"Purposeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her to ask what was the meaning of the delay, and whether she had given up the cause of the country. There is a terse determination in its brief, indignant sentences which is a relief to the reader weary of the wavering and purposeless campaign: ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... continued, "that the greatest and the most subtle of all policies is the policy of perfect truthfulness. Listen to me, then. The thing which you have in your mind concerning me is true. Two years I have spent in this country and in other countries of Europe. These two years have not been spent in purposeless travel. On the contrary, I have carried with me always a definite ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... himself to purposeless copying, without thought, each blade of grass, as commended by the inconsequent, but, in the long curve of the narrow leaf, corrected by the straight tall stem, he learns how grace is wedded to dignity, how strength enhances sweetness, that ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... worthy or unworthy isn't the point in question—worked for it hard, schemed, devised, and succeeded. As Mrs. Breckenridge Sewall I could again accomplish results. Many women marry simply because they cannot endure an arid and purposeless future. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... am afraid," he said, "that Miss Lenora's evidence will help no one. As an expert in these affairs, Mr. Quest, does it not seem to you that her imprisonment was just a little purposeless? There seems to have been no attempt to harm her in any way whatever, ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the ashes there, and had been there many a year. Hard by this pole, his lantern stood: lighting a few feet of the lower part of it and a little of the ashy surface around, and then casting off a purposeless little clear trail ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... ought rather to be considered as a continuous series of achievements of the human mind than as the conquest of any single individual. It has sometimes taken centuries of experience to ascertain the value of a single fact in its various bearings. Like man himself, experience is feeble and apparently purposeless in its infancy, but acquires maturity and strength with age. Experience, however, is not limited to a lifetime, but is the stored-up wealth and power of our race. Even amidst the death of successive ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... on my letter, there at the end of a corner-table of the saloon, when I saw Dacres saunter through. He wore a very conscious and elaborately purposeless air; and it jumped with my mood that he had nothing less than the crisis of his life in his pocket, and was looking for me. As he advanced towards me between the long tables doubt left me and alarm assailed me. 'I'm glad ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... worlds, but I sought in vain among that radiant silent throng for mine. And I would think of the day when diseased and a cripple I should be cast out into the world alone, with the brand of the convict, like the mark of Cain, upon my brow, without friends, without sympathy, without hope, useless, purposeless, to eat the bread of charity, and die a beggar in the streets, with only these cold bright eyes above to witness at the last. Can it be wondered at, if under the influence of these feelings I began to repine against that Providence ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... Purposeless... and void of meaning is the world which science reveals for our belief.... That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving, that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... has a good purpose, and another life in which there is a chance for further growth, if not for glory. But when I bump up against a series of afflictions such as you have been subjected to, I fall back upon Fred's philosophy of a purposeless or else a cruel God. ... I simply have a sinking of the heart, a goneness, a hopelessness—not even the pleasure of a resignation. Old Sid's cold mind has worked itself through to a decision that there is no purpose and no future, and finds solace in the ultimate; ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... the march—that is, allows them to lie dead—while the enemy's are fighting, he is a bad manager of his forces. In this sense there is a waste of forces, which is even worse than their employment to no purpose. If there must be action, then the first point is that all parts act, because the most purposeless activity still keeps employed and destroys a portion of the enemy's force, whilst troops completely inactive are for the moment quite neutralised. Unmistakably this idea is bound up with the principles contained in the last ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... the old bloody work has been going on, and the old lusts of the human heart have been busy sowing the dragon's teeth that shall spring up in wars and fightings. In savage lands warfare rages on, ceaseless, ignoble, unrecorded, and seemingly purposeless as that of animalcules in a drop of water. On civilised soil, men, who love the same Christ and worship Him in the same tongue, are fronting each other at this hour. The war of actual swords, and the war of conflicting ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... lamentably shaken the long-since failing man. On the afternoon of the fourth day, Mr. Lisle walked, or rather tottered, into Caleb's stall, and seated himself on the only vacant stool it contained. His manner was confused, and frequently purposeless, and there was an anxious, flurried expression in his face, which Jennings did not at all like. He remained silent for some time, with the exception of partially inaudible snatches of comment or questionings, apparently addressed to himself. At last he ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... be added that while the boy's action is not consciously intelligent, it is by no means purposeless, and is therefore not quite parallel with the insect's. By vigorously irritating the sensory nerves of the hand the boy imparts a stimulus to his muscular system. His act belongs to a large group which has been especially studied ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... scientific mind purposeless fiction is abhorrent. Fortunately we all are literally and scientifically inclined; the doom of purposeless fiction is sounded; and it is a great comfort to believe that, in the near future, only literary and scientific works suitable for man, woman, child, and suffragette, are to adorn the lingerie-laden ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... impossible; but what was not impossible, what was indeed certain and sure and beyond any sort of question, was that she loved Johnny St. Leath with all her heart and soul, and would so love him until the day of her death. Life could never be purposeless nor mean nor empty for her again, while she had that treasure to carry about with her in her heart. Meanwhile she could not look at him and doubt but that, for the moment at any rate, he loved her—and there was something simple and direct about Johnny as there ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... with good will on the viands prepared (Pork chops were the principal portion), Then retiring to bed, with their dreams they were scared, And spent half the night in contortion; Then rose in their sleep and came down to this room, And, instead of a purposeless pawing, They painted these pictures, then fled in the gloom, And Furniss has touched up ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... while the task which she had set herself was for a better purpose. But, although she did not study as had been her wont, while she sewed she occupied her mind in a way that was much more beneficial to it than the purposeless acquisition of facts, the solving of mathematical problems, or conning of parts of speech. Beside her was always an open book, it might be a passage of Scripture, a scene from Shakespeare, a poem or paragraph rich in the wisdom ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... these indignation meetings and, remembering that all of them bad proved purposeless, he went on toward the McCaskey brothers' tent. He and the McCaskeys were not the closest of friends, in spite of the fact that they had done him a favor—a favor, by the way. for which he had paid many times over—nevertheless, they were his most intimate acquaintances and he felt an urgent desire ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... the men were out at work. I sat down alone in my tent. I felt slightly dazed, but not as miserable as I had expected to feel. I did not know how to occupy my time. I had brought several books with me, but I felt no inclination to read. Life seemed empty and purposeless. I waited impatiently for the ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... tired, and we both, I think, were busy with our thoughts. Presently I saw a man, a negro, come into the avenue a little before us with a bundle of tools on his back. He went as slowly as we, with an indescribable, purposeless gait. His figure had the same look too, from his lop-sided old white hat to every fold of his clothing, which seemed to hang about him just as it would as lieve be off as on. I begged Preston to hail him and ask him the question about church going, which sorely ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the Court. The people in arms had attacked the Tuileries. Wildest rumours flew in all directions, and some of them found their way through the servants to the Hotel Plougastel, of that terrible fight for the palace which was to end in the purposeless massacre of all those whom the invertebrate monarch abandoned there, whilst placing himself and his family under the protection of the Assembly. Purposeless to the end, ever adopting the course pointed out to him by evil counsellors, he prepared for resistance only until the need for ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... of the book it is remarked that voluntary movements are preceded, not only by reflex, but also by "impulsive movements," the ceaseless activity of young infants being due to purposeless discharges of nervous energy. Reflex movements are followed by instinctive, and these by voluntary. The latter are first shown by grasping at objects, which took place in Preyer's child during ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... afford Lamb much real pleasure or enjoyment. Yea, London itself, with all its wonders and marvels, with all its (to him) memories and associations, he found to be, to one who had nothing to do but wander idly and purposeless through her thronged and busy streets and thoroughfares,—a mere looker-on in Vienna,—a somewhat dreary and melancholy place. Indeed, the London of 1825-30 was a far different place to Elia from the London of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... stooping shoulders, and got slowly upon his feet. Then, lurching in his walk, but not stumbling, he moved across the little space of saw-dusted, hard-beaten earth that divided him from W. Keyse, and drew up beside that insignificant minority. The action was not purposeless or unimpressive. The alcoholic wastrel had suddenly become protagonist in the common little drama that was veering towards tragedy. Beside the man, Billy Keyse dwindled to a stunted boy, a steam-pinnace bobbing under the quarter of an armoured battle-ship, its huge mailed ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... energy. "Unless man can erect himself above himself," said Daniel, a poet of the Elizabethan era, "how poor a thing is man!" Without a certain degree of practical efficient force—compounded of will, which is the root, and wisdom, which is the stem of character—life will be indefinite and purposeless—like a body of stagnant water, instead of a running stream doing useful work and keeping the machinery of a ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... dangerous game-those easy rhinos hardly counted-and I think we both preferred to feel that we had backing until we knew what our nerves were going to do with us. Nevertheless, occasionally, I would take Memba Sasa and go out for a little purposeless stroll a few miles up or down river. Sometimes we skirted the jungle, sometimes we held as near as possible to the river's bank, sometimes we cut loose and rambled through the dry, crackling scrub over the low volcanic hills ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... gulf of disorder. Here is the passion for gain, the very spirit of the bourgeoise gone drunk with desire. The result is something terrible. Chicago is leaderless, purposeless, slovenly, ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... of nature as are the general laws relating to specific differentiation; and in each illustration alike we find the result of the operation of known physical causes to be that of selection. If it should be argued in reply that the selection in the one case is obviously purposeless, while in the other it is as obviously purposive, I answer that this is pure assumption. It is perhaps not too much to say that every geological formation on the face of the globe is either wholly or in part due to the selective influence of specific gravity, ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... one of the purposeless and impetuous exploits of Grey, resulted in the death of Gibson and the loss of several horses. Giles' horse soon knocked up, and he had to return on foot. Having, with really astonishing prudence, left a keg of water buried on his way out, he made ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... I was requested to descend in order to have another interview with the General. Again an inquisitive crowd watched my movements, but civilly made way for me to pass into the little room where General Snyman was holding a sort of levee. The latter asked me a few purposeless questions. I gravely expressed a hope that his eyes were better (he had been suffering from inflamed sight); then he rose and held out his hand, which I could not ignore, and without further delay we were off. About ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... you in my last that the Consuls had tinkered up a treaty of peace with the rebels of Aana. A month has gone by, and I would not weary readers your with a story so intricate and purposeless. The Consuls seem to have gone backward and forward, to and fro. To periods of agitated activity, comparable to that of three ants about a broken nest, there succeeded seasons in which they rested from their labours and ruefully considered the result. I believe I am not overstating the case when ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... now, involved in soul...for now each of millions was free to think, free to manifest his own particular luck and knack in discovery, having a country, foothold, not hovering like Noah's dove, urging still the purposeless wing not to pitch into nowhere: for the promise says: "Ye shall not sow and another reap, ye shall not plant and another garner", but in a land of gentlemen ye shall live, as it were to swellings of music, while a noble height grows ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... departure Amherst, for the first time, became aware of a certain flatness in his life. His daily task seemed dull and purposeless, and he was galled by Truscomb's studied forbearance, under which he suspected a quickly accumulating store of animosity. He almost longed for some collision which would release the manager's pent-up resentment; yet he dreaded increasingly any ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... are some, whom a thirst Ardent, unquenchable, fires, Not with the crowd to be spent, Not without aim to go round In an eddy of purposeless dust, Effort unmeaning and vain. Ah yes! some of us strive Not without action to die Fruitless, but something to snatch From dull oblivion, nor all Glut the devouring grave! We, we have chosen our path— Path to a clear-purposed goal, Path of advance!—but it leads A long, steep journey, through ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... hour a feverish activity suddenly spread through the house. They met and passed each other, hurrying, troubled, secretive; the servants stumbled and quarrelled in their purposeless haste. To Belden, quieting when he could, sternly optimistic everywhere, at heart heavy and uncertain, it seemed that the one anchor of their hopes was this calm, clear-eyed woman in her ...
— In The Valley Of The Shadow • Josephine Daskam
... cut off, and of course resistance was hopeless. The first place our pursuers would make for would be the bridge and the ford, since they were the only roads by which we could hope to reach the frontier. To take to the mountains would have been a purposeless folly. We could look for nothing but starvation ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... compass. Hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of splendid acres were wrested from their innocent purchasers and holders. There began a vast hegira of evicted settlers in tattered wagons; going nowhere, cursing injustice, stunned, purposeless, homeless, hopeless. Their children began to look up to them for bread, ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... behind the others, Maggie did not at once know of the fact of Flower's disappearance with the baby. She was naturally a slow girl; ideas came to her at rare intervals; she even received startling and terrible news with a certain outward stolidity and calm. Still, Maggie was not an altogether purposeless and thoughtless maiden; thoughts occasionally drifted her way; ideas, when once born in her heart, were slow to die. When affection took root there it became a very sturdy plant. If there was any one in the world whom Maggie adored, it was her dear ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... to be a pretty regular thing, that Mr. Copley spent the evening abroad, excused himself from going anywhere with his family, and when they did see him wore an uncertain, purposeless, vagrant sort of look and air. By degrees this began to ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... the table. It is a theory among those who believe that a spirit nourishes all things from within, that there was some competition amongst these chairs as to which should be used at table, so dull, forlorn and purposeless was their life against the wall. Seven pictures hung on that wall; not because it was a mystic number, but because it filled up all the required space; two on each side of the looking-glass and three large ones on the opposite ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... and silence. Toward the rear these characteristics are less and less conspicuous, and finally, in point of space, are lost altogether in confusion, motion and noise. The homogeneous becomes heterogeneous. Definition is lacking; repose is replaced by an apparently purposeless activity; harmony vanishes in hubbub, form in disorder. Commotion everywhere and ceaseless unrest. The men who do not fight ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... fire replenished. Two of the servants were in their own chambers, enfranchised for an hour: one only remained on duty. All six women had the feeling, which comes to most women at a certain moment in each day, that life had, for a time, deteriorated into the purposeless and the futile; and that it waited, as in a trance, until some external masculine event, expected or unforeseen, should renew its virtue and ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... environment. Sometimes one observes both general resistiveness and specific acts. For instance, Mary G., who said, "Leave me alone," and covered her head or buried it in the pillows, accompanied her muscular resistiveness with laughter. This shows the affective nature of the apparently purposeless muscular tension. The case of Annie K. (Case 5) is more instructive. In the stage of deeper stupor she had the automatic type of resistiveness but also outbursts of anger, particularly toward the nurses, striking one of them ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... and Benton wandered from room to room with a seemingly purposeless eye, keenly alert for a black gown, a red rose, and a girl whom he could not find. Von Ritz also was missing, and this ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... the first fine careless rapture of their escape from death disappeared. The lure of loot evaporated. They did not stop their work on "the ship-duffle," but it became aimless and undirected. Their trips into the island seemed a little purposeless. Frank Merrill had to scourge them to patrol the beach, to keep their signal sheets flying, their signal fires burning. The effect upon their mental condition of this loss of animus was immediate. They became perceptibly more serious. Their first camp—it consisted ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... and paid for it. For Oldenhurst had absorbed all these and more until it had become a story of the past, incarnate in stone, greenwood, and flower; it had even drained the life-blood from adjacent hamlets, repaying them with tumuli growths like its own, in the shape of purposeless lodges, quaintly incompetent hospitals and schools, and churches where the inestimable blessing and knowledge of its gospel were taught and fostered. Nor had it dealt more kindly with the gentry within its walls, ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... object; the black shadows of foreshortened cattle rising before him on the plain and arousing the same uneasy sensation of their being waylaying men; the wondering recognition of houses and landmarks he had long been familiar with; his purposeless attempts to recall the circumstances in which he had known them—all these were like a dream. So, too, were the recollections of the night before, the episode with Susy, already mingled and blended ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... himself on the door-step, proclaimed two or three times:—"I have dined well ... I have dined well ... with the air of a judge who renders an impartial decision; after which he leaned against the post and let the smoke of his pipe and the gaze of his small fight-coloured eyes pursue the same purposeless wanderings. The elder Chapdelaine sank deeper and deeper into his chair, and ended by falling asleep; the others smoked and chatted ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... you really can't interpret anything until you are quite sure what it means. You see, I'm feverishly restless by temperament, and accustomed to indulge in all kinds of petty, purposeless activities. They are petty, though the major calls them duties—social duties—and being, I'm afraid, a rather frivolous person in spite of my love of art, they appeal ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... fact, had Hastings tried to bestir himself at something definite in the way of action, Henrietta would have been really disturbed instead of simply pretending to be. She had a good mind, a keen wit that had become bitter with unlicensed indulgence; but she was as indolent and purposeless as her husband. All her energy went in talk about doing something, and every day she had a new scheme, with ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... sunrise. But the greater number are bought and eaten by the loitering crowd from the tray of the fritterman. It is like a vast gitano-camp. The hurrying crowd which is going nowhere, the blazing fires, the cries of the venders, the songs of the majos under the great trees of the Paseo, the purposeless hurly-burly, and above, the steam of the boiling oil and the dust raised by the myriad feet, form together a striking and vivid picture. The city is more than usually quiet. The stir of life is localized in the Prado. The only busy men in town are those who stand by the seething oil-pots and ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... always the way with modern ghost stories—there is no sense or meaning in them. The ghosts appear to people who never knew them, who take no interest in them, as it were, and then they have nothing to say—there is no denouement, it is all purposeless." ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... make us both more just and more generous to remember that during our time of peril as a nation, these very ranks of purposeless men furnished us soldiers and money, and a cheerful faith in the cause, just as these very legions of idle women gave us ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... because of his secret discontent with the Commune itself. He had lost all confidence in its members, he felt it was inefficient, drawn this way and that by so many conflicting elements, losing its head and becoming purposeless and driveling as it saw the near approach of the peril with which it was menaced. Of the social reforms it had pledged itself to it had not been able to accomplish a single one, and it was now quite certain ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... captured a thing that had been so long struggling with death. Groot Willem, who had been for a time highly elated with the prospect of recovering the lost giraffes, was again in great despondence. Much time had been squandered in this purposeless pursuit. ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... forgotten the reason of my quest, forgotten the girl who had sent me on it, forgotten that I was once an erect and vigorous man with other interests than to crawl round for berries like an ape, and lie all day and sleep when once hunger was appeased. And thus I led an invertebrate, purposeless existence. I had warmth, food, and water, and the berries that gave me pleasant dreams, and I wanted nothing more. I took no note of the passing of time weeks, months God knows? even years! may have passed nay must have passed as in a dream, and I might well have died there beside the long-bleached ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... a purposeless way. All my acts are isolated; it would make little difference if they had never ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions. ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... recovery we sought merely a purposeless whirring of machinery. It is important, of course, that every man and woman in the country be able to find work, that every factory run, that business and farming as a whole earn profits. But Government in a democratic ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... You are a young and an ignorant man. Amongst other things you do not know what money will buy. You have your coarse pleasures I do not doubt, which seem sweet to you! Beyond them—what? A tasteless and barbaric display, a vulgar generosity, an ignorant and purposeless prodigality. Bah! How different it is with those who know! There are many things, my young friend, which I learned in my younger days, and amongst them was the knowledge of how to spend money. How to ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to South Africa. I know that I may die in an instant; and though, if dying at sea, I might sink to the depth, where something of Dorothy remains, I would as soon be reduced to ashes and scattered on the shores of this lake that I have known so long. That would be symbolical of my purposeless ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... flimsiest possible pretexts. Almost every child takes a pencil and tries to draw, yet there are many parents who spend thousands of dollars in trying to make great artists of children who have only the most mediocre artistic ability. Mere purposeless drawing of faces and figures is an entirely different thing from the drudgery necessary to become a great artist. The mere writing of little essays and compositions is quite a different thing from the long, hard training necessary to become a writer of any acceptability. Merely because ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... real state of her mind. He had, as it were, taken complete possession of her, by right of the deed of gift which she had made of herself that morning. She had endeavoured to resume the gift, but had altogether failed. She declared to herself that she was weak, impotent, purposeless; but she admitted, on the other hand, that he had displayed more of power than she had ever guessed at his possessing. A woman always loves this display of power in a man, and she felt that she could have loved him had it not been ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... truth,' said John, 'I do not think I was going anywhere. I am afraid I have not yet got over the delight of being back in London again, so I sometimes walk along the streets in rather a purposeless manner.' ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... beyond, you cannot resist the temptation to desert your own chosen road and explore them. You are usually paid for your trouble; consequently, your walk inland always turns out to be one of the most crooked, involved, purposeless, and interesting experiences a body can imagine. There is enough of variety. Sometimes you are in the level open, with marshes thick grown with flag-lances that are ten feet high on the one hand, and potato and onion orchards on the other; next, you are on a hilltop, with the ocean and the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to say that it was not. The struggle represented no great principles, begot no far-reaching consequences. It was not inspired by the "holy glee" with which in Wordsworth's sonnet Liberty fights against a tyrant, but by the faltering boldness, the drifting, purposeless unresolve of statesmen who did not desire it, and by the irrational violence of a Press which did not understand it. It was not a necessary war; its avowed object would have been attained within a few weeks or months by bloodless European concert. It ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... classes, before enthroned corporate combinations made equality before the law a mockery, before the development of our vast material resources restored to the intelligent and energetic few their power over the careless and purposeless many. ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... genuine writing than in a forgery.—While external and internal evidence thus combine to assert the genuineness of these writings, no satisfactory account has been or apparently can be given of them as a forgery of a later date than Ignatius. They would be quite purposeless as such; for they entirely omit all topics which would especially interest any ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... is waiting amongst the reeds, Grown tame in the silence that reigns around, Broken only, now and then, By shy woodpecker or noisy jay, By the far-off watch-dog's muffled bay; But where never the purposeless laughter of men, Or the seething city's murmurous sound Will float up ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... that the mind will become less effective, that life will become dull and purposeless, unless they are constantly thinking and planning and arranging their affairs. I believe that the mind may easily and wisely be free from conscious thought a good deal of the time, and that the greatest progress and development in mind often comes when the thinker is virtually at rest, ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... had so favorably impressed them, had not been altogether uninfluenced by the encounter. Her spirit was of a musing and perhaps somewhat moody character, and the little adventure related in our last chapter, had awakened in her mind a train of vague and purposeless thought, from which she did not strive to disengage herself. She ceased to pursue the direct path back to Charlemont, the moment she had persuaded herself that the strangers had continued on their way; and turning from the beaten ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... the sea, and first thinks of returning when his arms have begun to grow weary. He cleaves the waves with haste, scarcely venturing to cast a glance at the distant shore, feeling with every stroke that his strength is failing and that he is making no headway, until at last, purposeless and cramped, he scarcely has any realization of his position; then suddenly his foot touches the firm bottom, and his arm hugs the first rock on the shore. A fresh reality confronted me, and my sufferings were a dream. There are but few such ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... therefore, furnish a grand penitential mechanism for man. Such, on these principles, is their teleological explanation. In European philosophy there is no equivalent or counterpart of this view. With us animal life is purposeless. Hereafter we shall find that in Egypt, though the doctrine of transmigration must of course have tended to similar suggestions, it became disturbed in its practical application by the base fetich notions ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... the order of events in the long retreat," he says; "it was a nightmare, like being seized by a madman after coming out of a serious illness and forced towards the edge of a precipice." The constant marching, the want of sleep, the restless and (as it sometimes seemed to the men) purposeless backward movement night and day drove them into a fury. The intensity of the warfare, the fierce pressure upon the mental and physical powers of endurance, might well have exercised a mischievous effect upon the men. ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... fit them to struggle with these tempestuous elements. In times like these the faith is the man; and they to whom it is given in larger measure owe a special duty to those who for want of it are faint at heart, uncertain in speech, feeble in effort, and purposeless in aim. ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Nala met. To whom spake Rituparna:— "Joy go with thee and her, happily joined. But say, Nishadha, wrought I any jot Wrongful to thee, whilst sojourning unknown Within my walls? If any word or deed, Purposed or purposeless, hath vexed thee, friend, For one and all thy pardon grant to me!" And Nala answered: "Never act or word, The smallest, Raja, lingers to excuse! If this were otherwise, thy slave was I, And might not question, but must pardon thee. Yet ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... intent. Nor do they inflict any wounds upon their limbs; it is the mind that feels the direful stroke. She had brought, too, with her a monstrous composition of liquid poison, the foam of the mouth of Cerberus, and the venom of Echidna;[64] and purposeless aberrations, and the forgetfulness of a darkened understanding, and crime, and tears, and rage, and the love of murder. All these were blended together; and, mingled with fresh blood she had boiled them in a hollow vessel of brass, stirred about with {a stalk of} green hemlock. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... growing turbulent, and changed to ink Around the village center, till, at last, The whirling, gurgling vortex would engulf A maddened multitude in drunkenness. And this was in my thought (the while my heart Was palpitating with its nameless fear), As, wrapped in vaguest dreams, and purposeless, I laced my shoe and gazed upon the sky. Then strange determination stirred in me; And, turning sharply on my chair, I said, "Edward, where'er you go to-day, I go!" If I had smitten him upon the face, It had not tingled with a hotter flame. He turned upon me with a look of hate— A something ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... must have read as much in my face. But he kept up the strange and, to me, purposeless comedy ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... many drawing-rooms and known many women, more or less intimately, but he had never, in all his purposeless Bohemian life, come across exactly this type of woman—a type in which refinement counts for more than beauty, culture for more than grace. With a sudden leap of memory, he recalled some scenes of which he had been witness years before, ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Scoville was not in sight. The moment was the one when he had quit looking for Reuther and wandered away up the ravine. I have thought since that perhaps the glimpse he had got of his little one peering from the scene of his crime may have stirred even his guilty conscience and sent him off on this purposeless ramble; but, however this was, I did not see him or anybody else as I took my way leisurely down towards the bridge, whittling at the stick and thinking of what I should say to Mr. Etheridge when I met him. And now for Fate's final and most fatal touch! Nothing ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... NESBIT, of which "The Ebony Frame" (which should have been called "The Speaking Likeness,") "The Mystery of the Semi-Detached," "Life-size, in Marble," and "A Mass for the Dead," are the best, the last-mentioned being the only one that ends, as all otherwise purposeless tales should end, happily. The Stories are grim enough, in all conscience, but they are told in a hearty sort of fashion, which, while relieving them of some of their weirdness, is calculated to impress the reader with an idea of the honesty and bona fides ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... right,' muttered Reardon. 'Do as you think best.' Amy was in her most practical mood, and would not linger for purposeless talk. A few minutes, ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the faintest indication, and yet it was enough to tell me that the great malignant brain was there, as the gentlest tremors of the edges of the web remind one of the foul spider which lurks in the centre. Petty thefts, wanton assaults, purposeless outrage—to the man who held the clue all could be worked into one connected whole. To the scientific student of the higher criminal world no capital in Europe offered the advantages which London then possessed. But now——" He shrugged his shoulders ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the vocation of taking care of me, which you repudiated with scorn—in fact refused to entertain it seriously at all. Of course there may have been other grounds, but the one you laid stress on was that I was lazy and purposeless, and that if you ever did take up such a vocation it would be to take care of some one you could respect. I don't say for an instant that I approach to that altitude, but at least I may say I am no longer an idler, that I have worked hard, ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... once for all in the mind of a Creator, or gradually in the creation itself, which from the first monad or protoplasm to the last of the primates, or man, is not, I suppose, to be looked on as altogether causeless, meaningless, purposeless; think of him only as man (and man means the thinker), with his mind yet lying fallow, though full of germs—germs of which I hold as strongly as ever no trace has ever, no trace will ever, be discovered anywhere but in man; think of the Sun awakening the eyes of man ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... thy cold life be? What boots it to be emperor over all? His absence o'er thy visible empery Throws a dim pall. Now are thy nights widowed of love and kisses, Now are thy days robbed of the night's awaiting, Now are thy lips purposeless and thy blisses No longer of the size of thy life, mating Thy empire ...
— Antinous: A Poem • Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa
... themselves face to face with a will and a power stronger than their own; they lost in independence, but they gained far more than they lost. They were the basis on which the State was built up; they no longer wasted their military prowess in purposeless feuds or in mercenary service; in the Prussian army and administration they found full scope for their ambition, and when the victories of Frederick the Great had raised Prussia to the rank of a European Power, the nobles ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... paying auspicious attention to my horses, contraband, and saddle-bags. I was greatly relieved, on going out, to find that the warrior was too stupidly drunk, to be actuated by anything beyond an idle, purposeless curiosity. So, after receiving directions as to where I was likely to rejoin my companions, I set my face northeast again, and rode out into the deepening darkness with feelings not much less sullen than the black ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... wonders differ from Normal Science in this—they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous. They lead on to no grand results; and therefore the world does not heed, and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I saw or heard, a man, human as myself, was the remote originator; and I believe unconsciously to himself as to the exact effects produced, ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... obviously shallow and vain, a slave to those poor "man-of-the-world" passions—ostentation and cynicism and skill at vices old as mankind and tedious as a treadmill, the commonplace routine of the idle and foolish and purposeless. A clever, handsome fellow, but the more pitiful that he was by nature above the uses to which he ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... birth and doom, Whose sound and motion not alone declare, But are their whole of being! If the breath Be Life itself, and not its task and tent, If even a soul like Milton's can know death; O Man! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant, Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes! Surplus of Nature's dread activity, Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finished vase, Retreating slow, with meditative pause, She formed with restless hands unconsciously. Blank accident! nothing's anomaly! If rootless thus, ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... "For a purposeless and weary life; for an empty heart and a corroded faith," said her lover bitterly; "for an indifference to men, amounting almost to aversion; for a trifling estimate of women, amounting almost to contempt; for wasted abilities and neglected opportunities,—for all these, Dora, I ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... verdict upon Goldsmith's greatest poem, one thing is as significant as it is certain. These poetic yearnings were long in his heart ere he gave them utterance. A wayward, careless lad, heedless of all responsibility, he seems purposeless and perplexing to the last degree, yet the profoundest meditations of his life moved his soul. The very spell of poetry was upon him. This Divine revealing may have accounted for that outward want of earnestness of the character, and the career that troubled ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... interested in their surroundings and curiously prying into all that came within the field of their observation, they remained apathetic or dull, or dozed off to sleep, responding only to the sensations or impressions of the moment, or varying their listlessness with restless and purposeless wanderings to and fro. They had lost to all appearance the faculty of attentive and intelligent observation." This is precisely what the true cerebral psychology indicates. The imaginary muscular powers were not at all detected, for the section of the front lobe ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... thickly grated window. Looking out from where he sat, he could detect neither men nor houses nor trees—nothing but four rectangular patches of deep blue. The sea! Often had he wondered about the sea, and why it was there. It had ever been an enigma to him, this purposeless mass of water. Not even good to drink. He knew nothing of those fables of the pagans—of old Poseidon and white-armed Leucothea and the blithe crew of Triton and silver-footed Thetis moving upon the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... follies, . ." he answered softly.. "And I should perchance discover the small hidden secret of things—the little, simple unguessed clue, that would unravel the mystery and meaning of Existence! For can it be that the majestic marvel of created Nature is purposeless in its design?—that we are doomed to think thoughts which can never be realized?—to dream dreams that perish in the dreaming? ... to build up hopes without foundation? ... to call upon God when there is no God? ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... knows that uncongenial, badly-planned, disconnected, or purposeless effort fatigues, worries, and weakens both body and mind: is it difficult to believe the converse—that thorough, methodical, and helpful activity stimulates ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... discharge of pistols close at one's ear. The rain, to be sure, was quite sufficient to damp any joyous ebullition of feeling; but the next day, when the rain had ceased, and when the streets were still thronged with people, there was the same heavy, purposeless strolling from place to place, with no more alacrity of spirit than while it rained. The English do not know how to rejoice; and, in their present circumstances, to say the truth, have not much to rejoice for. We soon came home; but I believe it was ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... which threaten it with death by thirst. How long intelligence has existed upon Mars, if intelligence there be, no one can say; nor yet what its future will be. It would seem probable that our own fate must be similar, but it is far removed. And though the Whole may seem wanton, purposeless, stupid, we are very little folk; we see very dimly; we see only what we have the capacity to see; and there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of the wisest of us. So also there are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered. We are ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Grimm was an utterly different type from his chief. He was younger, perhaps thirty-one or two, physically well proportioned, a little above the average height, with regular features and listless, purposeless eyes—a replica of a hundred other young men who dawdle idly in the windows of their clubs and watch the world hurry by. His manner was languid; his dress showed ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... observing. His distress was pitiful. It was there in his kindly eyes, in the purposeless fashion in which he fingered his pipe. He was torn between two desires. One was to continue talking at all costs. The other was precipitate, ignominious flight from the sight of the other's voiceless despair. He knew Steve, and well enough he realized what the strong wall the man had set up ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... will wins victory and the weak will breaks down. Between the ability to control one's thoughts and the inability to control them lies all the difference between right actions and wrong actions; between withstanding temptation and yielding to it; between an inefficient purposeless life and a life of purpose and endeavor; between success and failure. For we act in accordance with those things which our thought rests upon. Suppose two lines of thought represented by A and B, ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... miles from the Ayrshire shore. There stands the cove, lonely as a foundling, proud as Cheops. But, like the battered brains surmounting the Giant of Gath, its haughty summit is crowned by a desolate castle, in and out of whose arches the aerial mists eddy like purposeless phantoms, thronging the soul of some ruinous genius, who, even in overthrow, ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... for all I knew he had made it up as he went along; that no tons of rust are scraped off the Menai Bridge, and that the rival tradesmen and Mr. Whiteley were creatures of the poet's brain. Instantly I conceived consuming respect for the man who was so circumstantial, so monotonous, so entirely purposeless a liar. With him it must have been a case of art for art's sake. The joke sustained so gravely through a respected lifetime was of that order of joke which is shared with omniscience. But what struck ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... most unmeaning and purposeless murder imaginable. Even as I write down its well-remembered particulars there comes again the sense of its strangeness, its pointlessness, its incompatibility with any of the neat and definite theories people hold about life and the meaning of the world. I did this thing ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... acquisition to either party. He that sitteth in the heavens must laugh sometimes at what man calls worship. This Pantheon is, as one might suppose from its history, a hybrid between a church and a theatre, and of course good for neither—purposeless and aimless. The Madeleine is another of these hybrid churches, begun by D'Ivry as a church, completed as a temple to victory by Napoleon, and on second thoughts, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... down the single street of Heart's Desire, a street as straggling and purposeless as his own misdirected life—a wavering lane through the poor habitations of a Land of Oblivion. Longer he looked, and stronger the conviction grew. "No, no," he said, clenching his hand; ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... there, an hour earlier, was by no means lost in purposeless marvelling. He boasted a certain aptitude for mechanics, perhaps legitimately inherited from that obscure origin of his, largely fostered by the requirements of his craft; into the bargain, he had been privileged ere now to gain ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... we can understand something of the processes which are at work for good or ill. We can in a measure trace whether these processes are making slowly but surely for righteousness, or whether all the sin and the suffering are aimless and purposeless, a voice that cries ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... apparently engaged with anything rather than the pain upon the corner-sofa, whose leave-taking he had mercilessly marred. Frederic dumb and furious; Mabel equally dumb and amazed to alarm, knowing as she did that her brother's actions were never purposeless, sat still, their hands clasped stealthily amid the folds of Mabel's dress; their eyes saying the dear and passionate things forbidden to their tongues. Neither would feign indifference, or attempt a lame dialogue upon other topics than those that filled their minds. ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... applicability of my methods to this class of offender; methods of quiet extermination without fuss, public disorder or risk to the precious lives of the police. But beyond these there was another reason for my interest. The murder of my wife had been a purposeless, unnecessary crime, committed by some wretch to whom human life was a thing of no consideration. There was an analogy in the circumstances that seemed to connect that murder with this type of miscreant. It was even possible that one of these very villains ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... prospect of joy was vanished in a drear mist of broken hopes. Here was John Cather departed in sore agony, for which was no cure that ever I heard of or could conceive. Here was John Cather gone with the wreck of a soul. A cynical, purposeless, brooding life he must live to his last day: there was no healing in all the world for his despair. Here with us—to whom, in the years of our intercourse, he gave nothing but gladness—his ruin had been wrought. 'Twas not by wish of us; but there was small comfort in the reflection, since ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... afraid that if he stayed around the hotel some one might ask him to register. He went, therefore, to the postoffice and stood just outside the door with his hands still in his pockets and the purposeful look on his face; whereas no man was ever more completely adrift and purposeless than was Jack Corey. Now that he had lost himself from the world—buried himself up here in these wonderfully green mountains where no one would ever think of looking for him—there seemed nothing ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... MEN.—the purposeless and aimless life of any number of effeminate and sickly young men, is to be distinctly attributed to these sins. The large class of mentally impotent "ne'er-do-wells" are being constantly recruited and added ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... No wonder this purposeless lullaby is satirised in the orthodox libretto of Punch's Opera or the Dominion of Fancy, for Punch, having sung it, throws the child out ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... his boyhood—to the time when his shoes were patched and his feet chilblained, but all the world was waiting for him to be a man to do him honor. If he could sit for an hour with the old man on the beach, would it bring the boyish feeling back again? He was conscious of a purposeless temptation—unreasonable as that which he had felt at the edge of a precipice to throw himself over. Nonsense! The committee would be waiting; there were appointments for every hour of his stay in Philadelphia; there was the leading article on the situation ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... to consist of boggy soil covered with a rank growth of coarse grass, reeds, and stunted bush, sparsely dotted here and there with a few gnarled and unwholesome-looking trees, the whole intersected by a labyrinth of canals filled with stagnant water, which wound hither and thither in a most purposeless and bewildering fashion. That insect life abounded there was manifest at the most cursory glance, for great clouds of midges or flies could be seen hovering in the air in every direction, while Earle's surmise as to the presence of alligators was abundantly ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... in July. The Northern General Sigel, who commanded in the lower part of the Shenandoah Valley, protecting the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, had marched southward in June in pursuance of a subsidiary part of Grant's scheme, but in a careless and rather purposeless manner. General Early, detached by Lee to deal with him, defeated him; outmanoeuvred and defeated General Hunter, who was sent to supersede him; overwhelmed with superior force General Lew Wallace, who stood in his way further on; and upon July 11 appeared before Washington itself. ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... philosophical view rather than another. I have nowhere expressed an opinion as to the comparative philosophical value of the systems of Sankara and Rmnuja; not because I have no definite opinions on this point, but because to introduce them into a critical enquiry would be purposeless ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... with books, pictures, talk? No, because it is all a purposeless passing of dreary hours. Before, there was always an object ahead of me, a light to which I made my way; and all the pleasant incidents of life were things to guide me, and to beguile the plodding path. Now I am adrift; I need ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the little gods of our miniature world. In his second year he had gained a position; most people spoke well of him, and liked him. It only rested with PETER himself to maintain what he had gained, and to enter on life with troops of friends. A few moments of purposeless folly were sufficient ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 6, 1892 • Various
... the street, purposeless now and bereft, he spied a recruiting party at the door of a public-house; and on coming nearer, found, by one of those strange coincidences which do occur in life, and which have possibly their root in a hidden and wondrous law, that it was a party, perhaps a remnant, of the very regiment ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... country, it was balanced by the pay and emoluments of a Brigadiership. Reluctant to allow Burnside quietly, a Caesar's opportunity to "cover his baldness with laurels," his whimsical movements, now galloping furiously and purposeless from front to rear, and from rear to front of his command, cursing the officers,—and that for fancied neglect of duty,—poorly concealed the workings of ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... came instantly. He had left indecision behind when he agreed to the Arab's conditions, and it was surely better to try whatever fixed plan the other had in mind than remain in Massowah, a prey to hopeless, purposeless agony. For he knew now what it would mean to him if Irene Fenshawe were reft from his life, and the knowledge made his eyes blaze, and sent the passionate ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... I was alone. Dead! dead! And I went away with my heart cold and sad, and my future all dark and purposeless. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... she did not flinch. She knew that Chauvelin had spoken the truth; the man was too earnest, too blindly devoted to the misguided cause he had at heart, too proud of his countrymen, of those makers of revolutions, to stoop to low, purposeless falsehoods. ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy |
