"Sloth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... our miseries, a protecting amulet to expel sin's venom, an attractive loadstone to draw God's mercy and graces unto us. [6771]Peccatum vulnus, poenitentia medicinam: sin made the breach, repentance must help it; howsoever thine offence came, by error, sloth, obstinacy, ignorance, exitur per poenitentiam, this is the sole means to be relieved. [6772]Hence comes our hope of safety, by this alone sinners are saved, God is provoked to mercy. "This unlooseth all that is bound, enlighteneth darkness, mends ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... ready to meet the Athabasca blacksmith, Albrecht Dumont, dying faster now, signed his last report to the Government at Berlin, which his daughter Ilse had written for him—something about Canadian canals and stupid Yankees and their greed, indifference, cowardice, and sloth. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... us. We all know what is likely to happen to an estate in the owner's prolonged or permanent absence—it deteriorates; his active interest and personal supervision are wanting, and the results are visible everywhere. Sloth and mismanagement, which his presence would check, go uncorrected, the daily duties are indifferently performed or remain undone, and soon the property as a whole bears unmistakeable traces of neglect. There is always the ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... and were I to visit your different places and huts, I fear I should find some of you spending the hours appointed for divine service in cultivating your gardens and grounds, others indulging themselves in mere sloth and idleness, others engaged in the most profane and unclean conversation, and others committing abominations, which it would defile my pen to describe. Now what must be the end of these courses? God says, Remember the sabbath day ...
— An Address to the Inhabitants of the Colonies, Established in New South Wales and Norfolk Island. • Richard Johnson
... too late. All ideas of peace on a basis of compromise had disappeared on either side. The end, it was seen clearly, must be either absolute slavery for all but the privileged, or a system of life founded on equality and Communism. The sloth, the hopelessness, and if I may say so, the cowardice of the last century, had given place to the eager, restless heroism of a declared revolutionary period. I will not say that the people of that time foresaw the life we are leading now, but there was a general instinct amongst them towards ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... keenest eye could discover The sign of the sloth on you, From the last mane-lock laid over To the last nail tight in the shoe; A blast, and your ranks stood ready; A shout, and your saddles filled; A wave, and your troop was ready To wheel where ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... an omelet Benny came out into the kitchen and stood regarding her, hands in pockets, making, as usual, one set of muscles rest upon another. His face was full of the utmost good nature, but it also convicted him of too much sloth to ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... riches, their numerous kinsmen, their wealth, and their arrogant and intolerable use of all these sources of influence; so that they may appear rather to trust to these circumstances than to the merits of their cause. They will be brought into contempt, if sloth, or negligence, or idleness, or indolent pursuits, or luxurious tranquillity can be alleged against them. Good-will will be procured, derived from the character of the hearers themselves, if exploits are mentioned which have been ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... not appear to know beef from mutton or rice from coffee. And in fact she was good for nothing; for even if he sent her on an errand, as on this occasion, she would stay forever and one day after, and charge her sloth upon her infirmities. She had been ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... the transports of his wrath, flung the power of attorney at the head of the innocent maidservant, and was only forcibly withheld from horse-whipping the rascally messenger by whose sloth and drunkenness the ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... maize, yucca, and anana fields, where they scratch up the root and eat the grain and fruit; but the slightest noise drives them back to their holes. In the deeper recesses of the forest resounds the monotonous, drawling cry of the sloth. Here we have a symbol of life under the utmost degree of listlessness, and of the greatest insensibility in a state of languid repose. This emblem of misery fixes itself on an almost leafless bough, and there remains defenceless; a ready prey to any assailant. ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... the mob accept our schemes with ease. Behold them! They will give us little trouble By wanting—well, to analyse the Bubble; So they get something for themselves more solid, They'll sit serene and stolid In titled sloth and coronetted slumber. I can secure them, friends, in any number; For Guinea Pigs are numerous and prolific And as decoys their influence is mirific. So whilst we work our Bubble-blowing rigs, Hurrah, for Guinea Pigs! They'll take our fees, assent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... "We palliate our sloth by the specious pretext of difficulty." Nothing, in fact, is too difficult to accomplish, which we set about, with a proper consideration of those difficulties, and pursue with perseverance. The Indian language ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Trappe were not only immersed in luxury and sloth, but were abandoned to the most scandalous excesses; most of them lived by robbery, and several had committed assassinations on the travellers who had occasion to traverse the woods. The neighbourhood shrunk with terror from the ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... parents. Once he blamed himself bitterly for not having gone to Mr. Lavington the moment he discovered Argemone's affection, and insuring—as he then might have done—his consent. But again he felt that no sloth had kept him back, but adoring reverence for his God-given treasure, and humble astonishment at his own happiness; and he fled from the thought into renewed examination into the state of the masses, the effect of which was only to deepen his own determination ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... fear The Giants caused us, that the way was lost By which we could pursue a fit career In search of Jesus and the saintly Host; And your departure breeds such sorrow here, That comfortless we all are to our cost; But months and years you would not stay in sloth, Nor are you formed to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the tan-bark sidewalk before he put his feet firmly down and squared himself on them to give the two-finger whistle for his chum, which is the terror to the nervous. Much of the boy had gone out of him. He moved with the motion and sloth of decrepit age. Next week you will not know him for the same boy. His feet will be hardened, he will dance over the macadam mixed streets with the callosity of a stone-crusher, and the fugacious cat will ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... seems as far removed from those that wear hoofs as it could be, but the philosopher, considering the point at which it has arrived, rather than the route by which it got there, will class it with them, for its idea of life is just theirs turned topsy-turvy. The nails of the sloth, instead of being hammered into hoofs on the hard ground, have grown long and curved, like those of a caged bird, and become hooks by which it can hang, without effort, in the midst of the leaves on which it feeds. A minimum of intellect is required ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... unlawful occupation probably, or sitting drinking his wages in an alehouse. That was what they saw, and what any man may see to-day for himself in his own village, whether in England or Australia, that working man's paradise. Drink, dirt, and sloth, my friends of the working orders, will produce the same ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... suddenly warmed up Jennie Stone, "they tell us about a two-toed sloth living in Central and South America. Believe me! the present-day shoemaker seems to have secured a last to fit ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... provoking, but such was the tiresome mode of travelling through this country. No consideration can induce the natives to shake off their habitual indolence, not if a voice from heaven were to be heard, would they do it. Pleasure and sloth are with them synonymous terms, and they are scarcely alive to any other gratification. In the mean time, the chief, who appeared to be a very good sort of man, although he had little authority over his people, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... the priests were awakened by the singing of birds and the chattering of monkeys (as if in derision at their sloth), they no sooner discovered their great loss than they set to berating each another right soundly; not because they cared a whit for what evil the fellow could do, but that, having set their hearts on the hanging, it only grieved them to find that they had lost so excellent ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... their precepts to the age in which they lived. Such monks as I have met[285] maintained that extreme forms of tapas were good for the nerves of ancient saints but not for the weaker natures of to-day. But in avoiding rigorous severity, they have not fallen into sloth or luxury. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... sometimes, after years of practice, finds it difficult to begin the composition of some simple reception or commemorative address; but the reading of a meagre outline, not one word or idea of which may be directly used, serves to break the spell of intellectual sloth or inertia, and starts him upon his ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... of Ireland appear in Spenser's account in all their well-known forms; some of them, as if they were what we were reading of yesterday. Throughout the work there is an honest zeal for order, an honest hatred of falsehood, sloth, treachery, and disorder. But there does not appear a trace of consideration for what the Irish might feel or desire or resent. He is sensible indeed of English mismanagement and vacillation, of the way in which money and force were wasted by not ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... have no knowledge of the Miocene mammalian fauna of the Australian and Austro-Columbian provinces; but, seeing that not a trace of a Platyrrhine Ape, of a Procyonine Carnivore, of a characteristically South-American Rodent, of a Sloth, an Armadillo, or an Ant-eater has yet been found in Miocene deposits of Arctogaea, I cannot doubt that they already existed in ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... who sweat and struggle to maintain the appearance of gentlemen; and, on the other hand, there are gentlemen of rank who seem industrious to appear mean and degenerate; the one sort raise themselves either by ambition or virtue, while the other abase themselves by viciousness or sloth; so that we must avail ourselves of our understanding and discernment in distinguishing those persons, who, though they bear the same appellation, are yet so different in point of character. All ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... therefore, technical in origin, the natural efflorescence of highly cultivated agilities of brain, and hand, and eye, is worthy of all commendation. But there is another kind that goes under the name of slang, the offspring rather of mental sloth, and current chiefly among those idle, jocular classes to whom all art is a bugbear and a puzzle. There is a public for every one; the pottle-headed lout who in a moment of exuberance strikes on a new ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... completed the survey of India, he opened his batteries on the sloth and selfishness of too many of Christ's professed followers; he poured contempt upon the men who said: "They are not so green as to waste their money on the farce of Foreign Missions." "No, no, indeed," he continued, "they are not green, for greenness implies verdure, and beauty, and there ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... the megatherium, of the elephant, and of the mastodon, which travellers have brought from South America, have all been found in the light soil of the valleys and table-lands. Excepting the megalonyx,* a kind of sloth of the size of an ox, described by Mr. Jefferson, I know not a single instance of the skeleton of an animal buried in a cavern of the New World. (* The megalonyx was found in the caverns of Green Briar, in Virginia, at the distance of 1500 leagues from the megatherium, which resembles it very much, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... between the end of the last chapter and the beginning of this. Meanwhile, I had moved to sociable chambers within sound of the city clocks, and had lived the life of a lonely man about town, sinking more and more into the comfortable sloth of bachelorhood. I had long come to look back upon my pilgrimage as a sort of Indian-summer youth, being, as the reader can reckon for himself, just on thirty-seven. As one will, with one's most serious experiences, hastening to laugh lest ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... there is no life. She had let her arms fall by her sides—round, smooth arms with a pretty dimple at the elbow. Her wrists were delicate; her hands, which did not betray the servant, were embellished with a lady's fingernails. And lazily, with graceful sloth, she allowed her indolent figure to curve and sway;—a figure that a garter might span, and that was made even more slender to the eye by the projection of the hips and the curve of the hoops that gave the balloon-like roundness to her ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... streets and squares, and founding congregation after congregation among the masses of its population. Another man, thus arrested in a career of ceaseless movement and immured within prison walls, might have allowed his mind to stagnate in sloth and despair. But Paul behaved very differently. Availing himself of every possibility of the situation, he converted his one room into a center of far-reaching activity and beneficence. On the few square feet ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... if a score of nobles were to take upon themselves to tell her to set her house in order, to adopt reforms, and to throw aside sloth and luxury; and yet the Church is stirring up a war, and raising and paying an army of fighting men—and for what? To settle which of two men shall be pope. The simple thing would be to hold a high tournament, and to let Urban and ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... to bring these beasts, birds, and insects all together in one spot? The task seems superhuman. Some species could be found only in very remote places—the kangaroo only in Australia, the sloth only in South America, the polar bear only in the Arctic regions. How could Noah, in those days of difficult locomotion, have journeyed in search of these across broad rivers, and over continents and oceans? Did he bring them singly to his dwelling-place in Asia, or ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... time in studies, is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar; they perfect nature and are perfected by experience— for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... violence of his appointed share of life, not because the law of the state requires him, nor yet under the compulsion of some painful and inevitable misfortune which has come upon him, nor because he has had to suffer from irremediable and intolerable shame, but who from sloth or want of manliness imposes upon himself an unjust penalty. For him, what ceremonies there are to be of purification and burial God knows, and about these the next of kin should enquire of the interpreters and of the laws thereto relating, and do according to their injunctions. They who ...
— Laws • Plato
... work in these centuries appears in the lack of spiritual activity and in the predominance of the material side of religion. The mediaeval Church suffered badly from excessive conservatism, which led towards sloth and a complacent inactivity. The morbid element showed itself during the fifteenth century mainly in lack of real earnestness, in the enjoyment of luxurious laziness, and in the steady neglect of the age to revise its Christianity. ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... he, "cannot be of God, that one of His saints, the founder of this house, should lead into sloth and luxury the children of the house he has founded. Sooner could I believe that this is a malignant snare of the most Evil One, who heals the bodily ailments of a few that he may wreck the ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... pervading the country like some spirit of unrest, threading the intricacies of city slums, north, south, east, and west, personally interviewing all manner of loathly creatures, damaged by vice and sloth and ignorance and crime almost out of all semblance of humanity. He had not dreamed that such beings existed upon the earth. Sometimes, unaware of the circumstances and the danger they courted, they caught up a child wherewith to deceive him, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... feel a passion for glory; give me leave to seek it amidst the perils of war. My father, the sultan of Harran, has many enemies. Why does he not call me to his assistance? Why does he leave me here so long in obscurity? Must I spend my life in sloth, when all my brothers have the happiness to be fighting by his side?" "My son," answered Pirouze, "I am no less impatient to have your name become famous; I could wish you had already signalized yourself ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... word, Another's chilly smile or peevish frown, I caught their talk—but added none of mine. They said how she still fumbled with her fate, How she had banished visitants divine, How long her sleep had been, her sloth how great, How others had drawn near and passed her by, While she luxuriously had dreamed, dreamed on, She, she her own eternal enemy, And wanting brain, brain, brain would be undone. The glasses ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part of their time, to be employed in its service. But idleness taxes many of us much more; if we reckon all that is spent in absolute sloth, or doing of nothing; with that which is spent in idle employments or amusements that amounts to nothing. Sloth, by bringing on disease, absolutely shortens life. Sloth, like Rust, consumes faster than Labor ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... the soul open to all external things, fills it with a thousand fancies and questionings, pleasing or vexatious, absorbing the mind, and making it quite impossible to retire within one's self and be recollected. Then follow distaste, sloth, and ennui for all that savors of silence, ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B.
... of extreme temperance and toil, and where it was often to be sought, sword in hand, from an enemy far superior in numbers. Whatever may have been the vices of the Spaniards, they cannot have been those of effeminate sloth. Thus a sober, hardy, and independent race was gradually formed, prepared to assert their ancient inheritance, and to lay the foundations of far more liberal and equitable forms of government, than were known to ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... more remarkable, because his slaves gave him constant annoyance by their wastefulness and sloth and dishonesty. Thus, "Paris has grown to be so lazy and self-willed" that his master does not know what to with him; "Doll at the Ferry must be taught to knit, and made to do a sufficient day's work of it—otherwise (if ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... wilt thou never cease The fathers from their tombs to summon forth? Why bring them, with this dead age to converse, That stifled is by enemies and by sloth? And why dost thou, voice of our ancestors, That hast so long been mute, Resound so loud and frequent in our ears? Why all these grand discoveries? As in a flash the fruitful pages come, What hath this wretched ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... a State has been corrupted by luxury and idleness, it may by its mere greatness bear up under the burden of its vices. But even while he wrote, Rome, of which he spoke, had played out her masquerade of freedom. Other causes than luxury and sloth destroy Republics. If small, their larger neighbors extinguish them by absorption. If of great extent, the cohesive force is too feeble to hold them together, and they fall to pieces by their own weight. The paltry ambition of small men disintegrates them. The want ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... bright, And girdling lands of lustrous growth, Vast continents and isles of light, Dumb tracts of undiscovered sloth; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... yours is worth its weight in gold, and it's not to me but to you a statue ought to be raised, and I would undertake it. There, as you are lying now, in that pose; one doesn't know which is uppermost in it, sloth or strength! That's how I would cast you in bronze. You aimed a just reproach at my egoism and vanity! Yes! yes! it's useless talking of one's-self; it's useless bragging. We have no one yet, no men, look where you will. Everywhere—either small fry, ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... itself with appetite, and so much the worse for those who die of indigestion. Envy is a low passion which no one ever avows; to punish it in any other way than by its own corroding venom, I would have to torture everybody at Court; and weariness is the punishment of sloth. But lust is a different thing altogether; my chaste soul could not forgive such a sin, and I declare open war against it. My subjects are at liberty to think women handsome as much as they please; women may do all in their power to appear beautiful; people ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... has a long time perceived that, in the direction of affairs relative to this war with England, there have been manifested an inconceivable lukewarmness and sloth; but they discover themselves still more, at this moment, by the little inclination which, in general, the Regencies of the Belgic Provinces testify to commence a treaty of commerce and friendship with the new Republic ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... Diogenes's hatching was not very discrepant, when he defined lechery the occupation of folks destitute of all other occupation. For this cause the Syconian engraver Canachus, being desirous to give us to understand that sloth, drowsiness, negligence, and laziness were the prime guardians and governesses of ribaldry, made the statue of Venus, not standing, as other stone-cutters had used to ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... to be one of them. They were so loyal and kind. It was they who would carry out her aspiration. Her campaign against village sloth was actually begun! On what specific reform should she first loose her army? During the gossip after the meeting Mrs. George Edwin Mott remarked that the city hall seemed inadequate for the splendid modern Gopher Prairie. Mrs. Nat Hicks timidly wished that the young people could have free dances ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... sole freebooters of the wood Since Adam Bell and Robin Hood— Kept every where asunder From other tribes—King, Church, and State Spurning, and only dedicate To freedom, sloth, and plunder. Your forest-camp—the forms one sees Banditti like amid the trees, The ragged donkies grazing, The Sibyl's eye prophetic, bright With flashes of the fitful ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... cold touched my hand. I started violently, and saw close to me a dim pinkish thing, looking more like a flayed child than anything else in the world. The creature had exactly the mild but repulsive features of a sloth, the same low forehead and ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... to endure a second travail, and the chances thereof, than to have defaced an enterprise of so great assurance, until I knew whether it pleased God to put a disposition in her princely and royal heart either to follow or forslow (neglect, decline, lose through sloth) the same. I will therefore leave it to His ordinance that hath only power in all things; and do humbly pray that your honours will excuse such errors as, without the defence of art, overrun in every part the following discourse, in which ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh
... love that you may loathe Intrigue and darkness, that you may disperse The ranks of ugly tyrannies and, worse, The sodden languor and complacent sloth. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... to reflect on the changed state of the American continent without the deepest astonishment. Formerly it must have swarmed with great monsters: now we find mere pigmies, compared with the antecedent, allied races. If Buffon had known of the gigantic sloth and armadillo-like animals, and of the lost Pachydermata, he might have said with a greater semblance of truth that the creative force in America had lost its power, rather than that it had never possessed great vigour. ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Gillman's Coleridge, Vol. I., deals rashly, unjustly, and almost maliciously, with some of our own particular friends; and yet, until late in this summer, Anno Domini 1844, we—that is, neither ourselves nor our friends—ever heard of its existence. Now a sloth, even without the benefit of Mr Waterton's evidence to his character, will travel faster than that. But malice, which travels fastest of all things, must be dead and cold at starting, when it can thus have lingered in the rear for six years; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... highly-coloured and unflattering pictures of the typical booksellers of the period. Tom Nash has limned for us a vivid little portrait in 'Pierce Penilesse' (1592), in which he declares that if he were to paint Sloth, 'I swear that I would draw it like a stationer that I know, with his thumb under his girdle, who, if ever a man come to his stall to ask him for a book, never stirs his head, or looks upon him, but stands stone still, ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... however degraded he may be, Swedenborg tells us there is a shrine that cannot be defiled, through which heavenly influences may come down into his life, and yet save him, if he will receive them ere he passes from this world; but when sloth has become habitual and confirmed, there is almost as little room for hope that this will ever take place as that artesian tubes will ever make the Saharan ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... with thee inclosed, I will loathe my pen and paper Art shall never be supposed, Sloth shall quench the ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... To carry on the work of the Church by revivals is as unreasonable as it would be to carry on a school, or a cotton factory, by a revival system—alternations of violent study and work, followed by relapses into indolence and sloth. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... Romans, likewise, and our own fathers imitated them, not being satisfied with their temporary fortune nor content with what they had inherited, and they regarded sloth as their sure destruction but exertion as their certain safety. They feared that if their treasures remained unaugmented they would be consumed and worn away by age, and were ashamed after receiving so rich a heritage to make no further additions: thus they performed ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part of their time, to be employed in its service; but idleness taxes many of us much more; sloth, by bringing on diseases, absolutely shortens life. Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while 'The used key is always bright,' as Poor Richard says. 'But dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of,' as ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the first years of my profession usually allow, and which diligent men, even with moderate talents, might often employ in a manner neither discreditable to themselves, nor wholly useless to others. Desirous that my own leisure should not be consumed in sloth, I anxiously looked about for some way of filling it up, which might enable me, according to the measure of my humble abilities, to contribute somewhat to the stock of general usefulness. I had long been convinced that ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... 'In the heathen classics you find no consciousness of sin.' It is very true—God be thanked for it. They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of 'enmity against God,' and didn't sit down and whine and groan against non-existent ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... sort (which by-the-bye would not prove me a Tory), but felt no vocation—perhaps no right—-to print them. I have always reproached myself as sorely amenable to the condemnations of a very fine poem by Barberino, On Sloth against Sin, which I translated in the Dante volume. Sloth, alas! has but too much to answer for with me; and is one of the reasons (though I will not say the only one), why I have always fallen back on quality instead of ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... we have defined what early rising is; seven, to those who have nothing to do,—as soon as ever business calls, to those who have. Was ever bed of sloth more eloquently reprobated than in the following lines from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... night we were certain he was on the very point of choking to death, and sat up in bed praying he wouldn't, and offering our month's salary to charity if he would; and through all our fatiguing anguish he snorted undisturbedly on. In House 35 he was known as "the Sloth." It was a ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... an animal destined for an active and useful life, Providence has ordained that sloth shall bring with it its own punishment. He who passes nearly the whole of his life in the open air, inhaling a salubrious atmosphere, enjoys health and vigour of body with tranquillity of mind, and dies at the utmost limit allotted to mortality. He, on the contrary, who leads an indolent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... body of life, and are "sin." "Call sin a lump—none other thing than thyself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing."[67] Capitulation to it is often brought about by mere slackness, or, as religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul. Sometimes; too, sin is deliberately indulged in because of the perverse satisfaction which this yielding to old craving gives ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... it is the sole formative influence I shall be better prepared to believe when I see that beauty is not regarded in Nature, but is a mere casual attendant upon use. The artist Greenough did, indeed, strenuously maintain this last. But the sloth and the bird-of-paradise are equally useful to themselves; if beauty were but an aspect of use, these should be equally comely in our eyes. No; "the struggle for life" has not grooved the bill of the auk, and painted the tail of the peacock, any more, so far as I can see, than it has given ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... these words so readily uttered, without premeditation, to declare the world's vanity, full of ridiculous contrariety, he made answer, that necessity compelled men to many such actions, and divers wills ensuing from divine permission, that we might not be idle, being nothing is so odious to them as sloth and negligence. Besides, men cannot foresee future events, in this uncertainty of human affairs; they would not so marry, if they could foretell the causes of their dislike and separation; or parents, if ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... we stand, The laws we made and guard, Our honour, lives, and land Are given for reward To Murder done by night, To Treason taught by day, To folly, sloth, and spite, And ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... his wandering. But he had only gone a few steps when once again he sank upon the grass and fell asleep and dreamed. Again he saw the field full of folk , and to them now Conscience was preaching, and at his words many began to repent them of their evil deeds. Pride, Envy, Sloth and others confessed their sins and ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... falling into plain and manifest destruction, and wouldst constrain us also to descend into like peril. But as long as we were tried in the warfare of this world, we failed in no point of duty. Thou thyself will bear me witness that we were never charged with sloth or heedlessness. ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... woman"—wholly to be loved By either name she found an easy way Into my heart, whose sentinels all proved Unfaithful to their trust, the luckless day She entered there. "Prudence and reason both! Did you not question her? How was it pray She so persuaded you?" "Nor sleep nor sloth," They cried, "o'ercame us then, a CHILD at play Went smiling past us, and then turning round Too late your heart to save, a woman's face ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... ended, Mubarek said to Zein ul Asnam, "Come, O my lord, let us set out on our way, lest we waste the time in sloth, now we have found that whereof we were in search." And the prince answered him, saying, "Thou art in the right." So Mubarek arose and fell to equipping them for the journey; moreover, he let make the young lady a camel-litter [127] with a travelling couch, [128] and they set out. But ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... The Jewish law, whate'er in mystic book Moses has handed down,—to show the way To none but he who the same rites observes, And those athirst to lead unto the spring Only if circumcised. Whereof the cause Was he, their sire, to whom each seventh day Was one of sloth, whereon he took in hand ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... can fight like a bull-dog, it can capture prey under or above ground, it can swim fearlessly, and it can sink wells for the purpose of quenching its thirst. Take the mole out of its proper sphere, and it is awkward and clumsy as the sloth when placed on level ground, or the seal when brought ashore. Replace it in the familiar earth and it becomes a different being, full of life and energy, and actuated by a fiery activity which seems quite inconsistent with its dull ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... in metal and stone. Miss Comstock, perceiving her interest in these toys, encouraged Adelle to try her own hand at the manufacture of jewelry, and engaged a needy woman worker to give her the necessary lessons in the lapidary art. Adelle had acquired considerable sloth from her desultory way of living; nevertheless, when the chance was forced into her hands, she took to the new work with ardor and produced some bungling imitations of the new art, which were much admired at the Villa Ponitowski. ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... be restrained in their hurry forward, the leaders, shouting with tears, examples of diligence, a pair in the rear crying out instances of sloth. ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... succeeding ages, yes, periods of ages, either wholly unknown or obscured or blemished with fables." Why this is so the great poet did not pretend to tell, but he thought that it might be because people did not know how to write in the first ages, or because their records had been lost in wars and by the sloth and ignorance that followed them. Perhaps men did not think that the records of their own times were worth preserving when they reflected how base and corrupt, how petty and perverse such deeds would appear ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... judging that means were to be spent upon learning, and not learning to be applied to means. And as for the privateness or obscureness (as it may be in vulgar estimation accounted) of life of contemplative men, it is a theme so common to extol a private life, not taxed with sensuality and sloth, in comparison and to the disadvantage of a civil life, for safety, liberty, pleasure, and dignity, or at least freedom from indignity, as no man handleth it but handleth it well; such a consonancy it hath to men's conceits in the expressing, and ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... every day he gave Thanks for the fair existence that was his; For a sick fancy made him not her slave, To mock him with her phantom miseries. No chronic tortures racked his aged limb, For luxury and sloth had ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... exists, but from which it is believed to have spread to others, we are bound to repay them, above all things, what we received from them. For I shall not be ashamed to go so far—especially as my life and achievements have been such as to exclude any suspicion of sloth or frivolity—as to confess that, whatever I have accomplished, I have accomplished by means of those studies and principles which have been transmitted to us in Greek literature and schools of thought. Wherefore, over and above the general good faith which is due to ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... rightly Nash's line. All the images it had awakened were false. His mind bred vermin. His thoughts were lice born of the sweat of sloth. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... patient in extreame adversitie, (Mans chiefest credit growes by dooing well). Be not high-minded in prosperitie; Falshood abhorre, no lying fable tell. Give not thyselfe to sloth, (the sinke of shame, The moath of ...
— The Affectionate Shepherd • Richard Barnfield
... La Tremouille, a man who had a foot in either camp, so that neither English nor Burgundians had ever raided on his rich lands, when these lay in their power. So, what with the self-seeking, and sloth, and jealousy of La Tremouille; what with the worldly policy of the Archbishop of Reims, crying Peace, where there was no peace, the Maid and the captains were not listened to, or, if they were heard, their plans were wrought out with ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... away in hideous sloth the inestimable gift of time; his valuable life, every second of which he would have to account for hereafter, passing away from him, unused. He might have been up stuffing himself with eggs and bacon, irritating the dog, or flirting ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... therefore, of any man in the sloth and darkness of a prison, is a loss to the nation, and no gain to the creditor. For of the multitudes who are pining in those cells of misery, a very small part is suspected of any fraudulent act by which they retain what belongs ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Grecians, we find that the chace, that foot-races, and especially dancing, principally composed the amusement of the young ladies of that country; where, in the great days of Greece, no maxim ever more practically prevailed, than that sloth or inactivity was equally the parent of diseases of the body, as of vices of the mind. Agreeable to which idea, one of the greatest physicians now in Europe, the celebrated Tronchin, while at Paris, vehemently declaimed against ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... be asked in ridicule whether I suppose that the megatherium and other allied huge monsters, which formerly lived in South America, have left behind them the sloth, armadillo, and anteater, as their degenerate descendants. This cannot for an instant be admitted. These huge animals have become wholly extinct, and have left no progeny. But in the caves of Brazil there are many extinct species which are closely allied in size and in all other characters ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... the wants and cravings of a growing creature; and whatever be their efforts, they are always surrounded by more than they can appropriate. It is not the ruin of a few individuals which may be soon repaired, but the inactivity and sloth of the community at large which would be fatal to such a people. Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid progress, its strength, and its greatness. Commercial business is there like a vast lottery, by which a small number of men continually ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... ideas, and weak, both in body and in mind, as the unhappy Californians. Their characteristics are stupidity and insensibility, want of knowledge and reflection, inconstancy, impetuosity, and blindness of appetite, excessive sloth, abhorrence of all fatigue of every kind, however trifling or brutal,—in fine, a most wretched want of everything which constitutes the real man and makes him rational, inventive, tractable, and useful to himself and others." All of which goes to show that climate is not everything, ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... "Spurn it. Shun sloth. In the midnight oil set the wick of knowledge. Burn it, trim it, ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... show Destruction to the rest: this pause between (Unanswerd least thou boast) to let thee know; At first I thought that Libertie and Heav'n To heav'nly Soules had bin all one; but now I see that most through sloth had rather serve, Ministring Spirits, traind up in Feast and Song; Such hast thou arm'd, the Minstrelsie of Heav'n, Servilitie with freedom to contend, As both thir deeds compar'd this day shall prove. 170 To whom ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... every better faculty of his head and heart, to invest the chequered vicissitudes of his fortune with a dignity derived from himself. The zeal of his nature overcame the temptations to that loitering and indecision, that fluctuation between sloth and consuming toil, that infirmity of resolution, with all its tormenting and enfeebling consequences, to which a literary man, working as he does at a solitary task, uncalled for by any pressing tangible demand, and to be recompensed by distant and dubious advantage, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... a queen to a poor devil of a subject? By what particular mark of superiority are you exempt from work? For a time you have had the excuse of illness, but you no longer have that. I should say that making tortillas was better than sitting in sloth while they are made for you! Do you never have any sense of shame that you are forever taking and ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... them. They give as a reason that, if the corsairs should discover that they were working these mines, they would come hither to take them captive; but even now, when no one can molest them, they do not work the mines, and hence we may infer that their poverty is mainly due to sloth. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... however, is the number of similar, but apparently independent, structures, that we suffer from a perfect embarras de richesses. Thus, for example, we have the convoluted windpipe of the sloth, reminding us{83} of the condition of the windpipe in birds; and in another mammal, allied to the sloth, namely the great ant-eater (Myrmecophaga), we have again an ornithic character in its horny gizzard-like stomach. In man and ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... Marbolt," he said, in confusion. "I acknowledge the sloth, but not the implied laxness anent ranching. Believe me, I have learned an ample lesson to-day. I now have a fuller appreciation of our worthy foreman; a fair knowledge of the horse, most accurately termed 'outlaw', as the bruised condition of my ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... in one day, I spoke a hundred times in prayer, and in the night almost as often; and even when I passed the night on the mountains, or in the forest, amid snow and ice and rain, I would awake before daybreak to pray. And I felt no discomfort, there was then no sloth in me, such as I find in my heart now, for then the ...
— The Annual Monitor for 1851 • Anonymous
... to Jove, Until he took from her the heavy curse Of immortality. With closer vows, The knight then sealed his worship and forswore All other aims and deeds to serve her cause. Thus passed unnoted seven barren years Of reckless passion and voluptuous sloth, Undignified by any lofty thought In his degraded mind, that sometime was Endowed with noble capability. From revelry to revelry he passed, Craving more pungent pleasure momently, And new intoxications, and each ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... grief, for the daily sacrifice could not be brought on this very morning of the Temple dedication, because the Temple keys lay under Solomon's pillow, and none dared awaken him. Word was sent to Bath-sheba, who forthwith aroused her son, and rebuked him for his sloth. "Thy father," she said, "was known to all as a God-fearing man, and now people will say, 'Solomon is the son of Bath-sheba, it is his mother's fault if he goes wrong.' Whenever thy father's wives were pregnant, they offered vows and prayed that a son worthy to reign might be born ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... useful products still the same. Not so the loss. The man of wealth and pride 275 Takes up a space that many poor supplied; Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds, Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds: The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth Has robbed the neighboring fields of half their growth;[22] 280 His seat, where solitary sports are seen, Indignant spurns the cottage from the green: Around the world each needful product flies, For all the luxuries the world ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... that he was growing old; he would still, perhaps, have fought the man who said that he was failing. And such a statement would be beside the fact; no perceptible decay had yet set up at the heart of his manhood. But the inception of that process was imminent; the sloth consequent upon Lettice's money ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... fire, and found the bread burning on the other side. She immediately assailed the king with reproaches. 'Why, man, do you sit thinking there, and are too proud to turn the bread? Whatever be your family, with such manners and sloth, what trust can be put in you hereafter? If you were a nobleman, you will be glad to eat the bread which you neglect to attend to.' The king, though stung by her upbraidings, yet heard her with patience and mildness, and roused by her scolding, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... I lie there on the ground; cold, cold, and pale: That death, I die in Roderick, is far More pleasant than that life, I live in Julia.— —See how he stands—when he is bid dispatch me! How dull! how spiritless! that sloth possest Thee not, when thou ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... with respect to the old man who knew Chinese, but could not tell what was o'clock. This individual was a man whose natural powers would have been utterly buried and lost beneath a mountain of sloth and laziness had not God determined otherwise. He had in his early years chalked out for himself a plan of life in which he had his own ease and self-indulgence solely in view; he had no particular bad passions to gratify, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... invigorating effect from the tight grasp of the child's warm little hand. Feeble as he was, she seemed to adopt him willingly for her protector. And the Doctor never afterwards shrank from his duty nor quailed beneath it, but bore himself like a man, striving, amid the sloth of age and the breaking-up of intellect, to earn the competency which he had failed to accumulate even in his most ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... discovery, thrusting it down the public's greedy maw. The ruthlessness of it! This exquisite creature of innocence, this very Ariel, born at last in life to leap forth from the imagination that had created her, this delicious spirit of freedom, come to beckon the world on to an awakening from its sloth and shame! To be used to feed the appetite for ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... as pride and envy are spiritual sins, so are sloth, avarice, and anger. But spiritual sins are concerned with the spirit, just as carnal sins are with the flesh. Therefore not only can there be pride and envy in the angels; ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... or a Pin to her Sleeve; a Pot, a Spit, or any Utensil to cook her Victuals, might as well be found among the Tartars as with her. She took every thing from her Sister at what Price she pleased, unsight unseen, and bought the Pig in the Poke. Necessity roused her from Stupidity and Sloth, she encouraged her Tenants to apply to Trades, assured them of a ready Market, and rewarded those that did their Work the best; and, at present, has every thing within herself. And tho' it must be owned a very unreasonable, ...
— The True Life of Betty Ireland • Anonymous
... of the Grail. To attempt to realize in thought the rapture and purification of such a vigil is to wonder that we so seldom pay heed to such inner promptings. So much we lose of the best kind of joy by spiritual inertia, or plain physical sloth; and some day it will be too late to get up and see the sunrise, or to follow the white feet of the moon as she treads her vanishing road of silver across the sea. This involuntary conscience that reproaches us ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... the most horrible wars which history has ever recorded. Meantime there was apathy where there should have been enthusiasm; parsimony and cowardice where generous and combined effort were more necessary than ever; sloth without security. The Protestant princes, growing fat and contented on the spoils of the church, lent but a deaf ear to the moans of Truchsess, forgetting that their neighbour's blazing roof was likely soon to fire their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... indignation would grow till he could contain himself no longer—and then he would take that ship home where he lived and keep it there carefully, expecting the owners to come for it, but they never did. And he would try to get the idleness and sloth out of the sailors of that ship by compelling them to take invigorating exercise and a bath. He called it "walking a plank." All the pupils liked it. At any rate, they never found any fault with it after trying it. When the owners were late coming for their ships, the Admiral ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... his life. For this reward of all his constancy he had endured what had been wellnigh unendurable—loneliness, homesickness, isolation, discomfort. For this he had kept his body clean and his soul clean where all about him was sloth and slackness. He thought backward upon that which he had undergone; he thought forward upon the dreary purposeless prospect that stretched unendingly before him. Never now could he bring himself to go back to the spot of his shattered dreams. And to him that was the one place ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... if this Part of our Trade were well cultivated, we should gain from one Nation; and if another, from another. I have heard him prove that Diligence makes more lasting Acquisitions than Valour, and that Sloth has ruin'd more Nations than the Sword. He abounds in several frugal Maxims, amongst which the greatest Favourite is, 'A Penny saved is a Penny got.' A General Trader of good Sense is pleasanter Company than a general Scholar; and Sir ANDREW having a natural ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Palinuris, steering straight the gallant bark, By voice and exhortation keep your heroes to the mark. Cheer the plucky, chide the cowards who to do their work are loth, And forbid them to grow torpid by indulging selfish sloth. Fool! I know my words are idle! yet if any love remain; If my honour be your glory, my discredit be your pain; If a spark of old affection in your hearts be still alive! Rally round old Father Camus, ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... arouse us! We are sleeping, Dreaming we wake, while through the heavy night Hardly perceived, the foe moves on unchallenged, Glad of the dream that doth delay the fight. O Christ our Captain, lead us out to battle! Shame on the sloth of soldiers of ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... yet night." Early rising is a great trial to some, but I think those who are conscientious often make a mistake between sloth and conscientious care of health: and the Virtuous Woman should be very careful of her health. Some girls think it fine not to be; they say, "Oh, well, I shall only die the sooner! Better to wear out than rust out!" and they feel—and so do some of their friends—that they ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... will, or do not will, that, in the real world in which we ourselves have to live and struggle, certain forces shall be operative,—that there shall be the beauty of health, as in the "Discobolus;" material love which is divine, as in the "Sistine Madonna;" that war shall be horrible; that sloth unstriven against shall triumph over love, as in "The Statue and the Bust;" that defiance of the social organism shall involve self-destruction, as in "Anna Karenina." The person or the combination of events expressing this idea we do not seek in our personal experience, ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... impoverishment of the life. There can be no true giving of the life in service unless there is a wise enriching of the self, a thorough fitting for that service. The more of a man you are, the brighter your intellect, the broader your sympathies, the better your service to the world may be. The sloth that sinks the soul in indifference to its own development is the most sinful of all forms ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... their crime, you ask? Nay, listen: "We Were sullen—sad what time we drank the light, And delicate air, that all day daintily Is cheered by sunshine; for we bore black night And murky smoke of sloth, in God's despite, Within our barren souls, by discontent From joy of all fair things ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... never known you were there; but, luckily for the children who lived on earth when it did (if there were any), it did not eat flesh, but only the leaves of trees and other vegetable things. It was called the giant ground sloth, and, as you may judge from this name, was not very quick in its movements. It was not found in England, but in South America, and there are now no more like it in existence; and if we had not got its skeleton we should never have ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... Smithfield, born in Clapton, then a country village of the parish of Hackney, in 1727. As you will see by and by, Howard spent the last seventeen years of his life in fighting three giants who were very hard to beat, named Ignorance, Sloth, and Dirt; and it is all the more difficult to overcome them because they are generally to be met with together. Unfortunately, they never can be wholly killed, for when you think they are left dead on the field after a hard struggle, they always come to life again; but they have ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... hardy study, labouring under the morbi eruditorum, but great overgrown dignitaries and rectors, with rubicund noses and gouty ancles, or broad bloated faces, dragging along great swag bellies; the emblems of sloth ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... dwell therein, and the same nation that was sometime first in Ireland, and all according thereto in tongue, in manners, and in kind. The men are light of heart, fierce, and courageous on their enemies. They love nigh as well death as thraldom, and they account it for sloth to die in bed, and a great worship and virtue to die in a field fighting against enemies. The men be of scarce living, and many suffer hunger long time, and eat selde tofore the sun going down, and use flesh, milk, meats, fish, and fruits more than ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... conformity. Could the history of opinions be fully written, it would be seen how large a part in human proceedings the love of conformity, or rather the fear of non-conformity, has occasioned. It has triumphed over all other fears; over love, hate, pity, sloth, anger, truth, pride, comfort, self-interest, vanity, and maternal love. It has torn down the sense of beauty in the human soul, and set up in its place little ugly idols which it compels us to worship with more than Japanese devotion. It has contradicted Nature in the most obvious ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... protect their country, their property, wives and children, and, what is dearer than these, their liberty and lives; that they should not suffer their hands to be tied behind their backs by a nation which, unless they were enervated by idleness and sloth, was not more powerful than themselves, but that they should arm those hands with buckler, sword, and spear, ready for the field of battle; and, because they thought this also of advantage to the people they were about to leave, they, with the help of the miserable natives, built ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas
... winter months, when inspection is scarce possible, it must seem a vain toil to polish the brass hand-rail of the stair, or to keep an unrewarded vigil in the lightroom; and the keepers are habitually tempted to the beginnings of sloth, and must unremittingly resist. He who temporises with his conscience is already lost. I must tell here an anecdote that illustrates the difficulties of inspection. In the days of my uncle David and my father there was a station which they regarded with jealousy. The ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... citizens. America was still undiscovered; the overland route to India was the only one known; the people of the continent outside of Italy were unthrifty serfs, ruled and ruined by unthrifty lords. The whole world's ignorance, pride, and sloth were Venetian gain; and the religious superstitions of the day, which, gross as they were, embodied perhaps its noblest and most hopeful sentiment, were a source of incalculable profit to the sharp-witted ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... vogue—Cannes is charming, magnificent! Cannes, certainly, with her fields of jasmine and roses, her groves of orange-trees, her burning sun, blue skies and sea, and her warm pine-woods, is a delightful spot;—but Cannes is also a place of languor and sloth, a lavender-water country. If you have the gout, if you are old and rich, if you have delicate lungs, go to Cannes, your life will ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... with them. He changes suddenly, when their change is sudden, and is as unlike what he was just before, as one fortune or external condition is unlike another. He moves when he is urged by appetite; else, he remains in sloth and inactivity. He lives, and he dies, and he has done nothing, but leaves the world as he found it. And what the individual is, such is his whole generation; and as that generation, such is the generation before and after. No ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... of its wings. These two stages are associated with a buoyant exaltation (piti) and a steady inward bliss called sukha [Footnote ref 1] instilling the mind. The formation of this first jhana roots out five ties of avijja, kamacchando (dallying with desires), vyapado (hatred), thinamiddham (sloth and torpor), uddhaccakukkuccam (pride and restlessness), and vicikiccha (doubt). The five elements of which this jhana is constituted are vitakka, vicara, plti, sukham and ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... the passionate ardour of discoverers, the fiery enthusiasm of confessors. They stood alone, sustained but little by intercourse among themselves, and wholly misunderstood by the people round them. Italy, sunk in sloth, priest-ridden, tyrant-ridden, exhausted with the unparalleled activity of the Renaissance, besotted with the vices of slavery and slow corruption, had no ears for spirit-thrilling prophecy. The Church, terrified by ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... differentiation for a long time, still turning, but it turned slowly and hesitantly and was close to coming to a standstill. Slowly, like humidity entering the dying stem of a tree, filling it slowly and making it rot, the world and sloth had entered Siddhartha's soul, slowly it filled his soul, made it heavy, made it tired, put it to sleep. On the other hand, his senses had become alive, there was much they had learned, ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... of fluids; 840 Each supples a dry brain, fills you its ins-and-outs, Gives your life's hour-glass a shake when the thin sand doubts Whether to run on or stop short, and guarantees Age is not all made of stark sloth and arrant ease. I have seen my little lady once more, Jacynth, the Gipsy, Berold, and the rest of it, For to me spoke the Duke, as I told you before; I always wanted to make a clean breast of it: And now it is made-why, my heart's blood, that went trickle, Trickle, but anon, in such ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... lovely scarlet begonias, and spotted caladiums, shaded by graceful tree-ferns and overhung by trees full of exquisite parasites and orchids. Among these, the most conspicuous, after the palms, are the tall thin-stemmed sloth-trees, so called from their being a favourite resort of the sloth, who with great difficulty crawls up into one of them, remains there until he has demolished every leaf, and then passes on to ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey |
