"Purposeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perhaps the relation of one form to another in the mazes of bonnet-making; it is at these odd moments that we learn. Or a boy may be painting a Christmas card, and in another odd moment he may feel something of the beauty of colour, if, for example, he is copying holly-berries. No purposeless looking at them would have stirred appreciation. Whether the end is doing, or whether it is thinking, the two are inextricably connected; in the earlier stages the way to know and feel is very often by action, and here is the basis ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... and Wilkins passed on, thoughtfully, towards Royal-street. In the excitement of the recent adventure, he had almost forgotten what had called him forth at that time of night, and now walked on, like one who wanders forth purposeless, into darkness and solitude. But suddenly, in passing a brilliantly lighted cafe, the thought of Arthur crossed his mind; and, for the first time, the idea flashed upon him, that he might have been one of those concerned in ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... that blind following of scientific precept is less blameworthy than its blind and purposeless rejection. The former produces at least an imitation of material objects which ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... natural chemistry, and those constitutions may produce chemic wonders,—in others a natural fluid, call it electricity, and these may produce electric wonders. But the wonders differ from Normal Science in this,—they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous. They lead on to no grand results; and therefore the world does not heed, and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I saw or heard, a man, human as ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Cleveland beyond sound of his voice or reach of his hand. He realized with an overwhelming certainty how badly he needed her, how much he wanted her—not only in ways that were sweet to think of, but as a friendly beacon in the murky, purposeless vista of years that stretched before him. Yes, and before her also. They had not spent all those hours together without talking of themselves. No matter that she was cheerful, that youth gave her courage and a ready smile, there was still a finality about ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... discomposure of the other, threw himself into a chair and looked at him with wonder and envy. The flute went "toot, toot, toot," till he could stand it no longer. So he got up and went to the window, and, leaning out, looked up and down the street for some minutes in a purposeless sort of fashion, staring hard at everybody and everything, but unconscious all the time that he was doing so. He would not have been able in fact, to answer Diogenes a word, had not that worthy inquired ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... call it—to angle for, and such a girl as she was could easily look higher; but still he might swell the list of those followers she seemed to like to behold at her feet offering up every homage to her beauty, even to their actual despair. And he thought of his own condition—very hopeless and purposeless ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... not thinking about Charlotta this morning, and she felt so strong a distaste for her lonely, purposeless life that she was in no haste to go forth to meet another ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... enthroned corporate combinations made equality before the law a mockery, before the development of our vast material resources restored to the intelligent and energetic few their power over the careless and purposeless many. ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... nature as are the general laws relating to specific differentiation; and in each illustration alike we find the result of the operation of known physical causes to be that of selection. If it should be argued in reply that the selection in the one case is obviously purposeless, while in the other it is as obviously purposive, I answer that this is pure assumption. It is perhaps not too much to say that every geological formation on the face of the globe is either wholly or in part due to the selective influence of specific gravity, ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... might be called the shadow of a religion—a God that has a good purpose, and another life in which there is a chance for further growth, if not for glory. But when I bump up against a series of afflictions such as you have been subjected to, I fall back upon Fred's philosophy of a purposeless or else a cruel God. ... I simply have a sinking of the heart, a goneness, a hopelessness—not even the pleasure of a resignation. Old Sid's cold mind has worked itself through to a decision that there is no purpose and no future, and finds ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... of taking care of me, which you repudiated with scorn—in fact refused to entertain it seriously at all. Of course there may have been other grounds, but the one you laid stress on was that I was lazy and purposeless, and that if you ever did take up such a vocation it would be to take care of some one you could respect. I don't say for an instant that I approach to that altitude, but at least I may say I am no longer an idler, that I have worked hard, and that I have every hope of success. ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... Something had decreed otherwise, and a subtle spirit under whose power they were but purposeless puppets inspired them to commit an act of folly which was to hurl them from the fools' paradise wherein they were reveling down to the pit ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... prospect of joy was vanished in a drear mist of broken hopes. Here was John Cather departed in sore agony, for which was no cure that ever I heard of or could conceive. Here was John Cather gone with the wreck of a soul. A cynical, purposeless, brooding life he must live to his last day: there was no healing in all the world for his despair. Here with us—to whom, in the years of our intercourse, he gave nothing but gladness—his ruin had been wrought. 