"Wasteful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ah, wasteful woman, she that may On her sweet self set her own price, Knowing man cannot choose but pay, How has she cheapened paradise; How given for nought her priceless gift, How spoiled the bread, and spilled the wine, Which, spent with due, respective ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... means, so soon as she had been some time in the country, attempted a reformation. Inquiring of some Belgian families with whom she was acquainted what were the just proportions allowed by them to their servants, she attempted by degrees to introduce the same system. The first article of wasteful expenditure was bread, and she put them upon an allowance. The morning after she was awoke with a loud hammering in the saloon below, the reason of which she could not comprehend; but on going down to breakfast she found one of ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... necessity arose, many of us were unwilling and more of us unable to engage in the work of production. In some localities legislation was invoked to urge us toward the fields and gardens. We have shown ourselves a wasteful people, and in the wake of our wastefulness have followed a dismal train of disasters, cold, hunger, and many another form of distress. Deplore and repent of our prodigality as we may, the effects abide to remind us of our decline from the high plane of industry, ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... capitally without sleep for nearly a week and I don't see any use in reacquiring a habit, a wasteful habit, which I've ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... Sir Walter Raleigh's century knew nothing of gaslight, and that it would require a prodigious and wasteful expenditure of tallow-candles to illuminate the Tunnel sufficiently to discern even a ghost. On this account, however, it would be all the more suitable place of confinement for a metaphysician, to keep him from bewildering mankind with his shadowy speculations; ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... obtained by using of chloride 5 grains to the ounce, and of silver 40 grains to the ounce. If so, let the photographic world know that the latter proportions are sufficient, and the others needless, wasteful, and expensive without cause. I trust you agree with me in thinking that it would be of use to a large number of beginners to have the proportions best suited for printing positives defined as near as possible, and not be left to guess ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... now a very popular word for a nouveau-riche, it is a schieber, one who exchanges. Getting your money changed is one of the most wasteful processes for you and one of the most ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... a time went into the world to seek their fortunes; but they soon fell into a wasteful foolish way of living, so that they could not return home again. Then their brother, who was a little insignificant dwarf, went out to seek for his brothers: but when he had found them they only laughed at him, to think that he, who was so young and simple, ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... Sarusti canal, which is intended to do the work formerly effected in a rude way by throwing bands or embankments across the bed of the stream, and forcing the water over the surrounding lands. The same wasteful form of irrigation was used on a large scale on the Ghagar and is still practised on its upper reaches. Lower down earthen bands have been superceded by a masonry weir at Otu in the Hissar district. The northern and southern ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... I have always found as good for a man's principles as professions. Nor, at the time of which I am speaking, was there any of that dread or fear of reforming the government that has since been occasioned by the wild and wasteful hand which the French employed ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... these heat had a peculiar effect, and the unwary one was sometimes startled by a loud report and the sight of his meal being hoist in the air. Usually two or more men combined in the cooking process, but the preparation of food by the individual was found to be wasteful and injurious to health in that it attracted many flies and lacked thoroughness. The company system was therefore reverted to, and the dixies brought into use in kitchens constructed outside the trenches. The dixies were then taken forward ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... apparently very wasteful, and in nothing is this more marked than in the case of the salmon. Probably not more than one egg in a thousand produces a fish which reaches the smolt stage, and a still smaller proportion grows to the spawning ...
— Amateur Fish Culture • Charles Edward Walker
... experiments, or by the instruction of those who have had experience. It is amusing to notice the various, and oftentimes contradictory, notions of economy, among judicious and experienced housekeepers; for there is probably no economist, who would not be deemed lavish or wasteful, in some respects, by another and equally experienced and judicious person, who, in some different points, would herself be as much condemned by the other. These diversities are occasioned by dissimilar early habits, and by the different relative value assigned, by ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... of New Orleans, and possessed a domestic establishment of great extent and elegance, with a body of servants in the condition of slaves, to whom he was an indulgent master. The description of this splendid mansion, with its lounging and wasteful attendants, its indolent, pretty, and capricious lady-mistress, and the account of Ophelia, a shrewd New-England cousin, who managed the household affairs, must be considered the best, or at least the most amusing portion of the work. The authoress also dwells with fondness on the character ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all. On Tuesday nights the Owl Club danced; then there was a little stir in the streets, and here and there one could see a lighted window until midnight. But the next night all ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... is wasteful of its subject; that is the whole objection to its loose, unstructural form. Criticism bases its conclusion upon nothing whatever but the injury done to the story, the loss of its full potential ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... those around him, are before us, and are amusingly characteristic. The honest captain is full of vexation on his own account, and solicitude on account of Mr. Astor, whose property he considers at the mercy of a most heterogeneous and wasteful crew. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... figures, to the simplest and least. The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the rudely jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate Firmaments: deep silent rock-foundations are built beneath; and the skyey vault with its everlasting Luminaries above: instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... a wasteful cock] [i.e. a cockloft, a garret. And a wasteful cock, signifies a garret lying in waste, neglected, put to no use. HANMER.] Hanmer's explanation is received by Dr. Warburton, yet I think them both apparently mistaken. A wasteful cock is a cock or pipe with a turning stopple running ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... conditions of existence in that desolate region. Parliament lavishly pours water into the sieve in the shape of Relief Acts. Even in my own short tenure of office I was responsible for one of these terribly wasteful and profoundly unsatisfactory measures. Instead of relief, what a statesman must seek is prevention of this great evil and strong root of evil; and prevention means a large, though it cannot be a very swift, displacement of the population. But among the many experts with whom I have discussed ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... venture to wear his new clothes while engaged in his business. This he felt would have been wasteful extravagance. About ten o'clock in the morning, when business slackened, he went home, and dressing himself went to a hotel where he could see copies of the "Morning Herald" and "Sun," and, noting down the places where a boy was wanted, went on a round of applications. But he ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... dark cell, nursed in the very bowels of Islam, had achieved his heart's desire. He had fulfilled the purpose of his life, a purpose which to Freddy seemed useless and wasteful. That was another question. He had left a life of endless toil under the tropical sun of primitive Africa for what to Freddy would have seemed a mad purpose—to walk to Cairo and spend the last few years of his existence in the silent ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... recognized, and that it should be looked up to with that humility without which no courage is possible, not even that wherewith to oppose falsehood. Finally he did not attempt to make any defence against what he considered a deserved reproach, that of giving way to a wasteful and inconsiderate expenditure of ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... of German tranquillity. Such expenditures are economic precautions against expensive wars. Thereby the solvency of the German exchequer would be moderately insured. So far from unduly fostering a bellicose spirit tending to war, these would be tactful preventives of wasteful foreign and civil broils. Fifty years' current expense to insure the empire's peace would not equal waste of one such serious conflict. There is no doubt that this sturdy sovereign possesses much military spirit. ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... hear what moderate wishes life brings one to at last? I used to be very ambitious,—wasteful, extravagant, and luxurious in all my fancies. Read too much in the "Arabian Nights." Must have the lamp,—couldn't do without the ring. Exercise every morning on the brazen horse. Plump down into castles as full of little milk-white princesses as a nest is of young sparrows. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... let him in by all means.—Well, friend, what do you want to say to me about my coffin?' 'Only, sir, that I'll saw up the oak tree that your honor was speaking of into seven-foot plank.' 'That would be wasteful,' answered my uncle; 'I never was more than six feet and an inch in my vamps, the best day ever I saw.' 'But your honor will stretch after death,' said the carpenter. 'Not eleven inches, I am sure, you blockhead! But I'll stretch, no doubt—perhaps a couple of inches or so. Well, make my coffin six ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... Clive, with pious respect for his dead father's memory, coupled Plassey with Seringapatam, and ordered that the fine figure-work on the facade of the hall should be a commemoration of both victories. In England the Directors of the Company complained of what they called 'such wasteful extravagance;' but the developments were a real want, and it is a matter of present-day satisfaction that the Madras Government have no need to be acquiring a site now and to be building a new Government House in these expensive ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... were fortunate innovators, whose race supplanted the more conservative element, who discovered an inexhaustible source of nourishment, to be obtained without painful search or dangerous conflict: the saccharine exudation of the flowers. The wasteful system of living upon prey, by no means favourable to large populations, has been preserved for the feeble larvae; but the vigorous adult has abandoned it for an easier and more prosperous existence. Thus the Philanthus of our own days was gradually developed; ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... hunter—neither rash nor wasteful of his resources. He knew a better plan than to kill the eland upon the spot. He knew that the animal was now quite in his power; and that he could drive him wherever he pleased, just like a tame ox. To have killed the creature on the spot would have been a waste of powder and shot. More than that, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... moments, too, he plunged into the sea of metaphysics, and floundered a while in waters too deep for intellectual security. But his abounding knowledge and happy judgment told a touching story of long attentive hours in this worshipful company; there was a reproach to my wasteful saunterings in so devoted a culture of opportunity. "There are two moods," I remember his saying, "in which we may walk through galleries—the critical and the ideal. They seize us at their pleasure, and we ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... stood, and from the Shore They view'd the vast immeasurable Abyss, Outrageous as a Sea, dark, wasteful, wild; Up from the bottom turned by furious Winds And surging Waves, as Mountains to assault Heavens height, and with the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... to Chicago, and the upper half of the State was generally a wilderness. The earlier emigrants, principally of the poorer class of Southern farmers, shunned the prairies with something of a superstitious dread. They preferred to pass the first years of their occupation in the wasteful and laborious work of clearing a patch of timber for corn, rather than enter upon those rich savannas which were ready to break into fertility at the slightest provocation of culture. Even so late as 1835, writes J. F. Speed, "no one dreamed the prairies would ever be occupied." ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... of limited supplies and the consumers. From the viewpoint of a rationing system a middleman who distributes the product in violation and disregard of the prescribed quotas is an inefficient and wasteful conduct. * * * Certainly we could not say that the President would lack the power under this Act to take away from a wasteful factory and route to an efficient one a previous supply of material needed for the manufacture of articles of war. * * * From the point of view of the factory owner ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... are wasteful and dirty, and let sewers run into the sea instead of putting the stuff upon the fields like thrifty reasonable souls; or throw herrings' heads and dead dog-fish, or any other refuse, into the water; or in any way make a mess upon the ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... feared the poisoned milk might have been given, and we dreaded what the next post might bring. Just at that moment it was suggested, with kindest intentions, that perhaps we were on the wrong track, the work seemed so difficult and wasteful. ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... toward the production of durable and helpful commodities, and away from the production of luxuries and such harmful commodities as have not been made illegal. Under competitive conditions, too, a number of shops or stores may exist in a community that might easily be served by a single firm. This is wasteful duplication, just as advertising is a waste when it goes beyond the point of informing the public as to whereabouts and character of commodities. Still another source of waste is traceable to an excessive number of middlemen, each of whom adds to the price of ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... This is done by building up a core of suitable size by laying together thin sheets of soft iron, or by forming a bundle of soft iron wires. The use of laminated cores is for the purpose of preventing eddy currents, which, if allowed to flow, would not only be wasteful of energy but would also tend to defeat the desired high impedance. Sometimes in iron-clad impedance coils, the iron shell is slotted longitudinally to break up the flow of eddy currents ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... No party to fork off, lag behind, or go before, without permission. No hunter or party to run buffalo before the general order, and every captain in turn to mount guard with his men and patrol the camp. The punishments for offenders were, like themselves, rather wild and wasteful. For a first offence against the laws, a culprit was to have his saddle and bridle cut up! For the second, his coat to be taken and cut up; and for the third he was to be flogged. A person convicted of theft was to be brought to the middle of the camp, and have his or her name loudly proclaimed ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... education, a clever boy who had learned to speak German in a year would have to be coerced into idleness until every dunce among his classmates could speak it as well as he; and a similar process would be repeated in after-life. This policy, as has been pointed out already, is, even if wasteful, not ruinous in the sphere of ordinary labour—a fact which shows how wide the difference is between the ordinary faculties, as applied to industry, and the exceptional; but no one in his senses, not even the most ardent apostle of equality, ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... elegance and luxury, and not the slightest weight of obligation laid upon you for the gratification your friend's company has given you. One has not to be a debtor in the sum of a friend's outlay for house, servants, refreshments, and the like. Nowhere in Europe is the senseless and wasteful American custom of treating known; and nothing could be more especially foreign to the frugal instincts and habits of the Italians. So, when a party of friends at a caffe eat or drink, each one pays for what he takes, and pecuniarily, the enjoyment ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... them unawed, content, and calm. His fortune was a little nook of land; And there the Scythian found him, hook in hand, His fruit-trees pruning. Here he cropp'd A barren branch, there slash'd and lopp'd, Correcting Nature everywhere, Who paid with usury his care. 'Pray, why this wasteful havoc, sir?'— So spoke the wondering traveller; 'Can it, I ask, in reason's name, Be wise these harmless trees to maim? Fling down that instrument of crime, And leave them to the scythe of Time. ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... put himself in communication with the Scots, the hereditary foes of England, and the great wars which were destined to last 116 years, and to exhaust the strength of two strong nations, were now about to begin. They brought brilliant and barren triumphs to England, and, like most wars, were a wasteful and terrible mistake, which, if crowned with ultimate success, might, by removing the centre of the kingdom into France, have marred the future welfare of England, for the happy constitutional development of the country could never have taken place ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the vestige of a breeze; but faint odors arrive, become stronger, and die away, or are wholly dissipated by an onrush of others, so musky or so sweet that one can almost taste them. These have their secret purposes, since Nature is not wasteful. If she creates beautiful things, it is to serve some ultimate end; it is her whim to walk in obscure paths, but her goal is fixed and immutable. However, her designs are hidden and not easy to decipher; at best, one achieves, not knowledge, but ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... of Public Instruction in New York State, writes,—[14] "We cannot exculpate the schools. They are as wasteful of child life as are the homes. From the bottom to the top of the American educational system we take little account of the time of the child.... We have eight or nine elementary grades for work which would be done in six if we were working mainly for productivity and power. We have shaped ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... trader, to the progress in military apparatus during the last few decades. The house-appliances of to-day for example, are little better than they were fifty years ago. A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory places of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the rifle or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to those we possess; in power, ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... flint, or to one stick rubbing against another stick, will be competent to afford a red-hot temperature unless the surface against which impact or friction is made be very small, or unless great care be taken to avoid the wasteful dissipation of heat. The spark made by a flint and steel, consists of a thin shaving of steel, scraped off by the flint and heated by the arrested motion. When well struck, the spark is white-hot and at that temperature it burns ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... rest it was much less. In two cases there was almost none. It is worth noting, however, that the people in these two had the largest incomes of all. In other words the best-to-do families were the least wasteful. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... dynamo principle, utilize those principles to the best mechanical advantage. So do others, in other respects that did not occur even to Edison, or were not adopted by him. Probably the modern dynamo is the most efficient, the most accurately measurable, the least wasteful of its power, and the most manageable, of any power-machine so far constructed by man for ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... tariff is the most wasteful and costly method ever designed for raising national revenue, because for every dollar obtained thereby for the public treasury at least three dollars pass into the pockets of the protected interests, thereby ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... country to exempt from the law against combinations in restraint of trade, combinations to increase the cost of living by increasing the prices of agricultural products and the prices to be paid for labor. The effort seems to be to compel men to compete in the use of their savings no matter how wasteful the competition, and to forbid men competing in the use of their labor, no matter what the idleness thereby caused. I think it a truism that whoever seeks to be exempted from the restrictions or liabilities he would impose on others, seeks not ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... against the Provincial Government (Chapter xlviii., page 379) was that its management of the clergy reserve lands was wasteful and extravagant. An effort was therefore made, in 1846, to vest these lands in the religious bodies then entitled to a share in the income derived from their sale. Mr. Gladstone communicated with the Governor-General ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... They mark another wide departure from the usual methods of ordinary farming. For many years it has been a ruinously, wasteful custom with farmers, to allow their crops of corn, grain and hay, to stand in the fields while curing. All, subject meanwhile to the destructive effects of storms, dews and all kinds of adverse weather, which as a rule, destroyed much of the crop, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... alluded to above yields from 30,000 to 40,000 lb. per annum; a uniform rate of 41/2 d. per lb. of finished bark is paid for the labor. Cinnamon oil is produced from this bark by distillation; the mode is very primitive and wasteful. About 40 lb. of bark, previously macerated in water, form one charge for the still, which is heated over a fire made of the spent bark of a previous distillation. Each charge of bark yields about three ounces of oil, and two charges are ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... life; nothing else, O heaven! nothing else. Even amid poverty, I could do so much better; keeping before my eyes some definite, some not unattainable, good; sternly dismissing the impracticable, the wasteful. ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... quarrying, jet spalling and channeling are proven techniques. Stone quarrying has been expensive and wasteful heretofore. Rocket flame equipment allows cutting along the natural cleavage planes, or crystal boundaries—hence cuts stone thin without danger of cracking and, in addition, produces a fine finish that cannot be obtained when cutting by steel ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... property of theirs, and the military advantage they seemed to possess is due less to any superiority of their own than to the extent of their territory and the roadless wildernesses which are at once the reproach and the fortification of their wasteful system of agriculture. Their advantages in war have been in proportion to their disadvantages in peace, and it is peace which most convincingly tries both the vigor of a nation and the wisdom of its polity. It is with this class that we shall have to deal in arranging the conditions ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... lights were going out in the Tuileries, had nearly all gone out. I wondered if the suspicious and timid and wasteful Emperor would keep the gas burning all night in his room. The night-roar of Paris still went on, sounding always to foreign ears like the beginning of a revolution. As I stood there, looking at the window that interested me most, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... ranches you see open try pots used; it is a more wasteful process, I imagine, but it is simpler and requires a smaller expenditure of capital for machinery. The cattle are managed here, as in California, on horseback and with the help of the lasso; and he who on our Pacific coast is called ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... ever you felt or found this in a London street; if ever it furnished you with one serious thought, or any ray of true and gentle pleasure; if there is in your heart a true delight in its green railings, and dark casements, and wasteful finery of shops, and feeble coxcombry of club-houses, it is well; promote the building of more like them. But if they never taught you any thing, and never made you happier as you passed beneath them, do not think they have any mysterious goodness of occult ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... came to northwest Africa chiefly through the Merinid princes. The Almohads had erected great monuments from Rabat to Marrakech, and had fortified Fez, but their "mighty wasteful empire" fell apart like those that had preceded it. Stability had to come from the west; it was not till the Arabs had learned it through the Moors that Morocco produced a dynasty strong and enlightened enough to carry out the dream ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... thoughts. It is a strongly pro-German piece of road. It supports allegations against Great Britain, as, for instance, that the British are quite unfit to control their own affairs, let alone those of an empire; that they are an incompetent people, a pig-headedly stupid people, a wasteful people, a people incapable of realising that a man who tills his field badly is a traitor and a ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... emperor has withdrawn every pension bestowed by you. He has received a statement of every annuity paid by your majesty's orders, and has declared his intention of cleaning out the Augean stables of this wasteful beneficence." [Footnote: Hubner, "Life of Joseph ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... have enabled a favored class to appropriate for its purposes the results of the work of others. While these sources have not been absent in the development of our civilization, the great source of energy has come from the rapid, and usually wasteful and reckless, utilization of the stored energy of the earth. The almost incredible advance in medical and other forms of scientific knowledge and the utilization of this knowledge is largely due to the greater forces which we have become ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... conscious power but placable enough for dominion and liberty of soul. Then perfection in action can be attained and a self-justifying energy can emerge out of apathy on the one hand and out of servile and wasteful work on the other. Art has accordingly two stages: one mechanical or industrial, in which untoward matter is better prepared, or impeding media are overcome; the other liberal, in which perfectly fit matter is appropriated ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... there was not in them the incentive to action and progress which is given by the consciousness of a part in human destiny, by the inspiration of a high idea, or even by the natural development of institutions. Their life and literature were aimless and wasteful. Without combination or concentration, they had no star to guide them in an onward course; and the progress of dawn into day was no more to them than to the flocks ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... our hero was reading Virgil and Shakespeare, and was learning to think for himself. The knowledge obtained from Billy Little the boy tried to impart to Rita. Tom held learning and books to be effeminate and wasteful of time; but Rita drank in Dic's teaching, with now and then a helpful draught from Billy Little, and the result soon began ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... ripening tops must be cut frequently, because the plants mature very unevenly. But this method is often more wasteful than spreading cloths or sheets of paper beneath the plants and allowing the seed to drop in them as it ripens. Twice a day, preferably about noon, and in the late afternoon the plants should be gently jarred to make the ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... the plant, and the dry, warm product being put up in bags at the other. All the latest devices and machinery for sugar-making we saw here in full operation, affording a contrast to the crude and wasteful methods I had seen in the island of Jamaica ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... services they render are at least voluntarily rendered, and impoverish no one, and cost nothing. Why should high civilisation and low savagery ever come together on the point of making them a wantonly wasteful and contemptible set ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... also, and is celebrated for its manufactures of iron, glass, paper, hardware, clocks, linen, woollen, and fire-arms. The people are industrious and careful, excepting in smoking tobacco, of which they are very wasteful. Industry is encouraged; and several schools have been established for teaching young men agriculture and gardening, with the ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... study of mathematics, though Locke would have his boy "look into all sorts of knowledge," and train his understanding with a wide variety of exercises. In the education given in the grammar schools of his time he found much that seemed to him wasteful of time and thoroughly bad in principle, and he used much space to point out defects and describe better methods of teaching and management, giving in some detail reasons therefor. His ideas as to needed reforms in the teaching of Latin (R. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... scold those two bright, hard-working little men? I think their papa had to console himself with thinking if only they would work as well at something useful when they were grown up, he could forgive their rather wasteful business ...
— The Nursery, September 1877, Vol. XXII, No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... way of any? Does it do injury to the great cause which has all my heart? He read, he thought, and read and thought again; and the more he read and thought, the more was he convinced that the habitual use of tobacco in any of its forms is useless; is wasteful of time and money; is dirty; is offensive to others, and a breach of Christian charity; is a bad example to the simple and young; is a temptation to drunkenness, and injurious to health. He resolved to renounce it, and flung the old black pipe from him to lift it again no more. Thus Jamie was conqueror ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... COUNT VON, minister of Augustus III., king of Poland, an unprincipled man, who encouraged his master, and indulged himself, in silly foppery and wasteful extravagance, so that when the Seven Years' War broke out he and his master had to flee from Dresden and seek refuge ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... at the neighbors' houses. He was a keen-faced, thoughtful-looking man; and he wore a blouse of blue cotton, from the pocket of which always dangled the leaves of some wild salad culled from our wasteful vacant lots ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... seemed criminal in a country beleaguered by submarines, in its third year of war, and largely dependent for its food-supply on the farm labor of women and children. We should not have been surprised if it had been only the Americans who indulged in this wasteful dish-cleansing process; but the Frenchmen did it, too. When I remarked upon this to one of my American comrades, ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... what he's about, or we'll eat him. Ah, here we are!" he exclaimed, pouncing upon a piece of burning wood. "Now you take your cap, Mr Rob, and hunt all round for any fruit you can find. Don't be wasteful and pick any that ain't ripe. Leave that for another day. We shall want it. And don't go in the forest. There's more to be found at the edge than inside, because you can't get to the tops of the trees; and don't eat a thing ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... the verandah and the one over Peter's head were still burning and looked garish and wan, and Jan's first coherent thought was, "How dreadfully wasteful to have had them on all night—Peter's electric light, too"—and ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... not merely to the physical necessities, but to the beauty and happiness of life. When Christ was invited to the marriage-feast at Cana of Galilee, when Matthew the publican made for Him a feast in His own house, He did not churlishly refuse, saying that such expenditure was wasteful and wicked excess. When in the house of Simon the leper Mary "took a pound of ointment of spikenard, very precious, and anointed the feet of Jesus," and they that sat by murmured, saying, "To what ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... apart from the morality of the matter, which I am forced to speak to you of; let me tell you that though simplicity in art may be costly as well as uncostly, at least it is not wasteful, and nothing is more destructive to art than the want of it. I have never been in any rich man's house which would not have looked the better for having a bonfire made outside of it of nine-tenths of all that ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... brushed: many, indeed, will perform all over what Keats, thinking of the ocean eternally washing the land, has called a 'priestlike task of pure ablution'; but others, faithful to tradition and Saturday night, will dodge this as wasteful. Downstairs in summer is his hat; in winter, his hat, his overcoat, his muffler, and, if the weather compels, his galoshes and perhaps his ear-muffs or ear-bobs. Last thing of all, the Perfect Gentleman will put on his walking-stick; somewhere ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... for women, for he had seen them less often deceived than deceiving. Again, too, the last few years had been spent without any high aims or fixed pursuits. Maltravers had been living on the capital of his faculties and affections in a wasteful, speculating spirit. It is a bad thing for a clever and ardent man not to have from the onset some paramount object ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... foul talk, that I neither cared for nor understood. What I really needed, like all the other boys, was a little timely help over the sexual problems, but this we none of us got, and each had to work out his own principle of conduct for himself. It was a long, difficult, and wasteful process, and I cannot but believe that many of us failed in the endeavor. We had come unprepared with any advice. The principle upon which we were apparently trained was the repression of every instinct. My mother was ignorant ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... pleased. One of her favorite caprices of ornament was to imitate the swell and fall of a bell, making her tones sweep through the air with the most delicious undulation, and, using her voice at pleasure, she would shower her graces in an absolutely wasteful profusion. Her greatest defect was that, while the ear was bewildered with the beauty and tremendous power of her voice, the feelings were untouched: she never touched the heart. She could not, like Mara, thrill, nor, like Billington, captivate her hearers by a birdlike softness and brilliancy; ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... of happiness by simply trying to turn out of one's life whatever is uncongenial. Life cannot be made into an Earthly Paradise, and it injures one's soul even to try. What we can turn out of our lives are the unfruitful, wasteful, conventional things; and one can follow what seems the true life, though one may mistake even that sometimes. One of the commonest mistakes nowadays is that so many people are haunted with a vague sense that they ought to DO GOOD, as they say. The best that most people can do is to perform their ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smooth the ice, or add another hue Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light To seek the beauteous eye of Heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess. 638 SHAKS.: King John, ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... enormous fees are paid the principal performers. The leading swordsmen receive about three hundred dollars for each performance, and they are eagerly disputed by the direction of all the arenas of Spain. In spite of these large wages, they are rarely rich. They are as wasteful and improvident as gamblers. Tato, when he lost his leg, lost his means of subsistence, and his comrades organized one or two benefits to keep him from want. Cuchares died in the Havana, and left ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... Jauer and the Duke of Schweidnitz,—lofty-minded gentlemen, perhaps a thought too lofty. But these also Johann's son, little Kaiser Karl IV., "marrying their heiress," contrived to bring in;—one fruitful adventure of little Karl's, among the many wasteful he made, in the German Reich. Schlesien is henceforth a bit of the Kingdom of Bohemia; indissolubly hooked to Germany; and its progress in the arts and composures, under wise Piasts with immigrating Germans, we guess to have become doubly rapid. [Busching, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of things around her to be remedied, or, at least, bettered, by a little exertion, and not one which could be helped by a vain regret. For the loss of that old barbaric splendour and profuse luxury which her father mourned over, she had no regrets. She knew that these wasteful and profligate livers had done nothing for the people either in act or in example; that they were a selfish, worthless, self-indulgent race, caring for nothing but their pleasures, and making all their patriotism consist in a ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... sorrow, in the name of this gallant girl who died with the word 'liberty' on her lips. We have come asking you this day to speak some favorable word to us that we may know that you will use your good and great office to end this wasteful struggle of women." ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... then Susanna was fetched home from Littlebath. Miss Mackenzie would have gone down herself but that she was averse to see Mr Maguire. She therefore kept on her Littlebath lodgings, though Mrs Tom said much to her of the wasteful extravagance in doing so. It was at last settled that Mr Rubb should go down to Littlebath and bring Susanna back with him; and this he did, not at all to that young lady's satisfaction. It was understood that ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... the Arab title to the far more appropriate heading, "Story of the Rich Man and his Wasteful Son." The tale begins with AEsop's fable of the faggot; and concludes with the "Heir of Linne," in the famous Scotch ballad. Mr. Clouston refers also to the Persian Tale of Murchlis (The Sorrowful Wazir); to the Forty Vezirs (23rd Story) to Cinthio ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... with pales, by many a weary stroke Of stubborn labour hewn from heart of oak: Frequent and thick. Within the space were rear'd Twelve ample cells, the lodgments of his herd. Full fifty pregnant females each contain'd; The males without (a smaller race) remain'd; Doom'd to supply the suitors' wasteful feast, A stock by daily luxury decreased; Now scarce four hundred left. These to defend, Four savage dogs, a watchful guard, attend. Here sat Eumaeus, and his cares applied To form strong buskins of well-season'd hide. Of four assistants who his ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... insinuations that disturbed him. Day after day there poured into his office not only complaints about the actual work, but accusations of graft. "The Service was working for the rich men of the valley." "The Service had its hand behind its back." "The Service was extravagant and wasteful of the people's money." "Every cent that the Project cost must be paid back by the farmers. What right had ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... respected by the white man. In peace he has too often been the dupe of artful traffic; in war he has been regarded as a ferocious animal whose life or death was a question of mere precaution and convenience. Man is cruelly wasteful of life when his own safety is endangered and he is sheltered by impunity, and little mercy is to be expected from him when he feels the sting of the reptile and is conscious of the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... there, where the pursuers still hung on, blue smoke was cutting through the white. Certainly we would have meat that day, enough and far more than enough. The valley was full of carcasses, product of the wasteful white man's hunting. Later I learned that old Mandy, riding a mule astride, had made the run and killed a buffalo with ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... climate and fertility of soil—causes which, in the absence of proper stimulus to industry and improvement, have led to an improvident system of cultivation, and to a blind and ignorant adherence to wasteful ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... have some Anglomania, of a sort. Why, in that free country, does one Minister, driven out by Parliament, vanish from his King's presence, and another enter, borne in by Parliament? (Montgaillard, Histoire de France, i. 410-17.) Surely not for mere change (which is ever wasteful); but that all men may have share of what is going; and so the strife of Freedom indefinitely prolong itself, and no harm ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... and a new, a purer, and more prosperous future will open upon the entire Republic. Perhaps, also, it may in time be discovered that even slave-labor is most profitable when most intelligent and best rewarded,—that the present mode of growing cotton is the most wasteful and extravagant, and one not bearing competition. Thus even the African may reap benefit from the result, and in his increased self-respect and intelligence may be found the real prosperity of the master. And thus the peaceful laws of trade may do the work which agitation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... when I looked again the sky was overcast, The summer insect's winged dance was o'er, yet on I past, The gaudy butterfly was gone, the bee away had fled, While on each fairest, brightest flower the wasteful locust fed. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... to squat and gaze into the fire, and mutter, and King lay still. After a while the mullah went and carried a great water bowl nearer to the fire and, as King had done, stripped himself. Then he heaped great fagots on the fire—wasteful fagots, each of which had cost some woman hours of mountain climbing. And in the glow of the leaping flame he scrubbed himself from head to foot with King's soap. Finally, with a feat of strength that nearly forced an exclamation out of King, he lifted the great water ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... complaint more just than what we find in almost every family, of the folly and ignorance, the fraud and knavery, the idleness and viciousness, the wasteful squandering temper of servants, who are, indeed, become one of the many public grievances of the kingdom; whereof, I believe, there are few masters that now hear me who are not convinced by their own experience. And I am not very confident, that more families, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... this; that people who are industrious, and careful, and who have a talent for business, get on in the world better than those who are idle or wasteful or ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... grounds, gardens, shrubberies and deer parks. But he defends them on the ground that they are good things for the community and thereby admits my principle. It is only against wasteful self indulgence that I have anything to say. No doubt, says Mr. Greg, if the land of a country is all occupied and cultivated, and if no more land is easily accessible, and if the produce of other lands is not procurable in return for manufactured articles of exchange, then a proprietor who shall ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith |
