"Sapless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... men who wish to win reputation before they are toothless. Of course if your work is strong, and you can afford to wait, the probability is that half a dozen people will at last begin to shout that you have been monstrously neglected, as you have. But that happens when you are hoary and sapless, and when nothing ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... Greeks; the prudent and gradual advances of a conqueror, who, in a reign of thirty-three years, rescued the provinces from national and foreign usurpers, till he pressed on all sides the Imperial city, a leafless and sapless trunk, which must full at the first stroke of the axe. But his interior and peaceful administration is still more deserving of notice and praise. [3] The calamities of the times had wasted the numbers and the substance of the Greeks; the motives ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... are little sapless twigs, chatterboxes, who twitter like the swallows, destroyers of the art, whose aptitude is withered with a single piece and who sputter forth all their talent to the tragic Muse at their first attempt. But look where you will, you will not ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... Canada. Most of the minority to which he appeals would now regard as an ill-timed paradox the view that the very vigour of their opposition to Home Rule is a better omen for the success of Home Rule than that kind of sapless Nationalism, astonishingly rare in Ireland under the circumstances, which is inclined to yield to the insidious temptation of setting the "eleemosynary benefits"—to use Mr. Walter Long's phrase[3]—derived from the British ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... 158; cramp, reduce, sprain, strain, blunt the edge of; dilute, impoverish; decimate; extenuate; reduce in strength, reduce the strength of; mettre de l'eau dans son vin [Fr.]. Adj. weak, feeble, debile^; impotent &c 158; relaxed, unnerved, &c v.; sapless, strengthless^, powerless; weakly, unstrung, flaccid, adynamic^, asthenic^; nervous. soft, effeminate, feminate^, womanly. frail, fragile, shattery^; flimsy, unsubstantial, insubstantial, gimcrack, gingerbread; rickety, creaky, creaking, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... take her from him to-morrow, if you pleased. The greater your folly, because you do not. As for her, her foolishness is such that she would follow you to the ends of the earth—poor girl! she little knows what a pale, wretched, sapless thing you have in your breast ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... bare boughs rattled shudderingly; 80 The river was numb and could not speak, For the weaver Winter its shroud had spun; A single crow on the tree-top bleak From his shining feathers shed off the cold sun; Again it was morning, but shrunk and cold 85 As if her veins were sapless and old, And she rose up decrepitly For a last dim ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... Mortimer. These eyes, like lamps whose wasting oil is spent, Wax dim, as drawing to their exigent; Weak shoulders, overborne with burdening grief, And pithless arms, like to a wither'd vine That droops his sapless branches to the ground: Yet are these feet, whose strengthless stay is numb, Unable to support this lump of clay, Swift-winged with desire to get a grave, As witting I no other comfort have. But tell me, ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... the knowledge and the power of a scenery hunter may be often seen illustrated in the fields of art. How common is the old sapless connoisseur in pictures, who retains his learned eye and his distinguished skill, but whose sensibilities are as dry as summer dust to the interests of the art. On the other hand, daily you see young people whose hearts and souls are in the forests and the hills, but for whom the ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... contrary, the termination less added to substantives, makes adjectives signifying want; as, worthless, witless, heartless, joyless, careless, helpless. Thus comfort, comfortless; sap, sapless. ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... architecture, but much machinery. Here the pupils were building two Bleriot-type machines, and trying to build an eight-cylinder V motor. All these things had Bagby given for the good of the game, expecting no profit in return. He was one of the real martyrs of aviation, this sapless, oldish man, never knowing the joy of the air, yet devoting a lifetime of ability to helping man ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... the signs of the extinction of the sun, the moon, the stars; I see the breath of life exhaling from the elements; I see Nature abandoned and apart, reduced to barrenness, crouching in her decrepitude; I see Time sapless and trembling, for his end has come, and he is seated on an arid throne; and while I hear the trumpets of the angels with their thunder shake the hearts of all, I see both Life and Death convulsed with horrible confusion, the one striving to resuscitate the dead, the other ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... night would soon be upon him. There was only one thing that could protect him in the night, and that was fire. With a feverish energy, regardless now of the rustlings about his little island, he began to cut the tallest of the reeds that were hard and sapless, and these he banked in six heaps round the base of the mound; and when the task was done he reared a bigger pile in the centre as ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers So sweet the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic's level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean know Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear, And tremble and despoil ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... eager to sip, always seeks the juices of new growths, this is the fault of the sapless ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... small fibrous rootlets tightly woven about my whole person, so that I was like a colossal basket-worm in its case, or a big man-shaped bottle covered with wicker-work. It appeared as if the roots had grown round me! Luckily they were quite sapless and brittle, and without bothering my brains too much about the matter, I set to work to rid myself of them. After stripping the woody covering off, I found that my tourist suit of rough Scotch homespun ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... depends Their vigour, injured soon, not soon restored. The soil must be renewed, which often washed Loses its treasure of salubrious salts, And disappoints the roots; the slender roots, Close interwoven where they meet the vase, Must smooth be shorn away; the sapless branch Must fly before the knife; the withered leaf Must be detached, and where it strews the floor Swept with a woman's neatness, breeding else Contagion, and disseminating death. Discharge but these kind offices (and who Would spare, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... more deeply avenged in the moral influence of this tribunal, which, eating like a pestilent canker into the heart of the monarchy, at the very time when it was exhibiting a most goodly promise, left it at length a bare and sapless trunk. ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... strong flesh, and beget strong children—the power of doing all this would pass away with youth, which was terribly transitory. I bethought me that a time would come when my eyes would be bleared, and, perhaps, sightless; my arms and thighs strengthless and sapless; when my teeth would shake in my jaws, even supposing they did not drop out. No going a wooing then—no labouring—no eating strong flesh, and begetting lusty children then; and I bethought me how, when all this should be, I should bewail the days of my youth as misspent, provided ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... pushed off, by that tranquil movement from beneath, which is too slow to be seen, but too powerful to be arrested. One finds them always, but one rarely sees them fall. So it is our youth drops from us,— scales off, sapless and lifeless, and lays bare the tender and immature fresh growth of old age. Looked at collectively, the changes of old age appear as a series of personal insults and indignities, terminating at last in death, which Sir Thomas Browne has ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... unless he recollects that in France there are no enclosures—that the country lies spread out before him, in some parts and seasons, like a richly variegated carpet; in others, like an Arabian desert. The romantic, Eastern, Biblical olive!—what is it? 'The trunk, a weazened, sapless-looking piece of timber, the branches spreading out from it like the top of a mushroom; and the colour, when you can see it for dust, a cold, sombre, grayish green. One olive is as like another as one mop-stick ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various |
