Free TranslationFree Translation
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'



Dissolute   Listen
Dissolute

adjective
1.
Unrestrained by convention or morality.  Synonyms: debauched, degenerate, degraded, dissipated, fast, libertine, profligate, riotous.  "Deplorably dissipated and degraded" , "Riotous living" , "Fast women"



Related search:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Dissolute" Quotes from Famous Books



... any long period a man of dissolute morals is improbable; for he was only twenty-four years of age when he was called to the bar, and before his call he had married (after a year's wooing) a virtuous and exemplary young lady, with whom he lived ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... ago; with tears doubtless from the poor rose-pink Mother, far away in Baireuth and childless otherwise; and also in a sense to the sorrow of Courland, which was hereby left vacant, a prey to enterprising neighbors. And on those terms it was that Saxons Moritz (our dissolute friend, who will be MARECHAL DE SAXE one day) made his clutch at Courland, backed by moneys of the French actress; rumor of which still floats vaguely about. Moritz might have succeeded, could he have done the first part ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... Bribes. But now and then comes out a Viceroy who is a Man of Honesty and Probity, and will have none of these Scoundrelly ways of Making Money (like Mr. Henry Fielding among the Trading Justices, a Bright exception for integrity, though his Life, as I have heard, was otherwise dissolute), and then he falls too and squeezes the Corregidores, in the same manner as Cardinal Richelieu, that was Lewis Thirteenth's Minister, was wont to do with the Financiers. "You must treat 'em like Leeches," said he; "and when they are bloated with blood, put salt upon them, to make them disgorge." ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... to the state. Later the Tokugawa sovereigns had the assistance of the Buddhist clergy in driving out Christianity but I do not think that their action can be compared either in extent or cruelty with the Inquisition. (c) In China Buddhism was in many reigns associated with a dissolute court and palace intrigues. This led to many scandals and great ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... Guienne, at Astaffort, the scene of a bloody engagement during the Wars of Religion in which the Protestant army was cut to pieces when about to cross the Garonne; at Nrac, where frail Marguerite de Valois kept her dissolute Court, and Catherine de Mdicis brought her flying squadron of fascinating maids of honour to gain over the Huguenot leaders to the Catholic cause; and at Cahors, the Divina, or divine fountain of the Celts, and the birthplace of Pope John XXII., of Clement Marot, the early French poet, and of ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly

... "religious houses" had kept true to their vows and aims as that at Evesham did we should no doubt have a very different story to tell. One abbot alone appears to have been an exception to this general rule of good conduct. This was Roger Norreys, a "dissolute monk" of Canterbury, who was thrust upon the unwilling convent by Prince John when acting as regent in King Richard's absence. After many years, and with much difficulty, he was convicted "of seven or eight distinct offences" and deposed. After ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New

... with regard to elision, which, with some trifling exceptions, he permits only in the case of contiguous open vowels, and of short unstressed vowels separated by a liquid consonant, in such words, for instance, as "dissolute," or "amorous." By a variety of small observances, which, when fully stated, make up a formidable code, he mended the shambling gait of the loose dramatic blank verse, and made of it ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... was known of this interview except the general impression in the family that Mrs. Catron had successfully resisted a vague attempt at blackmail from one of her husband's former dissolute companions. Yet it is only fair to say that Mrs. Catron snapped up, quite savagely, two male sympathizers on this subject, and cried a good deal for two days afterward, and once, in the hearing of her sister-in-law, to that lady's great ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte

... Annie judiciously; "not exactly dissolute. Feeble's more the word. Weak, 'E was. Weak as water. 'Ow long do ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... with every circumstance of pomp and splendor to charm the eye and please the imagination. A sacrifice was a feast attended with gayety and even licentiousness. Every temple was the resort of the idle and the dissolute, and the shrines of the Cyprian Venus and the Athenian Minerva could attest that devotion, far from being a pure and exalted exercise of the mind, was only the ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various

... and he makes out a pretty good case. He approves the remark of Scipione Ammirato, that she contracted four successive marriages through a desire to have direct heirs. Another notices that had she been dissolute, she would have preferred the liberty of remaining a widow. The poet cites Pope Innocent VI, who gave her the golden rose, and sets great store upon the expression of Saint Catherine of Siena, who calls her "Venerabile madre in Gesu Cristo," and he concludes by saying, "We prefer ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer

... him even look to come to an ill end. For youth that will follow none but their own bridle, That leadeth a dissolute life and an idle: Youth, that refuseth wholesome documents, Or to take example of their godly parents: Youth, that is retchless, and taketh no regard, What become of themself, nor which end go forward: It is great marvel and a special grace, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley

... the alleged proprietor of the Thunderbolt, was an idle, dissolute fellow, who employed his time in gunning, fishing, and loitering about the dramshops of Rippleton. He lived on the north shore. How he obtained his living, it would ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic

... most certainly expect to find in her some of the characteristic traits of Laura. It must not, indeed, be concealed, that these ladies have not the reputation of being virtuous in the extreme: to say the truth, they are considered as dissolute, and as having little restraint even in their married conduct. I cannot say this of them from any thing which I observed myself—to me they appeared gay, tender ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney

... though for many years he had lived as trader, mate, or supercargo, among people and in places where loose living was customary with white men, and where any departure from the general practice was looked upon with either contemptuous pity or open scorn. Yet no one, not even the roughest and most dissolute beachcomber in the two Pacifics, would have dared to "chaff" Harvey Carr upon his eccentricity, for he had an unpleasant manner when aroused which meant danger to the man who was so wanting in judgment. Yet some men had "chaffed" him, and found out to their cost that ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke

... There is no need Of trusting to their faith; who, save ourselves And our more chosen comrades, is aware 10 Fully of our intent? they think themselves Engaged in secret to the Signory,[421] To punish some more dissolute young nobles Who have defied the law in their excesses; But once drawn up, and their new swords well fleshed In the rank hearts of the more odious Senators, They will not hesitate to follow up Their ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... give any explanation you have to offer! Dad may be the spokesman, but I am the inspirer of these interrogations. My sister, sir, the purest girl in America, the most beautiful creature beneath the star-spangled banner of Columbia, is not going to be the companion of dissolute idleness and gilded dishonor—not, ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston

... friars, unless there are those to support and assist them. For although these people have the desire to-day to know what God is, to-morrow this disposition will change when they are obliged to lay aside and bring under their foul ways, their dissolute manners, and their savage indulgences. So that there is need of people and families to keep them in the way of duty, to constrain them through mildness to do better, and to move them by good example to mend their lives. Father Joseph [195] and myself have many times conferred with them in regard ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain

... broadened his point of view. There is no leveler like a ship's fo'c'sle, no better school of philosophy than that of men upon their "beam ends." There were many such—Poles, Slovaks, Roumanians, an Armenian or two, refugees, adventurers from America, old, young, dissolute, making a necessity of virtue under that successful oligarchy, ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... salvation from the world; there should be no more need of just those things which the modernist so deeply loves and respects and blushes that his church should not be adorned with—emancipated science, free poetic religion, optimistic politics, and dissolute art. These things, according to the Christian conscience, were all vanity and vexation of spirit, and the pagan world itself almost confessed as much. They were vexatious and vain because they were bred out of sin, out of ignoring the inward and the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... ghastly revellers they were that sat round that table!—My gudesire kend mony that had long before gane to their place, for often had he piped to the most part in the hall of Redgauntlet. There was the fierce Middleton, and the dissolute Rothes, and the crafty Lauderdale; and Dalyell, with his bald head and a beard to his girdle; and Earlshall, with Cameron's blude on his hand; and wild Bonshaw, that tied blessed Mr Cargill's limbs till the blude sprang; and Dunbarton ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... and fever energy of the escaped, in whose countenance, never to be forgotten, is the personification of plague-madness. It is recorded that such a one did so escape, swam across the Thames, and recovered. Beyond these are revellers, a dissolute band, card-playing. In the midst of the game one is smitten with the plague, and is falling back—one starts with horror at the sudden seizure—a stupid, drunken indifference marks the others—they had been waiting for a feast, which one is bringing in, who stands just above the falling ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... sleep, without provisions, and without hopes; [119] except that strong assurance, which, under the most desperate circumstances, the independent mind may derive from the contempt of fortune and of life. The triumph of Eugenius was celebrated by the insolent and dissolute joy of his camp; whilst the active and vigilant Arbogastes secretly detached a considerable body of troops to occupy the passes of the mountains, and to encompass the rear of the Eastern army. The dawn of day discovered to the eyes of Theodosius the extent and the extremity of his danger; but ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... pupil of Xenocrates, and succeeded him as the head of his school. There is a story that he had been a very dissolute young man, and that one day, at the head of a band of revellers, he burst into the school of Xenocrates, when his attention was so arrested by the discourse of the philosopher, which happened to be on the subject of temperance, that he tore off his festive ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... gamblers, and the like. The first lady, who was a star in her lowly orbit, was very great in all her different roles, appearing now as a sailor with the hornpipe of his calling, now as an organ-grinder, and now as a dissolute young gentleman,—whatever was the exigency of good morals. The dramatist seemed to have had an eye to her peculiar capabilities, and to have expressly invented edifying characters and situations that her talents ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells

... of San-Francisco, when the gay mining camp was building toward a stable adjustment of society, when the wild, the merry, the dissolute and the brave who built the city were settling down to found houses and cultivate respectability in face of a constantly resurgent past—in those days none who pretended to eminence in the city but knew the sisters Sturtevant. Members of that aristocracy which dwelt on Rincon Hill, their names ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin

... plunged boldly, No matter how coldly The rough river ran,— Over the brink of it, Picture it—think of it, Dissolute Man! Lave in it, drink of it, ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various

... fiction the exalted never fail to inspire. Rezanov, although he had accomplished great ends against greater odds, was too little of a courtier at heart ever to have been a prime favorite in St. Petersburg until the accession of a ruler with whom he had something in common. A dissolute woman and a crack-brained despot were the last to appreciate an original and independent mind, and the seclusion of Alexander had been so complete during the lifetime of his father that Rezanov barely had known him by sight. But the Tsarovitz, enthusiastic ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... generous, devoted to his sister and aunt, but not free from some of the vices of the times prevalent among the young men of rank and fortune in the colony, who in dress, luxury, and immorality, strove to imitate the brilliant, dissolute Court of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... simple theft, on unlawful damage under the lex Aquilia, on certain kinds of deposit, and for corruption of a slave, which lies against any one by whose instigation and advice another man's slave runs away, or becomes disobedient to his master, or takes to dissolute habits, or becomes worse in any way whatsoever, and in which the value of property which the runaway slave has carried off is taken into account. Finally, as we remarked above, the action for the recovery of legacies left to places of religion ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian

... Wold, my fellow-student, inquired the cause of the palpable change in my bearing and disposition. Would that my lips had been sealed to him forever! I knew that he was honest and generous by nature, but I knew not to what extent his dissolute habits (gradually acquired by having ample means, and yielding by degrees to the temptations of vice) had perverted his good qualities. I told him of my love, and while describing the charms of Laura, I was pleased to attribute ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones

... the Pope, and, being governed by ecclesiastical laws, were not like other English subjects amenable to the civil code. The king's power was thus endangered; a proud and encroaching spirit was fostered, and the clergy became dissolute in their lives. In ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... chronique scandaleuse and have also attracted the prurient curiosity of memoir writers. The Court of Berlin in the days of the polygamist King, Frederick William II., the successor of Old Fritz, was the most dissolute Court of Europe, as Berlin is to-day the most depraved city on the Continent. But somehow the scandals of the Hohenzollern seem to be irrelevant episodes. Somehow we do not think of the annals of the august House as a history of scandal. We only think of the Hohenzollern as the political ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... sorry to know. He is a dissolute fellow, who has broken the hearts of two wives, and thrown his children for maintenance on their maternal relations. 'Tis the same who carried your ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown

... our minds. If with continual oil we not supply Our lamp, the light for want of it will die; Though bodies may be tired with exercise, No weariness the mind could e'er surprise. Caecilius the comedian, when of age He represents the follies on the stage, They're credulous, forgetful, dissolute; Neither those crimes to age he doth impute, But to old men, to whom those crimes belong. Lust, petulance, rashness, are in youth more strong 390 Than ago, and yet young men those vices hate, Who virtuous are, discreet, and temperate: And so, what we call dotage seldom breeds In bodies, but ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham

... art a painstaking, industrious, money-making city, with more available wealth among thy pitch and slime than other towns can boast of in their trimness and finery, but spendthrift, and debauched, and dissolute withal ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie

... deep salaams The Parsee spreads his morning palms (A beacon blazing on a height Warms o'er his piety by night.) The Moslem deprecates the deed, Cuts off the head that holds the creed, Then reverently goes to grass, Muttering thanks to Balaam's Ass For faith and learning to refute Idolatry so dissolute! But should a maniac dash past, With straws in beard and hands upcast, To him (through whom, whene'er inclined To preach a bit to Madmankind, The Holy Prophet speaks his mind) Our True Believer lifts his eyes Devoutly and his prayer applies; But ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... how many ears are turned to the tales which dissolute crusaders, or hypocritical pilgrims, bring from that fatal land! I too might ask—I too might enquire—I too might listen with a beating heart to fables which the wily strollers devise to cheat us into hospitality—but no—The ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... almost every one of his poor parishioners, and yet without destroying that sense of independence which is the great characteristic of a true Englishman. He has issued a book of rules and conditions under which these allotments are held, and he thus places a strong check upon drunkenness and dissolute habits, indulgence in which is a sure way to lose the portions of ground. There is scarcely an end to the benefits of the allotment system. In villages there cannot be extensive gardens, and the allotments supply their place. The ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies

... laid him under, and the valuable privilege it has deprived him of; when he finds that it must descend to some relation, for whom, whether near or distant, he cares not one farthing; and who perhaps (if a man of virtue) has held him in the utmost contempt for his dissolute life. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... in many English, and in most Dutch towns. In those towns which are principally supported by the constant or occasional residence of a court, and in which the inferior ranks of people are chiefly maintained by the spending of revenue, they are in general idle, dissolute, and poor; as at Rome, Versailles, Compeigne, and Fontainbleau. If you except Rouen and Bourdeaux, there is little trade or industry in any of the parliament towns of France; and the inferior ranks of people, being chiefly maintained by the expense of the members of the courts of justice, and ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... or drinking-shop. During the evening a great number of Gauchos came in to drink spirits and smoke cigars: their appearance is very striking; they are generally tall and handsome, but with a proud and dissolute expression of countenance. They frequently wear their moustaches, and long black hair curling down their backs. With their brightly coloured garments, great spurs clanking about their heels, and knives stuck as daggers (and ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... just five-and-twenty years ago, the most notorious person among my parishioners was a man of the name of Edmunds, who leased a small farm near this spot. He was a morose, savage-hearted, bad man; idle and dissolute in his habits; cruel and ferocious in his disposition. Beyond the few lazy and reckless vagabonds with whom he sauntered away his time in the fields, or sotted in the ale-house, he had not a single friend or acquaintance; no one ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... great gifts of mind. He may have been, though the thing has been pretended of so many princes that one may be sceptical where evidence is lacking. If he possessed those gifts, he succeeded wonderfully in concealing them under a nature that was frivolously gay, dissolute, ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... moment were grouped some of the joyous members of that jovial sodality. There was Navailles, the brisk, the dissolute, the witty, always ready to risk everything, including honor, for a cast of the dice, for a kiss, for a pleasure or a revenge. There was Noce, pleasure-loving, pleasure-giving, always good-tempered, always good-humored, always serenely confident that the world as it existed was made ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... much disposed to play why do they not rather get apes, and litle puppets to play wythall? Osaye they: they be but chyldren. They be in deede: but it c scant be told how muche those fyrste beginninges of our yong age do helpe vs to guide all our lyfe after, & howe hard & vntractable a wanton and dissolute bryngyng vp, maketh the chylde to the teacher, callynge the same gentlenes, when in deede it is a marring. Might not an accion of euyl handlyng children meruelous iustli be laid against such mothers? For it is plainely a kynde of witchcraft ...
— The Education of Children • Desiderius Erasmus

... off in a rage, with all his crew of dissolute followers. He went first to his uncle in Flanders, then to Germany and Italy, always penniless from his lavish habits, though his mother often sent him supplies of money by a trusty messenger, called Samson le Breton. However, the King found ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... in thought, word, and deed formed no small part of his ideal, his tastes in architecture, painting, sculpture, rhetoric, or poetry were severe. He had no patience with what was artistically dissolute, luscious, or decorated more than in proportion to its animating idea—wishy-washy or sentimental. The ornamental parts of his own rooms (in which I lived in his absence) were a slab of marble to wash upon, a print of Rubens's "Deposition," and a head ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... penance he prescribes, as an essential condition for maintaining a spirit of compunction; saying that water and fire are not more contrary to each other, than a life of softness and delights is to compunction; pleasure being the mother of dissolute laughter and madness. A love of pleasure renders the soul heavy and altogether earthly; but compunction gives her wings, by which she raises herself above all created things. We see worldly men mourn for the loss ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... high-road of comedy which is the Roman road, and she carries in her train types that have done service to many since the ancients fashioned them years ago. Jealous husbands, foolish pragmatic fathers, a dissolute son, a boastful soldier, a cunning slave—they all are merely counters by which the game of comedy used to be played. In England, since Shakespeare took his hold on the stage, that road has been stopped for us, that game has ceased ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... fierce and swift. Coutlass searched with a thumb for Will's eye, and stamped on his instep with an iron-shod heel. But he was a dissolute brute, and for all his strength Yerkes' cleaner living very soon told. Presently Will spared a hand to wrench at the ambitious thumb, and Coutlass screamed with agony. Then he began to sway this way and that without volition ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy

... where your mother is right, Chris," Amos replied, with a laugh. "We shall all get the reputation of being very dissolute lads if the meetings at the Liberty Tree are continued many weeks longer. As a matter of fact, I think you had best ...
— Under the Liberty Tree - A Story of The 'Boston Massacre' • James Otis

... stumbled onto the story and repeated it to Hawley. That's what set that fellow going. It seems Mrs. Waite's maiden name was Pierpont, and when she was seventeen years old she was married to the son of a rich North Carolina planter. The fellow was a drunken, dissolute good-for-nothing. They had a daughter born—this Phyllis—and when the child was three years old her father, in a fit of drunken rage, ran away, and to spite his wife took the little girl with him. All efforts to trace them failed, and the mother finally secured a divorce ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish

... she been in expectation of an announcement to this effect, when one night,—a cold cheerless night in March,—Vavasor exceeded even his ordinary period of absence. The habitually dissolute of Paris rarely keep late hours. Vice does not form with them, as with the English roue, an occasional excess, but is consistent and regular in its habits. Captain Kendal usually returned home between two and three; and Amelia ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various

... columns of the Advocate and the Herald all the venom of outraged public plunder was emptied on the heads of Jeff Farnum and Captain Chunn. They were rebels, blackmailers, and anarchists. Jeff's life was held up to public scorn as dissolute and licentious. He had been expelled from college and consorted only with companions of the lowest sort. A free thinker and an atheist, he wanted to tear down the pillars which upheld society. Unless Verden ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... painted beauties at the theatre of a neighbouring city, there was one whose dissolute mirth seemed inconsistent with any sympathy for pure affections, and for the joys and griefs which are hallowed by them. Yet this was Prudence Inglefield. Her visit to the Thanksgiving fireside was the realization of one of those waking ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... sent to the Lords was ordered to be burnt by the common hangman. For six years, till his death in Rouen, he lived in exile, but he was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey. His private character in a dissolute age was unimpeachable. Anne Hyde, daughter of the earl, became Queen of England, as wife of James II., and was mother of two queens, Anne and Mary. The "History of the Rebellion" is a noble and monumental work, invaluable as ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... might even venture to compare the formerly simple and innocent Swiss river (I remember it thirty years ago—a current of pale green crystal) with the highly educated English streams of Weare or Tyne; and, finally, has as many French prints of dissolute tendency in its principal shop windows as if they had the privilege of opening on ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin

... of her first marriage, and like her ambitious and dissolute, entered into her designs. That year (probably the year 30) Antipas was at Machero on the anniversary of his birthday. Herod the Great had constructed in the interior of the fortress a magnificent palace, where the tetrarch frequently resided.[1] ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... of such cases before; he had read of them in newspapers and talked of them with cold curiosity. But they were of worldly, sinful people, of dissolute men whose characters he could not conceive—of silly, vain, frivolous, and abandoned women whom he had never even met. But Joan—O God! It was the first time since his mute prayer on the staircase that ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte

... whole masses are brought up in depraved and reckless habits, on the verge of, if not actually committing crime; and that "les classes dangereuses" are daily receiving additional accessions on the depraved, the dissolute, and abandoned from all the other ranks in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various

... automatic. 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that'—and not some other crop—'will he also reap.' The wages of sin are paid in ready money; and it is as just to lay them at God's door as it would be to charge Him with inflicting the disease which the dissolute man brings upon himself. It is no arbitrary appointment of God's that 'he that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption'; nor is it His will acting as that of a jealous despot which makes it inevitably true that here and hereafter, 'Every transgression and disobedience ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... seldom, but with choice and purpose—Joshua, without inspiring sympathy, commanded generally that cold respect, which is always paid to the rigid moralist; for instead of yielding to the influence of lax and dissolute colonial manners, he appeared to live with great regularity, and his exterior had something of austerity about it, which ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... such that other persons also felt the need of reflection, and Calder had not been walking by the Row very long before, lifting his eyes, he saw a young man approaching. The young man was not attired as he ought to have been: he wore a light suit, a dissolute necktie, and a soft wideawake crammed down low on his head. He had obviously forsworn the vanities of the world and was wearing the willow. He came up to Calder ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope

... the command he found that the garrison consisted but of one thousand men, horse and foot. They were hardy troops, seasoned in rough mountain-campaigning, but reckless and dissolute, as soldiers are apt to be when accustomed to predatory warfare. They would fight hard for booty, and then gamble it heedlessly away or squander it in licentious revelling. Alhama abounded with hawking, ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving

... not relate the story of my courtship—it was brief and sweet as a song sung perfectly. There were no obstacles. The girl I sought was the only daughter of a ruined Florentine noble of dissolute character, who gained a bare subsistence by frequenting the gaming-tables. His child had been brought up in a convent renowned for strict discipline—she knew nothing of the world. She was, he assured me, with maudlin tears in his eyes, "as innocent as a flower on the altar of the ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli

... first overture was made to her father, and usually by letter. Her music teacher was her first devotee. He was followed by her dancing master, who, as a propitiatory preparation had a wen cut out of his cheek; then came a wealthy butcher; then a man of rank; then a dissolute physician, from marrying whom she narrowly escaped; then a jeweler, and many others. The merits of these gentlemen—particularly those of the energetic butcher—-were warmly commended by their female friends, who, in France, are brokers in this business on a very extensive scale. It is ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... beautiful American, as she sat before him in an attitude expressive of dormant passion, tinged with an imperious coquetry which was one of the most alluring of her charms. The Hotel Montmartre was then the fashionable resort of Louis Napoleon's dissolute nobility, and the Baron de Reviere soon found himself a worshiper in the luxurious retreat. He was not a man who courted by halves. He fell madly in love with the voluptuous Helene, and yielding to an irresistible penchant, the soiled beauty threw herself and her ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... and looking exceedingly tired, dirty, and disreputable generally. However, all might have gone well even then had not Mrs. Aubrey Denison, the brother's wife, unduly interfered and lectured Tom on his "idle and dissolute life," as she called it, and made withering remarks about the low tastes of sailors other than captains of mail steamers or officers in the Navy. Tom, who intended to borrow L10 from his brother to pay his passage back to Sydney to look for a ship, ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke

... not exactly respectful, nor yet exactly disrespectful. Ben looked up from his seat. The speaker was Barclay Fetters, and his companion one Tom McRae, another dissolute young man of the town. Ben got up unsteadily and walked over ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt

... taking notice, that the quantity of strong liquors sold to these Indians, in the places of their residence, and during their hunting season, have increased to an inconceivable degree, so as to keep these poor creatures continually under the force of liquors, that they are thereby become dissolute, enfeebled and indolent when sober; and untractable and mischievous in their liquor, always quarreling, and often murdering one another." Some of the chiefs at this treaty said, "these wicked whisky-sellers, when they have once got the Indians in liquor, make them sell their very ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake

... questioned. He liked to recite his old triumphs. He especially plumed himself on his sagacity in dealing with one case which came before him. A complaint was made of a book well known at that time, the memoirs of a dissolute woman, which was full of indecency, but in which there could not be found a single, separate indecent sentence or word. The Major was at a loss for some time what to do in indicting it. If he set forth the whole book, it would give it an immortality on the records of the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... surprised if some one should yet rebel against the inequality of virtue. Aristotle was banished, Socrates drank the hemlock, Epaminondas was called to account, for having proved superior in intelligence and virtue to some dissolute and foolish demagogues. Such follies will be re-enacted, so long as the inequality of fortunes justifies a populace, blinded and oppressed by the wealthy, in fearing the elevation of new tyrants ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... other incident was that Donald Macdonald and the new gillie, Duncan Mackay, were reported to be 'lying around in a frightfully dissolute state.' Donald was a sober man, but Mackay, he explained next morning, proved to be his long lost cousin, hence the revel. Mackay, separately, stated that he had made Donald intoxicated for the purpose of eliciting any guilty secret which he might possess. ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... had more understanding in divinity than many of my years," etc. Yes, he evidently had. And though the kind of "divinity" which had trained his soul was of a grim sort, his own purity and gentleness of spirit softened it while accepting it. He adds,—"Yet I was still very wild & dissolute: & as years came on, my lusts grew stronger, but yet under some restraint of my natural reason, whereby I had that command of myself that I could turn into any form. I would, as occasion required, write letters, &c. of mere vanity; & if occasion was, I could write ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... notwithstanding his enlarged income, far too much involved to hope any immediate rescue from them. His new property, however, would afford him a refuge from troublesome creditors; there he might also avoid expenditure for a season, and perhaps rally the forces of a dissolute life; the place was not new to him, having, some twenty years before, spent nearly twelve months there, of which time the recollections were not altogether unpleasant: weighing all these things he had made up his mind, and here ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... morning hours to his profession, and then, growing weary, throw aside his pencil in disgust, and either wander about the neighbourhood in moody silence, or spend the rest of the day in the society of a few dissolute persons of education, with whom he had become acquainted since his residence in Manchester. The indolence of the parent had, however, the effect of awakening the latent energies of the daughter's mind; and young as she was at the time we introduce her to our readers, ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various

... railroads. I'd soon see how he dealt with the embarrassments of the roads and relished the bad diet; and not alone would I test him by hardships and hunger, fatigue and occasional upsets; but I'd try his powers of self-resistance by surrounding him with dissolute young attaches given to blind hookey and lansquenet. I'd have him invited to ravishing orgies, and tempted in as many ways as St Anthony; and all these after long privations. Then, I'd have him kept waiting either under a blazing sun or a deep snow, or both alternately, to test his ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever

... opinion of moral example and their depreciation of precept. Poetry, he says, contains great and profitable fruits for the instruction of manners and precepts of good life[400]. And he finds much profit even in the most dissolute works of Ovid and Martial because they abound in moral precepts. He does not, however, entirely discount the moral effect of example. Ovid and Martial should be kept from young people who have not yet gained sufficient ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark

... so extraordinary a change. About this time the father of our Chrysostom died, and he was left heir to a large amount of property in chattels as well as in land, no small number of cattle and sheep, and a large sum of money, of all of which the young man was left dissolute owner, and indeed he was deserving of it all, for he was a very good comrade, and kind-hearted, and a friend of worthy folk, and had a countenance like a benediction. Presently it came to be known that he had changed his dress with no other object than to wander about these ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... Purim Feast, appointed by Esther and Mordecai, commemorating deliverance from massacre which Hamar had determined by lot against them, gave occasion for relaxation. Even the most austere and gloomy rejoiced, while the younger people abandoned themselves to dissolute mirth, opposite sexes dressing up in the clothes of each other; a habit at present in favour amongst the coster fraternity of East London on Bank Holidays. The Jews were a peculiar people. No old-time imagery of ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green

... been prepared to return to their Highnesses with the good news of the gold, and to escape from governing a dissolute people, who fear neither God, nor their King and Queen, being full of vices and wickedness. I could have paid the people in full with six hundred thousand,[374-4] and for this purpose I had four millions of tenths and somewhat ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various

... Dale, who had been appointed to the government, arrived with a fresh supply of men and provisions, and found the colony relapsing into a state of anarchy, idleness, and want. It required all the authority of the new governor to maintain public order, and to compel the idle and the dissolute to labour. Some conspiracies having been detected, he proclaimed martial law, which was immediately put in execution. This severity was then deemed necessary, and is supposed ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall

... avarice; and as Britain was viewed in the light of a distinct and insulated world, the conquest scarcely formed any exception to the general system of continental measures. After a war of about forty years, undertaken by the most stupid, maintained by the most dissolute, and terminated by the most timid of all the emperors, the far greater part of the island submitted to the ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... presented to you as a token of esteem and gratitude. 10. The warrior fell back upon the bed a lifeless corpse. 11. The apple tastes and smells delicious. 12. Lord Darnley turned out a dissolute and insolent husband. 13. In the fable of the Discontented Pendulum, the weights hung speechless. 14. The brightness and freedom of the New Learning seemed incarnate in the young and scholarly Sir Thomas More. 15. Sir Philip Sidney lived and died the darling ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg

... appearance of great strictness in religion, to which he was bred under his father, who was a very popular minister of the Tolbooth Church, not acting in restraint of his convivial humour, he was held to be excellent company even by those of dissolute manners; while, being a five-bottle man, he could lay them all under the table. This had brought on him the nickname of Dr. Bonum Magnum in the time of faction. But never being indecently the worse of liquor, and a love of claret, to any degree, not being reckoned in those ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay

... him in commencing business; they accordingly lent him one thousand dollars as a capital to begin with. He opened a grocery in Ann Street, near what was then called the Tin Pot, a place full of abandoned women and dissolute fellows. As he dealt chiefly in liquor, and had a "License to retail Spirits," his drunkery was thronged with customers. But he sold his groceries chiefly to loose girls who paid him in their coin, which, although it answered his purpose, would neither buy him goods ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms

... was born by chance. He did not reflect that some outward circumstance is often made to serve an inward impulse. The outward circumstance was that the castle of Tournehem was frequented by a soldier, a friend of Batt, a man of very dissolute conduct, who behaved very badly towards his pious wife, and who was, moreover, an uncultured and violent hater of priests.[5] For the rest he was of a kindly disposition and excepted Erasmus from his hatred ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... the age of three, turned him by disease into the ugliest of children—"a tiger marked by the small-pox"—caressed and neglected by his dissolute mother, disowned and persecuted as a spurious graft in his house and home by the celebrated "Economist," his father—his very childhood presaged the disorders of his youth and manhood; and his father, mysteriously reverting to early crimes and calamities ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... the river bank had sharpened itself into one point of utterance which pierced the calm heavens in a mingling of native speech, French and broken English from Nakonkirhirinon and halfbreed, and, worse than both, dissolute "white Indian," and ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... neglected. Although the aged occasionally require neighborly assistance, even though they have means for their necessities, most of the neglected are infants and children. Orphans and foundlings for whom homes must be found, children who are over-worked or abused, or who are living with dissolute parents, all of these must be given proper guardianship and a chance for healthful growth and education, or they are likely to become delinquent and thus become a permanent liability to society. It is true that in the country the home is at its best (see chapter II), but ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson

... some years coming; with ominous rumors, consultations of physicians, and reports to the paternal Majesty, which produced small comfort in that quarter. The sad truth, dimly indicated, is sufficiently visible: his life for the next four or five years was "extremely dissolute." Poor young man, he has got into a disastrous course; consorts chiefly with debauched young fellows, as Lieutenants Katte, Keith, and others of their stamp, who lead him on ways not pleasant to his Father, nor conformable to the Laws of this Universe. Health, either of body or of mind, is not ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... what he does intend really, for that which he takes for the ornament of his language renders it the most odious and abominable. His custom of swearing takes away the sense of his saying. His oaths are but a dissolute formality of speech and the worst kind of affectation. He is a Knight-Baronet of the Post, or gentleman blasphemer, that swears for his pleasure only; a lay-affidavit man, in voto only and not in orders. He learned ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... I that brother's keeper? He is not an Abel, Is strange to my roof, and no guest at my table: I know not his mates, we are not near each other, He swills in the pothouse, that dissolute brother!— But there's your example?—The drunkards can't see it, And if they are told of it, scorn it and flee it; Example?—Your children!—No doubt it is right To be to them always a law and a light; But moderate temperance is the vise way To form them, and hinder their going astray; Whereas ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... fair and equal race. He began to tremble that he himself had been unjustly favoured, when he saw all the avenues of wealth, and power, and comfort closed against so many of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly open before so idle, so desultory, and so dissolute a being as himself. There sat a youth beside him on the college benches who had only one shirt to his back, and, at intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay at home to have it washed. It was my friend's principle to stay away as often as he dared; for I fear he was no friend to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... itself; the flames had peeled off its satin covering like a skin, and were slowly consuming the horse-hair stuffing; the pitiable object sent out great puffs and clouds of smoke that writhed in agonized spirals. The tiny room had become a battlefield of dissolute forces. But as yet none of the solid furniture was touched; it ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair

... age. Once when on a short visit to London, and away from the restraining responsibilities of his command, Wolfe, according to his own account, lapsed into debauchery. "In that short time I committed more imprudent acts than in all my life before I lived in the idlest, [most] dissolute, abandoned manner that could be conceived, and that not out of vice, which is the most extraordinary part of it. I have escaped at length and am once more master of my reason, and hereafter it shall rule my conduct; at least I hope so." Perhaps the lapse may have been worse by contrast ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... men of dissolute lives and irreligious spirits, on hearing of the miracles at Santa Maria Nuova, begin to jeer and laugh on the subject, and, moved only by curiosity, go to the church, approach the bier with mock demonstrations of respect. But no sooner ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton

... to my mind a very trifling occurrence. Fenton was one day in the company of Broome, his associate, and Ford, a clergyman[25], at that time too well known, whose abilities, instead of furnishing convivial merriment to the voluptuous and dissolute, might have enabled him to excel among the virtuous and the wise. They determined all to see the Merry Wives of Windsor, which was acted that night; and Fenton, as a dramatick poet, took them to the stage-door; where the door-keeper, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... between them. "If I can once convince her that she has a rival," said he, "she will listen to my passion if it is only to revenge his slights." Belcour knew but little of the female heart; and what he did know was only of those of loose and dissolute lives. He had no idea that a woman might fall a victim to imprudence, and yet retain so strong a sense of honour, as to reject with horror and contempt every solicitation to a second fault. He never imagined that a gentle, generous female heart, once tenderly attached, when ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson

... story of his life. It was a truly strange and chequered one. When quite a young man he had been flogged, and then deserted from H.M.S. Blossom, Captain Beechy, in 1825, and ever since then had remained in the South Seas, living sometimes the idle and dissolute life of the beach-comber, sometimes that of the industrious and adventurous trader. My husband was interested, for he liked the old fellow, who, in spite of his drunken habits, had many excellent qualities. For myself he always professed the greatest regard, ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke

... sincere Christian. Millions of the heathen, with thousands of years of savage and bestial heredity behind them, have become pure and loyal disciples of the spotless Redeemer. The fierce heathen Africaner, as well as the dissolute Jerry McCauley, have illustrated ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... courtesy, or for reward; and that breaches of conjugal fidelity, even in the wife, should not be otherwise punished than by a few hard words, or perhaps a slight beating, as indeed is the case: But there is a scale in dissolute sensuality, which these people have ascended, wholly unknown to every other nation whose manners have been recorded from the beginning of the world to the present hour, and which no imagination ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... irregular street is slightly picturesque, but I was impressed both with the unusual sight of loafers and with the dissolute look of the place, arising from the number of joroyas, and from the number of yadoyas that are also haunts of the vicious. I could only get a very small room in a very poor and dirty inn, but there were ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... repining, and poverty without a murmur—looking steadily forward to the time, when he who had so long witnessed her struggles for himself, might be enabled to make some exertions for their joint support. He had formed dissolute connexions; idleness had led to crime; and he had been committed to take his trial for some petty theft. He had been long in prison, and, after receiving some trifling additional punishment, had been ordered to be discharged that morning. It was his first offence, and his poor old mother, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... thus nursed on the fields of France found at last scope for action in England itself. Even before the outbreak of the War of the Roses the nobles had become as lawless and dissolute at home as they were greedy and cruel abroad. But with the struggle of York and Lancaster and the paralysis of government which it brought with it, all hold over the baronage was gone; and the lawlessness and brutality of their temper showed itself without a check. The disorder which their ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green

... from one district in the State of Illinois with the request that I bear it to you. Out of three hundred electors the names of two hundred stand in this petition that I shall leave in your hands. In this list stand not the wife-whippers, not the drunkards, not the dissolute, but every minister in that town, every editor in that town, every professional man in that town, every banker, and every prominent business man in that town of three hundred electors. I believe that petitions ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.

... Paris for two teachers of French to instruct her daughter in the literature of that country over which she was destined to reign. From that pleasure-loving metropolis two play actors were sent to take charge of her education, one of whom was a man of notoriously dissolute character. As the connection between Maria Antoinette and Louis, the heir apparent to the throne of France, was already contemplated, some solicitude was felt by members of the court of Versailles in reference to the impropriety of this selection, ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... her the better. She was a coarse and, it is to be feared, a very sinful woman. But at that time she was the only woman in Roaring Camp, and was just then lying in sore extremity, when she most needed the ministration of her own sex. Dissolute, abandoned, and irreclaimable, she was yet suffering a martyrdom hard enough to bear even when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible in her loneliness. The primal curse had come to her in that original isolation which ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... sir," Dick went on solemnly, and hating his task, "I am much afraid that you are going to be disappointed in him. The boy is known as Tag Mosher. He believes a dissolute, drunken, thieving fellow named Bill Mosher, who is now in jail, to be his father. Tag is himself a wild young savage of the forest, and ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock



Words linked to "Dissolute" :   immoral



Copyright © 2024 e-Free Translation.com