"Dabble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... earlier and idler parts of his life, Howard had been pleased to dabble somewhat in medicine, after the manner of the gentlemen of his time. This stood him in good part upon his travels, and made him familiar with the various forms of disease that especially afflicted prisons and the people at large. For jail fever and typhus he rightly judged that the sanitary ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... the exercises in unorthodoxy which he has been writing and which, in extract, he repeated to us with such unction; but I doubt it. They are too searching. But that so busy a man should turn aside from his work to dabble in religious satire seemed to me a very interesting thing; for nothing is so unprofitable—except to the honest soul ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... gracefully to the simple ration, and cease to dabble with frying-pans. Cooks to their aprons, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... Sunday afternoons; but I advise you not to speculate amongst us, for if you do we shall beat you. We know our business better than you do, and you'll get nothing out of us any more than we should get out of you if we were to dabble in your law, for you know that business better ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... indeed like to go to see you; apparently you have COOL WEATHER in Croisset since you want to sleep ON A WARM BEACH. Come here, you will not have a beach, but 36 degrees in the shade and a stream cold as ice, is not to be despised. I go there to dabble in it every day after my work; for I must work, Buloz advances me too much money. Here I am DOING MY BUSINESS, as Aurore says, and not being able to budge till autumn. I was too lazy after my fatigues as sick-nurse. Little Buloz recently came to stir ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... become active. He desires to dabble in science. One day he studies the Arab mystics, Oriental legends, and the next, he studies the marine fauna, etc. His perceptions have never been so clear. His brain is in continual activity. "It is strange," he acknowledges, "what a different man I am becoming mentally from ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... between the painter and my brother that they should depart the next day but one; they then began to talk of art. "I'll stick to the heroic," said the painter; "I now and then dabble in the comic, but what I do gives me no pleasure, the comic is so low; there is nothing like the heroic. I am engaged here on a heroic picture," said he, pointing to the canvas; "the subject is 'Pharaoh dismissing Moses from Egypt,' after the last plague—the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... reminds one of the seven Suabians who went to hunt a monster,—"a Ungeheuer,"—and returned with a hare. Elsie Venner is not a hare; she is a wonderful creation; but she is a winter-snake. I confess that I have no patience, however, with those who pretend to show us summer-snakes, and would fain dabble with vice; who are amateurs in the diabolical, and drawing-room dilettanti in damnation. Such, as I have said before, are the aesthetic adorers of Villon, whom the old roue himself would have most despised, and the admirers of "Faustine," whom Faustina would ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... up and died, after quarreling for years and years with the whole family, and left Philip all his money! I think Philip's quarrel with his father pleased him. But the very queerest part is that Philip actually likes to work and dabble in foreign politics and he flatly refused to give up his job! Isn't it romantic? Philip was always keen for adventure. Dick says you never could put your finger on a spot on the map and say comfortably, 'Philip Poynter's here!' for most likely Philip ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... romance from Catherine's imaginative mind, but the dark suspicions she harbours about General Tilney are not altogether inexplicable. He is so much less natural and so much more stagey than the other characters that he might reasonably be expected to dabble in the sinister. This time Catherine is misled by memories of the Sicilian Romance into weaving a mystery around the fate of Mrs. Tilney, whom she pictures receiving from the hands of her husband a nightly supply of coarse food. She watches in vain for "glimmering ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... burlesque quotation put down by Act of Parliament, and all who dabble in it placed with him who can cite Scripture for his purposes,' said ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... secure the beautiful creature. But the boy-seal swam lustily away as his grandmother had told him to do, and the men continued to pursue him. Whenever he rose to the surface to breathe, he took care to come up behind the kayaks, where he would splash and dabble in order to lure them on. As soon as he had attracted their attention and they had turned to pursue him, he would dive and come up farther out in the sea. The men were so interested in catching him that they did not observe how they were being led ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... times in quick, violent succession. Then it remained quiet, and Hamar knew, by a subtle change in the atmosphere, that all occult manifestations—for that night at least—were at an end. The ladies were, of course, dying to know what had happened; and like most ladies, who dabble in spiritualism, were ready to believe anything they were told. Hamar, who had no intention whatever of telling them what had ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... Cresswell, "I am free to confess that I have no personal desire to dabble in philanthropy, or conduct schools of any kind; my hands are full of ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... tea against which merchants borrowed money at the bank. In neither instance did the purchaser own outright what he sought to sell at an advance; merely in one case it was shares, in the other merchandise. Of course it was foolish for inexperienced country folk with small means to dabble in stocks and bonds, but why should not city people who were clever and had clever friends in the business eke out the cost of living by shrewd investments? In an old-fashioned sense it might be considered gambling; but, if it were true, as Wilbur and Mr. Williams both maintained, ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... a Hindu and in no small degree of his renown as an ancestor. [310] Thus it seems clear that a special virtue attaches to the choti. Before every warlike expedition the people of Minahassa in Celebes used to take the locks of hair of a slain foe and dabble them in boiling water to extract the courage; this infusion of bravery was then drunk by the warriors. [311] In a modern Greek folk-tale a man's strength lies in three golden hairs on his head. When his mother plucks them out, he grows weak ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... am the most miserable of men, a 'mute inglorious Milton' is nothing to me. Nature has created me a lover of the picturesque. In heart and soul I am an artist, I dabble in colours, I dream of lights and shades and glorious effects; but the power of working out my ideas is denied me. If I try to paint a tree my friends gibe at me. I am a poor literary hack; but I give you my word, my dear old Philistine, that I would willingly change places ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Only, of course, the ardour of new ideas which sincerely animates the Village does lend itself to all manner of poses. And because of this a perfectly earnest movement will attract a number of superficial dilettanti who dabble in it until it is in disrepute. And, vice versa, a crassly artificial fad will, by its novelty and picturesqueness, draw some of the real thinking people. Such inconsistencies and discrepancies are bound ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... into magnificent company, and modern taste finds that he deserved it; and certainly, me judice, nothing can be more purely artistic than a fine Scarabaeus, and the fascination that comes over whoever has ventured to dabble in that kind of wares is as dangerous as the chances of play. Be content with a single one! If you once get into comparison, you have abandoned yourself to the witchery of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... give these people, so to speak, a right to meddle and dabble in her heart? Was she to be wept over by Sister Angela—to confess her sins to Father Bowles—still worse, to Father Leadham? As she asked herself the question, she shrank in sudden passion from the whole world of ideas concerned—from all those ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the gate-way, the torch to the tower, We rifled the kist, and the cattle we maimed; Our dirks stabbed at guess through the leaves o' the bower, And crimes we committed that needna be named: Moonlight or dawning grey, Lammas or Lady-day, Donald maun dabble his plaid in the gore; He maun hough and maun harry, or should he miscarry, The Hielan's, the Hielan's will own ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... cried out in a voice that was like to break my heart, though I could not make out one word of his paraphernally. It minded me, by all the world, of a wheen cats fuffing and fighting through ither, and whiles something that sounded like "Sugar, sugar, measure the cord," and "dabble dabble." It was worse than the most outrageous Gaelic ever spoken in the height of passion by a ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... a different way and not through sense, whereas the possibility of the pleasure presupposes a feeling for it implanted in us, which is the first condition of this satisfaction; this is just as when ignorant persons that like to dabble in metaphysics imagine matter so subtle, so supersubtle that they almost make themselves giddy with it, and then think that in this way they have conceived it as a spiritual and yet extended being. If with ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... the Assyrian useless to dabble in: it is so vast, so fragmentary, so embarrassed by dogmatic hypotheses and assertions, and deterring complications, that one must give oneself wholly to it for any chance of getting to its foundations. But I feel on perfectly solid ground in Medo- Persian or Scythian. Difficulties ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... you that. I never myself trust him with a case, for I will not employ barristers who dabble in politics. But you can get his address from the 'Gazette des Tribuneaux'; he ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... has long since been consigned to family vaults with appropriate inscriptions, could have foreseen the dreadful inroads of the trading spirit, if in a moment of prophetic rapture they could have watched the painful decay of caste which permits a lady to dabble in bonnets, to toy with the making of fancy frames, to cut dresses almost like a dressmaker, and, horror of horrors, to send in bills to her customers, surely they would have refrained from the tomb in order to stem the tide of advancing demoralisation. But they are dead, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. July 4, 1891 • Various
... three different aspects on different occasions. It was this: when I was a boy, my father, who was anxious that I should learn something of physical science, which was then never taught at school, arranged with the owner of a large chemist's shop to let me dabble at chemistry for a few days in his laboratory. I had not thought of this fact, so far as I was aware, for many years; but in scrutinising the fleeting associations called up by the various words, I traced two mental visual images (an alembic and a particular ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... our English Newman Street apostles, and of M. de la M—, the mad priest, and his congregation of mad converts, should be a warning to such of us as are inclined to dabble in religious speculations; for, in them, as in all others, our flighty brains soon lose themselves, and we find our reason speedily lying prostrated at the mercy of our passions; and I think that Madame Sand's novel of Spiridion may do a vast deal of good, and bears a good ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... family must die, a natural death. Was it not singular that the least discussed issue, the most prominent one of the war, according to Smooth's opinion, was in regard to who should be the greatest toad in the European puddle? Your European puddle is no ordinary affair; kings and emperors only dabble in it at the expense of their people. I viewed with some interest this European cesspool. In the centre there was seated on a pole, with his arms folded, and having an air of assumed independence, a corpulent old gentleman, whose face fused broad and red, like a full moon in harvest-time. This ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... to give him a start, Uncle Zack," came still another voice, this time from the shrubbery where Brent, returning from a dabble at his work, had halted in ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... ignore proposals for change, which have long ago been threshed out and found wanting, or are obviously unpractical, he is merely showing that he has not studied the question. A fair analogy would be the case of a chemist or engineer who had recently begun to dabble in Greek in his spare moments, and who should undertake to emend the text of Sophocles. His suggestions would show that he knew no Greek, that he had never heard of Sir Richard Jebb, and that he was ignorant of all the results of scientific textual criticism. But here comes ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... a father to Elsie's confession of her thoughtlessness in giving Tim such a nervous shock. 'I used to dabble in phrenology and chiromancy, and such things, when I was young,' he said. 'As guides to character they are certainly interesting and often helpful, but, one should remember, ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... favourite themes for the display of his humour was the subject of prevarication. He seemed never to tire of ringing the changes upon the theme of the lie, its utility, its convenience, and its consequences. Doubtless he chose to dabble in falsehood because it is generally winked at as the most venial of all moral obliquities—a fault which is the most thoroughly universal of all that flesh is heir to. The incident of George Washington and the cherry tree furnished the basis for ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... Brooklyn. But in process of time Hiero (or, as he was then called, Henry) took it into his head to return to the original family mansion and live there. No objection was made; in truth, Henry's oddities, awkwardnesses, and propensity to dabble in queer branches of research and experiment may have allayed the parting pangs. Back he blundered, therefore, to the banks of the Hudson, and established himself in his birthplace. What he did there during the next few years will never be known. Grisly stories about the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... to hear from Mr. Norton's Letter to you that you hold well, through all the Wet and Cold we have had for the last six months. Our Church Bell here has been tolling for one and another of us very constantly. I get out on the River in my Boat, and dabble about my five acres of Ground just outside the Town. Sometimes I have thought you might come to my pleasant home, where I never live, but where you should be treated with better fare than you had at Farlingay: ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... worse," says our implacable critic; "when women were content with looking pretty before marriage, and with good housekeeping after, they were uninteresting certainly, but they were respectable. Now they dabble in all things; are weakly aesthetic, weakly scientific, weakly controversial, and wholly prosy, and contemptible." Dabbling is pitiful, certainly, and weakness has few allies, but let us do justice even to the weak dabblers. AEsthetic, or scientific, or controversial training has but recently ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... the captain merrily, "there's a beautifully fitted medicine-chest in that cupboard, with plenty of physic and books of instructions for that, and a bit of surgery; and I've had to dabble in it a little myself. We captains often have to do that out away abroad. Why, sir," he continued, with a queer humorous look at Jack, "I'd back myself to give a pill to any man against all the doctors ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... I am afraid I have been over-rated; I make my living tilling the soil and dabble in my nut grove only when I can find a few moments to spare—in fact all I know about nuts and nut-grafting, I owe to my good friend, Edgar Huen. I shall always remember that balmy May morning 25 years ago when Mr. Huen came over with a kit full of hickory scions, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... in livings but the thinking they can buy the Holy Ghost for money which vulgar rich people indulge in when they dabble ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... drink as much as they can. Not only is the water itself blessed, but all the streams, and wells, and fountains in the neighbourhood are equally benefited. It is curious to see the way in which the people dabble in the water, throw it over their persons, though it freezes as it falls, and drink of it till they can drink no more; all this being done in the belief that the water is holy, and that they will ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... number: "2,000 francs." He said nothing for a time, but stood looking at the picture, while the copyist began actively to dabble with her paint. "For a copy, isn't that a good deal?" he asked at ...
— The American • Henry James
... cared for nothing more in this world, after that took to drinking, used to get constantly drunk, and rolled from public-house to public-house, and bar to bar, and as the worst glass of vitrol still cost a penny, he became reduced to undertaking the part which you have seen, to dabble in the water, to blacken himself, and to allow ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... providing him with a wife would be very good if it were feasible. I should be very glad to see him settled. But if he will marry no one but Florence Mountjoy he must remain unmarried. Augustus has had his hand in that business, and don't let us dabble in it." Then the squire gave the lawyer full instructions as to the will which was to be made. Mr. Grey and Mr. Bullfist were to be named as trustees, with instructions to sell everything which it would be ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... out of my depth, at any rate," quoth he. "I am but ill read in ancient controversies, though I know you dabble in them." ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... more threatening still. The rowdier section of the people never fails to hoot the man out on every possible occasion and even the women of his family may be subjected to indignities. The vakils are a very powerful class in the Deccan. Many of them do not openly dabble in politics; but you can hardly find many among them who do not sympathize with extremist politics. The landholders, traders and agriculturists in general are always in need of the services or, as they think, of the favour of the legal profession ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... ample family had been installed as residents of the general waiting-room of a small, scantily-equipped station. No beds, no washing conveniences, no table, no chairs; just the wall seats, with a roof above them and the pump water at the end of the platform to drink from and dabble in. The distressed man arrived, harrassed and anxious, only to be met by a round-faced, laughing wife and nine round-faced, laughing children, who all made sport of their "camping" experience, and assured him they could have "stood it" a little ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... wishes to dispose of certain individuals who call themselves men of wit and fashion—about town—who he is told have abused his book "vaustly"—their own word. These people paint their cheeks, wear white kid gloves, and dabble in literature, or what they conceive to be literature. For abuse from such people, the writer was prepared. Does any one imagine that the writer was not well aware, before he published his book, that, whenever he gave it to the world, he should be attacked by every literary coxcomb in England ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... his way. That would explain it all right.... He must be runnin' for pretty big stakes, for that kind of lad don't dabble in crime for six-and-eightpence.... Now for the layout. You've got three men shut up in Dalquharter House, who by this time have probably escaped. One of you—what's his name?—Heritage?—is in the old Tower, and you think that they think the Princess ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... chance than when he starts his "daily" for a living. Yet the man who more than any other is responsible for the industrial regeneration of this continent started in life as a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway. Thomas Alva Edison was then about fifteen years of age. He had already begun to dabble in chemistry, and had fitted up a small itinerant laboratory. One day, as he was performing some occult experiment, the train rounded a curve, and the bottle of sulphuric acid broke. There followed a series of unearthly odors and unnatural ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... more or less interest in matters pertaining to surgery, at least as far as it is desirable that a boy should dabble in such things. He had borrowed many books from Dr. Temple, and on two occasions had set a broken arm in a fashion that won him words ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... the dabblers, as industry absorbs the engineers. The sands are of all earthly spots the most delightful; but a greater delight than any earthly spot can afford awaits the dabbler in the sea. It is mostly the girls who dabble; the gaiety and frolic suit them better than the serious industry of castles and canals. Deliverance from shoes and stockings, the first thrill of pleasure and surprise at the cool touch of the water, the wild rush along the brim, the dainty advance till the sea covers the little ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... what move to make an' when to make it. If Molly is one thing she is game. We've got a good deal out of the mine an' it's all come so far from the sale of gold to the mint, I take it. We don't dabble in stocks. We're ahead. If the mine's gone bu'st she's done nicely by ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... others of that class, at Dieppe, Calais,"—he shrugged his shoulders, comprehensively—"are impossible as resorts. In catering for the true devotees—for those who, unlike De Quincey, plunge and do not dabble—for those who seek to explore the ultimate regions of poppyland, for those who have learnt the mystery from the real masters in Asia and not in Europe—the enterprise conducted by Madame Jean supplied a want long and ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... departments, but all these delightful things are not the things that make a college.... And, Oh! the experiments! It is enough to try the patience of a Job. I came here to take a college course, and not to dabble in a little of every insignificant thing that comes up. More than half of my time is taken up in writing essays, practicing elocution, trotting to chapel, and reading poetry with the teacher of English literature, and it seems to make no difference to Miss Howard ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... wholesale assassins who destroy them; women, too, seem disposed to prove that they have something else to attend to, besides setting off and conserving their beauty. We have with us a youth sent for sale to Tripoli by the Bashaw of Fezzan, who it seems must dabble in slave-dealing, notwithstanding his imprecations against the merchants of Ghadames for the same crime. He is from Mandara, and was kidnapped by the Tibboos. This is the captain of all the sham-fighters, and the leader and prompter of all other sports on the way. There is ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... you were always theatrically given, and played the coquette in youth; so in age the character of go-between befits you still: dearly do you love to dabble in, what you are pleased to ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... even be reviewed. Neither the slashing, nor the puffing, nor the faintly praising notice will be meted out to them. There will be a conspiracy of silence. The very circulating libraries will be threatened, and coffins (stolen from undertakers who dabble in romance) will be laid at Mr. Mudie's door, unless he casts off the amateur in fiction. The professionals will march through rapine to emancipation. They will strike off the last gyves that fetter the noble art of romance, and in five or ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... not, which merely proves you are not a 'fly-cop,' only a measly busy-body sticking your nose into some one else's business. Well, we know how to take care of your kind, and this is likely to prove the last case you'll dabble in for a while, ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... Child was not permitted to dabble in the pan of soapy water, he revenged himself by bringing Cash's mitten and throwing that in, and crying "Ee? Ee?" with a shameless delight because it sailed round and round until Cash turned and saw it, and threw ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... thou hope to stay Time's dread advance till thou hast had thy day? Dost think the Strangler will release his hold Because, forsooth, some fibs remain untold? No, no—beneath thy multiplying load Of years thou canst not tarry on the road To dabble in the blood thy leaden feet Have pressed from bosoms that have ceased to beat Of reputations margining thy way, Nor wander from the path new truth to slay. Tell to thyself whatever lies thou wilt, Catch as thou canst at pennies got by guilt— Straight down to death this blessed year thou'lt ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... Bunny. "Your legs will dry better if they are just wet, instead of being wet and muddy, Sue. Dabble 'em ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Keeping Store • Laura Lee Hope
... the breeze. But not one of these leafy damsels had seen Proserpina. Then, going a little farther, Ceres would, perhaps, come to a fountain, gushing out of a pebbly hollow in the earth, and would dabble with her hand in the water. Behold, up through its sandy and pebbly bed, along with the fountain's gush, a young woman with dripping hair would arise, and stand gazing at Mother Ceres, half out of ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... enthusiasm for the United States and for the story of Abraham Lincoln. But you were never faddist or doctrinaire, and your practical bent showed itself in the keen interest you took in the noticing of political economy in which I used to dabble, and which we used to discuss by the hour. You seemed, without having studied text-books, to have an intuitive grasp of economic and fiscal truths which astonished me and others much better qualified ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... wonderful love for the excitement of gambling- -take him away from the betting ring and he goes straight to the share market to dabble in gold and silver shares. The Great Humbug Gold Mining Company is floated on the Melbourne market—a perfect fortune in itself, which influential men are floating in a kind of semi-philanthropic manner to benefit mankind at large, and themselves in particular. Report by competent geologists; rich ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... malady to profit by the cure, and retard the cure to augment the fees. As the quack exhausts the constitution the pettifogger exhausts the purse; and as he who has once been under the hands of a quack is for ever after prone to dabble in drugs, and poison himself with infallible prescriptions, so the client of the pettifogger is ever after prone to embroil himself with his neighbors, and impoverish himself with successful lawsuits. My readers will excuse this digression into which I have been unwarily ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... done without much alarm: for you must know that Perkins used to dabble in poetry, and ordinarily prepare himself for composition by this ...
— The Bedford-Row Conspiracy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fell, and the devil made a determined effort to unman me; first, with the scrambled tea which was the tardy substitute for an orderly lunch, then with the new and nauseous duty of filling the side-lights, which meant squatting in the fo'c'sle to inhale paraffin and dabble in lamp-black; lastly, with an all-round attack on my nerves as the night fell on our frail little vessel, pitching on her precarious way through driving mist. In a sense I think I went through the same sort of mental crisis as when I sat upon my portmanteau at Flensburg. The main issue was ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... the simplest solution of the problem is to accept the hypothesis that in early life he was in an attorney's office (!), that he there contracted a love for the law which never left him, that as a young man in London he continued to study or dabble in it for his amusement, to stroll in leisure hours into the Courts, and to frequent the society of lawyers. On no other supposition is it possible to explain the attraction which the law evidently had for him, and his minute and undeviating accuracy in a subject where no layman who ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sort is nothing but a man who possesses in an unusually high degree powers which most of his fellows arrogate to themselves on a smaller scale; for in rude society there is hardly a person who does not dabble in magic. Thus, whereas a man-god of the former or inspired type derives his divinity from a deity who has stooped to hide his heavenly radiance behind a dull mask of earthly mould, a man-god of the latter type draws his extraordinary power from a certain physical sympathy ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... listener, is, for his sins, fated to continue so to the end of the chapter—i.e., our interminable rhymes; til, tired of exchanging our bad prose for worse poetry, (and having the fear of his maledictions before our eyes,) we throw it aside in a pet. Then comes a change over our spirit; and we dabble in paint-pots, and flourish a palette, and are great on canvass, and in chalks, and there is a mingled perfume of oil and turpentine in our studio (whilome study) that is to us highly refreshing, and good against fainting; and we make tours in search ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... upon your swallowing all the advice she crams you with; for, provided she has the luxury of giving it, it can make little difference how it is taken; because whatever befals you, be it good or bad, it is equally a matter of exultation to her. Thus she has the satisfaction of saying, 'If poor Mrs. Dabble had but followed my advice, and not have taken these pills of Dr. Doolittle's, she would have been alive to-day, depend upon it;' or, 'If Sir Thomas Speckle had but taken advantage of a friendly hint I threw ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... to the plainest of plain prose, I am not a theorist on these subjects, nor do I dabble in small fruits as a rich and fanciful amateur, to whom it is a matter of indifference whether his strawberries cost five cents or a dollar a quart. As a farmer, milk must be less expensive than champagne. I could not afford a fruit ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... be able to look after him; the result is that he is allowed practically to do exactly as he likes in the holidays; he hates school cordially, and I don't wonder. He fortunately has one taste, and that is for science, and it is more than a taste, it is a real passion. He does not merely dabble about with chemicals, or play tricks with electricity; but he reads dry, hard, abstruse science, and writes elaborate monographs, which I read with more admiration than comprehension. This is almost his only hold on ordinary life, and I encourage it with all my might; ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Since there are things that exist, a thing of all things there must needs be; In the thing of all things dabble ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... bows, and bends her gaze O'er the eternal waste, as if to sum Its waves by weary thousands all her days, Dismally doom'd! meanwhile the billows come, And coldly dabble with her quiet feet, Like any bleaching stones ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... dabble a little in geology, mineralogy, and palaeontology. My friend is a botanist. You are Mr. Rawdon. Allow me, Mr. Rawdon, to introduce my friend Mr. Eugene Coristine, of Osgood Hall, Barrister, and my humble self, Farquhar Wilkinson, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... baking me more than was pleasant, I would rouse myself with an effort, and running down to the fringe of rushes that bordered the full-brimmed river, plunge again headlong into the quiet brown water, and dabble and swim till I was once more weary! For innocent animal delight, I know of nothing to match those days—so warm, yet so pure-aired—so clean, so glad. I often think how God must love his little children to have invented for them such delights! For, of course, if he did not love the children ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... it was too vast for him to decide, for he speedily dismissed it and turned his attention to that which more nearly concerned him. Still toiling with his hand, much in the same manner that a child would dabble in the water, he kept up the tardy movement of the canoe until he began to grow fearless again, and he ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... You know, of course, every tree and hole and stream and almost every stone and bird's nest about your own home in the country; you will never get to know any other place so well again in your life, for when one is grown up one can't climb trees and dabble in streams and build huts and root about in the earth. Jesus was just a natural boy; He grew to know all the byways between the little gardens, all the trees which bore figs or pomegranates or olives or oranges, and He climbed ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... Dublin en route for the Newmarket spring meeting. He told me that he made some L700 a year by the turf. "I've a cousin, you see, who is a great sporting man, and thus I'm 'in with a stable,' and get put up to tips," he said. "But for this the turf would be a very poor thing to dabble in." And this led to a talk about officers' lives and their money-affairs. "Oh," he said, "you've no notion of the number who go to utter grief. Why now, I'll tell you what happened to me last season in London. I was asked to go down and dine with some fellows at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... no desire to dabble in murder, nor do we aspire to turn an honest penny by the minute description of bodily mutilations. But while the Whitechapel atrocities are engaging the public attention, we are tempted to contribute our quota of speculation as to the monster's ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... his shoes, removed his socks, and thrust both feet over the side to dabble them in the saline water of ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... blanched faces Into their quivering hearts, with unknown dread, As that accuser pointed to the shape Before his feet. "Dogs, will ye lap his blood Before ye die? Make haste; for it grows cold! Ye will not, will not even dabble your hands In that red puddle of flesh, what? Are ye Spaniards? Come, come, I'll look at you, perchance there's one That's but a demi-devil and holds you back." And with the word Drake stepped among their ranks And read each face among the ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... hurries for the mother and the physician. He tells just enough of the story to convict himself, but suppresses everything which may convict her. How know I that this resistance in the carriage was more than a sham? How know I that he did not attend her in the house? That they did not dabble together on their way through the dark piazza—along the stairs?—Nay, what proof is there that he did not find his way, with polluting purpose, into the very chamber?—that chamber, from which, not three weeks after, she bade him fly to avoid my wrath! What makes her ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... motion) 348; high water, flood tide. V. be watery &c. adj.; reek. add water, water, wet; moisten &c. 339; dilute, dip, immerse; merge; immerge, submerge; plunge, souse, duck, drown; soak, steep, macerate, pickle, wash, sprinkle, lave, bathe, affuse[obs3], splash, swash, douse, drench; dabble, slop, slobber, irrigate, inundate, deluge; syringe, inject, gargle. Adj. watery, aqueous, aquatic, hydrous, lymphatic; balneal[obs3], diluent; drenching &c. v.; diluted &c. v.; weak; wet &c. (moist) 339. Phr. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... stake on stocks, secured a fair return from an investment in oil, and came out about even on the race-track. Up to this time, however, he had never indulged in the luxury of a theatrical venture, notwithstanding the hankering he had at times to dabble in that direction. As soon as he saw Handy he called him aside and began a little preliminary skirmishing, and in a roundabout way started in to lay bare the strenuous thoughts that were agitating his mind. He opened up the subject by inquiring ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... voyage to New York and to the Pacific, Joe thinks over every turn of this intrigue. If Hardin tries to hide Armand Valois' fortune, why should he dabble in the mystery ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... their opportunities few. One receives an impression, however, that life presents itself to them with attractions not accounted for in this meagre train of advantages, and that they are on better terms with it than many people who have made a better bargain. They lie in the sunshine; they dabble in the sea; they wear bright rags; they fall into attitudes and harmonies; they assist at an eternal conversazione. It is not easy to say that one would have them other than they are, and it certainly would make an immense difference ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... list," he said. "Let us have no students of occult; no men who dabble in laboratory spiritualism; just nice, live, healthy people who never heard of such things—if ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... "I was born of only ordinary capacity, but of extraordinary persistency," and herein is the secret of a great life. She did not dabble in French or music or painting and give it up; she went steadily on to success. Did she neglect home duties? Never. She knit stockings a yard long for her aged father till his death, usually studying while she knit. To those who learn to be ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... farmhouse, such as might well go with two or three hundred acres of tolerably good land, tolerably well farmed by an active old-fashioned tenant, who, though he did not use mowing-machines nor steam-ploughs nor dabble in chemical experiments, still brought an adequate capital to his land and made the capital yield a very fair return of interest. The supper was laid out in a good-sized though low-pitched parlour with a glazed door, now wide open, as were all the latticed windows, looking into a small ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ever hear of such a thing!" cried the widow. "Donkeys dance on ropes, school-boys dabble in doctor's business! Show me the thing at once! We want ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Henderson the very last person in the world to dabble in the occult, as they call it in the newspapers. I should have thought he would laugh ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... evidence of love and confidence in their wives, these colonial gentlemen were not, however, especially anxious to have womankind dabble in politics or other public affairs. The husbands were willing enough to explain public activities of a grave nature to their help-meets, and sometimes even asked their opinion on proposed movements; but the men did not hesitate to think aloud the theories that the home was woman's sphere and domestic ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... and a fit of the stone: the blow from the former," he adds, "was so violent, that my physician despaired of my revival; but, by the mercy of Heaven, I am so far revived, that I can again enjoy a social and literary intercourse with my friends; and even dabble again in rhyme; but, as I suspect, that my rhymes, like the Homilies of Gil Blas' Archbishop, may savour of apoplexy, I think it right to ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... labor, strive; drudge, slave; operate, manipulate, perform; ferment, effervesce. Antonyms: shirk, idle, dabble, loaf, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... and roystering; and it is a fine sight to behold them walk, poddling one after other, with their toes out, like soldiers drilling, and their little eyes cocked all ways at once, and the way that they dib with their bills, and dabble, and throw up their heads and enjoy something, and then tell the others about it. Therefore I knew at once, by the way they were carrying on, that there must be something or other gone wholly amiss in the duck-world. Sister Annie perceived it too, but with a greater ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... practise brought me! Since my interest in the Dollon affair is so keen, I follow it up, I wish to find the secret of it, just through love of my art. I dabble in ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... keenly alive to every passing sensation. Of course there are many so-called 'ARTISTS' who are mere shams of the real thing; persons who, having a little surface-education in one or the other branch of the arts, play idly with the paint-brush, or dabble carelessly in the deep waters of literature,—or borrow a few crotchets and quavers from other composers, and putting them together in haste, call it ORIGINAL COMPOSITION. Among these are to be found the self-called 'professors' of painting; the sculptors who allow the ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... on that account, was shaking in his shoes. But on making inquiries we could find no trace of any complaint, official or semi-official, having been made, and further, the Julie was accused of having tried to dabble in the slave trade. Here was a puzzle for us. What were we to do? Say nothing to Pepel? Then he would laugh us to scorn, for his conscience pricked him, we knew. All his canoes had taken to flight when we arrived, and not a single negro had boarded ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... little, and in his heart of hearts Ferguson thought Languor was, on the whole, more melodious than Dolores. But that was, of course, purely a matter of opinion. At any rate, it was a fine composition; and a poet must not dabble in the common intrigues of ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... suggestion. He thinks extraordinary curative effects, so far as the consciousness of pain goes, are to be derived from hypnotism, which is Mesmerism with a new Greek name. But he always exhorts laics not to dabble in it, and medical men to keep their hypnotic lore to themselves. This is charming after the way in which the profession of which Charcot is really a bright light treated Mesmerism. Mesmer was an empiric. But he ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... is there, but Harding's hammer is silent. And where his shop stood is a little cottage where children live, who dabble in summer on the ferry-step. And their mother will run from her washing or cooking to take you over the water for the same fee that Wayland asked for shoeing a poor man's donkey or making a rich man's sword. And this is the ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... this science," said he, "promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera but these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... she, honest woman, was so just to me as to lay it all out again for me, and gave me head-dresses, and linen, and gloves, and ribbons, and I went very neat, and always clean; for that I would do, and if I had rags on, I would always be clean, or else I would dabble them in water myself; but, I say, my good nurse, when I had money given me, very honestly laid it out for me, and would always tell the ladies this or that was bought with their money; and this made them oftentimes give me more, till at last I was indeed called upon by the magistrates, as ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... all, but when the shares moved it was to go down. He did not know what to do. If he sold now he would lose altogether hard on three hundred and fifty pounds; and that would leave him only eighty pounds to go on with. He wished with all his heart that he had never been such a fool as to dabble on the Stock Exchange, but the only thing was to hold on; something decisive might happen any day and the shares would go up; he did not hope now for a profit, but he wanted to make good his loss. It was his only ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... to that kind of thing," Geof answered; "you know I don't pretend to paint. My business is with bricks and mortar. It's only when I'm loafing that I dabble in colours." ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... morbid young person who loved to dabble in the supernatural. Her taste in literature was for Edgar A. Poe. In religion she inclined toward spiritualism. Her favorite amusement was to gather a few shuddering friends about her, turn out the gas, and tell ghost stories. ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... untouched? With what phase of life, character, or study does he fail to sympathize? So far from being the rough-hewn block 'dull fools' have supposed him, he is the most dilettante of great poets. Do you dabble in art and perambulate picture-galleries? Browning must be your favourite poet: he is art's historian. Are you devoted to music? So is he: and alone of our poets has sought to fathom in verse the deep mysteries of sound. Do ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... fashion, for the berries she gave him, the flowers she wove in his hair, and the brooks that drove his mimic mills. He chased the butterfly, he climbed the trees, he would stand in the rain, paint his cheeks with berry juice, dabble in the mud, and nothing was secure from his prying fingers and curious eyes. He must touch and taste of everything, and know every secret. But it eluded him; and he lay down from his giddy chase, tired and unsatisfied, yet still anticipating ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... against it. If he even asserts that he has counter-facts, but dare not state them, he is at once met with a praejudicium. The mere fact of his having ascertained the truth is imputed as a blame to him, in a sort of prudish cant. 'What a very improper person he must be to like to dabble in such improper books that they must not even be quoted.' If in self-defence he desperately gives his facts, he only increases the feeling against him, whilst the reactionists, hiding their blushing faces, find in their modesty an ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... nuthing 'bout votin' till freedom. I don't think I ever voted till I come to Mississippi. I votes Republican. That's the party of my color and I stick to them long as they do right. I don't dabble in white folk's buzness an' that white folks votin' is their buzness. If I vote I go do ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... He took off his linen painting sleeves, and began to dabble his fingers in a pan of turpentine. "My little brother! Do you know that the Directeur thinks you are charming, and he wonders that I do ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... a tub: In chemical bleachings they dabble and grub. Our shirts each bespatters Then brush them to tatters. The wearers get mad as March hares ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various