'Twas not by wish of us; but there ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... Sevier, Robertson set off alone through the woods and followed the great war trace down to the Cherokee towns. His mission was one of the greatest peril, for there was imminent danger that the justly angered savages would take his life. But he was a man who never rushed heedlessly into purposeless peril, and never flinched from a danger which there was an object in encountering. His quiet, resolute fearlessness doubtless impressed the savages to whom he went, and helped to save his life; moreover, the Cherokees knew ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... up this incessant din? If a love-song, surely the most optimistic cicada must realise that his amorous strains can never reach the ears of his lady-love, since hundreds of his brethren are all keeping up the same perpetual purposeless chirping, which must obviously drown any individual effort. Have the cicadas a double dose of gaiete francaise in their composition, and is this their manner of expressing it? Are they, like some young men we know, always yearning to turn night into day? ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... might have recognised him, and so he disguised himself. I saw the disguise assumed; I saw you come into the room amongst the flowers. And long before you had finished what you had to say I began to see the motive for what looked like a purposeless and cruel crime. But you were certainly talking ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... this purposeless lullaby is satirised in the orthodox libretto of Punch's Opera or the Dominion of Fancy, for Punch, having sung it, throws the child out of ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... minutes lying upon his face, craning out over the gangway, and his long withered arms submerged in the water. The others occupied themselves in guessing what he was about; but their guesses had been to no purpose. Equally purposeless had appeared the actions of the Indian; for, after keeping his arm under water for a period of several minutes, he drew it in with a dissatisfied air, and once more arose to his feet. It was just then that he perceived the tree-tops, ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... momentous decision. The question was simply whether he could pick up his life again, could find faith that anything was worth living for; or whether life was to be a hollow going through the forms—frustrated, purposeless, full of brooding regret and jealousy, shame, and sense of wrong. But he could not drag his bruised mind up to the question; he could not even think what it was. He lifted himself up, stepped down into the dry channel, and knelt on ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... worthy or unworthy isn't the point in question—worked for it hard, schemed, devised, and succeeded. As Mrs. Breckenridge Sewall I could again accomplish results. Many women marry simply because they cannot endure an arid and purposeless future. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... many people believe that the mind will become less effective, that life will become dull and purposeless, unless they are constantly thinking and planning and arranging their affairs. I believe that the mind may easily and wisely be free from conscious thought a good deal of the time, and that the greatest progress and development in mind often comes when the thinker ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... felt a moment before. He turned eagerly about with the intention of calling some one—the first person he met—to account. But the house that he had just quitted was gone. The wall! Ah, there it was, no longer purposeless, intrusive, and ivy-clad, but part of the buttress of another massive wall that rose into battlements above him. Mr. Clinch turned again hopelessly toward Sammtstadt. There was the fringe of poplars on the Rhine, there were the outlying fields lit by the same meridian sun; but the characteristic ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Cataract to the Equatorial Lakes was overrun by his fanatic hordes, who carried "fire, the sword, and desolation" far and wide over that unhappy land. It is not to the British administrators in Egypt that the blame of all this failure, and of the purposeless bloodshed of the two expeditions from Suakin, is to be laid, nor can it be said that after the fall of Khartoum any other course could have been adopted than to retire for a time; but it is to the British administrators ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... it impossible that he should be so much puzzled. He saw at once that the marked change was in the eyes. In their depths (he had before remarked them, that day, as indicating a nature a little weak, purposeless and not prone to self-examination)—in their depths, clear enough now, there lay a dark, sombre, but not unpleasing shadow, such as only shows itself in eyes that have been turned inward. We usually say of a man whose eyes show the same expression: "That man has studied much," ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... two guns slung about him—one before and one behind—besides the great cutlass at his waist, and a pistol in each pocket of his square-tailed coat. To complete his strange appearance, Captain Flint sat perched upon his shoulder and gabbling odds and ends of purposeless sea-talk. I had a line about my waist, and followed obediently after the sea-cook, who held the loose end of the rope, now in his free hand, now between his powerful teeth. For all the world, I was led like ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... give time and attention to the innumerable unknown who "collect" autographs as they would collect postage stamps, with no interest in the matter beyond the desire to accumulate as many as possible. The average autograph hunter, with his purposeless insistence, reminds one of the queen in Stockton's story whose fad was "the buttonholes of ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... is entirely purposeless and unwilled, merely the instinctive movement of every part of the body. Gradually, however, through the contact with different objects brought about by his restlessness, the baby learns to reach out for what he wants, and purpose in the activity begins to appear. Later, play affords ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... put it into my head to be an unspeakable idiot. By apparently careless and purposeless questioning I learned from my gossipy landlady that the young woman's bedroom adjoined my own, a party-wall between. Yielding to a sudden and coarse impulse I gently rapped on the wall. There was no response, ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... as a foundling, proud as Cheops. But, like the battered brains surmounting the Giant of Gath, its haughty summit is crowned by a desolate castle, in and out of whose arches the aerial mists eddy like purposeless phantoms, thronging the soul of some ruinous genius, who, even in overthrow, harbors none but ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... slavery and the rule of a master, develop an idea of goodness very different from that of princes. From our slave ancestry, says Lester Ward, we learnt to work, and certainly it is from slavery we derive the conception that industry, even though it be purposeless industry, is a virtue in itself. The good slave, too, has a morality of restraints; he abstains from the food he handles and hungers for, and he denies himself pride and initiative of every sort. He is honest in not taking, but he is unscrupulous about adequate service. He ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... his mind from dwelling on her. He tried to fix his thoughts upon his life as a boyish adventurer, but could not keep to those earlier periods of his career. All of his days before meeting her seemed base or trivial or purposeless. She filled his memory to the exclusion of all other loves and desires. She was at once his wife and his child. He possessed a thousand bright pictures of her swift and graceful body, her sunny smile, her sweet, grave eyes. He recalled the first time he ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... struggle represented no great principles, begot no far-reaching consequences. It was not inspired by the "holy glee" with which in Wordsworth's sonnet Liberty fights against a tyrant, but by the faltering boldness, the drifting, purposeless unresolve of statesmen who did not desire it, and by the irrational violence of a Press which did not understand it. It was not a necessary war; its avowed object would have been attained within a few weeks or months by bloodless European concert. It was not a glorious ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... or so it seemed, there had been a moment when a royal hand had clasped his, and a royal voice—the royalty all lost in the friend—had said, "Perhaps you are right. It is best to begin again. But do not imagine your life is over and its aims purposeless. Out there you will find renewing. Some day come back and ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... accounts latterly with great regularity, and was lavish as ever, but took note of all expenditures, however irregular. He was one of those men whom the possession of money seems to have energized; his life, so purposeless long before, grew by good fortune to a strict computation with the world. Yet what availed so sudden reformation, and of what use was the gaining of wealth, to throw one's life so soon away, and leap ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... nothing but quiet. She wanted to face this dreadful revelation all alone, and yet there came no high resolve that hereafter everything should be different. She lay there disconsolate, discouraged—a mere heap, it seemed to herself, weak, purposeless, a soul who had made a failure of life, with no power to alter it. If she might but slip out of the world entirely; it was all turned to ashes. How small and mean her ambitions all seemed now. She had given years of drudgery and this was the ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... have read as much in my face. But he kept up the strange and, to me, purposeless comedy when ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... When, years ago, she and Clarke had parted, the man had seemed, for once, greatly disturbed and had promised, in his agitation, that some day he would communicate to her what would exonerate him in her eyes. She had answered that all words between them were purposeless, and that she hoped never to see his face again. The experience that the years had brought to her, instead of elucidating the mystery of Reginald's personality, had, on the contrary, made his behaviour appear more and ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... day or two before Elfrida's disappearance, and saw her only once in the meantime. That was on the evening—which struck him later as one of purposeless duplicity—before the Peach-Blossom Company had left for the provinces, when he and Elfrida both dined at the Cardiffs'. With him that night she had the air of a chidden child; she was silent and embarrassed, and now and then he caught a glance which told him ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... truth. Even to be efficiently selfish one has to recognise this truth, and has to curb his immediate impulses—in other words, has to be moral. For our moral faculty is the faculty by which we know that life is not made up of fragments, purposeless and discontinuous. This moral sense of man not only gives him the power to see that the self has a continuity in time, but it also enables him to see that he is not true when he is only restricted to his own self. He is more in truth than he is in fact. He truly belongs to ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... verdict upon Goldsmith's greatest poem, one thing is as significant as it is certain. These poetic yearnings were long in his heart ere he gave them utterance. A wayward, careless lad, heedless of all responsibility, he seems purposeless and perplexing to the last degree, yet the profoundest meditations of his life moved his soul. The very spell of poetry was upon him. This Divine revealing may have accounted for that outward want of earnestness of the character, and the career that troubled others if it did ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... many who knew him much, but not truly, feel that he was purposeless and restless. They knew his talent, his opportunities. Why does he not concentrate? Why does he not bring himself to bear? He did not plead his ill-health; nor would they have allowed the plea. The difficulty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... to that object. Its opposite, therefore, consists in the apparent want of aim, and freedom from all restraint in the exercise of the mental powers; and it is therefore the more perfect, the more unreservedly it goes to work, and the more lively the appearance there is of purposeless fun and unrestrained caprice. Wit and raillery may be employed in a sportive manner, but they are also both of them compatible with the severest earnestness, as is proved by the example of the later Roman satires ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... musketry from the rebels' rifle-pits at the summit. General Grant attributed the small number of casualties our troops sustained in the attack to the rebels' surprise at its audacity, causing "confusion and purposeless ...
— A Treatise on the Tactical Use of the Three Arms: Infantry, Artillery, and Cavalry • Francis J. Lippitt
... laid on the floor and no one can give them any further care. What could one do when all means are lacking? Under those circumstances, it is almost useless to bring them in. Among the passersby, there are many who are uninjured. In a purposeless, insensate manner, distraught by the magnitude of the disaster most of them rush by and none conceives the thought of organizing help on his own initiative. They are concerned only with the welfare of their own families. ...
— The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United States
... quarter, and the next time its ponderous silver hammers woke the house it would be two. Half-past one? Why, then, did not the hands move? Why cling fixed on a point five minutes before the first quarter struck? To and fro, soundless and purposeless, swung the long pendulum. And, ah! what was this thing I had become? I had done with time. Not for me the hands moved on their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... dropped apathetically upon the couch after Phoebe had helped her pull off her coat. She did not feel as though anything mattered much, but she must go on with life, no matter how purposeless it seemed. To live awhile and work and struggle and know the pain of disappointment and weariness, and then to die: she did not see what use there was in struggling. But one had to go on just the same. She had borrowed money for mommie's sickness, and she would have ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... to be a pretty regular thing, that Mr. Copley spent the evening abroad, excused himself from going anywhere with his family, and when they did see him wore an uncertain, purposeless, vagrant sort of look and air. By degrees this began to ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... more used to the vagaries of their instrumental playing, she was amused at the way in which they combined business with diversion. Mr Baffy, also, interested her; he still continued to stare before him, as he played with watery, purposeless eyes, ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... outside the door were huge flying cockroaches that clung in his hair or buffeted him in the face as they blundered along on purposeless flights. Still other insects, unseen but none the less busy, added to the burden of his jeremiad. Borers riddled the pages of his books; and the white ant, as greedy for wood pulp as a paper baron, was constantly sapping and mining the underpinnings ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... himself to purposeless copying, without thought, each blade of grass, as commended by the inconsequent, but, in the long curve of the narrow leaf, corrected by the straight tall stem, he learns how grace is wedded to dignity, how strength enhances sweetness, that elegance ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... discern every half-formed ripple, and even the purple of the rocks beneath. Five hundred feet below and a quarter of a mile out, were three boats. They also, like the birds, seemed pitifully tiny. But, unlike the birds, they did not seem purposeless. It was evident they were moving, though one could not see rowers, oars, or splashes, for they progressed in short jumps and above the dulled rattle of a billow breaking on the pebbles, the faint click-thud of oars between thole-pins was plainly audible. ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... planetary conditions which threaten it with death by thirst. How long intelligence has existed upon Mars, if intelligence there be, no one can say; nor yet what its future will be. It would seem probable that our own fate must be similar, but it is far removed. And though the Whole may seem wanton, purposeless, stupid, we are very little folk; we see very dimly; we see only what we have the capacity to see; and there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of the wisest of us. So also there are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered. We are the ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Jews were obstinate. With the timid obstinacy peculiar to their race, they stuck to their point and refused to be enticed into purposeless extravagance. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... said John. "It's a tale of the wanton, ruthless, needless, purposeless sacrifice of two lives. It's his old black icy Puritan blood. Winthorpe—that's his name—had for years been a freethinker, far too intellectual and enlightened, and that sort of thing, you know, to believe any such old wives' tale as the Christian Religion. He and I used to have arguments, tremendous ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... exactly corresponding with its own excellence as human imperfection is in modes corresponding with its deficiencies, and the movements of the Divine Mind cannot but correspond with the affections of the Divine Mind. Those movements are not unmeaning, purposeless, wayward. They, too, have their appropriate springs, and proceed by regular process from legitimate causes, the chief of those causes being the infinite perfection of the Divine Nature. Divine Power cannot then, any more than human, be directed by its owner's ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... his nobles, and in 1772, supported by popular feeling, imposed a new constitution on the country greatly diminishing their power; Gustavus was an enlightened ruler, but somewhat alienated his people from him by his extravagance and fondness for French modes of life; in 1788 he became embroiled in a purposeless war with Russia; he was assassinated when about to take up arms in behalf of the Bourbon cause against the French ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... knew he had made it up as he went along; that no tons of rust are scraped off the Menai Bridge, and that the rival tradesmen and Mr. Whiteley were creatures of the poet's brain. Instantly I conceived consuming respect for the man who was so circumstantial, so monotonous, so entirely purposeless a liar. With him it must have been a case of art for art's sake. The joke sustained so gravely through a respected lifetime was of that order of joke which is shared with omniscience. But what struck me more cogently upon reflection ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... hills the train made its way cautiously, making long and apparently purposeless stops between stations, as if haunted by the fear of arriving too early. At such times Peter had leisure to carefully study the monotonous landscape, and he could not help but notice that the disparity in the size of the barn and that of the house in ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... between the captain and the manslayer who comes naked out of the seas as if from nowhere one tropical night, and is huddled away with his secrets in the captain's cabin. It is for the most part a comedy of the abnormal—an ironic fable of splendid purposeless fears and risks. Towards the end, however, we lose our concern with nerves and relationships and such things, and our hearts pause as the moment approaches when the captain ventures his ship in order to save the interloper's life. ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... with a little laugh. "At least, I shall not be sorry to return to Silverdale. It has a charm of its own, for while one is occasionally glad to get away from it, one is even more pleased to come home again. It is a somewhat purposeless life our friends are leading yonder in the cities. I, of ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... them as much as you like, but let me tell you that the life of a clergyman's wife—honoured, respected, and useful—is a more profitable one than the idle existence which you lead, utterly purposeless and lazy. You never do one single thing ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... the more he talked the more I thought it. There he was, purposeless in life and purposeless out of it. He talked of his father and mother and his schoolmaster, and all who had ever been anything to him in the world, meanly. He had been too sensitive, too nervous; none of them had ever valued him properly or understood him, ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... months. I have had my eye upon you, more closely than you suppose; and I am pleased to see that you have worked well and willingly—far more so than I expected from you. This has much encouraged me in the hope that you will, in time, settle down to business here; and not be contented to lead a purposeless and idle life. The happiest man, in my opinion, is he who has something to do—and yet, not too much; who can, by being free from anxieties regarding it, view his business as an occupation, and a pleasure; and who is its ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... chair, her face completely hidden within her arms. Winston, his hand already grasping the latch of the door, paused and glanced around at her, a sudden revulsion of feeling leaving him unnerved and purposeless. He had been possessed by but one thought, a savage determination to seek out Farnham and kill him. The brute was no more than a mad dog who had bitten one he loved; he was unworthy of mercy. But now, in a revealing burst of light, he realized the utter futility of such an act. Coward, ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... Prussia found themselves face to face with a will and a power stronger than their own; they lost in independence, but they gained far more than they lost. They were the basis on which the State was built up; they no longer wasted their military prowess in purposeless feuds or in mercenary service; in the Prussian army and administration they found full scope for their ambition, and when the victories of Frederick the Great had raised Prussia to the rank of a European Power, the nobles of Brandenburg were the most loyal of his subjects. They formed ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... art Olaf the Brave, as men do call thee," said the vision, "turn thyself to nobler deeds than vikings' ravaging and this wandering cruise. Turn back, turn back from thy purposeless journey to the land of Jerusalem, where neither honor nor fame awaits thee. Son of King Harald, return thee to thy heritage; for thou shalt ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... hottest days of summer and the coldest days of winter (that is, if there is sunlight and no ice on the water), it may be seen on the surface of ponds and streams, gyrating hither and thither in a seemingly mad and purposeless manner. ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... But besides this she filled page after page with "impressions," "outpourings," queer little speculations about her soul, quotations from poets, solemn criticisms of new novels, or as often as not mere purposeless meanderings of words, exclamatory, rhapsodic—involved lucubrations quite meaningless and futile, but which at times she re-read with vague ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... must have been of inestimable value. Every statue and ornamentation about the grounds was wilfully smashed to atoms; the flower-pots which lined the edges of the once beautiful floral walks had been deliberately crushed—in fact a more complete specimen of purposeless, wanton destruction it would be ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... powers and develop his latent forces. And what health there is in it all! How hearty and natural he is in comparison with the city boy, who is tempted to turn night into day, to live an artificial, purposeless life. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... mere personal benefit, while the task which she had set herself was for a better purpose. But, although she did not study as had been her wont, while she sewed she occupied her mind in a way that was much more beneficial to it than the purposeless acquisition of facts, the solving of mathematical problems, or conning of parts of speech. Beside her was always an open book, it might be a passage of Scripture, a scene from Shakespeare, a poem or paragraph ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... depends altogether on the thing, i.e. Brahman itself.—But, it might be said, as Brahman is an existing substance, it will be the object of the other means of right knowledge also, and from this it follows that a discussion of the Vedanta-texts is purposeless.—This we deny; for as Brahman is not an object of the senses, it has no connection with those other means of knowledge. For the senses have, according to their nature, only external things for their objects, not Brahman. If Brahman were an object of the senses, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... latent till now, involved in soul...for now each of millions was free to think, free to manifest his own particular luck and knack in discovery, having a country, foothold, not hovering like Noah's dove, urging still the purposeless wing not to pitch into nowhere: for the promise says: "Ye shall not sow and another reap, ye shall not plant and another garner", but in a land of gentlemen ye shall live, as it were to swellings of music, while a noble height grows upon your smooth foreheads, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... battle, the early portion of the proceedings was unmarked by excitement, being tinged with the purposeless lack of vitality that had of late marked all affairs of the Sefborough Ministry; and it was not until the adjournment of the House for the Easter recess had at last been moved that the spirit of activity hovering in the air descended and galvanized the assembly into life. ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... deep enough; and all those who have to tend and care for the sick, to lighten the burden and the sorrow for them, that has a meaning surely for all concerned? The reason why we feel as we do about broken lives, why they seem so utterly purposeless, is because we have the proportion so wrong. We do not really, in fact, believe in immortality, when we are bound in the body—some few of us do, and many of us say that we do. But we do not realise that the little life is but one in a great chain of lives, that each spirit ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... favorable thought, the King Made royal and gentle answer, with like grace By Nala met. To whom spake Rituparna:— "Joy go with thee and her, happily joined. But say, Nishadha, wrought I any jot Wrongful to thee, whilst sojourning unknown Within my walls? If any word or deed, Purposed or purposeless, hath vexed thee, friend, For one and all thy pardon grant to me!" And Nala answered: "Never act or word, The smallest, Raja, lingers to excuse! If this were otherwise, thy slave was I, And might not question, but must pardon thee. Yet good to me thou wert, princely and just, And ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... 'About this time, Madhavi, in course of her purposeless wanderings, came there. Beholding her, those monarchs saluted her and said, "What object hast thou in coming here? What command of thine shall we obey? Thou deservest to command us, for all of us are thy sons, O thou that art endued with wealth of asceticism!" Hearing these words of theirs, Madhavi ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Wynne's appearance three men whose watchful eyes had been fastened on the doorway of the H. Latham Company for something more than an hour stirred. One of them—Frank Claflin—was directly across the street, strolling along idly, the most purposeless of all in the hurrying, well-dressed throng; another—Steve Birnes, chief of the Birnes Detective Agency—appeared from the hallway of a building adjoining the H. Latham Company, and moved along behind Mr. Wynne, some thirty feet in the rear; the third—Jerry Malone—was half a block ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... be added that while the boy's action is not consciously intelligent, it is by no means purposeless, and is therefore not quite parallel with the insect's. By vigorously irritating the sensory nerves of the hand the boy imparts a stimulus to his muscular system. His act belongs to a large group which has been especially studied by Fere. See his Sensation et Mouvement ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... however, he plainly saw had lamentably shaken the long-since failing man. On the afternoon of the fourth day, Mr. Lisle walked, or rather tottered, into Caleb's stall, and seated himself on the only vacant stool it contained. His manner was confused, and frequently purposeless, and there was an anxious, flurried expression in his face, which Jennings did not at all like. He remained silent for some time, with the exception of partially inaudible snatches of comment or questionings, apparently addressed to himself. At last he said, "I shall take a longer journey to-morrow, ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... She obeyed the unwritten laws of society, and busied herself little in her neighbours' affairs. She was kind to her servants, and did not hate her neighbours more than is necessary in a crowded world. She led a blameless, unoccupied, and apparently purposeless life. And now she quietly told Tony Cornish that her life was not purposeless, but had for its aim the desire of an eye for an eye and ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... that purposeless wandering was better for you than healthy labor. Well, you have travelled, and you have read books. ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... chilblained, but all the world was waiting for him to be a man to do him honor. If he could sit for an hour with the old man on the beach, would it bring the boyish feeling back again? He was conscious of a purposeless temptation—unreasonable as that which he had felt at the edge of a precipice to throw himself over. Nonsense! The committee would be waiting; there were appointments for every hour of his stay in Philadelphia; there was the leading article on the situation ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... with good will on the viands prepared (Pork chops were the principal portion), Then retiring to bed, with their dreams they were scared, And spent half the night in contortion; Then rose in their sleep and came down to this room, And, instead of a purposeless pawing, They painted these pictures, then fled in the gloom, And Furniss has ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... grandeur, his avoidance of plain concrete terms, his manner of linking adjective with substantive, were all necessary to him for the describing of his strange world; but these habits became a mere vicious trick of absurd periphrasis and purposeless vagueness when they were carried by his imitators into the description of common and familiar objects. A reader making his first acquaintance with Thomson's Seasons might suppose that the poem was written for a wager, to prove that country life may be described, and nothing called by its name. ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... shall now thy cold life be? What boots it to be emperor over all? His absence o'er thy visible empery Throws a dim pall. Now are thy nights widowed of love and kisses, Now are thy days robbed of the night's awaiting, Now are thy lips purposeless and thy blisses No longer of the size of thy life, mating Thy empire with thy ...
— Antinous: A Poem • Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa
... says; "it was a nightmare, like being seized by a madman after coming out of a serious illness and forced towards the edge of a precipice." The constant marching, the want of sleep, the restless and (as it sometimes seemed to the men) purposeless backward movement night and day drove them into a fury. The intensity of the warfare, the fierce pressure upon the mental and physical powers of endurance, might well have exercised a mischievous effect ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... habit to make purposeless visits," continued he, "especially among frivolous, idle people like you. I've been coming here to make a study ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... pursuit after us in all directions. Once I remember—we must have been nearly three weeks wearily walking through unfrequented ways, day after day, not daring to make inquiry as to our whereabouts, nor yet to seem purposeless in our wanderings—we came to a kind of lonely roadside farrier's and blacksmith's. I was so tired, that Amante declared that, come what might, we would stay there all night; and accordingly she entered the house, and boldly announced herself as a travelling tailor, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... your traveler poet teaches is devilish laziness, and devilish laziness always tends to something worse. You may live such a life, and quote such poetry, but you don't believe that a man should flow on like a purposeless river. The lines you quoted bear the mark of a restless desire to apologize to conscience for a fearful waste of power and possibility. No," he said, rising, "I don't want that check. This one will do; but you won't forget that ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... something but unable to define that thing. There was a vague admission that this last pause before his entry into Jerusalem where he must accomplish so much was an opportunity for some sort of preparation, but he lacked direction and resource. He was irritable and purposeless. ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... country in a state of chronic peaceful war through purposeless mobilization, the present government has brought Greece to the verge of economic, material and moral bankruptcy. This policy, unhappily, is not a dream, but downright folly." He further laid great stress on the Bulgarian peril, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... the extreme sterility of all its illegitimate unions allows of any comparison. We are led, therefore, to conclude that the rule of increased sterility in accordance with increased inequality in length between the pistils and stamens, is a purposeless result, incidental on those changes through which the species has passed in acquiring certain characters fitted to ensure the legitimate fertilisation of the ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... can ever hope to become a really great or celebrated novel-reader who does not begin his apprenticeship under the age of fourteen, and, as I said before, stick to it as long as he lives. He must learn to scorn those frivolous, vacillating and purposeless ones who, after beginning properly, turn aside and whiling away their time on mere history, or science, or philosophy. In a sense these departments of literature are useful enough. They enable you often to perceive the most cunning and profoundly interesting touches ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... keep up—keep up!" urged the officers. "We have a new chief of staff and there will be no more purposeless sacrifices. It's their turn at the charge; ours to hold. We'll give them some of the medicine they've been giving us. God with us! Our ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... Gerald; you ought to know him—well—some day; he's just a clean-cut, human, blundering, erring, unreasonable,lovable man whom any woman, who is not a fool herself, could manage. . . . Some day I should like to have you know him—intimately. He's good for people of your sort—even good for a restless, purposeless woman of my sort. Peace to him!—if there's any in the world. . . . Turn your ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... table, as it were viciously, but her delightful innocent smile, directed vaguely upon Mrs Hamps, did not relax. Such duplicity passed Edwin's comprehension; it seemed to him purposeless. Yet he could not quite deny that there might be a certain sting, a certain insinuation, in ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... second stage there is complete loss of consciousness; and though the reflexes persist, the movements in response to the stimuli are purposeless. The muscles generally ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... when the idle warrior occupied his leisure in meaningless ornamentation of his garment or tipi, or spent hours of leisure in esthetic modification of his weapon or ceremonial badge, and to this purposeless activity, which engendered design with its own progress, the incipient graphic art of the tribes was largely due. The more important and characteristic sports were organized and interwoven with social organization ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... gets its significance from the context in which it belongs. But in art, where expression is freed from the particular setting within which it arises, thus attaining universality, the repetitious and imitative, having no environment from which they may derive new meaning, are purposeless. They are, indeed, worse than negligible, because having grown into the habit of expecting originality, we are disappointed and bored when we fail to find it. Originality is, of course, relative; it is not incompatible with the reminiscence of old works—what works of art are not reminiscent?—but ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... largely purposeless provender, he will pay thousands of simians to be reporters of such events day and night; and they will report them on such a voluminous scale as to smother or obscure more significant news altogether. Great ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... purposeless good-hearted master of the boy, Eugene himself, is as evidently in this: "If they were great things, I, the untrustworthy man in little things, would do them earnestly—But O No, I wouldn't!" What follows has a more direct reference; being ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... punishment in question consists essentially in the "penalty of loss"—the loss of goodness and of GOD, the loss of capacity for the life which is life indeed—rather than in any imagined "penalty of sense," or purposeless prolongation of pain. The imagery which our Lord employed to describe the spiritual condition known as "hell" is taken from the Valley of Hinnom, a ravine just outside the walls of Jerusalem, in which fires ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... successive changes through which each embryo is forced to pass, the late Mr. G. H. Lewes says that "none of these phases have any adaptation to the future state of the animal, but are in positive contradiction to it or are simply purposeless; whereas all show stamped on them the unmistakable characters of ancestral adaptation, and the progressions of organic evolution. What does the fact imply? There is not a single known example of a complex organism which is not ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... the Star of Truth to which the face is set, and while that shines all lesser lights may go. It was the long months of suffering through which I had been passing, with the seemingly purposeless torturing of my little one as a climax, that struck the first stunning blow at my belief in God as a merciful Father of men. I had been visiting the poor a good deal, and had marked the patient suffering of their lives; my idolised mother had been defrauded by a ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... of disorder. Here is the passion for gain, the very spirit of the bourgeoise gone drunk with desire. The result is something terrible. Chicago is leaderless, purposeless, slovenly, down at ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... It is assumed that recreation means amusement, idle and purposeless, if not skittles with beer and tobacco, then the music-hall with beer and tobacco, the comic man bawling a topical song and executing the famous clog-dance. If one points out that it is not amusement that is meant, but recreation, which is explained to mean a very different thing, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... after-proceedings went on very comfortably till about half-past nine o'clock, when Dutton's perturbation, increased perhaps by the considerable quantity of wine he had swallowed, not drunk, became, it was apparent to everybody, almost uncontrollable. He rose—purposeless it seemed—sat down again—drew out his watch almost every minute, and answered remarks addressed to him in the wildest manner. The decisive moment was, I saw, arrived, and at a gesture of mine, Elsworthy, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... energy. "Unless man can erect himself above himself," said Daniel, a poet of the Elizabethan era, "how poor a thing is man!" Without a certain degree of practical efficient force—compounded of will, which is the root, and wisdom, which is the stem of character—life will be indefinite and purposeless—like a body of stagnant water, instead of a running stream doing useful work and keeping the machinery of ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles |
