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More "Idle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the exception, perhaps, of those around certain towns, had neither voice nor part in the change; the nobility, sunk in sloth and smothered by incapacity, looked on as idle spectators; and a vast many of the restless and excitable spirits who got up the revolution, were mere instruments in the hands of a faction, and knew not what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... command of that fort is not idle," said Mr. Flint, who had been using his glass very industriously since the firing ceased. "The soldiers are busy setting up the guns again, or ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... on Eddie met a man who explained the news, which had run across the town like oil on water. Tim Holdredge, an idle lawyer who had nothing else to do, looked into the matter of Uncle Loren's will and found that the old man, in his innocence of charity and his passion for economy, had left his money to the church on conditions that were not according to the law. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... not serving God To quit the laws of nature; and that those Who here have ruled before me merit praise, That they have oped the cloister gates, and given Thousands of victims of ill-taught devotion Back to the duties of humanity. But yet a queen who hath not spent her days In fruitless, idle contemplation; who, Without murmur, indefatigably Performs the hardest of all duties; she Should be exempted from that natural law Which doth ordain one half of human kind Shall ever be subservient to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... seconded by the engineer, thus occupied himself without losing an hour, Gideon Spilett and Herbert were not idle. ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... he put out the candle, and jumped into bed. I continued talking till a loud snore from his corner of the room showed me that he was fast asleep. I soon followed his example, but my mind was not idle, for I dreamed that I had gone to sea, become a midshipman, and was sailing over the blue ocean with a fair breeze, that the captain was talking to me and telling me what a fine young sailor I had become, ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... tour through the northern part of California. We reached San Francisco on the 20th, and found that all, or nearly all, its male inhabitants had gone to the mines. The town, which a few months before was so busy and thriving, was then almost deserted. Along the whole route mills were lying idle, fields of wheat were open to cattle and horses, houses vacant, and farms ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... prisoners in the mines or quarries; their blue eyes and fair hair showing from beneath strangely shaped helmets, while their white skins, tall stature, and tattooed bodies excited for a few hours the interest and mirth of the idle crowd. At another time, one of the customary raids into the land of Kush would take place, consisting of a rapid march across the sands of the Ethiopian desert and a cruise along the coasts of Puanifc. This would be followed by another triumphal procession, in which fresh elements of interest ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... cried. "There's a matter my father doesn't deign to consider. It's not enough, nowadays, to give the lads a governor, but they must maintain their servants too, an idle gluttonous crew that prey on their pockets and get a commission off ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... impossible. Great resistance must have been made, and violent wars ensued; which was not the case. This account given by Wallingford, though he stands single, must he admitted as the only true one. We are told that the name LURDANE, LORD DANE, for an idle lazy fellow, who lives at other people's expense, came from the conduct of the Danes, who were put to death. But the English princes had been entirely masters for several generations; and only supported a military corps of ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... cordon of steel. The scattered relics of the "Grand Army" which had erected and sustained his empire were hastily collected, and, as they in turn reached Paris, were reviewed on the Carrousel and sent forward to concentre on the battle-ground that was to decide his fate. No branch of art was idle that could contribute to the approaching conflict. Cannon were cast with unprecedented rapidity, and the material of war was turned out to the extent of human ability. But he was deficient in everything that constitutes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... mischief—these raw and undisciplined militia, accustomed to do as they liked and to take orders from no man—for he kept them actively employed all the time. "It is better to dig a ditch every morning, and fill it up at evening, than to have the men idle," said Old Put, and though the men grumbled the results soon showed that ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... happy years. Young Garfield had but few idle moments. In teaching others, in pursuing his own education, in taking part in the work of the literary society, and in Sunday exhortations, his time was well filled up. But neither his religion nor his love of study made him less companionable. ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... preaching was attended by the same notable results. The monasteries of the Dominicans and the Franciscans were practically demolished by the mob, and with the approval of the magistrates every church in the town was stripped of its ornaments. Meanwhile the Regent had not been idle, and was now at Falkland with a force led by D'Oysel and Chatelherault. Confident in their strength, those two leaders marched toward Cupar, with the intention of dealing with St. Andrew's. But again they discovered ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... idle, but send her straight Defiance back in a full broadside! As hail rebounds from a roof of slate, Rebounds our heavier hail From each iron scale ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... week at the 'Flower of the Wavy Field;' and, in the society of old and new friends, found nothing of that sameness and monotony against which so many, myself included, have whilom declaimed. The truth is that most places breed ennui for an idle man. Nor is the climate of Madeira well made for sedentary purposes: it is apter for one who loves to flaner, or, as Victor Hugo ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... has stood for the doer as opposed to the dreamer—the doer, who lists not to idle songs of empty days, but who goes forth and does things, with bended back and sweated brow and work-hardened hands. The most characteristic thing about Kipling is his lover of actuality, his intense practicality, his proper and necessary respect for ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... casualties at a butchers' picnic. The strikers got hungry, too, finally, because the principles of unionism is like a rash on your mechanic, skin deep—inside, his gastrics works three shifts a day even if his outsides is idle and steaming ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... the cool air is beginning to blow across the fields with long shadows. When their work was done the boys hurried to join the little group under the big willows. They were all there. Ben was set there in the big armchair, Mrs. Boyle with her knitting, for there were no idle hours for her, Margaret with a book which she pretended to read, old Charley smoking in silent content, Iola lazily strumming her guitar and occasionally singing in her low, rich voice some of her old Mammy's songs or plantation hymns. Of these latter, however, Mrs. Boyle ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... instead of the real one. Blindness and mutilation are better, Jesus said, than the eye of lust (Matt. 5:28). How different from the moralists, for whom sin lies in action, and all actions are physical! The idle word is to condemn a man, not because it is idle, but because, being unstudied, it speaks of his heart and reveals, unconsciously but plainly, what he is in reality (Matt. 12:36). Thus it is that what comes out of the mouth defiles a man (Matt. 15:18)—with the curious suggestion, ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... beautiful in a girl. But Michael Amory had no desire to encourage any thoughts which gave woman a place in his mind. The very visualizing of Lampton as a girl, comical as it had been, had forced before his eyes another face and another form which he had been striving to forget. Whenever he was idle, and too often when he was busy over some piece of work which ought to have engrossed his entire thoughts, her haunting charm and beauty would suddenly become more real and vivid than the bright blues and greens and reds of the pigments on the white walls of the tomb ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... let me but hold Thy hand And all the rest may go. For nothing is, but only seems, And life is full of idle dreams, Until Thyself ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... a clerk in the counting-house of a leading merchant, by name Jeremiah Doolittle), should such idle fancies have come to him, he would have looked upon himself as little better than a fool, but now that he found himself for the first time in a foreign country, surrounded by such strange and unusual ...
— The Ruby of Kishmoor • Howard Pyle
... when they are not at work. Like other succulent pastures, it tends too much to induce laxness in the bowels with horses which graze it, without any dry fodder supplement. But it has high adaptation for providing pasture for brood mares, colts, and horses that are idle or working but little. While it induces abundant milk production in brood mares, and induces quick and large growth in colts until matured, it is thought by some practical horsemen that horses grown chiefly on alfalfa ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... but I was too young then for admission to the Chamber, and I fancied I had so many years yet to spare in idle loiterings at the Fountain of Youth. Pass over these circumstances. You became in love with Louise. I told you her troubled history; it did not diminish your love; and then I frankly favoured your suit. You set out for Aix-la-Chapelle ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... About the same time, however, two letters were found thrown carelessly about, as if to attract notice. These letters stated that kidnappers would be at my house on a certain night, and warned me to be on my guard. Still I did not let the matter trouble me. But it was no idle rumor. The bloodhounds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... said this is awful, and necessary for the Dignity of the State, yet the wisest of them have been remarkable, before they arrived at their present Stations, for being very well dressed Persons. As to my own Part, I am near Thirty; and since I left School have not been idle, which is a modern Phrase for having studied hard. I brought off a clean System of Moral Philosophy, and a tolerable Jargon of Metaphysicks from the University; since that, I have been engaged in the clearing Part of the perplexd Style and Matter of the Law, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... and he was a commercial traveller who had only been in the island an idle week before he began to hover in the tracks of Madeleine Durand. Since everyone knows everyone in so small a place, Madeleine certainly knew him to speak to; but it is not very evident that she ever spoke. He haunted ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... good hackstock; On this you must hew and knock: Shall none be idle in this flock, Nor now ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... the temple, and justified himself both to the Jewish law and to Caesar. And he had physical force at his command to back up his arguments: all that was needed was a speech to rally his followers; and he was not gagged. The reply of the evangelists would have been that all these inquiries are idle, because if Jesus had wished to escape, he could have saved himself all that trouble by doing what John describes him as doing: that is, casting his captors to the earth by an exertion of his miraculous power. If you asked John why he ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... Shanghae on the 2nd of September, Lord Elgin found that the Imperial Commissioners whom he came to meet had not yet appeared, and were not expected for four or five weeks. All this time, therefore, he was obliged to remain idle at Shanghae, hearing from time to time news from Canton which made his presence there desirable, but unable to proceed thither till the arrangements respecting the ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... know, but the man in the street who sees you ride out together day after day, and the woman who's no particular friend of yours, who sees you dance dance after dance together—they don't know. Aiken is a small place, but like the night, it has a thousand eyes, and as many idle tongues. If I didn't know Lucy so well, and you so well, I'd ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... dilemma, instead of justifying himself by reason or argument, had recourse to recrimination. In the paper which he sent me next day, he insisted in general that he had carefully perused the case (which you will perceive was a self-evident untruth); he said the theory it contained was idle; that he was sure it could not be written by a physician; that, with respect to the disorder, he was still of the same opinion; and adhered to his former prescription; but if I had any doubts I might come to his house, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... It would be idle, perhaps out of place here, to say how much display and foolish extravagance there is at such a time. Where it can be well afforded, it is of comparatively little importance, but a great deal of ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... form of wages for attendance in the courts of justice and other public assemblies. These payments to citizens for their share in the public business were quite new in Greece, and many considered the sitting and listening in these assemblies as an idle life in comparison with the labor of the plowman and vine-grower in the country, and for a long time the industrious cultivators, the brave warriors, and the men of old-fashioned morality were opposed, among ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... scarcely waits to be quite sure he is landed in existence, before he inaugurates a glorious fiction, the golden Past, which never has been; between which and its resurrection into an equally golden Future—which never will be—he sandwiches the pewter Present, which always is, and which it is idle to pretend is worth ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... saw in the idle curiosity of the girls an opportunity. They had never seen the sin and misery of Raymond. Why should they not see it, even if their motive in going down there was simply ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... lost? When the "Schiller" went down, out of three hundred and eighty people only forty were saved. When the "Ville du Havre" went down, out of three hundred and forty about fifty were saved. Out of this audience to-day, how many will get to the shore of heaven? It is no idle question for me to ask, for many of you I shall never see again until the day when the books ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... point to a state of being exquisitely conform to the laws of being. Such a perfect conformity soothes us into believing that while we witness it we are of it—ourselves conforming. These splendid creatures here, so superbly static—idle, you might say (only they wouldn't understand you), indulging their strength—are strong and able precisely because they have ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... melodiously while he spread the straw bedding with his fork. It was a beastly day, even for that climate, but he was glad of it. He had only to fill a dozen mangers and his morning's work was done, with the prospect of an idle forenoon; for no one would want to drive, today, unless ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... from his sleep and beheld Nausicaa and her maidens at play. But as Nausicaa, the princess, withstood his advance when all her maidens had fled, so Wilhelmina faced him, for she knew full well now that he was not a god. He was a water-hole prospector who for two idle years had eaten the bread of Judson Eells; and then, when chance led him to a rich vein of ore, had covered up the hole and said nothing. Yet for all his human weaknesses he had one godlike quality, a regal disregard for wealth; ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... originality, when she extolled Polly's eyes and Polly's hair, Polly's wit and Polly's sweetness, few listeners remained quite unmoved and incurious. Among the many who were thus stirred to seek out this youthful paragon, was Miss Compton's brother-in-law, Mr. Horace Clapp. Nor was an idle curiosity his only motive in taking the step. Beneath the pretext he found for paying the visit lurked a rather shamefaced purpose of doing this "plucky little genius" a ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... That it would be idle to lose time in settling the terms of alliance, till we had first determined we would ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... life, not one moment idle; but the man grows strong in it,—a healthy servant, doing a healthy work. The patients are glad when he comes to their ward in turn. How the windows open, and the fresh air comes in! how the lazy nurses find a masterful will over ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... around here for hire," said Hal, after looking up and down the Escolta. "Let's walk across the bridge over the Pasig. We'll be more likely to find an idle cochero on the other side of ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... the condition of affairs at Blugsey's, it seemed rather strange one morning, hours after breakfast, to see, sprinkled in every direction, a great number of idle picks, shovels and pans; in fact, the only mining implements in use that morning were those handled by a single miner, who was digging and carrying and washing dirt with an industry which seemed to indicate that he was working as a substitute for ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... a lot of time on his hands, and upon his long country beats, while his eyes surveyed the scene, Sam's intellects would turn over affairs and, no doubt, arrive at conclusions about 'em. And his conclusion about Chawner Green was that he must be a devious bird, else he wouldn't be so idle. For Samuel held that a chap of five-and-fifty, and hard as a nut, which Chawner Green was known to be, did ought to do honest work—an occupation never connected in the public mind with ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... old boy, when Satan taught your idle hands to punch Shadrach's head. But perhaps you had better put that pipe out. These azo-imide compounds are said to burn rather more safely than coal. Still, one never knows; the climate or the journey may have changed ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... with which, at Caripe, the native alcalde, the governador, and the sergento mayor, will harangue for whole hours the Indians assembled before the church; regulating the labours of the week, reprimanding the idle, or threatening the disobedient. Those chiefs who are also of the Chayma race, and who transmit the orders of the missionary, speak all together in a loud voice, with marked emphasis, but almost without action. Their features remain motionless; but their ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... Lin McLean might ride in to-night on his way to Riverside; or perhaps down at the corrals I could find some other acquaintance whose habit of washing I trusted and whose bed I might share. Failing these expedients, several empties stood idle upon a siding, and the box-like darkness of these freight-cars was timely. Nights were short now. Camping out, the dawn by three o'clock would flow like silver through the universe, and, sinking through my blankets, remorselessly pervade my buried hair and brain. ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... the poor and the weak, the negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent are fastened upon the industrious and prudent as a responsibility and a duty. On the one side, the terms are extended to cover the idle, intemperate, and vicious, who, by the combination, gain credit which they do not deserve, and which they could not get if they stood alone. On the other hand, the terms are extended to include wage-receivers of the humblest rank, who ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... time during the earlier stages of the siege, and although particulars are not obtainable for the last month of the period, there is no doubt that the struggle was incessant, and that the fighting was renewed from day to day. It was then that Gordon missed the ships lying idle at Shendy. If he had had them Omdurman would not have fallen, nor would it have been so easy for the Mahdi to transport the bulk of his force from the left to the right bank of the White Nile, as he did for the final assault ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... in idle debates at Seville, the Cortes had been compelled by the appearance of the French on the Sierra Morena to retire to Cadiz. As King Ferdinand refused to accompany them, he was declared temporarily insane, and forced to make the journey (June 12). Angouleme, following the French vanguard ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... man has ever been able to be impartial. The present writer will make no idle pretence of being so. That it was the most revolutionary of all revolutions, since it identified the dead body on a servile gibbet with the fatherhood in the skies, has long been a commonplace without ceasing to be a paradox. But there ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... which you are kind enough to hold out for me to sit on. I must go and see after my wife for a few minutes. Dear me! what a troublesome business a family is!" (though the idle little rogue did nothing at all, but left his poor wife to lay all the eggs by herself). "When I come back, I shall be glad of it, if you'll be so good as to keep it sticking out just so;" ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... apparell and in vain recreations among the young ones"; and in 1698 they issued a paper dealing in great detail with matters of dress and deportment. Among a hundred other things treated with minutest particularity, the desire is expressed that "all Idle and needless ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... when they were to sign and seal the perdition of their empire and blot themselves out as a nation, all firmness deserted them, and many gave way to tears. Muza alone retained an unaltered mien. "Leave, seniors," cried he, "this idle lamentation to helpless women and children: we are men—we have hearts, not to shed tender tears, but drops of blood. I see the spirit of the people so cast down that it is impossible to save the kingdom. Yet there still remains an alternative for noble minds—a glorious death! Let us die defending ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... dazzle the city and Court of Vienna by the most indecent and ill-judged extravagance. He formed a suite of eight or ten gentlemen, of names sufficiently high-sounding; twelve pages equally well born, a crowd of officers and servants, a company of chamber musicians, etc. But this idle pomp did not last; embarrassment and distress soon showed themselves; his people, no longer receiving pay, in order to make money, abused the privileges ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... or less utility, which science has realised in our time, one so important to the whole commercial world, so easy of accomplishment, and so certain to be productive of ample remuneration to the undertakers, as a Ship Canal through that Isthmus, had not been taken up. The idle objection, that if practicable it would not have been left unattempted for the last three hundred years, they considered, would have no weight in an age in which we have seen accomplished works that in our fathers' time, nay, even within our own memory, it would have been considered madness to propose,—witness ...
— A Succinct View of the Importance and Practicability of Forming a Ship Canal across the Isthmus of Panama • H. R. Hill
... subject which are worthy of the attention of those who think that Lord John was a mere alarmist. His Eminence delivered a suggestive address at Preston on September 10, 1894, on the 'Re-Union of Christendom.' He thinks—and it is idle to deny that he has good ground for thinking—that, in spite of bishops, lawyers, and legislature, Delphic judgments at Lambeth, and spasmodic protests up and down the country, a change in doctrine and ritual is in progress in the Anglican Church which can only ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... his reply, "it is useless. How can I write what I think? How can I publish what I write? I have now manuscript works begun in my desk, which it would be better to burn. Our only way to be happy is to be idle and ignorant. The more we know, the unhappier we must be. There is but one avenue for ambition,—the Church. I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... to be "a servant of the ladies" was no mere figure of the imagination—and to be in love was no idle pastime; but to be profoundly, furiously, almost ridiculously in earnest. In the mind of the cavalier, woman was a being of mystic power. As in the old forests of Germany, she had been listened to like a spirit of the woods, melodious, solemn ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... many other professions;—and though, to invent, and judge with accuracy, what is proper to be said, are important accomplishments, and the same as the soul is to the body, yet they rather belong to prudence than to Eloquence. In what cause, however, can prudence be idle? Our Orator, therefore, who is to be all perfection, should be thoroughly acquainted with the sources of argument and proof. For as every thing which can become the subject of debate, must rest upon one or another of these particulars, ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... them expressed it to me—"walks round them without getting off his chair" and, on the strength of his undeserved reputation for simplicity and fair dealing, keeps them dangling a lifetime in a tremble of obsequious amiability, cheered on by the hope of ultimately over-reaching him. Idle dream, where a pliant and sanguine southerner is pitted against the unswerving Saxon or Teuton! This accounts for the success of foreign trading houses in the south. Business is business, and the devil take the hindmost! By all means; but they who are not rooted to the spot by commercial ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... library that bright early autumn morning, I felt a shrinking at submitting my pictures, in their imperfection, to unsympathetic eyes, much as a mother might feel at bringing a deformed child to a baby show; but I had also a measure of satisfaction, since I could prove to my guardian that I had not been idle, when I spread before him copies, more or less defective, of views from his own grounds. The servants had watched them grow under my pencil and brush with an interest almost equalling my own; and it was amusing the eagerness which even Thomas evinced to be painted into ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... changes that inevitably occur in such perishable nutritive substances as water, milk, meats, vegetables, fruits, etc., if they be left uncared for; and he has been led thus to the inference of the law of decomposition—or putrefactive and fermentative changes. Idle substances, like idle minds, have decomposition and the devil for companions. Substances confined in containers open to the air—ponds, cesspools, etc.—are every-day object lessons to man of the fact that the chemical changes ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... dwelling finds himself like an ancient patriarch, and the shepherd of a flock, tender as young lambs, yet pleasant to his eye, and dear to his heart. And, in the third place (for I'll speak the truth and shame the deil) as I could not thole the gibes and idle tongues of a wheen fools that, for their diversion, would be asking me, "How the wife and bairns were; and if I had sent my auldest laddie to the ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... things, as if he were above all this. And yet he looked not like a fool; neither was he one altogether, when he began to think of things. The worst of him was that he always wanted something new to go on with. He never could be idle; and yet he never worked to the end which crowns the task. In the early stage he would labor hard, be full of the greatness of his aim, and demand every body's interest, exciting, also, mighty hopes ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... their meaning than the idle-hearted mind. Many a friend can prove unfriendly, many a kinsman less than kind: He who shares his comrade's portion, be he beggar, be he lord, Comes as truly, comes as duly, to the battle as the board— Stands before the king to succor, follows ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... poverty with dignified truthfulness; it is the moral coward who seeks to hide these limitations by a greater display than his circumstances warrant. And he reaps as he sows. His "entertainments" fill an idle hour for the class of visitors who gravitate mainly to the supper-room, while the giver of the feast, under the tension of this social effort, suffers a weariness of the spirit as well as of the flesh, and gives a sigh of relief when the door closes upon the last guest, and the pitiful ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... that Grell might not be guilty. She rang up the St. Jermyn's Club and asked for him. Fairfield answered, declaring that his friend was in the club, but busy—too busy to talk to the girl he was to marry next day, mark you. It is idle to suppose that she did not appreciate the excuse as a flimsy one—one manufactured perhaps for the purpose of an alibi. She must have gone to bed filled ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... that our salvation will just be what, with fear and trembling, or, as Butler says, with trouble and danger, we work out. No man, let all men understand, is to have his salvation thrust upon him. No man need expect to waken up at the end of an idle, indifferent, inattentive life and find his salvation superinduced upon all that. No man shall wear the crown of everlasting life who has not for himself won it. As every man soweth to the Spirit so also shall he reap. As a soldier warreth, so shall he hear it said to him, Well ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... on the breath of Autumn's breeze, From pastures dry and brown, Goes floating, like an idle thought, The fair, white thistle-down,— Oh, then what joy to walk at ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... England. It was written as the result of an investigation started by Innocent VIII., in 1489. In this communication the abbot and his monks were charged with the grossest licentiousness, waste and thieving. Lina Eckenstein, in her interesting work on "Woman Under Monasticism," says: "It were idle to deny that the state of discipline in many houses was bad, but the circumstances under which Morton's letter was penned argue that the charges made in it should be accepted with some reservation." ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... indomitable resolution, and a keen, eagle-like glance, our second boatman would have inspired confidence under any circumstances, or in any crisis. I could but regret that such a man should have no wider, loftier career before him than that of steering idle tourists through the rocks and eddies of the Tarn. Enough of character was surely here to make up a dozen ordinary individualities. You saw at a look that this dignified reserve hid rare qualities and capacities only awaiting occasion to ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... peculiarly intelligent, upright and religious people, and to have a strong feeling of family affection. There may be many among the colored race like them; certainly all should not be judged by the idle, miserable darkies who have swarmed about Washington and ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford
... Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... "Pshaw! idle tales," said Miss Manners, who had sat for some time silent. "I have seen the man, and do not think him one-half so bad as he is represented. Never yet have I met any one who had seen him do a wrong action; and yet every one will swell the cry ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... captive cup-bearer of a heathen prince, won his confidence and when honorably permitted to return and rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, nobly answered his idle opposers, "I am doing a great work I cannot come down ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... at Bellecour—the spring of 1789, a short three months before the fall of the Bastille came to give the nobles pause, and make them realise that these new philosophies, which so long they have derided, were by no means the idle vapours ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... he might believe, according to the common report, that your agents did not allow you to remain in ignorance of any circumstance which might interest you."—"I do know that the newspapers gave out that I had agents.... It is an idle story. It is true that I sent some of my people to France, in order to learn what was going on; but they stole my money, and only treated me with the gabble of the canaille. C**** has been to see me, ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... which follow each other in our favored region of the earth, and with membership in any mutual aid society, the industrious poor man of America has an assurance that no picture so black can be drawn of his lot "in the rainy day." We cannot reform human nature. When men cheat, steal, lie, and remain idle, they must suffer the results of their deeds, and, at present, those whom they drag down with them must also suffer. But, with industry and ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... others, the table had seen service very lately. But all the cups and saucers being clean, and in their proper places in the corner cupboard; and the brass toasting fork hanging in its usual nook, and spreading its four idle fingers out, as if it wanted to be measured for a glove; there remained no other visible tokens of the meal just finished, than such as purred and washed their whiskers in the person of the basking cat, and glistened in the gracious, not to say the ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... "that would be idle. When mother has work I stay at home to help her. I've learned to sew nicely now, and can save mother many a stitch. To-day's my holiday, and I can play with you as long as you please. I've brought some dinner, and we'll set a table in my dining- hall." And she took from her pocket ...
