|
|
|
More "Sloth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon these investigations can be shown by an example from Mr. Wallas's book. Take the quarrel over socialism. You hear it said that without the private ownership of capital people will lose ambition and sink into sloth. Many men, just as well aware of present-day evils as the socialists, are unwilling to accept the collectivist remedy. G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc speak of the "magic of property" as the real obstacle to socialism. Now obviously ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... not depend merely on the maintenance of its glory in the stricken field, but in protecting its homes from distress as well. It is a new patriotism, it is bringing a new outlook for all classes. A great flood of luxury and of sloth which had submerged the land is receding, and a new Britain is appearing. We can see for the first time the fundamental things that matter in life and that have been obscured from our vision by the ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... cares of government to his favorites, he sought only for repose and pleasure. Yet in this, as has been the case in more than one other instance, the most turbulent lot fell to him who would gladly have chosen quiet and sloth. ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... for a gallon of ice, Which a monkey in waiting served up in a trice. Then the jaguar, the couguar, and fierce Ocelot, And Sir Hans Armadillo, who came at full trot, Brother Jonathan Beaver, escaped from the trappers, Sloth, Tortoise, and Dormouse, notorious nappers. That beau, the musk-Ox, with his long scented hair, And John Bull just arrived on his travels, were there; Messrs. Martin, Hare, Squirrel, the Ermine, and Stoat, And the rock-mountain sheep, with his cousin, the goat; Then the sociable marmot, ...
— The Quadrupeds' Pic-Nic • F. B. C.
... and it seemed to him that from the moment he left the ground till now he had been like a drowsy man shaking off his sloth, like a drugged man recovering consciousness, like a man who was supposed to be dead rapidly coming to life again. With every inch added to the height from the ground, he felt stronger, more active, fuller of nervous and muscular ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... have so grown into us as to become part of us, and in which we now live, not knowing, or but partially knowing, that they are sins, habits of pride, self-reliance, self-conceit, sullenness, impurity, sloth, selfishness, worldliness. The history of all these, their beginnings, and their growth, is recorded in those dreadful books; and when we look forward to the future, how many sins shall we have committed by this time next year,—though we try ever so much to know ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... It was, however, recognized by all as a definite triumph for my sister. My grandmother, a rigid Calvinist, who believed in Election with all her intellect, and acted Free Will with all her heart, elected Agnes Anne upon the spot. Had the girl not willed to rise out of the pit of sloth and mere human learning? And lo! she had arisen. Thenceforth Agnes Anne stood on a pedestal, and for a while one sturdy disciple of Calvin's thought heretically of the pure doctrine. Here was a human being who had willed, and, according to my grandmother, ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... on her King, he was dwelling at Sully, in the castle of La Tremouille, a man who had a foot in either camp, so that neither English nor Burgundians had ever raided on his rich lands, when these lay in their power. So, what with the self-seeking, and sloth, and jealousy of La Tremouille; what with the worldly policy of the Archbishop of Reims, crying Peace, where there was no peace, the Maid and the captains were not listened to, or, if they were heard, their plans were wrought out with ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... Abdul Mujid; "if you will free one hand I will spread my own carpet by the bed, and you can thus guard me without getting up, for my legs are tied, and therefore I cannot escape. Assuredly Allah hath spread the cloak of stupidity and sloth over this fellow," he said to himself, as his janitor rolled over, and lazily muttering "Oh very well, anything for a little peace," to the sepoy's intense delight fumblingly untied ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... who are old have no hope of renewing themselves, nor expect any thing but their departure; so you being weakened through your worldly affairs gave yourself up to sloth, and cast not away your solicitude from yourself upon the Lord: and your sense was confused, and you grew old ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... between the pedestal of the sphinx and the marks of my feet where, on arrival, I had struggled with the overturned machine. There were other signs of removal about, with queer narrow footprints like those I could imagine made by a sloth. This directed my closer attention to the pedestal. It was, as I think I have said, of bronze. It was not a mere block, but highly decorated with deep framed panels on either side. I went and rapped ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... life in service unless there is a wise enriching of the self, a thorough fitting for that service. The more of a man you are, the brighter your intellect, the broader your sympathies, the better your service to the world may be. The sloth that sinks the soul in indifference to its own development is the most sinful of all ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... a great change from fertility to barrenness. From the moment we entered Bohemia we were oppressed by a sense of poverty, of sloth, or some worse curse resulting from Austrian domination, which seemed to have been enough to cripple even Nature herself as she stood about us. It was evident that we had got among another race of people, or else into contact with ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... "And craven Sloth, moulting his sleepless plumes, Nods drowsy wonder at th' adventurous wing That soars the shining azure o'er ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... close dependence on a verb or a conjunction, is generally preceded by the colon; as, "In his last moments, he uttered these words: 'I fall a sacrifice to sloth and luxury.'"—"At this the king hastily retorted: 'No put-offs, my lord; answer me presently.'"—Churchill's Gram., p. 367. "The father addressed himself to them to this effect: 'O my sons, behold the power of unity!'"— Rippingham's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Earth out of Paradise, each with the virtue to heal or to strengthen, stored under the leaves that give sweets to the air; here, soothing the heart when the world brings the trouble; here, recruiting the soul which our sloth or our senses enervate, leave we Woman, at least in the place Heaven assigns to her amidst the multiform ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... without hope, without any curiosity about anything, and he was seized with a feeling of misery and a wish to run away, to hide himself in Paris, in his cafe and his befuddlement! All the thoughts, all the dreams, all the desires which are dormant in the sloth of stagnating hearts, had reawakened, being brought to life by those rays of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... least two millions of money then sent out of the country for the purchase of foreign linen would be retained at home, besides increasing the value of the land on which the flax was grown, and giving remunerative employment to our own people, then emigrating for want of work. "Nothing but Sloth or Envy," he said, "can possibly hinder my labours from being crowned with the wished for success; our habitual fondness for the one hath already brought us to the brink of ruin, and our proneness to the other hath almost ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... crust of my bread, or one grasp of my hand, to save him from the loftiest gallows in all Europe. I will not meet him, come where he comes, or hear his name. I will not help him, or those who help him. With a full knowledge of what he brought upon you by so doing, he has come back in his selfish sloth, to be an aggravation of your wants, and a burden upon his sister's scanty wages. I regret to leave you, and more to leave her, now, but I will not encourage this compound of meanness and cruelty, and, as I will not ask you to renounce him, I see ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... "bad, licentious, and most disordered." "Whatever disorders," he writes, "you see in the Church of England, you may find in Ireland, and many more, namely, gross simony, greedy covetousness, incontinence, careless sloth, and generally all disordered life in the common clergyman. And, besides all these, they have their particular enormities; for all Irish ministers that now enjoy church livings are in a manner mere laymen, saving that they have taken holy orders, ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... with wit and strength. 'Falls to make something; 'piled yon pile of turfs, And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk, And, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each, And set up endwise certain spikes of tree, And crowned the whole with a sloth's skull a-top, Found dead i' the woods, too hard for one to kill. No use at all i' the work, for work's sole sake; 'Shall some day knock it ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... sixty-seven species of mammals, or, as they are commonly called, beasts. Of cetacea, or whale-like mammals, sixty-five; ruminantia, or cud-chewers, one hundred and seventy-seven; pachydermata, or thick-skinned mammals, such as the horse, hog, and elephant, forty-one; edentata, like the sloth and ant-eater, thirty-five; rodentia, or gnawers, such as the rat, squirrel, and beaver, six hundred and seventeen; carnivora, or flesh-eaters, four hundred and forty-six; cheiroptera, or bats, three hundred and twenty-eight; quadrumana, or monkeys, ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... as any one to necessity. Sleeping has taken up a great part of my life, and I yet continue, at the age I now am, to sleep eight or nine hours at one breath. I wean myself with utility from this proneness to sloth, and am evidently the better for so doing. I find the change a little hard indeed, but in three days 'tis over; and I see but few who live with less sleep, when need requires, and who more constantly exercise themselves, or to whom long journeys ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... love that you may loathe Intrigue and darkness, that you may disperse The ranks of ugly tyrannies and, worse, The sodden languor and complacent sloth. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... am I like the autumn breeze for you, Which feeds on tears even to the very grave, For whom all grief is but a drop of dew? O poet, but one kiss—'t was I who gave. The weed I fain would root from out this sod Is thine own sloth—thy grief belongs to God. Whatever sorrow thy young heart have found, Open it well, this ever-sacred wound Dealt by dark angels—give thy soul relief. Naught makes us nobler than a noble grief. Yet deem not, poet, though this pain have come, That therefore, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... weight is lighter than a feather in the public scale. It is better for me to mind my own affairs, and leave these higher attempts to more competent hands.' This is the language, not of reason and modesty, but of sloth, of selfishness, and of pride. The amount of it is, 'I cannot do every thing, therefore I will do nothing,' But you can do much. Act well your part according to your faculties, your station, and your ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... exceeded its assets—and the Tiger mortgaged up to its value! The creditors were not angry; they attributed the state of affairs to illness and the absence of male control, and good-humouredly accepted what they could get. None the less, Nina, the child of luxury and sloth, had to start life with several hundreds of pounds less than nothing. Of her father all trace had been long since lost. A place was found for her, and for over two years she saw the world from the office of a famous hotel in Doncaster. Her lethargy, ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... to mind what high capacious powers Lie folded up in man; how far beyond The praise of mortals, may the eternal growth Of Nature to perfection half divine, Expand the blooming soul! What pity then Should sloth's unkindly fogs depress to earth Her tender blossom; choke the streams of life, And blast her spring! Far otherwise design'd Almighty Wisdom; Nature's happy cares 230 The obedient heart far otherwise ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... inventions in the space of six years are a striking testimony to the fertility of Bain's imagination at this period. But after this extraordinary outburst he seems to have relapsed into sloth and the dissipation of his powers. We have been told, and indeed it is plain that he received a considerable sum for one or other of his inventions, probably the chemical telegraph. But while he could rise from the ranks, ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... pheasants and partridges from their coverts. Idris leant on my arm; her sadness yielded to the present sense of pleasure. We met other families on the Long Walk, enjoying like ourselves the return of the genial season. At once, I seemed to awake; I cast off the clinging sloth of the past months; earth assumed a new appearance, and my view of the future was suddenly made clear. I exclaimed, "I have now ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... "Overthroweth monasteries; through sloth and idleness soliciting religious men to be negligent in coming to Church, careless in preaching, and loose in their lives. In the marriage bed he soweth tares, treacheries, and lightness. With worldly men he ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various
... that, "if Massa will not work," it is the highest gentility in him not to work either, and sighs for a few acres whereon he may live in sluggish content. And his quondam master, left to his own resources, will not any more than before put his shoulder to the work; and, though sunk himself in sloth, ceases not to complain of another's indolence. The spirit of caste is still relentless. The white man despises the black man, and, if he can, cheats him and tramples upon him. The black man, in return, suspects ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... narrow sluggishness that they could interest themselves only in trivialities. Their thoughts were occupied by their neighbours and the humdrum details of the life about them. Flattering themselves on their ideals and their high principles, they vegetated in stupid sloth and in a less than animal vacuity. Every topic of conversation above the most commonplace they found dull or incomprehensible. James learned that he had to talk to them almost as if they were children, and the tedium of those ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... they, for the first time, bared their faces. The cowardly and sluggish, only, remained unshorn. They wore an iron ring, too, or shackle upon their necks until they had performed the same achievement, a symbol which they then threw away, as the emblem of sloth. The Batavians were ever spoken of by the Romans with entire respect. They conquered the Belgians, they forced the free Frisians to pay tribute, but they called the Batavians their friends. The tax-gatherer never invaded ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... manner, in the Pampas of South America the skeletons of Megatherium, Megalonyx, Glyptodon, Mylodon, Toxodon, Macrauchenia, and other extinct forms, are analogous to the living sloth, armadillo, cavy, capybara, and llama. The fossil quadrumana, also associated with some of these forms in the Brazilian caves, belong to the Platyrrhine family of monkeys, now peculiar to South America. ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... freedom of action; but that freedom is best exercised when it leads them to trust and depend on the Lord of all things: not that He who seeth even beyond the confines of light is pleased with idleness, or giveth encouragement to the sons of sloth; the spirit which He has infused into mankind He expects to find active and industrious; and, when prudence is joined with religion, Allah either gives success to its dictates, or, by counteracting its motions, draws forth the brighter ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... of our laughter and our rage. Look on us with our sins oppressed! I, too, have trodden mine heritage, Wickedly wearying of the best. Burn from my brain and from my breast Sloth, and the cowardice that clings, And stiffness and the soul's arrest: And feed my brain ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... respectable and wealthy families, and well may they be proud of a social position, which is due to the honest industry and hereditary virtues of several generations. Whilst some of patrician extraction, crushed under the weight of vices, or made inert by sloth, or labor-contemning pride, and degenerating from pure gold into vile dross, have been swept away, and have sunk into the dregs and sewers of the commonwealth. Thus in Louisiana, the high and the low, although the country has ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... the Church by revivals is as unreasonable as it would be to carry on a school, or a cotton factory, by a revival system—alternations of violent study and work, followed by relapses into indolence and sloth. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... studied a polite style much: But there was little strength in it: He had the beginnings of learning laid well in him: But he has allowed himself in a course of some years in much sloth and too many ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... a hard government that should tax its people one-tenth of their time to be employed in its service, but idleness taxes many of us much more: sloth, by bringing on disease, absolutely shortens life. 'Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright,' as Poor Richard says. 'But dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of,' as Poor Richard says. How much more than ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... ideas of peace on a basis of compromise had disappeared on either side. The end, it was seen clearly, must be either absolute slavery for all but the privileged, or a system of life founded on equality and Communism. The sloth, the hopelessness, and if I may say so, the cowardice of the last century, had given place to the eager, restless heroism of a declared revolutionary period. I will not say that the people of that time foresaw the life we are leading now, but there was a general instinct amongst them towards the ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... creatures in every way adapted to the mode of life which they are doomed to lead. Place them in any other, and they will be miserable. You see there the ai, or three-toed sloth (the Bradypus torquatus). Though its arms, or fore-legs more properly, are nearly twice as long as the hinder ones, it finds them exactly suited for climbing the trees on which it lives. Place it on the ground, and it cannot get along. It passes its life, not above, but under the branches. ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... said the king, "and think clearly. Have you not learned courage and hardiness? Have not your labours brought you strength; your perils, wisdom; your wounds, patience? Has not your task broken chains for you, and lifted you out of sloth and above fear? Do you say that the stone that has done this for you is ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... by slow but certain gradation, stores the young mind with valuable ideas; accumulates in it a large stock of useful knowledge; and imperceptibly insinuates a correct and refined taste. Nor is this all. It may serve, as it often has, to rouse the indolent from the gratification of complexional sloth, and recall the unthinking and irregular from the haunts of dissipation and vice to the blessings of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... Shubin, 'every word of yours is worth its weight in gold, and it's not to me but to you a statue ought to be raised, and I would undertake it. There, as you are lying now, in that pose; one doesn't know which is uppermost in it, sloth or strength! That's how I would cast you in bronze. You aimed a just reproach at my egoism and vanity! Yes! yes! it's useless talking of one's-self; it's useless bragging. We have no one yet, no men, look where you will. Everywhere—either small fry, nibblers, Hamlets on a small scale, ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... irritated, in which case it reared itself on its hind legs from the back of a chair to which it clung, and clawed out with its forepaws like a cat. Its manner of clinging with its claws, and the sluggishness of its motions, gave it a great resemblance to a sloth. It uttered no sound, and remained all night on the spot where I had placed it in the morning. The next day, I put it on a tree in the open air, and at night it escaped. These small Tamanduas are nocturnal in their habits, and feed on those species ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... was received with cheers, said that no one who had followed his recent speeches could be in any doubt as to the turpitude and sloth of the men whom a mischievous caprice had set at the head of this country's affairs. He for one should never cease to clamour for their dismissal. He begged to move a resolution that in the opinion of that important and representative meeting ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... of the word in the sense of stubbornness or self-will Roger Ascham gives a good instance in his 'Scholemaster,' (1570), where he recommends that such a vice in children as 'will,' which he places in the category of lying, sloth, and disobedience, should be 'with sharp chastisement daily cut away.' {418a} 'A woman will have her will' was, among Elizabethan wags, an exceptionally popular proverbial phrase, the point of which revolved about the equivocal meaning of ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... in using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... a decent appearance, which draws the kindness of the rich and charitable, while they turn away disgusted with filth and laziness: not out of pride, but because they see that it is next to impossible to mend the condition of those who degrade themselves by dirt and sloth; and few people care to help those who will not ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... since have seen that the series of disasters which have befallen the empire since the Gallilean atheism has taken root here, have pointed but to that—that they have been a chastisement of our supineness and sloth. When did Rome, almighty Rome, ever before tremble at the name of barbarian, or fly before their arms? While now, is it not much that we are able to keep them from the very walls of the Capital? They now swarm the German forests in multitudes, which ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... virtue and religion are openly reviled; and can they not watch one half hour to hear them defended? Is this to deal like a judge (I mean like a good judge), to listen on one side of the cause and sleep on the other? I shall add but one word more. That this indecent sloth is very much owing to that luxury and excess men usually practise upon this day, by which half the service thereof is turned to sin; men dividing their time between God and their bellies, when, after a gluttonous meal, their senses dozed and stupefied, they retire to God's house to sleep ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... the same uncouth-looking effort of humanity that he had been at Yale. No wonder the Northern boys jeered him, with his sloth-ways, his mouthed English, torpid eyes, and brain shut up in that worst of mud-moulds,—belief in caste. Even now, going up and down the tan-bark, his step was dead, sodden, like that of a man in whose life God had not yet wakened ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... most lamentable in the past is best for the future. How is this? Because you performed no part of your duty, great or small, and therefore you fared ill: had you done all that became you, and your situation were the same, there would be no hope of amendment. Philip has indeed prevailed over your sloth and negligence, but not over the country; you have not been worsted; you have ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... directs us do, if it be relaxed in sleep or drowned in wine or crushed beneath the weight of disease? Nay, as the sword acquires its sheen by usage, and rusts if it lie idle, so the voice is dulled by its long torpor if it be hidden in the sheath of silence. Desuetude must needs beget sloth, and sloth decay. If the tragic actor declaim not daily, the resonance of his voice is dulled and its channels grow hoarse. Wherefore he purges his huskiness by loud and repeated recitation. However, it is vain toil and useless labour[59] for a man ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... Answered thus; "Fie on a thousand pound! This wide world, which that men say is round, I would it give, if I were lord of it. This bargain is full-driv'n, for we be knit;* *agreed Ye shall be payed truly by my troth. But looke, for no negligence or sloth, Ye tarry us here no longer than to-morrow." "Nay," quoth the clerk, *"have here my faith to borrow."* *I pledge my To bed is gone Aurelius when him lest, faith on it* And well-nigh all that night he had his rest, What for his labour, and his hope ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... to the effort. He travelled here and there, pervading the country like some spirit of unrest, threading the intricacies of city slums, north, south, east, and west, personally interviewing all manner of loathly creatures, damaged by vice and sloth and ignorance and crime almost out of all semblance of humanity. He had not dreamed that such beings existed upon the earth. Sometimes, unaware of the circumstances and the danger they courted, they ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... man to stand, and stirreth man's soul, And though thy body bow, as boate doth in water, Aye is thy soule safe, but if thou wilt thyself Do a deadly sin, and drenche[14] so thy soul, God will suffer well thy sloth, if thyself liketh, For he gave thee two years' gifts, to teme well thyself, And that is wit and free-will, to every wight a portion, To flying fowles, to fishes, and to beasts, And man hath most thereof, and most is to blame But if he work well therewith, as Dowell him teacheth.' 'I have ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... corrected herself, even begged pardon for her stupidity, till Mahony could bear it no longer. Throwing politeness to the winds, he twitted Sara with her finical affectations, her old-maidish ways, the morning sloth that expected Polly, in her delicate state of health, to carry a breakfast-tray to the bedside: cast up at her, in short, all that had made him champ and fret in silence. Sara might, after a fitting period of the huff, have overlooked ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... whosoever they be, who, pressed by the management of civil and domestic life, have felt this human hunger, and at one table with others who have been in like bondage, let them sit. But at their feet let us place all those who have been the slaves of sloth, and who are not worthy to sit higher: and then let these and those eat of my dish, with the bread which I will cause them to taste ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... and there is the sluggish, scaly armadillo, which loves the detestable termites—those white ants which, with their sharp mandibles, gnaw to pieces paper, clothes, wood, the whole house in fact. Then there is the climbing sloth, with its round monkey head and large curved claws. All day long it remains sleepily hanging under a bough, and only wakes up when night falls. It lives only on trees and eats leaves. In far-back ages there were sloths as large as rhinoceroses ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... find 'em coming home to him sooner than the cattle he has lost through his sloth and pride. The Lord is on the side of the just, as well as agin all ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... 'galley-slave,' 'girl of the town'; to inspect the police registers; to contract the business of dispensaries; to study the questions of wages and want of work; to taste the black bread of the poor; to seek labor for the working-woman; to confront fashionable idleness with ragged sloth; to throw down the partition of ignorance; to open schools; to teach little children how to read; to attack shame, infamy, error, vice, crime, want of conscience; to preach the multiplication of spelling-books; to improve ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... sloth or from terror, having abnegated the evidence of his senses, has been guided in all his actions, in all his enterprizes, by imagination, by enthusiasm, by habit, by preconceived opinions, but above all, by the influence ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... this saying touched the sloth and sluggishness of his, and did not allow the fraud and subtlety of others; neither was glad that it was indeed as he had said, but complained rather that it should be so: as many men speak many things, not that ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... slang, therefore, technical in origin, the natural efflorescence of highly cultivated agilities of brain, and hand, and eye, is worthy of all commendation. But there is another kind that goes under the name of slang, the offspring rather of mental sloth, and current chiefly among those idle, jocular classes to whom all art is a bugbear and a puzzle. There is a public for every one; the pottle-headed lout who in a moment of exuberance strikes on a new sordid metaphor for any incident in the beaten round of drunkenness, ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... few who have taken the same time to learn the trade, and are as little afraid of hard work as himself, can compete with him. This temptation to seek a "soft berth," where the only work required is sitting in an office, or talking, or writing, or riding around, is the form of sloth which is taking the strength and independence and manliness out of young men to-day faster than anything else. It is only one degree above the loafer and the tramp. The young man who starts in life by seeking an easy place will never be a success ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... his person, refused to admit him to her presence; and for the love of this lady who had so unkindly treated him, the noble Orsino, forsaking the sports of the held and all manly exercises in which he used to delight, passed his hours in ignoble sloth, listening to the effeminate sounds of soft music, gentle airs, and passionate love-songs; and neglecting the company of the wise and learned lords with whom he used to associate, he was now all day long conversing with young Cesario. Unmeet companion no doubt his grave courtiers ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... stability; yet, from the nature of human infirmity, remedies are more tardy in their operation than diseases; and, as bodies slowly increase, but quickly perish, so it is more easy to suppress industry and genius, than to recall them. For indolence itself acquires a charm; and sloth, however odious at first, becomes at length engaging. During the space of fifteen years, [7] a large portion of human life, how great a number have fallen by casual events, and, as was the fate of all the most distinguished, by the cruelty ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... Were no such gifts as crave no thanksgiving, 900 If with one blow dividing the sheer life I might make end, and one pang wind up all And seal mine eyes from sorrow; for such end The Gods give none they love not; but my heart, That leaps up lightened of all sloth or fear To take the sword's point, yet with one thought's load Flags, and falls back, broken of wing, that halts Maimed in mid flight for thy sake and borne down, Mother, that in the places where I played An arm's length from thy bosom and no more 910 Shalt ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... on the broad moral ground that every human being, from the highest to the lowest, has two sides to his life—his work and his leisure. To be without work in life is selfishness and sloth. But if a man or woman is so entangled in routine duties as never to command leisure, we have a right to say to such persons that they are leading an immoral life. Such an individual has no claim to the ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... dynasties have been in all times distinguished by the same general features. A brave and adventurous prince, at the head of a population at once poor, warlike, and greedy, acquires dominion; while his successors, abandoning themselves to sensuality and sloth, probably also to oppressive and irascible dispositions, become in process of time victims to those same qualities in a stranger which had enabled their own father to seize the throne. Cyrus, the great founder of the Persian ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... seek it amidst the perils of war. My father, the sultan of Harran, has many enemies. Why does he not call me to his assistance? Why does he leave me here so long in obscurity? Must I spend my life in sloth, when all my brothers have the happiness to be fighting by his side?" "My son," answered Pirouze, "I am no less impatient to have your name become famous; I could wish you had already signalized yourself against your father's enemies; but we must ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... once on a time a Great King, who had two vast realms, the Land of Light and Truth, and the Land of Night and Sloth. Those who dwelt in the first were full of life and joy. The King held his court at the Place of Rest where all ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson Told in Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin
... Collect passages that tell of the rewards of virtue and piety. (2) Cite passages that show the evils of: sloth or indolence, of wine-drinking and drunkenness, of tale-bearing, of family contentions. (3) Make a list of the chief thoughts of the book concerning God, man, and other great religious teachings of our day. (4) What is said of a man who rules his own ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... venerable head; Who, well provided with the secret key To that gold alphabet, himself made me, Himself, I say, the savage he fore-read Fate somehow should be charged with; nipp'd the growth Of better nature in constraint and sloth, That only bring to bear the seed of wrong And turn'd the stream to fury whose out-burst Had kept his lawful channel uncoerced, And fertilized the land he flow'd along. Then like to some unskilful duellist, Who having over-reached himself pushing too hard His foe, or but a moment off his guard— ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... had such great liking for those of his Order (foolishly believing them possessed of greater virtues than belong to them), that she entrusted him with the correction of her daughter, whom he lay with by force instead of chastising her for the sin of sloth-fulness, as he had promised her ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... days, and the meeting-days of moots; and over special persons like priests and royal officials. The church, too, strove to set an example of centralized administration; but its organization was still monastic rather than parochial and episcopal, and even Dunstan failed to cleanse it of sloth and simony. With no regular system of taxation, little government machinery, and no police, standing army, or royal judges, it was impossible to enforce royal protection adequately, or to check the centrifugal tendency of England to break up ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... day the monks waged, in their conclaves of sloth and sosherie, against the children of the town, denouncing them to their parents as worms of the great serpent and heirs of perdition, only served to make their young spirits burn fiercer. As their joints ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... day," he remarked, nor did he realize how soulful were the words. "And I cleaned up the last of the stock-room to-day, Joe. A swift but accurate workman, eh? I'll leave behind a record unblemished by oversight or sloth. And now—now it's about time, I suppose, I was going back ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... much time in studies, is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar; they perfect nature and are perfected by experience— for natural abilities ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... horse that will never be broken in, will always refuse to submit to any guidance but their own lawless will. They will remain either the Ishmaels or the Sloths of Society. But man is naturally neither an Ishmael nor a Sloth. ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... his limbs, and who at length has slipped the cord from off one hand, there still remained to Alfieri an infinite amount of struggle, of bitter effort, of hopeless inaction, before he could completely liberate himself from the bonds of sloth, of worldly vanity, dissipation, and unworthy love, before he could step forth and walk steadily along the new road which had appeared to him. His ignorance was appalling. He could no longer construe a line of Latin, he had not for months opened ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... mean plebeians, who sweat and struggle to maintain the appearance of gentlemen; and, on the other hand, there are gentlemen of rank who seem industrious to appear mean and degenerate; the one sort raise themselves either by ambition or virtue, while the other abase themselves by viciousness or sloth; so that we must avail ourselves of our understanding and discernment in distinguishing those persons, who, though they bear the same appellation, are yet so different in point of character. All the genealogies in ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... lingering seeks thy shrine, On him but seldom, Power divine, Thy spirit rests. Satiety, And sloth, poor counterfeits of thee, Mock the tired worldling. Idle Hope, And dire Remembrance, interlope, And vex the feverish slumbers of the mind: The bubble floats before: the spectre stalks behind. —Coleridge's ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... wrong," said Mr. Lenox. "The life-blood of a caravan is sloth; the life-blood of a motor is speed. You can't mix them. And how could Robert here survey England creditably if he rushed through it in a motor? You're going to survey England, aren't you, Bobbie? No, it must be a horse, and I will get it. I will ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... representatives are all South American, originated in North America long before the two continents had any land connection. The stages of degeneration by which these animals gradually lost the enamel from their teeth, coming finally to the unique condition of their modern descendants of the sloth tribe, are illustrated by strikingly graded specimens now preserved in the American Museum of Natural History, as shown by ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Tyre, Sidon, Carthage, Babylon, and Troy, And rich Phoenicia—they are blotted out, Half razed from memory, and their very name And being in dispute.—Has Athens fallen? Is polish'd Greece become the savage seat Of ignorance and sloth? and ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... to conformity. Could the history of opinions be fully written, it would be seen how large a part in human proceedings the love of conformity, or rather the fear of non-conformity, has occasioned. It has triumphed over all other fears; over love, hate, pity, sloth, anger, truth, pride, comfort, self-interest, vanity, and maternal love. It has torn down the sense of beauty in the human soul, and set up in its place little ugly idols which it compels us to worship with more than Japanese devotion. It has contradicted ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... and negligence of our times, that we so quickly decline from the former love, and it is become a weariness to live, because of sloth and lukewarmness. May progress in holiness not wholly fall asleep in thee, who many times hast seen so many examples of ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... business or pleasure, and governed alike the army, the courts of justice, and the women. Thus was spent a reign of seventeen years, during which the king had never but once, when he met Antiochus in battle, roused himself from his life of sloth. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... settled, and you would not see governments shifted from hand to hand,[23] and things universally changed and confused. For dominion is easily secured by those qualities by which it was at first obtained. But when sloth has introduced itself in the place of industry, and covetousness and pride in that of moderation and equity, the fortune of a state is altered together with its morals; and thus authority is always transferred from the less to the ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... there are some that they know not; but against such as they do know they fight on as bravely as though no others existed; and these men will be often victorious. We shall have added most strangely to our safety and happiness and peace the day that our sloth and our ignorance shall have ceased to term fatal. What should truly be looked on as human and natural by our intelligence ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... uses, Air ripens not, nor earth produces: In vain we make poor Shelah toil, Fire will not roast, nor water boil. Through all the valleys, hills, and plains, The goddess Want in triumph reigns; And her chief officers of state; Sloth, Dirt, and Theft, ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... Yang-tse bat-wing junk And tatterdemalion sampan glide, Sails of brown and black and yellow swinging. Down the Yang-tse bat-wing junks Fish-eyed and gaudy take the tide, Forth to the sea in sloth they ride, ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... learned, what room To put it into act,—else worse than naught? We learn our souls more, tossing for an hour Upon this huge and ever-vexed sea Of human thought, where kingdoms go to wreck Like fragile bubbles yonder in the stream, Than in a cycle of New England sloth, Broke only by a petty Indian war, Or quarrel for a letter more or less In some hard word, which, spelt in either way, 190 Not their most learned clerks can understand. New times demand new measures and new men; The world advances, and in time outgrows The laws ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... British Army?" Excellent, too, is the passage in which his subordinate speaks of crushing the enemy in America, and Burgoyne asks him who will crush their enemies in England, snobbery and jobbery and incurable carelessness and sloth. And in one sentence towards the end, Shaw reaches a wider and more genial comprehension of mankind than he shows anywhere else; "it takes all sorts to make a world, saints as well as soldiers." ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... in her bridal tire, The self-devoted beauteous victim slow Ascend the pile where her dead husband lies: She kisses his cold cheeks, inclines her breast On his, and lights herself the fatal pile That shall consume them both! On Egypt's shore, Where Science rose, now Sloth and Ignorance Sleep like the huge Behemoth in the sun! 300 The turbaned Moor still stains with strangers' blood The inmost sands of Afric. But all these The light shall visit, and that vaster tract From Fuego to the furthest Labrador, Where roam ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... never-ending flight Of future days may bring, what chance, what change Worth waiting—since our present lot appears For happy though but ill, for ill not worst, If we procure not to ourselves more woe." Thus Belial, with words clothed in reason's garb, Counselled ignoble ease and peaceful sloth, Not peace; and after him thus Mammon spake:— "Either to disenthrone the King of Heaven We war, if war be best, or to regain Our own right lost. Him to unthrone we then May hope, when everlasting Fate shall yield To fickle Chance, and Chaos judge the ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... all know the speed produced by the employment of steam; we have experienced it either on railroads, or in boats when crossing the sea; but such a flight is like the travelling of a sloth in comparison with the velocity with which light moves. It flies nineteen million times faster than the best race-horse; and yet electricity is quicker still. Death is an electric shock which our heart receives; the ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... remuneration for their services. As the hierarchy advanced these ruling elders disappeared. Hence Hilary says—"The synagogue, and afterwards the Church, had elders, without whose counsel nothing was done in the Church, which, by what negligence it grew into disuse I know not; unless, perhaps, by the sloth, or rather by the pride of the teachers, while they alone wished to appear something."—Comment on 1 Tim. v. 1. Some late writers have contended that these elders (seniores) were not ecclesiastical officers at all, but civil magistrates of municipal corporations peculiar to Africa. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... conducive to health. A medical authority of highest repute affirms that "excessive labor, exposure to wet and cold, deprivation of sufficient quantities of necessary and wholesome food, habitual bad lodging, sloth, and intemperance are all deadly enemies to human life, but they are none of them so bad as violent and ungoverned passions;" that men and women have frequently lived to an advanced age in spite of these; but that instances are very ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... improving their estates in order to furnish such employment, they would not only speedily banish destitution and ignorance from the land but they would double the value of their own possessions. This is one of the truths which sloth, rapacity and extravagance are slow to learn, yet which they cannot safely ignore. The decay and ruin of nearly all the "old families" in Ireland are among the penalties of ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... justify himself, that he preached in public; yet writing is more public than preaching; and more easy to refutation, if need be, there being so many whose business and profession merely it is to be the champions of truth; which if they neglect, what can be imputed but their sloth, or unability? ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... character. He started from the fundamental principle that it was of little use freeing the people from this or that special superstition, but that we should do better by working for the future against sloth of thought and want of independent mental character from the very bottom—namely, by educating our young people. Therefore, he set great store by our undertaking. And when I told him of our downcast spirits and the absolute danger ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... and beasts in infinite variety, as also of those creatures which seem neither bird nor beast. There are large black howling monkeys, and little black-faced ones with prehensile tails, by means of which they swing in mid-air or jump from tree to tree in sheer lightness of heart. There is also the sloth, which, as its name implies, is painfully deliberate in its motions. Were I a Scotchman I should say that "I dinna think that in a' nature there is a mair curiouser cratur." Sidney Smith's summary of this strange animal is that it moves suspended, rests suspended, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... at evening both, You merry were and glad, So little care of sleep and sloth Those pretty ladies had. When Tom came home from labour. Or Cis to milking rose, Then merrily, merrily went their tabor, And ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... strawberries covered the ground in rare profusion. Sheltered within the protecting arm of Sandy Hook, the little city nourished and grew great. It had no idle hands. Its burgomasters all either kept shops, taverns, or worked on farms, and scorned sloth. All was prosperous growth, under the famous Governor Stuyvesant, when suddenly, in August, 1664, for the first time, a hostile English fleet sailed up the great harbor, and anchored in Gravesend Bay. It was composed of two fifty-gun ships and one of forty, with six hundred soldiers. The consternation ...
— Harper's Young People, October 12, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... say. For certain of these doughty Pacifists having told you how much their one object is to secure peace, then proceed to tell you that this thing which they hope to secure is a very evil thing, that under its blighting influence nations wane in luxury and sloth. And of course they imply that our own nation, about a third of whom have not enough to eat and about another third of whom have a heart-breaking struggle with small means and precariousness of livelihood, is ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... be dulled by neglect of duty, by sloth in prayer, by inattention to the Bible, by indefinite, hesitating testimony, and by carelessness, when we should be careful to walk soberly and steadfastly ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... hour after hour passed and they came not, the desperado began heartily to curse their sloth—for to no other cause was he enabled to attribute the delay, as he knew the house, the destined scene of the outrage, to be deserted by all for the night, except by the three ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... embrace principles, and to act on them, by the slow stupendous teaching of the world's events. Men will go on planting potatoes, and nothing else but potatoes, till a potato disease comes and forces them to find out the advantage of a varied crop. Selfishness, stupidity, sloth, persist in trying to adapt the world to their desires, till a time comes when the world manifests itself as too decidedly inconvenient to them. Wisdom stands outside of man and urges itself upon him, like the marks of the changing seasons, before it finds a home within ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... have taken the same time to learn the trade, and are as little afraid of hard work as himself, can compete with him. This temptation to seek a "soft berth," where the only work required is sitting in an office, or talking, or writing, or riding around, is the form of sloth which is taking the strength and independence and manliness out of young men to-day faster than anything else. It is only one degree above the loafer and the tramp. The young man who starts in life by seeking an easy place will never be a success ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... of the army chaplains was of the hardest. A pestilence had fallen upon Louisbourg, and turned the fortress into a hospital. "After we got into the town," says the sarcastic Dr. Douglas, whose pleasure it is to put everything in its worst light, "a sordid indolence or sloth, for want of discipline, induced putrid fevers and dysenteries, which at length in August became contagious, and the people died like rotten sheep." From fourteen to twenty-seven were buried every day in the cemetery behind the ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... all obeyed the summons of the half-past-six bell next morning with nervous alacrity. For it was something more than a mere call to shake off "dull sloth"—it was a reminder that they were fags, and that their masters lay in bed depending on them to rouse them in time ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... I would not, were I fifty times a prince, be a pensioner on the dead! I honor birth and ancestry when they are regarded as the incentives to exertion, not the titledeeds to sloth! I honor the laurels that overshadow the graves of our fathers; it is our fathers I emulate, when I desire that beneath the evergreen I myself have planted, my own ashes may repose! Dearest! couldst thou but see with ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... aid of a vague phraseology which juggles with the secret of the centuries and the unknown things of life, it is easy to build up a theory in which our mental sloth delights, after being discouraged by difficult researches whose final result is doubt rather than positive statement. But if, so far from being satisfied with hazy generalities and adopting as current coin the terms consecrated by fashion, we have the perseverance ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... pursuit. The creature appeared to be unalert; its movements were sloth-like; yet the girl knew that if Phil once ventured an inch too close, or slipped, or tried to dodge past it to the sphere, its torpidness would vanish and it would have him. His maneuvering had to be delicate, judged to a matter of inches. Tense with ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... love, hearken unto me. The Nine-bow barbarians overrun the ancient land of Khem; nine nations march up against Khem and lay it waste. Hearken unto me, my son, and I will give thee victory. Awake, awake from sloth, and I will give thee victory. Thou shalt hew down the Nine-bow barbarians as a countryman hews a rotting palm; they shall fall, and thou shalt spoil them. But hearken unto me, my son, thou shalt not thyself go up against them. Low in thy dungeon there ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... unprofitable inactivity that leisure which the first years of my profession usually allow, and which diligent men, even with moderate talents, might often employ in a manner neither discreditable to themselves, nor wholly useless to others. Desirous that my own leisure should not be consumed in sloth, I anxiously looked about for some way of filling it up, which might enable me, according to the measure of my humble abilities, to contribute somewhat to the stock of general usefulness. I had long been convinced that public lectures, which have been used in most ages and countries to teach ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... public; yet writing is more public than preaching; and more easy to refutation, if need be, there being so many whose business and profession merely it is to be the champions of truth; which if they neglect, what can be imputed but their sloth, or unability? ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... every particular member of the community sensible of the public calamity, and ambitious of the honor of extirpating such a notorious highwayman from society, since he owes his long successes to no other cause than his immoderate impudence, and the sloth and pusillanimity of those who ought to bring him to justice.' I will not deny," continued Coates, "that, professing myself, as I do, to be a staunch new Whig, I had not some covert political object in penning this epistle.[22] Nevertheless, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... veriest mollusk of a woman. In the case of the widow Broadnax this natural feeling was not at all affected by the fact that she was too indolent to make the exertion to claim and fill her rightful place as mistress of the house. It did not matter in the least that she lay and slept like a sloth while poor little Miss Penelope was up and working like a beaver. No woman's claims ever have anything to do with her deserts; perhaps no man's ever have either; perhaps all who claim most deserve least. At all events, it was perfectly natural that ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... be seen in all her splendour; active energetic and consolatory; not disturbed by doubt, not disgraced by acrimony, not slumbering in sloth, not bloated with pride, not dogmatical, not intolerant, not rancorous, not persecuting, not inquisitorial; but diffusing her mild yet clear and penetrating beams through the soul, where all could not but be light ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... famous champion careering you might spy (Ill there was sloth and idlesse) beneath fair Kriemhild's eye E'en to the place of landing; by knights of fair renown There many a high-born lady from steed was ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... quantity no longer intimidated him. Despite his grave defects as a keeper of resolves, despite his paltry trick of picking up a newspaper or periodical and reading it all through, out of sheer vacillation and mental sloth, before starting serious perusals, despite the human disinclination which he had to bracing himself, and keeping up the tension, in a manner necessary for the reading of long and difficult works, and despite sundry ignominious ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... knowledge and virtue; slavery has no enduring connection with tranquillity or security—she cannot frame a league with any thing which is desirable—she has no charter even for her own ignoble ease and darling sloth. Yet to this abject condition, mankind, betrayed by an ill-judging tenderness, would surely be led; and in the face of an inevitable contradiction! For neither in this state of things would the shedding of blood be prevented, nor would warfare cease. The only difference ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Roger.—If thou hast ease, the shadow of content, Believe the truth, none happier is than thee. Thou workest well; can that a trouble be? Sloth more would jade thee than the roughest day. Could'st thou the secret minds of others see, Thou would'st full soon see truth in what I say. But let me hear thy way of life, and then Hear thou from me the lives ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... scanty subsistence could only be earned by a life of extreme temperance and toil, and where it was often to be sought, sword in hand, from an enemy far superior in numbers. Whatever may have been the vices of the Spaniards, they cannot have been those of effeminate sloth. Thus a sober, hardy, and independent race was gradually formed, prepared to assert their ancient inheritance, and to lay the foundations of far more liberal and equitable forms of government, than were known ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... secret, our enemy, and the contingents which were joined to our military forces were prepared to betray us at the first opportunity, as events would shortly show. These events would not have taken so long to come about if the German's natural laxity and sloth had not prevented them from acting sooner than they did, for the debris of the French army which crossed the Elbe in 1812 stayed peacefully in cantonment on the left bank of the river for the first four months of 1813, without being attacked ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... endure a second travail, and the chances thereof, than to have defaced an enterprise of so great assurance, until I knew whether it pleased God to put a disposition in her princely and royal heart either to follow or forslow (neglect, decline, lose through sloth) the same. I will therefore leave it to His ordinance that hath only power in all things; and do humbly pray that your honours will excuse such errors as, without the defence of art, overrun in every part ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh
... head; Who, well provided with the secret key To that gold alphabet, himself made me, Himself, I say, the savage he fore-read Fate somehow should be charged with; nipp'd the growth Of better nature in constraint and sloth, That only bring to bear the seed of wrong And turn'd the stream to fury whose out-burst Had kept his lawful channel uncoerced, And fertilized the land he flow'd along. Then like to some unskilful duellist, ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... election. Either the wars might still supply thy wants, Or service of some virtuous gentleman, Or honest labour; nay, what can I name, But would become thee better than to beg: But men of thy condition feed on sloth, As cloth the beetle on the dung she breeds in; Nor caring how the metal of your minds Is eaten with the rust of idleness. Now, afore me, whate'er he be, that should Relieve a person of thy quality, While thou ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... were indeed very happy ones; he did not spend them in idle sloth, but he and Nelly, accompanied by her grandmother, set off early to worship together, never allowing either wind or rain to hinder them, although they had several miles to go. On their return they spent the remainder of the ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston
... beneficent commerce into baleful gambling Gigantic vices are proudly pointed to as the noblest No generation is long-lived enough to reap the harvest Proclaiming the virginity of the Virgin's mother Steeped to the lips in sloth which imagined itself to be pride To shirk labour, infinite numbers become priests ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... religion are openly reviled; and can they not watch one half hour to hear them defended? Is this to deal like a judge (I mean like a good judge), to listen on one side of the cause and sleep on the other? I shall add but one word more. That this indecent sloth is very much owing to that luxury and excess men usually practise upon this day, by which half the service thereof is turned to sin; men dividing their time between God and their bellies, when, after a gluttonous meal, their senses dozed and stupefied, they retire to God's house to ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... for thou hast striven with God and with men, and hast prevailed." And through all the ages God's children have understood, what Christ's two parables teach, that God holds Himself back, and seeks to get away from us, until what is of flesh and self and sloth in us is overcome, and we so prevail with Him that He can and must bless us. Oh! why is it that so many of God's children have no desire for this honour—being princes of God, strivers with God, and prevailing? What our Lord ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... woman"—wholly to be loved By either name she found an easy way Into my heart, whose sentinels all proved Unfaithful to their trust, the luckless day She entered there. "Prudence and reason both! Did you not question her? How was it pray She so persuaded you?" "Nor sleep nor sloth," They cried, "o'ercame us then, a CHILD at play Went smiling past us, and then turning round Too late your heart to save, a ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... he cried, when he saw me. 'You idler! dawdle! sloth! gee up, do make haste! You ought to have been here an hour ago! To-morrow I am going to read to Harel a grand ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... from this man's gibe and that keen word, Another's chilly smile or peevish frown, I caught their talk—but added none of mine. They said how she still fumbled with her fate, How she had banished visitants divine, How long her sleep had been, her sloth how great, How others had drawn near and passed her by, While she luxuriously had dreamed, dreamed on, She, she her own eternal enemy, And wanting brain, brain, brain would be undone. The glasses tinkled as they talked and laughed, And if the door a moment hung ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... energetic, in your thought. Then doubt: you must have decision of will, must be able to make up your mind. Then carelessness: this is one of the greatest difficulties with beginners; they read a thing carelessly, they are inaccurate. Sloth: a lazy man cannot be a Yogi; one who is inert, who lacks the power and the will to exert himself; how shall he make the desperate exertions wanted along this line? The next, worldly-mindedness, is obviously an obstacle. Mistaken ideas is another great obstacle, thinking ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... mother, "Madam, I begin to grow weary of Samaria; I feel a passion for glory; give me leave to seek it amidst the perils of war. My father, the sultan of Harran, has many enemies. Why does he not call me to his assistance? Why does he leave me here so long in obscurity? Must I spend my life in sloth, when all my brothers have the happiness to be fighting by his side?" "My son," answered Pirouze, "I am no less impatient to have your name become famous; I could wish you had already signalized yourself against your father's enemies; but we must wait till he requires it." "No, madam," ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... is the devil's motto. All history is strewn with its brilliant victims, the wrecks of half-finished plans and unexecuted resolutions. It is the favorite refuge of sloth and incompetency. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... said he, "cannot be of God, that one of His saints, the founder of this house, should lead into sloth and luxury the children of the house he has founded. Sooner could I believe that this is a malignant snare of the most Evil One, who heals the bodily ailments of a few that he may wreck the ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... that you imitate the glories of your ancestor, that illustrious Peter whom you have sworn to take as your model? It will not be long before your people's love will be changed to hatred. Rise up, my Czar! Shake off this lethargy and sloth. Prove that you are worthy of the faith which I and others have given you ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... appearance, which draws the kindness of the rich and charitable, while they turn away disgusted with filth and laziness: not out of pride, but because they see that it is next to impossible to mend the condition of those who degrade themselves by dirt and sloth; and few people care to help those ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... winter months, when inspection is scarce possible, it must seem a vain toil to polish the brass hand-rail of the stair, or to keep an unrewarded vigil in the lightroom; and the keepers are habitually tempted to the beginnings of sloth, and must unremittingly resist. He who temporises with his conscience is already lost. I must tell here an anecdote that illustrates the difficulties of inspection. In the days of my uncle David and my father ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... state, spends its life in trees, and never leaves them but from force or accident. The eagle to the sky, the mole to the ground, the sloth to the tree; but what is most extraordinary, he lives not upon the branches, but under them. He moves suspended, rests suspended, sleeps suspended, and passes his life in suspense,—like a young clergyman distantly related to ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... binding the ferns, bushes, and old dead branches together; and in this confused tangle the animal scrambled and tore with a great show of energy, but really made very little progress; and all at once it flashed into my mind that it was a sloth—a common animal, but rarely seen on the ground—with no tree near to take refuge in. The shock of joy this discovery produced was great enough to unnerve me, and for some moments I stood trembling, hardly able to breathe; then recovering I hastened after it, and stunned it with a blow from ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... pleasure so continuously as to leave no scope for any further end of life. It may be hard to indicate the precise hour in which this man's pleasure-seeking passes into sin: still this is clear, his life is not innocent. Clear him of gluttony and lust, there remains upon him the sin of sloth and of a ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... cried the sailor, as, relieved of the boy's weight, he too swung head downwards for a moment or two, then with a quick effort wrenched himself upwards, got hold of the branch with both hands, and after hanging like a sloth for a few moments, succeeded in dragging himself upon the bough, which all the while was swaying heavily up and down and threatening to shake Rodd from where he hung, but at the same time inciting him so to fresh desperate action, that with all a boy's activity he ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... commit, without reflection, some or other of these crimes, one of which is enough to damn a soul?" He mentions also, as general sins, swearing, evil words, vain-glory, not giving alms, want of confidence in divine providence, and of resignation to his will, covetousness, and sloth in the practice of virtue. He complains that whereas the narrow path only leads to heaven, almost all men throw themselves into the broad way, walking with the multitude in their employs and actions, seeking their ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Grogan, E., To-day will be brought up to me For impudence and sloth; Reveille only made him sneer; Aroused, he lipped a Bombardier ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... the worst of all." "There is another error," he proceeds, "of those who like to call themselves 'theopaths.' They take every impulse to be Divine, and repudiate all responsibility. Most of them live in inert sloth." As a corrective to these errors, he very rightly says, "Christ must be the rule and pattern of all our lives"; but he does not see that there is a deep inconsistency between the imitation of Christ as the living ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... inflamed conscience, he is the most valiant of men, whom they can hardly keep from getting himself killed, and for that matter all the rest of them. Here, again, is an inimitable flash of insight, where Simple, Sloth, and Presumption have prevailed with "one Short-Wind, one Sleepy-Head, and with a young woman, her name was Dull, to turn out of the way and ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... passing over the border,— And fading away from our view; All idleness, sloth, and disorder, All hatred and spite go with you. All bitterness, gloom, and repining Down into your stronghold are cast. Sail out where the sunsets are shining, Sail out ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... winter away, [p 7] Arriv'd, from the north, to be merry and gay. The Panther ferocious—the Lynx of quick sight, The Preacher[1] and Glutton[1] came hither that night. The Camel, so often with burthens opprest, Was glad for a while from his labour to rest. The Sloth, when invited, got up with much pain, Just groan'd out, "Ah, No!" and then laid down again. The Fox, near the hen-roost, no longer kept watch, But hied to the feast, better viands to catch. The Monkey, so cunning, and full of ...
— The Elephant's Ball, and Grand Fete Champetre • W. B.
... to those minds which instead of exercise give themselves up to sloth. They are like the razor here spoken of, and lose the keenness of their edge, while the rust of ignorance spoils their ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... bat-wing junk And tatterdemalion sampan glide, Sails of brown and black and yellow swinging. Down the Yang-tse bat-wing junks Fish-eyed and gaudy take the tide, Forth to the sea in sloth they ride, ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... unhealthy and angelic, of flesh in which there is no life. She had let her arms fall by her sides—round, smooth arms with a pretty dimple at the elbow. Her wrists were delicate; her hands, which did not betray the servant, were embellished with a lady's fingernails. And lazily, with graceful sloth, she allowed her indolent figure to curve and sway;—a figure that a garter might span, and that was made even more slender to the eye by the projection of the hips and the curve of the hoops that gave the balloon-like roundness ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... taste for adventure. Care-for-nothingness is one of man-kind's chief diseases, and if it plays so conspicuous a part in comparatively enlightened and favored communities, amidst the labors and the enjoyments of an advanced civilization, its influence was certainly not less in times of intellectual sloth and harshly monotonous existence. To escape therefrom, to satisfy in some sort the energy and curiosity inherent in man, the people of the eleventh century had scarcely any resource but war, with its excitement and distant excursions into unknown regions. Thither ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... gay capital. And when their general found it necessary to demand their aid on the ramparts, he could only secure their attendance by ordering the taverns and cookshops to be removed to the place of duty. Not yet so far sunk in sloth and debauch, the Byzantines were nevertheless hosts eminently dangerous to the austerer manners of their Greek visitors. The people, the women, the delicious wine, the balm of the subduing climate served to tempt the senses and relax the mind. Like all the Dorians, when freed from primitive ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... syrenis istius cantibus surdam posthac aurem obversurus.—I bid farewell to Sloth, being resolved henceforth not to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... groaned. "Spurn it. Shun sloth. In the midnight oil set the wick of knowledge. Burn ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... higher ranks, who have no call to exertion in gaining the means of subsistence, and no objects of interest on which to exercise their mental faculties, and who consequently sink into a state of mental sloth and nervous weakness, which not only deprives them of much enjoyment, but subjects them to suffering, both of body and ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... O bull of Bharata's race, Pandu who had achieved a victory over sloth and lethargy, accompanied by his two wives, Kunti and Madri, retired into the woods. Leaving his excellent palace with its luxurious beds, he became a permanent inhabitant of the woods, devoting the whole of his time to the chase of the deer. And fixing his abode in a delightful and hilly region ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... consist in keeping an everlasting bright look-out on your own side, and jamming all other varments slick through a stone wall, as the waggon-wheel used up the lame frog? (Hear, hear.) I say—and mind you I'll stick to it like a starved sloth to the back of a fat babby—I say, gentlemen, this country, the United States (particularly Kentucky, from which I come, and which will whip all the rest with out-straws and rotten bull-rushes agin pike, bagnet, mortars, and all their almighty fine artillery), ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... wealth and pride Takes up a space that many poor supplied— Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds, Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds; The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth Has robb'd the neighboring fields of half their growth; His seat, where solitary sports are seen, Indignant spurns the cottage from the green; Around the world each needful product flies, For all the luxuries the world supplies: While thus the land adorn'd for pleasure—all In ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... inferiors they were therefore dear; but the king's servants, his bailiffs and overseers, as being in nothing better men than themselves, they despised and slighted, nor were the least concerned at their commands and menaces. They used honest pastimes and liberal studies, not esteeming sloth and idleness honest and liberal, but rather such exercises as hunting and running, repelling robbers, taking of thieves, and delivering the wronged and oppressed from injury. For doing such things, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... calculated, under certain circumstances, to prove highly beneficial to us. The offensiveness and noxiousness look very much like a direct command from the Author of Nature, to do that which shall turn the refuse to a good account—namely, to bury it in the earth. Yet, from sloth and negligence, it is often allowed to cumber the surface, and there do its evil work instead. An important principle is thus instanced—the essential identity of Nuisance and Waste. Nearly all the physical annoyances we are subjected to, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... have, at least, a chance of winning the lady. It may be one chance in a million; but God favors the brave, and you have no chance if you remain perched owl-like upon this wilderness of rock. Max, you know not what awaits you. Rouse yourself from this sloth of a thousand years, and strike fire from the earth that shall illumine your name to the end ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... Alfarache never met with in the whole extent of the Hospital of Fools—'To increase the power, by new arts, of conquered nations!' These consequences are twisted like the cordage of Ocnus, the God of Sloth, in hell, which are fit for nothing but to fodder asses with. If our historian means by every little invention to increase the powers of mankind, as an enterprise of such renown, he is deceived; this glory is not due to ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... spring the roses, apples in the fall: And, when cold winter split the rocks in twain, And ice the running rivers did restrain, He stripp'd the bear's foot of its leafy growth, And, calling western winds, accus'd the spring of sloth He therefore first among the swains was found To reap the product of his labour'd ground, And squeeze the combs with golden liquor crown'd His limes were first in flow'rs, his lofty pines, With friendly shade, secur'd his tender ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... doors over night in a blizzard, that the jug, as a jug, would be no longer of value in the morning. He was, and is, routine impersonate, exponent of sound business personified; a living sermon against sloth and improvidence, and easy derelictions ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... I have been doing since you left. I spent three whole days in the most unimaginable wretchedness; I had no hindrances like yours—only the most fearful burden of dullness and sloth, that had crept upon me and mastered me, during all the weeks that I had let myself be so upset and delayed. I cannot picture what I go through when I lose my self-command in that way, but it is like one who is tied down upon ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... upon, rather than achieved by, their companies, but, once established in their respective positions, proceeded without exception to justify, by their energy and ability, their selection from the best element of Kenton City. Among the enlisted men the exponents of the old spirit of sloth, indifference, and laxity were weeded out as fast as their terms of service expired, and their places filled from the same sources whence the company officers were drawn. Colonel Broadcastle was a diplomat as well as a disciplinarian. By some unknowable system ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... saying touched the sloth and sluggishness of his, and did not allow the fraud and subtlety of others; neither was glad that it was indeed as he had said, but complained rather that it should be so: as many men speak many things, not that they ought to be so, ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... grasp of the child's warm little hand. Feeble as he was, she seemed to adopt him willingly for her protector. And the Doctor never afterwards shrank from his duty nor quailed beneath it, but bore himself like a man, striving, amid the sloth of age and the breaking-up of intellect, to earn the competency which he had failed to accumulate even in his ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... acquainted with the great power of steam; we have proved it by the rapidity with which we can travel, both on a railroad or in a steamship across the sea. But this speed is like the movements of the sloth, or the crawling march of the snail, when compared to the swiftness with which light travels; light flies nineteen million times faster than the fleetest race-horse, and electricity is more rapid still. Death is an electric shock which ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... The Jewish law, whate'er in mystic book Moses has handed down,—to show the way To none but he who the same rites observes, And those athirst to lead unto the spring Only if circumcised. Whereof the cause Was he, their sire, to whom each seventh day Was one of sloth, whereon he took in ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... These were that everyone, man or woman, ought to work for his or her living, that everyone was charged with the duty of achieving personal happiness, that great harm was done by encouraging habits of idleness, and that the presence of so much misery in the world was greatly due to sloth. This theory of hers was a sweeping condemnation of drunkenness, of all the legendary loafing ways of her father Macquart. But, though she did not know it, there was much of Macquart's nature in herself. She was merely ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... death, is dead. Too long Have sloth and doubt and treason bidden us be What Cromwell's England was not, when the sea To him bore witness given of Blake how strong She stood, a commonweal that brooked no wrong From foes less vile ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... management of civil and domestic life, have felt this human hunger, and at one table with others who have been in like bondage, let them sit. But at their feet let us place all those who have been the slaves of sloth, and who are not worthy to sit higher: and then let these and those eat of my dish, with the bread which I will cause them to ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... cease her prayers to Jove, Until he took from her the heavy curse Of immortality. With closer vows, The knight then sealed his worship and forswore All other aims and deeds to serve her cause. Thus passed unnoted seven barren years Of reckless passion and voluptuous sloth, Undignified by any lofty thought In his degraded mind, that sometime was Endowed with noble capability. From revelry to revelry he passed, Craving more pungent pleasure momently, And new intoxications, and each hour The siren ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... equally degrading to individuals as to nations. Sloth never made its mark in the world, and never will. Sloth never climbed a hill, nor overcame a difficulty that it could avoid. Indolence always failed in life, and always will. It is in the nature of things that it should not succeed in anything. It is a burden, an incumbrance, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... justice, by which she COMMANDS that condign vengeance be done upon them; others were lukewarm and remiss in devotion, and to them she gives letters of justice and grace, by which {375} she COMMANDS that grace be given to them, and yet, on account of their negligence and sloth, some pain of purgatory be also inflicted on them." [Part xii. Serm. ii. On the twenty-second ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... we see here have generally more marked faces than the young ones, and naturally enough; since it must be an extraordinary vigor and venerability of life that can overcome the rusty sloth of age, and keep the senior flexible enough to take an interest in new things; whereas, hundreds of commonplace young men come hither to stare with eyes of vacant wonder, and with vague hopes of finding out what they are fit for. And this ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... of the text referring to the habits and ranges of the living animals. Three species of mastodon and the gigantic megatherium were the only extinct mammalia known from South America previous to Darwin's voyage. To these were now added the Mylodon Darwinii, a giant sloth; the scelidotherium, a somewhat smaller form; the great camel-like, yet odd-toed, macrauchenia; and the toxodon, as large as a hippopotamus, yet having a strange resemblance to the little rodents. All these belonged to geological deposits not far anterior to the present ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... curse on. He'll find 'em coming home to him sooner than the cattle he has lost through his sloth and pride. The Lord is on the side of the just, as well as agin all slanderers ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... nettles, thistles, and other weeds, which, shooting up betwixt the flags, had displaced many of them from their level. Even matters demanding more peremptory attention had been left neglected, in a manner which argued sloth or poverty in the extreme. The stream, undermining a part of the bank near an angle of the ruinous wall, had brought it down, with a corner turret, the ruins of which lay in the bed of the river. The current, interrupted by the ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... the natives having seen large skeletons embedded in cliffs? I remember finding on the banks of the Parana a skeleton of a Mastodon, and the Gauchos concluded that it was a borrowing animal like the Bizcacha. (684/1. On the supposed existence in Patagonia of a gigantic land-sloth, see "Natural Science," XIII., 1898, page 288, where Ameghino's discovery of the skin of Neomylodon listai was practically first made known, since his privately published pamphlet was not generally seen. The animal was afterwards identified with a Glossotherium, closely ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the gardens and through the shady lanes to our camp, on the outskirts of the modern village. The air is heavy and languid, full of relaxing influence, an air of sloth and luxury, seeming to belong to some strange region below the level of human duty and effort as far as it is below the level of the sea. The fragrance of the orange-blossoms, like a subtle incense of indulgence, floats on the evening breeze. ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... strong as steel cables, and were about a foot through, while a huge, bony proboscis nine feet in length preceded the body. This was carried horizontally between two and three feet from the ground. Presently a large ground sloth came to the pool to drink, lapping up the water at the sides that had partly cooled. In an instant the black armored monster rushed down the slope with the speed of a nineteenth-century locomotive, and seemed about as formidable. The sloth turned in the direction of the sound, and for a moment ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... whenever I so please. On the other hand, when I had the honour of being responsible for your education, I adapted myself to a hot-house atmosphere in which Respectability and the concomitant virtues of Supineness and Sloth were cultivated like rare orchids; but in my bedroom I kept a secret fount which had its source in some good ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... printed in their language and characters a memorial upon the Christian life, with other brief tracts of prayer and meditation, in preparation for the holy sacraments, of confession and the sacred communion. He was an enemy of sloth, and so worked much in Chinese, in which he wrote a practically new grammar of the Chinese language, a vocabulary, a manual of confession and many sermons, in order that those who had to learn this language might find it less ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous
... mercy remember Thou me." Conceive, too, the multitude of sins which have so grown into us as to become part of us, and in which we now live, not knowing, or but partially knowing, that they are sins, habits of pride, self-reliance, self-conceit, sullenness, impurity, sloth, selfishness, worldliness. The history of all these, their beginnings, and their growth, is recorded in those dreadful books; and when we look forward to the future, how many sins shall we have committed by this time ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... and not as may be best examined; and he that receiveth knowledge, desireth rather present satisfaction than expectant inquiry; and so rather not to doubt, than not to err; glory making the author not to lay open his weakness, and sloth making the disciple ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... Speculations, or Constitutions, ancient Revelation will be purged and restored to its original pristine purity: the superannuated lumber that accumulated around it during centuries of apathy, fatalism, and sloth, must go: the dust and mould and cobwebs of the Temple will be swept away. Indeed, 'a war must be eternally waged on evils eternally renewed.' The genius of destruction has done its work, you say, O my esteemed Master? and there is nothing more to destroy? The gods might say this of ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... wholly to the effort. He travelled here and there, pervading the country like some spirit of unrest, threading the intricacies of city slums, north, south, east, and west, personally interviewing all manner of loathly creatures, damaged by vice and sloth and ignorance and crime almost out of all semblance of humanity. He had not dreamed that such beings existed upon the earth. Sometimes, unaware of the circumstances and the danger they courted, they caught up a child wherewith ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... many were their followers, how few yours. Their line was then withdrawn to the brow of a steep hill; it had before been gathered together to storm, but on your appearance was not deployed for battle. Meanwhile you, having slain some of their best men whom not sloth but courage had made the rearmost of the troop, occupied the level ground alone, though such a fight gave you not so many comrades as your table is wont to contain guests. And when you returned to the town at your leisure what came ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... and active services. But the persons of whom we are now speaking, forgetting alike the duties they owe to themselves and to their fellow-creatures, often act as though their condition were meant to be a state of uniform indulgence, and vacant, unprofitable sloth. To multiply the comforts of affluence, to provide for the gratification of appetite, to be luxurious without diseases, and indolent without lassitude, seems the chief study of their lives. Nor can they be clearly exempted from this class, who, by a common ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... very provoking, but such was the tiresome mode of travelling through this country. No consideration can induce the natives to shake off their habitual indolence, not if a voice from heaven were to be heard, would they do it. Pleasure and sloth are with them synonymous terms, and they are scarcely alive to any other gratification. In the mean time, the chief, who appeared to be a very good sort of man, although he had little authority over his people, sent them a fatted goat; and being in good health, and having very encouraging ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... White Man's burden— The savage wars of peace— Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch Sloth and heathen Folly Bring ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... have not good natural ability cannot to some extent make up for the deficiencies of nature by right training and practice, let such a one know that he is very wide of the mark, if not out of it altogether. For good natural parts are impaired by sloth; while inferior ability is mended by training: and while simple things escape the eyes of the careless, difficult things are reached by painstaking. The wonderful efficacy and power of long and continuous labour you may see indeed every ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... be asked in ridicule whether I suppose that the megatherium and other allied huge monsters, which formerly lived in South America, have left behind them the sloth, armadillo, and anteater, as their degenerate descendants. This cannot for an instant be admitted. These huge animals have become wholly extinct, and have left no progeny. But in the caves of Brazil there are many extinct species which are closely allied in size and in ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... rudiments of horns in the female of Cervulus moschatus; on the horns of goats and sheep; on crests of male antelopes; on the beard of the ibex; on the Berbura goat; on sexual differences in the coloration of Rodents; ornaments of male sloth; on the colours of the Elands; on the Sing-sing antelope; on the colours of goats; on Lemur Macaco; on ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... unruly sort were glad to see him go, but his old companions with whom he had shared so many dangers and privations were filled with grief. "He ever hated baseness, sloth, pride and indignity," said one of them. "He never allowed more for himself than for his soldiers with him. Upon no danger would he send them where he would not lead them himself. He would never see us want what he either had or could by any means get us. He loved action more than words, and ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... the most important particular of service; that Sherry, when he has done so much, should permit himself to be foiled of a last result by an idle carelessness of waiters, who if they do not forget one's orders outright, execute them with all imaginable sloth. They attend on guests as though the latter were pensioners, and are listless in everything save a collection of the gratuity, personal to themselves, which their avarice and a public's weakness have ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... in the distance. I did not touch at it, but Anselmo informed me that the inhabitants were engaged in a little civil war of their own, murdering each other to their hearts' content. Had we had time, I dare say we might have supplied ourselves with monkey and sloth-flesh, opossums, snakes, crabs, and a variety of birds, but I doubt whether the crew would have appreciated the exertions of the sportsman. At last Anselmo informed me, much to my satisfaction, that we were drawing near to ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... the youth, "is this the way "To free man's spirit from the deadening sway "Of worldly sloth,—to teach him while he lives "To know no bliss but that which virtue gives, "And when he dies to leave his lofty name "A light, a landmark on the cliffs of fame? "It was not so, Land of the generous thought "And daring deed, thy god-like sages taught; "It was not thus in bowers of wanton ease ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... of many of our most respectable and wealthy families, and well may they be proud of a social position, which is due to the honest industry and hereditary virtues of several generations. Whilst some of patrician extraction, crushed under the weight of vices, or made inert by sloth, or labor-contemning pride, and degenerating from pure gold into vile dross, have been swept away, and have sunk into the dregs and sewers of the commonwealth. Thus in Louisiana, the high and the low, ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... and under the bright sun, which we had already felt hot, men were plowing the gray fields for wheat. Other men were beginning their noonday lunch, which, with the long nap to follow, would last till three o'clock, and perhaps be rashly accounted to them for sloth by the industrious tourist who did not know that their work had begun at dawn and would not end till dusk. Indolence may be a vice of the towns in Spain, but there is no loafing in the country, if I may believe the conclusions of my note-book. The fields often ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... time of the Druids— Friendship may match with that monarch of fluids; 840 Each supples a dry brain, fills you its ins-and-outs, Gives your life's hour-glass a shake when the thin sand doubts Whether to run on or stop short, and guarantees Age is not all made of stark sloth and arrant ease. I have seen my little lady once more, Jacynth, the Gipsy, Berold, and the rest of it, For to me spoke the Duke, as I told you before; I always wanted to make a clean breast of it: And now it is made-why, my heart's blood, that went ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... were slow in matters of love, it was his only sloth. In action he was swift and thorough, and his perception in all matters pertaining to the plainsman's life ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... of La Trappe were not only immersed in luxury and sloth, but were abandoned to the most scandalous excesses; most of them lived by robbery, and several had committed assassinations on the travellers who had occasion to traverse the woods. The neighbourhood shrunk with terror from the approach of men who never went abroad unarmed, and whose excursions ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... have not been differentiated and correlated in South America. Hatcher believes that "there is no good evidence in favour of a great antiquity for man in Patagonia." In a cave near Consuelo Cove, southern Patagonia, have been found fragments of the skin and bones of a large ground-sloth, Grypotherium (Neomylodon) listai, associated with human remains. Ameghino argues that this creature is still living, while Ur Moreno advances the theory that the animal has been extinct for a ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... twelve shillings a week, and learning obedience, self-denial, self- respect, and trust in God, by the things suffered in that hard life here at home, than be a Negro in Tropic islands, fattening himself in sloth under that perpetual sunshine, and thinking nought of God, because, poor fool, he can get all he wants without ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... non-repetition; the taint of houses, non-repair; the taint of complexion is sloth; the taint ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... named priests), lousengers, and lounderers are wrongfully made and called Hermits; and have leave to defraud poor and needy creatures of their livelihood, and to live by their false winning and begging in sloth and other divers vices. And also of these Prelates, these cokir noses [?] are suffered to live in pride and hypocrisy, and to defoul ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... with the other, to secure something which he had, or to obtain something which he had not. The world had then no business to follow, no studies to exercise the mind. Their time was divided between sloth and fatigue. Hunting and war were their chief occupations; sleep and food their ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... alternation of a short period of intense activity with a long period of enforced idleness. He finds them resembling southern peoples in their capacity for sudden spurts of energy rather than sustained effort, thinks them benumbed by the sloth of the far north, which is not unlike the sloth ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... They had plenty to eat and drink, and a comfortable home, and not a care in the world; and familiarity with their master had bred assurance; and so they had become quite tame, and shamefully, abominably lazy. Luxury, we are taught, was ever the mother of sloth. I could put my hand in amongst them, and not one would bestir himself the littlest bit to escape me. Mercedes and I were inseparable. I used to take her to school with me every day; she could be more conveniently and privately transported than a lamb. Each lyceen ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... If you but knew how you the purpose cherish Whiles thus you mocke it: how in stripping it You more inuest it: ebbing men, indeed (Most often) do so neere the bottome run By their owne feare, or sloth ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... chief sources of sin? A. The chief sources of sin are seven: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth; and they are commonly ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 2 (of 4) • Anonymous
... brains are the highest nobility, if not the richest. I love birth, and ancestry, when they are incentives to exertion not the title deeds to sloth. Who would not prefer being the descendant of a Stephenson, an Arkwright, or a Crompton, or any other of those great architects of their own fortunes, and to feel some of their noble energies, firing their ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... again, feathers of thy dove, in the peace of conscience, and in a holy recourse to thine ark, to the instruments of true comfort, in thy institutions and in the ordinances of thy church. Forget my bed, O Lord, as it hath been a bed of sloth, and worse than sloth; take me not, O Lord, at this advantage, to terrify my soul with saying, Now I have met thee there where thou hast so often departed from me; but having burnt up that bed by these vehement heats, and washed that bed in these abundant sweats, make ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... them about their various cousins: the Black Bear, the Syrian bear, the Grizzly bear of America the Thibetan sun bear, the Polar bear of the Arctic regions, the Aswail hear of India, the Bruany bear (also of India), the Sloth bear, the White bear, and the Brown ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... no oil in their lamps: their way was material; thus they were in doubt and dark- ness. They heeded not their sloth, their fading warmth [5] of action; hence the steady decline of spiritual light, until, the midnight gloom upon them, they must borrow the better-tended lamps of the faithful. By entering the guest-chamber of Truth, and beholding the bridal of ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... priests were awakened by the singing of birds and the chattering of monkeys (as if in derision at their sloth), they no sooner discovered their great loss than they set to berating each another right soundly; not because they cared a whit for what evil the fellow could do, but that, having set their hearts on the hanging, it only grieved them to find that ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... highly-coloured and unflattering pictures of the typical booksellers of the period. Tom Nash has limned for us a vivid little portrait in 'Pierce Penilesse' (1592), in which he declares that if he were to paint Sloth, 'I swear that I would draw it like a stationer that I know, with his thumb under his girdle, who, if ever a man come to his stall to ask him for a book, never stirs his head, or looks upon him, but stands stone still, and speaks not a word, only with ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... his tail being dragged up a precipice, I was hanging around his neck like a limpet. One time, when the girth slipped, both the saddle and I rode upside down under his belly. Some time ago I saw a sloth clinging, wrong end to, to the top bars of his cage. It brought back painful memories of when ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... that Germany had left her behind in the race for international commerce. Indifference lay at the root of this backsliding. It was easier and cheaper to buy the German-made product and reship it than to produce the same article at home. Sloth hung like a chain on English energy. What did it matter? No forest of bayonets hemmed her in; she was still Mistress of ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... hand, there are gentlemen of rank who seem industrious to appear mean and degenerate; the one sort raise themselves either by ambition or virtue, while the other abase themselves by viciousness or sloth; so that we must avail ourselves of our understanding and discernment in distinguishing those persons, who, though they bear the same appellation, are yet so different in point of character. All the genealogies in the world may be reduced to four kinds. The first are those families who from a low ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... in matters of business or pleasure, and governed alike the army, the courts of justice, and the women. Thus was spent a reign of seventeen years, during which the king had never but once, when he met Antiochus in battle, roused himself from his life of sloth. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... certain gradation, stores the young mind with valuable ideas; accumulates in it a large stock of useful knowledge; and imperceptibly insinuates a correct and refined taste. Nor is this all. It may serve, as it often has, to rouse the indolent from the gratification of complexional sloth, and recall the unthinking and irregular from the haunts of dissipation and vice to the blessings of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... commands; sins to which we are tempted by the world, the flesh, or the devil; sins directly against God; sins that wrong our neighbours, and that ruin ourselves; sins of pride, covetousness, lust, gluttony, anger, envy, sloth. In many things we sin, and "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... festers, and all that seemed plausible in the open air is now monstrous, full of vice and despair. Whereas, outside, the man stood like a rock, and let Fate seam or bleach him bare; here, within walls, he rages, shows his teeth, blasphemes, or sinks into sloth. You will find him heaped against the walls like ordure, hear him howl for blood in the bull-ring, appraise women, as if they were dainties, in the alamedas, loaf, scratch, pry where none should ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... necessities as great. Innumerable circumstances reduce men to want; and pressing poverty obliges some people to make their cases public, or starve; and from thence came the custom of begging, which sloth and idleness has improved into a trade. But the method I propose, thoroughly put in practice, would remove the cause, and the effect would cease ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... (alluvium), containing the gigantic bones of ancient mammalia, such as the mastodons, the dinotherium, and the megatheroid animals, among which is the mylodon of Owen, an animal upwards of eleven feet in length, allied to the sloth. Associated with these extinct species are found the fossil remains of animals still living: elephants, rhinoceroses, oxen, horses, and deer. Near Bogota, at an elevation of 8,200 French feet above the level of the sea, there is a field filled with the ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... portion of his army in the celebrated ambuscade from which Washington escaped.[17] For a time French energy made the war seem not unequal; but the number of French in America was small; the home Government of Louis XV seemed wholly lost in sloth and indifferent to the result. The English Government was doggedly resolute. Its unwilling subjects, the French colonists of Acadia, were driven from their homes.[18] Troops were poured into America, and in 1759 Wolfe won his famous victory ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... evening both, You merry were and glad, So little care of sleep and sloth Those pretty ladies had. When Tom came home from labour. Or Cis to milking rose, Then merrily, merrily went their tabor, And merrily ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... the others destined never to come off. Tracey Tanner went to work for Graham and Duncan. The Citizen gained eighteen subscribers; four old ones paid up their accounts. Babies were born, people married and died, loved and hated, lived in striving or sloth, accomplished or failed. Roland Barnette paid ostentatious attentions to Bess Gabriel, who tolerated him simply because she didn't much like Josie; but, blighted by Josie's supreme indifference, this budding passion drooped and failed by mutual consent of both ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... arduous toils the breast inflame; Now avarice thirsts, insensible of shame; Now sloth unnerves them in voluptuous ease, And the sweet pleasures of the body please. With eager haste they rush the gulf within, And their whole souls are centred in their sin. But oh, great Jove! by whom all good is given— Dweller with lightnings ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... heroes, ascended from fields ye have won, Your toils are not closed in the deeds ye have done; Touch the souls of each laggard and profligate son, The greed and the sloth, and the cowardice shame; Till we rise to complete the great work ye've begun, And with ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... Romans, likewise, and our own fathers imitated them, not being satisfied with their temporary fortune nor content with what they had inherited, and they regarded sloth as their sure destruction but exertion as their certain safety. They feared that if their treasures remained unaugmented they would be consumed and worn away by age, and were ashamed after receiving so rich a heritage to make no further additions: thus they performed ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... retaliation; that his easel was transferred to a garret-room, in which there was scarce space for it to stand upright; and that he no longer ventured to join the weekly club, of which he had been once the life and soul. In short, Dick Tinto's friends feared that he had acted like the animal called the sloth, which, heaving eaten up the last green leaf upon the tree where it has established itself, ends by tumbling down from the top, and dying of inanition. I ventured to hint this to Dick, recommended his transferring the exercise of his ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... harvest and orchards apple-laden, he felt such grief that many even saw him weep for the sadness of his soul.' It would seem that he scarcely understood the source of this sweet trouble: for at such times he compared the sloth and inutility of men with the industry and fertility of nature; as though this were the secret of his melancholy. A poet of our century has noted the same stirring of the spirit, and has ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... and pendent pear; And not one empty spot escapes thy care. On every plant and tree thy cares are shown, Nothing neglected, but thyself alone. Forgive me, father, if this fault I blame; Age so advanced, may some indulgence claim. Not for thy sloth, I deem thy lord unkind: Nor speaks thy form a mean or servile mind; I read a monarch in that princely air, The same thy aspect, if the same thy care; Soft sleep, fair garments, and the joys of wine, These are the rights of age, and should be thine. ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... temper of the man was painted in a dream of his youth. It seemed to him as though heaven lay, a stately palace, amid the gleaming hill-peaks, while the women reaping in the corn-fields of the valley became harvest-maidens of its king. They reaped idly, and Anselm, grieved at their sloth, hastily climbed the mountain side to accuse them to their lord. As he reached the palace the king's voice called him to his feet and he poured forth his tale; then at the royal bidding bread of an unearthly whiteness was set before him, and he ate and was refreshed. The dream passed with ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... embraces, And on Andromache[186] his helmet laces. Great Agamemnon was, men say, amazed, On Priam's loose-trest daughter when he gazed. Mars in the deed the blacksmith's net did stable; In heaven was never more notorious fable. 40 Myself was dull and faint, to sloth inclined; Pleasure and ease had mollified my mind. A fair maid's care expelled this sluggishness, And to her tents willed me myself address. Since may'st thou see me watch and night-wars move: He that will not grow ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... "she doesn't get it. Probably, because she always grows fat, from sheer lack of will-power to resist sloth and gluttony—the only agreeable vices left her; and by no stretch of the imagination can a fat woman be converted into either a ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... elements have lost their uses, Air ripens not, nor earth produces: In vain we make poor Shelah toil, Fire will not roast, nor water boil. Through all the valleys, hills, and plains, The goddess Want in triumph reigns; And her chief officers of state; Sloth, Dirt, and Theft, around ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... manifest destruction, and wouldst constrain us also to descend into like peril. But as long as we were tried in the warfare of this world, we failed in no point of duty. Thou thyself will bear me witness that we were never charged with sloth or heedlessness. ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... moving of the heart after Christ is not to be discerned, at all times, by thy sensible affectionate performance of duties, but rather by those secret groanings and complaints which thy soul makes to God against that sloth ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... could discover The sign of the sloth on you, From the last mane-lock laid over To the last nail tight in the shoe; A blast, and your ranks stood ready; A shout, and your saddles filled; A wave, and your troop was ready To ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... the British Army?" Excellent, too, is the passage in which his subordinate speaks of crushing the enemy in America, and Burgoyne asks him who will crush their enemies in England, snobbery and jobbery and incurable carelessness and sloth. And in one sentence towards the end, Shaw reaches a wider and more genial comprehension of mankind than he shows anywhere else; "it takes all sorts to make a world, saints as well as soldiers." If Shaw had remembered that sentence on other occasions he ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... great nation had cast aside the bonds of sloth and luxury, and was girding itself to join in the fight for the free ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... Illow me to request yar kind hattention for a moment. (Stand back there, you boys, and don't beyave in such a silly manner!) We har now arrived at the Haswail, or Sloth Bear, described by BUFFON as 'aving 'abits which make it a burden to itself. (Severely.) The Haswail. In the hajoinin' cage observe the Loocorricks, the hony hanimal to oom fear is habsolootly hunknown. When hattacked by the Lion, he places ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... offered by music or eloquence, by book or newspaper, by trade and profession, many choose sloth and self-indulgence. These needy millions, blinded with sin and ignorance, stand forth as a great opportunity for loving hearts. Sympathy is making beautiful the pathway of knowledge, that young hearts may be allured along the shining ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... 1.8% are Hebrews and unclassified sects. Truly, a religious babel! and 10% of all the inhabitants of the globe, about the same number of people who profess to Protestantism, are Animists. This is the lowest stage of primitive religion, and millions of humans are still quagmired in the sloth of a primitive faith which once must have been the faith ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... my darling! Come, let us be going, So soft is the breeze and so fragrant the air, New health and new strength through our veins will be flowing, And sorrow will vanish and sadness and care! O banish the charms with which sloth would ensnare us, Far purer the joy in the sunshine that lurks, All nature her pinions is spreading to bear us, And show us her ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... almost unnatural ripeness, I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys that were at all near my own age, and before I was eight years old I was a "character". Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my understanding, were even then ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... to challenge this to his face or take the consequences of being swept into oblivion by the high tide of a people's indignation that would sweep everything before it on the third day of November next, having been aroused in its might at last from the debasing sloth into which the corrupt hell-hounds of a venal opposition had swept them, but a brighter day had dawned, which would sweep the onrushing hordes of petty chicanery to where they would get theirs; and, as one who had heard the call of ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... of you feel, but it's my opinion that this board has done too much for that lazy loafer already. Long's his sister, Thankful, lived, we couldn't say nothing, of course. If she wanted to slave and work so's her brother could live in idleness and sloth, why, that was her business. There ain't any law against a body's making a fool of herself, more's the pity. But she's been dead a year, and he's done nothing since but live on those that'll trust him, and ask help from the town. He ain't sick—except ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... not will, that, in the real world in which we ourselves have to live and struggle, certain forces shall be operative,—that there shall be the beauty of health, as in the "Discobolus;" material love which is divine, as in the "Sistine Madonna;" that war shall be horrible; that sloth unstriven against shall triumph over love, as in "The Statue and the Bust;" that defiance of the social organism shall involve self-destruction, as in "Anna Karenina." The person or the combination of events expressing ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... their close allies. If you turn to South America, where, at the present day, we have great sloths and armadilloes and creatures of that kind, what do you find in the newest tertiaries? You find the great sloth-like creature, the 'Megatherium', and the great armadillo, the 'Glyptodon', and so on. And if you go to Australia you find the same law holds good, namely, that that condition of organic nature ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... the place of Valens, his uncle, the 139 Emperor Gratian established Theodosius the Spaniard in the Eastern Empire. Military discipline was soon restored to a high level, and the Goth, perceiving that the cowardice and sloth of former princes was ended, became afraid. For the Emperor was famed alike for his acuteness and discretion. By stern commands and by generosity and kindness he encouraged a demoralized army to deeds of daring. But when the soldiers, who had obtained ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes
... firmly put her right; and Polly corrected herself, even begged pardon for her stupidity, till Mahony could bear it no longer. Throwing politeness to the winds, he twitted Sara with her finical affectations, her old-maidish ways, the morning sloth that expected Polly, in her delicate state of health, to carry a breakfast-tray to the bedside: cast up at her, in short, all that had made him champ and fret in silence. Sara might, after a fitting period of the huff, have overlooked ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... things in common, Heard of noble Equality, and of inspiriting Freedom! Each man then hoped to attain new life for himself, and the fetters Which had encircled many a land appear'd to be broken, Fetters held by the hands of sloth and selfish indulgence. Did not all nations turn their gaze, in those days of emotion, Tow'rds the world's capital, which so many a long year had been so, And then more than ever deserved a name so ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... which seemed to promise them the greatest advantage, gave the final stroke to their ruin and destruction. "Their courage," says Justin,(217) "did not survive that illustrious Theban. Freed from a rival, who kept their emulation alive, they sunk into a lethargic sloth and effeminacy. The funds for armaments by land and sea were soon lavished upon games and feasts. The seaman's and soldier's pay was distributed to the idle citizen. An indolent and luxurious mode of life enervated every breast. The representations of the theatre were preferred to the ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... perceiving her interest in these toys, encouraged Adelle to try her own hand at the manufacture of jewelry, and engaged a needy woman worker to give her the necessary lessons in the lapidary art. Adelle had acquired considerable sloth from her desultory way of living; nevertheless, when the chance was forced into her hands, she took to the new work with ardor and produced some bungling imitations of the new art, which were much admired at the Villa Ponitowski. Eveline, ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... are, after all, a mere matter of habit and a liking for new forms of food can usually be acquired. One can not have the cake and penny too. One can not safely reduce one's weight by any mysterious method that will leave one at liberty to continue the indulgences, whether of sloth or of appetite, that ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... not avoid a mental comparison between that Oriental slave become such a thorough Parisian, of such marked distinction in the most refined society on earth, and that other woman, the European enervated by the Orient, brutalized by Turkish tobacco and bloated by a life of sloth. His ambition, his pride as a husband were disappointed, humiliated in that union of which he now saw the peril and the emptiness, the last cruel blow of destiny which deprived him even of the refuge of domestic happiness against all his ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... would grow till he could contain himself no longer—and then he would take that ship home where he lived and keep it there carefully, expecting the owners to come for it, but they never did. And he would try to get the idleness and sloth out of the sailors of that ship by compelling them to take invigorating exercise and a bath. He called it "walking a plank." All the pupils liked it. At any rate, they never found any fault with it after trying it. When the owners ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... the female line from Chengiz Khan, was gifted by nature with the qualities which enable a man to control his fellow men. Fortune gave him the chance to employ those qualities to the best advantage. The successors of Chengiz Khan in the male line had gradually sunk into feebleness and sloth, and, in 1370, the family in that line had died out. Taimur, then thirty-four, seized the vacated seat, gained, after many vicissitudes of fortune, the complete upper hand, and established himself at Samarkand the undisputed ruler of ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... pride and envy are spiritual sins, so are sloth, avarice, and anger. But spiritual sins are concerned with the spirit, just as carnal sins are with the flesh. Therefore not only can there be pride and envy in the angels; but likewise ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... position, we have only to look at the numerous victims to be found among persons who have no call to exertion in gaining the means of subsistence, and no objects of interest on which to exercise their mental faculties, and who consequently sink into a state of mental sloth and nervous weakness." "If we look abroad upon society, we shall find innumerable examples of mental and nervous debility from this cause. When a person of some mental capacity is confined for a long time to an unvarying round of employment which affords neither scope nor stimulus ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... at home, wars abroad: sometimes terror, sometimes torpor, or stupid sloth: this is thy daily slavery. By little and little, if thou doest not better look to it, those sacred dogmata will be blotted out of thy mind. How many things be there, which when as a mere naturalist, thou hast barely considered of according to their ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... emperor himself, and from 1192 until 1868 the mikados were insignificant puppets and the shoguns the real lords of the land. Such was the strange progress of political evolution in Japan. The mikado was still emperor, but the holders of this title lay buried in sloth or religious fanaticism and let their ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... draw the conclusion that this singular quadruped, like the sloth, is not a walker on the ground of its own free-will, but ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... are young," he answered, "and your circumstances are capable of alteration and development. Except under very exceptional conditions, resignation is no virtue in the young. It is more often an excuse for cowardice and sloth. But at my age the world changes its complexion. My circumstances are incapable of alteration and development. They are final. Therefore I do well to accept them unreservedly. The work of my life is done. I do not say that it has been a failure, for I fulfilled ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... written for his paper, the Boston Evening Eagle, the wonderful story of the boys' adventures on the trail of the giant sloth of Brazil, other Boston reporters had regarded him as worth watching. In some way, young Masterson learned of Dick's frequent visits to High Towers while the preparations for the Colorado trip ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... march, it was the inevitable disorganization of a household reaching its climax, it was rebellion against nature's law and indulgence in vice leading to the gradual decline of a man of intelligence, it was a hard worker sinking into the sloth of so-called pleasure; and then, death having snatched away the only son, the home broke to pieces—the wife—fated to childlessness, and the husband driven away by her, rolling through ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... such great liking for those of his Order (foolishly believing them possessed of greater virtues than belong to them), that she entrusted him with the correction of her daughter, whom he lay with by force instead of chastising her for the sin of sloth-fulness, as he had promised her mother ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... application), veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter pain and especially labour; regard for the public good; estimation of persons according to their merits, and of things according to their intrinsic usefulness; a life of exertion in contradiction to one of self-indulgent ease and sloth. These and other moralities he conveyed in brief sentences, uttered as occasion arose, of grave exhortation, ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... country does not depend merely on the maintenance of its glory in the stricken field, but in protecting its homes from distress as well. It is a new patriotism, it is bringing a new outlook for all classes. A great flood of luxury and of sloth which had submerged the land is receding, and a new Britain is appearing. We can see for the first time the fundamental things that matter in life and that have been obscured from our vision by ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... wise and active conquer difficulties, By daring to attempt them. Sloth and folly Shiver and shrink at sight of toil and hazard, And make th' ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... ripeness, I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys that were at all near my own age, and before I was eight years old I was a "character". Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my understanding, were ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... will be drowned in the universal din; my weight is lighter than a feather in the public scale. It is better for me to mind my own affairs, and leave these higher attempts to more competent hands.' This is the language, not of reason and modesty, but of sloth, of selfishness, and of pride. The amount of it is, 'I cannot do every thing, therefore I will do nothing,' But you can do much. Act well your part according to your faculties, your station, and your means. The result ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... of a fashionable lady's novel is to me very much like looking at the scenery and decorations of a theatre by broad daylight. The source of the common fondness for novels of this sort rests in that dislike of vacancy and that love of sloth, which are inherent in the human mind; they afford excitement without producing reaction. By reaction I mean an activity of the intellectual faculties, which shows itself in consequent reasoning and observation, and ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... me very much amazed to find so very few in that innumerable multitude who had ears fine enough to hear or relish this music with pleasure; but my wonder abated when, upon looking round me, I saw most of them attentive to three Syrens, clothed like goddesses, and distinguished by the names of Sloth, Ignorance, and Pleasure. They were seated on three rocks, amidst a beautiful variety of groves, meadows, and rivulets that lay on the borders of the mountain. While this base and grovelling multitude of different nations, ranks, and ages were listening to these delusive deities, those of a more ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... the unwonted activities of the last half-century; or was it the sleep that presaged death? Her enemies told her so in plain and unvarnished language. Her friends, too, said that she was folding her robes to die with what dignity she could. Lethargy, sloth, sleep—a dead, dull, dreary sleep—fell like a leaden pall upon her spiritual life, darkening the light that shone but vaguely through the storied panes of her mediaeval windows, while a paralysing numbness crippled her limbs ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... down to the ordinary gray limbo of jobs and offices—as soon as he could get control of his chaotic desires. Literally, he hated himself at times; hated his own egotism, his treacherous appetite for drink and women and sloth, his imitative attempts at literature. But no one knew how bitterly he despised himself, in lonely walks in the rain, in savage pacing about his furnished room. To others he seemed vigorously conceited, cock-sure, noisily ready to blame the ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... once dependent and tyrannical, which purchased, by cringing to their enemies, the power of trampling on their subjects, the Romans sunk into the lowest state of effeminacy and debasement. Falsehood, cowardice, sloth, conscious and unrepining degradation, formed the national character. Such a character is totally incompatible with the stronger passions. Love, in particular, which, in the modern sense of the word, implies protection ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his brig in order. Jack is a slave aboard ship; but still he has many opportunities of thwarting and balking his master. When there is danger, or necessity, or when he is well used, no one can work faster than he; but the instant he feels that he is kept at work for nothing, no sloth could make less headway. He must not refuse his duty, or be in any way disobedient, but all the work that an officer gets out of him, he may be welcome to. Every man who has been three months at sea knows how to "work Tom Cox's traverse"—"three ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... "Soul of a sloth! will not that hurry you, la reine?" he said excitedly, in reply to Margot's startled question. "It is the signal Fouchard's son was to give when he and Von Hetzler arrived at the place where I am to meet them. Give me the paper quick! Tear ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... made him proud: In diet was perhaps too nice, But gluttony was ne'er his vice: In every turn of life content, And meekly took what fortune sent: Inquire through all the parish round, A better neighbor ne'er was found; His vigilance might some displease; Tis true, he hated sloth like pease. ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... last,' he cried, when he saw me. 'You idler! dawdle! sloth! gee up, do make haste! You ought to have been here an hour ago! To-morrow I am going to read to Harel a grand drama ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... was happy; every day he gave Thanks for the fair existence that was his; For a sick fancy made him not her slave, To mock him with her phantom miseries. No chronic tortures racked his aged limb, For luxury and sloth had ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... "We palliate our sloth by the specious pretext of difficulty." Nothing, in fact, is too difficult to accomplish, which we set about, with a proper consideration of those difficulties, and pursue with perseverance. The Indian ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... and if it plays so conspicuous a part in comparatively enlightened and favored communities, amidst the labors and the enjoyments of an advanced civilization, its influence was certainly not less in times of intellectual sloth and harshly monotonous existence. To escape therefrom, to satisfy in some sort the energy and curiosity inherent in man, the people of the eleventh century had scarcely any resource but war, with its excitement and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... does, 'I am the Lord that make holy.' Holiness is a burning fire that extends itself, that seeks to consume what is unholy, and to communicate its own blessedness to all that will receive it. Holiness and selfishness, holiness and inactivity, holiness and sloth, holiness and helplessness, are utterly irreconcilable. Whatever we read of as holy, was taken into the service of the Holiness ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... activity and indolence, the French nobility cultivated to their highest pitch those human pleasures which are at once the most vivid and the most delicate. They devoted themselves to society and to love-making. Too quick-witted to fall into sloth, too proud to become drunkards or gluttons, they dissipated their lives in conversation and stained their souls with intrigue. Never, probably, have the arts which make social intercourse delightful been carried to so ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... seven-league stride in the van of progress, banner-bearer of the highest and newest civilization, carving his beneficent way with the tomahawk of commercial enterprise, sounding the warwhoop of Christian culture, tearing off the reeking scalp of sloth and superstition to plant there the steam-plow and the school-house—ever in his front stretch arid lawlessness, ignorance, crime, despair; ever in his wake bloom the jail, the gallows, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... where they scratch up the root and eat the grain and fruit; but the slightest noise drives them back to their holes. In the deeper recesses of the forest resounds the monotonous, drawling cry of the sloth. Here we have a symbol of life under the utmost degree of listlessness, and of the greatest insensibility in a state of languid repose. This emblem of misery fixes itself on an almost leafless bough, and there remains defenceless; a ready prey to any assailant. Better ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... self-devoted beauteous victim slow Ascend the pile where her dead husband lies: She kisses his cold cheeks, inclines her breast On his, and lights herself the fatal pile That shall consume them both! On Egypt's shore, Where Science rose, now Sloth and Ignorance Sleep like the huge Behemoth in the sun! 300 The turbaned Moor still stains with strangers' blood The inmost sands of Afric. But all these The light shall visit, and that vaster tract From Fuego to the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... &c.,—of different species to those now living—but still their close allies. If you turn to South America, where, at the present day, we have great sloths and armadilloes and creatures of that kind, what do you find in the newest tertiaries? You find the great sloth-like creature, the Megatherium, and the great armadillo, the Glyptodon, and so on. And if you go to Australia you find the same law holds good, namely, that that condition of organic nature which has preceded the one which now exists, presents ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... toil, labor, employment, occupation; effort, exertion, striving; drudgery; diligence, assiduity; business, duty, job, task; magnum opus. Antonyms: idleness, dalliance, trifling, sloth, sluggardy, truancy, dabbling, dilettanteism, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... ground;—for the white-armed goddess Hera gave him speech: "Yea verily for this hour, dread Achilles, we will still bear thee safe, yet is thy death day nigh at hand, neither shall we be cause thereof, but a mighty god, and forceful Fate. For not through sloth or heedlessness of ours did the men of Troy from Patrokios' shoulders strip his arms, but the best of the gods, whom bright-haired Leto bore, slew him in the forefront of the battle, and to Hector gave renown. We even with the wind of Zephyr, swiftest, they say, of all winds, well might ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... if a score of nobles were to take upon themselves to tell her to set her house in order, to adopt reforms, and to throw aside sloth and luxury; and yet the Church is stirring up a war, and raising and paying an army of fighting men—and for what? To settle which of two men shall be pope. The simple thing would be to hold a high tournament, and to let Urban and Clement don ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... with the great power of steam; we have proved it by the rapidity with which we can travel, both on a railroad or in a steamship across the sea. But this speed is like the movements of the sloth, or the crawling march of the snail, when compared to the swiftness with which light travels; light flies nineteen million times faster than the fleetest race-horse, and electricity is more rapid still. Death is an electric shock which we receive in our hearts, and on the wings of electricity the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... scorn alliance with the race, Those aspen shoots that shiver at a breath; Children of sloth, that danger dare not face, And find in life ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... venerable and decrepit God of the Groves, what the state of religion must be among the people in general is easy to be imagined. In truth, I regard the Typees as a back-slidden generation. They are sunk in religious sloth, and require a spiritual revival. A long prosperity of bread-fruit and cocoanuts has rendered them remiss in the performance of their higher obligations. The wood-rot malady is spreading among the idols—the fruit upon their altars is becoming offensive—the temples themselves need ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... fall by her sides—round, smooth arms with a pretty dimple at the elbow. Her wrists were delicate; her hands, which did not betray the servant, were embellished with a lady's fingernails. And lazily, with graceful sloth, she allowed her indolent figure to curve and sway;—a figure that a garter might span, and that was made even more slender to the eye by the projection of the hips and the curve of the hoops that gave the balloon-like roundness to her skirt;—an impossible waist, absurdly small but adorable, like ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... fount of Castaly to drink from whenever I so please. On the other hand, when I had the honour of being responsible for your education, I adapted myself to a hot-house atmosphere in which Respectability and the concomitant virtues of Supineness and Sloth were cultivated like rare orchids; but in my bedroom I kept a secret fount which had its source in some good ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... therefore dear; but the king's servants, his bailiffs and overseers, as being in nothing better men than themselves, they despised and slighted, nor were the least concerned at their commands and menaces. They used honest pastimes and liberal studies, not esteeming sloth and idleness honest and liberal, but rather such exercises as hunting and running, repelling robbers, taking of thieves, and delivering the wronged and oppressed from injury. For doing such things, they ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... world in which we ourselves have to live and struggle, certain forces shall be operative,—that there shall be the beauty of health, as in the "Discobolus;" material love which is divine, as in the "Sistine Madonna;" that war shall be horrible; that sloth unstriven against shall triumph over love, as in "The Statue and the Bust;" that defiance of the social organism shall involve self-destruction, as in "Anna Karenina." The person or the combination of events expressing this idea we do not seek in our personal experience, ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... perhaps, have fought the man who said that he was failing. And such a statement would be beside the fact; no perceptible decay had yet set up at the heart of his manhood. But the inception of that process was imminent; the sloth consequent upon Lettice's money ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... no! I would not, were I fifty times a prince, be a pensioner on the dead! I honor birth and ancestry when they are regarded as the incentives to exertion, not the title-deeds to sloth! I honor the laurels that overshadow the graves of our fathers—it is our fathers I emulate, when I desire that beneath the evergreen I myself have planted my own ashes may repose! Dearest! couldst thou ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... God or Demigod For Britain's ancient Genius mov'd (If our afflicted land Have expiated at length the guilty sloth Of her degen'rate sons) Shall terminate our impious feuds, And discipline, with hallow'd voice, recall? 30 Recall the Muses too Driv'n from their antient seats In Albion, and well-nigh from Albion's shore, And with keen Phoebean shafts Piercing th'unseemly birds, Whose talons menace us Shall ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... all things were left to moulder away in dust and filth, and the worship of God was, if not inwardly profaned, at least outwardly dishonoured. Nor did this arise from real poverty, but from indifference, sloth, preoccupation of mind about vain earthly concerns, and often also from egotism and spiritual death; for I saw neglect of this kind in churches the pastors and congregations of which were rich, or at east tolerably well off. I saw many others in which worldly, tasteless, unsuitable ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... exercise a little of the wisdom of the serpent in time. Be it remembered that, although the ruined and blameless man is not subjected to such moral scorn as falls to the lot of the wastrel, the practical consequences of being down are much the same for him as for the victim of sloth or sin. He feels the pinch of physical misery, and, however lofty his spirit may be, it can never be lofty enough to relieve the gnawing pains of bodily privation. Moreover, he will meet with persecution ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... the Lord will; for we earnestly desire renewed fellowship with all such on original ground. Second, because the leaders among these make the fairest show in the flesh, and, calculating on spiritual sloth and the force of confirmed habit, hope to lead honest people insensibly after them back into Egypt. Third, because they are more numerous, and, from habit, more exemplary than other parties; and therefore more likely to influence honest Christians unwittingly to ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... shall be better prepared to believe when I see that beauty is not regarded in Nature, but is a mere casual attendant upon use. The artist Greenough did, indeed, strenuously maintain this last. But the sloth and the bird-of-paradise are equally useful to themselves; if beauty were but an aspect of use, these should be equally comely in our eyes. No; "the struggle for life" has not grooved the bill of the auk, and painted the tail of the peacock, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... the unruly sort were glad to see him go, but his old companions with whom he had shared so many dangers and privations were filled with grief. "He ever hated baseness, sloth, pride and indignity," said one of them. "He never allowed more for himself than for his soldiers with him. Upon no danger would he send them where he would not lead them himself. He would never see us want what he either had or could by any means get ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... one of their four proctors, with a seat in the Lisbon Town Council. On February 4, 1513, he had become Master of the Lisbon Mint. For the departure of the fleet against Azamor he comes forward as the poet laureate of the nation and vehemently inveighs against sloth and luxury while he sings a hymn to the glories of Portugal. The play alludes to the gifts sent to the Pope in the following year and this probably led to the date of the rubric (1514), but it also refers to the royal marriages of 1521, 1525 ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... sing, while other men took his wages, his wife, and homestead, was the crowning argument against the system. Then the political economists beset him, proving that without forced labor Russia must sink into sloth and poverty. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... of a coach was heathen Greek. Who ever saw, but upon extraordinary occasions, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Francis Drake ride in a coach? They made small use of coaches; there were but few in those times, and they were deadly foes to sloth and effeminacy. It is in the memory of many when in the whole kingdom there was not one! It is a doubtful question whether the devil brought tobacco into England in a coach, for both appeared at the same time." It appears that families, for the sake of their exterior show, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... through. These books are to be given out at the beginning of Lent. It is important that one or two seniors should be appointed to go round the monastery at the hours when brethren are engaged in reading, in case some ill-conditioned brother should be giving himself up to sloth or idle talk, instead of reading steadily; so that not only is he useless to himself, but ...
— Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods - The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894 • J. W. Clark
... to the old man who knew Chinese, but could not tell what was o'clock. This individual was a man whose natural powers would have been utterly buried and lost beneath a mountain of sloth and laziness had not God determined otherwise. He had in his early years chalked out for himself a plan of life in which he had his own ease and self-indulgence solely in view; he had no particular bad passions to gratify, he only wished to lead an easy quiet life, just ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... different treatment. An excess or a deficiency of iron in the body is liable to result in criminality. A chemical system of morals might be developed on this basis. Among the ferruginous sins would be placed murder, violence and licentiousness. Among the non-ferruginous, cowardice, sloth and lying. The former would be mostly sins of commission, the latter, sins of omission. The virtues could, of course, be similarly classified; the ferruginous virtues would include courage, self-reliance and ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... I am a lover and a child, A little child and happy lover, both! When by the breath of flowers I am beguiled From sense of pain, and lulled in odorous sloth. So I adore them, that no mistress sweet Seems worthier of the love which they awake: In innocence and beauty more complete, Was never maiden cheek in morning lake. Oh, while I live, surround me with fresh flowers! Oh, when I die, then bury me ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the ignoble sloth, how long The trust in greatness not thine own? Surely the lion's brood is strong To ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... conscriptions, created, moreover, a martial spirit among the people, which, although far removed from patriotism, might still, when compared with the spirit formerly pervading the imperial army, be regarded as a first step from effeminacy, cowardice, and sloth, toward ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... another. So he that can find no other way for correcting the errors of his people but by taking from them the conveniences of life, shows that he knows not what it is to govern a free nation. He himself ought rather to shake off his sloth, or to lay down his pride, for the contempt or hatred that his people have for him takes its rise from the vices in himself. Let him live upon what belongs to him without wronging others, and accommodate his expense to his revenue. Let ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... What you have already done, excellent as it is, is considered by your friends and the world as the bloom, the mere promise of the harvest. Will you suffer the fatal draught, which is ever accompanied by sloth, to rob you of your fame, and, what to you is a higher motive, of your power of doing good; of giving fragrance to your memory, among the worthies of future years, when you are numbered ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... was full of righteousness; the progenitor. True of his word, sober, piteous, and free; Clean of his ghost, and loved busi-ness, pure in his spirit. Against the vice of sloth in honesty; ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... provided with the secret key To that gold alphabet, himself made me, Himself, I say, the savage he fore-read Fate somehow should be charged with; nipp'd the growth Of better nature in constraint and sloth, That only bring to bear the seed of wrong And turn'd the stream to fury whose out-burst Had kept his lawful channel uncoerced, And fertilized the land he flow'd along. Then like to some unskilful duellist, Who having over-reached himself pushing too hard His foe, or but a moment off his ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... partridges from their coverts. Idris leant on my arm; her sadness yielded to the present sense of pleasure. We met other families on the Long Walk, enjoying like ourselves the return of the genial season. At once, I seemed to awake; I cast off the clinging sloth of the past months; earth assumed a new appearance, and my view of the future was suddenly made clear. I exclaimed, "I have ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... weapons, and bravely fighting, should valiantly protect their country, their property, wives and children, and, what is dearer than these, their liberty and lives; that they should not suffer their hands to be tied behind their backs by a nation which, unless they were enervated by idleness and sloth, was not more powerful than themselves, but that they should arm those hands with buckler, sword, and spear, ready for the field of battle; and, because they thought this also of advantage to the people they were about to leave, they, with the help of the miserable natives, built a wall different ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas
... Lord Byron at Missolonghi was not only hailed as a new era in the history of Greece, but as the beginning of a new cycle in his own extraordinary life. His natural indolence disappeared; the Sardanapalian sloth was thrown off, and he took a station in the van of her ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... we have no knowledge of the Miocene mammalian fauna of the Australian and Austro-Columbian provinces; but, seeing that not a trace of a Platyrrhine Ape, of a Procyonine Carnivore, of a characteristically South-American Rodent, of a Sloth, an Armadillo, or an Ant-eater has yet been found in Miocene deposits of Arctogaea, I cannot doubt that they already existed in ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... not been unhandsome; debauchery and sloth had puffed and coarsened him. Joseph, on the other hand, had never ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... Oriental seraglio, the pseudo Smerdis had the audacity to despatch, among the heralds that proclaimed his accession, a messenger to the Egyptian army, demanding their allegiance. The envoy found Cambyses at Ecbatana in Syria. Neither cowardice nor sloth was the fault of that monarch; he sprang upon his horse, determined to march at once to Susa, when the sheath fell from his sword, and he received a mortal wound from the naked blade. Cambyses left no offspring, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... He'll find 'em coming home to him sooner than the cattle he has lost through his sloth and pride. The Lord is on the side of the just, as well as agin all slanderers ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... I my faint soul, wherefore? Shake first from thine own powers dull sloth's control; Then lift thy voice with an exulting "Therefore Thou, too, shalt conquer, oh, thou ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... but a name That leaves our useful products still the same. Not so the loss. The man of wealth and pride 275 Takes up a space that many poor supplied; Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds, Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds: The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth Has robbed the neighboring fields of half their growth;[22] 280 His seat, where solitary sports are seen, Indignant spurns the cottage from the green: Around the world each needful product flies, For all the luxuries the world supplies; While thus the land adorned for pleasure all ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... Sylvia and the unwelcome newcomer, Nan Graham, had devolved the cleaning up of the camp grounds and their work had been most thoroughly done, but indeed no one could be accused, of anything approaching sloth this morning when so much of their future reputation was at stake. Only Edith Norton had been unable to help because of her work in town, but she hoped to be able to return to camp by noon so as not to miss the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... vowed that he would conquer sloth and lasciviousness, and outrageously triumph in the gaudy, foolish world, and insult his rival with riches and even honour. Then he heard Lizzie reproach Frank for refusing her first request, and the foolish fellow's ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... seen in the distance. I did not touch at it, but Anselmo informed me that the inhabitants were engaged in a little civil war of their own, murdering each other to their hearts' content. Had we had time, I dare say we might have supplied ourselves with monkey and sloth-flesh, opossums, snakes, crabs, and a variety of birds, but I doubt whether the crew would have appreciated the exertions of the sportsman. At last Anselmo informed me, much to my satisfaction, that we were drawing near to the termination of our voyage. ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshaling of affairs, come best from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience; for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... sandstone pillars. Inside is a great throne of white marble, inlaid with mosaic work, where the old kings of Delhi used to sit and listen to their ministers. The last of this line was still living in the palace when the Mutiny broke out. He was a poor specimen, given up to indulgence and sloth; but the British had left him the state of royalty and all his wealth until the rising made it impossible any more. His sons and grandson, who, when the Mutiny broke out, themselves actually murdered ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... are used only in the singular form; as, hemp, flax, barley, wheat, pitch, gold, sloth, pride, honesty, meekness, compassion, &c.; others only in the plural form; as, bellows, scissors, ashes, riches, snuffers, tongs, thanks, wages, embers, ides, ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... not only this frivolous ambition of being thought masterly inciting them on one hand, but also their natural sloth tempting them on the other. They are terrified at the prospect before them, of the toil required to attain exactness. The impetuosity of youth is distrusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, and desires, from mere impatience ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... the Mohammedan would have found a suitable enemy in the Barbary Corsairs, who were a plague to Europe right to the year 1816; but though we find many a struggle between Knight and Corsair in the seventeenth century, the sloth and decadence that were mastering the Order made it gradually neglect its duty in that direction. Whatever energies they had were more profitably spent in the Levant; for the Knights, in their seafaring expeditions, became little more than Corsairs themselves. When ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen
... conscience, he is the most valiant of men, whom they can hardly keep from getting himself killed, and for that matter all the rest of them. Here, again, is an inimitable flash of insight, where Simple, Sloth, and Presumption have prevailed with "one Short-Wind, one Sleepy-Head, and with a young woman, her name was Dull, to turn out of the way ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... laughter and our rage. Look on us with our sins oppressed! I, too, have trodden mine heritage, Wickedly wearying of the best. Burn from my brain and from my breast Sloth, and the cowardice that clings, And stiffness and the soul's arrest: And feed my brain with ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... back upon the green slope and the hollows and narrow ridges, with sheep and stubble and some low hedges, and oxen, and that old, old sloth—the plough—creeping in his path. The sun is bright on the stubble and the corners of furze; there are bees humming yonder, no doubt, and flowers, and hares crouching—the dew dried from around them long since, and waiting for it to fall again; partridges, too, corn-ricks, ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... He could just reach the saplings that formed the frame work of the roof. Like a huge sloth he drew himself to the roof of the structure. From here he could see beyond the palisade, and the wild freedom of the jungle called to him. He did not know what it was but in its leafy wall he perceived many breaks and openings that offered concealment from the creatures ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and pride Takes up a space that many poor supplied— Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds, Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds; The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth Has robb'd the neighboring fields of half their growth; His seat, where solitary sports are seen, Indignant spurns the cottage from the green; Around the world each needful product flies, For all the luxuries the world supplies: While thus the land adorn'd for ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... while after, O bull of Bharata's race, Pandu who had achieved a victory over sloth and lethargy, accompanied by his two wives, Kunti and Madri, retired into the woods. Leaving his excellent palace with its luxurious beds, he became a permanent inhabitant of the woods, devoting the whole of his time to the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... Horam, "have indeed a freedom of action; but that freedom is best exercised when it leads them to trust and depend on the Lord of all things: not that He who seeth even beyond the confines of light is pleased with idleness, or giveth encouragement to the sons of sloth; the spirit which He has infused into mankind He expects to find active and industrious; and, when prudence is joined with religion, Allah either gives success to its dictates, or, by counteracting its motions, draws forth the brighter virtues of patience and resignation. ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... character, and the perception of it. Something, as the reader will see, that is only emerging in the pages of this book. Something harsh and strong-fibred, nurtured upon coarse food and the inexorable discipline of the sea. Something that is the enemy of sloth and lies and the soft languors of love. Indeed, what the author has finally to say after all may be comprised in this—that out of his experience, which has been to a certain degree varied, he has come to the conviction that this same character, the achievement and acceptance of it, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... there, pervading the country like some spirit of unrest, threading the intricacies of city slums, north, south, east, and west, personally interviewing all manner of loathly creatures, damaged by vice and sloth and ignorance and crime almost out of all semblance of humanity. He had not dreamed that such beings existed upon the earth. Sometimes, unaware of the circumstances and the danger they courted, they caught up a child wherewith to deceive him, if it might ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Br[a]hmanas. We shall protest again when we come to the subject of Buddhism against the too great influence which has been claimed for climate. Politics and society, in our opinion, had more to do with altering the religions of India than had a higher temperature and miasma. As a result of ease and sloth—for the Brahmans are now the divine pampered servants of established kings, not the energetic peers of a changing population of warriors—the priests had lost the inspiration that came from action; they now made no new hymns; they only formulated new rules of sacrifice. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... give me leave to seek it amidst the perils of war. My father, the sultan of Harran, has many enemies. Why does he not call me to his assistance? Why does he leave me here so long in obscurity? Must I spend my life in sloth, when all my brothers have the happiness to be fighting by his side?" "My son," answered Pirouze, "I am no less impatient to have your name become famous; I could wish you had already signalized yourself against your father's enemies; but we must ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... heretofore. Our minds are so strangely constituted, it is impossible to say whether it is from the growth of habit suddenly showing itself, or from an unusual gift of Divine grace poured into our hearts, but so it is; let our temptation be to sloth, or irresolution, or worldly anxiety, or pride, or to other more base and miserable sins, we may suddenly find ourselves possessed of a power of self-command which we had not before. Or again, we may have ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... wild state, spends its life in trees, and never leaves them but from force or accident. The eagle to the sky, the mole to the ground, the sloth to the tree; but what is most extraordinary, he lives not upon the branches, but under them. He moves suspended, rests suspended, sleeps suspended, and passes his life in suspense,—like a young clergyman distantly ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... they were working these mines, they would come hither to take them captive; but even now, when no one can molest them, they do not work the mines, and hence we may infer that their poverty is mainly due to sloth. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... pride, haughtiness, covetousness, slandering the dead, anger, envy, the evil eye, shamelessness, looking at with evil intent, looking at with evil concupiscence, stiff-neckedness, discontent with the godly arrangements, self-willedness, sloth, despising others, mixing in strange matters, unbelief, opposing the Divine powers, false witness, false judgment, idol-worship, running naked, running with one shoe, the breaking of the low (midday) prayer, the omission of the (midday) prayer, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... you how much their one object is to secure peace, then proceed to tell you that this thing which they hope to secure is a very evil thing, that under its blighting influence nations wane in luxury and sloth. And of course they imply that our own nation, about a third of whom have not enough to eat and about another third of whom have a heart-breaking struggle with small means and precariousness of livelihood, ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... of his wrath, flung the power of attorney at the head of the innocent maidservant, and was only forcibly withheld from horse-whipping the rascally messenger by whose sloth and drunkenness the disappointment ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... this sickness, so, Lord, make these thorns feathers again, feathers of thy dove, in the peace of conscience, and in a holy recourse to thine ark, to the instruments of true comfort, in thy institutions and in the ordinances of thy church. Forget my bed, O Lord, as it hath been a bed of sloth, and worse than sloth; take me not, O Lord, at this advantage, to terrify my soul with saying, Now I have met thee there where thou hast so often departed from me; but having burnt up that bed by these vehement heats, and washed that bed in these ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... Roman and Vandal, had long been sharing the lot of Aryan Europe; they seemed destined to follow in its growth and fortune. But the Arab conquest restored them to Semitism, made Asia the seat from which they were to have their training, attached them to the chariot of sloth instead of that of effort. What they are to-day, all Europe ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
