"Misspent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seaside railway station, the arriving place of one of those health resorts where people flock in their millions to enjoy a little peace and quiet together. He, no doubt as a punishment for a misspent youth, was the station-master; she was one of those many kind ladies who come to meet their relatives and to make their arrival even more peaceful and quiet than such events ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... three-and-twenty years I now have lived, And naught achieved for immortality. I am aroused—I feel my inward powers— My title to the throne arouses me From slumber, like an angry creditor; And all the misspent hours of early youth, Like debts of honor, clamor in mine ears. It comes at length, the glorious moment comes That claims full interest on the intrusted talent. The annals of the world, ancestral fame, And glory's echoing trumpet urge me on. Now is the blessed hour at length ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... alternative remaining is to make this avowal, or be forgotten by you. I do not ask you now to promise to be mine, or even to love me, till I have proved myself worthy of your affection. My past life has been one of thoughtlessness and inaction, but it shall be my endeavor in future to atone for those misspent years. Your image will ever be with me as a bright spirit from whose presence I cannot flee, and whisper hope when my energies would fail. I only ask your remembrance till I am worthy to claim your love. If you do not see me or hear from me at the end of five years, you ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... that date, its history is bound up solely in that of Illinois, under its various organizations and names. A brief time upon occasion such as this given to a hurried review of the masterful epochs in the history of the great State of which our own county is so important a part, cannot be wholly misspent. ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... the midst of Tuscany," I straight began: "a brooklet, whose well-head Springs up in Falterona, with his race Not satisfied, when he some hundred miles Hath measur'd. From his banks bring, I this frame. To tell you who I am were words misspent: For yet my name ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... She had seen before that deep hunger of the eyes, for she was of the type of woman that holds a strong attraction for men. It told her that he had looked in the face of his happiness too late—too late by the many years of a misspent life that had decreed inexorably the character ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... said the Scotchman. "Dinna daunt yoursel' owermuch wi' the past, laddie. And for me—I'm not that presoomtious to think I can square up a misspent life as a man might compound wi's creditors. 'Gin HE forgi'es me, He'll forgi'e; but it's not a prayer up or a chapter doun that'll stan' between me and the Almighty. So dinna fret yoursel', but let ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... however, the wine was taking toll, and Lorelei felt a certain pity for him. Waste is shocking; it grieved her to see a man so blessed with opportunity flinging himself away so fatuously. The hilarity which greeted him on every hand spoke of misspent nights and a reckless prodigality that betokened long habitude. Only his splendid constitution—that abounding vitality which he had inherited from sturdy, temperate forebears—enabled him to keep up the pace; but Lorelei saw that he ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... your nose bleeds; you are stricken with Spanish mildew, and you smell vilely—but you are immortal. You have been a disgrace to the service, but Fate in her gentle irony has redeemed you, permitting you, in one brief moment of your misspent life, to save to your country the command of the seas—to guide, with your subconscious intelligence, the finest battle-ship the science of the world has constructed to glorious victory, through the fiercest sea-fight the world has known. Rise up, ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... your renoumed grandfather K. Edward of famous memory, and sundry times vnto your highnes also, to haue restitution made for their goods taken from them: whereby they haue nothing at al preuailed, but heaping losse vpon losse haue misspent their time and their charges: both because they were not permitted to propound and exhibit their complaints and letters before your maiesty, and also for diuers other impediments. Certain of them also considering how others of their countriemen had laboured in vain, and ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... face with the Chinese at home, one is overwhelmed by an impression of power,—actual power, potential power, power of the individual, power of the group, power well used, power misspent. The impression is almost stunning. You seem to be watching a community of ants, persistent, untiring, organized, only the ant-hill is a town, and the ants are men physically strong, gluttons for work, resourceful, adaptable, cheerful. Then ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... of Mrs. Gray brought the first great sorrow to the house of Robert Gray. It did its work in the heart of each who remained. It smote the husband with a conviction of misspent years, of a united fellowship in the things that perish so miserably instead of in those things which remain when all else is shaken. Had he but led his gentle wife, as was his opportunity, in ways of the Spirit, how different might have been their record together. And now the end had come ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... I have been able to make the work, I present it to the public. Whatever may be the reception which it may meet, I shall never think the moments misspent, which were devoted to the purpose of reviving the memory of Oglethorpe, and of perpetuating his fame by a more full recital of his deeds than had been ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... were aspiring to something beyond his previously humble and abridged reading. The reader may substitute for these names any others, of the superior order, that he may think more proper to stand in their place. It would therefore be animadversion or ridicule misspent, to make the charge of extravagance on this imagined course of a plain man's reading, with a specific reference to the authors here named, as if it had been meant that precisely these, by a peculiar selection, were to be the authors he may be supposed to peruse, and in perusing, to waste ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... garden or superintending an estate, as to make the love of God their motive, and the accomplishment of his will their only ambition in every action. All travail which leadeth not towards this end is but so much of life misspent and lost, whatever names men may give to their political or military achievements, study of nature, knowledge of distant shores, or cunning in the mysteries of trade, or arts of conversation. Though such actions, when of duty, fall under the order of ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... friendship, and 'tis something more. Each other every wish they give, Not to know love, is not to live.' 'Or love, or money,' Time replied, 'Were men the question to decide, 140 Would bear the prize: on both intent, My boon's neglected or misspent. 'Tis I who measure vital space, And deal out years to human race. Though little prized, and seldom sought, Without me love and gold are nought. How does the miser time employ? Did I e'er see him ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... and doing, working like a Trojan, because occupation takes his mind off the painful picture of his misspent opportunity and his destroyed natural instinct. When fighting for gold he forgets his appalling poverty of the really worth-while things in ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... sneaked home late Mrs. Button, who had learned how he had misspent his time, gave him a merciless thrashing. Why should he be trapesing about with Sunday schools, she asked, with impolite embroidery, while his poor little brothers and sisters were crying in the street? ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... on, telling her, that I was glad, from the hints she had given, to find her concerned for her past misspent life, and particularly for the part she had had in the ruin of the most excellent woman on earth: that if she would compose herself, and patiently submit to the consequences of an evil she had brought upon herself, it might possibly be ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... greater part of which I squandered in my youth in dissipation; but I perceived my error, and reflected that riches were perishable, and quickly consumed by such ill managers as myself, I further considered, that by my irregular way of living I wretchedly misspent my time; which is, of all things, the most valuable. Struck with these reflections, I collected the remains of my fortune, and sold all my effects by public auction. I then entered into a contract with some merchants, who traded by sea. I took ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... the machine of government is worked here. There are in it also many interesting details of the last war, which, in general, may be relied on. It may be considered as the small history of great events. I am in hopes, when you shall have read them, you will not think I have misspent your money for them. My method for making out this assortment was, to revise the list of my own purchases since the invoice of 1785, and to select such as I had found worth your having. Besides this, I have casually met with and purchased some ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... deal, and we found that we had quite a lot in common, having visited the same places and regarded many things from practically the same point of view. He took the trouble to be very entertaining," said Rose, with a pretty blush. "And his trouble was not misspent. I am convinced that he enjoyed the afternoon even more than I did. We also enjoyed the evening," she added. "He is an excellent dancer. We suited each ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... round, and, so great is the enthusiasm for the game at this moment, that it is regarded as a great misfortune that the sun has set and there is no more light left for play. These are the times when the golfer's pulse beats strong, and he feels the remorse of the man with the misspent youth because he was grown up and his limbs were setting before ever he ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... not misspent," she continued, and seeming to forget that Verry was still there. "Why should she find work for her hands when ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... rise of a hog-back range that was desolate and drear, When the Sailor Swede had a crazy fit, and he got to talking queer. He talked of his home in Oregon and the peach trees all in bloom, And the fern head-high, and the topaz sky, and the forest's scented gloom. He talked of the sins of his misspent life, and then he seemed to brood, And I watched him there like a fox a hare, for I knew it was not good. And sure enough in the dim dawn-light I missed him from the tent, And a fresh trail broke through the crusted ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... was a misspent life "at once unfinished and a ruin."* His was the poet's soul bound in the body of clay. He was an unhappy man, and we cannot but pity him, and yet remember him with gratitude for the beautiful songs he gave us. In his ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... Crabbe; and there are not very many characteristics of Romantic prose which find no illustration in the writings of Steele and Sterne. Nevertheless, the very name of romance has wielded such a power in human affairs, and has so habitually impressed the human imagination, that time is not misspent in exhibiting its historical bearings. These great vague words, invented to facilitate reference to whole centuries of human history—Middle Ages, Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Revival of Romance—are ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... clock strikes! Another day has vanished. Gone into the dim recesses of the past, leaving its record of misspent hours, false hopes, and disappointed expectations. May a morrow dawn that will bring recompense and requital for the sorrows of the days gone by, and a new order of things when there will be more starch in cuff and collar, and less ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... Mr. Stocks, who had found her alone, and had saddled her with his company for the space of an hour and a half. His vein had been badinage of the serious and reproving kind, and the girl had been bored to distraction. But a misspent hour is soon forgotten, and the sight of her hostess's cheery face would have restored her to good humour had it not been for a thought which could not be exorcised. She knew of Lady Manorwater's reputation as an inveterate matchmaker, and in some subtle ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... remedy for time misspent; No healing for the waste of idleness, Whose very languor is a punishment Heavier than active souls can feel or guess. Sonnet. SIR ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... that though he may do no great things in fighting he may be the means in saving some woman, some child, from the fury of the Spaniards. If he saved but one, the next three years of his life will not have been misspent." ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... sudden thoughtfulness at waking, that first matutinal retrospection, and prospection, into things as they have been and are to be; and the lowness of heart, the blankness of hope which follows the first remembrance of some folly lately done, some word ill-spoken, some money misspent,—or perhaps a cigar too much, or a glass of brandy and soda-water which he should have left untasted? And when things have gone well, how the waker comforts himself among the bedclothes as he claims for himself to be whole all over, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... you knew something of arithmetic by this time! Making up for misspent time, I see. Paying old debts is not ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... as I can your forming yourselves upon great principles and great models. Your time will be much misspent in every other pursuit. Small excellences should be viewed, not studied; they ought to be viewed, because nothing ought to escape a painter's observation, ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... answered, 'With all my heart; I would fain be reconciled to my stomach, which no longer performs its usual functions.' And his talk, we are told, during the fortnight that preceded his death, was not regret for a life we should, in seriousness, call misspent, but because partridges and pheasants no longer suited his condition, and he was obliged to be reduced to boiled meats. No one, however, could tell what might also be passing in his heart. We cannot always judge of a life, any more than of a drama, by its last ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... of the present writer may well experience some unsatisfactory feelings in looking back on the labours of the past. Though years spent in respectable periodical writing can by no means be termed misspent, yet such a career presents in the retrospect but a multitude of disconnected essays on all conceivable themes, and such as too often prove their hurried composition by crudeness and imperfections.' The ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... of the way in which a young friend, whom I do not choose to name, misspent his time and misapplied his talents. He took afterwards a better course, and became an useful member of society, respected, I believe, wherever he has ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... made in His own image. What else do we mean when we say under all horror and agony that befalls, 'It is God's will—God's will be done.' Base unbeliever though I am, I could not speak the words. Oh, she has something we have not. Her poor, little misspent life has changed itself into a shining thing, though it shines and glows only in this hideous place. She herself does not know of its shining. But Drunken Bet would stagger up to her room and ask ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Sylvia. He started on swiftly, and for a time the bitter thoughts seemed to fade, but when he paused at last, breathless, under the Arc de Triomphe, the bitterness and the wretchedness of the whole thing—yes, of his whole misspent life came back with a pang. Then the face of the prisoner, stamped with the horrible grimace of fear, grew in the ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... South Seas was ever in my head. I loafed in the sunshine, sitting on the pier-edge, with eyes fixed on the lazy shipping. These were care-free, irresponsible days, and not, I am now convinced, entirely misspent. I came to know the worthies of the wharfside, and plunged into an under-world of fascinating repellency. Crimpdom eyed and tempted me, but it was always with whales or seals, and never with pearls or copra. I rubbed shoulders with eager necessity, scrambled for free lunches in frowsy bar-rooms, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... pudding twice a week, you know that twice a week the man ate with genuine gusto and was physically happy; while if you learn that a rich man has seven courses a day, ten to one the half of them remain untasted, and the whole is but misspent money and a weariness to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who, under the influence of improper stimulants, could recite stirring scenes from the tragedies of Shakespeare. There was Buzby—old Buzby, who went about from office to office leaving his obituary set up by his own hand, conveying the impression that at last the end had come to a misspent life. Then there was J. N. Free—the "Immortal J. N.," as he called himself, a gaunt, cadaverous figure in broad hat and linen duster, with hair flowing over his shoulders, who stalked into the offices at unseemly hours to "raise the veil" of ignorance and error, and ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... considered that he derived great benefit from his comparatively limited study and practice of law; and that the little time he had given up to it had been far from being misspent. But the opening which now presented itself introduced him to a field of activity much more suited to his talents and his tastes. He liked the study of law better than its practice; for his early training had not been ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... world still," said Jim, his own eyes full. He knew now his father and himself, and he knew the meaning of all the bitter and misspent life of the old days. He and his father were on a level ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is what I see, Adele, as I lie here beside a shore upon which I shall never set my feet, and I say to you that if you and Amory go to the building of such a nation then indeed your lives are not misspent. It will come, and when it comes, may God guard it, may God watch over it and direct it!" His head had sunk gradually lower upon his breast and his lids had fallen slowly over his eyes which had been looking away ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tortuous, narrow streets into the main thoroughfare to watch them pass, or to accompany them, running beside their horses. She divined at once, by the passionate curiosity their entry aroused, that he had misspent his leisure in spreading through the city lying reports of their ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... dropping with the heavy somnolence of wearied adolescence, he stumbled on through the trials of an undiscernible and unfamiliar footing, lifting his heavy riding-boots sluggishly over imaginary obstacles, and fearing the while lest his toil were labor misspent. It was a dry camp, he felt dolefully certain, or there would have been more noise in it. He fell over a sleeping sergeant, and said to him hastily, "Steady, man—a friend!" as the half-roused soldier clutched his rifle. Then he found a lieutenant, and ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest
... sin Dwelleth every heart within; In its closely caverned cells, Many a wayward passion dwells. By the many hours misspent, By the gifts to error lent, By the wrongs thou didst not shun, By the good thou hast not done, With a lenient spirit scan The ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... What have I done to be thus used? My conscience presently checked me in that inquiry, as if I had blasphemed; and methought it spoke to me like a voice, "Wretch! dost thou ask what thou hast done? Look back upon a dreadful misspent life, and ask thyself, what thou hast not done? Ask, why is it that thou wert not long ago destroyed? Why wert thou not drowned in Yarmouth Roads; killed in the fight when the ship was taken by the Sallee man of war; devoured by the wild beasts on the coast of Africa; or drowned ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... space than one five stories high. Getting along with the old-style architecture costs the five-story man the income of twenty-five floors. Save ten steps a day for each of twelve thousand employees and you will have saved fifty miles of wasted motion and misspent energy. ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... many persons conceiving the title of any thing, to be of equal importance with the christening of a person; and surely where the etymology of a name of either person or thing can throw any light upon their respective histories, the time employed thereon can hardly be looked upon as either lost or misspent. But it unfortunately happens, as is almost always the case in regard to persons and things belonging to mythological eras, that the greatest confusion and perplexity exist in regard to the Indian titles which ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... and condemned to die, yea, fastened to the cross, that he might die like a rogue, as he was in his life; behold the Lord Jesus, when this wicked one, even now, desireth mercy at his hands, tells him, and that without the least reflection upon him, for his former misspent life, "To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). Let no man turn this grace of God into wantonness. My design is now ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... quite confident; wherever her husband had spent or misspent his life (if any part of so successful a whole could really have been misspent), it was not in England. He was un-English in a hundred superficial ways—in none that cut deep. With all his essential cynicism, ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... proceed to give an illustration of this. This principle applies to a misspent youth. The young are by God's Providence, exempted in a great measure from anxiety; they are as the apostles were in relation to their Master: their friends stand between them and the struggles of existence. They are not called upon to ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... took Pen's arm, and walked with him for some time silently puffing his cigar. At last, when they had reached Charing Cross on Arthur's way home to the Temple, Harry Foker relieved himself, and broke out with that eulogium upon poetry, and those regrets regarding a misspent youth which have just been mentioned. And all the way along the Strand, and up to the door of Pen's very staircase, in Lamb Court, Temple, young Harry Foker did not cease to speak about ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... man feels the burden of a misspent life; he cannot recall the past, nor make amends for its errors. But, withal, it is some relief that he can disclose his feelings to the old ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... Can't have much in you, though you do look like the last whisper of a misspent life. Well, men can't cry just when they want to, though a woman knows they cry oftener than any man ever sees. You have to ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... can I e'er these benefits forget? And can I e'er repay the friendly debt? No, doubly no;—yet should these rhymings please, I shall roll on the grass with two-fold ease: For I have long time been my fancy feeding With hopes that you would one day think the reading Of my rough verses not an hour misspent; Should it e'er be so, what a rich content! Some weeks have pass'd since last I saw the spires In lucent Thames reflected:—warm desires To see the sun o'er peep the eastern dimness, And morning shadows streaking into slimness Across the lawny fields, and pebbly water; To mark the ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... which the example of a young prince, of manners eminently popular, produced upon the young nobility of the realm must be taken into account in the narrative of that life which was so brilliant and so misspent; so blessed at its onset, so dreary in its close—the life of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Descended in the third degree from Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, Georgiana Spencer is said to have resembled her celebrated ancestress in the ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... Sad memory weaves No veil to hide the past; And as we trace our weary way, And count each lost and misspent day, We sadly find at last— Nothing but leaves! Nothing ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... dances with some other fellow mean anything more to Her than charity. He gets cold chills every time he reflects that at any minute a member of some royal family may pass by and notice Her, and that he will have to promote international spasms by hashing him. He realizes that he has misspent his life; that football is a boy business; that frats are foolish, and that there ought to be a law giving every college graduate a job paying at least two thousand dollars a year on graduation. He is nervous, feverish, depressed, inspired, anxious, oblivious, ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... soul. Money, sir, is not my chief good: May God Almighty desert me, whenever it is! and whenever, for the sake of that, I can give up my title to that blessed hope which will stand me in stead, at a time when millions of gold will not purchase one happy moment of reflection on a past misspent life! ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... into the face of his broken-down rake in the last plate but one of the Rake's Progress,[1] where a letter from the manager is brought to him to say that his play "will not do?" Here all is easy, natural, undistorted, but withal what a mass of woe is here accumulated!—the long history of a misspent life is compressed into the countenance as plainly as the series of plates before had told it; here is no attempt at Gorgonian looks, which are to freeze the beholder—no grinning at the antique bedposts—no face-making, or consciousness of the presence ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... to me, in my pessimism, and seems to me still, in my memory of all that ghastly fighting, that the fine mechanism of the Second Army applied to those battles in Flanders was utterly misspent, that after the first heavy rains had fallen the offensive ought to have been abandoned, and that it was a frightful error of judgment to ask masses of men to attack in conditions where they had not a dog's chance of victory, except at a cost which ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... contemplate it is, we are told, to know the true meaning of life, to taste for the first time the sweets of an untrammelled freedom. No sooner does M. Bartholdi's beneficent matron smile upon you, than you cast off the chains of an ancient slavery. You forget in a moment the years which you have misspent under the intolerable burden of a monarch. Be you Pole or Russ, Briton or Ruthenian, you rejoice at the mere sight of this marvel, in a new hope, in a boundless ambition. Unconscious of what awaits you, you surrender ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... aside the experience itself, as you would cast aside the skin of an orange from which the juice had been extracted. Don't fill the areas of your mortal mind with rubbish—with memories of "benefits forgot;" or loves unrequited; or friendships broken; or misspent hours; ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... Metropolitan Life Building, a reminder that humanity as a whole pays its premiums with decent regularity. They conned the nice gradations of tint in the spring foliage of Gramercy Park. They talked, a little soberly, of thrift, and of their misspent years. ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley |
