"Uselessness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... another to be compared with it. No mortal man has ever since preached a discourse of its kind. The spirit of the address is throughout that of sincerity and action, as opposed to empty profession and neglect. In the closing sentences the Lord showed the uselessness of hearing alone, as contrasted with the efficacy of doing. The man who hears and acts is likened unto the wise builder who set the foundation of his house upon a rock; and in spite of rain and hurricane and flood, the house stood. He that ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... manage to get through with this part of the day. But between breakfast and dinner, there is a whole desert to plough, a waste to traverse. My husband's want of occupation does not leave me a moment of repose, he overpowers me by his uselessness; his idle life positively wears me out. His two eyes always open and gazing at mine compel me to keep them ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... whined, licking her mitten, but left off struggling, as if it realized the uselessness of such a course. The other dogs were fastened in like manner, for they had all been trained to hunt wolves, and might bolt at an unexpected moment, wrecking the sledge and scattering the things which were loaded upon it. Then came ten minutes ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... Horng he heard the whisper of distrust, of fear, and the echoes of that hatred which had struck at him once before. But they were in the background; all around him here on the surface was a pervading feeling of ... uselessness, resignation, almost of unreality. The calm which he had noted before in Horng had been shaken and turned, and in its place was ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... forethoughtful had preempted every chair. Whereupon, with most ludicrous expressions of chagrin or of assumed nonchalance, they trooped back to meet the laughter of the wise, if not forethoughtful, who had realized the uselessness of the rush. After a moment's grumbling, however, the ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... progressive dissolution and in hopeless and exhausting struggles far more than in education or in profitable correction. Toothache and sea-sickness, birth-pangs and melancholia are not useful ills. The intenser the pain the more probable its uselessness. Only in vanishing is it a sign of progress; in occurring it is an omen of defeat, just as disease is an omen of death, although, for those diseased already, medicine and convalescence may be approaches to health again. Where a man's nature is out of gear and his instincts are inordinate, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... that he now had his eye on the Mormon vote. The non-Mormons in Hancock and the surrounding counties held meetings and appointed committees to obtain accurate information about the thefts, and the old complaints of the uselessness of tracing stolen goods to Nauvoo were revived. The Mormons vigorously denied these charges through formal action taken by the Nauvoo City Council and a citizens' meeting, alleging that in many cases "outlandish men" had visited the city at night to scatter counterfeit ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... people should have submitted to such monstrous usurpations, although decently veiled under the names of the old offices of the republic. But they had become degenerate. They wished for peace and leisure. They felt the uselessness of any independent authority, and resigned themselves to a condition which the Romans two centuries earlier would ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... another five years. And, in case Caesar should obtain the Consulship, he caused a law to be enacted, in virtue of which no one could have a province till five years had elapsed from the time of his holding a public office. Such were the precautions adopted against Caesar, the uselessness of which time ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... never came to realize his hopes of freedom, any more than he ever came to realize the uselessness of paint for his angels when he had no eyes for applying it. He whittled on, in melancholy dejection, ring upon ring in his endless chains of rings, forging in bitter irony the emblems of bondage, when his old heart so ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... antiquity to doctrine, expressed by the phrase, the "consent of the Fathers." The other objection was the inherent contradiction of the notion of infallibility to the conditions of human reception of teaching and knowledge, and its practical uselessness as an assurance of truth, its partly delusive, partly mischievous, working. But he felt, as all deep minds must feel, that it is easier to overthrow the Roman theory of Church authority than to replace it by another, equally complete and commanding, and more ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... warring vividly within. The dominion exercised over the natural violence of his character reminds us of the melancholy force of those beings who seek their strength in isolation and entire self-control, conscious of the uselessness of their vivid indignation and vexation, and too jealous of the mysteries of their ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... my counsel. If you do not like danger, go! It may be that I am mistaken, and that this nation, convinced of the uselessness of defense, may give itself up voluntarily. . . . At any rate, we shall soon see. I shall take great pleasure in returning to Paris when the flag of the Empire is floating over the Eiffel Tower, a mere matter of three or four weeks, certainly ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... clay in the latter condition only is meant when we say 'The jar has gone to pieces.' There, sixthly, is a numerical difference: the threads are many, the piece of cloth is one only. In the seventh place, there is the uselessness of the activity of the producing agent (which would result from cause and effect being identical); for if the effect were nothing but the cause, what could be effected by the activity of the agent?—Let us then say that, although the effect exists (at all times), the activity of the agent ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... rather nervous during their conversation, for Regine did not think it necessary to refrain from brusque questioning or candid comment, and her brother was frequently embarrassed and annoyed by both, but he had learned from experience the uselessness of striving to check her open speech, so gave himself up to the inevitable with a sigh. Of course, among other things, she spoke of Willibald's and Toni's betrothal, ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... across the cabin, flung the door open, sprang out. The uselessness of seeking his enemy in the black wet gloom was only too evident, but he would not give up. Gun in hand, he stood listening ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... and the Creche. He called mothers' meetings, and tried to show the uselessness of scolding and beating, because to do these things was really to teach the children to do them. He abolished the sale of strong drink in New Lanark. Model houses were erected, gardens planted, and prizes given for the raising ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... was done to him in many other ways. Conscious that all this disgrace had come upon him without any serious fault of his own, and even in spite of his direct and strenuous efforts, he became oppressed with a sense of injustice and undeserved persecution. The apparent uselessness of every attempt to shake himself free from these trammels of routine rendered him desperate and reckless, and the serious diminution of his hours for play and exercise made him dispirited and out-of-sorts. ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... and saw that my chains were kept secure. Then I looked in the faces of my guards, but all were unknown to me. As I had not before been to that castle as a guest, I was not surprised, and I said nothing to them, for I had found the uselessness of question and entreaty when I spoke at the ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... utilitarianism was the first efficient substitute for the labored metaphysics of the contract school; and even if he was not the first to see through its pretensions—that is perhaps the claim of Shaftesbury—he was the first to show the grounds of their uselessness. He saw that history and psychology together provide the materials for a political philosophy. So that even if he could not himself construct it the hints at least ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... languished suddenly, and he let both hands fall slowly upon his knees. In effect, the uselessness of all argument, the futility of any recrimination in the face of what had been accomplished, was suddenly borne in upon him with irresistible force: and his momentary irritation against the malice of circumstance, the baseness of the man, was swallowed up in a rising lassitude which ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... reflection sufficed to convince Wilkins of the folly, as well as uselessness, of rebellion. Pocketing his pride and burning with indignation, he walked forward, while the tyrannical steward went grumbling to ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... hardly grown-up we set to work to cultivate it, this luckless personality! Receiving no definite guidance from without, with no real respect for anything, no strong belief in anything, we are free to make what we choose of ourselves ... one can't expect every one to understand on the spot the uselessness of intellect 'seething in vain activity' ... and so we get again one monster the more in the world, one more of those worthless creatures in whom habits of self-ccnsciousness distort the very striving for truth, and a ludicrous simplicity exists side by side with a pitiful ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of Protestantism generally, or the "usurpations of Rome" is by no means unknown, while elsewhere than in Ireland, the public as a whole finds much pleasure in bating any religion that happens to differ from its own,—or offends its sense of the uselessness of all religion. Let us have a new "Truce of God," and for the space of a year let all clergy, lecturers, newspapers, religious journals, and private individuals, totally abstain from sneering and ill-natured attacks on other religions and their ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... for the objects of the society were practically the objects of the Mendicants; the vows were the same with a change of emphasis. The abandonment of austerities as a means of salvation or spiritual power was the natural fruit of past experiments that had proved the uselessness of asceticism merely for the sake of acquiring a spirit of self-denial. The extirpation of heresy undertaken by Ignatius had already been attempted by the friars, while the education of the young had long been carried on with considerable success by the Benedictine and Dominican ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... to promulgate the final edicts and the resolutions of the Council of Trent, and then retiring from the council of state. This line of conduct may be safely admitted and fairly defended by his admirers. He had seen the uselessness of remonstrance against the intentions of the king. Every possible means had been tried, without effect, to soften his pitiless heart to the sufferings of the country. At length the moment came when the people had reached that pitch ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... he was about, and showed her her part. She listened sullenly, but, seeing that his mind was made up, shrugged at the uselessness of opposing his will. Mary was to pay out the rope according to certain instructions, and afterwards ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... friendly gentleman who had interfered in Peter's case. He threw toward the colonel a look which resembled an appeal; but it was involuntary, and lasted but a moment, and, when the prisoner became conscious of it, and realised its uselessness, it ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... draw the sword." Applause rang out from a hundred thousand throats. Crassus followed to the same purpose, and was received with the same wild delight. A few senators, who retained their senses, saw the uselessness of the opposition, and retired. Bibulus was of duller and tougher metal. As the vote was about to be taken, he and his tribunes rushed to the rostra. The tribunes pronounced their veto. Bibulus said that he had ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... marvellous. All I had to do was to sit my saddle, and apply just that final touch of judgment denied even the wisest of the lower animals. Time and again the turn was so quick that the stirrup swept the ground. At last the cow, convinced of the uselessness of further effort to return, broke away on a long lumbering run to the open plain. She was stopped and held by the men detailed, and so formed the nucleus of the new cut-herd. Immediately Little G, his ears working in conscious ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... last four years she had become by degrees penetrated with a sense of her own utter uselessness, and she had gradually sunk into a melancholy condition. She did only what she was told to do, and she always expected to be ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... disobedience of the Son, you have none. There is nothing after unbelief, but ye are turned over, or rather left over, in the hand of the law and divine justice. Therefore it is the most dangerous and damnable thing to disobey this. It is to refuse the very remedy of sin. Consider also what vanity and uselessness is in these debates. What an unreasonable and senseless thing is it to dispute against our own soul, and against our own happiness! All is wrapt up here, and we do no less than the highest act of self-murder that can be. He that hateth me, wrongs his own soul. What an unreasonable thing then ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... my effort at self-control, I swore, tempted to batter that stolid face, yet realizing the utter uselessness of such violence. ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... like so many spiders, now weave about each other! But the contest between Truth and Falsehood is now pretty well balanced. Were it not so, and had the latter the mastery, even language would soon become extinct, from its very uselessness. The present superfluity of words is the result of ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... desired prosperity a reality. One of the most discouraging features about the Church to-day is the large number of utterly useless people within its fold. And these are not only useless, but saddest of all, they are content with their uselessness. They seem to feel that it is God's best for them; that it is all that God expects or has a ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... ambulances, to take away the blood-stained pillow-slips and blankets, and deliver them at the laundry and get clean ones from the linen-room. It's odd, but I'm almost foolishly elated at being allowed to do this. We are still more or less weighed down by the sense of our uselessness. Even the Chaplain, though his services as a stretcher-bearer have been definitely recognized—even the Chaplain continues to suffer in this way. He has just come to me to tell me with pride that he is making a good job of the stretchers he has got ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... with the doctor. "He has changed, has become more gentle, but is dispirited." Enter Nicholas Ivnovich and speaks to Doctor about the uselessness of treatment. But for his wife's sake he agrees to it. Enter Tnya with Stypa. Lyba with Starkvsky. Conversation about land. Nicholas Ivnovich tries not to offend them. Exeunt all. Nicholas Ivnovich with Lisa. "I am always ...
— The Light Shines in Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... enough room for him inside those neat fences. The man who, during long years, became accustomed to think of himself as indispensable to others, felt a bitter and savage rage at the cruel consciousness of his superfluity, of his uselessness; at the cold hostility visible in every look of the only white man in this barbarous corner of the world. He gnashed his teeth when he thought of the wasted days, of the life thrown away in the unwilling company of that peevish and suspicious fool. He heard the ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... vindicated the honor of his fleet, and shown the uselessness of further fighting, Tourville now thought of retreat, which was begun at midnight with a light northeast wind and continued all the next day. The allies pursued, the movements of the French being much embarrassed ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... order to have a look at that remarkable man, as he held forth with wonderful effect on the requirements of true theatrical art. Turning towards the dismal scene, I gently and respectfully pointed out to Spontini the uselessness of his declamation, and promised that everything should eventually be ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the end of the rainbow for a pot of gold, and if we want to belittle any effort we say that the individual is chasing the rainbow. So here I am again on the downhill road between two failures, following the rainbow to a hopeless condition of muddy uselessness. And if it were not bad enough to be following one rainbow, I am following a great number which must mean that I shall always end ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Mr. Cheviot, but he did expect concurrence from Mrs. Rivers and from Richard, and Flora assented to all his objections, but she was not to be induced to say she would remonstrate with her father or with Tom; and she intimated the uselessness thereof so plainly, that she almost hoped that Charles Cheviot would be less eager to assail the Doctor ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been reared as pets from the time they were calves, and have never learned to dread and obey the orders of a driver, are peculiarly apt to revert to wildness if they once are allowed to wander and escape to the woods. I believe this tendency, together with the cost of maintenance and the comparative uselessness of the beasts, are among the chief causes why Africans never tame them now; though they have not wholly lost the practice of capturing them when full-grown, and of keeping them imprisoned for some days alive. Mr. Winwood Reade's account of captured elephants, ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... reach, somehow, the myriads not reached, and to bring them forth from the darkness that they love into the saving light that now they hate—this was the problem. You can look at it. I have looked at it—till the sense of helplessness and uselessness threw me down upon my knees with my heart next door to despair. But there the still small voice was heard again, the voice of an infinite Saviour saying, "Be not afraid, only believe." "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ...
— The American Missionary—Volume 39, No. 02, February, 1885 • Various
... was he to "be good"? The English National Church, eighty years ago, had reached a depth of cold formality and uselessness which can hardly be imagined now. Nowhere was this more manifest than in the "parish" church. The rich had their allotted pew, a sort of reserved seat, into which no stranger dare enter, deserted ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... and weapon, lute and volume, man and woman, gift of speech, Have their uselessness or uses in the One who ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... sufficed to prove the utter uselessness of our efforts. The storm barricaded the track with a dozen drifts while we dug one away. And worse than this, it was discovered that the last grand charge the engine had made upon the enemy had broken the fore-and-aft shaft of the driving-wheel! With a free ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... true that the church had lost its power over the very kind of humanity which in the early ages of Christianity it reached in the greatest numbers? How much was true in what the Socialist leader said about the uselessness of looking to the church for reform or redemption, because of the selfishness and seclusion and aristocracy ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... Neither these ships nor the Nitherohy, which sails equally ill, are adapted to the purposes to be effected, as from their slowness, the enemy has an opportunity to force an action under any circumstances, however disadvantageous to this undisciplined squadron. The Real is no better, and her total uselessness as a ship of war, has determined me to prepare her as a fireship, there appearing no probability of ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... occasionally that it was "rough on us," and a "tough one." Sailors always have a vein of recklessness in their mental processes. It comes from their manner of life,—its constant peril. They learn the uselessness of "borrowing trouble." ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... of the validity of this piece of obvious logic, I suddenly felt a lot better. My morose feeling faded away; my conviction of utter uselessness died; and my half-formed desire to investigate a highly hypothetical Hereafter took an abrupt about-face. And in place of this collection of undesirable self-pities came a much nicer emotion. It was a fine feeling, that royal anger that boiled up ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... "Ja," which sometimes means yes, and sometimes means no. The shrewd and clear-sighted Rip is marked by the interview with Derrick Van Beekman. The thoughtful and kind-hearted Rip makes his appearance in that sad consciousness of his uselessness and the little influence he exerts when he says to the children, talking of their future marriage: "I thought maybe you might want to ask me about it," which had never occurred to the children. The improvident Rip is discovered when ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... he remarked, putting the letter back in his pocket, and settling himself in the corner with newspapers and books. He vouchsafed nothing more, and I knew the uselessness of trying to make him talk. Following his example I settled likewise with magazines into my corner. But when I closed my eyes again to look for the flashing lights and the sensation of heat, I found nothing but the usual phantasmagoria ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... even struck the peasantry, and whether through fear of the contagion, or through the uselessness of hunting down men who were treading to the grave by thousands, the peasantry ceased to follow us. Yet such was the wretchedness of that hideous progress, that this cessation of hostility was scarcely ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... separated here, he said, looking round, and then remembering that they had been pursued for several miles into the hills and that the enemy's scouts might be lurking in the neighbourhood, he turned back and descended the path, convinced of the uselessness of his search. We parted at that rock, Timothy keeping to the left and myself turning to the right, and if anything has befallen he must be sought for by shepherds, aided by dogs. Only with the help of dogs can he be traced, he said, and ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... attention having been attracted for a moment in another direction, when he looked again he had disappeared. He sought him where he fancied he saw the movement of his vanishing, but was soon convinced of the uselessness of the attempt, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... anything like it. Can it, therefore, be said that chemical analysis teaches nothing about the chemical composition of calc-spar? Such a statement would be absurd; but it is hardly more so than the talk one occasionally hears about the uselessness of applying the results of chemical analysis to the living bodies which have ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Seeing the uselessness of the siege, the attempt to capture Lillo was abandoned, having cost the Spaniards no less than two thousand lives. Parma's own camp was on the opposite side of the river, at the villages of Beveren, Kalloo, ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... [probably "Le Livre du Peuple": Paris, 1837], which I shall read with my whole heart and soul, as I have read all that you have written for four years. I shall owe you just so many more good and noble emotions. Will they remain for ever sterile? Will my life be for ever tainted with this idle uselessness which weighs upon me? Will the hour of devotion and of manly action never come? Am I condemned without respite to this trade of a Merry Andrew and to ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... vehicle at the post-office and drag himself to the veranda, even the person outraged by his latest flight of fancy forgave and pitied him. Everyone felt that the nimbleness of his tongue was perhaps only some slight compensation for the uselessness of his feet. ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... early adventures as a young "luff" were, for economical reasons, worked up into their present literary shape, with the addition of a certain amount of extraneous matter—love-making, and the like. Indeed, so far from uselessness, that veteran seaman and rigid economist, the Earl of St. Vincent, when First Lord of the Admiralty, had given to a specific form of old junk—viz., "shakings"—the honors of a special order, for the preservation thereof, the which forms the staple of a comical anecdote in Basil Hall's Fragments ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... hypercriticism has noticed, and which may likewise be traced to the original conformation of the play, is the uselessness of some of the characters to the action or business of it—almost the whole of the "Scandalous College" being but, as it were, excrescences, through which none of the life-blood of the plot circulates. The cause of this is evident:—Sir Benjamin ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... gentlemen of the jury," he said, "I feel impelled to say a few words, even although I realise their uselessness. I have no complaint to make concerning the motives which inspired the jury. I have no doubt that each one has tried to do his duty. Neither do I complain of the action of the counsel for the prosecution in doing his ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... with both anger and contempt; his face underwent a sudden change; for the first time I saw how cruel it could look. My heart sank as I realized the uselessness of any appeal to him for mercy. Then I thought ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... receptions and teas, and to have a dinner given in her honor, in the newspaper accounts of which the rare old Russell silver figured effectively, and on the whole she had enjoyed it. But a season of it was enough; her practical mind rebelled against the expense and uselessness of such a life. She adopted the plainest style of dress, declined invitations, ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... his descendants. The creature who passes his life without adding to the knowledge and goodness of the world has lived for naught, and he who fails to improve his own worth morally, mentally or physically has spent a life of uselessness for which his descendants must suffer; for to misuse oneself is to commit a crime against posterity. Each generation should be an improvement upon the preceding one. Having been entrusted with a piece of living machinery, it is the duty of everyone to give it the very best care and attention possible, ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... his back squarely upon him. A realization of the uselessness of further words possessed Gordon; he returned the money to his pocket. The contemptuous neglect of the other lit the ever-trimmed lamp of his temper. "What's this," he demanded, "I hear about driving stage? about Buck boasting around ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... to stand the test. The Times-Herald would have no more of it. Mr. Rogers himself could see the uselessness of the endeavor. He instructed Mr. Broughton to close up the matter as best he could and himself undertook the harder task of breaking the news to Mark Twain. His letters seem not to have been preserved, but the replies ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... we soon found out what you were—a man well born, well bred, full of brilliant possibility, who was slowly becoming an idle, cynical, self-centered egoist—a man who, lacking the lash of need or the spur of ambition, was degenerating through the sheer uselessness and inanity of his life. And, oh, the pity of it! For Mr. Keen and I have taken a—a curiously personal interest in you—in your case. I say, the ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... next paragraph, as to the uselessness of wire, I totally disagree, and for this reason, that, although I have myself proved it possible—having many years ago followed Waterton's instructions—to mount a bird entirely without wire, still ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... killed at the Grand Custom. Would to God this might meet the eyes of some of those philanthropic Englishmen who have some feeling for Africa! Oh! for some man of eloquence and influence to point out to the people of England the comparative uselessness of their expensive squadron out here, and the enormous benefits that must result to this country, and ultimately to England herself, morally and materially, if she would extend her establishments on this coast! Take away two-thirds of your squadron, ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... awakening of his literary instinct, quite as acutely, he told himself, as he should have felt it had she been presented to him in the form of a printed page. The sense of remoteness, of strangeness, grew upon him at each instant; he realised the uselessness of his good intentions toward her—the utter impossibility of snatching her or any human creature from ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... Russell, who was a large and somewhat pompous man. He knew his place, as a Western father, and never interfered with his daughter's love affairs. He knew Bradley as a likely and creditable young fellow, and besides, his experience with his two older daughters had taught him the perfect uselessness of trying to marry them to suit himself or ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... bay that lies next the head of the rapids, Belding was drifting aimlessly. He was still obsessed with a sense of the hideous uselessness of effort, and wanted to be alone. At one time Elsie used to be here in the bow of the canoe, but now it seemed that Elsie had little thought for him. And yet he could have sworn that, two years ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... experience of the uselessness of such warnings restrained me. I knew that these simple, law-abiding citizens would laugh me in the face if I told them that they were in danger from the ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... the cliffs, which skirted the property, potting rabbits. Jim expected Beth to act as a keeper for him, and also to retrieve like a well-trained dog; and when on one occasion she disappointed him, he had a good deal to say about the uselessness of sisters and the inferiority of the sex generally. Women, he always maintained, were only fit to sew on ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... is written over every forehead. Awake, my soul! Why should I give hours and days any longer to the vain world, when there is such a world of misery at my very door? Lord, put thine own strength in me; confirm every good resolution; forgive my past long life of uselessness and folly." ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... passing through an 'imperialist' phase in these years. The value attached by other countries to oversea possessions awakened among the British people a new pride in their far-spread dominions. Disraeli, who was in the ascendant when the period opened, had forgotten his old opinion of the uselessness of colonies, and had become a prophet of Empire. An Imperial Federation Society was founded in 1878. The old unwillingness to assume new responsibilities died out, or diminished; and the rapid annexations ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... has been stated by some authors, and I believe with truth, are apt to be highly variable. We shall have to recur to the general subject of rudimentary and aborted organs; and I will here only add that their variability seems to be owing to their uselessness, and therefore to natural selection having no power to check deviations in their structure. Thus {150} rudimentary parts are left to the free play of the various laws of growth, to the effects of long-continued disuse, and ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... You will not have misinterpreted my silence. I could not answer your letter until I had secured a time for quiet thought and for prayer. When I try to write, I feel the uselessness of words. I am doing better when I am praying for you than when I am writing to you. Yet I must write. . . . It is strange that God should have made us thus. To those whom He honours most He gives largest capacity ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... and hastened to the kitchen. Evidently a shell had exploded just outside, sending three or four pieces through. When order was restored I endeavored to impress on Martha's mind the necessity for calmness and the uselessness of such excitement. Looking round at the close of the lecture, there stood a group of Confederate soldiers laughing heartily at my sermon and the promising audience I had. They chimed in with ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... thinking ... slowly, listlessly, wrathfully. He thought of the vanity, the uselessness, the vulgar falsity of all things human. All the stages of man's life passed in order before his mental gaze (he had himself lately reached his fifty-second year), and not one found grace in his eyes. Everywhere the same ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... of Cavor, not a sound in all the stillness, only the stir and waving of the scrub and of the shadows increased. And suddenly and violently I shivered. "Cav—" I began, and realised once more the uselessness of the human voice in that thin air. Silence. The silence ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... aged nurse brings her tidings of the lover who has been unable to cast her out of his heart, and whose tears drop silently when he hears aught about her. Then, when she hears of his affections still living, and his heart still yearning, and thinks of the uselessness of the sacrifice she has made voluntarily, she touches the hair[31] on her forehead, and she becomes regretful. She may, indeed, do her best to persevere in her resolve, but if one single tear bedews her cheek, she is no ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... apparent temporary gain, but it always means greater loss, either immediate or remote. So nature punishes inaction with atrophy. Whatever is not used finally ceases to be. In plain language, apathy, inaction, idleness, uselessness, is the road to degeneration. On the other hand, aspiration and activity mean growth, ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... the mountain-valleys of Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald. The monks of that period were in good repute neither for their learning nor their morals. The Provost himself Nicholas Trachsel, was destitute both of external and internal dignity. And when the doctrines in regard to the uselessness of monkery, the unscripturalness of spiritual lordship, and the rights of Christian liberty now began to spread among the people subject to the foundation, they immediately applied them to deliverance ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... make his companion eat something, to take at least some soup and a glass of old Bordeaux; but he soon saw the uselessness of his efforts and went on with his dinner as if he were alone. He was very thoughtful, but any uncertainty of the result of his plans never entered his head. He drank much and often, and soon emptied his bottle of Leoville. Night having now come on the ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... to Y^2, a process which, clearly, does not make for peace. I should imagine that the best of diplomatists are quite aware of this. Indeed, there seems reason to suppose that Sir Edward Grey, owing to definite experience in the last two years, not only discovered the uselessness of the principle of a Balance of Power, but did his best to substitute something entirely different—the Concert of Europe. All the negotiations he conducted during and after the two Balkan wars, his constant ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... onslaught of time; she had maintained a system of public schools which produced first-class snobs and third-rate scholars; she had ignored the rights of women until in very desperation they had resorted to the crudities of violence in order to achieve some outlet for the pent-up uselessness and directionlessness of their sex; she had tolerated vile living conditions for the poor, and had forced men and women to work under conditions which were degrading and an insult to their Maker. . . . One by one these dragons reared their ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... this tough and simple stock will not, as I have just been saying, prove variable in religion; nor will they get nearer to apostasy than a mere external conformity like that of Naaman in the house of Rimmon. When Louis XVI., in the words of the edict, "convinced by the uselessness of a century of persecutions, and rather from necessity than sympathy," granted at last a royal grace of toleration, Cassagnas was still Protestant; and to a man, it is so to this day. There is, indeed, one family that is not Protestant, but neither is it Catholic. It is that of a Catholic cure ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "serviceableness," the true lost wife of Hamlet, is marked as having a Greek name by that of her brother, Laertes; and its signification is once exquisitely alluded to in that brother's last word of her, where her gentle preciousness is opposed to the uselessness of the churlish clergy—"A ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou liest howling." Hamlet is, I believe, connected in some way with "homely" the entire event of the tragedy turning on betrayal ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Elements being call'd so in relation to the constituting of mixt Bodies, it should be upon the account of its Ingrediency, not of its use, that any thing should be affirmed or denyed to be an Element: and as for the pretended uselessness of Earth and Water, it would be consider'd that usefulnesse, or the want of it, denotes only a Respect or Relation to us; and therefore the presence, or absence of it, alters not the Intrinsick nature of the thing. The hurtful Teeth of Vipers are for ought I know useless to us, and yet ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... taking up botany as a study; feeling well that even geology, which was antecedent to painting with me, could not be followed out in connection with art but under strict limits, and with sore shortcomings. It has only been the later discovery of the uselessness of old scientific botany, and the abominableness of new, as an element of education for youth;—and my certainty that a true knowledge of their native Flora was meant by Heaven to be one of the first heart-possessions of every happy boy and girl in flower-bearing lands, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Leyton's strange inquiry, Rushbrook's cold composure and scornful acceptance of her own credulousness, came to her in a flash of shameful intelligence. Somers had lied! The insufferable meanness of it! A lie, whose very uselessness and ignobility had defeated its purpose—a lie that implied the basest suspicion of her own independence and truthfulness—such a lie now stood out as plainly before her as ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... them, they were so quiet. Dad reckoned Ned was the better of the two. He was well-bred, and had a pedigree and a gentle disposition, and a bald-face, and a bumble-foot, and a raw wither, and a sore back that gave him a habit of "flinching"—a habit that discounted his uselessness a great deal, because, when we were n't at home, the women could n't saddle him to run the cows in. Whenever he saw the saddle or heard the girth-buckles rattle he would start to flinch. Put the cloth on his back—folded or otherwise—and, ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... reference to Pleydon then, and Linda failed to write as Arnaud suggested. Though she wasn't disturbed at the possibility of a continuation of his admissions of love she was weary of the thought of its uselessness. Linda was, she told herself, damned by practicability. Her husband used the familiar term of reproach, material. She didn't in the least want to be. Circumstance, she had a feeling, had ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... never be allowed to express a dislike of any thing which cannot be helped; but I think it is true. I do not mean that it should be positively forbidden or punished, but that it should never pass unnoticed; his attention should be invariably called to its uselessness, and to the annoyance it gives to other people. Children begin by being good-natured little grumblers at every thing which goes wrong, simply from the outspokenness of their natures. All they think they ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... neighbor through all the years of self-denial, labor, poverty and often hunger, which were necessary to pay for the leisure and the education of son or daughter. The feeling of inferiority, of uselessness, which this realization entails may humiliate the idle woman but it is bound to do her good. It will certainly deprive her conversation of sweeping criticisms on lives and conditions unknown to her. It will also utterly do away with many of her prejudices ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... the conversation, and pointing out the uselessness of my roving about, and the propriety of my settling in life, proposed that I should take an apothecary's shop, for which he would furnish the means, and that he could ensure me the custom of the whole Society of Friends in Reading, which ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... break into the house; millions of people have voted Mina their favorite; when she is out with me the most odious crowds positively stop my car. I won't go with her any more where she can be recognized." Lee rose, and his expression showed his increasing sense of the uselessness of their efforts. ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... though her husband and father were far less of guardians than they should have been, yet that there was absolute rest, peace, and protection in their presence compared with what it was to be alone with Freiherrinn Kunigunde and her rude women without them. A few sneers on her daintiness and uselessness had led her to make an offer of assisting in the grand chopping of sausage meat and preparation of winter stores, and she had been answered with contempt that my young lord would not have her soil her delicate hands, when one of the maids who had been sent to fetch beer from the cellar came back ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his career as an inspector of elementary schools Arnold had to reiterate this complaint again and again. He saw the incentive to cramming provided by the mode of distributing the grants, and he perceived the uselessness of the type of ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... proved the uselessness of the place, but it was necessary to go there to find this out. The death of his father brought matters to a climax, and Oliver must prepare for very hard times. Then London and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... is the absolute ruler of whatever spark I direct it against. Our own ignition is screened; but all others within the critical radius become impotent. So you recognize, do you not, the uselessness of machine-guns? The groundlessness of any fears ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... thus taken have therefore only more fully demonstrated the uselessness of further attempts at present to arrive at any agreement on ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... But having seen the uselessness of their fusillade against the cliff they had allowed their matches to go out, so that I was for the moment safe from musket shot. When I fired and brought down the first man, the rest hesitated, and seeing my companions clambering up behind me they scuttled back into the roundhouse again. ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... and incapable of collapse as the Bank of England itself. With a faltering tongue and a hanging head the nominal head of the firm told to those nearly concerned what was coming on them. Nobody reproached him; either no man had the heart, or all felt the uselessness of reproaches. Certainly these shareholders' silence ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... self-torture which are among the earliest and most cruel developments of grief, to realise how much of himself had died with her, after all. It was not merely the apathy of the first weeks that told him this, the sense of vacuity, of uselessness in all things, but the sense that never left him, even when he had awakened to an activity he had never known before, that nothing really mattered, however vigorously he might seem to act to the ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... passed a sleepless night. At first he had attempted to burst his chains asunder, but soon realising the utter uselessness of such conduct, and being also covered with bruises, he desisted and passed the next hour in calling out for relief. No relief came; only the mice and the insects heard his cries, and the former affrighted, sought seclusion in their holes, leaving the latter to survey in silent surprise ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... progress was creating anxieties in which she had no share. Her paroxysms of exhilaration, followed by a gnawing sense of failure and uselessness, were known to her mother only as "wildness" and "low spirits," to be combated by needlework as a sedative, or beef tea as a stimulant. Mrs. Wylie had learnt by rote that the whole duty of a lady is to be graceful, charitable, ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... Hamsun stands today where he has always stood. His objective is the same. If he has changed, it is only in the intensity of his feeling and the mode of his attack. What, above all, he hates and combats is the artificial uselessness of existence which to him has become embodied in the life of the city as opposed to ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... calmly you are going to do this: to spend the best and most vigorous portion of your days in idleness—in uselessness—in the gratification of self—in the contamination of others. And then weakness, the relics, and the miserable dregs of life;—you are going to give that sorry offering to God, because His mercy endureth for ever! Shame—shame upon the heart which can let such a plan rest in it one ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... fellow obeyed, seeing that there was nothing else for it. Hercules spat upon his hand, clenched his fist, and smote. Crash went the whole machine into ruin, the wooden upright splintered, and the iron supports doubled into uselessness. The destroyer rolled on rejoicing; but the crowd made a subscription, and the owner of the machine stowed away ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... rigging up another arrangement of the kind for perpendicular artillery practice, it would have required a long time to get it into working order, and the director of Repeller No. 7 hoped that now the British captain would see the uselessness of continued resistance. ...
— The Great War Syndicate • Frank Stockton
... far away, Cal felt a pity at the uselessness of the self-torture, the senseless need of man to punish himself for the guilt of imagined wrongs; and felt a wonder if the strangely developed moral sense of man had not, after all, done more harm than good. ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... young man, in spite of his bubbling rage, felt the madness of further resistance, and the uselessness of wasting breath; so he sprang to his sledge, to begin lashing it fast ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... silent an end. For more than a minute, he hung suspended over the dark and working water, expecting to see the student return; and, when hope was reluctantly abandoned, he arose to his feet, a startled and admonished man. Still discretion did not desert him. He saw the uselessness, and even the danger, of distracting the attention of the workmen, and the ill-fated scholar was permitted to pass away without a word of regret or a comment on his fate. None knew of his loss but the wary mariner, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... behind him, and, recognising the uselessness of argument, Ann yielded and laid hers in it. Somehow she was not altogether sorry to feel that friendly, human grip. In single file they made the perilous return journey along the narrow track, emerging at length on ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... is debarred from woman's best profession—wifehood and motherhood—must find some other work to do; idleness, uselessness—above all, idleness—are the hotbed of all manner of follies. The stupidest man in existence, working day by day at the worldliest work, has the better of us in this, that he is weighted, so to speak, and cannot flutter to and fro with every breeze that blows. ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... years—later extended to ten—had been sanctioned by custom. In the seventeenth century the institution fell into utter disuse, and there was no meeting of the Chapter-General from 1631 to 1776, when its uselessness was ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen
... always a charm, for there are estuaries of a particularly dispiriting ugliness: lowlands, mud- flats, or perhaps barren sandhills without beauty of form or amenity of aspect, covered with a shabby and scanty vegetation conveying the impression of poverty and uselessness. Sometimes such an ugliness is merely a repulsive mask. A river whose estuary resembles a breach in a sand rampart may flow through a most fertile country. But all the estuaries of great rivers have their fascination, the attractiveness of an open portal. Water ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... spiritual dominion towering above her. She looked upon the gorgeous pomp of papal worship, with its gormandizing pastors and its starving flocks, with its pageants to excite the sense and to paralyze the mind, with its friars and monks loitering in sloth and uselessness, and often in the grossest dissipation, and her reason gradually began to condemn it as a gigantic superstition for the enthrallment of mankind. Still, the influence of Christian sentiments, like a guardian angel, ever hovered around her, and when her bewildered mind was groping amid the labyrinths ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... strove by peering about to discover some marks of guidance, only to learn the uselessness of the effort. Even a slight advance brought no result, and it was with some difficulty I even succeeded in locating her again in the darkness—indeed, only the sound of her voice made me aware of her ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... grayish-green foam among the slimy stones, whilst long swelling billows dashed into the harbour, broke under the Custom House, and rolled great names and gloomy memories over the stocks round the fleet's anchorage, where lay the old dismantled wooden frigates in all their imposing uselessness. ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... It occurred to Leigh that possibly he had been a little short with Emmet, somewhat unsympathetic with his practical and industrial interests. If this were so, it was merely because he realised the uselessness of explaining the peculiar intoxication of his mood, for he suspected that the other would regard such emotions as fit only for women and poets. "You might come for a walk with me," he suggested. "The exercise ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... induced the viceroy to withdraw his troops in spite of the opposition of Omar, and after the disastrous end of that campaign the remainder were embarked for Egypt, 10,000 surviving out of the 24,000 who had landed under Schahin Pasha. The other change was the removal of Derch, whose uselessness even to his own government had finally become evident. His successor—Tricou, a quick-witted Parisian, of a character entirely opposed to the Turcophile Derch—asked permission to follow the army in the next movement, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... Her mother was able for no such work now, though she might think so herself; and Shenac knew that to try and fail would make the mother miserable. What was to be done? Over this question she pondered with an earnestness, and, alas! with a uselessness, that gave impatience to her hand and sharpness ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... sanction the idea that the bees had this view of the uselessness of his chimney. The subject of his girllessness leading on to another case of "why," he fell back promptly upon the hollow tree theory pure and simple; the which he took pains to establish by stories of trees filled with honey ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... qualified nurse, and the distance from home, and the handicap of her ignorance of the Russian language, would probably have prevented her organising anything like comforts for the soldiers there as she had done in Belgium. To those of us who loved her the very uselessness of her efforts in Russia adds to the poignancy of the tragedy of the death ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... indulgently at her son's masculine obtuseness. The subtleties of women were so far beyond his comprehension that it was hardly worth while to endeavor to make him understand. She made the effort, however, despite its uselessness. ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... nodded again. He had done so long without speech that he had no doubt come to recognize its uselessness in the majority of human happenings. The abbe felt in his pocket, and gave the man a packet of tobacco. The Corsicans, unlike nearly all other races of the Mediterranean, are smokers of ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... Wyclif, needed not to be urged. So a council was assembled at the Dominican Convent at Blackfriars, where the "Times" office now stands, and unanimously condemned not only the opinions of Wyclif as to the eucharist, but also those in reference to the power of excommunication, and the uselessness of the religious orders. Yet he himself was allowed to escape; and the condemnation had no other effect than to drive him from Oxford to his rectory at Lutterworth, where until his death he occupied himself in literary and controversial writings. His illness soon afterwards prevented him from ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... "I speak this for your interest. You cannot go on without the Earl's help. You know I am not on ceremony with you; and if I refrain from saying what you see I think about your present ruinous mode of life, it is not to spare your feelings, but from a sense of the uselessness of any such remonstrance. What I do give you is with goodwill; but all my fortune would not suffice to furnish pug-dogs and deformed teapots for such a vitiated taste; and if it would, hang me if it should! But enough on this head. The Earl has been in bad health, and is lately come to ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... memories, and imaginations must, however, be carefully guarded, lest, instead of reconciling you to the apparent uselessness of your present life, they should contribute to increase your discontent. This they might easily do, even though such reflections and memories related only to trials and difficulties, instead of contemplating the pleasures and the importance of responsibilities. To an ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... learning at Oxford the necessity of rousing his countrymen from the religious lethargy into which they had sunk. "Have not pride and haughtiness of spirit, impatience, and peevishness, sloth and indolence, gluttony and sensuality, and even a proverbial uselessness been objected to us, perhaps not always by our enemies nor wholly without ground?" So said Wesley, preaching before the University of Oxford in 1744, and the words in his mouth imply more than the preacher's formality. Adam Smith, Johnson's junior by fourteen years, was so impressed ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... "I was reflecting on the uselessness of our being filled, for, let us go away never so full, we ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... through the naive and intelligent count and played with him as with a toy, seeing the effect these prearranged receptions had on Pierre, pressed him still harder with proofs of the impossibility and above all the uselessness of freeing the serfs, who were quite happy ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... be asked, "Why, then, do the workers strike in such cases, when the uselessness of such measures is so evident?" Simply because they must protest against every reduction, even if dictated by necessity; because they feel bound to proclaim that they, as human beings, shall not be made to ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... about Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the choice spirit who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity. The place had also a more abiding defect; it drank hard. The staple conversation on the farms around was on the uselessness of saving money; and smock-frocked arithmeticians, leaning on their ploughs or hoes, would enter into calculations of great nicety to prove that parish relief was a fuller provision for a man in his old age than any which could result from ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... righteous, and let my last end be like his,' was the aspiration of that Gentile prophet, whose love of the world obscured even the prophetic illumination which he possessed—and his epitaph is a stern comment on the uselessness of such empty wishes, 'Balaam, the son of Beor, they slew with the sword.' It needs more than a wish to set us at Christ's right ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the popular taste has changed, it may be; a new generation has grown up, which takes no interest in his work; others have gone a shorter way and got the start of him. These are the facts of life which Horace must have had in view, when he lamented the uselessness ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... time the persecutions were rousing the horror of Catholic as well as Calvinist. The prisons were crowded with victims, and through the streets went continual processions to the stake. The four estates of Flanders were united in an appeal to Philip. Egmont was to visit Spain and point out the uselessness of forcing the Netherlands to accept religious decrees which reduced them to abject slavery. Before he set out, William of Orange made a notable speech, declaring the provinces free and ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... said Mr. Frank Hawley; at which everybody turned away from Mr. Hackbutt, leaving him to feel the uselessness of superior gifts in Middlemarch. "Come, Doctor, I must have you on the right ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... is to eat a fish of a Sunday. I go altogether by faith, in my religion, general, for they talked so much to me of the uselessness of works, that I've got to be very unparticular as to what I do. Your people who have been converted four or five times, are like so many pickerel, which strike at ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... hourly oppressed with a sense of her own uselessness, a feeling her aunt's aggrieved manner tended to foster. Her heart smote her as she saw everyone at work but herself. She tried to help her father with his township affairs, but he met all her offers of ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... you carry your head more proudly, your step is more elastic, there is more light in your eyes, more breath in your lungs, and you feel a celestial leaven fermenting in your heart. My old friend, you have emerged from your long uselessness to give birth to a soul! Oh, glorious task! God bless ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... brilliant man in New York who is full of charm and wit in conversation, but the moment he touches a pen he becomes, as a rule, a melancholy pessimist, crying out at the injustice of the world and the uselessness of high endeavor in ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... canyon, and some rapids below, but had no idea they were so bad, and thought they were about ended. No one had warned him, for he had told no one what he intended doing. He had bought an old water-logged boat that had been built by Galloway, and seeing the uselessness of trying to run the rapids with it, worked it down along the shores by holding it with a light chain. Once he had been pulled into the river, twice the boat had been upset, and he was just about dried out from the last spill when we arrived. He had heard us shooting at ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... the public-school and university teaching through which my grandfather made his money. Yes, but then if he is largely responsible for that which has made me useless, has he not also left me the hardly-won money which makes my uselessness sufficiently agreeable to myself? And would not the poor old gentleman gladly change lots with me, ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... beneath the firm clasp of my fingers. As we advanced I became conscious that my own position was an awkward one. I had no money of my own with me—not a cent other than those two five-hundred dollar bills handed me by Vail. The uselessness of attempting to pass one of these was apparent; it would be better to plead lack of cash, and put up some security if the man in charge refused credit. At whatever cost the girl must ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... is also true that our criminal law, based on a conception of crime and punishment which is nothing but our vindictiveness and cruelty in a virtuous disguise, is an unmitigated and abominable nuisance, bound to be beaten out of us finally by the mere weight of our experience of its evil and uselessness. But it will not be replaced by anarchy. Applied to the industrial or political machinery of modern society, anarchy must always reduce itself speedily to absurdity. Even the modified form of anarchy on which modern civilization is based: that is, the abandonment of industry, in the name of ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... weary sense of uselessness had overtaken her, and she shrank from encountering the unchanging and unchangeable; but she cast off the oppression, and followed the dog to the bedside. He jumped up, and lay down where his master had placed him, as if to say he knew his duty, ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... is worked for no one end or purpose that is not better answered by a question to his tutor, by consulting his dictionary, or by the insensible progress of daily experience. Even this argument derived from its utter uselessness does not however weigh so much with us as the other argument derived from the want of common-sense, involved in the wilful forestalling and artificial concentrating into one long rosary of anomalies, what else the nature of the case has by good luck ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... that amused incredulity that he so frequently bestowed upon his fellow-creatures. How was this kind of animal, with its cowardice, its stupidity, its ugliness, its uselessness, possible? He had never spoken to Bunning, although he had once received a note from him asking him to coffee—a piece of very considerable impertinence. He had never assisted Carfax and Cards in their raiding expeditions, but that was only because he considered ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... said, "until I give you some medicine, and then you shall take my arm to your cabin." With a motion of the hand, signifying the uselessness of remedies, he sat down again. As I handed him the phial, I continued: "I know that it is none of my business, but you are suffering. To help your body, your mind should be helped also. Can't you tell me your trouble? Perhaps I should be able ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Liberalism than is to be found among the ultramontane peasantry of the Tyrol." In politics Ibsen had now become a pagan; "I do not believe," he said, "in the emancipatory power of political measures, nor have I much confidence in the altruism and good will of those in power." This sense of the uselessness of effort is strongly marked in the course of the next work on which he was engaged, the very brilliant, but saturnine and sardonic tragi-comedy of The Wild Duck. The first sketch of it was made during the spring ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... and I grew more and more excited and angry; but I refrained from questioning the black any more, feeling as I did the uselessness of that course, and being unwilling to bring down upon myself the reproof of the officers for talking at a time when the order had been passed for strict silence, so that the Boers might meet with a ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... one, for a moment. Then the uselessness of such an effort at concealment became apparent. With sinking hearts the boys heard the ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... of India, shows that communications overland existed from a remote period; and we know that the East India Company had always a route open for their dispatches on emergent occasions; but let the reader consult the Reminiscences of Dr. Dibdin, and he will find an example of its utter uselessness when resorted to in 1776 to apprize the Home Government of hostile movements on the part of an enemy. To show, however, in a more striking light, the difference between the "overland route" a century back, and that of 1853, I turn up the Journal of Bartholomew Plaisted: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various |