— Little Alice's Palace - or, The Sunny Heart • Anonymous
... otherwise than well. But those idle shooters of the Dusky Ones, whereabouts nigh ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... alike powerful to save or to destroy. It cannot be denied, that our libraries contain as many volumes of the latter, as the former description; for we rank amongst the latter that long catalogue of idle productions, which, if they produce no other evil, lead to the misspending of time, our own perhaps included. But we cannot refrain expressing our regret, that such formidable weapons in the cause of morality, should be suffered to ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... wings its idle Tread of leisurely delay; Fear or doubt it cannot bridle Should it headlong run away; No remorse, no incantation Moves the ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... which had begun three years before was now at its height. Thousands of cars, for lack of engines to move them, were lying idle on the switches all over the west. Trains swarming with immigrants from every country of the world were haltingly creeping out upon the level lands. Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Scotchmen, Englishmen, and Russians all mingled in this flood of land-seekers rolling toward the ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... could not beautify, and beautifying where it could not hide, like Christian charity; gave a most exquisite lesson to the world, of how much more mighty is spirit than matter. Diana did not see it, as she had seen the June day; her arms were folded, lying one upon another in idle fashion; her face was grave and fixed, the eyes aimless and visionless, looking at nothing and seeing nothing; cheeks pale, and the mouth parted with pain and questioning, its delicious childlike curves just now all gone. So ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... a lull. After the lapse of so many years, it would be idle to try to recall the hours, where they went and how they sped. There was no thought of retreat, slight fear of being attacked. All were wondering what would be done, when cheering and a great commotion arose ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... an old man? Why, how often do men of family and fortune, who haven't your excuse, but have all the means and superfluities of life within their reach, how often do they marry their daughters to old men, or (worse still) to young men without heads or hearts, to tickle some idle vanity, strengthen some family interest, or secure some seat in Parliament! Judge for her, sir, judge for her. You must know best, and she ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... charm and the pathos lay in the way Mistress Marjory told it, sitting in the shadows before the open wood fire, with her hands, so seldom idle, folded listlessly in her lap, and her beautiful gray eyes looking far into the past. What a pretty picture she was in her black silk dress, with its lace kerchief crossed on her bosom, with her hair, white as snow, drawn ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... masters in Soochow, thus revealed his plan for defying all parties, and for deciding the fate of the Dragon Throne. The only reply he received was the cold one that it would be better and wiser to confine his attention to the question of whether he intended to yield or not, instead of discussing idle schemes ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... war. Let us remember, too, what she has been in peace. "After all, in our saner moments we all of us know that the Germans are a great people, with a great part in the world to play. Their boasts about their 'culture' are not idle boasts, and, when one comes to think of it, it is rather important to have in our midst a people that cares to boast about its culture. The Englishman is more given to complaining than boasting, and when he does ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... It is idle, in a war of such astounding magnitude, to speak about any one single incident as being a "decisive" one. Such a term can only rightly be applied to conditions where the opposing powers each have but one organized army in the field, and these armies meet in a pitched battle. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... refute these arguments, but merely to state them. I need not refute what has not yet been proved. It is sufficient for me to repeat what I have already said, that they are founded upon a mere assumption. Supposing, indeed, religious truth cannot be ascertained, then, of course, it is not only idle, but mischievous, to attempt to do so; then, of course, argument does but increase the mistake of attempting it. But surely both Catholics and Protestants have written solid defences of Revelation, of Christianity, and of dogma, as such, and these are not simply to be put aside ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... are, of course, always misdirected force; but it is not unusual to see a woman suffering from nervous prostration caused by nervous power lying idle. This form of invalidism comes to women who have not enough to fill their lives in necessary interest and work, and have not thought of turning or been willing to turn their attention to some needed charity or work for others. A woman in ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... Revolution? Did not the men of Kentucky and Tennessee, standing on the lines of New Orleans, under the eye of Andrew Jackson, fight with colored battalions whom he had summoned to the field, and whom he thanked publicly for their gallantry in hurling back a British foe? It is all talk, idle talk, to say that the volunteers who are fighting the battles of this country are governed by any such narrow prejudice or bigotry. These prejudices are the results of the teachings of demagogues and politicians, who have for years undertaken to delude and deceive the American people, and ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... legacy divine of every soul. Thy will, O man, thy will is that great ship, And yet behold it drifting here and there - One moment lying motionless in port, Then on high seas by sudden impulse flung, Then drying on the sands, and yet again Sent forth on idle quests to no-man's land To carry nothing and to nothing bring; Till, worn and fretted by the aimless strife And buffeted by vacillating winds, It founders on a rock, or springs a leak, With all its unused treasures in ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Giusti passed three idle years with his family, and then went to study the humanities at Pisa, where he found the cafe better adapted to their pursuit than the University, since he could there unite with it the pursuit of the exact science of billiards. He represents ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... required for piping down banks than for washing the dirt; and often the sluice is almost idle for want of dirt, while the water, after being thrown against the hillside, runs away without doing any service at washing. Blasting, therefore, by loosening the earth, enables the hydraulic miner to have an abundant and regular supply of dirt in his sluice, at an expense much less than ...
— Hittel on Gold Mines and Mining • John S. Hittell
... a bet I'm no idle an' listless looker-on that blizzard time; an' I grows speshul active at the close. It behooves us Red River gents of cattle to stir about. The wild hard-ridin' knight-errants of the rope an' spur who cataracts themse'fs upon us with ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... the cold was intense, but there was no lack of either wood or coal. Cyrus Harding had established a second fireplace in the dining-room, and there the long winter evenings were spent. Talking while they worked, reading when the hands remained idle, the time ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... faculties should be so enhanced in a future life as to enable us to perceive and trace the ineffaceable consequences of our idle words and evil deeds, and render our remorse and grief as eternal as those consequences themselves? No more fearful punishment to a superior intelligence can be conceived, than to see still in action, with ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... commander of forces, the chief judge, the general in interior command, the chief priest, the chief physician, and the chief astrologer), have not, I hope, succumbed to the influence of thy foes, nor have they, I hope, become idle in consequence of the wealth they have earned? They are, I hope, all obedient to thee. Thy counsels, I hope, are never divulged by thy trusted spies in disguise, by thyself or by thy ministers? Thou ascertainest, I hope, what thy friends, foes and strangers are about? Makest thou peace ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... in United States bonds comes to Boston, hires a house...; thus he lives in luxury.... I am in favor of taxing idle investments such as this, and allowing manufacturing investments to ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... hereafter provided against runaways.' The Act of 1806, chap. 81, sec. 5, provides, 'That any person taking up such runaway, shall have and receive $6,' to be paid by the master or owner. It was also determined to have put in force the act of 1825, chap. 161, and the act of 1839, chap. 320, relative to idle, vagabond, free negroes, providing for their sale or banishment from the State. All persons interested, are hereby notified that the aforesaid laws, in particular, will be enforced, and all officers failing ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... been idle. They had got old Clover, the cart-horse, but she would do nothing but graze, so we decided not to use her in the bull-fight, but to let her be the Elephant. The Elephant's is a nice quiet part, and she was quite big enough for a young one. Then the black pig could ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... It was of course none of his business what Dock did with himself, though he might think the other was a mean shirk to hang around idle when his people needed every dollar ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... was yet in its baby clothes, and people were not as wise as they are nowadays, there dwelt in the good town of London a poor tailor's apprentice named Bartlemy Bowbell. He might be called poor in a double sense; for not only was he such a lazy, idle fellow that he scarcely ever took a stitch, and so seldom had a copper of his own, but he was a miserable workman, and, like an organ-grinder's monkey, or a blind man's dog, obtained more kicks ...
— Funny Big Socks - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... doth not bar them to write, so that it be some new invention of their own; but we weave the same web still, twist the same rope again and again; or if it be a new invention, 'tis but some bauble or toy which idle fellows write, for as idle fellows to read, and who so cannot invent? [91]"He must have a barren wit, that in this scribbling age can forge nothing. [92]Princes show their armies, rich men vaunt their buildings, soldiers their manhood, and scholars vent their toys;" ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... to gratify their idle curiosity, but the very return of her brightness, and her unwillingness to talk about the matter, only added to the foolish desires of outsiders to find out what had really occurred. So some of these naughty busybodies began questioning the children ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... says Gladstone, "was singularly free of vices ... one point only we reserve, a certain tinge of occasional vindictiveness. Was he envious? Never. Was he servile? No. Was he insolent? No.... Was he idle? The question is ridiculous. Was he false? No; but true as steel and transparent as crystal. Was he vain? We hold that he was not. At every point in the ugly list ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Parliament, for then they need not change, but your people are appointed by you and not by me (nominally), and therefore, unless they were to vote against my Government (which would be awkward), they need not change. You may rely upon my care that you shall have proper people, and not idle and not too young, and Lord Melbourne has already mentioned several to me who ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... of the kind, perhaps," replied Haviland, contemptuously; "but I looked upon them only as the silly vaporings of a few disaffected creatures, who, having heard of the rebellious movements in the Bay State, have thrown out these idle threats with the hope of intimidating our authorities, and so prevent the holding of a court, which they fear might bring too many ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... had become insupportable, and he asked permission to return to Flanders, whence he had been summoned. Philip V. allowed him to depart, and Madame des Ursins lost not one jot of her authority. But the complaints, the murmurs, the idle talk continued, the incessant repetition of which could not fail at last to make an impression upon a weak mind. In the end the King grew wearied, and vexed, especially at the reports relating to such ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... satisfactory. Celestina worked so steadily that she would soon have left Biddy behind had Biddy been as idle as had often been the case under Miss Millet. And Mrs. Vane was pleased to think that the plan had ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... say nothing of its agricultural possibilities, will render the construction of a line imperative, at any rate as far as the city of Yakutsk. The prolongation of this as far north as Gijiga is no idle dream, for I have frequently heard it seriously discussed, and even advocated, by the merchant princes of Irkutsk. A railway to Gijiga would open up Kamtchatka, with its valuable minerals, furs, and lumber, and also Nelkan, near Ayan, where gold ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... against it was it meant waiting over another day, till the funeral outfit got down from Denver—all hands having chipped in to give Hart a good send-off, and telegraphed his size to a first-class Denver undertaker, with orders to do him up in style. Making him wait around so long, sort of idle, was what Santa Fe kicked hardest against at first. But after his talk with the Hen, as was remembered afterwards, he didn't do any more kicking; and some of the boys noticed he was a little nervous, and kept asking, ...
— Santa Fe's Partner - Being Some Memorials of Events in a New-Mexican Track-end Town • Thomas A. Janvier
... of March Wednesday 1805 a fine day visited by Mr. Mckinsey one of the Clerks of the N W Companey, the river riseing a little- maney Inds. here to day all anxiety for war axes the Smiths have not an hour of Idle time to Spear wind ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... walls as soon as they were made; but Kheyr-ed-Din from the city watched the progress of the bombardment gloomily, as he saw and knew that the fall of the Goletta was but a matter of days. All this time he was far from idle; sortie after sortie did the dauntless old warrior lead in person against those engaged in the task of bombardment. Time and again he heartened the Arab and Berber levies to attack, but the sallies were repulsed, and the lightly armed Africans were driven like chaff ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... begun out of idle admiration; he had continued from inclination; but to-night it was plus fort que lui, and he knew he ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... finance. Amongst the characters, those geniuses, who perceive everything at a glance, but penetrate nothing, are conspicuous. People of quick perception, whom we use to admire, are despised by the Potuans, who look upon them as idle loungers, that, though always moving, make no progress. Prudent men, on the contrary, who measure their own strength, and advance cautiously, are greatly esteemed by that nation, though with us they pass for fools or cowards. The Potuans and Martinians are ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... power of doing such things without being judged. Sometimes they see that a child is really unable to learn, when the others perceive no difference; and it would be very harsh and cruel to oppress one who is out of order for fear little silly, idle, healthy things should think themselves ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with Liz and Cissy across the fields from Endleigh, the trio came upon a group of the idle boys of the village who were assembled in front of an inclosed paddock containing Farmer Giles's brindled bull, a savage animal, whose implacable viciousness was the talk of the place; not even the ploughman, with whom he was more ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... eye, which belong to the best examples. We respect even the humbler ones; for they at least hate sentiment, they do not comprehend or approve of humor, and they never relish wit. What does a taste for these qualities indicate, but an idle and frivolous mind, devoted to trifles: and how fatal is such a taste, in the pursuit of wealth ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... drudge, slave; operate, manipulate, perform; ferment, effervesce. Antonyms: shirk, idle, dabble, loaf, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... sarcasms such as, in moments of spleen, dropped but too easily from the lips of the keenwitted Dorset. Caermarthen, a Tory, and a Tory who had been mercilessly persecuted by the Whigs, was disposed to make the most of this idle hearsay. But he received no encouragement from his master, who, of all the great politicians mentioned in history, was the least prone to suspicion. When William returned to England, Preston was brought before him, and was commanded to repeat the confession which had already ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... me your purpose of retiring from the government, though I felt all the magnitude of the event, I was in a considerable degree silent. I knew that to such a mind as yours persuasion was idle and impertinent; that, before forming your decision, you had weighed all the reasons for and against the measure, had made up your mind on full view of them, and that there could be little hope ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... little—wrote notes and letters, and am alone, which Locke says, is bad company. 'Be not solitary, be not idle.'—Um!—the idleness is troublesome; but I can't see so much to regret in the solitude. The more I see of men, the less I like them. If I could but say so of women too, all would be well. Why can't I? I am now six-and-twenty; ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Phoenicians to the Greeks. The Phoenicians were certainly using it with freedom in the 9th century B.C.; with so much freedom, indeed, that they must have been in possession of it for a considerable time before we can trace it. With the materials available up to August 1910 it would be idle here to attempt to trace its earlier history. Great discoveries in Cappadocia, Assyria and Egypt were then only at their beginning, and any statement was liable to be quickly disproved by the appearance of new evidence. The prevalent ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Aratov, after a preliminary apology for his boldness, for the strangeness of his visit, delivered the speech he had prepared, explaining that he was anxious to collect all the information possible about the gifted artist so early lost, that he was not led to this by idle curiosity, but by profound sympathy for her talent, of which he was the devoted admirer (he said that, devoted admirer!) that, in fact, it would be a sin to leave the public in ignorance of what it had lost—and ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... men and more women can be happy idle when they're single, but once you marry them to each other they've got to find work or they'll find trouble. Everybody's got to raise something in this world, and unless people raise a job, or crops, or children, they'll raise Cain. You can ride three miles ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... with a careless, idle air gazing on the gentlemen and ladies as they disembarked. None specially excited her interest. Many were there greeting relatives and friends; but she had no friend or relative, and what were ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... "d'ye think I brook Being worse treated than a cook? Insulted by a lazy ribald With idle pipe and vesture piebald? You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst! Blow your pipe there ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... forth in a monster cavalcade by the Paseo de la Vega to meet him some miles out of the city, and escort him back to the palace. All this was pleasant and exciting, but wise heads saw that this was no time for idle pleasure, and some impatience was manifested ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... France, divided and subdivided since the Revolution of 1789, into departments, arondissements, and cantons, is filled with chateaux, which, in the reign of Louis XV., were inhabited by those gold-be-spangled marquises, those idle, godless abbes, and those obese financiers, whom the secret memoirs of Grimm and Bachaumont, and the letters of the Marquis de Lauraguais, have held up to such unsparing ridicule and contempt. This milky and cheese-producing ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... "my homage deep Ah, not your rank, your wealth command! These idle baubles, lady, keep. Give ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... with renewed interest, although she had not been idle during the summer by any means. With her pen she had copied nature in every possible phase, and had brought home, for her winter's campaign, rich treasures of ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... was that without conscious effort, without even a proof of merit beyond her appearance, Lorelei had arrived at the point where further advancement depended upon study and hard work; but, since these formed no part of the family program, she remained idle while Mrs. Knight and Jim arranged so many demands upon her time that she had no leisure for serious endeavors, even had she desired it. Proficiency in stage-craft of any sort comes only at the expense of peonage, and this girl was being ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... be of publique matters 'tis not (aside) Like to be talke or idle fault finding, On which the coward onely spends his wisedome: These are all men of action and of spirit, And dare performe what ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... Ethics because they are convinced, on general principles, that only a mind hopelessly lost in the dark night of medieval speculation could conceive of philosophy in such ultra-deductive fashion. Reason was for so long servile to idle theology, it is not at all surprising that a work exemplifying reason to such high degree as does the Ethics, should receive scant respect from intrepid empiricists. It is so easy to confuse the rationalizations of reason with the ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... that is what annoys me. The others are all busy with your affairs or mine. But this idle one follows me like my shadow, and looks at me all the time. It is not at all polite. I fear he has a vacant mind and has ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... nor Carnot did the name of Ombreval mean anything. Robespierre's subscription of the document was accepted by each as affording him a sufficient warrant to append his own signature, and although Carnot asked a question or two, it was done in an idle humour, and he paid little attention to such ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... not allow him to remain idle. He was continually engaging in some daring enterprise, in which it must not be supposed he displayed nothing more than headlong recklessness. That quality was supplemented by coolness and skill, without which he never could have attained ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... to that censure. But, tried by this standard, Rip Van Winkle, as Mr. Jefferson plays it, is far from an immoral play. The picture as he paints it is moral in the same sense that nature is moral. No man, shiftless, idle, and drunken, afraid to go home, ashamed before his children, without self-respect or the regard of others, however gentle and sweet, and however much a favorite with the boys and girls and animals he may be, is a man whose courses those boys will wish to imitate or who will make vice more tasteful ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... spirit of it. I cannot tell you of the countless things she has sent away—bedding, clothes, shoes, furniture, food—everything. I do not know why the workers' shacks around the vineyard should remain idle practically all the time—there must be others in damp cellars in that crowded city who have become diseased, and who could be healed by the pure cold air up among my ancestral pines. I will see what can ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... friends, such as "Glory be to God on high," "Prosper Thou, O Lord, the work of our hands," "Innocency is never better lodged than at the sign of labour," "The industrious man hath no leisure to sin; and the idle man hath ...
— Little Gidding and its inmates in the Time of King Charles I. - with an account of the Harmonies • J. E. Acland
... all have laid to heart that maxim, 'Pain first and pleasure after.' (10) And in regard to pleasure of the senses, of all men I know, he is the most continent; so that these also are powerless to make him idle at the expense of duty. You must consider the matter then and tell me, as befits you, what you can ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... extent, combined the tastes of an aristocracy with the insight and verve of men of business. These are pushed out, so to say, by the dirty crowd of little men. After a generation or two they retire into idle luxury. Upon their immense capital they can only obtain low profits, and these they do not think enough to compensate them for the rough companions and rude manners they must meet in business. This constant levelling of our commercial houses is, too, unfavourable ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... "Yet, verily, is some of his advice important, and I should imagine commendable, yet I do not find my remedy therein. 'Avoid idleness'—yes, that is sage counsel—and employment to one that hath not employed himself may drive away thought; but I have never been idle, and mine hath not been love in idleness; 'Avoid her presence'—that I must do; yet doth she still present herself to mine imagination, and I doubt whether the tangible reality could be more clearly ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... again now as she noted the network of scratches upon his outstretched palms. "You certainly have not been idle," she ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... knowing the temper of the times under Nero, in which indolence was wisdom. He maintained the same tenor of conduct when praetor; for the judiciary part of the office did not fall to his share. [22] In the exhibition of public games, and the idle trappings of dignity, he consulted propriety and the measure of his fortune; by no means approaching to extravagance, yet inclining rather to a popular course. When he was afterwards appointed by Galba to manage an inquest concerning ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... uncertain language. It is fair to conclude that some insincerity, or some lack of a correct basis for sentiment, is betrayed in every pointless flirtation. It is hopelessly bad form. Young people who gratify vanity by idle "conquests," so called, make a sufficiently conspicuous show of ill-breeding; but a married flirt is ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... known anything else—! Well, he would like to see her at closer range. He lit another cigarette and studied her profile as she slipped out of the organ bench and settled herself nearer the window. He could hear the man's voice reading now. Some of the words drew his idle attention: ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... saint. Twice a week there was the sound of fiddling and dancing feet in a certain wooden hall that stood near the river; and there, with the men and women of the worldly sort, Ann and her sister danced. It was their amusement; they had no other except the idle talking and laughing that went on over the table at which Ann sold her home-brewed beer. Ann's end in life was just the ordinary one—respectability, or a moderate righteousness, first, and after that, pleasure. She was a strong, vigorous, sunbrowned maiden; she worked ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... he intended to keep his copy of the Iliad in it. This fact is mentioned by many historians; and if the legend which is current among the people of Alexandria; on the authority of Herakleides, be true, the poems of Homer were far from idle or useless companions to him, even when on a campaign. The story goes that after conquering Egypt, he desired to found a great and populous Grecian city, to be called after his own name, and that after he had fixed upon an excellent site, ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... founde to honestie and godlines. In our forefathers tyme, whan Papistrie, as a standyng poole, couered and ouerflowed all England, fewe bookes were read in our tong, sauyng certaine bookes of Cheualrie, as they sayd, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in Monasteries, by idle Monkes, or wanton Chanons: ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... Rotherham line was contemplated, "A hundred and twenty inhabitants of Rotherham, headed by their vicar, petitioned against the bill, because they thought the canal and turnpike furnished sufficient accommodation between the two towns, and because they dreaded an incursion of the idle, drunken, and dissolute portion of the Sheffield people as a consequence of increasing the facilities of transit." For a time the opposition was successful but eventually the Lord's Committee yielded to the perseverance of the promoters of ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... said Maverick in his letter, "that Adele, while having a thorough womanly education, should grow up with simple tastes. I think I see a little tendency In her to a good many idle coquetries of dress, (which you will set down, I know, to her French blood,) which I trust your good sister will see the prudence of correcting. My fortune is now such that I may reasonably hope to put luxuries within her reach, if they be desirable; but of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... investigation started by Innocent VIII., in 1489. In this communication the abbot and his monks were charged with the grossest licentiousness, waste and thieving. Lina Eckenstein, in her interesting work on "Woman Under Monasticism," says: "It were idle to deny that the state of discipline in many houses was bad, but the circumstances under which Morton's letter was penned argue that the charges made in it should be accepted with some reservation." ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... squirrel cried, 'Trust him not, Lettice, trust, oh trust him not!' And many another woodland tongue beside Rose softly in the silence—'Trust him not!' Then cried the Pedlar in a bitter voice, 'What, in the thicket, is this idle noise?' ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... compelled to leave it according to our habit when we are at fault, and much as the poet leaves it here. In the case of the man, we think we understand. In that of the dog, our difficulty appears to defy solution: it is no question of argument, assertions are idle, dogma has no place. On the one hand we have those principles that come to man's aid, but of which it would be unbecoming now to speak. The vast majority of Christian men are enabled to ride out the storms of life without confidence wholly giving way, and with the first of sheet-anchors fixed in ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... and looks upwards, on the prodigy of design, and skill, and perseverance, and tributary wealth, he may image to himself the multitudes that, during successive ages, frequented this fane in the assured belief, that the idle ceremonies and impious superstitions, which they there performed or witnessed, were a service acceptable to heaven, and to be repaid in blessings ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... too late to do anything with the book, so put it away and tried for teaching, sewing, or any honest work. Won't go home to sit idle while I have a head and pair ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... completely than a man. Miss Hitchcock was a full generation ahead of the others in her conception of inherited, personal rights. As the dinner dragged on, there occurred no further opportunity for talk until near the end, when suddenly the clear, even tones of Miss Hitchcock's voice brought his idle musing ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... was a matter of experiment! As if you could take it up or lay it down as an idle frolic! As if the dire goddess that presides over it, with her murderous spear in hand, and her gorgon at her breast, was a coquette to be flirted with! We ought with reverence to approach that tremendous divinity, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... persons, please be tremendously brave. Don't let anything turn you into cowards—we've all got to be worthy of each other's sacrifice; the greater the sacrifice may prove to be for the one the greater the nobility demanded of the remainder. How idle the words sound, and yet they will take deep meanings when time has given them graver sanctions. I think gallant is the word I've been trying to find—we must be gallant ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... being recognized, little Bobby's teaching was carefully directed. He was not discouraged in his varied activities; but the bigger practical principles of American life were inculcated. These may be very briefly stated. An American must not idle; he must direct his energies toward success; success means making one's way in life; nine times out of ten, for ninety-nine men out of a hundred, that means the business world. To seize the business opportunity; to develop that opportunity ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... of his visit to Monseigneur Lourde, and the details of what was going forward in Manitou so far as he had learned. Also the ubiquitous Osterhaut had not been idle, and his bulletin had just been ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Germans were not idle. If their infantry was held back from making a counter-attack, their heavy guns, and here and there, machine-guns, were not idle. And these weapons tore big holes in the ranks of the Sammies. But ever the holes were closed up—comparatively closed up, that is, for the fighting ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates
... for idle loafers; they offer an excuse for shunning one's duty. 'I want to read a bit,' they say when told to do something. 'Oh, let me just finish this page, it is so interesting,' they plead, when asked to quickly fetch some article. This is what Adele used to do, but I nipped ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... said Albert in a firm, calm voice; "you love me too well to wish me to remain useless and idle with you; besides, I ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... what fervour He addresses his prayers to the insensible Image! Ah! may not his sentiments be inspired by some kind and secret Genius, Friend to my affection? May it not be Man's natural instinct which informs him... Be silent, idle hopes! Let me not encourage an idea which takes from the brilliance of Ambrosio's virtue. 'Tis Religion, not Beauty which attracts his admiration; 'Tis not to the Woman, but the Divinity that He kneels. Would He but address to me the least tender expression ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... be idle. Some hunted; some fished; some labored at the houses and defences. To the large building made by La Salle he added four lodging-houses for the men, and a fifth for the women, besides a small chapel. ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... must not be imagined that Ito was an idle man. On the contrary, he was exceedingly hard working and ambitious. His dream was to become a statesman, to enjoy unlimited patronage, to make men and to break men, and to die a peer. When he returned to Japan from his wanderings with exactly two shillings in ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had practised literature and made verses in his idle hours, had prosecuted love-intrigues of every sort, and got himself initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying. But the flexible ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... another time would have earned the speaker an admonition or a cuff. They fell on Gerard now like idle air. He paid the lad in silence, and descended the hill alone. The brook was silvery; it ran murmuring over little pebbles, that glittered, varnished by the clear water; he sat down and looked stupidly at them. Then ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... garrison of the Residency was not idle. On the day of the arrival of the British at Dil Koosha flag-signals from the towers of that palace had established communication with the Residency, and it was arranged that as soon as the relieving ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... remained in ignorance of the fact that she ever thought of the young man, except when he was present, or his name introduced by others. To her, all that related to marriage was too serious to form the theme of ordinary conversation, light jests, or idle chit-chat. Rarely indeed would she have any thing to say, when others spoke lightly or jested on the subject. This being the case, now that her own mind had become deeply interested in a matter of most vital importance to her future welfare, she had no one to disturb the even balance of her ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... an epistle addressed by Martyr to Cardinal Mendoza, dated at Granada, April, 1492, he alludes to the promise of a liberal recompense from the queen, if he would assist in reclaiming the young cavaliers of the court from the idle and unprofitable pursuits, in which, to her great mortification, they consumed their hours. The prejudices to be encountered seem to have filled him with natural distrust of his success; for he remarks, "Like their ancestors, they hold the ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... making definite plans for departure in the New Year. She could not satisfy herself with an idle life, though Tommy vehemently opposed the idea of her going. Monck never opposed it. He listened silently when she spoke of it, sometimes faintly smiling. She often saw him. He came to the Green Bungalow in Tommy's company at all hours of the day. She met him constantly at the Club, and he never ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... terminating at the castle of the Governor, and the other in the market. These are of some width, there being space for a dozen camels to pass abreast. There are, besides, many little squares before the houses of the grandees, where the people lounge: the streets are always full of idle people. ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... resolved almost at once to walk. Though hampered considerably by crowds of rustics who gathered, gaping, at every point in the line of march, he had made good progress. The German troops had strict orders to reply to no questions, with the result that little time was lost in idle chatter, and in a couple of days it was seen that the army of the Fatherland was bound, barring accidents, to ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... and his mule Boomerang are growing old together, and I guess my colored helper is 'seeing things,' as well as hearing them. But, as you say, it may be that the house is going to be rented. It's too valuable a property to let stand idle. Did you hear how long Andy was going ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... this windfall, I can get over that difficulty by taking you to the sea to grill my bacon for me, and the Lump to keep you occupied while you are not grilling it, that Satan may not find some mischief still for idle hands ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... raiment thin and spare Was idle mail 'gainst the barbed air, For it was just at the Christmas time; 260 So he mused, as he sat, of a sunnier clime, And sought for a shelter from cold and snow In the light and warmth of long ago; He sees the snake-like caravan crawl O'er the edge of the desert, black and small, 265 Then nearer ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... the upper house, petitioned that he might be admitted to bail; but this indulgence was refused, and the commons seemed bent upon prosecuting him with such severity as gave disgust to men of moderate principles. Meanwhile the tories were not idle. They boldly affirmed that the whigs had formed a design to pull down the church, and that this prosecution was intended to try their strength before they could proceed openly to the execution of their project. These assertions were supported, and even credited by great ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... thought that our own guns, though seldom mentioned, are idle all this while. They do not waste ammunition, for a very good reason, but wait their opportunity for effective reply to the enemy's batteries, and when a naval 12-pounder or the "Lady Anne" comes into action the Boer fire is apt to be hurried and wildly inaccurate ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... an' fairies be Sent frae the deil to fleetch[37] us to our ill; That kye hae tint[38] their milk wi' evil ee; An' corn been scowder'd[39] on the glowin' kiln. O mock nae this, my friends! but rather mourn, Ye in life's brawest spring wi' reason clear; Wi' eild[40] our idle fancies a' return, And dim our dolefu' days wi' bairnly[41] fear; The mind's aye cradled whan ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... sound that speedeth o'er the land! Behold the sword in fratricidal hand! 'Tis duty calls thee, Lincoln, and thy trust Demands that all thy acts be wise and just. No idle task to thee has been assigned, But work that's worthy of a giant mind— And on the issue hangs the nation's fame As a free people who deserve the name. So, walk thou in the way the fathers trod; Be true to ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... have been idle and absent at Baden, or I should sooner have answered your letter and told you with what pleasure we will execute your commission. [Footnote: See post, p. 54.] I was very sorry to have missed you here, though ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... bairnie's soft cosseting he aye fled to Auld Jock and the rough hospitality of the sheep fold. Being exact opposites in temperaments, but alike in tastes, Bobby and Auld Jock were inseparable. In the quiet corner of Mr. Traill's crowded dining-room they spent the one idle hour of the week together, happily. Bobby had the leavings of a herring or haddie, for a rough little Skye will eat anything from smoked fish to moor-fowl eggs, and he had the tidbit of a farthing bone to worry at his leisure. Auld Jock smoked his cutty ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... go to the workhouse. She'll have an idle enough time there," said the duke who was ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... to work no more. But he was not used to being idle, and time passed slowly,—the days seemed ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... "I sit by him just now; I take off the flag and look at his face, so calm, look so happy, so good, I almost tink he smile at me, and then I cry. Oh! Massa Tommy, all because you idle boy." ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... by way of epilogue. The "Reminiscences" contain a catalogue raisonne of such works as were published up to the year 1836. Since then the author has not been idle. The "Tour into the North of England and Scotland," in two super-royal octavos, studded with graphic gems of a variety of description—and dedicated to the most illustrious female in Europe, for the magnificence of a library, the fruit chiefly ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of Valladolid, on the other hand (How it Strikes a Contemporary), is not so much a study of a poet as of popular misconception and obtuseness. A grotesquely idle legend of the habits of the "Corregidor" flourishes among the good folks of Valladolid; the speaker himself, who desires to do him justice, is a plain, shrewd, but unimaginative observer ("I never wrote a line of verse, did you?"), and makes us acquainted with everything but the inner nature of ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... gaze and meditate upon the Great Stone Face. According to their idea of the matter, it was a folly, indeed, but pardonable, inasmuch as Ernest was industrious, kind, and neighborly, and neglected no duty for the sake of indulging this idle habit. They knew not that the Great Stone Face had become a teacher to him, and that the sentiment which was expressed in it would enlarge the young man's heart, and fill it with wider and deeper sympathies than other hearts. They ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... Or perhaps a languid, idle, good-for-nothing domestic delicacy, who liked only to make toilettes, to sit for hours together before the mirror, and in the evening read novels by lamp-light. What a jest it would be to mock her, to make her stare at country work, to spoil her precious ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... princess, released by Huldbrand from the power of some wicked enchanter of the forest. If she or her husband were questioned about it, they gave evasive answers; Father Heilmann's lips were sealed on all such idle topics, beside which, he had left them soon after they arrived, and returned to his cloister: so the citizens were left to their own wondering conjectures, and even Bertalda came no nearer the ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... front the bunch is o' Jane's. But, land, 'Queenie,' you best not wait fer the cap'n. Best keep a doin', an' onct you're at it again, the holler'll come all right. Like myself—jest let me stan' up afore this here tub an' the wash begins to do itself, unbeknownst like. Don't you idle. Keep peddlin' er patchin', though peddlin's the least lonesome, an' the time'll fly like lightnin'. It's them 'at don't do nothin' 'at don't know what to do. Ain't many them sort in the Lane, though, thank the ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... possible sequence of events with the real course of history, to estimate the good lost and evil got through events which at the time seemed to vindicate the moral governance of the world, is no idle exercise of the imagination. It may serve to give caution to the judgment: it may guard us against an arbitrary and fanciful interpretation of the actual. The generation which witnessed the fall of Napoleon is not the only one which has seen Providence in the fulfilment of its own ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... no part in it: turning, he said sternly, "Do we risk our lives together, then, to skulk off when danger offers and leave one to suffer for all? Let's have no more of such idle talk. While things promised to run smooth you was welcome to the boast of havin' fired first shot, but now every man aboard fired it; and let he who says he didn't stand out and say ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... far too much for the legislator. And therefore, as I said before, in most places they will not endure to have the truth spoken without raising a tremendous outcry, but in this state perhaps they may. And if we may assume that our whole discussion about the state has not been mere idle talk, I should like to prove to you, if you will consent to listen, that this institution is good and proper; but if you had ...
— Laws • Plato
... is idle thus to speculate. We have been born into the world during the nineteenth Century, whether we wish it or not. We have been nourished, (GOD be thanked!) in the bosom of the Christian Church, whether we would or no. The glory of the Gospel has informed our natural reason, and we cannot undo ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... to me of secrets or alarms, whilst I am in such a blissful rapture. After what has just taken place, I ought not to listen to any suspicions. The unequalled kindness of a divine object ought to shut my ears against all such idle reports. ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... Greek science. It involves the doctrine that the Theoretic Life is the highest way of life for man, a belief still held by Plato and Aristotle, and to which we shall have to return. We may note at once, however, that it is not an 'intellectualist' ideal. There is no question of idle contemplation; it is a strenuous way of life, the aim of which is the soul's salvation, and it gives rise to an eager desire to convert other men. Just for that reason, the Pythagorean philosopher ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... but the rich and idle take taxis, and he seems to think he can in some way insure the welfare of his dog ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... ancestors be went to the Germans and informed against me! The sneak-thief! The turn-coat! The maggot! I shall not forget! I, Georges Coutlass, forget nothing! He informed against me, and they set askaris* on my trail who prevented me from making further search. I had to sit idle in Usumbura or Ujiji, or else come away; and idleness ill suits my blood! I came here, and Hassan followed me. The Germans made a regular, salaried spy of him—the semi-Arab rat! The one-tenth Arab, nine-tenths mud-rat! Here he stays in Zanzibar and spies ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... so painstaking and voluminous as that of Rostafinski, and in view of the almost universal confusion that preceded him, it would seem idle to change for reasons purely technical the nomenclature which the Polish author has established. Especially is this true in the case of organisms so very perishable and fragile as those now in question where comparative revision is apt to result in uncertainty. We had preferred to leave the Rostafinskian, ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... was making the pies, and the cake, and the pudding, Ann Mary was sitting idle, for her part of the Thanksgiving cooking was done. She had worked so fast the day before and early that morning that she had the raisins all picked over and seeded, and the apples pared and sliced; and that was about all that her grandmother thought she could do. Ann Mary herself ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... displayed his fullest beams from his red and radiant countenance, just then, too, at that critical moment, began the daily period when I considered his business capacities as seriously disturbed for the remainder of the twenty-four hours. Not that he was absolutely idle, or averse to business, then; far from it. The difficulty was, he was apt to be altogether too energetic. There was a strange, inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of activity about him. He would be incautious in dipping his pen into his inkstand. All his blots upon ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... such sights as those, and live idle?" Richard resumed. "I feel ashamed of asking my men to work for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... conflicting social and political systems—perfect equality for Dutch and British in the British Colonies side by side with the permanent subjection of the British to the Dutch in one of the Republics. It is idle to talk of peace and unity under ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... strange and a sad home-coming, she thought, as they rode over the drawbridge and through the sodden and weed-smothered pleasaunce to the familiar door. Yet it might have been worse, for the tenants whom Bolle had warned had not been idle. For two hours past and more a dozen willing women had swept and cleaned; the fires had been lit, and there was plenteous food of a sort in the kitchen ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... perfectness. Nay, and no jot of time, at any time, Rests any actionless; his nature's law Compels him, even unwilling, into act; [For thought is act in fancy]. He who sits Suppressing all the instruments of flesh, Yet in his idle heart thinking on them, Plays the inept and guilty hypocrite: But he who, with strong body serving mind, Gives up his mortal powers to worthy work, Not seeking gain, Arjuna! such an one Is honourable. Do thine allotted task! Work is more excellent than idleness; The body's life proceeds not, ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... it, as if at the instant of the apparition he had offered that majestic, silent figure some grotesque indignity: thrown a pillow at it, or hailed it in tones of mocking offence. He was profoundly and exquisitely ashamed even before he ceased to tell the story for his listeners' idle amusement. When he stopped doing so, and snubbed solicitation with the curt answer that everybody had heard that story, he was retrospectively ashamed; and mixed with the expectation of seeing the vision again was the formless wish to ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... after noon-time before Barton actually rallied his aching bones, his dizzy head, his refractory inclinations, to meet the fluctuant sympathy and chaff that awaited him down-stairs in every nook and corner of the great, idle-minded hotel. ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... heroic sufferer that he was. This is a most interesting historic fact, and bears out wonderfully the truth of God's words. But I did not mean to give a lecture on history. It is out of place here. I meant to do you good yesterday, and discourage you from becoming an idle rhymer—a vain dreamer. You are not getting angry I hope, little girl, for ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... to tell. I must surely have begun work early in the day, he remarked, which was perhaps the best way for getting it soon over. I remembered having seen similar markings on the hewn-work of ancient castles, and of indulging in, I daresay, idle enough speculations regarding what was doing at court and in the field, in Scotland and elsewhere, when the old long-departed mechanics had been engaged in their work. When this mark was affixed, I have said, all Scotland was in mourning for the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... I won't call you that; and mind, as you grow up, that you do not get into an idle and wicked habit of calling yourselves that. You are something better than dust, and have other duties to do than ever dust can do; and the bonds of affection you will enter into are better than merely "getting in to order." But see to ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... visited by travellers. The answer was, "If we went, you should go too; but even we dare not go now. The two doors have been closed, one for seventy years, and the other for one hundred and fifty years." Speaking generally, we found Hebron a dirty, depressing place, full of lazy, idle people, and a shaykh told us that there was not a Christian in the place, as though that were something to ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... in this idle fingering of the cards. His eyes which already were burning with hot tears, seemed to take on an almost savage glitter. A hoarse ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... without reason, ridiculous, absurd, idiotic, silly, stupid, asinine; ill-imagined, ill-advised, ill-judged, ill-devised; mal entendu[Fr]; inconsistent, irrational, unphilosophical[obs3]; extravagant &c (nonsensical) 497; sleeveless, idle; pointless, useless &c. 645; inexpedient &c. 647; frivolous &c. (trivial) 643. Phr. Davus sum non [Lat][Oedipus]; "a fool's bolt is soon shot" clitellae bovi sunt impositae [obs3][Henry V.][Lat][Cicero]; "fools rush in where angels fear to tread" ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... accustomed to arms, ingenious, energetic, brave and strong. The same qualities that have enabled a single generation of men to develop the resources of a continent, would enable us to destroy more rapidly than we have constructed. It is idle for individuals of either section to suppose themselves superior in military power. The French and English tried that question for a thousand years. We ought to know it now. The result of the contest would not depend upon the first blow of the first ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... of laws. He ordered the German language alone to be used in public documents and offices; declared the Roman Catholic religion to be dominant. There were two thousand convents in Austria. He reduced them to seven hundred, and cut down the number of thirty-two thousand idle monks to twenty-seven hundred; and nobly issued an edict of toleration, granting to all members of Protestant churches the free exercise of their religion. All Christians, of every denomination, were declared to be equally eligible to any offices ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... of course. He does not know anything about them, and does not want to. His idea of business is to get real estate, and "hold on" till somebody else makes it valuable. Gentlemen of new Washington, Hercules will stand idle till he sees your own shoulders at the wheel. When you shall have the faithful, enlightened manual labor of New England, you may expect such flowers as Yale and Harvard and the aesthetic fruits they enfold. You may be unable to see any intimate connection between such labor and such culture, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... amongst the repealers. It is manifest that the great majority of the Repeal Association must exert themselves strenuously to support the association, or the persons to whom I allude will divide its ranks, and finally destroy the association itself. For my poor part, I will not be an idle spectator of such a struggle. 'Tis true that the people may be induced to desert me, but I never will desert the people. I perceive that it is—I will not use the proper term—but I will say, most unhandsomely suggested that, in the event ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... character, motive, and action. You are reminded that the authoress writes with a purpose, as well as a power, that the earnest, God-fearing soul of the philanthropist has travailed here for the good of her kind, not the mere 'sensation' romancist writer for the entertainment of an idle hour.' We quote ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... (love-talker). He does not appear, like the Leprechaun, with a purse in one of his pockets, but with his hands in both of them, and a dudeen (short pipe) in his mouth, as he lazily strolls through lonely valleys making love to the foolish country lasses and "gostering" with the idle "boys." To meet him meant bad luck, and whoever was ruined by ill-judged love was said to ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... be San Miniato's boatman this summer, is waiting outside the Count's door, until that idle gentleman wakes from his late sleep and calls him. The final agreement is yet to be made, and Ruggiero makes calculations upon his fingers as he sits on the box in the corridor. The Count wants a boat ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... "Bessie" and "Elinor" tattooed on his arm was enjoying a pipe and mending a net, not to be too idle. The glass might be rising—or not. He was independent of Science. A trifle of wind in the night was his verdict, glass or no! The season was drawing nigh to a close now for a bathing-resort, as you might ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... nothing better or more life-like than the sketch of the court in the chill morning, and before the actors came on the scene—the inimitable description of the idle barristers hanging about "the Bar of England," which is ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... has some little means, aside from a salary, a father and mother to visit through the idle months and so eke that salary out—is bound to be tormented by the question of clothes; for she is human, and wants to look as well as those about her, and besides she knows the stage manager is not likely to seek out the poorest dresser for ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... can break, and in the midst of which the weakest can sit secure. Peter thinks that every Christian has assailants whom no Christian by himself can repel, but that he may, if he likes, have an impregnable ring of defence drawn round him, which shall fling back in idle spray the wildest onset of the waves, as a breakwater or a cliff ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... at this moment, as she sat, an idle, desultory, neither happy nor unhappy woman, rapidly growing old, watching the century draw to a close amid chaos and misery,—it was at this moment that an eccentric English prelate, Lord Bristol, Bishop of Derry, introduced at the ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... thing that shortens life, and is used as the most cruel of punishments in our prisons, is the thing that will destroy all the life and force of a speech. Avoid it as you would shun a deadly dull bore. The "idle rich" can have half-a-dozen homes, command all the varieties of foods gathered from the four corners of the earth, and sail for Africa or Alaska at their pleasure; but the poverty-stricken man must walk or take ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... the maritime republics, the army, idle and unwarlike as it was in most cases, continued to be one of the three careers open to the younger sons of good family; the civil service and the Church were the other two. In Genoa, nobles had engaged in commerce with equal honor and profit; ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... that couldn't possibly be altered?" asked Mr. Perkins, with his quizzical smile. "I shall be very sorry to lose you. In schools the rather stupid boys who work always do better than the clever boy who's idle, but when the clever boy works—why then, he does ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... arose and partook of a hurried, half-eaten breakfast. It was not likely that he would hear from Dick Cronk before the middle of the forenoon. Until then he was to be harassed by doubts and fears that would not be easy to suppress in his present unquiet frame of mind. While he was obliged to stand idle and impotent, the very foundation of all the future happiness of the girl he loved might be irreparably shattered. Silent, deadly, purposeful forces were working toward that end. Her mother would, no doubt, prepare ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Baptist Chapel, and straight back again; and before he got home he made a solemn resolution to rouse himself from the idle lethargic state into which he felt himself slipping deeper and deeper. Thinking about business and other matters, he decided now that the odd weariness which he had been experiencing must be struggled with, ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... never fought," said de Laval sullenly. "Only Stewart and his Scots stood up against Fastolf's spears. You would not have me stay idle in face of such odds. I was not the only French knight who charged. There was La Hire and de Saintrailles and ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... altogether exclude the roar of the people outside. "Wards! Wards! Wards!" they seemed to be saying. Through it there were visible the beams and supports of metal scaffoldings that rose and fell according to the requirements of a great crowd of workmen. An idle building machine, with lank arms of red painted metal that caught the still plastic blocks of mineral paste and swung them neatly into position, stretched gauntly across this green tinted picture. On it were still a number of workmen staring ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... a fine job, boys," he said. "The fleet is in good formation." He paused as he settled back in his chair. "But I'm not the one who believes in idle hands. I've assigned you to Professor Sykes. He needs help in charting the unexplored regions of space we're approaching. And you three need that kind of training. Report to him ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... faithful and industrious man, and he will be willing to do work for moderate wages. Indeed, he cares more for a permanent place than high pay. Where he is now, he is liable to be idle for some months ...
— Herbert Carter's Legacy • Horatio Alger
... he had reached the farther end of the piazza. In wheeling about to come back, the woman whose profile he now faced attracted his eye again, in spite of himself, and he gave her another idle thought. How absorbing was the subject upon which she was brooding, and how ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... round the waist and neck; an old woman or a little child occupies the lower floor of the cage; and the confinement lasts only a month. Probably the long period mentioned by Dr. Brown is that prescribed for chiefs' daughters. Poor people could not afford to keep their children so long idle. This distinction is sometimes expressly stated. See above, p. 30. Among the Goajiras of Colombia rich people keep their daughters shut up in separate huts at puberty for periods varying from one to four years, but poor people cannot afford to do so for more than a fortnight or a month. See ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... do now? We simply propose to stop the purchase. We do not say when we will renew it again, but we simply say we believe, in view of a panic or any possibilities of a panic, that it would be idle for us to waste either our credit money or our actual money to buy that which must be put down into the cellar of our treasury and there lie unused, except as it is represented by promises to pay gold. I say that such a policy as that would ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... writers to whom the past was an open book. Even Westminster had long ago had her chronographer, and far away in furthest Wales, Geoffrey, the Monmouth man, was making men open their eyes very wide indeed with tales—idle tales they might be, but they were well worth the reading—and there was talk too of another young Welshman, Giraldus, who was on the way towards outdoing the other by-and-bye. What are we coming ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... surrendered to Krupp. Through every cogwheel in that incomparable machinery, through every link in that iron and unending chain, ran the mastery and the skill of a certain kind of artist; an artist whose hands are never idle through dreaming or drawn back in disgust or lifted in wonder or in wrath; but sure and tireless in their touch upon the thousand little things that make the invisible machinery of life. That artist was there in triumph; ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... long months idle They have kept you ready and fit, All shining from hock to bridle, All burnished from hoof to bit; The set of your silk coat's beauty, The lie of its lightest hair, Was an anxious trooper's duty And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... irresistible, and she came back in high spirits with report of progress. Denzil, who had just been badgered by a deputation of voters who wished to discover his mind on seven points of strictly non-practical politics, listened with idle amusement. ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... the back settlements the news travelled. It was discussed at the store, the blacksmith shop, the mill, and in the homes at night, wherever a few were gathered together. The Fletchers had never been idle since the night of old Billy's death. They stirred up others by various stories and conjectures, fashioned in their own suspicious minds. "Why," they asked, "did not the parson explain about that ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... parties," replied he. "In the first place, for one respectable carriage driving up to the door, there are twenty cabs and jarveys, so that the company isn't so good; and then at parties, when there is a good supper, I get my share of it in the kitchen. You don't think we are idle down below. I have been to Mrs Allwood's twice, and there's no supper, nothing but feast of reason, which remains upstairs, and they're welcome to my share of it. As for the drink, it's negus and cherry-water; nothing else, and if ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... nevertheless, it has a broad field of independent action. Otherwise, why give it a separate personality and a separate organization? Cities are permitted to exercise vast powers of police and of taxation. It is idle to say that a few commissioners can give satisfactory legislation. They cannot represent community interests. Their executive functions will naturally bias their judgment. Moreover, each commissioner, knowing little of the needs of the other departments, will naturally take the word ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... hoped for a play upon the sea, with a tall mast rocking from wing to wing and a tempest roaring at the rail. Alas! Our pirates grow old and stiff. They have retired, as we say, from active practice and live in idle luxury on shore. Yet we shall see ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... of death, who makes it possible for these fellows to spend their days in pleasant exercise in the fields. The soldier bears civilization on his back, he supports all the rest, he is the pedestal which bears without complaint the civilian as an idle ornament. The soldier, in short, is the real man, the ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... at the audacity of this idle demonstration, when all at once, from the heights on their left, an enemy's battery began firing. Its bullets crossed the road; at the same time thirty squadrons showed themselves on the same side, threatening the Westphalian corps which was advancing, the commander of which ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... amply supplies all that the army needs, without its calling on its abundant reserves. I propose, Sir, to write to you twice a week, to give you the news about His Majesty, and details about the operations of the army. These communications will enable you to contradict the idle rumors which malicious persons ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... mothers will make indolent and unfaithful children. You cannot expect neatness and order in any house where the daughters see nothing but slatternness and upsidedownativeness in their parents. Let Hannah be idle, and most certainly Samuel will ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... of Bishop Carileph the see of Durham remained vacant for three years. The monks, however, were not idle during this period, and they continued the work vigorously, completing the west walls of the transepts and the vaulting of the north transept. In 1099 Ralph Flambard was appointed bishop, and he held ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Durham - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • J. E. Bygate
... to get the strength?... And he would have liked to busy himself in the department of writing also,—he knew how to do that beautifully, as you are aware; but his hands shook so, and he could not hold the pen properly.... He was always reproaching himself: 'I'm an idle dog,' he said. 'I have done no one any good, I have helped no one, I have not toiled!' He was very much afflicted over that same.... He used to say, 'Our people toil, but what are we doing?...' Akh, Nikolai Nikolaitch, ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... respects to Mrs. Gibson,' said he. 'I shall come as soon as I may. Your father has been a very kind friend to me ever since I was a boy. And when I come, I shall expect my pupil to have been very diligent,' he concluded, smiling his kind, pleasant smile at idle Molly. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... not idle upon deck; the carpenter was busy fixing a step for one of the spare topmasts instead of a mainmast, and the men were fitting the rigging; the ship unfortunately had sprung a leak, and four hands ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the room, before his inflammable brain was on fire with a new idea. Other idle men in trouble had found the solace and the occupation of their lives in books. Why should he not be one of them? Why not plunge into study in this delightful retirement—and perhaps, one day, astonish Regina and ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... ripened moment, not a sheaf Of arrows should be wasted, not a brave Should perish aimlessly, nor discord reign Amongst our tribes, nor jealousy distrain The large effects of valour. We must now Pack all our energies. Our eyes and ears No more must idle with the hour, but work As carriers to the brain, where we shall store, As in an arsenal, deep ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... in their right places?" To his credit be it spoken, Mount Dunstan managed to say it as if in the mere putting together of idle words. What man likes to be reminded of his right place! No man wants to be put in his right place. There is always another ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... less than twelve feet under full cargo, which made possible her use of the shorter and smoother inland water-way from Norfolk to Beaufort, North Carolina, where was the factory. Zeke, who would remain idle until the first catch of fish, went early to his bunk the first evening aboard, wearied by the long and exciting day. He had, indeed, scarce time to contemplate a guardian vision of Plutina ere his senses were locked in slumber, and his next ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... the open water and Geneva already lies far behind. Not a ripple on the blue water that shades into deep blue behind us. Ahead the scene melts into a milky haze. A little boat, with idle sails embroidered with sunlight, vanishes into it. On the right rise the mountains of Savoy, dotted with forests, veiled in clouds which cast their shadows on the broken slopes. The contrast is happy, and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Her own child, she said, was then in her arms; and she could not forbear wishing it were possible to give her the fortune which seemed so little valued for me. This wish once raised was not easily suppressed; on the contrary, what at first appeared a mere idle desire, in a short time seemed a feasible scheme. Her husband was dead, and she had little regard for any body but her child; and, in short, having saved money for the journey, she contrived to enquire a direction to my father; and, ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... the men of Kentucky and Tennessee, standing on the lines of New Orleans, under the eye of Andrew Jackson, fight with colored battalions whom he had summoned to the field, and whom he thanked publicly for their gallantry in hurling back a British foe? It is all talk, idle talk, to say that the volunteers who are fighting the battles of this country are governed by any such narrow prejudice or bigotry. These prejudices are the results of the teachings of demagogues and politicians, who have for years undertaken to delude and ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching treats in that shadowy little stream, which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the forest,—though you and I will never cast a line in it again,—two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things that the Faculty never heard of, or else it had been the worse for us,—still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny, that he was to be a writer of fiction." ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... and always, and intentionally, I am sure, most amusing to contemplate. In addition to all this he had an air of well-being, force and alertness which belied the other surface characteristics as anything more than a genial pose or bit of idle gayety. ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... like to see a man sewing, Charley? I don't. I don't believe that their great muscular arms were intended to wield a needle, especially when so many feminine fingers are forced to be idle for want of employment; so I never like to see a tailor.—Oh, yes, I do, too. I came very ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... at all fond. My friends have often remarked upon it. A palmist once told me that I had one of those rare spiritual natures which cannot be satisfied with substitutes but must seek and seek till they find their soul-mate. When other men all round me were frittering away their emotions in idle flirtations which did not touch their deeper natures, I was ... I was ... well, I wasn't, if you see ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... boy, not quite so fast. I shall not turn him out to-night, if he has no home to go to; but we cannot keep a lot of idle ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... story, they laughed and said, 'Verily, thou art dung, the son of dung! Thou liedst most abominably!' Then said they to the third slave, 'Tell us thy story.' 'O my cousins,' replied he, 'all that ye have said is idle: I will tell you how I came to lose my cullions, and indeed, I deserved more than this, for I swived my mistress and my master's son: but my story is a long one and this is no time to tell it, for the dawn is near, and if the day surprise us with this chest yet unburied, we shall be blown upon ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... I passed under the ruined walls of the castle. In the little town itself, early as was the hour, many people were stirring. One gave me good-morning—a man of singular character, for here, in the very peep of day, he was sitting on a doorstep, idle, lazy and contented, as though it was full noon. Another was yoking oxen; a third going out singing to work in ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... little, and made innumerable inquiries, I was very much gratified to find that the whole party were in good health, and that every thing had been conducted in a satisfactory manner during my absence. No one had been idle, and every thing that I could have wished, had been properly arranged. The stores had been safely brought up from the WATERWITCH, including a barometer kindly sent by the Governor, and a large packet of English letters, at any time ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... brilliant schoolboy, then an idle law student, George Henry Moore was driven to travel by the complications of a passionate love affair, and he travelled adventurously, being a pioneer of exploration in the Caucasus and Syria. Sketches reproduced in the book show that he could draw no less well than he wrote. Returning ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... Little snow had fallen. The stars were all out overhead, and the great night was round her, enclosing, watching her. She tried to rise, and could just move her limbs. Had she fallen asleep again, she would not have lived through the night. But it is idle to talk of what would have been; nothing could have been but what was. Mercy wondered afterwards that she did not lose her reason. She must, she thought, have ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... gifts of free land, stock, and money, it was hard to secure a suitable class of settlers. Many of those who came up from Mexico to live in the pueblos were idle or dissipated, and nearly all uneducated. When, after several years, a Spanish officer was sent down from Monterey to convey to the Los Angeles settlers full title to their lands, he found that not one of the twenty-four heads of families could sign his ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... things better than men, though at the same time what good they do is by their advice. It would be odd indeed, if I, who laid this plot myself, could not carry it on as well as you. But let us lose no time in idle discourse; lie down in my place, and witness if I do not come off with ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... little as he stood up, and his arms both required a rub, especially about the elbows; but while he performed these little comforting offices he was not idle, for he carefully inspected the shelf. Escape on the one side did not seem possible, for it was over into the gorge; the other side, a curve, was one nearly perpendicular wall of rock, along which he walked from where he stood ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... these little things that help the soul at first, as you will find, like—like—the bindings of a peach-tree, that it may learn how to grow and bear its fruit. And the Rule will be given you, and what a monk must have by rote, and how to sing. You will not be idle, Chris." ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... Paderewski tuft, a rolling collar that exposed the points of his right and left clavicles, a Windsor tie, and, to preserve the unity of his characterization, a slight nondescript foreign accent, despite the circumstance that he was born in Newark, N. J. All this, however, was not an idle pose on Felix's part. He merely applied to a dry-goods store the business principles of the successful virtuoso, and he had found them so efficacious that personally he sold more garments than any six of his clerks. He was no less astute in the buying end of the business; for in pitting ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... revealed his plan for defying all parties, and for deciding the fate of the Dragon Throne. The only reply he received was the cold one that it would be better and wiser to confine his attention to the question of whether he intended to yield or not, instead of discussing idle schemes ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... "Sit down, if you can find chairs. I'm hard at work as you see, but a poor lone widder can't afford to be idle." ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... the coquette, using her eyes, which had remained idle so long, "this famous compact which you proposed to me, the right of always giving me your arm, of visiting me when you liked; did that give you ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... time for the intruders to make it known that business of some sort, not idle curiosity, had brought them on the scene, and Nevill stepped forward, holding out the visiting card given him by Josette, and the crimson velvet case containing the watch which Stephen ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... serious, I hope," said the Doctor. "It is a pity to take the boy away unless there is. He is a very good boy, rather idle and unenergetic, but he is a very honest gentlemanlike little fellow, though I can't get him to construe as I wish. Won't you come in and have some luncheon? My wife will be ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... probably true enough, and only as a general picture does it matter; its details are supremely unimportant. The river here is pouting through the gorges, or shallowly meandering the meads. It is watering Farmer Balbus's fields; Grazier Ahenobarbus's cows drink at it; idle Dolabell angles in its quiet reaches: there are bloody tribal affrays yearly at its fords. It is important, certainly, to Babbus and Dolabella, and the men slain in ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... fire, a nurse of trembling fear, A path that leads to peril and mishap, A true retreat of sorrow and despair, An idle boy that sleeps in Pleasure's lap; A deep distrust of that which certain seems, A hope of ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... their bodies, other some of more milder spirit sought to saue the soule by deuout prayer and meditation to the Almightie, thinking indeede by no other meanes possible then by a diuine Miracle to haue their deliuerance: so that there was none that were either idle, or not well occupied, and he that helde himselfe in best securitie had (God knoweth) but onely bare hope remayning for ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... an idle lad, And loung'd about all day; And though he many a lesson had. He minded ...
— Phebe, The Blackberry Girl • Edward Livermore
... shovels was 159 cu. yd. in one shift, and the best average in any month—which was between July and December, 1907, during which time only the enlargement and bench of the Central Shaft headings was being taken out from the western end—was 60 cu. yd. per shift. As the shovels were generally idle for one shift out of three, the quantity actually handled averaged 90 cu. yd. per shift during the shifts the shovel worked. All these quantities were "measured in place," and, as previously noted, would be about equal to twice as much measured ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Bergen Hill Tunnels. Paper No. 1154 • F. Lavis
... creature is determined by its individual qualities; whereas in civilised societies a man may obtain the highest position and the most beautiful wife because he is rich and well-born, although he may be ugly, idle or improvident; and then it is he who will perpetuate the species. The wealthy man, ill constituted, incapable, sickly, enjoys his riches and establishes his stock under the protection of the laws." Haycraft in England and Jentsch in Germany have strongly emphasised these "anomalies," ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... civilisation and of eternal religion. Shakespeare, in the heart of his fantastic forest, turns with a splendid suddenness to the Cockney ideal as being the true one after all. For a jest, for a reaction, for an idle summer love or still idler summer hatred, it is well to wander away into the bewildering forest of Arden. It is well that those who are sick with love or sick with the absence of love, those who weary of the folly of courts or weary yet more of their wisdom, it is natural ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... their apostle and teacher, and so treated him, whether present or absent. Leaving that employment, he went forth to the Filipinas, where he arrived, as we have said, in June of the year one thousand five hundred and ninety-five. During the voyage he was not idle, but rather kindled the fervor of all on the ship with discourses and sermons, as I was told in his praise by the commander of the fleet, and by the father commissary of the Holy Office in the province of Pintados, the associate of the right reverend bishop of Sebu. I conducted him ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... kind well," persisted Cassidy. "Th' idle rich! Small use have they f'r th' wur-r-r-kin' man! Souls no wider than th' ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... lost his leg at the battle of Vittoria, and after suffering amputation with the greatest courage, thus addressed his servant who was crying, or pretending to cry, in one corner of the room, "None of your hypocritical tears, you idle dog; you know you are very glad, for now you will have only one boot to clean instead ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... deal amused and should have felt a little rebuked, had I asked a single question from idle curiosity. "Yes, it's a sort of one, ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Nuremberg," Hans Sebald Beham, Bartholomew Beham, and George Penz. The first named expressed some doubts about various Protestant doctrines. Bartholomew went further, asserting that baptism was a human device, that the Scriptures could not be believed and that the preaching he had heard was but idle talk, producing no fruit in the life of the preacher himself; he recognized no superior authority but that of God. George Penz went further still, for while he admitted the existence of God he asserted that his nature was unknowable, and that he could believe neither in Christ ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... he had seen for a moment through the doors of the Milan. The red seal ring upon the finger—what did it mean? A doubt chilled him for a moment. He told himself with passionate insistence, that it was not possible that she could know of these things. Her words were idle, her theories a jest. He turned away from the window and caught up a morning paper, resolved to escape from his thoughts. The first headline ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in vain has he lived that such a treasure be given him? What is ambition compared to that but selfish vanity? To be rich, to be famous: what do these profit a year hence when other names sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away under the ground along with the idle titles engraven on your coffin? Only true love lives after you, follows your memory with secret blessing or precedes you and intercedes for you. 'Non omnis moriar'—if dying I yet live in a tender heart or two, nor am lost ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... founded, and has attracted a fair number of candidates. Naturally I rejoice in this change, knowing from experience the value of these studies; and knowing also from experience, if I may speak boldly, how idle is that dream which flits about in Oxford and whispers that the mastering of Old English, on the basis of Teutonic phonology, and the conquest of the worlds opened by Chaucer and Shakespeare and Swift and Burke ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... not let his eyes see the painful sight. He would try to forget, would deny to himself that he had seen. For to his shallow, conventional nature Susan's expression could only mean delight in wealth, in the opportunity that now offered to idle and to luxuriate in the dead man's money, to realize the crude dreamings of those lesser minds whose initial impulses toward growth have been stifled by the routine our social system imposes upon all but the few with the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... shall be brought into judgment for every idle word I say, I will endeavor never to engage in trifling conversation, but on every proper occasion to speak of the wondrous ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... Kate merely sat in a pleasant place and allowed her nerves to settle, after the short nap she had enjoyed in the rocking chair. It was such a novel experience for her to sit idle, that despite the attractions of growing things, running water, and singing birds, she soon veered to thoughts of what she would be doing if she were at home, and that brought her to the fact that she was forbidden her father's house; so if she might not go there, she was ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... suggest, in order to mark that due gradation which in every well regulated society must necessarily exist in the scale of rewards to be accorded to such as may be subordinate or refractory,—industrious, or idle; that these latter encouragements should only be extended in this double ratio to those who might quit the establishment with a certificate of good conduct from ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... Hall and took up my wife, who is mighty sad to think of her father, who is going into Germany against the Turkes; but what will become of her brother I know not. He is so idle, and out of all capacity, I think, to earn his bread. Home and at my office till is at night making my solemn vowes for the next year, which I trust in the Lord I shall keep, but I fear I have a little too severely ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... fraught with immediate danger to the integrity of the Empire, as in truth it was, for the Republican nature of the insurrection had become an established fact, whilst the squadron which, months before, ought to have sailed to quell the revolt, was, from, want of men, lying idle in the port ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... of plaint, Or the starling's courtship quaint, Heart made much of; 'twas a boon Won from silence, and too soon Wasted in the ample air: Building rooks far distant were. Scarce at all would speak the rills, And I saw the idle hills, In their amber hazes deep, Fold themselves and go to sleep, Though it was not yet ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... of our birds which afford more surprise and pleasure to a novice than the family of warblers. A well-known ornithologist has related how one day he wandered into the forest in an idle mood, and accidentally catching a gleam of bright color overhead, raised his gun and brought the bird to his feet; and how excited and charmed he was with the wondrous beauty of his little trophy. Were there ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... shut it off from the street; it was dinner-time with the humbler people of the town, and there was not a soul visible, when Donal put the key in the lock of the front door, opened it, and went in: he had timed his entrance so, desiring to avoid idle curiosity, and bring no gathering feet about the house. Almost on tiptoe he entered the lofty hall, high above the first story. The dust lay thick on a large marble table—but what was that?—a streak across it, brushed sharply through the middle of the dust! It ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... order that in this world I might prosper, and excel in tongue-science, which should serve to the "praise of men," and to deceitful riches. Next I was put to school to get learning, in which I (poor wretch) knew not what use there was; and yet, if idle in learning, I was beaten. For this was judged right by our forefathers; and many, passing the same course before us, framed for us weary paths, through which we were fain to pass; multiplying toil and grief upon the sons of Adam. But, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... other men, must needs love with constancy and faith. You must not be jealous of what is called the Muse. Happy is the wife of a man whose days are occupied. If you heard the complaints of women who have to endure the burden of an idle husband, either a man without duties, or one so rich as to have nothing to do, you would know that the highest happiness of a Parisian wife is freedom,—the right to rule in her own home. Now we writers and men of functions and occupations, we leave the sceptre to our wives; we ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... going to pay servants," she persisted, "why should I idle about the house? Why should not I, an able-bodied person, be out helping in the world's work somehow—and also helping you to ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... life must be one of action. "I am able to endure the strain of daily traveling and lecturing at over three-score and ten," she observed, "mainly because I have always worked and loved work.... As machinery in motion lasts longer than when lying idle, so a body and soul in active exercise escapes the corroding rust of physical and mental laziness, which prematurely cuts off the ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... differs widely from our English authors, who generally slightly despise their own art, and think that, in providing amusement for our idle hours, they are rather derogating from their dignity. Instead of claiming our attention as a right, they try to entice us into interest by every possible artifice: they give us exciting glimpses of horrors to come; they ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... my son, you break my heart with your sorrow! Study if you would play like your father, study and be brave, be courageous! All will come out right. Idle fretting ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Hinchinbrook;(1031) I heard a very bad account of her when I was last in town. Your letter to Madame Roland shall be taken care of; but as you are so scrupulous of making me pay postage, I must remember not to overcharge you, as I can frank my idle letters no longer; ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... however, an event occurred which was calculated to give some ground to these idle, gossiping tales. One fine morning in the month of July, 1847, the lady died suddenly of apoplexy. Six weeks later, a report began to spread that Count Ville-Handry was going to ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... party of hunters were thus successfully pushing along, the other bands were not idle, though, possessing no fire-arms, they were less noisy. In fact their proceedings were altogether of the cat-catty. One fellow, as black as a coal, as lithe as an eel, and as long—according to Disco's standard—as a fathom of pump-water, having come upon a herd of buffalo unseen by them, and ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... the meantime the Valley of Ruins no longer lies alone and unheeded in the sunlight; and no longer do the hills look down upon rich plains left solely to the idle pleasure of a careless black people. The forerunners of to-day's great civilising army have marched into the valley, and beside the ancient walls there is now a police camp of the British South Africa Police, presided over ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... unworthiness she had been suffered to be born in Joppa, made it one of her most fervent and reiterated petitions that she might not always have to live there; that some time, if she were very good and very patient, it might be granted her to go. She was so weary of it all: of the busy idleness and the idle business, of the unthinking gayety and the gay thoughtlessness, and of the nothingness that made up its all. She wanted, she did not exactly know what, only something different; and to go, she did not quite know where, only somewhere ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... earl, come back from the dead? Ghost of Tyr-owen, why stand you here idle in the gap of Ulster, where once Cuculain fought against the host of Meave? Do you also stand here to fight as ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... fingers grimed with charcoal and crayons. Laura is always Laura, a stylish young girl, busy with the strip of an extremely elegant carriage robe, and Mrs. Grandon, a handsome woman past fifty, has a bit of embroidery in her hands. She seems never exactly idle, but now she holds her work and listens, then drops ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... next point of interest is the window. The modern Italian is completely owl-like in his habits. All the daytime he lies idle and inert; but during the night he is all activity, but it is mere activity of inoccupation. Idleness, partly induced by the temperature of the climate, and partly consequent on the decaying prosperity of the nation, leaves indications of its influence on all his undertakings. ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... piteous cries of distress. 'The causes' of this serious affection are very numerous; among the most usual and active agents may be enumerated, exposure to atmospherical vicissitudes, remaining wet and idle after coming from the water, damp kennels, suppressed perspiration, metastasis of eruptive diseases, luxurious living, laziness and over-feeding. These and many other causes are all busy in the production of this disease. Duck dogs on the ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... history of human intellectual interest is more striking than the excellent judgment displayed by the editors who selected the works to be printed at this time. Very few of them were trivial or insignificant. Fewer still were idle speculations, and most of them were almost of classical import for literature and science. Four editions of this work were printed in Venice in the sixteenth century, one of them as late as 1560, when the work done by such men as Vesalius, Columbus, ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... aware how essential a kindness you offered me when you undertook to receive my boxes. I do not know what I should do without such head-quarters. And now for an apologetical prose about my collection: I am afraid you will say it is very small, but I have not been idle, and you must recollect what a very small show hundreds of species make. The box contains a good many geological specimens; I am well aware that the greater number are too small. But I maintain that no person has a right to accuse me, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... before any of my friends in England were aware of my retreat, or of my ever having accompanied the Princess. Though my letters were written and dated at Paris, they were all forwarded to England by way of Holland or Germany, that no clue should be given for annoyances from idle curiosity. It is to this discreetness, to this inviolable secrecy, firmness, and fidelity, which I so early in life displayed to the august personages who stood in need of such a person, that I owe the unlimited confidence of my illustrious benefactress, through ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... phenomena at so great a distance apart, in connection with active or dormant volcanoes, would seem to be enough to prove the connection in any candid mind, and utterly refute the idle theory that all this heat may be produced by the chemical action of water on beds of sulphates or phosphates just below the surface. The temperature of the water should be sufficient to show that it comes from great depths. The writer ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and west of Compiegne. Hence he so wrought that he made a pact with the captain of the French in Gournay, a town some four leagues north and west of Compiegne, whereby the garrison there promised to lie idle, and make no onslaught against them of Burgundy, unless the King brought them a rescue. Therefore the Duke went back to Noyon on the Oise, some eight leagues north and east of Compiegne, while his ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... was exchanged for the agricultural, the latter tendencies have been always gaining ground on the former. All experience testifies that regularity in domestic relations is almost in direct proportion to industrial civilization. Idle life, and military life with its long intervals of idleness, are the conditions to which, either sexual profligacy, or prolonged vagaries of imagination on that subject, are congenial. Busy men have no time for them, and ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... go for flowers. It is a sinful waste of time, and we have no use for them, since they do but litter everything. And thou wilt some day be called to account for these idle, frivolous moments." ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... a few days of brilliant weather— furious, hot sun, with passing clouds. Idle men and women, tired of the dullness and confinement of the flood season, begin to report, on returning from their morning bath, the cessation of the flow— as agoas estao paradas, "the waters have stopped." The muddy streets, in a few days, dry up; groups of young fellows are now seen seated ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... pikemen, and now and then a wagon went down some old-world street and lumbered through the gateway and out to the country, and now and then a wagon drew up to the city from the mist that was rolling with evening over the fields. Sometimes folks put their heads out of lattice windows, sometimes some idle troubadour seemed to sing, and nobody hurried or troubled about anything. Airy and dizzy though the distance was, for Mr. Sladden seemed higher above the city than any cathedral gargoyle, yet one clear detail he obtained as a clue: the banners ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... future, or fostering their growth, or actually contriving their appearance. Such is man's first industrial habit, seen in grazing, agriculture, and mining. Among nature's products are also those of man's own purposeless and imitative activity, results of his idle ingenuity and restlessness. Some of these, like nature's other random creations, may chance to have some utility. They may then become conspicuous to reflection, be strengthened by the relations which they establish in life, and be henceforth called works of human art. They then constitute ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... serious character was not at all adapted to such conversation, and who, still occupied with the importance of the scene he had just witnessed and the great interests which had been discussed, made no answer to this torrent of idle words. He looked at the Duc de Bouillon with an astonished air, as if to ask him whether this was really the man whom they were going to place at the head of the most audacious enterprise that had ever been launched; while the Prince, without appearing to perceive that he remained unanswered, ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... by reason of their having indulged idle fancies, are led into curious blunders. Others, having indulged in exaggerated ideas of married life, say to themselves, as soon as they have taken a husband, "What! Is this all?" In every way, the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... be sent to a missionary family among the distant heathen. Seaming, stitching, piecing, quilting and knitting, kept every hand busy, while their owners' tongues were equally so, yet the conversation was not the common, idle talk of the day, but useful and elevating, for religion was loved, and lived, by most of those dear and pleasant people, and it could not but be spoken of. Still there was interest in each other's welfare, as their social ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... opinions of their own respecting the Tracts and Mr. Newman. He took his degree, and then started himself in the world upon that career which is of all the most difficult to follow with respect and self-comfort. He proposed to himself the life of an idle man with a moderate income,—a life which should be luxurious, refined, and graceful, but to which should be attached the burden of no necessary occupation. His small estate gave him but little to do, as he would not farm any portion of his own ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... pardon, friend. Methought the query was prompted by idle curiosity. By a great oversight my driver forgot to put his box of tools in the wagon, so that when the accident occurred he was obliged to ride on to the next tavern for help. I doubt not but that he ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... his hearers by the force and impressiveness of his oratory. The presence of this extraordinary stranger could not remain long unknown to the Athenian literati; but, when they entered into conversation with him, some of them were disposed to ridicule him as an idle talker, whilst others seemed inclined to denounce him as a dangerous innovator. "Certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered him; and some said—What will this babbler say? other some—He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods, because he preached ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... instead of the cloth one he had worn in the morning—he had a single white japonica in his buttonhole—his face was pale and his eyes unusually brilliant. He looked his best—I admitted it, and could readily understand how an idle, pleasure-seeking feminine animal might be easily attracted by the purely physical beauty of his form and features. I spoke a part ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Barge, late Senior Fellow of St. Michael's, thinks that his pretty bride has not been received with due honours; or Dr. Crotchet is for years kept out of his destined bishopric by a sinister influence; or Mr. Professor Carraway has been infamously shown up, in the Edinburgh, by an idle fellow whom he plucked in the schools; or (majora movemus) three colleges interchange a mortal vow of opposition to a fourth; or the young working Masters conspire against the Heads. Now, however, we ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... passion may rage with great intensity when the soul takes its first long flight in the world of books, and ninety per cent of all Conradi's cases showed it. Of these, thirty-two per cent read to have the feelings stirred and the desire of knowledge was a far less frequent motive. Some read to pass idle time, others to appear learned or to acquire a style or a vocabulary. Romance led. Some specialized, and with some the appetite was omnivorous. Some preferred books about or addressed to children, some fairy tales, and some ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... interlaced hedge of vines bordered the clearing. Toward this Gavin bent his idle steps, wondering vaguely how such a lofty and impenetrable wall of vine was supported from the ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... started to his feet. He could not help understanding the colonel's meaning. It would have been idle to pretend it. ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... might be, a base at one place would not meet our necessities, and a base at the other place would. If a base at Guantanamo would not meet our necessities in case of an invasion of the Caribbean by a naval fleet superior to ours, then it seems idle to discuss the value of Guantanamo relative to some other place, no matter how good the position of Guantanamo may be, and no matter how nearly it may approximate to adequacy. There is no real usefulness in having a naval base anywhere, unless ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... got there, and how I got away at all from the Polytechnic candidate, he may perhaps know, for I don't. The moon shone upon the floor where the box lay open, and the dolls all in a confusion together—great and small all scattered about; but I was not idle. Out of bed I jumped, and into the box they had all to go, some on their heads, some on their feet, and I shut down the lid and seated myself upon the box. 'Now you'll just have to stay there,' said I, 'and I shall beware how I wish you flesh and blood again.' I felt quite light, my good humour ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... motherhood upon a married woman in absolute despite of her health and of the interests of the children is none the less an iniquity because it has at present the approval of Church and State. It is woman who bears the great burden of parenthood, and with her the decision must rest. It is idle to reply that this is impossible, for it is possible, as there are not a few happy wives throughout the civilized world to bear testimony. Every new life that comes into being is to be regarded as sacred from the first. The accident of birth at a particular stage in its development does not ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... royal warrant, received in 1830. It now became necessary to ascertain disputed titles. It was proposed by some to establish them by a general act: against this course Mr. A. Stephen protested, and pointed out consequences, that proved his objections were just. Many of these illustrate the idle and fraudulent manner in which the public business is often transacted. A grant issued in 1823, gave one side-line 32 acres, written over an erasure. An investigation took place: a record book kept ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... grown at any time that the soil is not occupied by other crops, provided other conditions are suitable. Land which is used for spring and summer crops often lies bare and idle during fall and winter. A hardy green manure crop planted after the summer crop is harvested will make considerable growth during the fall and early spring, and this can be plowed under for the use of the following summer crops. If there is a long interval of time during spring ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... he or I will be standing at my door. It is as well that you should look carefully round, before you enter, so as to be sure there is no one in the corridor, and that you can slip in unobserved. You may be sure that I am asking you to come for no idle freak, but because I have something very important to ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... "A thousand idle stories have been related concerning the Emperor's motives for breaking the bonds he had contracted upwards of fifteen years before, and separating from one who was the partner of his life during the most stormy events of his glorious career. It ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... superior to all other bliss; and many other points. Now, all at once, the clause 'from whence speech returns' is said to mean that neither speech nor mind applies to Brahman, and that thus there are no means whatever of knowing Brahman! This is idle talk indeed! In the clause '(that) from which speech returns,' the relative pronoun 'from which' denotes bliss; this bliss is again explicitly referred to in the clause 'knowing the bliss of Brahman'—the genitive 'of Brahman' ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... my son, take my advice. Avoid The places where thou seest much drapery, Colours, and gold, and plumes, and heraldries, And such new-fanglements. But, above all, Take care how evil chance or youthful wandering Bring thee upon the house of Idle Babble." "What place is that?" said I; and he resumed;— "Enchantresses dwell there, who make one see Things as they are not, ay and hear them too. That which shall seem pure diamond and fine gold Is glass and brass; and coffers that ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... an old adage, that "when the devil finds a man idle, he sets him to work;" when love finds a heart unoccupied, he soon finds it a tenant, for it always has been, is now, and always ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... said something to the same effect," observed the doctor; "but the captain remarks that there are many wild, idle boys sent to sea who may claim to be the sons of gentlemen; and as your appearance shows, as you acknowledge was the case, that you were before the mast, there you must continue till your conduct proves that you are deserving of a higher rank. And now go for'ard. I'll recollect what you have ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... will do most of the butchering, and transport the meat and hides to camp. If there is no band of buffalo near by, they go off, singly or by twos and threes, to still-hunt scattering buffalo, or deer, or elk, or such other game as may be found. The women remaining in camp are not idle. All day long they tan robes, dry meat, sew moccasins, and perform a thousand and one other tasks. The young men who have stayed at home carefully comb and braid their hair, paint their faces, and, if the weather is pleasant, ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... barn, and I engaged a man to put a string of wire above the wall. That was effective as long as it was in repair. But it was Mis' Cow's business to see that it did not remain in repair permanently. She would examine it during idle moments, pick out a weak spot in the entanglement, and pull it flat with her horns. Or where the wall was broad enough at the top she would climb up and walk it, just for exercise, stepping over when she got ready. If she could have been persuaded to do those things to order I could have ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... jus' 's well be a warnin' to you too, f'r I was put off three miles from where there ain't no omnibus, 'n' I had to leg it over a road 's is laid out three hills to the mile. I ain't one 's is give to idle words, but I will remark 't by the time I'd clum the fourth hill I hadn't no kind o' family feelin's left alive within me, 'n' when I did finally get to Knoxville I was so nigh to puffed out 't I c'd hardly find breath to ask where Cousin Marion did live. It was a boy ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... the general stile of Mr. Wherry's letters, they too much talk of government affairs. It is our duty to take care of the Smyrna trade, as well as all other, and it never has yet been neglected; but Great Britain, extensive as her navy is, cannot afford to have one ship lay idle. Be assured, my dear Sir Sidney, of my perfect esteem and regard, and do not let any one persuade you to the contrary: but my character is, that I will not suffer the smallest tittle of my command to be taken from me. But, with pleasure, I give way to my friends; among ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... it will, no doubt, be admitted by most readers that the reason why they know their friends and foes better than they know anyone else is that they carry the remembrance of them not only in their eyes, but in their whole body. When in idle moments we find the memory of an absent friend surging up in our minds with no apparent reason, we may often note, to our astonishment, that we have just been unconsciously adopting one of his characteristic attitudes, or imitating ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... "You ask me idle questions," she sighed. "We have gone, perhaps, a little further than I intended. I came to plead with you for all our sakes, if I could, to make things more comfortable by remaining here instead of insisting upon ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... showers over the frozen fields and through the naked woods of Bacchus Island. The short day was nearing a dismal close. Harman Blennerhassett paced uneasily to and fro within the narrow confines of his study. His face was haggard, his general aspect that of a man harassed and hopeless. Yet he seemed idle and without sense of responsibility for the future. His air indicated irresolution, ennui, mild disgust of the world and of himself. He took down Homer, brushed the dust from the covers, and then replaced the volume on its shelf. He gave the glass cylinder ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... During his first idle day, Harry's attention was drawn to a handbill which had been posted up in the store, the post office, the tavern, and other public places in the village. ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... But all this is idle talk. My brain is a wilderness, and I thirst for a long, long sleep, to awake only when my arms are around you. Write to me very precisely, also whether you are inclined, after a little stay at Zurich, to go with ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... Justice is a thing absolute; it is not altered by circumstances, especially for a circumstance so trivial as a young man's idle fancy." ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... immediately to the camp. During his absence I was abundantly occupied, and anxious that Mr. Poole and Mr. Browne should have a little rest after their late journey. Both those gentlemen were however too interested in the service in which they were engaged to remain idle when they could be usefully employed. Mr. Poole went out with me on the 5th and 6th to assist in the measurement of the new base line I had deemed it prudent to run, for the purpose, as I have said, of correcting ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... to the south of that cape was utterly unfit for the habitation of mankind, sterile, burnt up, and destitute of soil and water, like the sandy deserts of Lybia; and they pretended to object on principles of patriotism, that the natives of Portugal were improvidently wasted on idle discoveries, which, if at all advisable, would have been undertaken by their former, wise sovereigns; who, contented with the known world, did not, vainly seek for conquests in the torrid zone, which was altogether ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... "Idle fancies, monsieur. I do not laugh at you, although I am a Gascon. And, as for being indifferent, if I were so, I should have sent you about your business a quarter of an hour ago, for you would make a man who was out of his senses with delight as dull as possible, ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Lowell always stayed at Elmwood, in an impassioned love for his home and for his town. I must have found him there in the afternoon, and he must have made me sup with him (dinner was at two o'clock) and then go with him for a long night of talk in his study. He liked to have some one help him idle the time away, and keep him as long as possible from his work; and no doubt I was impersonally serving his turn in this way, aside from any pleasure he might have had in my company as some one he had always been kind to, and as a fresh arrival from ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... your Majesty's time with idle words," said the Abbe, glancing at a written memorandum which he held in his hand. "My master, King Louis, sends greeting to his royal brother, and hopes that no cause of difference may ever arise to darken the blue sky of peace that now ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... allow himself to remain idle many minutes. The fractured front of the craft being immovably fixed in the bank, he leaned his head over the side and washed the paint from his face. He disliked to disfigure himself in that fashion, though he always carried the stuff ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... nations. Honour, too, to our King, and, that I may be just, to his illustrious wife; for wherever in the Grecian world a friend of the Muses appears, whether he is investigator, poet, architect, sculptor, artist, actor, or singer, he is drawn to Alexandria, and, that he may not be idle, work is provided. Palaces spring from ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the insinuating air he knew so well how to assume. Miss Hyslop took but little notice of him when he addressed her, and turned away, giving her attention to Bella's lessons, or going on with any work she might have in hand, for she never was a moment idle. She was admirably fitted for colonial life; indeed, I may say, for any position in which she might be placed. If she had become a duchess, she would not have been an idle one.—I again addressed Mr Kydd. I told him that the captain wished to have ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... forms the subject of the first is no idle piece of subtle argument, but a consideration of such decidedly practical importance that it comes up whenever the plan of pushing War to the utmost extremity is mooted, and by its weight in most cases restrains the execution of ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... had—temporized. The war, unfortunately, must be delayed for those twenty days necessary for the going and coming of the ambassadors. The ambassadors could do nothing. But still they must wait. In the mean time he will not be idle. For them, the Roman people, he will work and watch with all his experience, with diligence almost above his strength, to repay them for their faith in him. When Caesar was with them they had had no choice but obedience—so much the times ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... tribute in kind. You will observe the necessary system in taxing them, and will execute whatever decision is reached about the matter; moreover you will inform me of what is being done, and will always be careful to see that the Indians work in some occupation or other and be not idle, since idleness is the chief cause of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume XI, 1599-1602 • Various
... naturally, riding was delightful to her cousin. Jacqueline was never tired of it; while she paid as little attention to the absurd remarks Oscar made to her between their gallops as a girl does at a ball to the idle words of her partner. She supposed it was his custom to talk in that manner—a sort of rough gallantry—but with the best intentions. Jacqueline was disposed to look upon her life at Fresne as a feast after a long famine. Everything was to her taste, the whole appearance ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... people among themselves. By these means, from being temporary they became perpetual; from elective, hereditary; and the state, agitated by the intrigues of the ambitious, by largesses from the rich and factious, by the venality of the poor and idle, by the influence of orators, by the boldness of the wicked, and the weakness of the virtuous, was convulsed with all the inconveniences ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... should there be delay? Amy wished nothing but to become his wife. Idle to think of his doing any more work until he sat down in the home of which she was mistress. His brain burned with visions of the books he would henceforth write, but his hand was incapable of anything ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... to find himself thus situated in a House of Commons which had just been elected, and from which it would therefore be idle to appeal to the electors, he would instantly resign his office, and his adversaries would take his place. The change would be most advantageous to the public, even if we suppose his successor to be both less virtuous and less ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... marching to the relief of Washington before Philadelphia, as he was ordered, kept his victorious troops idle at Saratoga; and it was only by the extraordinary tact of Alexander Hamilton, the youthful aide, secretary, and counsellor of Washington, who had been sent North for the purpose, that the return of Morgan ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... justice to his fellow-subjects: it is principally with this order of men that the commission of the peace is filled. And here a very ample field is opened for a gentleman to exert his talents, by maintaining good order in his neighbourhood; by punishing the dissolute and idle; by protecting the peaceable and industrious; and, above all, by healing petty differences and preventing vexatious prosecutions. But, in order to attain these desirable ends, it is necessary that the magistrate ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... the heavy work and drudgery about camp, and it troubled Bob not a little to see them working while the men were idle. Several times he attempted to help them, but his efforts were met with such a storm of protestations and disapproval, not only from the men, but the women ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... again? It would be like a new life to spend a day with you. How I shudder when I think of our awful experience with those mobs last winter, and yet even now I long for action." Miss Anthony was equally restive in her own seclusion which, although by no means an idle one, had shut her from the great outside world that at this hour seemed to cry aloud for the best service of every man and woman. In January, 1862, she went to Mrs. Stanton's and together they prepared an address for the State Anti-Slavery ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... as Pythagoras imagined he had been Panthoides Enphorbus in the Trojan war, I am not sure that I did not ride upon a pillion behind a gentleman-usher, when her Majesty Elizabeth went in procession to St. Paul's on the defeat of the Armada! Adieu! the postman puts an end to idle speculations—but, Scarborough ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... individuals over whom he was so mercilessly tyrannising, while each thought himself the tyrant. All this may seem improbable to well-nurtured, shore-bred young gentlemen and ladies; but midshipmen were always reckless and idle—that is, personally. On actual service, they have ever been equally reckless, but commensurably active. This kindness of Joshua, in taking all trouble off our hands, soon left us almost nothing wherewith to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... of God Almighty. We are not children but men, you know that all must die; and in a few years those who kill us must die too. When I was born, God set the way of my death; I do not blame any body. I was taken by the pirates and they made me help them; they would not let me be idle. I could not show that this was the truth, and therefore they have judged me by the people they have found me with. I am put to death unjustly, but I blame nobody. It was my misfortune. Come, let us pray. If we are innocent, so much the less we have to repent. I do not come here ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... was, before the Revolution, a journeyman printer, and married to a washerwoman, whose industry and labour alone prevented him from starving, for he was as vicious as idle. The money he gained when he chose to work was generally squandered away in brothels, among prostitutes. To supply his excesses he had even recourse to dishonest means, and was shut up in the prison of Bicetre for robbing his master of types and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... crowned with a mass of grayish hair, surmounted a monster body. The voice, when it came, did justice to such a frame. "My old one, my friend, Letonne! Thou art well come. Thou art the saving grace to an idle hour." ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... all the delicate magnificence of leaf tracery and flower petal and feather, soft fur and the shining wonder of living skin, musical with thunder and the singing of birds; but an arena nevertheless, an arena which offers no seats for idle spectators, in which one must will and do, decide, strike and strike ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... boys," he said. "The fleet is in good formation." He paused as he settled back in his chair. "But I'm not the one who believes in idle hands. I've assigned you to Professor Sykes. He needs help in charting the unexplored regions of space we're approaching. And you three need that kind of training. Report to ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... a tailor; for I always envied the comfortable seat which they appeared to enjoy upon the shopboard, and their elevated position, which enabled them to look down upon the constant succession of the idle or the busy, who passed in review before them in the main street of the country town, near to which I passed the first fourteen years of ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... hope I shall now and then have their company. They being gone, I to my office till towards twelve o'clock, and then home and to bed. Upon the 'Change, this day, I saw how uncertain the temper of the people is, that, from our discharging of about 200 that lay idle, having nothing to do, upon some of our ships, which were ordered to be fitted for service, and their works are now done, the towne do talk that the King discharges all his men, 200 yesterday and 800 to-day, and that now he hath got L100,000 in his hand, he values not ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... his Karma, and extricate himself from an evil doom, and the evil Karma may be expiated in various ways. Accordingly, O good Brahmana, I am charitable, truthful, assiduous in attending on my superior, full of respect towards regenerate Brahmanas, devoted to and free from pride and (idle) excessive talk. Agriculture is considered to be a praiseworthy occupation, but it is well-known that even there, great harm is done to animal life; and in the operation of digging the earth with the plough, numberless creatures lurking in the ground as also various ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... there is always the alternative that he will starve. France, which is most accessible to creative ideas, is least interested in this particular matter. Great Britain is still heavily conservative. It is idle to ignore the forces still entrenched in the established church, in the universities and the great schools, that stand for an irrational resistance to all new things. American universities are comparatively youthful and sometimes quite ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... him. Some having to do with the earliest days of his childhood; some with fighting on the Danube, before he left the army, impoverished and ashamed; some with idle hours in the North Tower in Stavely Castle; and one with the day he and his sister left the old castle, never to return, and looked back upon it from the top of Farcalladen Moor, waving a "God bless you" to it. The thought of his sister filled him with a desire, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "is an assembly of seven hundred and thirty-five tyrants. While I have four inches of iron I will not suffer it to reign and shed blood with the revolutionary tribunal it has just created; as for the republic," he added, "it is an idle word. I had faith in it for three days. Since Jemappes, I have deplored all the successes I obtained in so bad a cause. There is only one way to save the country—that is, to re-establish the constitution of 1791, and a ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... time were the Emperor and his young "Confucius" idle? By no means. They had hatched a counterplot, and had decided that what they could not do by moral suasion and statesmanship they would do by force, and so they sent an order to Yuan Shih-kai, who as we have said had drilled and was in charge of 12,500 of the best troops in the empire, urging ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... by his suggestions, I studied the letter I had just received. It was merely an idle fancy, for if Mrs. Cunningham was going to tell Miss Lloyd her story, it made little difference to me what might be her stature or the color of her hair. But, probably because of Parmalee's suggestion, I pictured ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... accent, appeared to be a Canadian of Irish parentage, said, in a few curt words, that he had a cart outside, and was going to drive at once to Cloud Island, that he wished to take the young doctor with him; for death, he observed, was not sitting idle eating his dinner at The Cloud, and if anyone was coming to do battle with him it would be ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... the midshipmen and youngsters, to the number of nearly thirty, could not be in a better situation for obtaining a knowledge of practical seamanship. We soon found that the activity of our captain would not allow us an idle hour, and there was so much kindness of heart, and cheerfulness of manner, blended with daring exertion in the performance of his duties, that we were all happy to imitate his example to the best of our abilities. In the course ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... have changed for the better in the eyes of the coral-fisher, his lot still remains hard enough, even in the present days of grace; whilst any employment that saps the workman's strength during the hot summer months and leaves him idle or unemployed in winter time cannot well be described as a desirable trade. Yet the temptation to obtain a considerable sum of money in advance, as is the case in this particular industry, often proves overwhelming to the young man of the Torres or of Castellamare, imprudently married before he ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... not pay any attention to such idle tales," said the doctor, well pleased, however, to find that his patient could afford to pay for ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... make cowards of us all! I was so downcast by my pitiful mismanagement of the morning's business that I shrank from the eye of my own hired infant, and read offensive meanings into his idle tootling. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chief justice or adelantado under the marquis, and Antonio Picado who had been his secretary, to be taken into custody[2]. In the next place he appointed Juan Tello, Francisco de Chaves[3], and one Sotelo to be captains of his troops. On the news of this revolution, all the idle vagabonds and debauched blackguards of the country hastened to enrol themselves under the banners of Don Diego, in hopes of participating in the plunder of the partizans of Pizarro, and of being enabled to live licentiously without labour. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... understand such an expression, gentlemen? I cannot; it must be looked up in a dictionary before one can understand it; these things of a bygone day are already unintelligible to us). He appears to have been one of those Russian parasites who lead an idle existence abroad, spending the summer at some spa, and the winter in Paris, to the greater profit of the organizers of public balls. It may safely be said that the manager of the Chateau des Fleurs (lucky man!) pocketed at least a third of the money paid by Russian peasants to their lords ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... it will be perceived, is but little practised in the ways of literature; much less is he gifted with that prophetic spirit which can anticipate the judgment of the public. It may be that he is too idle or too apathetic to think anxiously or much about the matter; and yet he has been amused, in his earlier days, at watching the first appearance of such few books as he believed to be the production of some powerful intellect. He has seen people slowly rise up to them, ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... reward than my foal, for it has not its like in the world, and is not to be bought for love or money; for it can go from one end of the earth to another in a few minutes. Of course the cunning Corva will do her best to dissuade you from taking the foal, and will tell you that it is both idle and sickly; but do not believe her, and ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... played at it in every city in Europe, without, however, the care or the wish to study the Theory of Chances—that philosopher's stone of all gamblers! And a gambler, in the strict sense of the word, I had never been. I was heart-whole from the corroding passion for play. My gaming was a mere idle amusement. I never resorted to it by necessity, because I never knew what it was to want money. I never practised it so incessantly as to lose more than I could afford, or to gain more than I could coolly pocket without being thrown off ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... also, its perceptions and its sympathies, it will be entirely deficient in expression of character, and acuteness of thought, but will be peculiarly restless, manifesting its desire for excitement in idle changes of subject and purpose. Incapable of true imagination, it will seek to supply its place by exaggerations, incoherencies, and monstrosities; and the form of the grotesque to which it gives ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... making them look in the least like their English equivalents, if equivalents they may be said to have. Was it there that Mr. Parsons learned so well how Americans would like England to appear? I ask this idle question simply because the England of his pencil, and not less of his brush (of his eminent brush there would be much to say), is exactly the England that the American imagination, restricted to itself, constructs from the poets, the novelists, from all the ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... tell each other in a lane, it would be a parallel case to the publication of some of the Browning Letters. Why the serious and universal portions of those Letters could not be published without those which are to us idle and unmeaning it is difficult to understand. Our wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... to credit the idle tales you hear of Natty; he has a kind of natural right to gain a livelihood in these mountains; and if the idlers in the village take it into their heads to annoy him, as they sometimes do reputed rogues, they shall find him protected by the strong ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... the nation, the actual Nation; they were about all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respect-worthy, and to subtract them would have been to subtract the Nation and leave behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world. And yet, by ingenious contrivance, this gilded minority, instead of being in the tail of the procession where it belonged, was marching head up and banners ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sorry to see the other day a very large bill upon a quarter hitherto so respectable. We are aware that its exposed condition gives every one a handle against it, and we are, therefore, the more circumspect in giving currency to every idle rumour. We should be no less sorry to see Aldgate Pump stop from external causes, than to know that it had been swamped by its own excessive issues. Though as yet quite above water, it is feared that it will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 25, 1841 • Various
... to pay servants," she persisted, "why should I idle about the house? Why should not I, an able-bodied person, be out helping in the world's work somehow—and also helping you ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... not at all like his new benefice; his parishioners were evidently idle, ill-disposed people, doing no credit to the ministry of the deceased incumbent; and looking with eyes any thing but respectful and affectionate upon their new pastor. In short, he foresaw a host of troubles; although he had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... samphire,—dreadful trade! Methinks he seems no bigger than his head: The fishermen, that walk upon the beach, Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark, Diminished to her cock; her cock, a buoy Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge, That on th' unnumbered idle pebbles chafes, Cannot be heard so high.—I'll look no more, Lest my brain turn, and the ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... through the cracks, and an ever-present fear lest they should suddenly fly open with "impetuous recoil, grating harsh thunder" on their wheels, and not exactly letting Satan in, but everything in the room fall out; an idle fear, for they can only be shoved asunder by dint of much pushing and pulling, especially if they are warped by having one side exposed to more heat than the other, as usually happens. Being at last opened ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... letter very much, and am so glad you keep "office hours." It is very good of you not to be angry with my good advice! "Experientia does it," as Mr. 'Aughton would say.... I break down about once in three months like clockwork—from sheer overwork. I certainly am never happy idle; but I have too often to sit in sackcloth in the depths of my heart—whilst everybody is beseeching me to be "idle"—from a consciousness that, not from doing nothing, but by doing B when I should have done A, and C ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... long, long summer hours, The golden light should lie, And thick young herbs and groups of flowers Stand in their beauty by. The oriole should build and tell His love-tale, close beside my cell; The idle butterfly Should rest him there, and there be heard ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... several times he found the official was abroad. Leon Berthelini began to grow quite a familiar figure in the streets of Castel-le-Gachis; he became a local celebrity, and was pointed out as "the man who was looking for the Commissary." Idle children attached themselves to his footsteps, and trotted after him back and forward between the hotel and the office. Leon might try as he liked; he might roll cigarettes, he might straddle, he might cock his hat at a dozen different jaunty inclinations - the part of Almaviva ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... vanity of a little brief authority has before now tempted subordinate officers to hint at weaknesses on the part of their superiors. Ignorance of war and of the situation has induced them to criticise and to condemn; and idle words, greedily listened to, and quickly exaggerated, may easily destroy the confidence of the soldiery in the ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... the headman of that kraal?" I asked of one of the Kafirs who had collected round us in our trouble, as such idle ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... sounded now like the buzzing of a swarm of bees, magnified a thousand times. And then the field was full of men, rushing from the inn. He wondered how they could have been concealed there. But such wonder was idle, and he did not think of it. Instead he watched keenly. First one monstrous aerial battleship came to rest on the earth. At once the men in the field surrounded her, seizing the ropes that were flung out, and ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston
... Indians away from their huts. Their settlement they named Jamestown. The early colonists of Virginia were not very well fitted for such a work. Some of them were gentlemen who had never labored with their hands; others were poor, idle fellows whose only wish was to do nothing whatever. There were a few energetic men among them as Ratcliffe, Archer, and Smith. But these spent most of their time in exploring the bay and the rivers, in hunting for gold, and in quarreling ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... conception of its blessedness, some half-waking desires to become a standard-bearer in the hottest of the fight with the foes of God,—a minister or missionary of the Cross, so as to labor more efficiently in saving souls. But in your circumstances you find it an idle wish. Do you hence smother these kindling emotions and fold your hands in despair? The Gospel may be preached by your alms. There are many links in the chain of influences which God employs in rescuing sinners ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... of the relation of war to human instincts, on the one hand, and to human ideals, on the other, is the issue about which most recent observation and discussion has centered. It seems idle to assert that hostility has no roots in man's original nature. The concrete materials given in this chapter show beyond question how readily the wishes and the instincts of the person may take the form of the fighting ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... indeed, but its words were idle. For the Turks and their Mamelukes I have no great love. They prey upon the land, and enrich themselves at our expense; but the Franks would doubtless do the same, and I would rather be fleeced by those of the true faith ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... this is a queer thing about them: though our building is pocked with windows that are open by day seven months in the year, and though the air of the building is clean enough, save for the smell of the ink, yet at night, after the machines have been idle for many hours and are probably asleep, the place smells like the lair of wild animals. By day they are as clean as machines may be kept. And even in the days when David Lewis petted them and coddled them and gave them the core of his heart, they were speckless, and bright ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... consist in the truth which he possesses, or means to possess, but in the sincere pain which he hath taken to find it out. For his powers do not augment by possessing truth, but by investigating it, wherein consists his only perfectibility. Possession lulls the energy of man, and makes him idle and proud. If God held inclosed in his right hand absolute truth, and in his left only the inward lively impulse toward truth, and if He said to me: Choose! even at the risk of exposing mankind to continual erring, I most humbly would seize His left ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... talk from you, Thomas McDonagh, and it seemed The words were idle, but they grew To nobleness by death redeemed. Life cannot utter words more great Than life may meet by sacrifice, High words were equaled by high fate, You paid the price. You paid ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... gentleness and the wisdom of the domestic animals and the sadness which they feel when their master dies. But he has many other qualities that bring him much closer to humanity: he is treacherous, cruel, idle, greedy and quarrelsome; and, above all, he is ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... my idle curiosity—a curiosity which, in him, I had the moment before viewed both with suspicion and disgust; but so it was—I felt a desire to know who he could be who was neither lawyer nor preacher, and yet talked of his circuit with the gravity of both. How ridiculous, I thought to myself is this; ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... features were small, a heavy beard and mustache covered his face, his brow was low, and his eyes black and twinkling. A sharp, furtive glance which he gave at Brandon attracted the attention of the latter, for there was something in the glance that meant more than idle curiosity. ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... for the question. The ways of aristocratic ladies, whose idle hours often supply a field of labour for the Evil One, were perfectly well known to her; and she wondered a little sharply how far he was still unspoilt. The majority of big, strong, full-blooded young men in his place would assuredly have sipped the cup of pleasure pretty deeply ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... conception of inherited, personal rights. As the dinner dragged on, there occurred no further opportunity for talk until near the end, when suddenly the clear, even tones of Miss Hitchcock's voice brought his idle musing ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... "molendinum," the grinding-place. I do not know if actually the local name,[61] or Scott's invention. Compare Sir Piercie's "Molinaras." But at all events used here with by-sense of degradation of the formerly idle saints ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... his last meeting with Mary. The part he played in public affairs was as great, and the standing quarrel with the Court, and all those who favoured it, more acrimonious than ever, every slanderous tale that came on the idle winds of gossip being taken for granted, and the most hideous accusations made in the pulpit as well as in private places against the Queen and her lighthearted company. The principles, of such profound importance to the nation, which were undoubtedly involved, are discredited ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... things in their right places?" To his credit be it spoken, Mount Dunstan managed to say it as if in the mere putting together of idle words. What man likes to be reminded of his right place! No man wants to be put in his right place. There is always another place ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... loafer, a conscious loafer, not a simple loafer. Simple loafers lie on the stove and do nothing because they don't know how to do anything; they don't think about anything either, but you are a man of ideas—and yet you lie on the stove; you could do something—and you do nothing; you lie idle with a full stomach and look down from above and say, 'It's best to lie idle like this, because whatever people do, is ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... souls? What of her warning that she would drive her chosen ones by strange paths through doubt and need and danger and battle? Which of these had he encountered, beyond the vanished phantoms of idle hours passed in the cozy comfort of the Orient Express? "Never ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... There was no reason why Hilda should remain,—burning gas to no purpose. She had telegraphed, by favour of a Karkeek office-boy, to Miss Gailey, saying that she would come by the first train on the morrow—Saturday, and she had therefore much to do at home. Nevertheless, she sat idle in the office, unable to leave. Her whole life was in that office, and it was just when she was most weary of the environment that she would vacillate longest before quitting it. She was unhappy and apprehensive, much less about her mother than about the attitude of her conscience ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... weary of these interminable discussions and unending compliments, and glad of a respite in which to turn to other matters. But there were no idle hours in that august assembly, though it might chance that some whimsical phase of statesmanship lightened, by way of entr'acte, the severity of their deliberations. They were, possibly, not unpleasantly aware of the irony of the situation when a letter from their governor in Constantinople ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Legenden zu erkennen." This seems too positive an opinion of their untrustworthiness. It is agreed with, however, by Orelli (Introd.to Hab., Clarke's Transl.), who styles Bel and the Dragon, or at least the Habakkuk incident in it, "an idle story." A.B. Davidson also (Encyclop. Brit. ed. 9, II. 181) writes of it as being "completely fabulous;" and Ewald speaks of the episode of Habakkuk as an example of an unhistoric spirit, growing rapidly and dangerously ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... flower of thy beauty into the deep dust of defilement. Alas, what great evil have the sons and daughters of Khem wrought that the High Gods should have visited them with so sore a judgment! How long shall thy bright wings lie folded and idle, ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... or Stimson idle. To assist Stetson in his press-work, and to further the idea that all Europe was now clamoring for the "Rise and fall," Peter paid an impecunious but over-educated dragoman to translate it into five languages, and Stimson officially wrote ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... landing, sat the portress, a woman-angel of dark visage, leaning her shadowed brow on her idle hand. The children rushed upon her, covering her with caresses, and ere she understood, they had taken heaven by surprise, and were already in the city, still mounting the stair by the side of the descending torrent. ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... the camp. During his absence I was abundantly occupied, and anxious that Mr. Poole and Mr. Browne should have a little rest after their late journey. Both those gentlemen were however too interested in the service in which they were engaged to remain idle when they could be usefully employed. Mr. Poole went out with me on the 5th and 6th to assist in the measurement of the new base line I had deemed it prudent to run, for the purpose, as I have said, of correcting any previous ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... a thing absolute; it is not altered by circumstances, especially for a circumstance so trivial as a young man's idle fancy." ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... Saxon charter as granted by king Edgar in 973 to Thorney Abbey.—Collectanea Topographica, iv., 55.] The condition of military service attached to its manor will be found to have been often exacted, nor was the service in the grand hunt an idle form. Hunting came next to war in those days, as the occupation of the nobility and gentry. The clergy engaged in it equally with the laity. The hunting establishment of the Bishop of Durham was on a princely scale. He had his forests, chases and parks, with ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... however, that the charges against these men were proven. They were not dismissed because of idle hearsay, but because of absolute and convincing proof. The breath of scandal has assailed more than one ball player without any good and convincing reason, and will doubtless do so again, just as it has assailed private reputations of men in other walks of life. The breath ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... reporter I do not believe there was a week in which it was not heard from in the police reports, generally in connection with a crime of violence, a murder or a stabbing affray. It was usually on Sunday, when the Italians who lived there were idle and quarreled over their cards. Every fight was the signal for at least two more, sometimes a dozen, for they clung to their traditions and met all efforts of the police to get at the facts with their stubborn "fix him myself." And when the ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... her letters are more distinctly literary. She discusses modern realism with Flaubert, and play-writing with Dumas fils; and protests with passionate vehemence against the doctrine of L'art pour l'art. 'Art for the sake of itself is an idle sentence,' she writes; 'art for the sake of truth, for the sake of what is beautiful and good, that is the creed I seek.' And in a delightful letter to M. Charles Poncy she repeats the same idea very charmingly. 'People say that birds sing for the sake of singing, but I doubt it. They ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... glanced at the now enormous stack of pearl shells and at the tubs once more well filled with oysters, for the beachcomber had not let his men be idle. But the sight of the treasures of which they had been robbed only irritated the boy, and he turned away to forget it in encountering the grinning face of ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... and Spratt and Bigg did the same, but we found that the blacks had turned three or four while we could scarcely get over some of the smaller ones. We had another companion who showed that he had no wish to be idle. As soon as we began the onslaught on the creatures Solon commenced an attack on them also. As he had no handspike to turn them over, all he could do was to lay hold of their flappers, and to try to hold them till we came up; many a ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... to be so. Infinitely sadder is the sight of a mind which is falling to pieces by reason of the rust that has eaten into its very core. For rust must needs mean idleness—and no human intellect need be idle. So it had been with these two old ladies. Born in a wofully unintellectual age, they had never left a certain groove in life. When their brother married Christian Vellacott's grandmother, they had left his house in Honiton to go and live in Bodmin upon a limited but sufficient income. These "sufficient ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... most clearly in organic beings, plants and animals. Organisms, except the very lowest, are compounds of a number of different parts, each fulfilling a special function for the good of the whole. There is no idle constituent in an organic body, none without its function. What are called rudimentary organs, even if they serve no purpose in the individual, have their use in the species, or in some higher genus. In the animal there is no idle natural craving, or appetite. True, in the individual, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... did not remain long idle in their new position. In the First Month, 1827, they received a "minute" for visiting the meetings in their Monthly Meeting; and in the Second Month they commenced a tour amongst the meetings in some other parts of Yorkshire. ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... Indiana, and Illinois centers of wealth and production, and when the wonderful Northwestern country embracing the States of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, was so rapidly opened up and brought nearer to the Eastern markets, the Vanderbilt railroad interests were not idle. The original genius, Cornelius Vanderbilt, was soon gathered to his fathers, but his son, William H. Vanderbilt, was in ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... It was all idle and strangely empty, and yet hard to understand. She would have been much surprised if she could have guessed how much its emptiness interested other people in Rome; how the dowagers chattered about her over their tea, abusing her mother and all her relations for ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the slush he said to himself: "I guess it's up the river for mine.... By God, it's a shame, for I'm feeling pretty good, too, and that's no idle quip!... Old Squills handed out a line of talk all right-o!... He landed it, too.... I ought to find ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... governors (gunshi) in their provinces, although this evil system had been prohibited in the time of Gemmyo. In connexion, too, with the rice collected for public purposes, there were abuses. This rice, so long as it lay in the official storehouses, represented so much idle capital. The provincial governors utilized it by lending the grain to the farmers in the spring, partly for seed purposes and partly for food, on condition that it should be paid back in the autumn with fifty per cent, increment. Subsequently this exorbitant figure ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... into bundles, and Alice thoughtfully bought a pennyworth of pins. Of course it was idle to suppose that we could go through the village in our gipsy clothes without exciting ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... regulates and watches their perilous course through the intricate ford of a deep river, or stands upon some solitary hill to reconnoitre the trackless country and select the line along which the motley assemblage is to pass. He is now an idle unoccupied gentleman, the inhabitant of a boarding-house, with no object in the world before him; but ere long the plans of fresh achievements and speculations are sketched out. You see a muster of bearded weather-beaten men, carrying short-handled ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... replenished. With the aid of its content, a newspaper, and some skimming of the cream of the pie-stock, Flora got through the remainder of the day in perfect good humour; though occasionally embarrassed by the consequences of an idle rumour which circulated among the credulous infants of the neighbourhood, to the effect that an old lady had sold herself to the pie-shop to be made up, and was then sitting in the pie-shop parlour, declining to complete her contract. This attracted so many young persons of both sexes, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... I got away at all from the Polytechnic candidate, he may perhaps know, for I don't. The moon shone upon the floor where the box lay open, and the dolls all in a confusion together—great and small all scattered about; but I was not idle. Out of bed I jumped, and into the box they had all to go, some on their heads, some on their feet, and I shut down the lid and seated myself upon the box. 'Now you'll just have to stay there,' said I, 'and I shall beware how I wish you flesh and blood again.' ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... merely as a matter of idle curiosity and without prejudice to the question of the five francs, whether the mother of your children is your ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... a light rifle. It was but the work of a moment to unsling and level it. The sharp crack followed, and the ball impinged between the monster's eyes, glancing harmlessly from his hard skull as though it had been a plate of steel. The shot was an idle one, perhaps worse; for, stung to madness with the stunning shock, the reptile sprang far out into the water, and ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... emoluments that might accumulate during the period of their apprenticeships, I would suggest, in order to mark that due gradation which in every well regulated society must necessarily exist in the scale of rewards to be accorded to such as may be subordinate or refractory,—industrious, or idle; that these latter encouragements should only be extended in this double ratio to those who might quit the establishment with a certificate of ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... to some poor ship close locked in water dense and dark and vile The wind comes garrulous from afar and sets the idle masts a-quiver; And ev'n to her so foully docked, swift as the sun's first beam at dawn The sea-bird comes and like a star wheels by and ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... Pencroft, "are we not going back to work? Let Mount Franklin smoke, groan, bellow, or spout forth fire and flame as much as it pleases, that is no reason why we should be idle! Come, Ayrton, Neb, Herbert, Captain Harding, Mr. Spilett, every one of us must turn to at our work to-day! We are going to place the keelson, and a dozen pair of hands would not be too many. Before two months ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... for a babbling girl? I love your mother better than you do, or this brat of yours would not be here. I shall not bring her gray hairs down with sorrow to the grave. I shall speak of this villany to but one person; and to him I shall talk with this, and not with the idle tongue." And he tapped his sword-hilt with a ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... home trying to think of a way of bringing their plan to a successful issue, and so doing something, at least, towards the diffusion of a better spirit among the people. She could not bear the thought of being idle while there was a vague possibility of the slightest improvement being made in the present aspect of affairs. But her brain seemed willing to turn to anything but that, and she found herself as far off as ever from any settlement by ...
— Hollowmell - or, A Schoolgirl's Mission • E.R. Burden
... Many of our animals are domesticated and trained to do light services, but as for servants of our own flesh and blood, no such class exists. We all share whatever work there is, and no labor is menial. Whatever I ask others to do I am glad to do for them when occasion offers. Do not suppose we are idle. There is work for us, but with our abundant strength and continual good health it is never a burden. Then there are the duties connected with our higher life and education, for we are ever seeking to fit ourselves for a still better existence ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... be laborious in reading and study, and yet idle in business and action, it groweth from some weakness of body or softness of spirit, such as Seneca speaketh of: Quidam tam sunt umbratiles, ut putent in turbido esse quicquid in luce est; and not of learning: well may it be that such a point of a man's nature may make him give ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... was put out, so that, had my curiosity been idle, my purpose could not be accomplished. To retire from this scene, neither curiosity nor benevolence would permit. That some mortal injury had been intended was apparent. What greater mischief had befallen, or whether greater ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... inquiry it is to be preferred to that other which it confutes, and according to which, as has been said, the world appears doubly incomprehensible. But it is in the very nature of things that we cannot on this point come to any clear conclusion, and all further words on the subject are idle—and so, 'Ignorabimus.'" ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... was lonely and idle, and because I dreaded inexpressibly going back to my still house, I went with her. Her ways were a kind of entertainment, and I remember that I believed my leisure to ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... Nor was the archbishop idle at this time. He proceeded to give rules to the new Audiencia as to the manner in which it was to conduct itself, declaring that recourse to it in cases of fuerza and banishment was faulty; and a little later, when urged to absolve Governor Vargas, he replied that ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... "I should rather call his house a school or university of Christian religion, for there is none therein but readeth or studieth the liberal sciences; their special care is piety and virtue; there is no quarreling or intemperate words heard; none are seen idle; which household that worthy gentleman doth not govern, but with all courteous benevolence." The servant men abode on one side of the house, the women on the other, and met at prayer time or on Church festivals, when More would ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... Oyer and Terminer and Jail-Delivery usually holden in London in a Year, many of which, through the great Number of Prisoners try'd, continue four or five Days successively; during which time, the Old-Bailey-Yard is crouded with an idle disorderly Crew of Persons of both Sexes, who have no other Business but to obstruct those who have any unwish'd for Avocation to the Place——In one Corner stands a Circle, compos'd of, perhaps, a Baker's-Boy, a Journeyman-Shoemaker, a Butcher's-'Prentice, ...
— The Tricks of the Town: or, Ways and Means of getting Money • John Thomson
... said, "you are a rich, idle fellow; De Rochemont, and we want rich, idle fellows to come and look into all this and do something for us. You must let me take you with me ...
— Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... years devoted to limiting the acreage which any one person could buy or lease, and to ensuring that any person acquiring land should himself live thereon, and should use and improve it, and not leave it lying idle until the spread of population enabled him to sell it at a profit to some monopolist or, more often, some genuine farmer. As early as 1856 Otago had set the example of insisting on an outlay of 30s. an acre in improvement by each purchaser of public land. Gradually ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... ever sat by the seashore playing with pebbles in an idle mood? You are not aiming at anything, you are much too lazy to aim; but some god directs your arm, and, without thinking, you hit something that, ten to one, you never would have hit if you had ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... bring back the French and Belgian wounded. I wish I could have gone with him, for we seem so useless here now that our soldiers are well, and the days are long, since the wild excitement of a giant army on the wing has cooled down. "On the wing" is not an idle expression when we remember those forced marches and how they lashed the poor artillery horses which galloped and strained in the traces without making much impression on the wheels. It was rather like that famous chariot race in the play, "Ben Hur," when the landscape rolled ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... helpless under thy rays.* Thy loveliness is in the southern sky,* thy graciousness is in the northern sky.* Thy beauties seize upon hearts,* thy loveliness maketh the arms weak,* thy beautiful operations make the hands idle,* hearts become weak ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... doth seem; And clasping her within convulsing arms, Receives a thrill that all his nerves alarms, And wakes him from the dreams she had instilled. "What means this fantasy that hath me filled, And spirit form that o'er my pillow leans; I wonder what this fragrant incense means? Oh, tush! 'tis but an idle, wildering dream, But how delightful, joyous it did seem! Her beauteous form it had, its breath perfume; Do spirit forms such ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... exclaimed. "Singularly enough, that happens to be precisely the amount I now have lying idle. Now, Jack, my lad, I have known you from a boy; and, though it is an axiom with us lawyers never to think well of anything or anybody, I would stake my last penny upon your integrity. So far as your honesty is concerned I would not hesitate ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... reckoning the time and wages of my men at work on the claims. Accounts of assessment work on twenty claims, besides new prospecting in different localities, will give you something to do after cutting the kindling for Mother; and neither of you need feel that you are useless nor idle. Part of these gold claims are yours, and in your own names, and you can both make short 'mushing' trips of inspection over the country when you like; though the new railroad up Anvil will be finished in a few weeks, and then you can ride. Under no consideration must either of you ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... ordinary men would sail one. The model of the triremes, revealing the number of the rowers but concealing their faces, was first furnished by the Argonauts. So too the sail, that flying sheet[391] which wafts idle men to their destination quicker than swiftest birds can fly, was first invented by the lorn Isis, when she set off on her wanderings through the world to find her lost ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... dialectician if, in order to avoid this difficulty, I were to say (as you are saying of pleasure) that there is no difference between one science and another;—would not the argument founder and disappear like an idle tale, although we might ourselves escape drowning by clinging ...
— Philebus • Plato
... when the elements of Latin grammar confronted him, Will had already found grammar-school an excellent place to plead aching tooth or heavy head to stay away from. At eight, a dreary traveling for him to cover did his "Sententiae Pueriles" prove, and idle paths more pleasing. ...
— A Warwickshire Lad - The Story of the Boyhood of William Shakespeare • George Madden Martin
... lend it their influence, but those who are indifferent or hostile to Christian institutions. Fathers and mothers who are careless of the example they set their children; vain followers of the fashions, who think more of a golden trinket than they do of virtue; idle and dissipated hangers-on of society; fast young men in the road to ruin; vicious young women; dissolute men, whose vices would horrify every sensitive heart were they uncovered; with a sprinkling, perhaps, of better people who forget, for the time being, what company they ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... Miss Rylance. 'I suppose, Bessie, you know that Miss Pew has especially forbidden us all to indulge in idle ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... to the tireless stove) Lazily rising, see how the smoke From thousands of chimneys floats upward! And yet that stove of ours No fuel seems to need, the idle rascal, Content to live in ease, just like ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... find cheap vacation homes in the country, and by establishing vacation banks to help the girls save for their summer outings, the committee hopes to discourage some of the haphazard picnic park dissipation. In summer many trades are slack, girls are idle, and out of sheer boredom they hang around the parks seeking amusement. It is only a theory, perhaps, but Mrs. Israels and the others on her committee believe that if many of these girls knew that a country vacation were within the possibilities, ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... were all too busy, running here, running there, hastening to and fro, carrying long-swords and shields, holding horses' heads, stamping, tramping, scolding and jesting. Little Wattie was more than once told to stand aside, and more than once got pushed about and mixed up with the throng of idle children, whose juvenile curiosity kept them spell-bound, stationed near the ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... child were not yet, however, at an end. Before her entrance to the convent he had been remarkably good and docile, but now, so completely had his temper been soured by the irritating remarks of injudicious advisers, that he had grown idle, self-willed and absolutely reckless. This was the worst pang of all; she dreaded more than any other misfortune, that of his offending God; the news of his death would have been a light sorrow in comparison. ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... could not understand why it was; but whenever there was a dispute about cards in a club, it was brought to him to settle. It was most odd. But it was trite. In public affairs, no less than in private, Lord Hartington's decisions carried an extraordinary weight. The feeling of his idle friends in high society was shared by the great mass of the English people; here was a man they could trust. For indeed he was built upon a pattern which was very dear to his countrymen. It was not simply that he was honest: ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... her meat and drink, and bade her rest and think of nothing troublous, and in all wise made her good cheer; and she was merry with them, and praised their fairness and their deftness, and asked them many questions about their weaving and spinning and carding; (howbeit the looms were idle as then because it was midsummer, and the men gone to the war). And this they deemed strange, as it seemed to them that all women should know of such things; but they thought it was a token that ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... Alone, idle, and always surrounded with danger, savage man must be fond of sleep, and sleep lightly like other animals, who think but little, and may, in a manner, be said to sleep all the time they do not think: self-preservation being almost his only concern, he must exercise those faculties ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... crimes, and the misfortunes, of the suffering people, were presumptuously compared with those of their ancestors; and they arraigned the Divine Justice, which did not exempt from the common destruction the feeble, the guiltless, the infant portion of the human species. These idle disputants overlooked the invariable laws of nature, which have connected peace with innocence, plenty with industry, and safety with valor. The timid and selfish policy of the court of Ravenna might recall the Palatine legions for the protection of Italy; the remains of the stationary ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... better families the horoscope of the children was drawn as a matter of course, and it sometimes happened that for half a lifetime men were haunted by the idle expectation of events which never occurred! The stars were questioned whenever a great man had to come to any important decision, and even consulted as to the hour at which any undertaking was to be begun. The ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... who had recognized him as he entered the town, quickly, by their cries of greeting, roused the loungers and idle conversationalists along the sidewalks further down the street. There was a rush to shop doors, a craning of necks, excited inquiries in Spanish and English; more shouts of greeting. A gaunt, hawk-faced ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... had reached the palace, the sultan perceiving his disordered state, inquired the adventures of the day; and being informed of his fruitless pursuit, and the remarks of the old man, said, "My son, discharge this idle chimera from thy mind, nor perplex thyself longer, since he who wishes for an impossibility may pine himself to death, but can never gain his desires: calm then thy soul, nor vex thyself longer in vain." "By Allah!" answered the prince, "my soul, O my father, is captivated with ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... without saying. Nobody could possibly have whiskers like them without feeling proud of them. I feel that if I had such whiskers I should never be away from the looking-glass. And consider the pleasurable employment they give in idle moments. Satan, it is said, has mischief still for idle hands to do. But no one with such streamers as Sir Edward's can ever have idle hands. When you have nothing else to do with them you stroke ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... and patriotic Statesman on his way to Washington to beseech the President for an office, an idle Tramp accosted him and begged twenty- five cents with which to buy a suit ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... a purchase is due from the day fixed upon for completing: where it cannot be completed, the loss rests with the party with whom the delay rests; but it appears, when the delay rests with the seller, and the money is lying idle, notice of that is to be given to the seller to make him liable to the loss of interest. In law, the property belongs to the purchaser from the date of the contract; he is entitled to any benefit, and must ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... find life. I do not obtain the vitalizing air through controversy, or clamour, or idle lamentation, but by opening the window! Faith opens the door and window of the soul to the Son of God. It can be done without tears, it can be done without sensationalism. "If any man will open the door, I will come in." "And he that hath the ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... here, as in Paris, what a suffering multitude, what a shameless exhibition too of the social sore, the devouring cancer openly tolerated and displayed in utter heedlessness! There are whole families leading idle and hungry lives in the splendid sunlight; fathers waiting for work to fall to them from heaven; sons listlessly spending their days asleep on the dry grass; mothers and daughters, withered before their time, shuffling about in loquacious idleness. O Holy Father, already to-morrow at dawn may your ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... of the loyalty and faith of Godwin were required and conceded. They were selected from his own family; and the choice fell on Wolnoth, his son, and Haco, the son of Sweyn. As, when nearly all England may be said to have repassed to the hands of Godwin, it would have been an idle precaution to consign these hostages to the keeping of Edward, it was settled, after some discussion, that they should be placed in the Court of the Norman Duke until such time as the King, satisfied with the good faith of the family, should ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... see the hounds throw off; otherwise it is not different from other meets. As for the Roman mountains, they are so totally unlike any other hills in the world, and so extremely beautiful in their own peculiar way, that to describe them would be an idle and a useless task, which could only serve to exhibit the vanity of the writer and the feebleness ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... saw Gavin and his mother happy in our Auld Licht manse, that did not prevent my considering the contingencies which might leave her without a son. In the school- house I had brooded over them as one may think over moves on a draught-board. It may have been idle, but it was done that I might know how to act best for Margaret if any thing untoward occurred. The time for such action had come. Gavin's death had struck me hard, but it did not crush me. I was not unprepared. I was ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... daily bread and very fortunate was he to have so good a place. Having read himself this lecture he was wont to turn to his duties with lighter heart, closing his ears to the laughter and his eyes to the merriment that made up the days of the idle. But what he never could get used to was the fact that he must not ask questions or voice his opinions. In a free country where one man was as good as another the mandate seemed absurd. But it wasn't done. That was all there was about it. Jerry said ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... cage; and the confinement lasts only a month. Probably the long period mentioned by Dr. Brown is that prescribed for chiefs' daughters. Poor people could not afford to keep their children so long idle. This distinction is sometimes expressly stated. See above, p. 30. Among the Goajiras of Colombia rich people keep their daughters shut up in separate huts at puberty for periods varying from one to four ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... man was not quite convinced, and received the warning as an idle threat, he shrugged his shoulders and walked leisurely towards the table, upon which lay a writing-case and a pen, the length of which would have terrified the topographical Porthos. De Wardes then saw that nothing could well be more seriously intended than the threat in question, ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Greek may be a good thing or no; but nobody says that if Greek scholarship is carried past a certain point, everybody will be torn in pieces like Orpheus, or burned up like Semele, or poisoned like Socrates. Philosophy, theology and logic may or may not be idle academic studies; but nobody supposes that the study of philosophy, or even of theology, ultimately forces its students to manufacture racks and thumb-screws against their will; or that even logicians need be so alarmingly logical as all that. Science seems to be ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... from Lenorme, and was getting hopeless in respect of that quarter of possible aid. But so long as Florimel could content herself with the quiet of Lossie House, there was time to wait, he said to himself. She was not idle, and that was promising. Every day she rode out with Stoat. Now and then she would make a call in the neighbourhood, and, apparently to trouble Malcolm, took care to let him know that on one of these occasions her call had been upon ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... sorrowful, more awkward and more baneful than those which we are leaving; and how shall we explain that these have come about after so many millions of others which should have opened the eyes of the genius of infinity? It is idle to persuade ourselves, as Hindu wisdom would, that our sorrows are but illusions and appearances: it is none the less true that they make us very really unhappy. Has the universe elsewhere a more complete consciousness, a more ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... wasted. They mean our meat supply. I'm still wearing my pistol, and I've got two boxes of shells for it in my pocket—it's a small caliber, and there's fifty in each box. There are plenty of blankets and cooking utensils, magazines for idle hours and, Heaven bless us, an old and battered phonograph on the table. Don't scorn it—anything that has to be packed on a horse this far mustn't be scorned. We can have music with our meals, if we like." He ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... was none of my business," says Conscience, "and a pretty piece of work you have made of it without me. Idle in college, and, when you began to perceive the connection between study and what people call success in life, overworking yourself, here you are, and just beginning to bethink yourself that I might have furnished just the right degree of stimulus, if you ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... a little languidly, for the spell of her presence was so strong that it threatened to subjugate him. He was never willingly alone with her now. The fear was always upon him that, in some weak moment, he might betray himself. The fear was an idle one—no man was less likely than Michael to lose his self-control; but, nevertheless, ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... reading habit. He would carry in his pocket a tract or a pamphlet which some one had loaned him, and whenever he had an idle moment during the day he would plod through a paragraph, and then think about it while he worked. Also he read the newspapers, and asked questions about them. One of the other porters at Hinds's was a sharp little Irishman, who knew everything that Jurgis wanted to know; and while ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... reason or argument, had recourse to recrimination. In the paper which he sent me next day, he insisted in general that he had carefully perused the case (which you will perceive was a self-evident untruth); he said the theory it contained was idle; that he was sure it could not be written by a physician; that, with respect to the disorder, he was still of the same opinion; and adhered to his former prescription; but if I had any doubts I might come to his house, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... disposition, in spite of ages of oppression. In the course of centuries they have not furnished a single man to that army of rash minds which have carried the rest of Europe headlong through lofty, perhaps, but at bottom empty and idle theories, to the brink of that bottomless abyss into which no one can peer ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... master, was inclined to pardon and reward; and it was their interest, as well as duty, to reclaim their deluded brethren, who had been seduced by the arts of the usurper. Not a man was tempted to desert the standard of the Gothic king. Belisarius soon discovered, that he was sent to remain the idle and impotent spectator of the glory of a young Barbarian; and his own epistle exhibits a genuine and lively picture of the distress of a noble mind. "Most excellent prince, we are arrived in Italy, destitute ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... been left in the detestable position of independent gentlemen. The dignity of labor was a dignity unknown to these degraded young men. "I despise a wealthy idler," I said to Oscar, with my republican severity. "You want the ennobling influence of labor to make a man of you. Nobody has a right to be idle—nobody has a right to be rich. You would be in a more wholesome state of mind about yourself, my young gentleman, if you had to earn your bread and cheese ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... stood dozing behind his mistress's chair as in days of old. The sideboard was under his charge, and so were all the groceries and pickles. To the question, had he not heard of the emancipation, he invariably replied: "How can one take notice of every idle piece of gossip? To be sure the Turks were emancipated, but such a dreadful thing had not happened to him, thank the Lord!" A girl, Pufka, was kept in the house for entertainment, and the old nurse Vassilievna used to ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... attachment existed between them. Many thought—and idle gossips whispered it about—that the widow was soon to console herself for the great loss she had sustained, by taking Mr. Scofield as a second husband; but no such idea ever entered their minds. Her heart was ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... have I waited, hoped and prayed for the dark clouds to break, and for a restoration of our former sunshine. To wait longer would be a crime. All hope for peace is dead. My prayers have proved as idle as my hopes. God's will be done. I go to see and ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... for meddling with what did not belong to you: you shall see me no more." He struck her eye as he spoke, and from that hour till the day of her death she was blind on the right side, thus dearly paying for having gratified an idle curiosity in ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... furnished the basis for the incorporation of the Furnaces Company. After $2,000,000 had been "expended," the clamor of the stockholders caused the company actually to build several furnaces. They were erected and stood idle, with nothing to feed them. The whole scheme collapsed in 1892. The stockholders lost every dollar of ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... high, spreads her boughs and secular arms, where, one saith, idle Dreams dwell clustering, and cling under every leaf. And monstrous creatures besides, many and diverse, keep covert at the gates, Centaurs and twy-shaped Scyllas, and the hundredfold Briareus, and the beast ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... evident that Ralph Mainwaring's oft repeated assertions concerning the elaborate preparation he had made for the coming contest were no idle boast. Nothing that human ingenuity could devise had been left undone which could help to turn the scale in his own favor. The original will of Ralph Maxwell Mainwaring, by which his elder son was disinherited, ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... that time you should care to write, who then will have recovered from this folly of the desert and an idle moon?" ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... but it gave him no opportunity of thinking. He had to be continually dodging large bales of fruit and wine, and if he made a mistake the officer on duty would shout at him angrily, "Lazy dog! you would not have left Greece were you not an idle fellow." Such words wounded his pride, and he determined to do so well that he should earn praise. But the little officer, his bright buttons flashing in the sunlight, who smoked quietly in the intervals of silence, never praised anybody; but he left off abusing Gregorio at last, and when ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... to any friend about Bresci—and especially if you mention the subject to any young man inclined to be idle—call attention to this point. You can amplify what must be presented ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... moving around under the boathouse, Shep and Snap were not idle. The doctor's son, on awakening, had wanted to throw the flour paste out of the window at the midnight prowlers, but ...
— Young Hunters of the Lake • Ralph Bonehill
... no idle boast, for Bayard's company was composed of picked men, the greater number of whom had been commanders themselves, but who preferred the honor of serving under the noted chevalier to ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... began to boom and foam upon another sunken reef; and ever and again a breaker would fall in sounding ruin under the very bows of her, and the brown reef and streaming tangle appear in the hollow of the wave. I tell you, they had to stand to their tackle: there was no idle men aboard that ship, God knows. It was upon the progress of a scene so horrible to any human-hearted man that my misguided uncle now pored and gloated like a connoisseur. As I turned to go down the hill, he was lying on his ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he was, yet after staying with the Knight and his lady for some time, Jack grew weary of such an idle life, and set out again in search of new adventures. He went over hills and dales without meeting any, till he came to the foot of a very high mountain. Here he knocked at the door of a small and lonely house, and an old man, with a head as white ...
— The Story of Jack and the Giants • Anonymous
... and high-priced land, necessitate high farming; and by high farming, I mean growing large crops every year, and on every portion of the farm; but high wages and low-priced land do not necessarily demand high farming. If the land is cheap we can suffer it to lie idle without much loss. But when we raise crops, whether on high-priced land or on low-priced land, we must raise good crops, or the expense of cultivating and harvesting them will eat up all the profits. ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... highest way of life for man, a belief still held by Plato and Aristotle, and to which we shall have to return. We may note at once, however, that it is not an 'intellectualist' ideal. There is no question of idle contemplation; it is a strenuous way of life, the aim of which is the soul's salvation, and it gives rise to an eager desire to convert other men. Just for that reason, the Pythagorean philosopher will take part ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... it in electric letters on Broadway. It was the first night of 'Overheard.' Florance was playing at the Hudson Theatre, which is a bit higher up Forty-fourth Street, and his name was in electric letters too, but further off Broadway than mine. I strolled up, just out of idle curiosity, and there the old man was standing in the porch of the theatre, all alone! 'Hullo, Sachs,' he said, 'I'm glad I've seen you. It's saved me twenty-five cents.' I asked how. He said, 'I was just going to send you a telegram of congratulations.' ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... It is as futile as it is stupid to expect that in this matter history will go backward. To oppose measures already accomplished which are in the direction of democratic adjustment of social relations, even by those who think certain measures "a reform against nature," is not only idle in effect but shows that the opposer is out of touch with "whatsoever forces draw ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... and now and then it brings him into conflict with the department,... or with his own better nature. Sometimes his unerring instinct discovers secrets in high places, secrets which the Police Department is bidden to hush up and leave untouched. Muller is then taken off the case, and left idle for a while if he persists in his opinion as to the true facts. And at other times, Muller's own warm heart gets him into trouble. He will track down his victim, driven by the power in his soul which is stronger than all volition; but when he has this victim in the net, he will ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... no hirers of labour. Had the colony been as large and as prosperous as its neighbour it could scarcely have absorbed the glut of workmen; but it was really on the verge of bankruptcy—its finances were embarrassed, its trades and industries at a standstill. But not only were the convicts idle; they were utterly depraved. It was soon found that the system which kept large bodies always together had a most pernicious effect upon their moral condition. "The congregation of criminals in large batches without adequate supervision meant ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... trouble themselves so much about them. If therefore I can make out in this Essay, that there were such Animals as Pygmies; and that they were not a Race of Men, but Apes; and can discover the Authors, who have forged all, or most of the idle Stories concerning them; and shew how the Cheat in after Ages has been carried on, by embalming the Bodies of Apes, then exposing them for the Men of the Country, from whence they brought them: If I can do this, I shall think my time not wholly lost, nor the trouble altogether ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... of just ideas respecting comets has been slow, it must nevertheless be regarded as on the whole satisfactory. When we remember that it was not a mere idle fancy which had to be opposed, not mere terrors which had to be calmed, but that the idea of the significance of changes in the heavens had come to be regarded by mankind as a part of their religion, it cannot but be thought ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... see there was no Englishman, so it must have been idle gossip. And Varvara Petrovna and Stepan Trofimovitch both tell lies. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... can; he is just idle and spoiled," the firm lips set more firmly. "He shall take his ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... your prairie nest, Blow from the mountains, blow from the west. The sail is idle, the sailor too; O! wind of the west, we wait for you. Blow, blow! I have wooed you so, But never a favour you bestow. You rock your cradle the hills between, But scorn to ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... same to-day in my village of Serignan, where there are numbers of youthful adepts in the art of putting poultry to sleep. Science often has very humble beginnings. There is nothing to tell us that the mischief of a pack of idle urchins is not the starting-point ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... too severe an economist of time, to waste it willingly on idle pomp and ceremonial. His heart swelled with satisfaction, however, as he gazed on the magnificent capital thus laid at his feet, and pouring forth the most lively expressions of a loyalty, which of late he had been led to distrust. With all his impatience, therefore, he was not ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... extraordinary Advantage, if carried on in Virginia; but I presume these may suffice as a Specimen to shew how useful and easy it is to promote many Trades, Arts, and Manufactures there, and what Numbers of poor, idle, and wicked People may there be employed, and get a plentiful Maintenance and Settlement for their Families, and by their Labour may enrich themselves, the Planters and Merchants, benefit our Trade, encrease the Revenue of the Crown, and advance ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... of Italy all that is corruptible and corrupting is assembled. The young are idle, the old lascivious, and each sex and every age abounds with debasing habits, which the good laws, by misapplication, have lost the power to correct. Hence arises the avarice so observable among the ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... a man can be born with," cried Bakkus with startling vindictiveness. "It turns him into an idle, sentimental, hypocritical and dissolute hound. If I hadn't been cursed young with a voice like a Cherub, I should possibly be on the same affable terms with the Almighty as my brother, the Archdeacon, or profitably paralysing the intellects of the young like my ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... reaedship in that. Whether vo'k mid have childern or no, Wou'dden meaeke mighty odds in the main; They do bring us mwore jay wi' mwore ho, An' wi' nwone we've less jay wi' less pain We be all lik' a zull's idle sheaere out, An' shall rust out, unless we do wear out, Lik' do-nothen, rue-nothen, Dead ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... that streaked the "severing clouds in yonder east," through the sun's matin, meridian, postmeridian, and vesper circuit; from the disappearance of Lucifer in the re-illumined skies, to his evening entree in the character of Hesperus. Complain not of the brevity of life; 'tis men that are idle; a thousand things could be contrived and accomplished in that space, and a thousand schemes were devised by us, when boys, to prevent any portion of it passing over without improvement. We pursued the fleet angel of time through all his movements ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... semi-independent state, the Nawab of which has a revenue of sixteen lacs of rupees, (L160,000,) while the city, being without the pale of English law, is "a city of refuge, a very Goshen of robbers, ... the streets are crowded with a mob of very handsome, idle, lounging fellows, having generally the fullest and finest jet-black beards and black mustaches in the world. Many of these were handsomely dressed, and many (which struck me as a very curious fact) appeared clean!" These were the Pathans and Rohillas, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... machine shop, Mike spotted the Security man through the open bulkhead—just standing there while Paul and Tombu grimly worked on; and Millie sat idle, watching. ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... are becoming idle, living in luxury and ease, and in the gratification of artificial wants. Some indulge in the use of food rendered unwholesome by bad cookery, and think more of gratifying a morbid appetite than of supplying the body ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... not only cut off the importation of manufactured commodities, but also made idle the capital employed. Manufacturing enterprises started in various parts of the United States, but they prospered in this region for three reasons—an abundance of power, plenty of capital, and business experience. Steam-power ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... sought for products of the soil and manufactories, to the end that we may be able to pay these debts. Where a new market can be created for the sale of our products, either of the soil, the mine, or the manufactory, a new means is discovered of utilizing our idle capital and labor to the advantage of the whole people. But, in my judgment, the first step toward accomplishing this object is to secure a currency of fixed, stable value; a currency good wherever civilization ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... there he ended. Miss Milroy contrived in some mysterious manner to get, in this case, between the reader and the books. Her formal bow and her merciless parting speech dwelt, try how he might to forget them, on Allan's mind; he began to grow more and more anxious as the idle hour wore on, to recover his lost place in her favor. To call again that day at the cottage, and ask if he had been so unfortunate as to offend her, was impossible. To put the question in writing with the needful nicety of expression proved, on trying the experiment, to be a task beyond his literary ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... do not remain idle, another resource engaging them—a feat for which the Fuegian native has obtained a world-wide celebrity— namely, diving for sea-eggs. A difficult, dangerous industry it is, and just on this account committed to the women, who ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... resignation to the Governor immediately on the announcement of the result of the Presidential election. Hopes were still cherished that the Northern leaders would appreciate the impending peril, would cease to treat the warnings, so often given, as idle threats, would refrain from the bravado, so often and so unwisely indulged, of ability "to whip the South" in thirty, sixty, or ninety days, and would address themselves to the more manly purpose of devising means to allay the indignation, and quiet the apprehensions, whether well, founded or ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... come? As wind i' th' hypocondries pent, Is but a blast if downward sent, But if it upward chance to fly, 775 Becomes new Light and Prophecy So when your speculations tend Above their just and useful end, Although they promise strange and great Discoveries of things far set, 780 They are but idle dreams and fancies, And savour strongly of the ganzas. Tell me but what's the natural cause, Why on a sign no painter draws The full moon ever, but the half; 785 Resolve that with your JACOB's staff; Or why wolves raise a hubbub at her, And dogs howl when she shines in water; And I shall freely ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Richmond Whig—a paper beyond all comparison the most respectable and moderate in the whole South, and by no means of so little weight or character that its remarks can be passed by as mere Southern vaunt and idle bluster signifying nothing. It speaks the deep-seated belief and heartfelt conviction of even the most intelligent secessionists—for the editor of the Whig is not only one of these, but one of the most honest and upright men to be found ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... Rylton remains silent. The mind is a strange thing, not to be controlled, full of vagaries, and now, for no reason whatever, as it seems to him, it has run back to his wedding morning. Is this the careless, idle, little tomboy who had stood before the altar—the little girl he had assured himself he ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... father," returned she. "Well, what idle beggars! not to have a penny to pay honest people, and get tipsy ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... my time of day one can think a ball worth going to London for on purpose, you will not wonder that I am childish enough to write an account of it. I could give a better reason, your bidding me send you any news; but I scorn a good reason when I am idle enough to do any thing for a bad one. You had heard, before you left London, of Miss Chudleigh's intended loyalty on the Prince's birthday. Poor thing, I fear she has thrown away above a quarter's salary! It was ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... there is nothing bitter in it to him. Those fine young gentlemen, my brothers, who are the dearest little chicks in the world, five and six and seven years old, will be able to laugh pleasantly at their elder brother when they grow up, as they will do, among the other idle young swells of the nation. That their brother and George Roden should be always together will not even vex them. They may probably receive some benefit themselves, may achieve some diminution of the folly natural ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... blase. This is so much the case with the arts in America—the fashions change with the season's end and there is never enough of novelty; dancing is already dying out, skating will not prevail for long among the idle; what shall we predict for our variety which is in its last ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... braced into Vesey and Barday Streets. My editor assigned me to this interesting event. I stood in the crowd, that morning, and saw what was really the beginning of the war in New York. There was no babble of voices, no impatient call, no sound of idle jeering such as one is apt to hear in a waiting crowd. It stood silent, each man busy with the rising current of his own emotions, solemnified by the faces all around him. The soldiers filed out upon the pavement, ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... opposed these resolutions as leading inevitably and logically to revolution and separation; but Henry, in a storm of patriotic, eloquent enthusiasm, carried everything, uttering those deathless sentences, "Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle. What is it that gentlemen wish? What would ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... the greatest work given him to do—the reduction of Ireland; who did it ill from some unexplained reason of spite and mischief; and who, when called to account for it, broke out into senseless and idle rebellion. This was the end. But he was not always thus. He began life with great gifts and noble ends; he was a serious, modest, and large-minded student both of books and things, and he turned his studies to full account. ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... brought him little satisfaction. He stood there in the dark watching the fireflies amid the rhododendrons, till the hoofbeats had faded. Then he sighed and roused himself. He had much to do. His journey into the town had not been one of idle curiosity to see how the Spaniards conducted themselves in victory. It had been inspired by a very different purpose, and he had gained in the course of it all the information he desired. He had an extremely busy night before him, ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... Victorian area, or,—which is perhaps more important, though we do not seem to hear of any communication on this line,—how far there is a stock of folktales common to the Darling district and the central area, it is obviously idle to speculate as to how it comes that an Eaglehawk myth is told in both areas. The physical anthropology of the Australian natives is at present a little-worked field, in which, singularly enough, the French have done more than ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... not been idle. Behind a large rock he had scooped out a small cave in which he and the wounded man might lie protected. Now the Indians, in the full light of day, were spraying the spot with bullets. Fortunately they were ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... pleasure, delight. delicado, -a delicate, sweet. delicia f. delight. delicioso, -a delicious, delightful. delirante adj. delirious, raving. delirar rave, dote. delirio m. delirium, madness, rapture, rant, idle talk. delito m. crime. demasa f. excess. demasiado, -a too much, too great. demonio m. devil, demon. denso, -a dense, thick. dentro adv. within; —— de prep. within. denuesto m. insult, abuse. derecho m. right. ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... of from thirty to fifty feet wide were effected in the walls. The Saxons had not been idle. Behind each of the threatened points they raised banks of earth ten feet high, and cut away the bank perpendicularly behind the shattered wall, so that the assailants as they poured in at the gaps would have ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... as I was writing some letters by my fireside before going to bed, I was conscious, in the midst of that train of sensuous visions that sometimes pass through one's brain in moments of idle reverie, of a kind of slight influence, passing over me, a little flutter of the heart, and immediately, without any cause, without any logical connection of thought, I saw distinctly, as if I were touching her, saw from head to foot, and disrobed, this young ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Europe—by a series of querulous, petty, officious, needless, undignified interpositions; by the exhibition of a vacillating and short-sighted policy; by appearing (novel position for Great Britain) "willing to wound, but yet afraid to strike;" by conceiving and executing idle and preposterous schemes of aggrandizement and conquest. To go no further in Europe than our immediate neighbour, France, let us ask whether Lord Palmerston did not bring us to the very verge, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... head, she presented herself in De Maintenon's salons at a time when she knew the king would be present there. This stately robe invested the venerable lady's noble figure with such majesty as could not fail to inspire respect, even in the mob of idle loungers who were wont to collect in anterooms, laughing and jesting in frivolous and irreverent fashion. They all shyly made way for her; and when she entered the salon the king himself in his astonishment rose and came ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... more than five hundred million miles in circumference, while only eight thousand miles of this path are at any one time occupied by the earth's mass. Through these eight thousand miles the sun's radiated energy is doing work, but through the remainder of the five hundred million it is idle and wasted. But the case is far more striking when we reflect that it is not in the plane of the earth's orbit only that the sun's radiance is being poured out. It is not an affair of a circle, but of a sphere. In order to utilize all the solar rays, we should need to have an ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... a letter to John Franklin (January 14th, 1812) regarding a lad named Wiles, the son of a Jamaica friend, who had lately been put on the Bedford as a midshipman: "I will thank you to let me know from time to time how he goes on. Pray don't let him be idle. Employ him in learning to knot and splice under a quartermaster; in working under observation, in writing his journal, and in such studies as may be useful to him. Make it a point of honour with him to be quick in ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... the production of numbers of young men who have somehow or other, educated themselves up to the belief that they were created to make their living by doing nothing. Every city, town, and village in the land is filled to overflowing with young men who are idle—hunting clerkships, or some place where they hope to obtain a living without work. Numbers are hanging around, living from hand to mouth, living upon some friend, waiting for a vacancy in some overcrowded store; and, when a vacancy occurs, ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... be a trifle to do in the way of amusing her; but though idle people might call it work, working people would call it play. Think of the company and the life you'd lead, miss; the gaiety you'd see, and the gentleman you'd marry. My uncle is to inquire for a trustworthy young lady from the country, as she don't ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... of mankind! It is they that keep awake the finer parts of our souls; that give us better aims than power or pleasure, and withstand the total sovereignty of Mammon in this earth. They are the vanguard in the march of mind; the intellectual Backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and the activity of their happier brethren. Pity that from all their conquests, so rich in benefit to others, themselves should reap so little! But it is vain to murmur. They are volunteers ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... affairs, that late at night he withdrew Warren, and ordered him to hurry toward Dinwiddie Court-House, to succor Sheridan in his hour of need. Then if our flanking column could have pushed on—if Lee had then advanced—but all this is idle, reader. Providence had decreed otherwise. The flanking column could not advance—at ten at night it was withdrawn by Lee—midnight found the two armies resting on their arms, awaiting the morning of the first ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... arrival he went to visit the barracks occupied by some Chinese living on the island, and a place called Longwood Farm. He complained to Las Cases that they had been idle of late; but by degrees their hours and the employment of them became fixed and regular. The Campaign of Italy being now finished, Napoleon corrected it, and dictated on other subjects. This was their morning's ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... study of history and the study of the mores. Abraham Lincoln's career illustrated in many ways the mores of his time, and the knowledge of some of the facts about the mores would have been by no means idle or irrelevant for a policeman. In like manner it may well be that other branches of study pursued in our schools contain valuable instruction or discipline, but it does not lie on the surface, and it is an art to get it out and bring it to the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Atossa. She was perfectly calm since she saw that there was no fear of Phraortes making a mistake upon this vital point. "What need have I of a force to protect lands that are all within a day's journey of the king's fortress? The idea of carrying weapons would make all the slaves idle and quarrelsome. Leave them their spades and their ploughs, and let them labour while the soldiers fight. How many slaves have ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... and a drowned woman in a wood, a wall, and a door, and suchlike idle stuff. Y' see, Perry, not content with getting yourself wet through, you must let that brute of a horse o' yours throw you on to your head; doctors say 't is a marvel you're alive, and begad, Perry lad, 'tis our firm belief, Jervas and mine, that you'd ha' died if ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... all idle persons that will not work for their living, but go about loitering and are chargeable unto others; and also drunken persons that abuse the benefits of God in dishonouring themselves, so that they lose the use of reason, and their natural wits wherewith God has endued them, ...
— The Pulpit Of The Reformation, Nos. 1, 2 and 3. • John Welch, Bishop Latimer and John Knox
... Curee" and "Pot-Bouille" are more forgotten than "Le Grand Cyrus," men and women—and, above all, boys—will laugh and weep over the page of Alexandre Dumas. Like Scott himself, you take us captive in our childhood. I remember a very idle little boy who was busy with the "Three Musketeers" when he should have been occupied with "Wilkins's Latin Prose." "Twenty years after" (alas! and more) he is still constant to that gallant company; and, at this very moment, is breathlessly wondering ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... table, not reading a novel as Lydia and too many of his clients had found him, but idle, with not even a book at hand. There were packets of papers, in a methodical sequence, but everything on the table bore the aspect of an order not akin to work. Choate looked pale and harassed. "You?" said his upward glance. "You, of all the people ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... offer for it. The sum was not big, but invested would have added five hundred francs a year to his income. But no one could make either him or his sister resolve to part with it. So there it lies idle, and the only thing it serves for is to add to the tax bill every year. But they would rather own land than have money in the bank. Land can't run away. They can go and look at it, press their feet on it, and realize that ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... showers—but, as Adair observed, regular bucketsful, which compelled them to open the ports to let the water run off the decks, for fear of swamping the vessel. No people could behave better than did their little crew. Murray allowed no one to be idle. They were employed either in cleaning their arms, mending their clothes, repairing the rigging, and, when the sea was sufficiently calm, in fishing. Needham kept up his own spirits, and did his best to keep up that ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... Jedge has, and git to whar you kin afford to be idle, you kin read any stuff you ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... place nice. She hasn't got the patience. You think she's doing the dusting; and you find her groaning about what she'd do if she was rich. 'Yes,' I tell her; 'it's all very well to do that; but you'd far better be doing something useful,' I say. 'Instead of wasting your time on idle fancies.'" ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... roses, waves, and smiles, Are poet-nothings. You play with them as shells, Stirring chance colors for an idle eye. It is your way of saying, is it not, That I shall ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... had wagered on the head of Angelique against the wild love of Le Gardeur, the empty admiration of Bigot, and the flatteries of the troop of idle ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... our cave. I begged them, as a boon, to lay His corse in dust whereon the day Might shine—it was a foolish thought, But then within my brain it wrought,[16] That even in death his freeborn breast In such a dungeon could not rest. I might have spared my idle prayer— They coldly laughed—and laid him there: The flat and turfless earth above 160 The being we so much did love; His empty chain above it ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... with legs crossed after the fashion of the country, the long tschibuq caressingly held in one hand, the other uplifted, and with finger pointed to his brow, haranguing the German man of letters at his side on the advantages to be enjoyed under his tuition, and on the idle pretensions of those who call themselves learned without so much as comprehending the sacred languages. He cherished, however, the pious hope that in the course of time, thanks to his efforts, the enlightenment ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... dares to speak The first-fruits of thy mind,— I have regard [Aloud.] For thee, young man, see that you keep it warm As now—but mind, no swords, as ye are brothers— Not e'en reproach.—Sweet heart, when foolish mercy [To his daughter.] Doth beg an idle tale from thy dear lips, Perchance thou'lt seek thy father—until then, All good be with thee! [Crosses to R.] Sir! I will direct [To Arthur.] A ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... inclined to deal, bargains can very soon be struck at idle watering-places, where anything in the shape of occupation is a godsend, and bargainers know where to find each other in a minute. Everybody knows ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... which had been done, as it were, in the name of all of them. But the rapid certainty in which the machinery of the law moved on toward its sacrifice unnerved them. There was nothing for them to do, it seemed, but to sit there, idle and ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... has been tried over and over again, Neddy, and many times it has been mercifully attended with success. The idle have become industrious, the thieves honest, the vicious been reclaimed, the lost found and saved! I will tell you a striking occurrence which really took place in a reformatory for thieves. Not ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... that, previous to the Revolution of 1688, during the whole progress that Louis XIV. made in obtaining such exorbitant power, as gave him well-grounded hopes of acquiring at last to his family the Spanish monarchy, England had been either an idle spectator of what passed on the continent, or a faint and uncertain ally against France, or a warm and sure ally on her side, or a partial mediator between her and the powers confederated together in their common defence. ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... I can make out in this Essay, that there were such Animals as Pygmies; and that they were not a Race of Men, but Apes; and can discover the Authors, who have forged all, or most of the idle Stories concerning them; and shew how the Cheat in after Ages has been carried on, by embalming the Bodies of Apes, then exposing them for the Men of the Country, from whence they brought them: If I can do this, I shall think my ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... said Tom, ready to idle a little now the work was done, and very proud of the place he had helped ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... out the moment Varney laid down the paper, but Varney, staring absently out of the porthole, did not listen. This, then, was the meaning of the pale young editor's enigmatical remark last night. Here was no idle malice. Diabolically resourceful and without shame, young Mr. Smith had circulated this lie to discredit reform and drive off its new champion. And this was the way that he, Varney, had kept the coming of the Cypriani ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... other persons. His determination to live exclusively in their society, and to hear and see nothing of what his officers do or his people suffer, he no longer makes any attempt to conceal. It would be idle to hope for anything from him but a resignation of power into more competent hands; whatever he retains he will assuredly give to his singers and eunuchs, or allow them to take. No man can take charge of any office without anticipating ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... already disposed to all concessions except those which touch my honour, and I assure you that my mother and I are both ready to scorn all idle talk." ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... judging wind and tide, and sitting patiently with the wondrous patience of the seaman, learnt in years of tide and calm; for he would tell me that sea learning never ends, so that though the sailor seemed to be idle, he must needs be studying some new turn of his craft if only his eyes were noting how things went around him. Yet I thought he ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... passed, during which the drizzle scarcely ceased for a moment. But during all this time the young woman was not idle, so far as her new interests were concerned. She had asked questions, inquiring the names of things and their uses until she knew them intimately. The ropes and stays, from a mass of complex, meaningless cordage, had resolved themselves into individual ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... done our hanging upon the parapet of the bridge we found a somewhat reluctant cab and drove homeward through the muted Sunday streets. The roar of the city was still there, but it was subdued; the crowd was still abroad, but it was an aimless, idle, shuffling crowd. The air itself seemed more vacant than on week-days, and there was a silencing suspense everywhere. The poor were out in their poor best, and the children strayed along the streets without playing, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... These were not idle words. Ivan personally visited the wounded, cheered them with his sympathy, and ever after watched over them with parental care. His brother-in-law, Daniel, was immediately sent an envoy to the empress and to the metropolitan bishop, to inform them of the victory. The day was closed by a festival, ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... horse power in a boat of that size, because the weight of the motor was not great. With regard to the formation of a film on the surface, no doubt a film of sulphate of lead was formed if the battery stood idle, but it did not considerably reduce its efficiency; as soon as it was broke through by the energy being evolved from it, it would give off its maximum current. They knew by experience that, with properly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... still air of delightful studies" into the bitterest and sternest controversy of the age—she bore herself with patience, fortitude, and unshaken reliance upon the justice and ultimate triumph of the cause she had espoused. Her pen was never idle. Wherever there was a brave word to be spoken, her voice was heard, and never without effect. It is not exaggeration to say that no man or woman at that period rendered more substantial service to the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... her and considered her a moment; he found something strange in her. But he was a libertine through and through, nourished equal contempt and suspicion of all womankind, and paid his way among them habitually with idle compliments. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... loved! How pleasant it was to humiliate himself and depreciate himself before her! How delightful it was to get such splendid opportunities of hinting that if his life had been sanctified by an object he might indeed have striven to be something better than an idle flaneur upon the smooth pathways that have no particular goal; that, blessed by the ties which would have given a solemn purpose to every hour of his existence, he might indeed have fought the battle earnestly and unflinchingly. He generally wound up with a gloomy insinuation ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... poor tailor, who had a son called Aladdin, a careless, idle boy who would do nothing but play ball all day long in the streets with little idle boys like himself. This so grieved the father that he died; yet, in spite of his mother's tears and prayers, Aladdin ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... and letters, and am alone, which Locke says, is bad company. 'Be not solitary, be not idle.'—Um!—the idleness is troublesome; but I can't see so much to regret in the solitude. The more I see of men, the less I like them. If I could but say so of women too, all would be well. Why can't I? I am now six-and-twenty; my passions have had enough to cool them; my affections ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... street. Since the highwayman wandered, fur-coated, into the City, the patterer has lost his occupation. Robbery and murder have degenerated into Chinese puzzles, whose solution is a pleasant irritant to the idle brain. The misunderstanding of Poe has produced a vast polyglot literature, for which one would not give in exchange a single chapter of Captain Smith. Vautrin and Bill Sykes are already discredited, and it is a false reflection of M. Dupin, which dazzles the eye of a ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... we know even less, is the "Cercopes". These Cercopes ('Monkey-Men') were a pair of malignant dwarfs who went about the world mischief-making. Their punishment by Heracles is represented on one of the earlier metopes from Selinus. It would be idle to speculate as to the date ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... Every house in it presents the same blighted aspect. There is no urban stir. But in the brief intervals of the deafening cannonade can be heard one sound—blinds and curtains fluttering against empty window-frames and perhaps the idle, faint banging of a loose shutter. Not even a cat walks. We are alone, we and the small group of Staff officers who are acting as our hosts. We feel like thieves, like desecrators, impiously prying. At the other side of the place a shell has dropped before a house and sliced away all its front. ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... here this morning with a long exordium concerning how some of you can and may, if you choose, play havoc with the priceless gift God baa bestowed upon each one of you. I only desire to impress upon you all, with the utmost earnestness, that it is idle to say among yourselves 'We have no souls,' or 'The soul is an unknown quantity and cannot be proved.' The soul is as and actual a part of you as the main artery is of the body,—and that you cannot see it, touch it, or put it under the surgeon's dissecting knife is no proof ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... It resumed, that night, in Flint's luxurious study at "Idle Hour," his superb estate on the Palisades. Waldron paid only a perfunctory court to Catherine, who manifested her pleasure by studied indifference. Both magnates felt relieved when she withdrew. They had other and larger ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... such intimate terms with his mother: the mother had been quite determined that such an introduction should not take place. Claire knew enough of the world to realise how different would have been the proceedings if she had announced herself as a member of the "idle rich," bound for a course of visits to well-known houses in the country. "May I introduce my son, Miss Gifford? Miss Gifford has been an angel of goodness to me, Erskine. Positively I don't know what I should have done without her! Do look after ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... deal - and the king asked many questions about me. There is a new play, he told Mrs. Delany, coming out ; "and it is said to be Miss Burney's!" Mrs. Delany immediately answered that she knew the report must be untrue. "But I hope she is not idle?" cried the king. "I hope she ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... means. The aggregate capital of the banks of the three principal cities of the United States is but $105,000,000, and they have taken more than their capital in bonds of the United States." It was, therefore, idle to look to the banks for relief. "They have," continued the senator, "already tied up their whole capital in the public securities. They ask this currency to enable them to assist further in carrying on the government. Among others, the cashier of the Bank of Commerce, the largest ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... and the name of Robert Catesby is mingled in all of them. However, he speaks little to me of matters of state. Men in high places are for ever hearing whispers and rumours, and it boots not to give over-much credence to every idle tale. Only, what thou spakest of this Catesby recalled the matter to my mind. He is a man to fear, to avoid. He has a way with him that wins men's hearts; yet it is but the fatal fascination of the glittering snake, that snares the fluttering ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... again. Anubis took great pleasure in the pretty creatures, and by the permission of his superiors a dovecote was erected on the roof of the treasurer's house. Mary was now lying ill, and their intercourse was at an end; still, the well-trained messengers need not be idle, and Katharina had begun to use them ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... ouerthrow giuen to my best opposed forces) violently taken with the ouerflowing delights of hart-rauishing Poesie, the common infection of easie youth, and commending manie idle houres to these papers, and these to the Presse, I commit both to your fauorable censures. In which, if there be any thing (yet I feare I am not to attend so high a blisfulnesse) which may yeeld you the least content, my fortune hath ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... foundations of its pillars are themselves the seats—not "of them that sell doves"[156] for sacrifice, but of the vendors of toys and caricatures. Round the whole square in front of the church there is almost a continuous line of cafes, where the idle Venetians of the middle classes lounge, and read empty journals; in its centre the Austrian bands play during the time of vespers, their martial music jarring with the organ notes,—the march drowning the miserere, and the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... work with renewed interest, although she had not been idle during the summer by any means. With her pen she had copied nature in every possible phase, and had brought home, for her winter's campaign, rich treasures of beauty ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... The Scots from Flodden ridge saw the English host leave Barmore-wood and cross the river Till. Why did Scotland's hosts stand idle? What checked the fiery James, that he sat inactive on his steed and saw Surrey place the English army between Scotland and Scotland's army? O Douglas! O Wallace! O Bruce! for one hour of thy leadership to rule the fight! The precious hour passed,—the hour when in crossing ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... ignorance and idle curiosity, I led you on and on, over first one hill and then another, until you lost your way in that awful desert over there, but yet perhaps there was a destiny in that. When I was leading you out of the desert, a blind man, it ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... have just discovered?" answered Sergeant Griffin without taking his eyes from the newspaper before him. He was seated by the window, musing the morning news, his curved pipe hanging idle from his mouth, from which incipient clouds of smoke lazily issued and as lazily climbed upward and vanished through the open casement into threads ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... secretary, Gashford, a man of ugly face, with beetling brows and great flapped ears. He had been a thief and a scoundrel all his life, and had wormed himself into Lord George's confidence by flattery. He easily fooled his master into believing that the rabble who flocked to hear him, and the idle loungers who yelled themselves hoarse at what he said, were crowds of honest citizens who believed as he did, and were ready to follow his leadership. Gashford had added to his followers even Dennis, the hangman of London, and the foolish nobleman ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... and Illinois centers of wealth and production, and when the wonderful Northwestern country embracing the States of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, was so rapidly opened up and brought nearer to the Eastern markets, the Vanderbilt railroad interests were not idle. The original genius, Cornelius Vanderbilt, was soon gathered to his fathers, but his son, William H. Vanderbilt, was in many ways ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... extension to adjacent cases. To extend it further is to make a supposition without evidence, and to which, in the absence of any ground from experience for estimating its degree of probability, it would be idle to attempt ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... contend. He hath no certain name among them, which is not unusual, their rude fashion being to distinguish each other by nicknames; and they have called him the Laird of the Lakes (not remembering there should be no one called Lord, save one only) in idle derision; the pools of salt water left by the tide among the sands being called the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... agent promptly replied. "And he'd have to fight that beachmaster. Evidently! And so on every few feet he went. Besides, the very moment his back was turned a neighboring bull would steal some of his cows. Certainly! Or, an idle bull would try and beat ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... trained to do light services, but as for servants of our own flesh and blood, no such class exists. We all share whatever work there is, and no labor is menial. Whatever I ask others to do I am glad to do for them when occasion offers. Do not suppose we are idle. There is work for us, but with our abundant strength and continual good health it is never a burden. Then there are the duties connected with our higher life and education, for we are ever seeking to fit ourselves for a still better existence ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... and flushing, in return. She came, and there began a rather short liaison. It was interesting but not brilliant. The girl did not have sufficient temperament to bind him beyond a period of rather idle investigation. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... Their idle life, on pleasure bent, Their mania for some silly game, Their hours in stupid gossip spent,— Would give me self-contempt and shame; Between us is no common ground On ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... warm and broad the plow land lies, The idle oxen wait! We pray thee, holy river, rise, Nor glut thy fields too late! The year awakes! The slumbering seed Swells to its birth! Oh ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... sublimity of Christianity, and read the seals of its authenticity: the natural conceptions of divinity reveal them. No mythologies are so crude, therefore, none so barbarous, but deserve the attention of the philosophic mind, for they are never the empty fictions of an idle fancy, but rather the utterances, however inarticulate, of an immortal and ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionate, idle, waiting, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... the galleries, motions in the open air, mobs and manifestations in the streets; nothing is less attractive and more impracticable to civilized and busy people. In our modern communities, work, the family, and social intercourse absorb nearly all our time; hence, such a system suits only the idle and rough outcasts who feel at home there; the others refuse to enter an environment expressly set up for singles, orphans, unskilled persons, living in lodgings, foul-mouthed, lacking the sense of smell, with a gift of the gab, robust arms, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of some elms lights twinkled in the sky, incontinent sparks, as though glow lamps on an invisible pattern of wires were being switched on and off by an idle child. That was shrapnel. I walked along the empty street a little to get a view between and beyond the villas. I turned to say something to my companion, and saw then my silent neighbours, shadowy groups about ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... of storms, here was another unreasonable thing. The morning sky had been (like the miller's wedded life) without a cloud. The day had been sultry, for the time of year unseasonably so. And, just when the miller most grudged an idle day, when times were hard, when he was in debt,—for some small matters, as well as the sail business,—and when, for the first time in his life, he felt almost afraid of his own hearthstone, and would fain have been busy at his trade, not ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... started southward with the needed supplies, and this great, anxious, agonized North gave a sob of relief when the message thrilled through the land that Jane C. Hoge and Mary A. Livermore had arrived at the front with the needed supplies. Idle, helpless, dependent queens were not then in demand, but women fitted to be wives of heroes. Because our lake-bordered, tree-fringed village was once her home, I lovingly trace first on Evanston's scroll of honor the name of Jane C. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... words are idle; Words from me are vainer still; But the thoughts we cannot bridle Force their way ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... about, and then, if he was a stickler for the observance of the Sabbath, he was not compelled to move a muscle. The Boer burgher could eat, sleep, or fight whenever he wished, and inasmuch as he was a law unto himself, there was no one who could compel him to change his habits. It was an ideal idle-man's mode of living and the foreign volunteers who had leaves of absence from their own armies made the most of their holiday, but in that respect they did not surpass ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... were owing some one who needed the money. I am not a rich man, but I have no one save myself to provide for and I have funds lying idle that I would be glad to use for you. If you make a point of it, when you are rested, ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... their canoes, and secured their weapons, by setting them up against a tree, or placing them in such a position, that they could be laid hold of in an instant. I took particular notice that no one neglected this precaution. While the men were employed in raising the huts, the women were not idle. Some were stationed to take care of the canoes; others to secure the provisions, and the few utensils in their possession; and the rest went to gather dry sticks, that a fire might be prepared for dressing their victuals. As to the children, I kept them, as also some of the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... law of work and the law of recreation. Man has to work, and to work hard, in order to live. Work also is necessary to happiness. "He that labors," says the Italian proverb, "is tempted by one devil; he that is idle, by a thousand." The industrious life, it is perfectly plain (as we have shown in a previous chapter), is that which we should all follow. But recreation is as needful in its place as work. (a) This is the teaching of nature. ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... Mary was rather ugly and had straight hair. Curls in my childhood days were something very much sought for. Although Sarah was pretty in the face she had very rude ways; she would not speak kindly and politely; would not help her hard working mother; but was idle and quarrelsome, always wanted some one to wait on her; while Mary was the reverse; would pick up chips to make a fire, would sweep the yard and bring water, and was kind to all, especially to her mother. One day the well went dry and there was no water to make the tea ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... simply to cross to the other side, so as to rejoin Jack Carleton. As there was but the one means of passing over, it was idle to hesitate. The Shawanoe stepped carefully a few paces, when the water reached his armpits, and he began swimming. He did so, holding his bow above the surface with one hand, so as to protect the string from moisture. This was one of the disadvantages of that weapon, though the rifle was ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... however, act like a fool by giving free indulgence to his senses. Prosperity never resides in one who suffers himself to be tortured by a grief, who is addicted to evil ways, who denies Godhead, who is idle, who hath not his senses under control, and who is divested of exertion. The man that is humble, and who from humility is modest is regarded as weak and persecuted by persons of misdirected intelligence. Prosperity never approacheth from ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... should be heartily vexed. But it either is, or at any rate it shall be, one of the most beautiful spots in the three kingdoms, ay or in the whole world! Of that I am resolved; so go on with your work, Abimelech. Do not be idle. The love of fame is a noble passion; and the name of Arthur St. Ives shall be remembered at Wenbourne-Hill, long after his remains are laid in their kindred ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... and Joe had provisioned the Cockatoo—which, by the way, was no longer the Cockatoo, but the Adventurer, having been renamed during the process of painting—the crew had not been altogether idle during their wait. Each had thought of something further to add. Ossie, who, as a special favour, was to be allowed to try his hand at cooking, had made several trips between a big department store on Fulton Street and had returned to the ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... was for a short time Governor of Massachusetts. These are idle speculations, and yet, when we reflect that Oliver Cromwell was on the point of embarking for America when he was prevented by the king's officers, we may, for the nonce, "let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise," ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... right truly! She is a tender flower, and one that might be suddenly cut off by the frosts of St Bernard. And the noble Genoese, who travels with so much modest simplicity, in a way to reprove the vain and idle—I hope he does not miss the sun ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... that the old ideas connected with "the Master" can not only be revived but acted up to in our day, and the sense of shame for idle excuses drive out all the paltry pleas set up for ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... call for twenty-five years of their life, that is to say, as long as they continue able-bodied men; formerly, for the heaviest part of the service in France, no lives are confiscated by decree, only those bought by contract, and lives suited to this business and elsewhere idle or mischievous; about one hundred and fifty thousand lives of inferior quality, of mediocre value, which the State could expend with less regret than others, and the sacrifice of which is not a serious injury to society or to civilization. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... meetings when they were travelling together in Switzerland. They revived the impressions, they recalled the events, of the happy bygone time. Little by little, Marguerite's constraint vanished. She smiled, she was interested, she looked at Vendale, she grew idle with her needle, she made false stitches in her work. Their voices sank lower and lower; their faces bent nearer and nearer to each other as they spoke. And Madame Dor? Madame Dor behaved like an ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... tons of water for our ship, the Hind probably taking as much. On this part of the coast I could not find that the natives had any gold or other valuable article of trade, for indeed they are so savage and idle that they give not themselves the trouble to seek for any thing, for if they would take pains they might easily gather large quantities of grains, yet I do not believe there were two tons to be had in all that river. They have ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... teaching that you have established. What you have done in one village, why should not legislation do throughout a kingdom? Again, you find that, by simply holding out hope and emulation to industry, by making stern distinctions between the energetic and the idle, the independent exertion and the pauper-mendicancy, you have found a lever by which you have literally moved and shifted the little world around you. But what is the difference here between the rules of a village lord and the laws of a ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... what by mortals in this world is brought, In times great period shall return to nought; That fairest states have fatal nights and days; I know that all the Muses heavenly lays, With toil of spirit, which are so dearly bought. As idle sounds, of few or none are sought, That there is nothing lighter than vain praise. I know frail beauty like the purple flower, To which one morn, oft birth, and death affords, That love a jarring is, of minds accords, Where sense, and will, bring ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... genius, or his misfortunes, were objected to him; for the greatest malice found no particular crime with which it could reproach this unhappy prince. He was accused of incapacity for government, of wasting his time in idle amusements, of neglecting public business, of being swayed by evil counsellors, of having lost, by his misconduct, the kingdom of Scotland, and part of Guienne; and to swell the charge, even the death of some barons, and the imprisonment of some ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... spring morning as she sat by the kitchen fire. All the funny little wrinkles in her dear old face, which were generally only telegraph lines for smiles to run over, were sobered by some weighty consideration. Her knitting-work lay idle in her lap; and she did not even notice that little Tillie had pulled two of the needles out, nor that mischievous Nick was sawing away on the back of her chair with his antiquated pocket-knife. Whatever the problem was, it troubled her all the forenoon; ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... conventional farewell (which also served as a greeting), he stepped onto the sidewalk and was borne off. Ludovick looked after him pensively for a moment, then shrugged. Why should the Belphins surrender their secrets to gratify the idle curiosity of a poet? ...
— The Blue Tower • Evelyn E. Smith
... generous dinner was cooking indoors; for the host intended to refuse his guests nothing that was good. The song of mallets and hammers rang out, and the timbers began to come together; but the master framer was idle. Over by the old house door sat grandfather. He positively refused to lend a hand to the enterprise unless treated to his rum. For a time the work progressed rapidly; then there came a halt. There was a place where the timbers would not fit. After much delay and many vain ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... Madame on his arm. He has only one to offer her, for where the other should be an empty sleeve is pinned to his breast, on which a bit of ribbon is stirred by the breeze. Monsieur the Viscount has not been idle since we saw him last; the faith that taught him to die, has taught him also how to ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... been twice married, the second time to the widow West. She had brought with her to her new home a good-looking, long-legged, black-eyed, black-haired ne'er-do-well of a son, a year or so younger than Hiram. He was a shrewd, quick-witted lad, idle, shiftless, willful, ill-trained perhaps, but as bright and keen as a pin. He was the very opposite to poor, dull Hiram. Eleazer White had never loved his son; he was ashamed of the poor, slack-witted oaf. Upon the other hand, he was very fond of Levi West, ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... his search and stepping boldly forward, "it would be idle in me to disguise, that I have unwittingly heard a portion of the conversation between your aunt and yourself; and, as your brother's friend and tutor, your father's trusted adviser in many a way, both professional ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... you do see me,' said Monks, rising boldly, 'what then? Fraud and robbery are high-sounding words—justified, you think, by a fancied resemblance in some young imp to an idle daub of a dead man's Brother! You don't even know that a child was born of this maudlin pair; you don't ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... be changed by man, others are by his utmost effort immutable. God has implanted in you a right reason by which, when it is well trained, you can infallibly distinguish between the two, avoiding thus all unworthy fretfulness and all idle kicking against the pricks. Therefore he has made you for happiness; for the joy of men is an achievement; and their misery in the coveting of the unattainable end. If you would fulfil his benevolent design, seek only what has been placed in your power, frankly ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... discouraged, the latter lost all taste for work, and gave himself up, more and more, to the idle pleasures of his position. Abandoning himself wholly to these, he threw into them all the seductions of his person, all the generosity of his character—but at the same time a sadness always ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... to the same effect," observed the doctor; "but the captain remarks that there are many wild, idle boys sent to sea who may claim to be the sons of gentlemen; and as your appearance shows, as you acknowledge was the case, that you were before the mast, there you must continue till your conduct proves that you are deserving of a higher ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... camp Hunsa and Sookdee were clamouring at Ajeet to undertake a decoity for they were all in need, and to be idle was ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... about its being the clapper of the bell is mere nonsense, and would hardly deceive a child. I don't know why people say such things. Most Bell-people are very energetic busy folk, who love the sound of their own voices, and hate being idle, and when nearly two hundred years had gone by, and no princesses had been born, they got tired of living in bells that were never rung. So they slipped out of the belfry one fine frosty night, and left the big beautiful bells empty, and went off to find ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... basements. His pastime, cheap movies, and the park on Sundays. When he is not working he is too "dead tired" for anything heavier than the Sunday Supplement or perhaps the socialist club-rooms, where he talks about the down-trodden working man and learns to hate the "idle" rich. He spends his money on food and cheap shows and showy clothes. He talks loudly, eats ravenously, works hard, is honest, and wants something better for his children than he and the "old woman" have had. His ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... Abyssinian army; but negotiations took the place of fighting, with the result that both forces retired, the Italians only leaving some 5000 troops in Eritrea, as their colony was now called. Meanwhile John had not been idle with regard to the dervishes, who had in the meantime become masters of the Egyptian Sudan. Although he had set his troops in motion too late to relieve Kassala, Ras Alula, his chief general, had succeeded ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... would listen to no entreaties, "Am I a madman," he said, "that I am stripped of my arms? Are you going to bind my hands and give me up to Caesar? As for the sword I can do without it; I need but hold my breath or dash my head against the wall. It is idle to think that you can keep a man of my years alive against his will." It was felt to be impossible to persist in the face of this determination, and a young slave-boy brought back the sword. Cato felt ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... which he founded upon the mal-a-propos text; but still it was unquestionably a fair subject for "chaff," and the preacher was rallied upon it by no less a person than David Hume. Gossip having magnified this into a dispute between the parson and the philosopher, Sterne disposes of the idle story in a passage deriving an additional interest from its tribute to that sweet disposition which had an equal charm for two men so utterly unlike as the author of Tristram Shandy and the author of the Wealth of Nations. "I should," he writes, "be exceedingly ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
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