... meeting each other with immense ceremony, we have our seasonal movements in relation to the ritual of politics and sport, we travel south for the Budget and north for the grouse, we play games to amuse the men who keep us—not a woman would play a game for its own sake—we dabble with social reform and politics, for which few of us care a rap except as an occupation, we 'discover' artists or musicians or lecturers (as though we cared), we try to believe in lovers or, still harder, try to believe in old or new religions, ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... important subject of truth; and that those who must be the most injured by it, will be the very class of people, whom he professes a desire to benefit. We much regret the fact, that there are but too many of our brethren, who undertake to dabble in literary matters, in the shape of newspaper and book-making, who are wholly unqualified for the important work. This, however, seems to be called forth by the palpable neglect, and indifference of those who have had the educational advantages, ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... just the kind of weather I wanted to-day. See them splash along. Aren't they hideous, aren't they filthy? What mud! It's everywhere, in the streets, on the quays, even in the Seine, even in the sky. Ah! mud is a fine thing when you're downhearted. I would like to dabble in it, to mould a statue with it, a statue one hundred feet high, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... place where the average short story writer should not seek his material is the world of literature. Almost from the time when men first began to dabble in letters they have drawn on their predecessors for their subject matter; but this practice has produced a deal of unconscious plagiarism, which is responsible for most of the conventional and stereotyped stories with which we are afflicted ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... What does each member of the family require of the house? A place to live in. And that means far more than eating and sleeping and having a place for one's clothes. There must be not only a place for everything, but a place for everybody in the ideal house. The boys who wish to dabble in electricity, the girls who wish to entertain their friends in their own way, the tired father who wishes to read his newspaper "in peace," the younger children who want to pop corn or blow bubbles or play games, all must be planned for. There will be no room ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... professional study of philosophy was discouraged among the true Romans—more than once the professional philosophers were banished from the capital—there were few cultivated persons who did not to some extent dabble in it, and even go so far as to profess an adherence to one school or another. None of these men believed in the "Roman religion" as administered by the state, although many of them were administering it themselves. The same man could one ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... against all comers, attracted wide attention, so that the Bishop gave him a professorship, and the Duke, who, like some other crowned heads of those days,—notably Henry VIII. and James I.,—liked to dabble in theology, made him a court theologian. But the duties of this position were uncongenial: a flippant duke, fond of putting questions which the wisest theologian could not answer, and laying out work which the young scholar evidently thought futile, apparently wearied ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... for the numbers come;" but few discourse Alexandrian metaphysics at the same age, for the very good reason that the metaphysics as a rule do not "come." And even among those youth whom curiosity, or more often vanity, induces to dabble in such studies, one would find few indeed over whom they have cast such an irresistible spell as to estrange them for a while from poetry altogether. That this was the experience of Coleridge we have his own words to show. His son and biographer, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, has a ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... back into his clothes, pausing now and then to dabble tentatively at the freshly broken bruise with the wet towel which Ogden had at last forced him to accept, when the door of the dressing-room opened, and Hogarty stepped briskly inside and closed ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... ducks, we might dabble in mud: Or dogs, we might play till it ended in blood; So foul, or so fierce are their natures. But Thomas and William, and such pretty names, Should be cleanly and harmless as doves, or as lambs, Those ...
— Divine Songs • Isaac Watts
... only serve to amuse the lookers-on. A retired tradesman, it is true, may chase ennui and the 'taedium vitae,' by digging and planting in his kitchen-garden, or try his hand at rearing tulips and hyacinths; but if he vainly attempt any other art, or dabble in light literature or heavy philosophy, he is lost. Old Foozle was one of those who, having accumulated wealth, retire with their housekeepers to spend the remnant of their days in some suburban retreat, the monotony of whose life is varied by monthly trips to town to bring tea and grocery, ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... make good sculpture is to let the youth thumb and punch and dabble in wet clay, and see what he can make of it; and the way to make a painter is to give the boy now a burnt stick, and at another time a pin and a back of a looking-glass, and see what he can delineate with such materials as these and with all other materials with which a line can be drawn. To ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... at those children down there!' said the queen, sobbing and pointing to them. 'Did you ever see anybody so happy? Why can't I have mud to dabble in too, and why can't I take off my shoes and stockings, and amuse myself like the children do, instead of being so dull and ...
— Milly and Olly • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... us, you see; but not for this must you accuse us of the levity of culture. We might patronize; we did not dabble.—One seems to hear from those early ages, echoes of tones familiar now. Ours is the good old roast beef and common sense of—I mean, the grand old gravitas of Rome. What! you must have a Jupiter to worship, mustn't you? No sound as by Parliament-Established-Religion of Numa Pompilius, Sir, and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... he said, and sat down on the floor. "I went tired this morning, since I came in here and started talking to you—as tired as if I had been pouring my life-blood here on these planks for you to dabble your ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... I began to dabble in politics. And my views of political subjects were as much out of the ordinary way as my views on matters pertaining to religion. I was a republican. I would have no King, no Queen, no House of Lords, and no State Church. I would abolish the laws of entail and primogeniture, and reduce ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... troubled myself. I began to see more clearly that it doesn't do for a man of scruples to dabble in politics. I had a great regard for poor Johnny, and I felt no confidence in the colonel treating him with any consideration. In fact, I would not have insured Johnny's life for the next week at any conceivable premium. Again I thought it unlikely that, ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope |
