"Improvidence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cure. The parent who shrinks from inflicting any suffering on his child, or withholding from him any pleasure that he desires, is not laying the foundation of a happy life, and the benevolence which counteracts or obscures the law of nature that extravagance, improvidence and vice lead naturally to ruin, is no real kindness either to the upright man who has resisted temptation or to the weak man whose virtue is trembling doubtfully in the balance. Nor is it in the long run for the benefit of the world that superior ability ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... to the fact of English protection. If millions of the Irish will not work, and will not grow corn—if they prefer trusting to the potato, and the potato happens to fail—are we to be punished for that defect, be it one of carelessness, of improvidence, or of misgovernment? Better that we had no reason at all than one so obviously flimsy. If we turn to the petitions which, about the end of autumn, were forwarded from different towns, praying for that favourite measure of the League, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... assured, say of myself, that no mortal could reap more perfect happiness from the tender passion than my fortune had decreed me. I married a charming young woman for love; she was the daughter of a neighboring beggar, who, with an improvidence too often seen, spent a very large income which he procured by his profession, so that he was able to give her no fortune down; however, at his death he left her a very well accustomed begging-hut, situated on the side ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... in response, "I thing you is juz right. I believe, me, strong-strong in the improvidence, yes. You know my papa he hown a sugah-plantation, you know. 'Jules, me son,' he say one time to me, 'I goin' to make one baril sugah to fedge the moze high price in New Orleans.' Well, he take his bez ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... who is the author, that he should be exempt? Let us bear our ills with the same constancy with which others endure them, accept our manly part in life, hold our own, and ask no more. I can conceive of no kings or laws causing or curing Goldsmith's improvidence, or Fielding's fatal love of pleasure, or Dick Steele's mania for running races with the constable. You never can outrun that sure-footed officer—not by any swiftness or by dodges devised by any genius, however great; ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... assessed, not according to a man's income, but according to the assets of which he is possessed. The effect of such a tax would be that he who has spent everything that he has earned on his own enjoyment would go scot free in the matter of the capital tax, and would be rewarded for his improvidence by being asked to make no sacrifice; while his thrifty brother who, out of a smaller income, has set aside a certain proportion during the last twenty or thirty years, would have to hand over a portion of his current income assessed upon the value of ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... system. The States, to whose lot it might fall to support the necessary establishments, would be as little able as willing, for a considerable time to come, to bear the burden of competent provisions. The security of all would thus be subjected to the parsimony, improvidence, or inability of a part. If the resources of such part becoming more abundant and extensive, its provisions should be proportionally enlarged, the other States would quickly take the alarm at seeing the whole military force of the Union ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... greatness; and he has watched, with such emotions as none but a gentleman of the old school can feel, the infusion and gradual diffusion of those principles of plebeianism and ruffianism, from discontented improvidence, immigration, and other causes, which threaten to destroy whatever has justified the wisest pride; and to sink—not raise—all the mob of people to a common level. He has his whims, and though they have won for him little popularity, we regret ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... delightful. The slave-holders, all told, numbered some 350,000. The controlling element consisted of the large planters, with the affiliated members of the liberal professions. Plantation life at its best had a great deal of beauty and charm. A degree of improvidence and "shiftlessness," by Northern standards, was not inconsistent with free hospitality, a generous outdoor life, an old-time culture with an atmosphere of leisure and courtesy, superior in its way to what the busy and bustling North could show. The charming and chivalrous "Colonel ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... respectability among the disreputable, a pure spirit of Philistinism among the waifs and strays of thy Bohemia. For lo! thy very gravediggers talk politics; and thy castaways kneel upon new graves, to discuss the cost of the monument and grumble at the improvidence ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... modern feeling. For the sake of the general reader, it may be well to state the occasion and character of it. It will be remembered by all that early in the winter of 1854-5, so fatal by its inclemency, and by our own improvidence, to our army in the Crimea, the late Emperor of Russia said, or was reported to have said, that "his best commanders, General January and General February, were not yet come." The word, if ever spoken, was at once base, cruel, and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... pointed out that the remedy for these disorders must be a radical one. Improvidence among the poorer classes is familiar to economists in more experienced societies than that of Newfoundland, and may be accepted as a permanent element in the difficulty. The real hope lay in opening up, on remunerative lines, industries which would occupy ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... of the natural rights of the negro, the prejudice of color, nor of the ruinous improvidence of the system of slavery, that controlled the decision in Mr. Jefferson's mind, as to the methods by which the system should be terminated. On these points, he was as radical as the extremest abolitionist; but he could not satisfy himself as to the mental capacity of the negro—whether ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... independent State in Western Europe. The very rich families, however, are not numerous. The lavish expenditure in which Russian nobles often indulge indicates too frequently not large fortune, but simply foolish ostentation and reckless improvidence. ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... except what is purely accidental, or brought on by the improvidence of individuals. In the very best regulated society there must, of necessity, be poverty less or more," said the ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... that Providence: it was his improvidence with our money, and he ought to be punished. Can't we go to law and recover our fortune? My uncle ought to take measures, and not sit down by such wrongs. We ought to go ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... would be cheap at sixty guineas. And, remember, there was wear for twenty years in it. And think of the saving in doctor's bills—for you simply can't catch colds if you wear a fur coat. In short, not to buy a fur coat at this moment was an act of gross improvidence, a wrong to one's family, a ... a ... And then he looked, with the cold disapproval of a connoisseur, at the coat I was wearing. And in the light of that glance I saw for the first time that it was ... yes ... certainly, it was not what ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... looking nervous. But it was not by the images which his ordinary stock in trade would naturally cause to arise that he was disturbed,—images though they were of folly, improvidence, and distress. There was indeed hardly an article in the shop, except the new plated jewelry in the window, that was not suggestive of misery or of sin. But in Mr. Isaacs's well-poised mind no morbid fancies arose. "Those hard winters makes me cheerful," he was wont ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... I could not light my pipe—for, although I had long ago started a match factory, I had forgotten to bring matches with me—and partly because we had nothing to eat. Here was another illustration of the childlike improvidence of this age and people. A man in armor always trusted to chance for his food on a journey, and would have been scandalized at the idea of hanging a basket of sandwiches on his spear. There was probably ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... good weather so that the grazing in the Basin itself would be held in reserve for storms. It was a very grave error, said Holman Sommers, to exhaust the pasturage immediately contiguous to the home corral. It might almost be defined as downright improvidence. Then he forestalled any resentment she might feel by apologizing for his seeming presumption. But he apprehended the fact that she and her brother were both inexperienced, and he would be sorry indeed to see them suffer any loss because of that inexperience. His practical knowledge ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... that has been said, and so justly said, of the notorious improvidence of the poor, it will be seen from the above hasty sketches, that they yet can and do help themselves to many things which are undeniably profitable and advantageous to them: they only want, in fact, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... but considering their numbers, and his limited means, it was impossible for him to afford them adequate relief. To those thus emancipated, others, discharged from the army and navy, were afterward added, who, by their improvidence, were reduced to extreme distress. After much reflection, Mr. Sharp determined to colonize them in Africa; but this benevolent scheme could not be executed at once, and the blacks—indigent, unemployed, despised, forlorn, vicious—became such nuisances, as to make it ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... reason of which he did not seem to understand himself. This Teter was one of those good-natured, obliging, reckless, happy-go-lucky individuals who never fail to win the love of boys. His generosity was equalled only by his improvidence, and both were surpassed ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... hole-picking might find a good deal of indebtedness. It is the old jealousy of a clever and unscrupulous self-made man towards an improvident seigneur and his somewhat robustious son. The seigniorial improvidence, however, is not of the usual kind, for M. le Marquis de Clairefont wastes his substance, and gets into his enemy's debt and power, by costly experiments on agricultural and other machinery, partly due to the fact that ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... also, and benefits no one, cannot be otherwise than wrong; that purely objectless asceticism which has not even self-discipline in view, is not virtue, but folly; that misdirected charity which, engendering improvidence, creates more distress than it relieves, is not virtue, but criminal weakness. But though admitting that there can be no virtue without utility, I do not admit either that virtue must be absent unless utility preponderate, or ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... vices were the counterfeit of virtues, contrived so cunningly that it was hard to distinguish their true texture. The fidelity of the clansmen to their leaders was faultlessly beautiful; extravagance appeared like generosity, and improvidence like unselfishness; anarchy disguised itself under the name of liberty; and war and plunder were decorated by poetry as the honourable occupation of heroic natures. Such were the Irish with whom the Norman conquerors found themselves in contact; ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... canvass prattle of obeying instructions, and having no opinions but yours, and such idle, senseless tales, which amuse the vacant ears of unthinking men, have saved you from "the pelting of that pitiless storm," to which the loose improvidence, the cowardly rashness, of those who dare not look danger in the face so as to provide against it in time, and therefore throw themselves headlong into the midst of it, have exposed this degraded nation, beat down and prostrate on the earth, unsheltered, unarmed, unresisting? ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... keen reckoner, began quickly to put the dilapidated Castlewood accounts in order, of which long neglect, poverty, and improvidence had hastened the ruin. The business of the old gentleman's life now, and for some time henceforth, was to advance, improve, mend my lord's finances; to screw the rents up where practicable, to pare the expenses ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... master was exactly of that treacherous kind which not only deceives a man himself, but enables him to deceive others, and thus combined all that a person of his carelessness and ambition had most to dread. An uncertain income, which, by eluding calculation, gives an excuse for improvidence, [Footnote: How feelingly aware he was of this great source of all his misfortunes appears from a passage in the able speech which he delivered before the Chancellor, as Counsel in his own case, in ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... powers of which they were most jealous, I found them in a perfect phrensy of rage and indignation: not that they were hurt at the shocking and uncoloured violence and injustice of that partition, but at the debility, improvidence, and want of activity, in their government, in not preventing it as a means of aggrandisement to their rivals, or in not contriving, by exchanges of some kind or other, to obtain their share of advantage ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... was desired; and had free labor then and there superseded it, far different would have been the destiny of the fair State; whose western portion affords such a contrast to that wherein this blight induced improvidence and deterioration, the tokens whereof were noted by every visitor in the spare and desultory culture of the soil, the neglected resources, the dilapidated fences and dwellings, and the absence of that order and comfort which inevitably attaches to legitimate industry and self-reliance. This ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... their work again, seeing nothing all around but the sky and the sea. Though this was enough to distress them sufficiently, yet they were besides in the predicament of Tantalus, who had water within a span of his mouth yet could not quench his thirst; such was their distress, for, through the improvidence of the Indians and the prodigious heat of the preceding day and night, all their water was drank up without any regard to the future. As heat and labour together are altogether intolerable without drink, and as the heat and thirst increased the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... was the end of that stage in Sally's life. After the funeral, Sally and her mother were quite without money. Everything was so wretched and unforeseen that the two were lost in this miserable new aspect of poverty and improvidence. For a time Mrs. Perce was good to them, and Mrs. Clancy would have been the same if Mrs. Minto had not stared through her as through a pane of glass. But when that was done, and the funeral was over, they had nothing. Together they sat in their bare room ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... ache at the utter grayness of his life. A wall had sprung up suddenly around him hedging him in, a wall as definite and tangible as the white wall of his bare room. And with his perception of this wall all that had been the romance of his existence, the casualness, the light-hearted improvidence, the miraculous open-handedness of life faded out. The Jelly-bean strolling up Jackson Street humming a lazy song, known at every shop and street stand, cropful of easy greeting and local wit, sad sometimes for only the sake of sadness and the flight of time—that Jelly-bean was ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... rank he is entitled to deference and submission; and the workman conceives that, in virtue of his comparative poverty, he is entitled to assistance in difficulty, and to protection from the consequences of his own folly and improvidence. Each party expects from the other something more than is expressed or implied in the covenant between them. The workman, asserting his equality and independence, claims from his employer services which only inferiority can legitimately demand; the master, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... career we must feel that no amount of wealth would have availed against his improvidence and his extravagance in the small way in which fate permitted him to be extravagant. Nor could a life of bachelorhood or a life with some woman married for money conceivably have made him produce greater compositions—for no greater compositions than those he produced ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... was intrinsically savage. At the end of the day's work, primitive man followed primitive instinct. Gorged to repletion, they slept, or wasted their substance with the improvidence of jungle-beasts. And these were the men Chloe Elliston had pictured labouring joyously in the upbuilding of homes! Once more the feeling of hopelessness came over her—seemed smothering, stifling her. And a great wave of longing carried ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... favour with which Cimon and others had sought to corrupt the populace. Nor was Pericles without the means or the spirit to devote his private fortune to proper objects of generosity. "It was his wealth and his prudence," says Plutarch, when, blaming the improvidence of Anaxagoras, "that enabled him to relieve the distressed." What he spent in charity he might perhaps have spent more profitably in display, had he not conceived that charity was the province of the citizen, magnificence the privilege of the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with utter improvidence, although deprived of sufficient food. Three or four couples there have some four or five ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... clothing. Of fuel to feed the big stove they had always enough without cost, for their mother's father was alive, and sold wood and fir cones and coke, and never grudged them to his grandchildren, though he grumbled at Strehla's improvidence and hapless, dreamy ways. ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... with game, and it was killed from mere wantonness, such was their improvidence, that they were obliged to resort to their salt pork and other provisions; and as, in thirty days, forty large casks of whisky were consumed, it is easy to suppose, which was indeed the fact, that every night that they halted, the camp was ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... condemn the other man, who, rather than sacrifice his immediate gratification, will incur the risk of forfeiting his self-respect and independence in after years as well as of making others suffer for his improvidence. A man who, by the exercise of similar economy and forethought, makes provision for his family or relations we esteem still more than the man who simply makes provision for himself, because the sacrifice ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... This propensity is as subservient to the advancement of private interests in the one as in the other, and those who direct them both, being principally guided by the same views and influenced by the same motives, will be equally ready to stimulate extravagance of enterprise by improvidence of credit. How strikingly is this conclusion sustained by experience! The Bank of the United States, with the vast powers conferred on it by Congress, did not or could not prevent former and similar embarrassments, nor has the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... encouragement of the government; that it has since been paralysed by a concatenation of unwise and unjust disabilities imposed by the same power; and that consequently their present wretched and degraded situation is not so much to be ascribed to their former improvidence as to the actual impolicy and injustice of their rulers. If we furthermore consider the short period in which this great change in their circumstances has been effected, we shall feel convinced that so sudden a transition from affluence to poverty ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... in miniature flourished for a time, and drained the streets of the large towns of Canada of the miserable objects; but, such was the improvidence of most of these settlers and such their broken constitutions, that, on my present visit, I found but one old serjeant left, and he was ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle |
