of disappointed scribblers have followed that haphazard plan of battle. They would know better than to try to market crates of eggs to a shoe store, but they see nothing equally absurd in shipping a popular science article to the Atlantic Monthly or an "uplift" essay to the ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... their lodging, in the courtyard wherein all these folks' chests and bales were bestowed. He rushed forth, beside himself; and whereas he shouted out to the courtyard and got no reply, he thrust right and left at haphazard with his naked sword among the chests whence he had heard the voices, and a pitiful cry warned him that he had struck home. Then there came the wailing of a woman; and when the squires and yeomen came forth with torches and lanterns, he could see that he ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... flower gardens. Here a long low brick wall edges the road, mellow and lichened; here a double-gabled, weather-tiled building stands next to a patch of old brick painted the newest possible yellow. Somehow the effect is not hideous, and fits with the haphazard, sunlit tiles and whitewash. Chiddingfold is at its best and sleepiest in high summer—a village of weatherworn ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... complicated by another question—that of how words were pronounced at different periods in our literary history: in order to exclude the most serious consequent difficulties, I shall say nothing here about any poet prior to Milton. I take at haphazard four pages of rhymed verse from each of the following six poets, and the result proves ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... speculators bought lands at haphazard, certain parties who found favour at the government offices managed to secure the best lands which were for sale or location, before they were exposed to fair competition at the periodical public sales in the different districts. ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... talked with him, I began to see into the laboratory of life where "Casuals of the Sea" originated. This book is valuable because it is a triumphant expression of the haphazard, strangely woven chances that govern the lives of the humble. In Tommy's honest, gentle face, and in the talk of his shipmates when we sat down to dinner together, I saw a microcosm of the strange barren life of the ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... seemed too utterly haphazard to be possible, but Rose decided not to ask any of the authorities about this, because, while the possibility of Grant's return dangled over her head, she didn't want to remind anybody how green she was. But she finally questioned one of her colleagues in the chorus about it, and was told that back ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of the paper. And being, of course, entirely ignorant of journalism, she was not in a position to criticize the organizing arrangements of the newspaper. Not that these would have seemed excessively peculiar to anybody familiar with the haphazard improvisations of minor journalism in the provinces! She had indeed, in her innocence, imagined that the basic fact of a newspaper enterprise would be a printing-press; but when Mr. Dayson, who had been on The Signal and on sundry country papers in Shropshire, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... clings haphazard to the steep bank of the Tyne, and spreads away up and beyond it, reaching out towards Wallsend on the river shore and Tynemouth along by the sea, the older parts by the river looking black and grimy to the last degree; but there is a silver lining to this very black cloud—not ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... remember that it is possible to make a great many changes in diet without altering food value, and that there are few diets which cannot be so rearranged as to give a better nutritive return on the money spent than is usually secured by our haphazard methods of planning meals. Saving of waste is commendable and will go a long way, but this is a kind of passive service; loyal citizens ought to be active participants in the food conservation movement, ...
— Everyday Foods in War Time • Mary Swartz Rose
... is Law. We have given up a chaos-philosophy—the haphazard continuity of events—a cometary orbit, for the world. There are fixed relations everywhere existent: the succession of cycles is ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... shadow of doubt," said the doctor. "I've had Sir Abraham Haphazard, and Sir Rickety Giggs, and old Neversaye Die, and Mr Snilam; and they are all of the same opinion. There is not the smallest doubt about it. Of course, she must administer, and all that; and I'm afraid there'll be a very heavy sum to pay for the tax; for she cannot inherit ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... for me that I cannot hear music when I will; assuredly I should not have such intense pleasure as comes to me now and then by haphazard. As I walked on, forgetting all about the distance, and reaching home before I knew I was half way there, I felt gratitude to my unknown benefactor—a state of mind I have often experienced in the days long gone by. It happened at times—not in my barest ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... all sorts of fruits and vegetables thrive. In fact the natives live on what they raise in their haphazard way. They have a rude system of irrigation which carries water to every little garden. One other thing grows in abundance there—dogs! Such a flock of surly, mangy mongrels one would have to travel far to find. I don't know what they ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... tireless, thorough-going man, therefore he did not set about his explorations in the haphazard manner of Dona Isabel. Commencing at the lower edge of the grounds, he ripped them up with a series of deep trenches and cross-cuts. It was a task that required the labor of many men for several weeks, and when it was finished there was scarcely a growing thing left upon the place. Only a few ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... picked out haphazard all over the country. No, they had to, every one on 'em, run the gantlet of the most severe and ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... way; wherefore, to put an end to these futile ramblings, I set my face westward, hoping to strike the highroad somewhere between Tonbridge and Sevenoaks; determined rather to run the extra chance of capture than follow haphazard these ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... Returning to the ranch for the first time in more than a week, he went to bed directly after supper and slept like a log until breakfast. Rising, refreshed and fit, he decided that the time had come to abandon his former haphazard methods of getting information, and to launch a campaign of active ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... this great name with its legends. Let us content ourselves with those already existing; "the restlessness of man" is such that he cannot do without them; in default of those already made he would fashion others, haphazard, and still more strange. The positive religions keep man from going astray; it is these which render the supernatural definite and precise;[5110] "he had better catch it there than pick it up at Mademoiselle Lenormand's, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... lenses are being used in motion picture photography, but I am doubtful as to their success in the way they are being used at present—a somewhat haphazard way. You are too conscious of the soft focus lens and of the anastigmatic lens. That is, one part of the picture is made with a soft focus lens and one with an anastigmatic. I believe that the soft focus lens can be used, and will be used, in ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1921 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... sent across your way the people who were required to assist you." Chance! dear reader, is there such a thing as chance? Do you believe in chance? Do you attach any precise meaning to the word? Do you employ it at haphazard, allowing it to mean what it may? Chance! What a field for psychical investigation is at once opened up; how we may tear to shreds our past lives in search of—what? Of the Chance that made us. I think, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... prepared to seize, repair, reconstruct, work, and fight such an important element in the new social machinery as a railway system. Such a business, in the next European war, will be hastily entrusted to some haphazard incapables drafted from one or other of the two prehistoric arms.... I do not see how this condition of affairs can be anything but transitory. There may be several wars between European powers, prepared and ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... have noticed the geomantic process in my "History of Sindh" (chaps. vii.). It is called "Zarb al-Ram!" (strike the sand, the French say "frapper le sable") because the rudest form is to make on the ground dots at haphazard, usually in four lines one above the other: these are counted and, if even-numbered, two are taken ( ** ); if odd one ( * ); and thus the four lines will form a scheme say * * * * * * This is repeated three times, producing the same number of figures; and then the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... wonder that so few persons find their true vocations in the world, when it is remembered the random, haphazard way in which children are brought up—educated for the most part in some scholastic mill that grinds down all to the same dead level of mediocrity, and then turns them into the Army, ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... a peculiar one, varying greatly with the occasion. As he flys southward, his cry is a kind of clinking note; but the love song addressed to his mate is voluble and fervent. It has been said that if you should strike the keys of a pianoforte haphazard, the higher and the lower singly very quickly, you might have some idea of the Bobolink's notes. In the month of June he gradually changes his pretty, attractive dress and puts on one very like the females, which is of a plain rusty brown, and ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [March 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... tangle of string, you know that it is worth your while to look patiently for one of the ends. If you make an aimless dash at it the result is confusion worse confounded, and by-and-by the tangle is thrown down in despair, its worst knots made by the hands that tried in a haphazard way to simplify it. Life is that tangle; and religion, if it does not loosen all the knots and straighten all the twists, at least shows us where the two ends are. They are with God and the soul. God deals with a man's soul. We cannot explain ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... nothing vexes people so much, and hardens them in their unbelief and in their dogged resistance to reforms, as undeniable facts and unanswerable arguments. Reforms are carried by Time, and what generally prevails in the end, are not logical deductions, but some haphazard and frequently irrational motives. I do not say, therefore, with Dean Swift, that "there is a degree of corruption wherein some nations, as bad as the world is, will proceed to an amendment; till which time particular ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... house for the motherless brood, and for Gran'ther and Mr. Fen Llewellen. They lived in a most haphazard fashion, for, although they were not really poor, the children never seemed to have any decent clothing to wear; and if, by chance, they got a new garment, something always happened to it as, for instance, the taking of Margaret's new gingham by Bob as a dress ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... missionary to intellectual indolence as well as to intellectual dissipation. He is in danger, under the pressure of other interesting work and distractions, either not to read anything very seriously or to read in a haphazard, desultory way. The latter is specially a dangerous habit on the mission field. The missionary needs not only to cultivate habits of study and to devote certain hours daily, so far as possible, to that habit; ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... Roman at the close of the first or the commencement of the second century of our aera a geographical knowledge more minute than that of the President of the Royal Geographical Society, unless at the haphazard mention of any particular village in the newly annexed Fiji Islands, Sir Henry Rawlinson could enter into a correct account of its chief characteristic. But if we are to go to the extreme length of supposing that Tacitus had heard of ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... of intellect. The equality of man before the law has been acknowledged, now they want to proclaim the equality of intellect. Soon universal suffrage will give place to the drawing of lots. There was a time in Athens when the names of the archontes were taken haphazard out of a bag, ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... noticed. Possessing but a limited amount of education, the boatswain of the Plantagenet endeavoured, on attaining his present rank, to instruct himself; and having no one to advise him, he had purchased some books at haphazard, the contents of which he respected the more that they were totally beyond his comprehension. The work mentioned was among them, and as he thought that he understood it best it was his chief favourite. He was a short, spare man, with a ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... must be so, we are well assured that it is so, because all observation and experiment are found to bear out the truth of the principle we have assumed. All we have learned concerning nature excludes the notion that there is anything haphazard or arbitrary in her ways. We do not feel at all as though the action of natural forces might be suspended or modified for our particular benefit, and hence certain ideas of the efficacy of prayer—e.g., for rain or fine weather—have become impossible for us to entertain with the ease of ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the other two bulls. They were staring about, and at that moment they caught sight of me. Then they came, the pair of them—came like thunderbolts, and from different angles. I had only time to snap my rifle to, lift it, and fire, almost at haphazard, at the head of ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard
... imperceptibly, the formation of judgments. If they do nothing else, they will at any rate accustom the observer to the highly important idea of the correlation of all phenomena. Especially in England a haphazard particularity is the chief vitiating element in ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... under Quinnox stood their ground; a solid, defiant line that fired with telling accuracy into the struggling horde. On the walls two Gatling guns began to cackle their laugh of death. And still the mercenaries poured through the gap, forming in haphazard lines under the direction of ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... unenlightened and Philistine commonness of the reviewers, his earlier contemporaries, or from the aimless "I like that" and "I don't like this" which does duty now, and did then, and has done always, for criticism itself. True, Mr Arnold himself might be wilful, capricious, haphazard; true, he might often be absolutely unable to give any real reason for the faith that was in him; true, he sometimes might have known more than he did know about his subject. But in all these points he saved himself: in his wilfulness, by the grace ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... sort of Herodotean parenthesis, rather than an integral part of the story. And, as a matter of fact, it joins on much more to the Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes than to its actual companions. In fact, it is an instance of the somewhat haphazard and arbitrary way in which the actual division of the Comedie has worked, that it should, dealing as it does wholly and solely with Parisian life, be put in the Scenes de la Vie de Province, and should be separated from its natural conclusion not merely as a matter of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... would be given to all other vessels which its submarines might seek to destroy, when no resistance was offered or escape attempted, and care taken that their crews were given at least a fair chance to save their lives in their open boats. The precautions taken were meager and haphazard enough, as was proved in distressing instance after instance in the progress of the cruel and unmanly business, but a certain degree of restraint was observed. The new policy has swept every restriction aside. Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... silk thread, ranging in shade from gray to lavender, to begin on a crocheted tie and pair of socks for him. Daddy was as good as gold to him and fell immediately into Judge Vandyne's attitude toward him. I knew he would. Eph maintained the dignity of the haphazard family at meal-times, and waited on Peter worshipfully at all others. The black beauty in the kitchen was heard to remark to ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... far from being a perfunctory, haphazard affair. Everything had been thought out and planned beforehand. The servants sat in a circle with eager, expectant faces. In front of them was a circle of dogs. The dogs' presents were not much of a novelty. A new collar for one, a new basket for another, ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... of the high beginnings, but there is that in the stock which is fated to endure. The sons and daughters blunder and sin and perish, but the race goes on, for there is a fierce stuff of life in it. It sinks and rises again and blossoms at haphazard into virtue or vice, since the ordinary moral laws do not concern its mission. Some rags of greatness always cling to it, the dumb faith that sometime and somehow that blood drawn from kings it never knew will be royal again. Though nature is wasteful of material things, there is no waste of ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... taken the precaution to buoy before I put it into the boat. To bring the end back to the sloop was a smaller matter still, and I believe I chuckled above my sorrows when I found that in all the haphazard my judgment or my good genius had faithfully stood by me. The cable reached from the anchor in deep water to the sloop's windlass by just enough to secure a turn and no more. The anchor had been dropped at the right distance ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... duties in a very haphazard way. She had no particular time for doing anything, and no particular place for keeping anything. And alas! it is to be regretted her mistress was the last woman in the world to train her in the ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... dozens of people as he stood before the footlights and brandished his dagger; but his swift horse quickly carried him beyond any haphazard pursuit. He crossed the Navy-Yard bridge and rode into Maryland, being joined very soon by Herold. The assassin and his wretched acolyte came at midnight to Mrs. Surratt's tavern, and afterward pushed on through the moonlight to the house of an acquaintance of ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... some external basis is necessary in the progressive development of such phenomena, and that the teacher, who is to respond to the requests of the child in conscious evolution, cannot do so adequately by haphazard means; he must be guided by conditions previously determined by experience. In other words, those external means already alluded to several times, that staircase, the steps of which lead the soul upwards, must ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... turned the freight depot into offices for his various departments, for a system has been established which will reach all the victims, bury all the dead, discover all the living and clean up the town. There is now a central bureau, into which reports are turned, and the old haphazard way of doing things has been swept as clean as the sand before us. There is General Hastings' horse standing at the steps, for the general is in the saddle most of the time, here, there, ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... Nor are the lessons haphazard dashes at the nearest living thing; on the contrary, they are virtually fundamental, whether with respect to their relation to some of the classified sciences, or with reference to the development of thought and power of expression in ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 18, March 11, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... a second distinct body, the largest of all, and on which all eyes are centered. For, in their wake, "their is no longer any distinction between persons and functionaries," all being confounded together, marching pell-mell, executive council, city officials, judges scattered about haphazard and, by virtue of equality, lost in the crowd. At each station, thanks to their insignia, the delegates form the most conspicuous element. On reaching the last one, that of the Champ de Mars, they alone with the Convention, ascend the steps leading to the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Evil is mostly an active and transitive form of Good. Law was his great Creator of all things, but he refused a creator of law, because such a creator would require another creator, and so on in a quasi-interminable series up to absurdity. This reduced his law to a manner of haphazard. To those who, arguing against it, asked him their favourite question, How often might a man after he had jumbled a set of letters in a bag fling them out upon the ground before they would fall into ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... energy. In every modern city the milk supply is distributed by erratic milkmen who skip from door to door and from street to street, covering the same ground, each leaving his cans of milk here and there in a sporadic fashion as haphazard as a bee among the flowers. Contrast, says the socialist, the wasted labors of the milkman with the orderly and systematic performance of the postman, himself a little fragment of socialism. And the milkman, they ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... constantly and conspicuously in his own sight and that of his readers, the profoundly important crisis in the midst of which we are living. The moral and social dissolution in progress about us, and the enormous peril of sailing blindfold and haphazard, without rudder or compass or chart, have always been fully visible to him, and it is no fault of his if they have not become equally plain to his contemporaries. The policy of drifting has had no ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... bank, and in a few minutes the guns were at work. Never before had I seen such thousands of pigeons in so small an area. It could hardly be called sport, for the birds were so thick on the trees that when a native fired at haphazard into the branches the heavy charge of shot would bring them down by the dozen—the remainder would simply fly off to the next tree. Owing to the dense foliage the skipper and I seldom got a shot at them on ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... M. Bonaparte ought to be satisfied! To have shot down at night, in the dark, in solitude, on the Champ-de-Mars, under the arches of the bridges, behind a lonely wall, at random, haphazard, no matter whom, unknown persons, shadows, the very number of whom none can tell; to cause nameless persons to be slain by nameless persons; and to have all this vanish in obscurity, in oblivion, is, in very truth, far from gratifying to one's self-esteem; it looks ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... Votaress's "family," one seated, three standing at ease, were allowing their mild, slow conversation its haphazard way under barely enough constraint to hold it in the channel of discretion. It drifted as unpretentiously as a raft or flatboat, now and then merely floating without progress, like a floating alligator; ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... all their blunders,' said Lord Montacute. 'I can conceive an individual who has once been entrapped into their haphazard courses, continuing in the fatal confusion to which he has contributed his quota; but I am at least free, and I wish to ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... his dinner partner. That Kathleen had given him her full attention throughout the dinner had partly compensated for the fact that she was not wearing his orchids. It had been weeks since he had enjoyed so uninterrupted a talk with her. That her manner was distrait and her replies somewhat haphazard escaped him utterly. The drive to Chevy Chase was both long and cold, and while waiting for Miss Kiametia's other guests to assemble before he presented himself, he had enjoyed more than one cocktail. That stimulant, combined with Miss Kiametia's excellent champagne, ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... so, the wheels drew rapidly nearer, and, just as I was expecting them to go whirling by, stopped,—in front of the house. My heart leapt in my bosom. In a convulsion of frantic terror, again, during the passage of one frenzied moment, I all but burst the bonds that held me, and fled, haphazard, from the imminent peril. But the bonds were stronger than I,—it was as if I had ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... of hybrids will, superficially, appear to run somewhat haphazard. There will, of course, be no traceable difference between social or economic classes, in point of heredity,—as is visibly the case in Christendom. But variation—of an apparently haphazard description—will be large and ubiquitous among the individuals of such a populace. Indeed, it ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... cattle and horses to watch, when buying or bart'ring But a man, who's so useful, provided he's good and efficient, And who does so much harm and mischief by treacherous dealings, Him will people admit to their houses by chance and haphazard, And too late find reason to rue an o'erhasty decision. This you appear to understand, for a girl you have chosen As your servant, and that of your parents, who thoroughly good is. Treat her well, and as long as she finds the business suit ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... and effortless game of chess, yawning between the moves he generally made almost at haphazard, and with attention elsewhere engaged. About five o'clock came the sound of a distant ring, and Seaton jumped up, overturning the board, and so ending a game that else might have fatuously continued to this day. He effusively excused himself, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... should be being modelled by us on a definite plan, and into a harmonious whole. I wonder how many of us in this chapel this morning have ever spent a quiet hour in trying to set clearly before ourselves what we want to make of ourselves, and how we mean to go about it. Most of us live by haphazard very largely, even in regard to outward things, and still more entirely in regard to our characters. Most of us have not consciously before us, as you put a pattern-line before a child learning to write, any ideal of ourselves to which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... tendency to variation in certain directions. To introduce chance into the world is to introduce chaos. No more would the waters of the interiors of the continents find their way to the sea, were there not a slant in that direction, than could haphazard variation, though checked and controlled by natural selection, result in the production of the race of man. This view may be only the outcome of our inevitable anthropomorphism which we cannot escape from, no matter how deep we dive or high ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... anchor half a mile outside the entrance of Little Cove our deck became active. I went off first with the supplies to choose a spot where they should be stored, although in such a black night this might have been left haphazard to the men. But one never believes, on occasions so momentous as pitching camp, that others know a jot about it but oneself—to this there are practically ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... are really very comfortably lodged. I can just stand upright in my bedroom. Otherwise, it is a good deal like one of Ballard's top-rooms. We have a very obliging and comfortable landlady; and it is a clean nice place in a rough wild country. We came here haphazard, but could not have ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... without saying that a motor tour should be planned in advance as carefully as possible. If one starts out in a haphazard way, it takes him a long time to find his bearings, and much valuable time is lost. Before crossing the water, it would be well to become posted as thoroughly as possible on what one desires to see and to gain a general idea of the road from the ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... Unhappily the joy of those who thus pursue a much-loved occupation is bound to overflow in words; and if they have no daily auditor within their own four walls, they are driven by circumstances to choose their confidants haphazard when they go out. Miss Tarlton's confidences, however, were all of an optimistic character: she inflicted on her hearers no grievances against destiny. She recorded her vote, so to speak, in favour of content, and thereby established a claim to ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... tend to be phonetic and haphazard. Eg Pensanz, Pensans, Pensants, Pensance, and Penzance are all ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... meditate on freedom, wealth, power; on a career which should at the same time dazzle the imagination and gratify her heart. Notwithstanding the gossip of Paris, founded on no authentic knowledge of her husband's character or information, based on the haphazard observations of the floating multitude, Lucretia herself had no reason to fear that her influence over Lord Monmouth, if exerted, was materially diminished. But satisfied that he had formed no other tie, with her ever the test of her position, she had not thought it expedient, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... may dig his spade haphazard into the earth and by that act liberate a small stream which shall become a mighty river. Not less casual perhaps, certainly not less momentous in its consequences, was the first attempt, by some enterprising ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... print of a foot, the smear of a hand and, of course, describing carefully the appearance of a victim's body, the wounds, the position, the expression of the face, any tearing or disorder of the garments. Many times these quick, haphazard jottings, made in the precious moments immediately following a crime, had proved of incalculable value in ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... Vinteuil's sonata or in Biche's portraits, what constituted harmony, for them, in music or beauty in painting. It appeared to them, when the pianist played his sonata, as though he were striking haphazard from the piano a medley of notes which bore no relation to the musical forms to which they themselves were accustomed, and that the painter simply flung the colours haphazard upon his canvas. When, on one of these, they were able to distinguish a human form, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... cliff had given place to green-clad bluffs sown thick with cottages of all sorts, from the quaintly hideous and the obviously inexpensive to the bewitchingly pretty and the pretentiously ornate —a haphazard arrangement that ran suddenly into a plot of streets linking a clutter of utilitarian buildings, all converging upon the focal ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... topmasts also; in spite of everything the ship labored fearfully; the heavy seas kept the deck continually deluged with water; the smoke flew eastward with inconceivable rapidity; they went on almost at haphazard through the floating ice; the barometer fell to 29 degrees; it was hard to stay on deck, so most of the men were kept below to ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... two floors at least of the respectable Kensington house must have been sacrificed. The walls were decorated with Egyptian frescoes and Chinese embroideries, and silk divans which might have figured in a cinema producer's idea of a Turkish harem were set haphazard on the mosaic floor. In the centre a stone fountain of the modern-primitive school and banked with flowers splashed noisily. Somehow it offered Kensington the final insult. But she had wanted it, just as she had wanted the Greek columns. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... again a scrap takes place, and a few hundreds or thousands of yards of trenches are taken or lost. To the ordinary civilian mind this all seems very haphazard, but it is not so; every movement is made with a purpose, and the result carefully noted by the master mind ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... the center. They thought that the Union was a trick to deprive them of their fiercely cherished independence, and when the Union sent embassies to invite them into the common effort, they rejected them. And when we suggested that in the interests of racial safety they abandon their haphazard colonization efforts that resulted in an uncontrolled series of jumps into the dark, punctuated by minor wars and clashes when colonists from separate origins landed, more or less simultaneously, on a promising planet, they were certain we were up ...
— A Question of Courage • Jesse Franklin Bone
... along the lane, head on breast, plunged in a profound reverie, and following a haphazard course, so much so that, chancing presently to look about him, he found that the lane had narrowed into a rough cart track that wound away between high banks gay with wild flowers, and crowned with hedges, a pleasant, ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... streak of almost feminine delicacy of perception and ideality of purpose. Diana had once told him, laughingly, that he was of the stuff of which martyrs were made in the old days of persecution, and in this she had haphazard lit upon the fundamental force that shaped his actions. The burden which fate, or his own deeds, might lay upon his shoulders, that he would bear, be it what ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... The latter method is indispensable to the work of the critic. Without reference, express or implied, to other types of genius or to other ways of treatment it is impossible for criticism to take a single step in definition either of an author, or a movement, or a form of art. In a vague and haphazard fashion, even the Elizabethans were comparative. Meres was so in his endless stream of classical parallels; Sidney, after a loftier strain, in his defence of harmonious prose as a form of poetry. And it is the highest achievement of modern criticism to have brought science and order into the ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... description. They come from writers of the most unlike tastes and the most unequal degrees of trustworthiness. They are generally very vague, leaving most that we want to know unsaid. And they have such a haphazard character that, when taken all together, they do not begin to cover the field. Nothing like all the works of the greater sculptors, let alone the lesser ones, are so much as mentioned by name ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... the American islands, where her father, perhaps a gentleman, had gone to seek his bread, and where he was stifled by obscurity, she returned alone and at haphazard into France. She landed at La Rochelle, and was received in pity by Madame de Neuillant, mother of the Marechale Duchesse de Navailles, and was reduced by that avaricious old woman to keep the keys of her ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... or destroy a bridge, or how to meet the countless other needs with which a sapper is called upon to deal!" Increasing attention was paid to staff training and staff courses. And insufficient as it all was, for months, the general results of this haphazard training, when the men actually got into the field—all short-comings and disappointments admitted—were nothing short of wonderful. Had the Germans forgotten that we are and always have been a fighting people? That fact, at any rate, was brought ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at hand. She hastened to it, and sinking down upon it, seemed to surrender herself to tears. He moved moodily after her, and stood looking down at the pathway, tracing haphazard figures on its moss-grown surface with ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... inhabitants of the whole region from Newcastle to the coast, warned by authorities, plunge the territory into darkness, which has the effect of baffling the airship pilot; bombs, chiefly of the incendiary kind, are dropped from time to time haphazard; a Zeppelin, while flying over the Ypres district, is shot at and badly damaged, coming down some hours afterward a complete wreck near Maria Aeletre; a Zeppelin drops bombs on Bailleul, the objective ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... so intense that he has no desire to paint her seduction as greater than it was. She has got into his blood, so to speak, and each drop of it under the microscope would show her image. Take any sonnet at haphazard, and you will hear the rage ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... discovered by force, and other creatures have similarly provided themselves with some species of covering. Clothing, therefore, is not an art, but an instinct, and the fact that man is born naked and does not grow his clothing upon himself from within but collects it from various distant and haphazard sources is not any reason to call this necessity an instinct for decency. These, you will admit, are weighty reflections and worthy of consideration before we proceed to the wide and thorny subject of moral and immoral action. Now, what is virtue?" Pan, who had listened with great ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... care of that being who was himself. He had provided richly for his future, wiped out his past where it threatened to gall him, and was giving due consideration to his present. He meant supremely to be safe, and to that end he had entrenched himself on every side. Jeff felt a very disorganised, haphazard sort of being indeed before so complete a creature. And Reardon, so far from breaking into the old intimacy that Jeff had seen still living behind them in a sunny calm, only waiting for the gate to be opened on it again, stood there distinctly ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... about twenty people had arrived, and as many more were expected. A lively chatter had already begun; for each woman had been offered on her arrival a basket from which she had to choose a brightly coloured ribbon. These ribbons matched the rosettes presented in an equally haphazard way to every man. As Vincy observed, it gave one the rather ghastly impression that there was going to be a cotillion at once, on sight, before dinner; which was a little frightening. In reality it was merely so that the partners for the meal should be chosen by chance. Mitchell thought ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... the most methodical man that ever lived. He had a place for everything and insisted that everything should be kept in its place. There was nothing haphazard about his methods of business. He kept exact accounts ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... had faded, Kirkwood had dismissed the subject of Ruth Mary's engagement, with the careless reflection that Enselman was probably not the right man, but that the primitive laws which decide such haphazard unions doubtless provided the necessary hardihood of temperament wherewith to meet their exigencies. She was a nice little girl, but possibly she was not so sensitive ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... child makes each part with careful effort, looking at the model from time to time, or whether the strokes are made in a haphazard way with only an initial glance at the original. The latter procedure is quite common with young or retarded subjects. Curiously enough, the first trial is more successful than either of the others, due perhaps to a waning of effort ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... succeeded each other without end like sombre, uncrested waves, and from the depths of the town under his feet ascended a confused and unceasing mutter. The spires of churches, numerous, scattered haphazard, uprose like beacons on a maze of shoals without a channel; the driving rain mingled with the falling dusk of a winter's evening; and the booming of a big clock on a tower, striking the hour, rolled past in voluminous, austere bursts of sound, with a shrill vibrating cry at the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... 1696 catalogue is indisputable. And now, after wading through this dry forest of figures and dates and haphazard or dogmatic attributions, we are at the fatal number, thirty-four—only thirty-four authentic Vermeers in existence. Some one must be mistaken. Who owns the thirty-fifth ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... voting was conducted in a calm and methodical fashion. Here and there a dead man was elected; the proceedings—though they were not faked, as in Nikita's time—were rough-and-ready. But if the deputies had been selected in a more haphazard fashion, say according to the first letter of their surnames, the result would have been identical—they would, with a crushing majority, have deposed their King and voted for the merging of their ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... because he had taken service with the Iron Heel in the Mercenaries.* A member of the 'Frisco Reds pledged himself to twelve annual executions. The penalty for failure was death. A member who failed to complete his number committed suicide. These executions were not haphazard. This group of madmen met frequently and passed wholesale judgments upon offending members and servitors of the Oligarchy. The executions ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... are in no sense of the word Cockneys, and they represent not the dregs of the country but rather its brighter and more adventurous spirits who have boldly tried to make their way in new and uncongenial spheres and have terribly come to grief. Of thirty cases, selected haphazard, in the various Shelters during the week ending July 5th, 1890, twenty-two were country-born, sixteen were men who had come up a long time ago, but did not ever seem to have settled to regular employ, and four were old military men. Of sixty cases examined into at the Bureau and Shelters during ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... hard here," he ventured, as, noticing the damage that the damp grass was doing to his trouser hems, he covered the remaining distance between them in a series of violent haphazard leaps. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... Anne's mother"—here the Princess paused, and then went on with an obvious effort—"I know nothing of Anne's mother, Mr. Ware. She died when Anne was a child. Mr. Denham brought up his daughter in a haphazard way." ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... giving relief upon a definite plan are the results of haphazard benevolence that are all around us—feeble-minded women with illegitimate offspring, children crippled by drunken fathers, juvenile offenders who began as child-beggars, aged parents neglected by their children. Every form of human ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... orthodox development of the Adventure. He perceives he was too precipitate. But he feels his honour is involved, and meditates the development of a new attack. And the girl? She is unawakened. Her motives are bookish, written by a haphazard syndicate of authors, novelists, and biographers, on her white inexperience. An artificial oversoul she is, that may presently break down and reveal a human being beneath it. She is still in that schoolgirl phase when a talkative old man is more interesting than a tongue-tied ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... somewhere or other distinctly disclaims the possession. Yet, irregular as he is in his fashion of writing, no less than in the merit of it, the germs of some of the most famous styles of this century may be discovered in his casual and haphazard work. Everybody knows Jeffrey's question to Macaulay, "Where the devil did you get that style?" If any one will read Hazlitt (who, be it remembered, was a contributor to the Edinburgh) carefully, he will see where Macaulay got that style, or ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... a haphazard blow, had given Chook the dreaded knock-out, a jolt beside the chin that, in the expressive ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... summoned two by two, as we have just said, filed in the parlor before the police agents, and then they were ordered to get into the "robbers' box." The stowage was apparently made at haphazard and promiscuously; nevertheless, later, by the difference of the treatment accorded to the Representatives in the various prisons, it was apparent that this promiscuous loading had perhaps been somewhat prearranged. When the first vehicle was full, a second, of a similar construction ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... same conclusion," pursued my father,—"I with my theory, you with your experience,—that the physic we take must not be chosen haphazard, and that a mistake in the bottle may kill a horse. But when we come to the medicine for the mind, how little do we think of the golden rule which common-sense applies to ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and still there was no sign of her ahead, nor was there any conclusion in my mind. And then I chanced to look round and saw her hastening after me, about a couple of hundred yards away. I wheeled round and on the instant leapt to one of my typical haphazard decisions. I would simply show her the pocket book and see ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... for cash. The book-lined study was in the care of a Mr. Tombs, a gentleman who combined the appearance of a mute at a funeral with the aloof and mysterious manner of a man waiting for his wife in a ladies' underwear department, and the peculiar faculty of making the haphazard visitor feel that he had strayed into a ladies' underwear shop also. "Have you an account with us, sir?" Mr. Tombs would inquire; and on being told "No" would look guiltily all around (as it were at partially undressed ladies) and whisper, "Except to the masters ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... the church is by the north doorway, but the more convenient trysting-place is the west end of the nave. Our purpose in the following pages is to picture a morning spent in the Abbey with a party of tourists, who have been collected in a somewhat haphazard manner before a start is made, and are now assembled beneath the statue of the younger Pitt. Although the majority are probably of British and American nationality with a sprinkling no doubt of our colonial brothers, ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... you, the man taken haphazard from among men, remember—there was not a moment when you were yourself. Never did you cease to be bowed under the harsh and answerless command, "It has to be, it has to be." In times of peace encircled in the law of incessant labor, in the mechanical ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... should be able to get the better of my misfortunes. I thought it over, and decided to give public lectures in Zurich on subjects related to my writings during the coming winter, hoping in that free and haphazard fashion to keep body and soul together for a little while, although I had no fixed appointment and did not intend to work ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... does, too, in "Parnell and his Island" (1887), though here with scant sympathy; but it is not until "Evelyn Innes" that he becomes deeply concerned with beauty of subject or beauty of background, or, except at haphazard, possessed of any mastery of style. "Evelyn Innes" is very well written,—in spots,—but "The Lake" is of a wholeness of good tissue that is attainable only through an art that has labored long and earnestly to achieve beauty. Had Mr. Moore never recaptured ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... taken upon myself to alter the order of the different voyages. I have grouped together those voyages which relate to the same parts of the globe, instead of adopting the somewhat haphazard arrangement of the original edition. This, and the indices I have added to each volume, will, I hope, greatly assist the student. The maps, with the exception of the facsimile ones, are modern; on them I have traced the presumed course of the journey or ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... Meredith," he said. "One doesn't meet a new face haphazard in Kohat, and ... you are wonderfully like your brother. I am Major Wyndham. You may have heard ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... was so true that she had made a really prodigious amount of money. Her large, her solid, her unrelenting books lay upon every table. Even the smart set kept them, uncut—like pretty sinners who have never been "found out"—to give an air of haphazard intellectuality to frisky boudoirs, All the clergy, however unable to get their tithes, bought them. All bishops alluded to them in "pulpit utterances." Fabulous prices were paid for them by magazine editors. They ran as serials through all the tale of months. The suburbs battened ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... the rural school is haphazard and faulty. This is partly because of the small enrollment and irregular attendance, and partly because of the inexperience and lack of supervision of the teacher. Children are often found pursuing studies in three or four ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... of it as is of durable importance—comes haphazard. It is tinged by the enthusiasms of our teachers, gleaned by suggestions from our friends, prompted by glimpses and footnotes and margins. There was a time, I think, when I hung in tender equilibrium among various possibilities. I was enamoured of mathematics and physics: ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... of extinction had at last begun in real earnest. As long as they could only stand in the street and throw water in through the windows at haphazard, they might or might not hit the fire—and at all events they could not attack its strong points; but now, Baxmore at one window, and one of the men of the first engine at another, played point-blank into the flames, and, ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... fitted into the haphazard household at Deer Trace Manor, with what struggles she came through the inevitable attack of homesickness, and how Mammy Juliet and every one else petted and indulged her, are matters which need not be dwelt on. But we shall gladly believe ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde |
