"Slovenliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... too, that only men are shabby-genteel; a woman is always either dirty and slovenly in the extreme, or neat and respectable, however poverty-stricken in appearance. A very poor man, 'who has seen better days,' as the phrase goes, is a strange compound of dirty-slovenliness and wretched attempts ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... usually a SYMPTOM - of selfishness, vanity, greed, slovenliness, or some other vicious tendency which a man cannot afford to tolerate. Refusing to give vent in speech to these undesirable states of mind helps to atrophy them, while every expression of them insures them a deeper ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... unusually high, and his person large and well proportioned, but he was rendered uncouth in his appearance by the scars which his scrophulous disease had impressed upon him, by convulsive motions, and by the slovenliness of his garb. His eyes, of which the sight was very imperfect, were of a light grey colour, yet had withal a wildness and penetration, and at times a fierceness of expression, that could not be encountered without a sensation of fear. He had a strange way of making inarticulate ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... of Pam must look to her laurels. Slovenliness is the aptest word to apply to the workmanship of Maria (Hutchinson), the latest heroine of the Baroness Von Hutten. Maria has the air of having been contracted for, while that fastidious overseer who lurks at the elbow of every honest craftsman, condemning ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... admit of this being done. The Kitchen Garden is much too frequently seen in a disreputable state, even in pretentious places, and where flower-gardening is done very well. But well-executed work in one department by no means justifies slovenliness in another. Vacant spaces of ground will need digging, but this operation should, if possible, be left to a labourer, who, for the sake of a small remuneration, would probably be very glad to do it after his ordinary working hours. ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... few people might be hungry after a late dinner, she should always have a good supply of cakes and sweetmeats on a side table, and that some cold meat and a bottle of wine would often be found acceptable. Notwithstanding the imperfection of his eyesight, and his own slovenliness, he was a critical observer of dress and demeanour, and found fault without ceremony or compunction when any of his canons of taste or propriety were infringed. Several amusing examples are ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... almost inevitably grow up into the thorns and weeds of life. If the child could but grasp the bare truth, if one could but pull away the veil of the years and show him the careless natural joy ending in the dingy, broken slovenliness of failure! But one cannot; and perhaps life would lose all its ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... people glad to be singing together, the contagious interest of a well-filled house, and the simple directness of the preacher were all of a piece. Here was no effort to ape the forms of a cathedral, but neither was there any careless, cheap slovenliness. And assuredly ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... repasts were trifles, passovers, unceremonious and irregular peckings, begun and finished in a few moments. And if Marthe was always untidy in her person, Christine, up till three in the afternoon, was also untidy. They went about the flat in a wonderful state of unkempt and insecure slovenliness. And sometimes Marthe might be lolling in the sitting-room over the illustrations in La Vie Parisienne, which was part of the apparatus of the flat, while Christine was in the tiny kitchen washing gloves as ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... about near the chimney, intending, if the strip of molding were there, to take it upstairs and nail it on where it belonged, for one of the good things which the scout life had taught Tom was that broken furniture and crooked nails sticking out spell carelessness and slovenliness. ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... around him, and, sooth to say, comparatively unaccustomed as he must have been to the use of the language, much more handsomely than they. In truth, Redclyffe was struck and amused with the rudeness, the slovenliness, the inartistic quality of the English speakers, who rather seemed to avoid grace and neatness of set purpose, as if they would be ashamed of it. Nothing could be more ragged than these utterances which they called speeches; so patched, and ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is not good for man to drink alone, and Grief threw sharp scrutiny into his pass-ing glance. He saw a well-built young man of thirty, well-featured, well-dressed, and evidently, in the world's catalogue, a gentleman. But in the faint hint of slovenliness, in the shaking, eager hand that spilled the liquor, and in the nervous, vacillating eyes, Grief read the unmistakable marks of ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... Sancho; for disordered attire is a sign of an unstable mind, unless indeed the slovenliness and slackness is to be set down to craft, as was the common opinion in the case of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... himself, and was taking extraordinary pains to destroy all traces of the natural slovenliness of his appearance. This was precisely what I expected. A vagabond like Mr. Jay knows the importance of giving himself a respectable look when he is going to run the risk of changing a stolen bank-note. At five minutes past ten o'clock he had given the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... steadiness and regularity, that every man may have a glass of wine upon his head and not a drop will be spilt; attempt the same thing with a French regiment, and wine and glass would soon be on the ground, and in all their military proceeding there is an apparent slovenliness and irregularity, a want of closeness and compactness in their movements; with regard to outward appearance, the National Guard have the advantage on a field day, as there is a sort of esprit du corps between ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... the mellifluousness of her manner left her when she was engaged in teaching. She put up with no nonsense. Her voice became a little peremptory, and instinctively she suppressed inattention and corrected slovenliness. She knew what she was about and put ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... slovenliness about Emmeline Nash. Her gray dress was fresh and neat, a tiny bunch of spring flowers was fastened in it, a ribbon of delicate blue was round her neck. As she came forward with a slight flush on her cheek, her head carried defiantly and the sunlight shining on her pale hair, Miss ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... dish into a plate, which the steward passed on to the first-mate, "I see a rope's-end hangin' down thaar, too, like a bight of the signal halliards or the boom-sheet, which some lubber hez let tow overboard. Hev it made fast an' shipshape. I hate slovenliness like pizen!" ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... itself even before the death of Chapman, which happened in 1634. But I cannot believe that the author of Bussy d'Ambois (where the verse is rude enough but never lax) and the contemporary or elder of Shakespere, Marlowe, and all the great race, could ever have been guilty of the slovenliness which, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewn with gray sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a voluminous funnel; an old pine desk, with a three-legged stool beside it; two or three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in all his arrangements and orderings. He disliked leaving things vague or undetermined and never allowed slovenliness or makeshifts. He had a well-defined code to regulate his relations with others and theirs with him. In this he was different from the generality of his countrymen. With the rest of us a little carelessness ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... forms we find in his Chinese vase painteress ... an ostentatious slovenliness of execution ... objects as much out of perspective as the great blue vase in ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... and Hamirpur districts of Bundelkhand sugar-cane is now grown only in the small areas where good loam soil is found. The method of cultivation differs in several respects from that practised in the Gangetic plains, but the editor never observed the slovenliness of which the author complains. He always found the cultivation in sugar- cane villages to be extremely careful and laborious. Ancient stone mills are sometimes found in black soil country, and it is ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Winstanley gravely. "There is a slovenliness, so to speak, about the present arrangement of things, and a great deal of useless expense; every small town with its half-a-dozen churches and chapels of different denominations—Episcopalians, Wesleyans, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Primitive Methodists. Now on your plan ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... is apt to suppose that his business is merely to describe facts without adding anything out of his own imaginative faculty, that he may bring his characters on the stage in their daily garb, in the dirty slovenliness with which they go about dreaming or acting in their own petty sphere,[23] and so he overcharges with technicalities or trivial particulars. Nevertheless one may say that the poetry of action has found better methods since it shook off the influence of fantastic romance, and is distinctly improving: ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... duty—good in place, but never, as I remember, literally commanded—from the charge of an undecent formality. Rightly taken, sir, that paper was not against graces, but want of grace; not against the ceremony, but the carelessness and slovenliness so often observed ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... now be permitted to visit his own Academy, and our exhibitions in general, he would be startled at the excess of ornament, in defiance of his rule of repose, succeeding the slovenliness of his own day. Whatever be the subject, history, landscape, or familiar life, it superabounds both in objects and colour. In established academies, the faults of genius are more readily adopted than their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... in July. But he was evidently a deliberate pedestrian, and not a recent deposit of the proceeding stage-coach; and although his stout walking-shoes were covered with dust, he had neither the habitual slouch and slovenliness of the tramp, nor the hurried fatigue and growing negligence of an involuntary wayfarer. His clothes, which were strong and serviceable, were better fitted for their present usage than the ordinary garments of the Californian ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... stubbornness to defend him against impositions at home or in college; but the love for adventure and the strenuous life, that characterised Weed's capricious youth, were entirely absent. As a boy, Weed, untidy even to slovenliness, explored the mountain and the valley, drifted among the resolute lads of the town, and lingered in gardens and orchards, infinitely lovable and capable of the noblest tenderness. On the contrary, Seward was precise, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... know that these were the gifts, these were the graces, of one from whose tongue our rough English came music such as I should never hear from any other. In this speech there was nothing of our slipshod American slovenliness, but a truly Italian conscience and an artistic sense of beauty ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... is best exhibited in the Home. The first condition of a happy home, where good influences prevail over bad ones, is Comfort. Where there are carking cares, querulousness, untidiness, slovenliness, and dirt, there can be little comfort either for man or woman. The husband who has been working all day, expects to have something as a compensation for his toil. The least that his wife can do for him, ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... regular cavalry encamped in the centre of the city. These troops were especially on home-service—guard-mounting, orderly duty, &c.—with no field or picket work whatever. There was no more excuse for slovenliness than might have been allowed to a regiment in huts at Aldershott or Shorncliffe. I wish that the critical eye of the present Cavalry Inspector-General could inspect that encampment; if he preserved his wonted ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... perpetual repairs. It has not at all the air of once knowing better days. It began life hopelessly; and though the mayor and common council and board of aldermen, with ten righteous men, should daily march through it, the broom of official and private virtue could not sweep it clean of its slovenliness. But one of its idle turnings does suddenly end in a virtuous court: here Every Lane may come, when it indulges in vain aspirations for a more respectable character, and take refuge in the quiet demeanor of Every Court. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... if prominent, indicates a person who is generous, loves power, and is brilliant in conversation; if a woman, she desires to shine and be a social leader. When not well developed, it indicates lack of self-esteem, slovenliness and ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... to day, as her wardrobe fell into confusion and disrepair. She felt that she must rise to the situation, must teach herself, must save herself from impending dowdiness and slovenliness. But her brain seemed to be paralyzed. She did not know how or where to begin to learn. She often in secret gave way to the futility ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... turned into the stalwart Andrei Ivanovitch Byelovzorov. And it was not only his exterior that was transformed. The modest spruceness, the sedateness and tidiness of his earlier years, was replaced by a careless swagger and slovenliness quite insufferable; he rolled from side to side as he walked, lolled in easy-chairs, put his elbows on the table, stretched and yawned, and behaved rudely to his aunt and the servants. 'I'm an artist,' he would say; 'a free Cossack! That's our ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... with so little attention, with such slovenliness, or so without verification—albeit with so much confidence and word-painting—as the eyes of the men and women whose faces have been made memorable by their works. The describer generally takes the first colour that seems to him probable. The grey eyes ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... picturesque. It rather indicates than evinces scholarship. Perhaps only the scholastic, or, more properly, those accustomed to look narrowly at the structure of phrases, would be willing to acquit her of ignorance of grammar—would be willing to attribute her slovenliness to disregard of the shell in anxiety for the kernel; or to waywardness, or to affectation, or to blind reverence to Carlyle—would be able to detect, in her strange and continual inaccuracies, a capacity for ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... rolls and butter, and whole breakfast apparatus were all in such decorum, and his behaviour was so courteous, that Colonel Stopford was quite surprised, and wondered at his having heard so much said of Johnson's slovenliness and roughness. I have preserved nothing of what passed, except that Crosbie pleased him much by talking learnedly of alchymy, as to which Johnson was not a positive unbeliever, but rather delighted in considering what progress had actually ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... to resist them. Mavick had visibly aged during the year. It was only in his office that he maintained anything of the spruce appearance and 'sang froid' which had distinguished the diplomatist and the young adventurer. At home he had fallen into the slovenliness that marks a disappointed old age. Was Mrs. Mavick peevish and unreasonable? Very likely. And had she not reason to be? Was she, as a woman, any more likely to be reconciled to her fate when her mirror told her, with pitiless reflection, that she ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... had enjoyed its special success. . . . We venture to think that, with his love of intellectual self-indulgence, had he found novel-writing really enjoyable, he would never have doubted at all. But there comes in the difference between him and Scott, whom he condemns for the slovenliness of hasty workmanship. Scott, in his best days, sat down to his desk and let the swift pen take its course in inspiration that seemed to come without an effort. Even when racked with pains, and groaning in agony, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... There was steadfast courage in the bronzed faces, and most of those who sat about the long tables had kindly eyes. The stamp of a clean life of effort was upon them, and there was a certain lithe gracefulness in the unconscious poses of the straight-limbed men. There was no sign of limp slovenliness about them. Even in their relaxation they were intent and alert, and, as she watched them, Laura realized something of their restless activity and daring optimism. They believe in anything that is good enough ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... people capable of accepting Mr. Mill's social principles, and the theoretical corollaries they contain, who yet would condemn his manly plainness and austere consistency in acting on them. The too common tendency in us all to moral slovenliness, and a lazy contentment with a little flaccid protest against evil, finds a constant rebuke in his career. The indomitable passion for justice which made him strive so long and so tenaciously to bring to judgment a public official, whom he conceived to be a great criminal, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... rooms at the top of a house in Bloomsbury, one for his books, one for his work, and one for himself—for sleeping and bathing. Unlike most men who are indifferent to the outside world he was clean, because he found that slovenliness impaired his efficiency, and took the edge off his energy. He was as fastidious mentally as a trained ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... whether verbal or visual, is as notorious as their sense of beauty. This becomes less surprising when we reflect that the former includes the latter. The fact is, critics, with their habitual slovenliness, apply the term "sensibility" to two different things. Sometimes they are talking about the artist's imagination, and sometimes about his use of the instrument: sometimes about his reactions, and sometimes—in the case of painters—about the tips of his fingers. It is true that both qualities ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... a joint ill-fitted, a tracing clumsily done, anything to which a man had set his hand and not set it aptly, moved him to shame and anger. With such a character, he would feel but little drudgery at Fairbairn's. There would be something daily to be done, slovenliness to be avoided, and a higher mark of skill to be attained; he would chip and file, as he had practiced scales, impatient of his own imperfection, but ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ignorance not uncommon in any day, and nearly universal in Nicolas Poussin's day. 'The great master of elevated ideal landscape,' Mr Ruskin calls Nicolas Poussin, and illustrates his excellence in one respect, after contrasting it with the slovenliness of Sir Joshua Reynolds, by describing the vine in Poussin's 'Nursing of Jupiter,' in ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... become a soldier in the Low Countries, but that, having to consult the learned Glanville as to legal proceedings taken against him which endangered his patrimony, he was persuaded to become a law student. He again resumed a quiet method of life, and owing to the slovenliness of his dress narrowly escaped being shipped to the West Indies by a press-gang. He was called in 1637, and already enjoying a considerable reputation at once acquired a lucrative practice. He devilled ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... whose need for preliminary preparation was reduced to its lowest terms, and who himself was almost an instantaneous extemporizer, recognized the need for careful planning by young speakers and warned them against "the temptation to slovenliness in workmanship, to careless and inaccurate statement, to repetition, to violation ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... of shapeless old Romeo slippers, his ordinary business waistcoat and trousers. He was wearing neither tie nor collar, and a short, black pipe was between his fingers. We had evidently caught the household stripped of "lugs," and sunk in the down-at-the-heel slovenliness which it called "comfort." Joe was crimson with confusion, and was using his free hand to stroke, alternately, his shiny bald head and his heavy brown mustache. He got himself together sufficiently, after a few seconds, to disappear into his den. When he came out again, pipe and ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... orders, ought to have been at work at the thrashing machine. But it appeared that the carpenter was repairing the harrows, which ought to have been repaired before Lent. This was very annoying to Levin. It was annoying to come upon that everlasting slovenliness in the farm work against which he had been striving with all his might for so many years. The hurdles, as he ascertained, being not wanted in winter, had been carried to the cart-horses' stable; and there broken, as they were of light ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... and slovenliness. I know what you mean. My father thinks 'tis all nonsense in me, but his profession has made him insensible to such things, and he fancies every one else is the same! Now, Margaret, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... Exact nothing less than the best in a man. Tolerate no slovenliness. Deal laziness a sharp rebuke. The great majority of your men are doing their level best. Let them know that this is what you expect, but at the same time you appreciate them ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... in what might be called a state of ferment the singer is only anxious to produce tones, and diction slips by the wayside. The appreciative listener should be able to know whether a lack of diction on the singer's part means immaturity or simply slovenliness. ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... conditions of service under a broiling sun; and, until the advent of Abercromby, only slight changes took place either in the uniform or the time of drills. Dr. Pinckard, in his account of this enterprise, mentions cases of gross stupidity, slovenliness, and even of dishonesty on the part of army officials in those colonies;[378] and it is clear that to this cause the long death-roll was largely due. The following figures at the close of 1794 ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... by a countenance; because we imperceptibly lose sight of the national character, when we become more intimate with individuals. It is not then useless or presumptuous to note, that, when I first entered Paris, the striking contrast of riches and poverty, elegance and slovenliness, urbanity and deceit, every where caught my eye, and saddened my soul; and these impressions are still the foundation of my remarks on the manners, which flatter the senses, more than they interest the heart, and yet excite more ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... penalty for his transgressions. I never intended that the work in question should be taken as history; and I should have made that point clear in an introduction, bearing my name, but that I was unwilling to take responsibility for the literary slovenliness, which was unavoidable through my haste in writing, and through Mr. D. A. Rose's hurry in publishing, the work. It occupied me only seventeen days; and I did not see ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... purposely refrained from speaking about the physical interpretation of space- and time-data in the case of the general theory of relativity. As a consequence, I am guilty of a certain slovenliness of treatment, which, as we know from the special theory of relativity, is far from being unimportant and pardonable. It is now high time that we remedy this defect; but I would mention at the outset, that this matter lays no small claims on the patience ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... quickly absorb the gaseous emanations from the patient, and become unfit for the purpose which they were intended to serve. Their presence gives the room an untidy appearance, suggestive of filth and slovenliness, and imparts to the patient a feeling of loathing and ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... The damp, mouldy, dingy cellar-kitchen, the cold, windy, desolate attic, devoid of any comfort, where the domestics are doomed to pass their whole time, are witnesses to what such families consider economy. Economy in the view of some is undisguised slipshod slovenliness in the home-circle for the sake of fine clothes to be shown abroad; it is undisguised hard selfishness to servants and dependents, counting their every approach to comfort a needless waste,—grudging the Roman-Catholic cook her cup of tea at dinner on Friday, when ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... States in showing the natives how life can be lived safely and healthily in tropical jungles. Yet the lesson will not be learned, and on the heels of the last canal builder will return all the old slovenliness and disease, and the native will sink back into just what he would have ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... is a defect of character rather than virtue, and often denotes indolence and slovenliness. Every woman should aim to make herself look as well as possible with the means at her command. Among the rich, a fondness for dress promotes exertion and activity of the mental powers, cultivates a correct taste and fosters industry and ingenuity among those ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... for space in such close quarters was great fun for lads accustomed to roomy houses, and careless, almost to slovenliness, in the matter of keeping things in place. Absurd as these details may seem, they were all parts, and very important parts, in the life and training of that mighty host that carried the destiny of the country in its discipline ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... bread, with onions as a relish. Every thing prospers in house and field. The house is no work of art, but an architect might learn symmetry from it. Care is taken of the field that it shall not be left disorderly, and waste or go to ruin through slovenliness or neglect; and, in return, grateful Ceres wards off damage from the produce, that the high-piled sheaves may gladden the heart of the husbandman. Here hospitality still holds good; every one who has but imbibed mother's milk is welcome. The bread-pantry, ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... the poor, wearied, and limp-looking baby wearily on the other arm, dirty, drabbled, and forlorn, with the firelight playing upon her features no longer fresh or young, but still refined and delicate, and even in her grotesque slovenliness still bearing a faint reminiscence of birth and breeding, it was not to be wondered that I did not fall into excessive raptures over the barbarian's kindness. Emboldened by my sympathy, she told me how she had given up, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... woman's duty to set herself off as much as possible," he would say to the long-suffering Anna, and then he transposed a certain saying, "If you can't be handsome, be as handsome as you can;" and he would hold forth on the immorality of slovenliness. ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... commodious easy-chairs and sofas; but the truth is, that they find it much more commodious to avoid the trouble of inventing and making them.... Nor did the inhabitants exhibit much less simplicity and moderation; or, to speak more properly, slovenliness and penury in their dress than in their furniture.... The distance at which they are from the Cape may, indeed, be some excuse for their having no other earthenware or china in their houses but what was cracked or broken; but this, methinks, should ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... made beds, swept and dusted dormitories, and all that; but each girl was supposed to attend to her own personal belongings; slovenliness was frowned upon ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... Master's gown, but in a surplice. The whole character of the service was changed; you could not say it was high even now, for high-church Theobald could never under any circumstances become, but the old easy-going slovenliness, if I may say so, was gone for ever. The orchestral accompaniments to the hymns had disappeared while my hero was yet a boy, but there had been no chanting for some years after the harmonium had been introduced. While Ernest was ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... enunciation is another. A person articulates the sounds of a language; he enunciates the syllables and words. A clear and distinct enunciation is as necessary as the perfect articulation on which it is based. Indistinct enunciation comes from a natural slovenliness of mind, from nervousness, haste ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... it is one of Field's lost works," I must take leave to dissent. Field is the author of two comedies, "A Woman is a Weathercock" and "Amends for Ladies," and he assisted Massinger in the "Fatal Dowry." His comedies are well-constructed, bright, and airy. There is no slovenliness in the workmanship, and success is attained by honest, straightforward endeavour. It seems to me quite incredible that the author of those two admirable comedies should be responsible for the gloomy, ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... between passive submission to island laziness, shiftlessness, slovenliness, dirt, and active assertion of Ohio vim. Sick of vermin and slime, I would take pail, scrubbing brush and lye, and fall to; sick of it all, I would get a Summit county breakfast, old fashioned pan cakes for old times' sake; sick of the native laundress who cleansed ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... necessary to continue to study single pieces, industriously and artistically, and with great exactness; for otherwise the practice of reading at sight, which often amounts to a passion, leads very soon to slovenliness in piano-playing and to more or less ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... not "reform" the opera form—the opera form of Mozart and Weber needed no reforming—he simply developed it. He did reform operatic performances by insisting on precision and intelligence in place of slovenliness and stupidity, on enthusiasm for art in place of stolid indifference; and he did as much in the concert-room. I shall not theorize about these matters, but point out what he achieved by making a continuous appeal ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... at the ragged edge this made on the paper, for he was a careful person and hated slovenliness. But he could not refrain a smile as he saw the expression of disappointment growing upon Hallam's face, where he sat upon black Balaam, his crutches crossed before him, looking down at the open sheet he had found. The envelope dropped to the ground, and Amy picked it up; but her brother ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... the ham and eggs on his plate. He was handsome, too, but his full beard was reddish, whereas Mr. Arbuton's mustache was flaxen; and his dress was not worn with that scrupulosity with which the Bostonian bore his clothes; there was a touch of slovenliness in him that scarcely consorted with the alert, ex-military air of some of his movements. "Good-looking young John Bull," he thought concerning Mr. Arbuton, and then thought no more about him, being no ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... tedious austerity. It was one of the briskest times of day, and the short street and the steps of the building were alive with young people of both sexes. Young men sauntered to and from the cafe at the corner, or stood gesticulating in animated groups. All alike were conspicuous for a rather wilful slovenliness, for smooth faces and bushy hair, while the numerous girls, with whom they paused to laugh and trifle, were, for the most part, showy in dress and loudly vivacious in manner. On the kerbstone, a knot of the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... half our sorrows, give an elegance to our manner, and a relish to our pleasures. They soothe our afflictions, and soften our cares. Too much of their company will render us effeminate, and infallibly stamp upon us many signatures of the female nature. A rough and unpolished behavior, as well as slovenliness of person, will certainly be the consequence of an almost constant exclusion from it. By spending a reasonable portion of our time in the company of women, and another in the company of our own sex, we shall imbibe a ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... theory without any restrictions or mental reservations. But neither of these suppositions is true. The greatest grandeur may coexist with the most perfect, nay with a microscopic accuracy of detail, as we see it does often in nature: the greatest looseness and slovenliness of execution may be displayed without any grandeur at all either in the outline or distribution of the masses of colour. To explain more particularly what I mean. I have seen and copied portraits by Titian, in which the eyebrows were marked with a number of small strokes, like hairlines ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... illustrate the truths of political economy are what might be expected from a writer of this character. They are far from being wanting—many of them—in the genuine interest of good story-telling. They are rapid, definite, and without a trace of either slovenliness or fatigue. We are amazed as we think of the speed and prompt regularity with which they were produced; and the fertile ingenuity with which the pill of political economy is wrapped up in the confectionery of a tale, may stand as ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... professes to uphold is very doubtful; there is a tacit consent that it exists more on paper than in reality. If he is a man of any tact, he can say all he is compelled to say and do all the Church requires of him—like a gentleman, with neither undue slovenliness nor undue unction—yet it shall be perfectly plain to all his parishioners who are worth considering that he is acting as a mouthpiece and that his words are spoken dramatically. As for the unimaginative, they ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... irrepressible wrinkle or two in the waist of his frock-coat—denoting that he had not damned his tailor sufficiently to drive that tradesman up to the orthodox high pressure of cunning workmanship. Second, a slight slovenliness of umbrella, occasioned by its owner's habit of resting heavily upon it, and using it as a veritable walking-stick, instead of letting its point touch the ground in the most coquettish of kisses, as is the ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... aware as anyone that Christians do not, in general, undergo the demoralizing consequences which seem inherent in such a creed, in the manner or to the extent which might have been expected from it. The same slovenliness of thought, and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction in terms, prevents them from perceiving the logical consequences of the theory. Such is the facility ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... himself, as he stood holding the door ajar, a lank little figure, dressed with reckless slovenliness in a suit of old-fashioned black; a loose neck-cloth fell stringing down his shirt front, which his unbuttoned waistcoat exposed, with its stains from the tobacco upon which his thin little jaws worked mechanically, as he stared into the room with flamy blue eyes; his silk hat was pushed back ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... needle; try both ends of the magnet. Do not think the work dull; you are conversing with Nature, and must acquire over her language a certain grace and mastery, which practice can alone impart. Let every movement be made with care, and avoid slovenliness, from the outset. Experiment, as I have said, is the language by which we address Nature, and through which she sends her replies; in the use of this language a lack of straightforwardness is as possible, and as prejudicial, as in the spoken language ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the slovenliness, and admire the length of this scrawl, if you could look into my study, and see the file of unanswered, and even unperused letters; bundles of papers on public and on private business; all soliciting ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... himself with precision, as if he had been called upon to make a public statement; and the balanced sing-song neatness of his speech, occasionally corresponded to by a movement of his head, was the more conspicuous from its contrast with good Mr. Brooke's scrappy slovenliness. Dorothea said to herself that Mr. Casaubon was the most interesting man she had ever seen, not excepting even Monsieur Liret, the Vaudois clergyman who had given conferences on the history of the Waldenses. To reconstruct a past ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... names, his introduction of sustained similes, his trick of repeating a sound at intervals (a trick borrowed by Greene later), his habit of letting a speaker refer to himself in the third person (Tamburlaine loves to boast the greatness of Tamburlaine), and his occasional slovenliness, especially in the insertion of a few lines of prose into the midst of his verse. All these and others are minor features which the student will search out for himself. Some of them, however, may be detected in the following excerpt from the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... take her and you to some bum two-bit vaudeville show some night, if you'd like.... Got to show my gratitude to you for standing my general slovenliness.... Lord! nice evening—dine at a rotisserie with a newspaper for companion. Well—g' night ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... "Slovenliness in walking characterizes some. They go shuffling along, precisely as if their shoes were down at the heel—"slipshod"—and they could not lift up their feet in consequence. If it is dusty or sandy, they kick up the dust before them and fill their skirts ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... rule of almost universal application, that supposing all other things to be equal, he who is most guilty of personal neglect; will be the most ignorant and the most vicious. Why there should be, universally, a connection between slovenliness, ignorance, and vice, is a question I have no room in this work ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... precisely the same manner as The Bible in Spain, viz., on blank sheets of old account-books, backs of letters,' etc., and he recalls Mahomet writing the Koran on mutton bones as an analogy to his own 'slovenliness of manuscript.'[174] I have had plenty of opportunity of testing this slovenliness in the collection of manuscripts of portions of Lavengro that have come into my possession. These are written upon pieces of paper of all shapes and sizes, although at least a third ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... exception to the squalid slovenliness that disgraced the living rooms, where the curtains were yellow with smoke and dust, and where the child, evidently left to himself, littered every spot with his toys. Valerie's room and dressing-room were situated in the part of the house which, on one side of ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... practice, also, to take an easy chant or hymn tune, hitherto unknown, and try to get some idea of its melody and harmony without playing it. When all this is done, one of the most important tasks remains: that of mastering time in all its branches. Slovenliness in this particular is fatal to all music, above all to that for the organ, which is meant to guide and control. A feeling for rhythm and a quick-sighted accurate knowledge of time, may be much improved by playing with others, either duets on the piano, or accompaniments ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... slovenliness he affixed the signature and seal, then threw the pen to the floor. I took the order, scanned it, and ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... misto of crooks, demi-mondaines, blackmailers, gamblers, roues, murderers, receivers and decent congenital idiots of all sorts. The characterisation is adroitly done and the workmanship avoids that slovenliness which makes nineteen out of twenty books of this kind a weariness of spirit to the perceptive. I wonder if Maisie with such a father and mother would have been such a darling. Perhaps Professor ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... unpleasant—slovenliness, perhaps, excepted—than a bad temper. I beseech every one who is so unhappy as to possess such a temper, to pay particular attention to what I am about to say, on this interesting and ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... to be mentioned, who, in person and figure, was diametrically different from the other two. There was neither foppery nor slovenliness in his exterior, nor had he any marks of military service or rank about his person. A small walking rapier seemed merely worn as a badge of his rank as a gentleman, without his hand having the least purpose of becoming acquainted with the hilt, or his eye with the blade. ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Everything prospers in house and field. The house is no work of art; but an architect might learn symmetry from it. Care is taken of the field, that it shall not be left disorderly and waste, or go to ruin through slovenliness and neglect; in return the grateful Ceres wards off damage from the produce, that the high-piled sheaves may gladden the heart of the husbandman. Here hospitality still holds good; every one who has but imbibed mother's milk is welcome. the bread-pantry ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... a sort of metre, the law of which is a balance of thesis and antithesis. When he gets out of this aphorismic metre into a sentence of five or six lines long, nothing can exceed the slovenliness of the English. Horne Tooke and a long sentence seem the only two antagonists that were too much for him. Still the antithesis of Junius is a real antithesis of images or thought; but the antithesis of Johnson is rarely more ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge |
