"Hand to mouth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beggarly account of empty boxes [Romeo and Juliet]; indigence &c 804; insolvency &c (nonpayment) 808. V. be insufficient &c adj.; not suffice &c 639; come short of &c 304; run dry. want, lack, need, require; caret; be in want &c (poor) 804, live from hand to mouth. render insufficient &c Adj.; drain of resources, impoverish &c (waste) 638; stint &c (begrudge) 819; put on short allowance. do insufficiently &c adv.; scotch the snake. Adj. insufficient, inadequate; too little &c 32; not enough &c 639; unequal to; incompetent ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Don't interrupt. Up to within a short time you had always lived from hand to mouth—now you are in easy circumstances —for which you need give credit to no one but yourself. The turning-point in ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... States women are guaranteed equal rights to property; but of what avail is that right to the mass of women without property, the thousands of wage workers, who live from hand to mouth? That equal suffrage did not, and cannot, affect their condition is admitted even by Dr. Sumner, who certainly is in a position to know. As an ardent suffragist, and having been sent to Colorado by the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League of New York State to collect material in favor of suffrage, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... had passed since the accidental encounter with Martin outside of the Academy of Music. Rufus began to hope that he had gone out of the city, though he hardly expected it. Such men as Martin prefer to live from hand to mouth in a great city, rather than go to the country, where they would have less difficulty in earning an honest living. At any rate he had successfully baffled Martin's attempts to learn where Rose and he were boarding. But he knew his step-father ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr
... viewed the flood with concern. On the further bank of the river was Mrs. Sheridan's small cottage, where a poor widow struggled to keep a large family by milking on the share system. Kathleen knew that one of the children was seriously ill, and that the mother, always living from hand to mouth, but always carrying a brave face, would be seriously encumbered by Michael's sickness. She feared, too, that the flood waters might even reach to the little ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... thou hadst mind when I harried the magpie's nest, thou wouldst not eat that without giving me my share. I lost my little finger bringing it down, and I want it still." Then, suddenly, the King's son remembered, and knew who it was, and sprang to her and kissed her from hand to mouth; and the priest came, and they ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... lines in length, and that the ruin of a noble family was the result. Everything which is in the market goes to Milverton, and there are hundreds in this great city who turn white at his name. No one knows where his grip may fall, for he is far too rich and far too cunning to work from hand to mouth. He will hold a card back for years in order to play it at the moment when the stake is best worth winning. I have said that he is the worst man in London, and I would ask you how could one compare the ruffian, who in ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pot-boilers, borrowed, deferred, pawned his wife's watch, and had the satisfaction of bringing his son home 'crowned as first-prize man in mathematics.' For one who was in the toils of the money-lenders, who was only living from hand to mouth, and who had never made an investment in his life, to give his son a university career, must be regarded, according to individual feeling, either as a proof of presumptuous folly or of childlike trust ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... day and hour; study that life, it is very mysterious, but exceeding precious. Had we our stock before hand, we should quickly spend all, and prove bankrupts: God hath laid up all our treasure of "wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption in Jesus Christ," and will have us live from hand to mouth, that so we might be safe, and God's free grace be exalted: "It is of faith, that it might be by grace, to the end your promise might be sure to all the seed." Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of this heavenly calling, look up to Jesus Christ, who is the covenant of His Father, and your covenant; ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... setting up the poker afore the ribs, instead of blowing with the bellies to make the fire burn? I was of a pinion that the Englishers were naturally masterful; but I can ashure you this is no the case at all—and I am beginning to think that the way of leeving from hand to mouth is great frugality, when ye consider that all is left in the logive hands of ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... as glad as they were astonished—and that was no little—to hear of the provision in store for them. To pass from those three rooms in Shoe Lane to the breezy hills and wide chambers of Selwick Hall—to live no more from hand to mouth, with little in either, but to be assured, as far as they could be so, among the changes and chances of this mortal life, of bread to eat and raiment to put on—to be treated as beloved and honoured friends ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... their mother. All three are nervous and excited watching for the Prince. They are neatly dressed in thin clothes, through which their slightly angular figures show, and have nervous movements of hand to mouth, and quick gentle voices, slightly staccato, what is called "chee ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... if not delicate feeding, but a Dartie will tax the resources of a Crown and Sceptre. Living as he does, from hand to mouth, nothing is too good for him to eat; and he will eat it. His drink, too, will need to be carefully provided; there is much drink in this country 'not good enough' for a Dartie; he will have the best. Paying for things ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... earnings in cards and drunkenness, instead of laying them by against a time of need—has not thy sin found thee out? Then be sure it will some day, when thou hast to bring home thy bride to a cheerless, unfurnished house, and there to live from hand to mouth,—without money to provide for her sickness,—without money to give her the means of keeping things neat and comfortable when she is well,—without a farthing laid by against distress, and illness, and old age:—THEN your sin will ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... purest irony on the part of fate, for he was in no respect a Bostonian, and it was to Bostonians especially that he was anathema. His parents were actors, travelling from place to place, and his birth at Boston was purely accidental. They had no home and no fortune, but lived from hand to mouth, in the most precarious way, and both of them were dead before their son was two years old. He had an elder brother and a younger sister, and these three babies were left stranded at Richmond, Virginia, entirely without money. Luckily they were too young to realize how very ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... authorities, together with the laxity of the times, secured him impunity. As soon as his children were large enough he made them serviceable to his comfort, caring no more for their morality than for that of his wife. He had two sons and two daughters. Tonsard, who lived, as did his wife, from hand to mouth, might have come to an end of this easy life if he had not maintained a sort of martial law over his family, which compelled them to work for the preservation of it. When he had brought up his children, at the cost ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... in their present state; but when love really comes, they grow fastidious and end by craving the luxuries of gastronomy. Love holds toil and poverty in horror. It would rather die than merely live on from hand to mouth. ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... upon a time a couple of poor folks who lived in a wretched hut, far away from everyone else, in a wood. They only just managed to live from hand to mouth, and had great difficulty in doing even so much as that, but they had three sons, and the youngest of them was called Cinderlad, for he did nothing else but lie and poke about among ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... gradually, as it makes every man, moody, suspicious, apt to take offence where none is meant. Besides they were very poor. He, though neither extravagant nor profligate, was, like most literary men who are accustomed to live from hand to mouth, careless, self-indulgent, unmethodical. She knew as much of housekeeping as the Queen of Oude does; and her charming little dreams of shopping for herself were rudely enough broken, ere the first week was out, by the horrified looks of Clara, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... time Elodie brought him luck. This time in the shape of a hundred and three louis, a goodly sum when one has to live from hand to mouth. And the time came, at the end of their engagement at La Boite Blanche, when they lost even that precarious method of existence. For the first time in his life Andrew spent a month in vain search for employment. Dead season Paris had more variety ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... brow shalt thou eat bread.' So learn what you have to do with that great power of anticipation. It is meant to be the guide of wise work. It is meant to be the support for far-reaching, strenuous action. It is meant to elevate us above mere living from hand to mouth; to ennoble our whole being by leading to and directing toil that is blessed because there is no anxiety in it, labour that will be successful since it is according to the will of that God who has endowed us with the power ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... inconsistency painful. Of the vast piles of books which load our libraries, ninety-nine hundredths and more are but printed echoes: and it is the rarest of pleasures to say, Here is a distinct record of impressions at first hand. We commonplace beings are hurried along in the crowd, living from hand to mouth on such slices of material and spiritual food as happen to drift in our direction, with little more power of taking an independent course, or of forming any general theory, than the polyps which are carried along by an oceanic current. Ask any man what he thinks of the world ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... you; and there has come no change yet. It is months now since I first knew that I loved you. Well; I told myself more than once,—when I was down at Nuncombe for instance,—that I had no right to speak to you. What right can a poor devil like me have, who lives from hand to mouth, to ask such a girl as you to be his wife? And so I said nothing,—though it was on my lips every moment that I was there." Nora remembered at the moment how she had looked to his lips, and had not seen the words there. ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... in an order of the day that there would be a battle on the day following. The army welcomed this announcement with pleasure, in the hope that it would mean an end to their privations, for there had been no supply of rations for a month, and everyone had lived from hand to mouth. On both sides the evening was employed in taking up positions ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... with him, made him fall in love with her, and married him, despite the opposition of her father, Bartolomeo di Piombo. Luigi Porta chose as a witness, when he was married, his former comrade, Louis Vergniaud, also known to Hyacinthe Chabert. He lived from hand to mouth by doing secretary's work, lost his wife, and, crushed by poverty, went to tell the Piombos of her death. He died almost immediately after her ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... living from hand to mouth, my father never getting so far ahead of the wolf as to be able to pause and choose his way. But I was very happy, and would have been no whit less happy if he had explained our circumstances, for that would have conveyed to me no hint of danger. Neither has any ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... Bakounin sought a martyr's death in Italy, but in this, as in all his other exploits, he was unsuccessful. And from that time on to his death his life is a humiliating story as he sought here and there the necessary money for his livelihood. Nearly always he had been forced to live from hand to mouth. Money, money, money was the burden of hundreds of his letters. In order to obtain funds he had resorted to almost every possible plan. He had accepted money in advance from publishers for books which he had never had time to write. From time to ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... horrors gathered behind. That his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these things was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it that I simply procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to say to me: "Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... were in inefficiency. Ireland of yesterday was bound up in one vicious circle of work that was necessarily underpaid because it was inefficient, and work that was necessarily inefficient because it was underpaid. In the lower class there were no reserves; the dependants lived from hand to mouth, and when hand failed to find food, they had to come to the upper class, first for remission of its claims on them and then for actual subsistence. But the dependence was mutual, and there were no reserves at top ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... contrasting the condition of these people with that of the Australian blacks, a considerable portion of whose time, at certain periods of the year, is spent in shifting about from place to place, searching for food, living from hand to mouth, and leading a hard and precarious life. But here, on this little island, the coconut-tree alone would be sufficient to supply many of the principal wants of man. The fruit serves both for food and drink—the shell is used to ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... referred to in this book are not a race of today, they have existed in all climes and ages, and can claim an illustrious descent. In ancient Greece, to go no farther back in this genealogy, there existed a celebrated Bohemian, who lived from hand to mouth round the fertile country of Ionia, eating the bread of charity, and halting in the evening to tune beside some hospitable hearth the harmonious lyre that had sung the loves of Helen and the fall of Troy. Descending the steps of time modern Bohemia finds ancestors at every artistic and literary ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... ladies are often as pale as if they had just left the cloister or were ready for the bier. Boys run begging after the carriage, and poor mothers with small infants in their arms beseech only a small coin. There are many in Rome who live from hand to mouth. But all ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... I like to hear him tell of his earlier days when he sold liniments and cough cures on street corners, living hand to mouth, heart to heart with the people, throwing heads or tails with ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... contested his title to a tax, without which his state could not be kept up. In the assembled Privy Council he declared that a temporary grant was derogatory to his honour. He said that he would no longer live from hand to mouth: he had as little disposition to suffer from want, or to allow the privileges of his crown to be wrested from him, as he had had thought of infringing the liberties of his people.[491] Secretary Coke, a member of the House, brought in the requisite bill without delay, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... not to be regularly depended upon however. They were likewise not to be had without paying a heavy price for them, and the Prince had no money in his coffer. He lived from hand to mouth, and was obliged to borrow from every private individual who had anything to lend. Merchants, nobles, official personages, were all obliged to assist in eking out the scanty pittance allowed by ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... steals along with a bent head; one is tempted to hail him and toss him a shilling. To-morrow, all powdered, curled, in a good coat, he marches about with head erect and open mien, and you would almost take him for a decent worthy creature. He lives from day to day, from hand to mouth, downcast or sad, just as things may go. His first care of a morning when he gets up is to know where he will dine; after dinner, he begins to think where he may pick up a supper. Night brings disquiets of its own. Either he climbs to a shabby ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... if our ministers were the poorest lot!" complained Mrs. Robinson. "If their salary is two months behindhand they begin to be nervous! Seems as though they might lay up a little before they come here, and not live from hand to mouth so! The Baxters seem quite different, and I only hope they won't get wasteful and run into debt. They say she keeps the parlor blinds open bout half the time, and the room is lit up so often evenin's ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... prejudices, envies, rivalries; but none could contest that he was a potential figure. If to know him the rising demagogue of the time dressed him in such terrors as to make him appear an impending Attila of the voracious hordes which live from hand to mouth, without intervention of a banker and property to cry truce to the wolf, he would have shone under a different aspect enough to send them to the poets to solve their perplexity, had the knowledge been subjoined that this terrific devastator swinging the sanguinary stick was a slave ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... never wanted to have a fortune until now. And I must tell you the reason of that, too. A man without a fortune does very well by himself. He can knock about, and live from hand to mouth. But when he wants to live for somebody else,—even if he has only a very faint hope of getting the opportunity of doing it,—then he must have some settled means of livelihood to justify him. So I say I am in a difficult position. For if I give this ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... had a good character; even before he got his money he used to gamble, and was getting a bad name. Afterwards he began drinking, and he took to gambling harder than ever. Presently his money all went and he had to work; but his bad habits had fastened on him, and now he lives from hand to mouth, sometimes working for a month, sometimes idle for months. There's something sinister about him, there's some mystery; for poverty or drink even—and he doesn't drink much now—couldn't make him what he is. He doesn't seek company, and he walks ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... suppose, three times more than we could eat; and one of them, with an empty laugh, threw what was left into the fire, which blazed and roared again over this unusual fuel. I never in my life saw men so careless of the morrow; hand to mouth is the only word that can describe their way of doing; and what with wasted food and sleeping sentries, though they were bold enough for a brush and be done with it, I could see their entire unfitness for anything ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... according to your own taste, and so I got the same tastes as you—or else I pretended to, I am really not quite sure which—I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other. When I look back on it, it seems to me as if I had been living here like a poor woman—just from hand to mouth. I have existed merely to perform tricks for you, Torvald. But you would have it so. You and papa have committed a great sin against me. It is your fault that I have made nothing of ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... besides the residents in the hotels (whose uses to vagabonds are purely financial) there is on this shore a drifting and incalculable population, heterogeneous, yet with a note of character common to all. A population cosmopolitan and shifting, living from hand to mouth, vagrants of the road or of the street corner, finding life a warm and easy thing in this long garden shut between hills and sea. So warm and lovely and easy a garden is it that it has for that reason become a lee shore; a shore where the sick ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... of the other—while the Government of the hour, joyfully hastening to undo all that its predecessors have done, will wield a majority so immense that the fate of every question will be foredoomed, and debate will be a farce; in one word, we shall be a nation living from hand to mouth, and with no settled principle—an army, whose only marching orders ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... is true that the man who merely hoards for the sake of hoarding, developing no new and higher wants, no clearly defined aims, will still be almost as helpless as the most thriftless. But no one is more helpless against the encroachments of employers than the man who lives from hand to mouth, whose necessities press ever hard upon him, crippling him and crippling those {110} with whom he competes in the open market. Then again, successful cooperation is impossible to the thriftless. The lack of self-control, the lack of power to defer ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... had been happy in the occupation which the necessities of his situation demanded of him. Many a boy, wrecked as he had been, with no one but a weak and timid girl to support him, would have done nothing but repine at his hard lot; would have lived "from hand to mouth" during those two months, and made every day a day of misery. Noddy had worked hard; but what had he won? Was his labor, now that he was to abandon the house, the cisterns, the stores, and ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... in constitution, powerful in frame, inquisitive in mind, and enterprising in spirit. Frequently had he arrived at Fort Chipewyan with ninety or a hundred men without any provision for their sustenance for the winter save their fishing-nets and guns. He was therefore accustomed to live from hand to mouth, and to depend on his own exertions and resources in a country where the winter is upwards of eight months long and the severity of the ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... tallest of matete, eschinomenae, and thorny bush, and flooded with water, it was useless to fatigue our men searching for the shore party in such an inhospitable country. No provisions were procurable, for the villages were in a state of semi-starvation, the inhabitants living from hand to mouth on what reluctant Fortune threw into ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... my native town," replied Fenton; "but I have resided here from hand to mouth long enough to know almost every individual in the ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... and well into the eighties, in Wyoming, Dakota, western Kansas and Nebraska, New Mexico, and west Texas, courts were idle most of the time, and lawyers lived from hand to mouth. The then state of local society was so rudimentary that it had not acquired the habit of appeal to the law for settlement of its differences. And while it may sound an anachronism, it is nevertheless the simple truth that ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... suggests to us this: the need of having a clear consciousness of what is our object in life. The most of men have never answered that question. They live from hand to mouth, driven by circumstances, guided by accidents, impelled by unreflecting passions and desires, knowing what they want for the moment, but never having tried to shape the course of their lives into a consistent whole, so as to stand up before God in Christ when He puts ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... no one to work but mama and I tell you time brought about a change. A house full of little children—we lived from hand to mouth. Not enough corn to feed one mule. No syrup, no hogs, no cows. Oh! we had a hard time. I remember hearing my mama many a night ask God to help her through the struggle with her children. The more my mama prayed the harder ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... towns there is a numerous class of 'roughs' known as the kullah-numdah (felt-caps; they wear a brown hard-felt low hat without a brim), excitable and reckless, and always ready for disturbance. They are the 'casuals', who live from hand to mouth, those to whom an appeal can be made by the careful working class when the price of bread is run up to famine figure, owing to the 'cornering' of wheat, which of late years has been much practised in Persia. The baker used to be the first victim of popular fury in a bread ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... Pearl has her notions, and they're mighty strong ones. It's the way she's been brought up," this with some pride. "You see, me and her pop started out with the idea that we wasn't going to have the Pearl live one of those hand to mouth lives that we'd seen girls in the circus that didn't have much training or much ability live. We saw right from the first that she was awful smart and awful pretty, and her Pop he had the knack of making money and ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... reasons. It is my own, and four years old. You see, a poor man has to economize. And you know, since I lost my fortune, I've been living almost from hand to mouth. Honestly, Helena, many is the time when I've gone out fishing, trying to catch me ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... between the Parliamentary leaders, which might be effected, provided they would lay aside personal feelings and jealousies; that Lyndhurst might be the greatest obstacle; he thought a strong Government ought to be formed, one that should not live as this does from hand to mouth, and by no means but by a coalition could this be effected. The Radicals, he said, were clearly extinct, being reduced, as far as he could learn, 'to Grote and his wife;' that he had not been prepared for the tranquillity and contentment that he found on ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... indispensable to people of taste, and everybody has a taste now-a-days. But rejected papers are good for nothing but to light one's fire, if one can keep a fire. Look at Stamford! Stamford has done excellent work for thirty years; he has been neither idle nor thriftless, and he lives from hand to mouth still. He is one of the writers for bread, who must take the price he can get, and not refuse it, lest he get nothing. And that would be my case—is my case—for, as you know, my pen provides two-thirds of my maintenance. I cannot tax my father further. If I had not ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... expedient for the present that Austria and Prussia should be quasi allies, for in this way peace has been secured to Europe. But my system of diplomacy, which the empress has made her own, forbids me to make any permanent alliance with a prince who lives politically from hand to mouth, and has no fixed line of policy. [Footnote: Kaunitz's own words. See Ferrand. vol. i., v. 69.] No—I do not fear him; for I see through his hypocritical professions, and in spite of his usurped crown I feel myself to be more than his equal. If he has won thirteen victories ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... books; and even if he were, there is an excuse for the old country; for she was founded on no political principles, but discovered what she knows step by step, a sort of political Topsy, as Claude Mellot calls her, who has 'kinder growed,' doing from hand to mouth what seemed best. But that we, who profess to start as an ideal nation, on fixed ideas of justice, freedom, and equality—that we should have been stultifying ever since every great principle of which we so ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... that being so, I cannot see any reason why the Native should not be allowed to buy back what he has lost; in my opinion he should be encouraged to do so. . . . He is a better citizen than the thriftless European who lives from hand to mouth and makes no effort to better his circumstances. . . . Legislation should be carefully watched lest endeavours be made to deprive deserving Natives of the privilege of acquiring title to land. In the Transvaal strong efforts are being made to restrict the acquisition ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... of wine and emptied it, and began to speak. "You all of you know how you see me," he said, "a man without a desire to make an advance in the world: careless about reputation; and living in a garret and from hand to mouth, though I have friends and a name, and I daresay capabilities of my own, that would serve me if I had a mind. But mind I have none. I shall die in that garret most likely, and alone. I nailed myself ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... would convict me from my own words, and bring against me what I had said or written elsewhere. You may act in that manner with those who dispute by established rules: we live from hand to mouth, and say anything that strikes our mind with probability, so that we are the only people who are really at liberty. But, since I just now spoke of consistency, I do not think the inquiry in this place is, if the opinion of ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... of the soil are not sent in this way is rather the fault of the wretched government than of the rayahs or agricultural laborers. They are ground to the very earth by iniquitous taxation, and only manage to live from hand to mouth in what should ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Dragon! send us rain.'' It was pitiful. This country is fertile but the population is so enormous that, in the absence of any manufacturing or mining, the people even in the most favoured seasons live from hand to mouth, and a drought means ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... Colonists had been sent on in good time, there was not a single bag of pemmican or any other article of provision awaiting the hapless settlers. The few French people who were freemen, lived in what is now the St. Boniface side of the river, were only living from hand to mouth, and the Company's people were little better provided. The river was the only resource, and from the scarceness of hooks the supply of fish obtainable was ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... more frequently than in England. In England the laborer who did not get his wages on the Saturday, could not go on for the next week. To him, under such circumstances, the world would be coming to an end. But in the Western States the laborer does not live so completely from hand to mouth. He is rarely paid by the week, is accustomed to give some credit, and, till hard pressed by bad circumstances, generally has something by him. They do save money, and are thus fattened up to a state which admits of victimization. I cannot owe money to the little village ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... of Ab were not more than two years past their honeymoon. They, in their way, were glad that their union had been so blest and that a lusty man-child was rolling about and crowing and cooing upon the earthen floor of the cave. They lived from hand to mouth, and from day to day, and this day had been a good one. They were there together, man, woman and child. They had warmth and food. The entrance to the cave was barred so that no monster of the period might enter. ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... definite character. Alas, how many of our lives are liker a heap of stones tilted at random out of a cart than a house with a plan. But there is a character stamped on every life, and however the man may have lived from hand to mouth without premeditation, the result has a character of its own, be it temple or pig-sty. Each life, too, is built up by slow labour, course by course. Our deeds become our dwelling-places. Like coral-insects, we live in what we build. Memory, habit, ever-springing consequences, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to the belief in God. The truth being that man—the average man—only seeks for an explanation of immediate happenings. Once the immediate thing before him is explained his curiosity is allayed. The average man lives mentally from hand to mouth, and troubles as little about ultimate explanations as he does about the exhaustion ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... vessel, dear Prince?" she smiled. "What vessel, in the world, have I? This little house is all our ship, Bob's and mine—and thankful we are, now, to have it. We've wandered far, living, as you may say, from hand to mouth, without rest for the soles of our feet. But the time has come for us at last to ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... all, they miss the lump sums laid by against need. If their earnings would ever overtake their expenses and give a little margin, they might do better; but buying, as they are obliged to do, from hand to mouth, they buy at extravagant prices. Coal, for instance, which costs me about twenty-six shillings for a ton, costs the labourer half as much again as that, because he can only pay for a hundredweight or so at a time. So, too, the boots he can get ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... uncomforted people who had somehow lost Christ instead of finding Him, grew so keen that he resolved to give up his entire life to the work of beginning to try and remedy the evil. He had no independent means,—he lived from hand to mouth earning just what he could by hard labour,—till one day, when the forces in his own soul said "Ready!" he betook himself to one small room which he hired in a fisherman's cottage on the coast of Cornwall, and there sat down to write a book. Half ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... high buildings, and confined in dingy basements, and had done all kinds of hard labor for other men. They had given their lives and strength for others, and this was the end of it—to die poor and forsaken. I looked at them, and they reminded me of the martyrs of old. Ground down, living from hand to mouth, separated from their families in many cases—they had had a bitter lot. They had never had a chance to get away from their fate, and had to work till they dropped. I tell you there is something wrong. We don't do enough for the people that slave and toil for us. We should ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... does a walled city or a cathedral town. Our native bee, on the other hand, "the burly, dozing humble-bee," affects one more like the rude, untutored savage. He has learned nothing from experience. He lives from hand to mouth. He luxuriates in time of plenty, and he starves in times of scarcity. He lives in a rude nest or in a hole in the ground, and in small communities; he builds a few deep cells or sacks in which he stores a little honey and ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... men, easily satisfied; as working people are, who have been used all their days to live from hand to mouth, and to whom the present is all in all. They followed the master, who settled them in the barn; and then came back to consult with his wife as to where the women could be stowed away. So, in a short time, the five homeless families ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... be suspicious. "Eh! my friend," said he, "one never has too much money. Madame du Vallon left things in much disorder; I am not much of a hand at figures, so that I live almost from hand to mouth." ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... interrupt: Up to within a short time you had always lived from hand to mouth-now you are in easy circumstances—for which you need give credit to no one but yourself. The turning point in your ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... mainly by writing stories or articles for various magazines and papers, which paid him from $5 to $50 each. It was a hand to mouth way of living, for he was often, ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... very little about this poorer population of Rome. They must have lived from hand to mouth. Since their votes controlled elections, [16] they were courted by candidates for office and kept from grumbling by being fed and amused. Such poor citizens, too lazy for steady work, too intelligent to starve, formed, with the other riffraff of a great city, the elements of a dangerous mob. And ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... to-night, without being able to tell you the event of to-morrow; but I will let you know it on Thursday, if I write but two lines. You have no notion how I laughed at Mrs. Goldsworthy's "talking from hand to mouth."(511) How happy I am that you have Mr. Chute still with you; you would have been distracted else with that simple woman; for fools prey upon one when one has no companion to laugh ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... of nature was against it; the new land of the south held forth no inducements even for the pirate or marauder. In the hand to mouth struggle for existence, not even a supply of food would be found in a ransacked camp; no land seen tempting settlement by its luxuriant vegetation and produce. The visitors of the straits scorned the inhospitable coast, and returned north. Only those whom ill-fate had deprived ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... the commencement of this lawsuit, it has been the business of Hocus, in sharing out expenses, to plead for Frog. "Poor Frog," says he, "is in hard circumstances, he has a numerous family, and lives from hand to mouth; his children don't eat a bit of good victuals from one year's end to the other, but live upon salt herring, sour curd, and borecole. He does his utmost, poor fellow, to keep things even in the world, and has exerted himself beyond his ability in this lawsuit; but he really ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... is quite gone. We live now like other country people, and try to pay our debts, which that generation never did. They lived from hand to mouth. They kept a stable-full of horses. The young men were always riding about the country, betting on horse-races, gambling, drinking, fighting, and making love. No one knew exactly what he was worth until the crash came about fifty years ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... he was living on from hand to mouth, flashing out in his old brilliancy and power, and forcing himself to take the lead in whatever company he might be; but utterly lonely and depressed when by himself—reading feverishly in secret, in a desperate effort to retrieve all by high honors and a fellowship. As Tom said ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... out of the prison; out of the succession to Mrs Bangham in executing commissions, and out of the slang interchange with very doubtful companions consequent upon both; was her hardest task. At eighteen he would have dragged on from hand to mouth, from hour to hour, from penny to penny, until eighty. Nobody got into the prison from whom he derived anything useful or good, and she could find no patron for him but her ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... ostentation rather than worship is dominant. The immorality of debt not being known, churches are very often built without regard to the financial inability of the people, and deceive by suggesting rich parishioners when the people are very poor and live from hand to mouth. Many disruptions between pastors and churches could have been avoided were church finances not kept in a confused state. Pastor's salaries and other church obligations are not raised and met in a systematic way, but are left to appeals to the feelings ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... doing nothing. Every city, town, and village in the land is filled to overflowing with young men who are idle—hunting clerkships, or some place where they hope to obtain a living without work. Numbers are hanging around, living from hand to mouth, living upon some friend, waiting for a vacancy in some overcrowded store; and, when a vacancy occurs, offering to work for a salary that would cause a shrewd business man to suspect their honesty; and when remonstrated with by friends, and advised ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... of provisions by them, but each one went daily to the market to buy the pittance for his family. The improvidence which he laments over in his contemporaries had been handed down from their most remote ancestors. Workmen, fellahin, employes, small townsfolk, all lived from hand to mouth in the Egypt of the Pharaohs. Pay-days were almost everywhere days of rejoicing and extra eating: no one spared either the grain, oil, or beer of the treasury, and copious feasting continued unsparingly, as long as anything was left of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... section of the city are full of cheap lodging houses, which form a peculiar feature of city life. "There is a very large and increasing class of vagrants who live from hand to mouth, and who, beneath the dignity of the lowest grade of boarding houses, find a nightly abode in cheap lodgings. These establishments are planned so as to afford the greatest accommodation in point of numbers with the ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... use it with his unvarying correctness, and it soon became literally a dead letter. The change was a momentous one for English prosody, and none of the fifteenth-century writers possessed sufficient poetic genius to adapt their verse to the altered conditions of the language. They lived from hand to mouth, as it were, without arriving at any systematic tradition. Thus it was that at the beginning of the sixteenth century Hawes could write such ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... treason"—as the Commandante gave a loud exclamation of horror—"I merely illustrate and emphasize. My sands are nearly run, Excellency; it is to the estimable mind and strong paternal hand of my friend that this miserable colony must look before long, would she continue even this hand to mouth existence—a fact well known to our king and natural lord. When he ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... liberty, to seek employment for the sake of raising themselves and their children in the social scale, and to accumulate property. They are not merely free, but are becoming independent. Still the number of those who live from hand to mouth, in the indolent and useless possession of freedom, is very great. In Mr. Trollope's opinion, little is to be expected from the blacks. "To lie in the sun and eat bread-fruit and yams is the negro's idea of being free. Such freedom as that has not been intended for man in this world; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... first, in rearing her daughters, and intellectual culture only second; indeed, they are commonly satisfied with a merely negative condition of health. The girl is considered to be well, if she is not too ill to go to school; and she therefore lives from hand to mouth, as respects her constitution, and lays up nothing for emergencies. From this negative condition proceeds her inability to endure accidents which to an active boy would be trivial. Who ever hears of a boy's incurring a lame knee for a year by slipping on the ice, or spinal disease for a lifetime ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... dethronement of the king who had provoked it; and we have thus, at this period of the history, five reigns in twenty-five years. No monarch had time to distinguish himself by a re-organization of the kingdom, or even by undertaking buildings on a large scale—each was forced to live from hand to mouth, meeting as he best might the immediate difficulties of his position, without providing for a future, which he might never live to see. Fear of re-conquest was also perpetual; and the monarchs had therefore constantly to be courting alliances with foreign states, ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... his way down to her. The Palace seemed to be full of servants, all apparently busy about something which brought them for a moment in sight of the newly arrived Prince, and then whisked them off, hand to mouth and shoulders shaking. By one of these, with more control over her countenance than the others, an annoyed Udo was led ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... to live and a little over to pay their debts with; but when the earnings of Jurgis fell from nine or ten dollars a week to five or six, there was no longer anything to spare. The winter went, and the spring came, and found them still living thus from hand to mouth, hanging on day by day, with literally not a month's wages between them and starvation. Marija was in despair, for there was still no word about the reopening of the canning factory, and her savings were almost entirely gone. She had had to give up all idea of marrying then; the family ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... practical M. Forestier would not give way. Ingres' persistence looked like folly, even madness in his eyes. The young man was with difficulty living from hand to mouth, portraits and small orders barely keeping the wolf from the door. The return home and marriage would ensure his future materially and socially, and up to a certain point render him independent of malevolent ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... a movement of hand to mouth, in a universal gesture of amusement. "Ah, El Hassan," he said, "you forget you left me the magical ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds |
