"Idle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and inke were made to write, And idle heads, that little do, haue leisure to indite: Wherefore, respecting these, and thine assured loue, If I would write no newes to thee, them might'st my pen reproue. And sithence fortune thus hath shou'd my shippe on ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... to go to the Bible, on this subject. I mean, it is idle to pretend to do so, when we mean not so much. Men who incline to wine and other alcoholic drinks, plead the example and authority of the Bible. Yet you will hardly find a man who drinks wine simply because he believes ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... patients, it occurred to Grenfell that here was not only a pleasant but a useful profession. With his knowledge of medicine the doctor assisted nature in restoring people to health. Man must have a well body if he would be happy and useful. Without a well body man's hands would be idle and his brain dull. Only healthy men could invent and build and administer. It was the doctor's job to keep them fit. Here then was creative work of the highest kind! The ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... acquainted neither with Jews nor with music, humored as it was by that foreign trick in the book, the idioms of another tongue; but the latter theory was too false on its face to be tenable, and then people left off caring about it. It is perhaps an idle infirmity, this request for the personality of authors; yet it is indeed a response to the fact that there never was one who did not prefer to be esteemed for himself rather than for his writing,—and, ascending, may we love the works of God and not the Lord ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... ground his own, Yet as he looks around, he cries with glee, These bounding prospects all were made for me: For me yon waving fields their burden bear, For me yon labourer guides the shining share, While happy I in idle ease recline, And mark the glorious visions as they shine. This is the charm, by sages often told, Converting all it touches into gold. Content can soothe where'er by fortune placed, Can rear a garden ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... of the cloth one he had worn in the morning—he had a single white japonica in his buttonhole—his face was pale and his eyes unusually brilliant. He looked his best—I admitted it, and could readily understand how an idle, pleasure-seeking feminine animal might be easily attracted by the purely physical beauty of his form and features. I spoke a part ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... that Frank Woods had been seeing a lot of Helen, and several close friends had asked me if Jim knew the man's reputation. I had even spoken to Helen, only to be laughed at, and assured that it was the idle gossip of scandal-mongers. That she should have left Jim, darling old Jim, for Frank Woods, or any other man, was unthinkable. Jim sank on a bench and turned a face to me that ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... they shall not go far all adoe unpunished; no, but they shall have their due to a farthing, when every threatening and curse shall be accomplished and fulfilled on the head of the transgressor. Friend, there is never an idle word that thou speakest but God will account with thee for it; there is never a lie thou tellest, but God will reckon with thee for it; nay, there shall not pass so much as one passage in all thy lifetime but God, the righteous God, will have it in the trial by His law, if thou die ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... gunboats had not been idle during the preparation of the main ironclad fleet. Arriving at Cairo, as has been stated, on the 12th of August, the necessity for action soon arose. During the early months of the war the State of Kentucky had announced her intention ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... cobblers' stalls; and another strange thing is that from the same rags are made the paper on which the wisdom of sages is recorded, and the crown which is placed on the head of a fool. The same, too, may be said of children: one daughter is good and another bad; one idle, another a good housewife; one fair, another ugly; one spiteful, another kind; one unfortunate, another born to good luck, and who being all of one family ought to be of one nature. But leaving this subject to those who know more ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... same schools as the men. The contempt of men for idleness, in a stage of society when there was more than enough work for all men to do, necessarily extended to the women. It is not good, in the United States, for any one, woman hardly more than man, to be idle. ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... should hear infinitely less of cattle-spearing and shepherd-murdering than at present obtains. I mention this, not from any good-will towards the blacks, who have been causes of much sorrow to me and mine, but because I am sure that a discontinuance of this idle habit would tend to lessen the existing causes of friction ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... him headfirst into the swallowing sand? It seemed preposterous to be harbouring such thought against the cheerful and most respectable farmer at his side. What foundation had he for it? None but the hearing of an idle boast that the man had made one day to his wife, and that she in simplicity ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... I attended to the rigging, the breeze right aft filled our swelling canvas, and we ran before it over the untroubled deep. The wind died away at noon; its idle breath just permitted us to hold our course. As lazy, fair-weather sailors, careless of the coming hour, we talked gaily of our coasting voyage, of our arrival at Athens. We would make our home of one of the Cyclades, and there in myrtle-groves, amidst perpetual spring, ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... not return to us while Day and Night divide— Never while the bars of sunset hold: But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died, Shall they thrust for high employments as ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... The idle young pages were wont to take great delight in shooting at the bear with blunt arrows, and when it growled and snarled, then they would calm it again by throwing over bits of bread steeped in honey or syrup. So Sidonia, waiting to see the fun, had ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... could learn without my Method, and with equal thoroughness in many, many times as long a period! And if any one who has been pressed for time, or who has been in a panic about an impending examination, or who has been too much troubled with Discontinuity, too ill in general health, or too idle, to do more than superficially glance at my lessons—if any such person doubts his competency to accomplish as much as the diligent student of average ability has done, then let him turn back and really and truly MASTER my System [for he does not even KNOW what my System is until ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... said: "Stella, can you not give up the pleasure of a wedding tour for the sake of helping others out of bondage into freedom, thus making their lives happier and brighter?" The powerful voice said: "It is only idle curiosity on the part of the people wanting to see you. Do not be influenced by them; just think how it will help you in your future labors to have visited the Oriental countries and sat at the feet of those great Spiritual luminaries of India. If you go now, you have got the money and ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... the Japanese if he met them. In giving this advice the Chinese admiral was reasoning on correct principles, even if his confidence in his own fighting power was not justified by facts. To keep the fleet idle at Port Arthur or Wei-hai-wei would be to concede the command of the sea to Japan, without an ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... clear light; And let the shimmer of thy chariot wheels Burn through the cracks of night.—So slowly, Lord, To lift myself to thee with hands of toil, Climbing the slippery cliff of unheard prayer! Lift up a hand among my idle days— One beckoning finger. I will cast aside The clogs of earthly circumstance, and run Up the broad highways where the countless worlds Sit ripening in the summer of ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... morning air. "Come to work, come to work! The birds build homes, and rear their young; the bee skims the fragrant air in search of flowers; the rivers run to the sea, turning wheels, driving ships: nothing in the great economy of nature is idle," sang out ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... hope, that of the Woman's Rights movement has far outstripped our most sanguine expectations. When the war-cry was heard in 1861, the advance-guard of the Woman's Rights party cried 'halt!' And for five years we have stood waiting while the grand drama of the Rebellion was passing. Not as idle spectators, but as the busiest and most unwearied actors on the boards. We have, as our manly men assert, fought half the battle, and helped to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... face might fascinate other foolish moths; it had lost its power to dazzle her long, long ago. Perhaps the disenchantment was mutual; for the pretty, rose-cheeked, starry-eyed girl who had captivated his idle fancy had become a dream of the past, and his wife was a pale, sickly, peevish invalid, with frowsy hair ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... it is; but that sort of thing soon passes away, and we have no sooner obtained possession of one, than another still more desirable presents itself. How peaceful and happy you seem. Well, an idle mind must ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... rouse him up, for she wanted a box that she could not allow to have opened. The clerk then went up to the Sieur Picard's bedroom, but came back saying that what the marquise demanded was for the time being an impossibility, for the commissary was asleep. She saw that it was idle to insist, and went away, saying that she should send a man the next morning to fetch the box. In the morning the man came, offering fifty Louis to the commissary on behalf of the marquise, if he would give her the box. But he replied that the box was in the sealed room, that it would have ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... nearest approach to a "slumming section" that Eastshore possessed. The idle, the shiftless and the vicious congregated there, living in tumbled down shacks in the winter and the middle of the streets, in summer. There were two factories, one a novelty works, the other a canning and candy ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... had visited all the empire and had come to Cuzco where he was served and adored, being for the time idle, he remembered that his father Pachacuti had called the city of Cuzco the lion city. He said that the tail was where the two rivers unite which flow through it[112], that the body was the great square and the houses round it, and that the head was wanting. It ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... idle and depraved; appearing to retain the bad qualities of the slaves, with whom they continue to associate, without acquiring any of the good ones of the whites, from whom (they) continued separated by prejudices against ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... fancies you and I have seriously entertained at one time or another! What superstitious notions have got into our heads and taken possession of its empty chambers,—or, in the language of science, seized on the groups of nerve-cells in some of the idle cerebral convolutions! ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... deferentially. He felt a personal sense of gratitude towards her for having kept three of his most unruly charges quiet so long. He felt, too, that she did not ask merely from idle curiosity, as ...
— Big Brother • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... recollections of it. Well, that dream is now realised; the gates of the Western world are opening to me. What experience awaits me I know not; but this I do know, that the emotion with which I confront it is not one of idle curiosity, or even of calmly sympathetic interest. It is not primarily to my intelligence, but to my imagination, that the word "America" appeals. To many people that word conveys none but prosaic ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... was printed in white letters against a background of red on the side of the machine. Farmer boys in the States of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and all the great corn-growing States saw it and in idle moments wondered what kind of man had invented the machine they operated. A Cleveland newspaper man came to Bidwell and went to Pickleville to see Hugh. He wrote a story telling of Hugh's early poverty and his efforts to become an inventor. When the reporter talked to Hugh he found ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... incredible quantity of fine merchandise, and so much cheaper than what we see in England, I have much ado to persuade myself I am still so near it. Here is neither dirt nor beggary to be seen. One is not shocked with those loathsome cripples, so common in London, nor teased with the importunities of idle fellows and wenches, that choose to be nasty and lazy. The common servants and the little shopwomen here are more nicely clean than most of our ladies; and the great variety of neat dresses (every woman dressing her head after her own fashion) is an additional pleasure in ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... Mills Athletic Association. With their backing, he was certain that he could eliminate most of that very considerable wastage in time that even a cursory observation had revealed to him in the shops, due to such causes as dilatory workers, idle machines, lack of co-ordination, improper routing of work, and the like. He had the suspicion that a little investigation would reveal other ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... when such dedications determined the lives of young men. Theology as a grave topic of historic and metaphysical investigation I delighted to pursue, but for the ministry I had no calling. I would have been idle if I could, for I had no ambition, but I had no fortune and I could ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... fulfils himself in many ways: ways we little think of when we try to set up our own shortsighted laws against his Word. When does the Devil catch hold of a man? Not when he's working and not when he's drunk; but when he's idle and sober. Our own natures tell us to drink when we have nothing else to do. Look at you and me! When we'd both earned a pocketful of money, what did we do? Went on the spree, naturally. But I was humble minded. I did ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... [he is speaking of the English Subsidy in 1758], how useful will it prove in a Country bred everywhere to Spartan thrift, accustomed to regard waste as sin, and which will lay out no penny except to purpose! I guess the Prussian Exchequer is, by this time, much on the ebb; idle precious metals tending everywhere towards the melting-pot. At what precise date the Friedrich-Wilhelm balustrades, and enormous silver furnitures, were first gone into, Dryasdust has not informed me: but we know they all went; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the ne'er-do-wells who maintained a precarious existence below the Dividing Line; and Governor Spotswood deplored the shiftless servants who lived on the Virginia frontier. Yet we may suppose that freedom often transformed the idle bondsman into an industrious freeholder. Nor were all the settlers of the Virginia back country emancipated servants. In 1732 Peter Jefferson patented a thousand acres at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was in this frontier community above ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... flame. "It shall not be borne, Madonna!" he cried. "I have hands and a heart and a brain as good as Simone's. I would rather play the knave and stab him in the back than have him live to be your lord. But there is no need of stabbing or idle talk of stabbing. This false wedlock shall be broken ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home: Is this a holiday? what! know you not, Being mechanical, you ought not walk Upon a labouring day without the sign Of your profession? Speak, what ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... a keen look at his companion, but could discern in him none of the common symptoms of guilt. The priest, however, was a mine of sunless riddles, one lode connecting with another; it was idle attempting to explore them all at once. So the young man recurred to that vein which was of most immediate interest ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... foreigner and an Englishman—a double reason why you should leave the Companions of Jehu to fight their own battles with the government, whose downfall they have sworn. You failed in wisdom, you yielded to idle curiosity; instead of keeping away, you have entered the lion's den, and ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... artists, rather than women, is indicated by the fact that the natural objects designed by early pre-historic artists were mainly women and wild beasts, that is to say, they were the work of masculine hunters, executed in idle intervals of the chase. But within the range in which nearly all of us move, there are always many men who in mental respects can do what most women can do, many women who can do what most men can do. We are not justified in excluding a whole sex absolutely from any field. In so doing ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... who obeyed eagerly. They had been chafing throughout the running of the gantlet as they stood beside their beloved but idle piece. ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... royal plate, court hunters' wives, and whatever else these aristocratic domestics are termed, and their under-domestics ran about behind their chairs and shoved full plates before their mouths; but I, who was passed by and neglected, sat idle without the least occupation for my jaws, and kneaded little bread-balls, and drummed with my fingers, from boredom, and, to my astonishment, I found myself suddenly drumming ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Wigan, that there was every reason to look for an amateur in this business, and in spite of the hooligan club, you seem to have been half conscious of this fact. You would have been glad to know what the romance connected with the jewels was. Not idle curiosity, I take it, but a grasping for a clue in that direction. Miss Belford cannot help you beyond writing to her aunt's old friend in Yorkshire, yet had it not been for the hooligans' club, I fancy you would have followed this trail more keenly. According ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... reckoned up all the most Eminent Poets which have come to our knowledge, craving pardon for those we have omitted. We shall conclude all with Sir Roger L'Strange, one whose Pen was never idle in asserting the Royal Cause, as well before the King's Restoration, against his open Enemies, as since that time against his Feigned Friends. Those who shall consider the Number and Greatness of his Books, will admire he should ever write so many, and those who have Read them, considering the ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... successful, judged by the standards of the time. "At this moment," wrote Nelson some few months later, "there are nearly fifty sail employed in the trade between the Islands of St. Kitts, Nevis, and America, which are truly British built, owned, and navigated. Had I been an idle spectator, my firm belief is that not a single vessel would have belonged to those islands in the foreign trade." His own action was further endorsed by the ministry, which now gave captains of ships-of-war ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... "which would seem to indicate that he still retained his property at that place;" and further, that his father is spoken of as a "brigadier-general," whereas (according to the Gentleman's Magazine) he had been made a major-general in December 1735. Of discrepancies like these it is idle to attempt any explanation. But, if Murphy is to be believed, Fielding devoted himself henceforth with remarkable assiduity to the study of law. The old irregularity of life, it is alleged, occasionally asserted itself, ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... an idea of what Bonaparte was during this painful scene. However, I kept my ground. I repeated what I had said. I begged of him to consider with what facility tales were fabricated and circulated, and that gossip such as that which had been repeated to him was only the amusement of idle persons; and deserved the contempt of strong minds. I spoke of his glory. "My glory!" cried he. "I know not what I would not give if that which Junot has told me should be untrue; so much do I love Josephine! If she be really guilty a divorce must separate us for ever. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... correct speaker, is always able to command attention and doors are thrown open to him which remain closed to others not equipped with a like facility of expression. The man who can talk well and to the point need never fear to go idle. He is required in nearly every walk of life and field of human endeavor, the world wants him at every turn. Employers are constantly on the lookout for good talkers, those who are able to attract the public and convince others ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... cases, by maudlin and often notoriously extravagant agitators, and passerby sentimental orgy—all of the old rights of the husband have been converted into obligations. He no longer has any control over his wife's property; she may devote its income to the family or she may squander that income upon idle follies, and he can do nothing. She has equal authority in regulating and disposing of the children, and in the case of infants, more than he. There is no law compelling her to do her share of the family labour: she may spend her whole time ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... nature; and that those Who here have ruled before me merit praise, That they have oped the cloister gates, and given Thousands of victims of ill-taught devotion Back to the duties of humanity. But yet a queen who hath not spent her days In fruitless, idle contemplation; who, Without murmur, indefatigably Performs the hardest of all duties; she Should be exempted from that natural law Which doth ordain one half of human kind Shall ever be subservient ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Jack was an idle, lazy boy who would do no work to support his widowed mother; and at last they both came to such poverty that the poor woman had to sell her cow to buy food to keep them from starving. She sent Jack to market with ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... distributed among them in the form of wages for attendance in the courts of justice and other public assemblies. These payments to citizens for their share in the public business were quite new in Greece, and many considered the sitting and listening in these assemblies as an idle life in comparison with the labor of the plowman and vine-grower in the country, and for a long time the industrious cultivators, the brave warriors, and the men of old-fashioned morality were opposed, among the citizens of Athens, to the loquacious, luxurious, and dissolute generation who passed ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... been transpiring in the Spanish town, Captain Dynamite had not been idle. As the last man of the little Cuban army filed down the mountain-side, he rose from his chair, and tightening his belt stretched his big body as was his custom ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... bright seemed for ever broken. I was surprised, however, into a confession of the truth by the good-natured junior partner, who lived near us on Clapham Common, and who dropped in sometimes as he went by my mother's gate, to while away an idle half-hour in some ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... 'long wid you—idle t'ing!" he exclaimed, with sudden severity, and apparent though not real violence, for at the moment his watchful eye had observed one of the ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... the volubility with which, at Caripe, the native alcalde, the governador, and the sergento mayor, will harangue for whole hours the Indians assembled before the church; regulating the labours of the week, reprimanding the idle, or threatening the disobedient. Those chiefs who are also of the Chayma race, and who transmit the orders of the missionary, speak all together in a loud voice, with marked emphasis, but almost without ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... "To one charged with the cure of souls the frequent reading of the Apology is invaluable; in many (we may say, in most) parts it is a book of practical religion." (The Book of Concord 2, 41.) The Apology does not offer all manner of theories of idle minds, but living testimonies of what faith, while struggling hotly with the devil and languishing in the fear of death and the terrors of sin and the Law found and experienced in the sweet Gospel as restored by Luther. In reading the Apology, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... Trudchen, seeing him idle, pushed her cold nose into his hand. Trudchen just now was feeling clever and important. Was she not the mother of the five most wonderful puppies in all Saxony? They swarmed about his legs, pressing him with their little foolish heads. Ulrich stooped ...
— The Love of Ulrich Nebendahl • Jerome K. Jerome
... Joe were away after the white wolves, Henri came floundering into camp tossing his arms like a maniac, and shouting that "seven bars wos be down in de bush close bye!" It chanced that this was an idle day with most of the men, so they all leaped on their horses, and taking guns and knives sallied forth to give ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... are hard workers," she said, "and you ought to be hard resters, too. You're not acting sensibly. Any one would think you were the idle rich." ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... ask you, you idle, lazy, good-for-nothing vagabond. I suppose it was you who kept the girl all this time. Six people coming to dinner, and I've been the whole day without a kitchen-maid. If Margaret Gale hadn't come down to help me, I don't know where we should ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... fell under the wiles of an ingenious Alsatian gambler, Guerlac by name, who foresaw that Baden-Baden and Hombourg were approaching their finish and that the sports must look elsewhere for their living, the idle rich for their sport. This tiny "enclave" in French territory presented many advantages over the German Dukedoms. It was an independent sovereignty issuing its own coins and postage stamps. It was in proud possession of a half-dozen policemen ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... want to contradict you, M'sieur l'abbe, for you are wiser than I, and perhaps you'll know how to explain something that puzzles me. Now see, here I am, ain't I?—that drunken, lazy, idle, good-for-nothing old Fourchon, who had an education and was a farmer, and got down in the mud and never got up again,—well, what difference is there between me and that honest and worthy old Niseron, seventy years ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... letters speak of the common talk of girls as being largely idle gossip; criticisms of absent people; unkind words about persons whom the ladies would meet with warm professions of friendship and fervent kisses if they were to ...
— Girls: Faults and Ideals - A Familiar Talk, With Quotations From Letters • J.R. Miller
... spectacular financial success; bringing home ropes of enormous pearls from India in addition to the fantastic sums paid him by enraptured native princes. But while Morgan Ruyler believed that rich men should work and make their sons work, if only because an idle class was both out of place in a republic and conducive to unrest in the masses, it was quite otherwise with women. They were for men to shelter, and it was their sole duty to be useful in the home, and, wherever possible, ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... though I do not take upon me to say it absolutely was so. His partiality however, to that part of the kingdom, is manifest enough, for he pretended to say, that a good racer could be bred in no place but the North; whereas, late experience has proved that to be a very idle notion. But as the northern gentlemen were the first breeders of racing Horses, so it is very probably they were also the first subscribers to his book, and then we shall find his partiality might arise, either from his gratitude to ...
— A Dissertation on Horses • William Osmer
... (seek not food for themselves,) but sitting idle, seek how they may eat of the flesh others have provided being destructive ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... remedy in sight is for an investment of capital in up-to-date houses of various grades in city, suburbs, and country; such investment to bring 4 per cent, not 40, or even 15, unless by rise of land values. No better use of idle money could be made at the present time. In "Anticipations" Mr. Wells writes: "The erection of a series of experimental labor-saving houses by some philanthropic person for exhibition and discussion ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... the material to the necessary level above the threshold for retention. How far overlearning is necessary and when it becomes wasteful are yet to be determined. (3) Deterioration is hastened by competing connections. If during the time a particular function is lying idle other bonds of connection are being formed into some parts or elements of it, the rate of forgetting of the function in question is hastened and the possibility of recall made more problematic. The less the interference, the greater ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... in front of, before. deleite m. pleasure, delight. delicado, -a delicate, sweet. delicia f. delight. delicioso, -a delicious, delightful. delirante adj. delirious, raving. delirar rave, dote. delirio m. delirium, madness, rapture, rant, idle talk. delito m. crime. demasa f. excess. demasiado, -a too much, too great. demonio m. devil, demon. denso, -a dense, thick. dentro adv. within; —— de prep. within. denuesto ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... of competent experts it is idle to look for a commercial future for the flying machine. There is, and always will be, a limit to its carrying capacity which will prohibit its employment for passenger or freight purposes in a wholesale or general ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... them, and Mermes warned them also, but they would not listen, saying that they were but the idle dreams of one who strives to peep into the future and sees false pictures there. More, Pharaoh sent for me himself, and whilst thanking me and Mermes my husband, told me that he had inquired into the matter and found no cause to distrust Abi or those under his command. Moreover, he forbade me to ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... does it matter; its details are supremely unimportant. The river here is pouting through the gorges, or shallowly meandering the meads. It is watering Farmer Balbus's fields; Grazier Ahenobarbus's cows drink at it; idle Dolabell angles in its quiet reaches: there are bloody tribal affrays yearly at its fords. It is important, certainly, to Babbus and Dolabella, and the men slain in the forays;—but to ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... as a conspirator—'in good faith he will never help his friend or harm his foe'—and the praises of Bower, are characteristic, and, here, are in place; elsewhere they are idle repetitions, mere copies. The apology for bad writing—Logan could not employ a secretary in this case—is natural: the two days writing agrees ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... call me coward fool: I lay a claim to better blood, But yet a heap of idle mud Hath power to make ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... for all but a few. Saturday will always be my Sabbath, no matter what convention would make me do. We have decided that writing or sewing or pleasuring, since it hurts no one, is no more a sin on that day than on another; to sit with idle hands and gossip or slander is more so. But on that day my heart always holds its Sabbath; this is the force of custom. Any day would do as well if we were used to it,—for who can tell which was the first and which the seventh counting from creation? On our New Year I should still feel ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... and what became of the case she did not know. But Mr. Bethune, who could not shield himself in this way, very promptly answered that he was arrested at the suit of this man; and Hemmings could not make idle charges there. He was a theatrical manager in Pittsburgh, a public man! and, as they told you, boasted that he was intimate with the members of the press and police force, who were dead-heads at his theatre, and who witnessed the performance gratuitously; so that you perceive he was ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... day, And there, unless when charity forbids, The livelong night. A tattered apron hides, Worn as a cloak, and hardly hides, a gown More tattered still; and both but ill conceal A bosom heaved with never-ceasing sighs. She begs an idle pin of all she meets, And hoards them in her sleeve; but needful food, Though pressed with hunger oft, or comelier clothes, Though pinched with cold, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... Union, and Sweden's struggle for freedom from Denmark in the middle ages. Sweden's way of using its power has been stamped as an intolerable oppression. It can scarcely be necessary to give a more powerful confutation to these very idle fancies, than simply to refer to the fact that Norway's "struggle for freedom" has had for its object the enormously important ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... with us, but they now declined. The inspector, constable, or governor of the place appeared to be a very slippery customer, and I fancy discouraged the men from going, whilst making a great show of forwarding our views. These outlying settlements are the resort of a number of idle, worthless characters. There was a kind of festival going on, and the people fuddled themselves with cashiri, an intoxicating drink invented by the Indians. It is made by soaking mandioca cakes in water until fermentation takes place, and tastes ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... who answered. "I haven't heard any such rumors," he said. "I believe Lieutenant Rayburn said he heard some idle report about the bank's having lost a sum of money, but there was ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... had done it, as if at the instant of the apparition he had offered that majestic, silent figure some grotesque indignity: thrown a pillow at it, or hailed it in tones of mocking offence. He was profoundly and exquisitely ashamed even before he ceased to tell the story for his listeners' idle amusement. When he stopped doing so, and snubbed solicitation with the curt answer that everybody had heard that story, he was retrospectively ashamed; and mixed with the expectation of seeing the vision again was the formless wish to offer it some ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... call all his lords and knights of the Round Table to counsel upon this matter, and desired them to say their advice. Then Sir Cador of Cornwall spake first and said, Sir, this message liketh me well, for we have many days rested us and have been idle, and now I hope ye shall make sharp war on the Romans, where I doubt not we shall get honour. I believe well, said Arthur, that this matter pleaseth thee well, but these answers may not be answered, for the demand grieveth me sore, for truly I will never ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... beautiful, undying, precious thing. If every young woman would think of her soul when she looks in the glass, would hear the cry of her naked mind when she dallies away her precious hours at her toilet, would listen to the sad moaning of her hollow heart, as it wails through her idle, useless life, something would be done for the elevation of womanhood. I hope I address those who appreciate my words and my feelings. Above almost every thing else do I desire woman's elevation in the moral ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... the shade, lounged on the cabin porches and stood about the sunny glade in idle groups. They wore the dress of peace. A single black-tipped white eagle feather waved above the band binding each black head. They watched the merry children tumble round the playground. Silvermane browsed where he listed under the shady trees, and ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... seem to hear the regretful echo in her sister's voice, nor did she take her to task for the idle hands that lay folded on her lap, nor disturb by word or look the times of silent musing, that grew longer and more frequent as those uneventful days passed on. What was to be said? The doubts and fears that had made her unhappy ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... one can hardly say how, in the tone of a single word. So it was with this word, even to the ears of Eleanor in the next room. It was round and sweet, untrembling, with something like a vibration of joy in its low utterance. It was but a word, said in answer to a child's idle question; it pierced like a barbed arrow through all the involutions of another heart, down into the core. It was an accent of strength and quiet and fearless security, though spoken by lips that ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... singular moderation, and well-composed carriage can happily overcome, a second is no whit able to sustain, but upon every small occasion of misconceived abuse, injury, grief, disgrace, loss, cross, humour, &c. (if solitary, or idle) yields so far to passion, that his complexion is altered, his digestion hindered, his sleep gone, his spirits obscured, and his heart heavy, his hypochondries misaffected; wind, crudity, on a sudden overtake him, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... shall lead to ruin and repentance. Nor, O King of the age" (added he), "is this story stranger than that of the Cheat and the Merchants." When the King heard these words, he said in himself, "Indeed, had I given ear to the sayings of my courtiers and inclined to their idle prate in the matter of my Minister, I had repented to the utterest of penitence, but Alhamdolillah—laud be to the Lord—who hath disposed me to endurance and long-suffering and hath vouchsafed to me patience!" ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... not only terrible but exceedingly singular, as well as trying, for as long as stones came thundering down on the deck it would have been sheer madness to have attempted to do anything aboveboard, and to sit idle in the cabins with almost certain death staring them in the face, was ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... the mere sight of her without converse—that of an idle and vulgar flirtation with a timber-merchant's pretty daughter, grated painfully upon him now that he had found what Grace intrinsically was. Personal intercourse with such as she could take no lower form than intellectual communion, and mutual ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... why the Mississippi should not be made to roll, and Niagara to fall through our workshops, or even to impel our street-cars. They may as well work as to be idle as they go. ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... Did you ever hear any of our old successful financiers diverting their idle surplus into those investments where almost unlimited ...
— Plain Facts • G. A. Bauman
... such malice, obloquy, and spite Expire e're morn, the mushroom of a night! Transient as vapours glimm'ring thro' the glades, Half-form'd and idle, as the dreams of maids, Vain as the sick man's vow, or young man's sigh, Third-nights ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... had just appeared, and had been the delight of idle folks. I was quite a young girl at that time, and nothing of that kind hurt me or troubled me. In the first place, all the doctors had given me up, so that I was indifferent about things; but all the doctors were mistaken, ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... lead an idle life, and they want every one they see to stop and play with them. I don't want to be rude, but we are not going to dawdle about here; and as for ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... and Eben walked at a little distance from the party, apparently taking no more interest in the affair than one of idle curiosity. ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... forgetting, or neglecting the friendship I made at college, now begin that correspondence by letters, which you and I agreed, at parting, to cultivate. I begin it sooner than I intended, that you may have it in your power to refute any idle reports which may be circulated to my prejudice at Oxford, touching a foolish quarrel, in which I have been involved on account of my sister, who had been some time settled here in a boarding-school. When I came hither with my uncle and aunt (who ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... substance. And thus places that are dug open flow by that pressure, and afford the more water (as the breasts of women do milk by their being sucked), the vapor thus moistening and becoming fluid; whereas ground that remains idle and undug is not capable of producing any water, whilst it wants that motion which is the cause of liquefaction. But those that assert this opinion, give occasion to the doubtful to argue, that on the same ground there should be no blood in living creatures, but that it must be formed by the ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... did that. A wheen idle callants, when the dominie was out at his twal'-hours, read the Lord's Prayer backlans, an' raised him, but couldna lay him again, for he threepit ower them that he wadna gang awa unless he gat ane o' them wi' him. Ye may be sure this put them in an awfu' swither. They were a' squallin' an' crawlin' ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... ability to read runes which, in five days, got you more favor than Rolf Erlingsson's strength had gained him in five years. Are your accomplishments so limited to your weapons that when you cannot use your sword you must lie idle? Many little services will count as much as one big one, when the time of reckoning comes. Shake the sleep-thorn out of your ear, my comrade, and be your brave strong-minded self again. Without courage, never would Robert Sans-Peur ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... a life of unremitting conflict, Calvin visited Italy. In the entire absence of any trustworthy statement of the occasion of this journey, it is almost idle to speculate on the objects he had in view.[400] Certain, however, it is that the court of the Duchess Renee, at Ferrara, offered to a patriotic Frenchman ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... thus engaged in strong commercial rivalry, Germany unexpectedly made her appearance in the Western region of Central Persia, where their competition meets. Nor has Persia been idle in trading enterprise; her merchants are not only aiming at getting more exclusively into their own hands the interior commerce of the country, but they have established direct relations with firms in foreign countries, and now work in active competition with the European houses ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon |
