"Idler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that even the candle-droppings would not be creased and fall away! He was happy, though wretched because he could not see her. It was the life he had longed for. At last (and most pathetic!) he was proving his usefulness in this world. He was no longer the mere idler whom ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... which Leon intended to make for himself, and the hours which, of preference, he would give to study. This excellent little woman would have been ashamed to bear the name of a sloth, and unhappy in passing her days with an idler. She promised Leon in advance, to respect his work as a sacred thing. On her part she thoroughly intended to make her time also of use, and not to live with folded arms. At the start she would take charge of the housekeeping, ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... of happiness" is luminous nonsense. Governments are not instituted; they grow. They are evolved out of the necessity of protecting from the handworker the life and property of the brain worker and the idler. The first is the most dangerous because the most numerous and the least content. Take from the science and the art of government, and from its methods, whatever has had its origin in the consciousness of his ill-will and the ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... attainment in a certain way and on certain subjects. His favourite authors were Montaigne and Burton, and he knew more perhaps than any other man in his own county and the next to it of the English essayists of the two last centuries. He possessed complete sets of the Idler, the Spectator, the Tatler, the Guardian, and the Rambler, and would discourse by hours together on the superiority of such publications to anything which has since been produced in our Edinburghs and Quarterlies. ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... twenty hours after our arrival in the village, we took our departure from it—turning our faces towards the almost limitless wilderness of the west. I had endeavoured to add to our company but without success. The caravan had cleared Van Buren of its unemployed population; and not an idler remained—at least not one who felt inclined to adventure with us. Even the needy "loafer" could not be induced to try the trip—deeming ours too dangerous an expedition. To say the least, it was reckless enough; but impelled by motives far more powerful than the thirst of gold, my comrade ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... rather have my son the dullest plodder that ever toiled at the bar, or droned bald platitudes from a pulpit, than the most brilliant drawing-room idler, whose amateur art and amateur music ever made him the fashion of a single season, to leave him forgotten in the next. I utterly ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... you have disdained to have them eat at your table, they cast you out eternally from their bosom and condemn you, in turn, to wear the shackles prepared for them by your indifference or your maneuvers." In other words, whoever has a good roof over his head, or wears good clothes, man or woman, idler or industrious, noble or commoner, is available for the prison or the guillotine, or, at the very least, he is a taxable and workable serf at pleasure; his capital and accumulations, if not spontaneously and immediately handed over, form a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the idler, "that our usages with regard to vermin and reptiles might be so amended as to be more temperately diabolical; but please to remember that the gentle agonies with which we afflict you are wholesome and exhilarating compared with the ills we ladle out to one another. During the ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... Great World, "is in a frame-work of the adventures of Sir Heedless Headlong, who neither reaches the Great World by a balloon, nor Perkins's steam-gun. He cruises about St. James's Straits, makes for Idler's Harbour, in Alba; is repulsed, but with a friend, Jack Rashleigh, journeys to Society Island, lands at Small Talk Bay, and makes for the capital, Flirtington. He first visits a general assembly of the leaders of the isle. At the house of assembly the rush of charioteers ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... Furthermore, I am persuaded that if every man could see in a flash the burning history of the one who is down, the whole of our reasonable population would take thought for the morrow—drink-shops would be closed, the dice-box would rattle no more, and the sight of a genuine idler would be unknown. Not a few of us have seen tragedies enough in the course of our pilgrimage, and have learned to regard the doomed weaklings—the wreckage of civilisation, the folk who are down—with mingled compassion and dismay. I have found in such cases that the miserable mortals never knew ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... whom he had always loved with the best part of his heart. He had married at one-and-twenty. He found himself, in the midst of a dissolute society, at the head of a great fortune. Forced into luxury, and obliged to be a great lord and a great idler, he yielded to some temptations, and paid for them a bitter penalty of manly remorse; from some others he fled wisely, and ended by conquering them nobly. But he always had the good wife and children in his mind, and they saved him. ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... IDLER. A general designation for all those on board a ship-of-war, who, from being liable to constant day duty, are not subjected to keep the night-watch, but must go on deck if all hands are called during the night. Surgeons, marine-officers, paymasters, and the civil department, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... of 1758 Johnson put forth the first of a series of essays, entitled the Idler. During two years these essays continued to appear weekly. They were eagerly read, widely circulated, and indeed, impudently pirated, while they were still in the original form, and had a large sale when collected into volumes. The Idler may be described ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was a stool, which served as a block upon which to stretch a victim whose offense deserved the extreme punishment, but that was not often required. A favorite instrument was the strap, or, as Willy termed it, "the belt." Should the master catch sight of an idler, or practical joker, he would throw the strap to the delinquent as a sign that a thrashing was due, and the boy or girl had to come up to his table and ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... his childhood, and has still worn it in his bosom, not as an early dewdrop, but as a diamond of pure white lustre,—it is a pity to lose it, then. And thus, when Kenyon saw how much his friend had now to hide, and how well he hid it, he would have wept, although his tears would have been even idler than those which Donatello had ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the boats that busily ply here. Quite obviously this is no resort of mere pleasure, and it is all the more pleasurable for that; it has set itself to live sturdily, not troubling to attract the idler and the luxurious. Fowey is not altogether content to repose on its memories, though these are great. Generations of those who laboured on deep waters have nestled in these riverside homesteads, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... little disappointments of schoolboy life, and the somewhat less childish ones of an uneventful and undistinguished academic career, should not have sufficed to turn me out at one-and-twenty years of age a melancholic, listless idler. Some weakness of my own character may have contributed to the result, but in a greater degree it was due to my having a reputation for bad luck. However, I will not try to analyse the causes of my state, for ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... me off with allegories," his companion objected petulantly. "The eternal blackness exists surely enough, even if my metaphor is faulty. I am disposed to be philosophical. Let me ramble on. Here am I, an idler in my boyhood, a harmless pleasure-seeker in my youth till I ran up against tragedy, and since then a drifter, a drifter with a slowly growing vice, lolling through life with no definite purpose, with no definite hope or wish, except," he went on a little drowsily, "that ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... man who believes this only, that his doctrine has obtained and preserved its heavenly character from the successful, unanswerable, appeal which it makes to the human heart—can dispute this fact. Is he an idler, then, or a dreamer in the land, who comes forth, and on the high-road of our popular literature, insists on it that men should assume their full moral strength, and declares that herein lies the salvation of the world? ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... day, from the hour of rising, is, I actually believe, more injurious to the nerves than hard drinking. It paralyzes exertion. I never saw an Irish labourer, with his hod and his pipe, mounting a ladder, but I was sure to discover that he was an idler. I never had a groom that smoked much who took proper care of my horses; and I never knew a gentleman seriously addicted to smoking, who cared much for any thing beyond self. A Father Matthew pledge ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... you're getting worse. Now let me hear no more of this, please. I wish you would imitate your sister a little more. Of course if you won't do your share in the shop, no one can make you. If you choose to be an idler about the house, we shall have to endure it. We can only advise you for your own good. But as for this ..." She stopped, and let silence speak, and then finished: "Let me hear no more ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... with a sudden rush of blood to the face, "do you suppose I cannot guess why you are here? Oh, for God's sake let me hear the worst! If for five years I have been an enforced idler here, do me at least the justice to believe that I know the range of modern artillery and something of what a modern battleship can do. Fifteen years ago when I came to take over the command of the Islands, the old Black Prince was the last word in ships and gunnery. Think of ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... coming—that neither he nor any else troubles me. But really," said he, in his natural voice, and with some feeling, "I was ashamed to go away and leave him there. He would have died if we had. He worked day and night. Talk of saints and martyrs! Campbell himself said he was an idler by the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... art! is it befitting for thee, so young as thou art, to stand there like an old idler? Go forth into the world, and fetch the wonder-stone from Mount Massis, otherwise thou ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... and beadle of Saint-Francois church, Marais, Paris, in 1845; dwelt on rue d'Orleans. A drunken idler. [Cousin Pons.] ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the mill; why, only in the mill was I happy. But could you imagine a man as proud as he, David, taking help from me? He answered rather curtly; said that some day I should see what he was worth; that he was not the idler he seemed. He said that again to me face to face, that once when I have seen him in all the years ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... time I ever saw him. He was an Irishman all right, but he had been educated in England, and except for his accent he was more an Englishman than anything else. A freight outfit brought him into Tucson from Santa Fe and dumped him down on the plaza, where at once every idler in town ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... severe and unpitying of his youthful judges. There was no servility in his manner, for he neither courted nor shunned observation; nor, though he was as willing as ever to do a kind action for any one, did he allow himself to be persuaded to give up all his time to his idler school-fellows. There seemed more firmness and decision in his naturally yielding disposition, and those who knew not the power of assisting grace, looked and wondered at the firmness the sweet but weak boy could ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... surprising that rumours as to the marriage were rife, although they did not reach the Chancellor's ears. His absorption in his work perhaps prevented him from gaining that confidence in his own family which an idler man would have commanded. Such stories were soon spread abroad by the gossip of the Court, and shrewd observers guessed the truth. Ashley Cooper, on one occasion soon after the Restoration, quitting the dinner- table of the Chancellor, in the company of Lord Southampton, declared to him ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... of your heavy-sides, a student who studies, a greenhorn pedant, strong on letters, theology, science, and sapience, one of those dull wits cut by the square; a pin by profession. He is an honorable idler who lounges, who practises country jaunts, who cultivates the grisette, who pays court to the fair sex, who is at this very moment, perhaps, with my mistress. Let us save him. Death to Blondeau!' At that moment, Blondeau ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... With idler, knave, and tyrant! Why for sluggards cark and moil? He that will not live by toil Has no right on English soil! God's ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... clear-skinned type. The eyes were very fine; the nose and mouth had the lines of distinction; the chin was—positive. Altogether the young man did not look the part he had that day been playing—that of the rich young idler who drives a hundred and fifty miles in a powerful car, over the worst kind of roads, merely for the sake of diversion ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... aristocracy when it can lure him into its nets. To watch one of these small horse-dealers at a fair, and to observe the manner in which he conducts his bargains, is very curious. He lounges about all day, apparently doing nothing; he is the only idler around. Once in a while somebody approaches him and mutters something, to which he gives a brief reply. Then he goes to a tap-room or stable-yard, and is merged in a mob of his mates. But all the while he is doing ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... him as a permanent colleague on their staff. Henceforward existence was no concern to the literary vagabond, who on his own showing had had four teachers: the cook on the Volga steamer, the advocate Lanin, the idler whom he describes ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... because she is her husband's business partner and can continue the business in his absence. A partner with responsibility is better and happier than a worker without responsibility, and of infinitely more value to the community than an idler without an ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy
... from the house, and he was a jealous parent; it kept him from the office, and he was a martinet; lastly, Mr. Nicholson was ambitious for his family (in which, and the Disruption Principles, he entirely lived), and he hated to see a son of his play second fiddle to an idler. After some hesitation, he ordered that the friendship should cease - an unfair command, though seemingly inspired by the spirit of prophecy; and John, saying nothing, continued to disobey the order under ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the matters of kindly soft-heartedness and sympathy was Mrs Welsh—a poor, gentle, delicate Englishwoman, the wife of a great hulking cross-grained fellow named Abel, who was a carpenter by trade and an idler by preference. Mrs Welsh was particularly good as a sick-nurse and a cook, in which capacities she ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... special task can do, Though trivial it may seem to thee. Thou canst not shirk God-given work And still be blest of Heaven, from sin be free. O idler in life's ripened harvest-field, Perform thy task, that rich ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... his too short life above them all sang Burns—for Scotland's sake. Dear is the band that ties the humbly educated man to the true national poet. To many in the upper classes he is, perhaps, but one among a thousand artificers of amusement who entertain and scatter the tedium of their idler hours. To the peasant the book lies upon his shelf a household treasure. There he finds depicted himself—his own works and his own ways. There he finds a cordial for his drooping spirits, nutriment for his wearied strength. Burns is his brother—his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... ancestors did well to esteem the Romans who lived in the country above those who dwelt in town. For as our peasants today contemn the tenant of a villa as an idler in comparison with the busy life of an agricultural labourer, so our ancestors regarded the sedentary occupations of the town as waste of time from their habitual rural pursuits: and in consequence they so divided their time that ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... it. Obsequiousness, servility, cupidity roused by the prevailing smell of money. When Mr Carnegie rattled his millions in his pockets all England became one rapacious cringe. Only, when Rhodes (who had probably been reading my Socialism for Millionaires) left word that no idler was to inherit his estate, the bent backs straightened mistrustfully for a moment. Could it be that the Diamond King was no gentleman after all? However, it was easy to ignore a rich man's solecism. The ungentlemanly clause was not mentioned again; and the backs ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... their eyes were they alike; both of them had the keen, alert eyes of observers. Perhaps the most curious thing of all was that, in spite of the fact that he had for so much of his life been an idler, trifling away his time in the pursuit of pleasure, except when he had made his expedition to the South Pole, the Duke gave one the impression of being a cleverer man, of a far finer brain, than the detective who had spent so much of his life sharpening ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... follow the purplish ridge of Mount Aegaleos as it runs down the Attic coast to westward, we come to a headland then to a belt of azure water, about a mile wide, then the reddish hills of an irregular island. Every idler on the citadel can tell us all the story. On that headland on a certain fateful morning sat Xerxes, lord of the Persians, with his sword-hands and mighty men about him and his ships before him, to look down on the naval spectacle and see how his slaves would fight. The island beyond ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is more ...
— Maxims for Revolutionists • George Bernard Shaw
... the mask, smooth and sterile, of the hunger for adornment, for gold bands and jewels and perfume, for goffered linen and draperies of silk and scarlet. She was the naked idler stained with antimony in the clay courts of Sumeria; the Paphian with painted feet loitering on the roofs of Memphis while the blocks of red sandstone floated sluggishly down the Nile for the pyramid of Khufu the King; she was the flushed voluptuousness ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... V. Let no Idler who hath no particular calling, or vagrant Person under pretence of a calling, be suffered to perform worship in Families, to or for the same: Seeing persons tainted with errours or aiming at division, may be ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... oaks, which supplied the crew with firewood; while a beautiful and clear stream, the pride and boast of the county, curved into the waving grass land, and kept it ever fresh and verdant. Here and there its silvery bosom reflected a small tent, or the figure of an idler, bending over the bank, with fishing rod in hand, a perfect picture of patience and philosophy. Half a dozen tents served to accommodate the gregarious fraternity; and though the sail cloths which composed them were worn and weather-beaten, yet their brown hues harmonized well with the ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... edited two immense commentaries; he was the president of the Committee on Biblical Revision, and he crossed the ocean fourteen times as a fraternal internuncio between the churches of Europe and America. His prodigious capacity for work made Dr. Samuel Johnson seem an idler, and his varied attainments and activities were ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... his very measures contravened—and this by fraud? And than Robespierre's anger there were few things more terrible in '93. It was an anger that shore away heads as recklessly as wayside flowers are flicked from their stems by the idler's cane. ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... basis, and no one could live with us without having his speech braced for life. You felt equal to any emergency, and were always able to express your mind with some degree of accuracy, which is one of the luxuries of life. There is, for instance, a type of idler who exasperates one to the point of assault, and whom one hungers to describe after a becoming manner. He was rare in the cold air of the North, but we had produced one specimen, and it was my luck to be present when he ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... (1789-1849).—Married as her second husband the 1st Earl of B., with whom she travelled much on the Continent, where she met Lord Byron, her Conversations with whom she pub. in 1834. This is the only one of her books which has any value. The others were slight works on Travel, such as The Idler in Italy, annuals, and novels. She became bankrupt and went to Paris, where she lived under the protection ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... God ever made an idler," she said, with high gravity that widened the gulf between them. "To whom much is given, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... profit, served to introduce him to the townspeople of Winchester. The morning after his arrival, he found a crowd in the public square and learned that an auction sale of personal effects was about to take place. Everyone from the administrator of the estate to the village idler, was eager for the sale to begin. But a clerk to keep record of the sales and to draw the notes was wanting. The eye of the administrator fell upon Douglass; something in the youth's appearance gave assurance that he could "cipher.". The impatient bystanders ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... I came back to London by the next mail; Calais, in the month of November, not being one of those wildly-gay watering-places which tempt the idler. I arrived just in time to catch this afternoon's post; and now I look impatiently to your Miss Charlotte Meynell, of Huxter's Cross.—Yours, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... The idler and lover of the picturesque will not find time hang heavy on his hands here. Very sweet are the riverside views, no matter on which side we obtain them, and the quaintest little staircases of streets run from base to summit ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... unsuccessful experiments, he was sauntering home to dinner along the boulevards (the lounger in Paris is a man in despair quite as often as a genuine idler), when a book among a hamperful at six sous apiece caught his attention; his eyes were attracted by the yellow dusty title-page, Abdeker, so it ran, or the Art of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... forgotten to settle for the wine. The lady had refused to do so. Courtlandt chuckled and gave him a ten-franc piece. In other days, in other circumstances, he would have liked to know more about the unknown who scribbled notes on composition paper. She was not an idler in the Rue Royale, and it did not require that indefinable intuition which comes of worldly-wiseness to discover this fact. She might be a friend of the Desimone woman, but she had stepped out ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... and spending their surplus time and money in drink. They seem wanting in respect for themselves as well as for their class. They encourage the notion that there is something degrading in labour,—than which nothing can be more false. Labour of all kinds is dignifying and honourable; it is the idler, above all others, who is undignified ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... accompany him to the graves at that hour; though everybody but Josh had turned-in, as he informed Mulford, to catch short naps previously to the hour of getting the brig under way. As for the steward, he had been placed on the look-out as the greatest idler on board. All this was exceedingly favourable to Jack Tier's project, since Josh was already in the secret of his absence, and would not be likely to betray his return. After a brief consultation, it was agreed to wait half an hour or an hour, in order to let the sleepers lose all consciousness, ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... idler in the affairs of his ranch or of the town. Few city men were so busy. His everlasting talk was incidental, like the babbling of a brook which, however, keeps steadily flowing on; and the stored scholarship of his mind ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... other things. A lad with a sickly constitution and no very active mind, who can just retain what is pointed out to him, and has neither sagacity to distinguish nor spirit to enjoy for himself, will generally be at the head of his form. An idler at school, on the other hand, is one who has high health and spirits, who has the free use of his limbs, with all his wits about him, who feels the circulation of his blood and the motion of his heart, who is ready to laugh and cry in a breath, and who had rather chase a ball or a butterfly, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... an Indian would look for it. It is the opinion of many wise and busy people that the hill-folk pass the ten-month interval between the end and renewal of winter rains, with no drink; but your true idler, with days and nights to spend beside the water trails, will not subscribe to it. The trails begin, as I said, very far back in the Ceriso, faintly, and converge in one span broad, white, hard-trodden ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... was a small man, now verging on sixty years. His warmest admirers could not say that he had ever been an industrious man; the circumstances of his life had not called on him to so; and yet he could hardly be called an idler. He had greatly improved the choir of Barchester, and taken something more than his fair share in the cathedral services. He was generous to all, but especially to the twelve old men who were under his care. With an income ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... but lazy—just an idler—he had concluded. Been playing around Manila for the last two months—resting up, he had said. And from what? the Admiral had questioned disdainfully. Admiral Struthers did not like indolent young men, but it would have saved him money if he had really got an answer to his question ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... much about the matter as a cow might, and was rather less active. But if perseverance could have made a cricketer, he would have turned out a first-rate one. Not content with two or three hours of it every fine evening, when we all sallied down to the marsh, followed by every idler in Glyndewi, he used to disappear occasionally in the mornings, and for some days puzzled us as to where and how he disposed of himself. We had engaged, in our corporate capacity, the services of a most original retainer, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... Edward Plantagenet Mortimer, was simply a useless, soft-headed dandy, who would as soon have dreamed of throwing himself overboard as of soiling his hands; there was no harm in him, he was good-natured enough, but he was emphatically the idler of the ship, never even making a pretence of performing any duty, but simply dawdling about the deck in kid gloves, with an eye-glass eternally screwed into his starboard top-light. His one idea was that he was a brilliant performer on the flute; and in his watch below he was incessantly ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... oppressions they endured; how they were delivered; and above all what ideals of righteousness and truth and mercy they cherished, and how they came to think and feel about God. It makes little difference to us what particular idler at any particular time sat in the palace at Jerusalem sending forth tax-collectors to raise funds for his luxuries. It is of very great interest and concern to us if there were daughters like Ruth in the barley fields of Bethlehem, if shepherds tended ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... He seemed to have no particular interest of his own in life. He dressed very perfectly, he went to a number of parties, he had delightful little gatherings in his own flat, but, with it all, he was something more—a great deal more—than the mere society idler. There was a hint at possible wildness, an almost sinister suggestion of possible lawlessness that made him infinitely attractive. He was such good company and yet one felt that one didn't know ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... features may certainly be easily reorganized; if we substitute sherry, a chop, and a club in Pall-Mall, for white spruce beer, sandwiches, and a tavern; replacing the curricle and footman by a cab and tiger, the remainder, with trivial alterations, may stand good of the fashionable idler of to-day, as of him ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... A statue of the first year of his reign, 1547, ordains that if anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler. The master shall feed his slave on bread and water, weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks fit. He has the right to force him to do any work, no matter how disgusting, with whip and chains. If the slave is absent a fortnight, ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... of the idler and the traveller; the Paris of the boulevards and the night life provided for the tourist; the Paris that sparkled and smiled in entertainment; the Paris exploited to the average American through Sunday supplements and the reminiscences of smoking-rooms ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... like Zaluski, with his easy nonchalance, his knowledge of the world, his genuine good-nature, and the background of sterling qualities which came upon you as a surprise because he loved to make himself seem a mere idler, was apt to eclipse an ordinary mortal like James Blackthorne. The curate perceived this and did not like to be eclipsed—as a matter of fact, nobody does. It seemed to him a little unfair that he, who had ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... structure of society above him. On the other hand, it has been necessary to demonstrate to the white man in the South that education does not 'spoil' the Negro, as it has been so often predicted that it would. It was necessary to make him actually see that education makes the Negro not an idler or spendthrift, but a more industrious, thrifty, law-abiding, and useful citizen than ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... indulging a fancy. But how and when, I should like to know, are you to enter Parliament now? This Parliament will last: it will go on to the lees. Lord Eskdale told me so not a week ago. Well then, at any rate, you lose three years: for three years you are an idler. I never thought that was your character. I have always had an impression you would turn your mind to public business, that the county might look up to you. If you have what are called higher views, you should not forget there is a great opening now in public life, which may not offer ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... morrow after that Master Hawkins departed from hence, I, having nothing to do, as an idler went to Lambeth to the bishop's palace, to see what news; and I took a wherry at Paul's Wharf, wherein also was already a doctor named Crewkhorne, which was sent for to come to the Bishop of Canterbury. And he, before the ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... and Leyte.] The inhabitants of Samar and Leyte, who are at once idler and filthier than those of Luzon, seem to be as much behind the Bicols as the latter are behind the Tagalogs. In Tacloban, where a more active intercourse with Manila exists, these qualities are less pronounced, and the women, ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... better sailor than scholar, yet he generously sought to secure for little Robin the advantages he did not himself possess; Robin, accordingly, received daily instruction in penmanship from a run-away merchant's clerk, the clerk and bookkeeper, the lubber and idler ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... certain that no ship would clear for home for two or three days, I made little shooting journeys inland, but in the main this is how I spent my days, filling them with work and distraction so as not to have idle hours for idler thinking. Spring passed, summer came and went, and the leaves were turning from gold to brown when one morning, as I was at breakfast, Mr. Faneuil's man came in with a letter. It was from Master Freake, summoning me home as all was put right. It contained a few lines from Margaret, written in ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... aviation sentry. But at this period airplanes were rare. Guynemer had his own thoughts, and tenacity was one of his dominant traits; he was already one of those who never renounce. The bathers who passed this everlasting idler never suspected that he was obstinately developing one single plan, and hanging his ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... ought to be done, and what man can do; and he makes them do it too. There's no shirking work or being slack in stays when he carries on the duty, and there's not a smarter ship in the service, nor a happier one either, though he won't allow an idler on board. The fact is, my boy, both officers and men know that no one can shirk their work, so it comes easy to all, and we have more leave and less punishment than nearly any other vessel ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... the religious world and led to more than one clerical prosecution. Another sign was the publication of Colenso's learned work on the Pentateuch. This hard-working Colonial Bishop was denounced as a heretic by the idler home Bishops, and Ruskin has said that they would have liked to burn Colenso alive, and make Ludgate Hill easier for the omnibuses with the cinders of him. An antagonist very different from the Bishops ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... had opened the door had, no doubt, informed Vivian of my visit, for he did not seem surprised to see me; but he cast that hurried, suspicious look round the room which a man is apt to cast when he has left his papers about and finds some idler, on whose trustworthiness he by no means depends, seated in the midst of the unguarded secrets. The look was not flattering; but my conscience was so unreproachful that I laid all the blame upon the general ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... goes in ten minutes—what is to be done?"—"Ma foi—it is too late!" "Try, ma bonne—it's a pity he should lose his passage—voici." The Englishman gave his fee. Desiree looked about her, and then taking the idler by the arm, she hurried him through the crowd, this way and that way, ending by putting him aboard without any passport at all. "It is too late to get one," she said; "and they can but send you back." He passed undetected. France has a plenty of these managing females, though ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... stimulants at all. To such as these pure air and nature are stimulants sufficient. Whoever heard of a drunken pioneer and facer of natural difficulties, from Natty Bumpo of imagination to Kit Carson of reality? John Appleman as a soldier did not drink. As a half idler in Guaymas he tried, casually, mescal and aguardiente and all Mexican intoxicants, but cast them aside as things unnecessary. More years passed, and finally fear of Mrs. Appleman became to an extent attenuated, while ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... into splendor and beauty. It was well, not because of that splendor and beauty; but because the act creating them is better than the things themselves; because exertion is nobler than enjoyment; because the laborer is greater and more worthy of honor than the idler. Masonry stands up for the nobility of labor. It is Heaven's great ordinance for human improvement. It has been broken down for ages; and Masonry desires to build it up again. It has been broken down, because men toil only because they must, submitting to it ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... time, and you have made acquaintances and got your relations round you; or if you have got a good big house like this, and a wife and children and mother and sister, and everything comfortable. I don't like that way of living all in rooms next door to each other. But I am not an idler. I try to be, but I can't manage it; it goes against the grain. My business habits are too deep-seated. Then, I haven't any house to call my own, or anything in the way of a family. My sisters are five thousand miles away, my mother ...
— The American • Henry James
... grandfather's home. It was there that he first tasted the delights of romance. In his school work he was none too studious, but all his teachers were charmed by his pleasing manner and general intelligence. Though an idler in other things, he worked constantly on the art of writing. Throughout his study in Edinburgh University and his unsuccessful efforts in engineering and the practice of law, literature became more and ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... on causes which have had little relation to the individual character of convicts. A mild or severe governor, or secretary of state; a great increase or decrease of numbers; the book of some literary idler, or of an angry colonist; instances of extraordinary good fortune, or an insurrection against tyranny; the fluctuations of feeling at home, sometimes wrath against crime, sometimes compassion for the criminal. Such ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... many years. Wilkes, who had known him intimately, describes him, in his letters to the electors of Aylesbury, as "the most abandoned man of the age." He is even said not to have been a man of business; yet the Admiralty was a place which can scarcely be managed by an idler, and the Secretaryship of State, in this country, can never be a sinecure. He had certainly one quality which is remarkable for conciliation, and without which no minister, let his talents be what they may, has ever been personally popular; he was a man of great ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... amusing, well-dressed idler, was living down at the "Savoy," and was daily in her company, driving, motoring, picnicking, making excursions in the mountains, or taking trips over to "Monte" by the train-de-luxe. He had left the villa early in the afternoon, returned ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... others; our object in that work being to counteract the virus scattered among His Majesty's subjects through the pages of the Edinburgh Review. Now, I wish to enlist you in our corps, not as a mere advising idler, but as an efficient labourer in our ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... Earl of Clarendon, etc. Dr. Johnson, in the sixty-fifth number of the Idler, has also celebrated the appearance of this ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... know not, save that they are, because they must be—just and merciful laws. But of the laws by which He rules this world we do know, by experience, that His laws are of most terrible and unbending severity, as I have warned you again and again, and shall warn you, as long as there is a liar or an idler, a drunkard or ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... in the Bible, and determined to make known the whole mysterious case at once to Mr. Craigie, the chief magistrate of Aberdeen. Not for a single instant did Mr. Comyn suspect a hoax, or imagine the affair to be only the mischievous trick of some idler. Indeed, such was not likely; the times were superstitious, nor were there any persons connected or at variance with the family who were liable to be suspected of having played off such a foolish and wicked jest at the expense of the minister, even if any motive for doing so had existed. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... population have a second- hand look which is not to be detected on the mass of the Parisian population. I think this is mainly because a Parisian workman does not in the least trouble himself about what is worn by a Parisian idler, but dresses in the way of his own class, and for his own comfort. In London, on the contrary, the fashions descend; and you never fully know how inconvenient or ridiculous a fashion is, until you see it in its last descent. It was but the other ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... present, I've been passed over by the authorities; but now I've been given my chance. If I can hammer the raw native levies into shape and keep order along a disturbed frontier, it will lead to something better. Now, I'm neither a military genius nor altogether a careless idler—I believe I can do this work; but, coming rather late, it has less attraction for me. Well, I would let the chance slip, for one reason only; but if I'm to go on continually repressing myself and only allowed to see you at long intervals, I might as well go ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... ending late, he is an excellent stuffer of birds and beasts, and the good condition of our collection is owing entirely to him. His son, Kwasi Yau (Sunday Joe), is a sharp 'boy' in the Anglo-Indian sense. The carpenter, our model idler, who won't work and can't work, receives 3l. per mens., when $8 should be the utmost; we cleared him out on return to Axim. Meanwhile he saunters about under an umbrella, and is always missing ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... be like a team in which every man has his place, his work to do, his mission or duty. There is no room in it either for the idler who consumes but renders no service, or for the unskilled man who bungles a task to which he has not been trained. A nation may be compared to a living creature. Consider the way in which nature organises all things that live and grow. In the structure of a living thing every part has its ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... reverts to himself: The warrior has no thanks, he exclaims in the bitterness of disappointment—"The coward and the brave man are held in equal honour." Nay, he goes further, and quarrels with providence and fixed destiny.—"After all, the idler, and the man of many achievements, each must die."[3] To-morrow, he adds, his vessels shall float on the Hellespont. The morning dawned; but the ships of Achilles still lingered near the banks of the Scamander. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... him as he strode away, and I fancy there was a new light in my eyes,—certainly there was a new purpose in my heart. For I had been often sadly puzzled as to what I should do when once I was out of college. I had no mind to become an idler at Riverview, but was determined to win myself a place in the world. Yet when I came to look about me, I saw small prospect of success. The professions—the law, medicine, and even the church—were overrun with vagabonds ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... high, wide arch of the skull is lowered or narrowed; the broad brow cramped; the features finer cut, but losing in force what they gain in fineness. Look, for instance, at this Vandyck of Sir John Suckling,—only the next generation after the great men; but his portrait is that of an idler, his head that of a man without great thoughts or great interests. The age of imagination had passed; the age of fancy was setting in. Here and there in the later days one finds a man who might belong to the earlier time;—for instance, this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... was far too practical to let the poet in him rule his life. One sensed, by the most cursory glance, that here was a type of virile young American who could not only dream, but make his dreams come true. No idler he! And he had no use for idlers. He had dared to come to this far country, establish himself on a ranch, and seek to win out in ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... His father had left the family well provided for, so there was no rush to get into something whereby a living might be earned. Yet Theodore Roosevelt had long since determined not to be an idler. He would travel and improve his mind, and then settle down to that for which he ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... happiness is intellectual sympathy. Man requires a woman who can make his home a place of rest for him, and woman requires a man of domestic tastes. While a woman who seeks to find happiness in a married life will never consent to be wedded to an idler or a pleasure-seeker, so a man of intelligence will wed none but a woman of intelligence and good sense. Neither beauty, physical characteristics nor other external qualifications will compensate for the absence of intellectual thought and clear and quick comprehensions. An ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... inevitable amid the circulation of Parisian humanity. Oh, how deeply she feels the value of a minute! Her gait, her toilet, the expression of her face, involve her in a thousand indiscretions, but oh, what a ravishing picture she presents to the idler, and what an ominous page for the eye of a husband to read, is the face of this woman when she returns from the secret place of rendezvous in which her heart ever dwells! Her happiness is impressed even on the unmistakable disarray of her hair, the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... again, perfectly composed, "these are but secondary matters; yet there is such light in them with respect to my main argument, that I think best to make them good by proofs, lest my reverend brethren dismiss me as an idler in words.... Behold the Bible of the Bodhisattwa"—he held up a roll of broad-leafed vellum, and turned it dextrously for better exhibition—"and hear, while I read from it, of a Birth, Life and Death which took place a thousand and twenty-seven ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... She's a utilitarian. She would say, 'Cousin Phil is interesting, but he hides his talent in a napkin. He studied law, and now neglects to practise it because his uncle left him two or three thousand dollars a year.' To her I am only an idler, when I'm not ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... dairymen had driven off to their homesteads in the country, he came downstairs, took a biscuit and one glass of wine, and walked out into the town, where the radiance from the shop-windows had grown so in volume of late years as to flood with cheerfulness every standing cart, barrow, stall, and idler that occupied the wayside, whether shabby or genteel. His chief interest at present seemed to lie in the names painted over the shop-fronts and on door-ways, as far as they were visible; these now differed to an ominous extent from what they had been one-and-twenty ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... intended to, and he was getting a training that would enable him to work to the best advantage. Just because he was a millionaire he did not despise work. In fact he liked it, and he had made up his mind that he would not be an idler. ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... house of K'ang, her name being Hwa-mei, though from the nature of her charm she is ofttime called the Golden Mouse. But touching this affair of your own immediate danger: we being both but common men of the idler sort, it is only fitting that when high ones threaten ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... you're talking nonsense," he said sulkily, though he shrank from meeting her fiery look. "And if I am idle, there are plenty of people idler than me—people who live on their money, with no land to bother about, and nothing to ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bearer served me the space of one year, during which time he was an idler and a drunkard, I then discharged him as such; but how far his having been five years at sea may have mended his manners, I leave to the penetration of those who may ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift |
