"Thriftless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Scotland, it was bound up with and dependent on the system of long pays. In order to carry on from one pay day to the next, the men got advances on the company's store. In this way many lived permanently ahead of their wages. The thriftless and drunkards were always 'advance men, but the provident miners hated it and only dealt ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... fittingly demand. As none of these appeared to entice her imagination, he went on to rebuke her want of foresight, and, still later, having unsuccessfully pointed out to her the inevitable penury and degradation in which her thriftless perversity would involve her later years, to kick the less substantial ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... thriftless man a good turn, and now was the moment when Beaucock had chosen to remember it in his own way. During his absence in town with Melbury, the lawyer's clerk had naturally heard a great deal of the timber-merchant's family scheme of justice to Giles, and his ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... no means. I hope not. But he is a dour man of nearly twice her years. An honest man? Well, I have never heard him accused of dishonesty. A hard man he has been called, but he suits our thriftless laird all the better for that. He has kept his place as factor at Blackhills for fifteen years and more, and has grown rich, they say—as riches are counted among folk who for the most part are poor. And he is respected—in ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... weaknesses which gave inferiors advantage over them? Men of letters cannot lay their hands on their hearts, and say, "No, the fault was fortune's, and the indifferent world's, not Goldsmith's nor Fielding's." There was no reason why Oliver should always be thriftless; why Fielding and Steele should sponge upon their friends; why Sterne should make love to his neighbors' wives. Swift, for a long time, was as poor as any wag that ever laughed: but he owed no penny to ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... So thriftless were the antiquated methods he followed that the lawyer, as he watched him, could barely repress a smile. Two hundred years ago the same crop was probably raised, cut and cured on the same soil in the same careless and primitive fashion. Beneath ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... the top of Holborn Hill, that difficult ascent which good citizens found too long, and bad ones too short. "Sirrah, you'll be hanged; I shall live to see you go up Holborn Hill," says Sir Sampson Legend to his thriftless son in Congreve's "Love ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... virtue be his vice's bawd, And he shall spend mine honour with his shame, As thriftless sons their scraping fathers' gold. Mine honour lives when his dishonour dies, Or my sham'd life in his dishonour lies: Thou kill'st me in his life; giving him breath, The traitor lives, the true man's ...
— The Tragedy of King Richard II • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... both quadruped and biped, he enumerates seriatim, giving the pas to the former—a precedence perhaps well merited by steeds up to such a welter weight under the climate of India, over such a set of unredeemed and thriftless knaves as he describes his native attendants. Accordingly, he gives the names and pedigrees of the whole stud, from "the buggy mare Maiden-head and my wicked little favourite Fish-Guts," up to "my favourite brood-mare Fair Amelia, purchased at a prize sale on the frontier, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... Earth's eye, tongue, or heart else, where Else, but in dear and dogged man?—Ah, the heir To his own selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn, To thriftless reave both our rich round world bare And none reck of world after, this bids wear Earth brows of such care, care ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... helped to crush the small farmers who, though they employed no labour, were forced to pay towards the maintenance of the labourers employed by their richer neighbours; it kept wages from rising, encouraged thriftless marriages and dissolute living, discouraged industry and efficient work, destroyed self-respect, and pauperised ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... like the gay thriftless Paris workman that he was. The little ones? Well, they grew up without his even noticing it, and, indeed, he was really fond of them, so long as they remained at home. And, besides, they worked as they grew older, and brought a little money in. However, he preferred to ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... seek to curry favour with the craven crowd," burst out the now thoroughly angry King, always jealous of the popularity of this brave young Prince of Wales. "And am I, sirrah, to be badgered and browbeaten in my own palace by such a thriftless ne'er-do-weel as you, ungrateful boy, who seekest to gain preference with the people in this realm before your liege lord the King? Quit my presence, sirrah, and that instanter, ere that I do send you to spend your Christmas where your great-grandfather, ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... travellers. These are known as Hattiwala. Bhils also serve as village watchmen in Nimar and the adjoining tracts of the Berar Districts. Captain Forsyth, writing in 1868, described the Bhils as follows: "The Muhammadan Bhils are with few exceptions a miserable lot, idle and thriftless, and steeped in the deadly vice of opium-eating. The unconverted Bhils are held to be tolerably reliable. When they borrow money or stock for cultivation they seldom abscond fraudulently from their creditors, and this simple ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... consequent improvement in her father, the power to pay off his indebtedness—all these had turned that day into a day of thankfulness. The happiness that was in her rippled her face into smiles. When the door creaked on its hinges as it swung open, she laughed. It was a thriftless old door, such as bachelors kept, she murmured. Her brother's face, gloomy behind the iron screen, tickled her fancy. "You're like a caged bear, Alan," she cried, with a smile of impertinence; "I should hate to be shut up a day like this—no ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... our great English souls. A strong and noble man; so much left undeveloped in him to the last; in a kindlier element what might he not have been,—Poet, Priest, Sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a man must not complain of his 'element," or his 'time' or the like; it is thriftless work doing so. His time is bad; well then, he is there ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... So you are thriftless when you eagerly seize the first opportunity to fritter away your time over old clothes. You precipitate yourself unnecessarily against a disagreeable thing. For you are not going to put your stockings on. Perhaps ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... makes haste, Belated, thriftless, vagrant, And golden-rod is dying fast, And lanes with ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... and it appears not only more highly cultivated, but more fertile and more picturesque than either. I have rarely seen richer pastures than those of Kentucky. The forest trees, where not too crowded, are of magnificent growth, and the crops are gloriously abundant where the thriftless husbandry has not worn out the soil by an unvarying succession of exhausting crops. We were shewn ground which had borne abundant crops of wheat for twenty successive years; but a much shorter period suffices to exhaust ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... more. One has only to think of a lazy man to get an impression of something essentially contemptible and {109} cowardly. On the other hand the man that loves work and throws himself into it with energy is winning more than material rewards. The thriftless and the extravagant, whether rich or poor, are often mean and self-indulgent, lacking the first quality of the unselfish in lacking self-control. In teaching industry and thrift, therefore,—though these virtues, like others, ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... it was like one of those faces which look out of Fra Angelico's pictures, and express what we are fond of talking about—adoration and beneficence: "Could I paint for the potteries, Master Locke?" For, in his noble thriftless way, he had initiated her into some of the very secrets of his tinting, and Dulcie was made bold by the ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... inner history of an English town we find the same peaceful revolution in progress, services disappearing through disuse or omission, while privileges and immunities are being purchased in hard cash. The lord of the town, whether he were king, baron, or abbot, was commonly thriftless or poor, and the capture of a noble, or the campaign of a sovereign, or the building of some new minster by a prior, brought about an appeal to the thrifty burghers, who were ready to fill again their master's treasury at the price of the strip of parchment which gave them ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... fashions and customs, often sweep property from the shrewd and careful. "Riches make themselves wings; they fly away." If for any cause the borrower fails there is scant sympathy from the usurer. He charges him with being deficient in business management and thriftless. If the yoke of bondage galls and becomes so painful that in his distress the debtor turns from the struggle in one direction to struggle in another in hope of relief, he calls him fickle; and if at last, after a long and hard service, he is unable to return the loan in full, he calls him dishonest. ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... from the West Indies have diminished since emancipation,—and that the negroes, having worked, as they believed, quite long enough without wages, now refuse to work for the planters without higher pay than the latter, with the thriftless and evil habits of slavery still clinging to them, can afford to give,—the author considers himself justified in denouncing negro emancipation as one of the "shams" which he was specially sent into this world to belabor. Had he confned himself ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... then it would occur to him that precious time was passing, but that he'd been so busy he'd not had time to go at it right. He said that most of the women on any list of the kind he'd seen was fussy and looked lazy and thriftless. Then he come right out and asked me if I happened to know a suitable candidate, and—well, Dixie, I couldn't hold in. I talked as earnest as a preacher at a ranting revival. I had his eye and I helt it clean through. I described ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... White velvet sounds thriftless; but in Finland, in the summer, it is very hot and dry; in fact, the three or four months of summer are really summer in all its glory. It is all daylight and there is no night, so that June, July, and August seem one perpetual midsummer day. For travelling or country ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... Inns, Ale-houses, Bowling Allies, and such like thriftless places of resort for tradesmen and artificers, ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... poor by impotence, as the fatherless child, the aged, blind, and lame, and the diseased person that is judged to be incurable; the second are poor by casualty, as the wounded soldier, the decayed householder, and the sick person visited with grievous and painful diseases; the third consisteth of thriftless poor, as the rioter that hath consumed all, the vagabond that will abide nowhere, but runneth up and down from place to place (as it were seeking work and finding none), and finally the rogue and the strumpet, which are not possible to be divided in sunder, but run to and fro over all the ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... in possession, lies the secret of enjoyment; a fact which nature illustrates in a thousand ways, and to which every man's experience gives affirmation. "Very good doctrine for the idle and thriftless," said Mr. Henry Steel, a gentleman of large wealth, in answer to a friend, who had advanced the truth we have ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... moisture of the atmosphere descends upon the earth. The rain cleanses the air of its impurities, and conveys them to the plants. The vapors of the marshes, and of the exposed manure heaps of the thriftless farmer, are gently wafted to the well-drained fields of his neighbor, and there, amidst the roots of the well-tilled crops, deposit, at the same time, ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... when some thriftless, distant relation, whose debts he had paid a dozen times over, gave him an overhauling on the subject of liberality, and seemed inclined to take him by the throat for further charity, he calmed himself down by a chapter or two from the New Testament and ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... family of 1200 persons have sprung from five sisters, several of whom were illegitimate, and three of whom were known to be unchaste, and who married men whose father was an idle, thriftless hunter, a ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... grieve about that which he cannot catch. He is not careful to catch all that he could. His purpose is to draw the largest possible revenue per day from his claim. He does not intend to spend many years in mining, or if he does, he has become thriftless and improvident. In either case, he wishes to derive the utmost immediate profit from his mine. If his claim contain a dollar to the ton, and he can save five dollars by slowly washing only six tons in a day, while he might make ten dollars by rapidly washing fifteen tons in a day, he will ...
— Hittel on Gold Mines and Mining • John S. Hittell
... scrupulous speedily began to recollect him as a school-companion, a townsman, or so forth. On the other hand, two or three grave, sedate-looking persons shook their heads, and left the inn, hinting that, if Giles Gosling wished to continue to thrive, he should turn his thriftless, godless nephew adrift again, as soon as he could. Gosling demeaned himself as if he were much of the same opinion, for even the sight of the gold made less impression on the honest gentleman than it usually doth upon one of ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... be found some wretched-looking, thriftless, or lazy negroes, of the vagabond order. These miserable beings formed the lowest caste, and were despised and often persecuted by those of their fellow-slaves who were orderly and industrious, and cherished ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... could, and be ridden by them when he couldn't. He had long since lost his situation at the sheep fold, having proved rather an attraction to dogs, who are fond of low company, than a protection to sheep. Untidy, thriftless, a loafer, kicked and cuffed about by the public and half starved, he presented a pitiable contrast to his wife, neat little lady, who, after her husband had lost his situation, left him and joined a respectable circle of cows and spent her time ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... difference. The people on this island are more advanced than their neighbours, and the families here are gradually forming into different ranks, made up of the well-to-do, the struggling, and the quite poor and thriftless. These distinctions are present in the middle island also, but over there they have had no effect on the people, among whom ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... niggers" has left a grandson who is illiterate, uncultured and thriftless. He despises manual labor, but is too poor and too ignorant to live without doing it. Unfit to be the associate of the new Southerner, and feeling himself too superior to mingle with Negroes, he broods over his hardships and bemoans his fate. He is a Negro hater and thirsts for the excitement ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... a thoroughly honest though rather thriftless man, speaks of two classes of persons, not unlike each other—those who cannot keep their own money in their hands, and those who cannot keep their hands from other people's. The former are always in want of money, for they throw it away on any object that first presents itself, as if to ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... revolution, and revolution is being carefully and insidiously prepared after the common fashion. Not a word is left unsaid that can flatter the criminal or encourage the thriftless. Those who are too idle to work but not too idle to read the Sunday papers are told that it will be the fault of their own inaction, not of the Yellow Press, if they do not some day lay violent hands upon the country's wealth. And when they ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... On his father's death, he had succeeded to about three thousand a-year, and he left about one; and he would have spent or mortgaged this, had he not, on his marriage, put it beyond his own power to do so. It was not only by thriftless extravagance that he thus destroyed a property which, with care, and without extortion, would have doubled its value in the thirty-five years during which it was in his hands; but he had been afraid to come to Ireland, and ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... been compelled to leave their beautiful farms, because of the pestilential swarthy swarms.—What were these wretches fit for? Nothing. They cooked our victuals and shampooned us; but who would not rather that these duties should be performed by white men? The blacks were a worthless, useless, thriftless set of beings—they were too indolent, lazy and ignorant to work, too proud to be taught; and not only that, if the criminal calendars of the country were examined, it would be found that they were a majority of the criminals. They were so detestable that unless some method were adopted ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... question,—wished to leave the subject. Perhaps he did not regard the poor old school-master as a practical judge of practical matters. All his life he had called him thriftless and unready. ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... Plan was likewise a source of great tribulation to me; for he was ever and anon coming forward with some new device, either for ornament or profit, as he said, to the burgh; and no small portion of my time, that might have been more advantageously employed, was wasted in the thriftless consideration of his schemes: all which, with my advanced years, begat in me a sort of distaste to the bickerings of the council chamber; so I conferred and communed with myself, anent the possibility of ruling the town without ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... chaperon is as much at home here as the stockbroker on 'Change, or the betting-man in the ring, or the fisherman amidst the roar and turmoil of the waves. With lynx eyes she notes how Lady Carmine's eldest girl is "carrying on" with young Thriftless, and how Lord Looby's eyeglass is fixed on her own youngest daughter; yet for all this she is not absent or preoccupied, but can whisper to stupid Lady Dulwich the very latest intelligence of a marriage, or listen, all attention, to the freshest ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... gifts, and ask a blessing. Meddle not with minor cares. Trust me, your unprepossessing Dam soon settles those affairs! Then will I, with honeyed suasion, Pinch some thriftless man of bills Of a mark of the occasion For my Lady ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... to the Bennet place, and called the husband aside before mentioning his errand. He had long waited for some chance to secure an advantage over his thriftless neighbor, and now that it had come he drove it home with all the solemnity and earnestness that he could command. Bennet listened with eyes staring at the earth, and the veins throbbing in his bared neck, until the talk had reached a point where ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... Ingoldsby Bray, Rise up, rise up, I say to thee; A soldier, I trow, Of the Cross art thou; Rise up, rise up, from thy bended knee! Ill it seems that soldier true Of Holy Church should vainly sue:— —Foot-pages they are by no means rare, A thriftless crew, I ween, be they; Well mote we spare A Page—or a pair, For the matter of that—Sir Ingoldsby Bray, But stout and true Soldiers like you, Grow scarcer and scarcer every day!— Be prayers for the dead Duly read, Let a mass be sung, and a pater be said: So ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... knew God called his name. For me, I think I said, "Appear! "Good were it to be ever here. "If thou wilt, let me build to thee "Service-tabernacles three, "Where, forever in thy presence, "In ecstatic acquiescence, "Far alike from thriftless learning "And ignorance's undiscerning, "I may worship and remain!" Thus at the show above me, gazing With upturned eyes, I felt my brain Glutted with the glory, blazing Throughout its whole mass, over and under Until at length it burst asunder And out of it bodily there streamed, ...
— Christmas Eve • Robert Browning
... walks London streets, but can point out a half-dozen of men riding by him splendidly, while he is on foot, courted by fashion, bowed into their carriages by tradesmen, denying themselves nothing, and living on who knows what? We see Jack Thriftless prancing in the park, or darting in his brougham down Pall Mall: we eat his dinners served on his miraculous plate. "How did this begin," we say, "or where will it end?" "My dear fellow," I heard Jack once say, "I owe money in every capital ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hills with their sombre green. The birds came back. The wild goose swam and screamed, and the winter wren caroled his bright song—loudest when there seemed least cause for rejoicing. The beaver cut his timber and patiently worked at his dams. The thriftless porcupine destroyed a tree for every morning meal. The gray jay, the "camp robber," followed the Indians about in hope that some forgotten piece of meat or of boiled root might fall to his share; while the buffalo, the bear, and the elk each carried on his affairs in his own way, as did ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... well known that the very earliest population of the Old Dominion was not of the highest, but predominantly idle and thriftless. Vagabonds and homeless children picked up in the streets of London, as well as some convicts, were sent to the colony from England to be indented as servants, permanently, or for a term of years. Persons of the ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... and with a shrug of the shoulders to express resignation, that she might have been a cleverer housekeeper and just a thought more economical in expenditure! but considering her happy-go-lucky upbringing under the most thriftless of fathers, the darling really deserved more praise for what she accomplished than blame ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... in his park-wall. Ye may e'en tell him he has mair than he makes good use of; he gangs up and down drinking, roaring, and quarrelling, through all the country markets, making foolish bargains in his cups, which he repents when he is sober; like a thriftless wretch, spending the goods and gear that his forefathers won with the sweat of their brows: light come, light go, he cares not a farthing. But why should I stand surety for his contracts? The little I have is free, and ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... what kind of woman such a man might have chosen to share his life. Had he contemplated marriage for some time, and been prevented from it by stress of circumstances? It was not easy to picture the suitable partner for Grail. Clearly she must be another than the thriftless, shiftless creature too common in working-class homes. Yet it was not likely that he had met with any one who could share his inner life. Had he, following the example of many a prudent man, chosen a good, quiet, modest ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... very timidly, but in a few moments an admiring group was collected around him. A purchaser was soon found for Phelim, and Teddy having doubled his money, felt rich and grand, and cast rather contemptuous looks on his thriftless cousin. But before the day was over, Larry had made more money than two pigs like Phelim would bring—by playing for the dancers, and singing ballads. Among those who listened most attentively to him ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... Mr. Kruger to Johannesburg was the famous one of 1890, when the collapse of the share market and the apparent failure of many of the mines left a thriftless and gambling community wholly ruined and half starving, unable to bear the burden which the State imposed, almost wholly unappreciative of the possibilities of the Main Reef, and ignorant of what to do to create an industry and ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... defiance, and he saw her lip curl. An idler is apt to be like a sullen child, except that in a grown man the child's sulky spite becomes a dark malice, all-embracing. For the very reason that Vance knew he was receiving what he deserved, and that this was the just reward for his thriftless years of idleness, he began to hate Elizabeth with a cold, quiet hatred. There is something stimulating about any great passion. Now Vance felt his nerves soothed and calmed. His self-possession ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... bonny daughter of a thriftless, honest man, whose energy in the effort to recover some hundreds of acres of woodland deeded to her in jest, and supposed to be unprofitable, leads to comfort for her father, and a happy marriage for ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... beginning pastoral society and tribal government develop among savages primarily through the domestication of animals. The young of the animals slain in the hunt are kept first as pets: then, when as a result of the thriftless nature of the savages supplies at times become scarce, the pets are slain for food. As pets become more common and population increases, the advantage of breeding for use is apparent, and private property, in distinction from community possessions, appears. The growing herds naturally ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... the old man, "that in their private and domestic life, as well as in their labouring career, the lower classes of this country are improvident, thriftless, and extravagant. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... conventionality which he would feel had he the ability. The sick man mentally resolves that all the mistakes of his life shall be corrected if he shall survive, and yet there are few who are able to fulfill the programmes thus formulated—frequently the thriftless man is more prodigal after an illness which has stabbed his pride with an advertisement of his indigence than he was before his great vow of future economy was recorded up ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... rail or worm fences, but they often neglect to provide spacious barns and other outhouses for their grain, hay and stock. The influence of habit, is powerful. A Kentuckian would look with contempt upon the low fences of a New-Englander as indicating thriftless habits, while the latter would point at the unsheltered stacks of wheat, and dirty threshing floor of the former, as proof direct ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... advised him temperately. "You always were a thriftless fellow; you must have been wasting your fire. Oh, I say, what's the ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... "but I hope I have acquired some common-sense in roving about the world. The women of California are admirable in every way,—chaste, strong of character, industrious, devoted wives and mothers, born with sufficient capacity for small pleasures. But what are our men? Idle, thriftless, unambitious, too lazy to walk across the street, but with a horse for every step, sleeping all day in a hammock, gambling and drinking all night. They are the natural followers of a race of men who came here to force fortune out of an unbroken country with ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... deshabille[Fr]. unqualified, disqualified; unfitted; ill-digested; unbegun, unready, unarranged[obs3], unorganized, unfurnished, unprovided, unequipped, untrimmed; out of gear, out of order; dismantled &c. v. shiftless, improvident, unthrifty, thriftless, thoughtless, unguarded; happy-go-lucky; caught napping &c. (inexpectant) 508[obs3]; unpremeditated &c. 612. Adv. extempore ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... County. Just beyond the stream, as you go west from Washington, are the plains of Manassas,—level lands, which years ago waved with corn and tobacco, but the fields long since were worn out by the thriftless farming of the slaveholders, and now they are overgrown with thickets of ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... upon the family. As it was, her life was filled up with struggles to make the ends meet; but, though she had the worst of it, she did not complain, and did all she could to comfort and encourage her thriftless husband. ...
— Haste and Waste • Oliver Optic
... achievement in Brandenburg History is his recovery of the Province called the Neumark to that Electorate. In the thriftless Sigismund times, the Neumark had been pledged, had been sold; Teutsch Ritterdom, to whose dominions it lay contiguous, had purchased it with money down. The Teutsch Ritters were fallen moneyless enough since then; they offered to pledge the Neumark to Friedrich, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... ass it is That scatters and consumeth all he hath: Each one do pluck from him without control. He is not hot nor cold; a silly soul, That fain would please each part[106], if so he might. He and the Spring are scholars' favourites: What scholars are, what thriftless kind of men, Yourself be judge; and judge of him by them. When Cerberus was headlong drawn from hell, He voided a black poison from his mouth, Call'd Aconitum, whereof ink was made: That ink, with reeds first laid on dried barks, Serv'd me awhile to make rude works withal, Till ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... strain it well Through such vessel, as in Hell Wicked maids, with vain endeavour, Toil to fill, and toil for ever. Nine-and-forty Danaides, Wedded maids, and virgin brides, (So blind Gentiles did believe,) Toil to fill a faithless sieve; Thirsty thing, with naught content, Thriftless and incontinent. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... public distress did Tom Walker set up as a usurer in Boston. His door was soon thronged by customers. The needy and the adventurous; the gambling speculator; the dreaming land jobber; the thriftless tradesman; the merchant with cracked credit; in short, every one driven to raise money by desperate means and desperate sacrifices, hurried to ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... useless, charities established to carry out some silly fad or to gratify some silly vanity; sectarian charities intended to further ends which, in the eyes of all but the members of one sect, are not only useless but mischievous; charities that encourage thriftless marriages, or make it easy for men to neglect obvious duties, or keep a semi-pauper population stationary in employments and on a soil where they can never prosper, or in other ways handicap, impede ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... man who has the heartache. I knew one man—a most steady and industrious fellow, in constant work which kept him from home all day—whose wife became a sort of parasite on him in the interest of her own thriftless relatives. In his absence her brothers and sisters were at his table eating at his expense; food and coals bought with his earnings found their way to her mother's cottage; in short, he had "married the family," as they ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... for the most part very thriftless. In the purchase and in the preparation of food—the chief item of expense in the workingman's family and that wherein economic habits count for most—men and women are alike improvident. The art of making money go the farthest in food is comparatively unknown. ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... pounds fell into my hands, and had I contented myself with this farm, and purchased two adjoining cleared farms containing two hundred acres of land of the finest quality which were sold far below their value by the thriftless owners, I should have done well, or at all events have invested my money profitably. But the temptation to buy wild land at 5s. an acre, which was expected to double in value in a few months, with the example of many instances of ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... was not at home; Anther had payd his gold away; Another call'd him thriftless loon, And bade him sharply ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... knight," said Robin. "Sir, I much wonder that your clothing is so thin. Tell me one thing, I pray. I trow you must have been made a knight by force, or else you have squandered your means by reckless or riotous living? Perhaps you have been foolish and thriftless, or else have lost all your money in brawling and strife? Or possibly you have been a usurer or a drunkard, or wasted your life in wickedness ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... chokhis,[3] where blue-coated, yellow-trousered policemen squatted, and smoked, and spat, in glorious idleness, from dawn to dusk, and exchanged full-flavoured compliments with the Pathan driver in passing. For the rest there was always the passionless serenity of the desert, with its crop of thriftless thorn-bushes, whose berries showed like blood-drops pricked from the hard heart of the land; and beyond the desert, looming steadily nearer with every mile of progress, the rugged ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... pale of polite society even in this new and isolated corner of the earth. He had had an Indian wife in his youth; being more accustomed to the ways of her people than of his own. For nearly twenty years he had lived a thriftless, bachelor existence, known among men, and by hearsay among women, as a noted story-teller, and genial, devil-may-care, old mountain man, whose heart was in the right place, but who never drew very heavily upon his brain resources, except to embellish a tale of his early exploits ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... competition of the large slaveholders, who bought up their lands and forced them to occupy the foothills to the north of the "black belt" in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi which were ill adapted to the plantation slave system. Next came the thriftless and impecunious whites, variously known as the "pine-landers" and "crackers" in Georgia, the "sand-hillers" of South Carolina, or the "red-necks" of Mississippi. The lowest stratum was composed of slaves with a ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... pride in his art, with all his genius, with all his rare gifts of imagination and fancy—was destined to be left behind in the race of life, what could poor Robert hope for? It is sad to think that in later life, poor easy-going, thriftless, careless, Bohemian Robert sank into neglect and consequent poverty. He died (of bronchitis) on the 13th of March, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... for. He shone more, in his remarkable way, in society; and twice he had a little holiday to Glenmorven, where, as may be fancied, he was the delight of the Highlanders. One of his last pleasures was to arrange his dining- room. Many and many a room (in their wandering and thriftless existence) had he seen his wife furnish with exquisite taste, and perhaps with 'considerable luxury': now it was his turn to be the decorator. On the wall he had an engraving of Lord Rodney's action, showing the PROTHEE, his father's ship, if the reader recollects; ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I cried, "I know I seem a worthless, thriftless sort of fellow, for as yet I have done nothing to get back Pennington, but if you could love me just a little"—and I looked toward her appealingly. "Anyhow, trust me," I continued, "and be not afraid. Remember I shall love ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... sheep-herder. That restless emigrant class, whose origin, as a class, lay in the community of its own uncertain schemes of fortune; the West, with her splendid, lavish promises, called them from their thriftless farms in the South and their gray cabins in New England. They began their journeying towards the land of promise long before the Indians had ever seen the shrieking "fire-wagon." All day they would toil over the infinitude of prairie, the sun ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... second marriage was no marriage, then his son, Lord Blandamer, who was drowned in Cullerne Bay, had been illegitimate, and his grandson, Lord Blandamer, who now sat on the throne of Fording, was illegitimate too. And Martin's dream had been true. Selfish, thriftless, idle Martin, whom the boys called "Old Nebuly," had not been mad after all, but ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... way—"She would have made a good wife, and a still better mother. But an all-wise Providence has a remarkable habit—yes, I think we may call it quite a remarkable habit!—of persuading men generally to choose thriftless and flighty women for their wives, and to leave the capable ones single. That is so. Or in Miss Deane's case it may be an illustration of the statement that 'Mary hath chosen the better part.' Certainly when either men or women are happy in a state of single blessedness, a reference ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... Canada, their strength and condition, would cause me to tremble for these United States, should a war ever ensue between the English and American governments, which I pray may never occur. These fugitives may be thought to be a class of poor, thriftless, illiterate creatures, like the Southern slaves, but it is not so. They are no longer slaves; many of whom have been many years free men, and a large number were never slaves. They are a hardy, robust class of men; very many of them, men of superior intellect; and men who ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... boots, she liked him better than the farm-bailiff. The farm-bailiff was thrifty, and sensible and faithful, and Thomasina was faithful and sensible and thrifty, and they each had a tendency to claim the monopoly of those virtues. Notable people complain, very properly, of thriftless and untidy ones, but they sometimes agree better with them than with rival notabilities. And so Thomasina's broad face beamed benevolently as she bid the cowherd "draw up" to the fire, and he who (like Thomasina) was a native of the country, would confirm the marvels she related, with ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... though startled and aroused, the untamed spirits of those who crowded the, menaced pile were rather in a state of uneasiness, than of that fierce excitement to which they were so capable of being wrought, and which was in some degree necessary to induce even them, thriftless and destitute as they were, to be the agents of effecting so great a destruction of properly. The project of the cool and calculating Maso would therefore have failed entirely, but for another wheeling ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... wealthy young Richard,[122] Dame Fortune should hing by the neck; For prodigal, thriftless, bestowing, His merit had won him respect: An' there will be rich brother nabobs, Tho' nabobs, yet men of the first, An' there will be Collieston's[123] whiskers, An' Quintin, o' lads ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the bumblebee makes haste, Belated, thriftless vagrant, And goldenrod is dying fast, And lanes with grapes ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... which once stretched south of the Forty-ninth Parallel from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I have been traveling extensively in what is left of Lincoln's nation. 'Dukes,' remarked Chesterton, 'don't emigrate.' This country was settled by the poor and thriftless and now few more than the poor and ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... and poet; was of the Cockney school, a friend of Keats and Shelley; edited the Examiner, a Radical organ; was a busy man but a thriftless, and always in financial embarrassment, though latterly he had a fair pension; lived near Carlyle, who at one time saw a good deal of him, his household, and its disorderliness, an eyesore to Carlyle, a "poetical tinkerdom" he called ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... thriftless hand seize Them too? My poor, poor wife! Must she lose all? I would not ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... courtesy of well-bred people, and he made it plain that he regarded it as a sort of expensive and useless product. He had, I found, a different kind of contempt for the lower classes, regarding them as thriftless and unenterprising. In fact, the professional middle class seemed to him to have a monopoly ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... democrats, he is very fond of anything aristocratic. Mrs. Briggs, nee Van Duysen, has nothing Dutch about her but her name. The Knickerbockers of New York were famous for their thrift, their economy, their neatness, and, above all, their housewifely virtues. Mrs. Briggs is thriftless, extravagant, dowdy in her old age, although she had been a beauty in her youth, and knows as little about keeping a house as she does about keeping a horse. During the war, at a fair given for the benefit of the Sanitary ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Thriftless yet my swain have turned, Though my sun he never showeth: Though I weep, I am not mourned; Though I ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... art and mystery to Tony, he undertook to impart a great deal more knowledge than he himself possessed,—a thing, by the way, which is very common with a good many other people. Altogether it was a hard bargain for poor Tony; but when parents are so idle and thriftless as to expose their children to such a fate as his, they leave them a legacy of nothing better than the very hardest kind ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... thriftless, vain if you like—but merciful, gentle, generous, full of love and pity. He passes out of our life and goes to render his account beyond it. Think of the poor pensioners weeping at his grave; think of the noble spirits that admired and deplored him; think ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... I wis, was not at home; Another had paid his gold away; Another called him thriftless loon, And bade him sharply wend ...
— The Book of Brave Old Ballads • Unknown
... led the Indians, had been in favor of peace, but was overborne by more impetuous warriors. Peace soon followed, and the settlement of the Northwest proceeded for a time without interruption. Those who regard the Indians as a lazy and thriftless race should read what General Wayne says about them: "The very extensive and highly cultivated fields and gardens show the work of many hands. The margins of these beautiful rivers appear like a continued village for a number of miles. Nor have I ever before beheld such immense fields of corn in ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... trouble to any teacher, because they know that their parents are on the side of order, and, even if the children are inclined to be rebellious, they dare not defy the united authority of parents and teacher. But the child of the thief, the costermonger, the racecourse swindler, the thriftless labourer, is now practically emancipated through the action of sentimental persons. He may go to school or not, as he likes; and, while the decent and orderly poor are harried by School Board regulations, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... wander over the clustered faces, full of strong colour in the warm light, with bright, vacant looks and half-open mouths. He knew everyone there, had christened and married many of them, he knew their individual count of kindness and coarseness and self-seeking; knew how hard-working they were, how thriftless, how generous and strangely tolerant, yet how harsh at times in condemnation. It was to their charity of outlook he wished to appeal now, or rather wished Ishmael ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... a great part of the south and east, at least of England—though never so well off, for several generations, as they are now—are growing up thriftless, shiftless; inferior, it seems to me, to their grandfathers in everything, save that they can usually read and write, and their grandfathers could not; and that they wear smart cheap cloth clothes, instead of ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... none can deny; When idleness of all Eternity Becomes our furlough, and the marigold Our thriftless, bullion-minting Treasury ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... course of his migrations was not determined by high moral motives, and we may safely affirm that had he ever found himself among the fleshpots of Egypt, he would have stayed there, however deep the moral darkness might have been. He was a thriftless "ne'er do weel," who had very commonplace reasons for wandering away from the miserable, solitary farm in Kentucky, on which his child first formed a sad acquaintance with life and nature, and which, as it happened, was not in the slave-owning region of the State. His decision appears to ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... fondly hope for the good of all concerned in the end. These modified rules, however, will not come into operation this year; tenants will have time to consider them; and, when introduced, we believe generally, they will see the advantage accruing to themselves. We do not expect that the idle and thriftless will admire them, but it may help them to discover that 'Idleness is the parent of want, while the hand of the diligent ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... all sorts of rancorous abuse and hostility, as Otho called for his mirror in the Illyrian field. One good thing is, that this evil, in some degree, cures itself; and when a man has been nearly ruined by a herd of these sycophants, he finds them leaving him, like thriftless dependants, for some more eligible situation, carrying away with them all the tattle they can pick up, and some left-off suit of finery. The same proneness to adulation which made them lick the dust before one idol makes them bow as low to the rising Sun; they are as lavish of detraction as ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... primitive of mills should be examined, and that one of the several and slow processes by which a poisonous, repugnant, and intractable nut was wont to be converted into food should be cited to the credit of the economic forethought of the most thriftless of people. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... express the part he had to act. He was what we may call the sloop's husband, but was bound to do whatever Murray commanded, to ask no questions, and to be profoundly ignorant of the real objects of the expedition. This pliant auxiliary had, like many thrifty—or more probably thriftless—persons of that time, a double occupation. He was amphibious in his habits, and lived equally on land and water. At home he was a tailor, and abroad a seaman, frequently plying his craft as a skipper on the Bay, and sufficiently known in the latter vocation ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... after dinner. At his present mature age all these pleasures are over: and the times have passed away too. It is but a very very few years since—but the time is gone, and most of the men. Bludyer will no more bully authors or cheat landlords of their score. Shandon, the learned and thriftless, the witty and unwise, sleeps his last sleep. They buried honest Doolan the other day: never will he cringe or flatter, never pull long-bow ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the system; the reckless habits of extravagance and prodigality in the masters, the ruinous wastefulness and ignorant incapacity of the slaves, the deterioration of the land under the exhausting and thriftless cultivation to which it is subjected, made it evident to me that there were but two means of maintaining a prosperous ownership in Southern plantations: either the possession of considerable capital wherewith to recruit the gradual waste of the energies of the soil, and supply by all the improved ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... become more important under their new masters than it was under their old ones, they had less care of selection, and their originality was weakened by diffusiveness. They indulged themselves but sparingly in the luxury of composing verse, which was too thriftless an occupation to be continued long. They used it, perhaps, as the means of attracting notice to themselves at their first entrance on the world, but not as the staple on which they were afterwards to depend. When the song had drawn a band ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... It is his nature to be sanguine, and to hope loudly, vaingloriously; and he writes it honestly enough to his merchant—and draws. The labor gets worse and worse. In the indolent summer days the negro, careless, thriftless, ignorant, works only at intervals. Perhaps the June rise catches him, and there is a heavy expense in ditching and damming to save the Rottenbottom crop. Maybe the merchant hears of the army-worm and is alarmed, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... schoolmaster's creed is somewhat awry?' Yes, I have found few creeds entirely correct; few light-beams shining white, pure of admixture: but of all creeds and religions now or ever before known, was not that of thoughtless thriftless Animalism, of Distilled Gin, and Stupor and Despair, unspeakably the least orthodox? We will exchange it even with Paganism, with Fetishism; and, on the whole, must ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... doomed,' he said. 'The people are lazy, thriftless, and priest-ridden. The best of them are flying to America, and those that remain are dying away, drifting into lunatic asylums, hospitals, and workhouses. There is a curse upon us. In another twenty years there will be no Irish people—at least, none in Ireland. ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... yet, and her son was a well-doing helpful lad, who would soon be able to take care of himself. Her mother had another daughter too, but Janet knew that her sister could never supply her place to her mother. Though kind and well-intentioned, she was easy minded, not to say thriftless, and the mother of many bairns besides, and there could neither be room nor comfort for her mother at her fireside, should its ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... pirating some valuable invention held by powerless hands, can scarcely by conceived by those not familiar with the records of such cases as I have referred to. Inventors, however gifted in other respects, are known to be confiding and thriftless; and being generally without wealth, and always without knowledge of the chicaneries of law, they too often prove but children in those rude conflicts which they are called on to endure with the stalwart fraud and cunning of the world." (U. S. Senate ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... towards mankind, that we have to our own families. The proverb, Waste not, want not, does not apply merely to each private income. We have accounts to settle not only with our bankers, but with the community. It will thrive or not according as we are thrifty or thriftless; and our thrift depends upon how we spend our income, not merely on how much we spend of it. For all that part of it which we do not spend on necessaries is the superfluous energy of mankind, and we determine how it shall be exercised; each individual determines ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... thus thy judgment wronging, With praises not to me belonging, In task more meet for mightiest powers, Wouldst thou engage my thriftless hours. But say, my Erskine, hast thou weighed That secret power by all obeyed, Which warps not less the passive mind, Its source concealed, or undefined: Whether an impulse, that has birth Soon as the infant wakes on earth, One with our feelings and our powers, And ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... looking at," said Mr. Borden. "A bit of Europe on one of our islands and really a lesson to our own thriftless poor." ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas |
