"Sevens" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... head? Rot about Napoleon, rot about Alexander, rot about 'is blessed family and 'im and Gord and David and all that. Any one who wasn't a dressed-up silly fool of a Prince could 'ave told all this was goin' to 'appen. There was us in Europe all at sixes and sevens with our silly flags and our silly newspapers raggin' us up against each other and keepin' us apart, and there was China, solid as a cheese, with millions and millions of men only wantin' a bit of science and a bit of enterprise to be as good as all of us. You thought ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... sailed for Kingston in the Townshend packet. The day auspicious was, and calm the heavens; Not so the scene on board—oh, what a racket! And everything on deck apparently at sixes and sevens. Mail-bags and passengers mixed up in every direction, The latter engaged with their relatives in fond farewells; On the one hand the faltering accents of affection, On the other the unpolisht seamen emitting yells, With criticisms ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... to note that she found herself as women wish to be who love their lords. She had been married on the 27th of January, and as the Shereef had entered into his present residence but recently, they were still at sixes and sevens. It was his habit to spend the winter in the country and the summer in town. She had been but two years in Morocco, and had not ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... their faces and hands washed," went on her step-mother. "Oh, dear, if you were a different kind of girl how much easier would it be! I wish your father would come home and look after his own affairs, instead of my having to leave things at sixes and sevens and go running round the country hunting up his sick ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... the dice and began rolling sevens absently. "How come you're walking beat, anyhow? With what you pulled here, you should ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... dealer drew down until there were less than a dozen cards left, when the king came, which lost a fifty dollar bet on the seven. Officer laid his hand on the money, and, as was his privilege, said to the dealer, "Let me look over the remainder of those cards. If there's two sevens there, you have won. If there isn't, don't ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... rest of the animal kingdom. It is with the nature and constitution of man that most of the surviving early biological writings are concerned, and in these departments are unmistakable tendencies towards systematic arrangement of the material. Thus we have division and description of the body in sevens from the periphery to the centre and from the vertex to the sole of the foot,[9] or a division into four regions or zones.[10] The teaching concerning the four elements and four humours too became of great importance and some of it was later adopted by Aristotle. We also meet numerous mechanical ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Aug. 4th the infantry combats were localized with terrible fury. The outskirts of Fismes were solidly held by the Germans, where their advance groups were difficult to take. The Americans stormed them and reduced them with light mortars and thirty-sevens. They succeeded, though not without loss, and at the end of the day, thanks to this slow but sure tenacity, they were within one kilometre of Fismes and masters of Villes, Savoye and Chezelle Farm. All night long rains hindered their movements and rendered their following ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... father held that a man's life went by sevens, and that every man was a boy till he was twenty-one, a fool till he was twenty-eight, and a man, by God's ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... cattle and the crop. Larry promised well, as far as words went, and no doubt hoped to be able to perform; but he hadn't steadiness to go through with a thing. Thruth's best;—you see both himself and his wife neglected their business in the beginning, so that everything went at sixes and sevens. They then found themselves uncomfortable at their own hearth, and had no heart to labor: so that what would make a careful person work their fingers to the stumps to get out of poverty, only prevented them from working at all, or druv them to work for those that had more comfort, ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... torment; her last years would probably be dreadful, both for herself and for others. The prospects of the boarding-house were not radiant. Hilda could direct the enterprise, but not well. She could work, but she had not the art of making others work. Already the place was slightly at sixes and sevens. And she loathed it. She loathed the whole business of catering. Along the entire length of the King's Road, the smells of basement kitchens ascended to the pavement and offended the nose. And Hilda saw all Brighton as a colossal and disgusting ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... told me, Mrs. Stebbing,' he answered grimly, not at all inclined to support her at this moment of anger. 'I am sure I wish I had never listened to you. I never saw anything amiss in the girl's behaviour, and they are all at sixes and sevens without her at the mosaic work—-though she is only absent from her mother's illness ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bachelor's hall?" Susan asked in quick concern. "Excuse me, but I could not think of renting the house to a bachelor or bachelors. It is a rare man who is a house-keeper. Things would soon be at sixes and sevens with a set of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... who are respectively addicted to Fours and Fives, occupy the same set of rooms, which is always at Sixes and Sevens. Find the probable amount of reading done by A and B while ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... suggestions of modern science in interpreting them to us. If one could use a figure borrowed from electricity, the One is "stepped-down" through a series of planes and manifestations. Theosophy makes much of sevens—no use to ask why—and bridges the gulf between ultimate and present realities by a series of seven planes in which what is coarsest in the plane above becomes the germ of what is finest in the plane ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... everywhere, a little, low plant which produces its heads of white, pink-tipped flowers from a rosette of leaves. In the United States we often see daisies in cultivation but they are nowhere native. The child is at her seventh birthday and has learned her multiplication table, the "sevens". Nowadays in our schools the children do not have the drudgery of committing the long tables to memory as their grand-parents did. Our little friend thinks that as she has lived seven years that makes her "seven times ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... queen of his city too well, reproaches her with her treatment of her husband and her other lovers—Tammuz, to whom, from year to year, she caused bitter weeping; the bright coloured Allala bird, whom she smote and broke his wings; the lion perfect in strength, in whom she cut wounds "by sevens"; the horse glorious in war, to whom she caused hardship and distress, and to his mother Silili bitter weeping; the shepherd who provided for her things which she liked, whom she smote and changed ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... a little before coming to the table, no matter how heavy her work, and never but once was she guilty of sitting down to her dinner in her pasteboard sun-bonnet, giving as an excuse that her "hair was at sixes and sevens." She remembered seeing her mother do this fifty years before, and she had clung to the habit as one which must be right because they used to do so in Vermont. Gradually, too, there came to be napkins for tea, and James' Christmas present to his wife was a set of silver forks, while John contributed ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... popularity and was conscious of intellect. But at the present moment two or three sovereigns in his pocket were the extent of his worldly wealth and his character was utterly ruined. He regarded his fate as does a card-player who day after day holds sixes and sevens when other men have the aces and kings. Fate was against him. He saw no reason why he should not have had the aces and kings continually, especially as fate had given him perhaps more than his share of them at first. He had, however, lost ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... along, and learned to speak "The tenderest feelings in the purest Greek; "Ah! then how little did we think or hope, "Dearest of men, that I should e'er be Pope![1] "That I, the humble Joan, whose housewife art "Seemed just enough to keep thy house and heart, "(And those, alas! at sixes and at sevens,) "Should soon keep all the keys ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... overtaken with, and swallowed up of for ever. A man void of this fear of God, wherever he is wise, or in whatever he excels, yet about the matters of his soul, there is none more foolish than himself; for through the want of the fear of the Lord, he leaves the best things at sixes and sevens, and only pursueth with all his heart those that will leave him in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... withdrawn, and a pledge was to be given that no fortress should be placed in the hands of any power. But Spain at the last moment had refused to sanction the treaty, and everything was remitted to what might be exactly described as a state of sixes and sevens. Subsequently it was hoped that the States' troops might be induced to withdraw simultaneously with the Catholic forces on an undertaking by Spinola that there should be no re-occupation of the disputed territory either by the Republic or by Spain. But Barneveld accurately pointed out that, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... pity," said the other. "If, before everything was at sixes and sevens, he could have been persuaded to adopt our views, we could perhaps have had the pleasure of receiving ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... never happened before within the memory of man. The girls, like the rest of the congregation, had always been humble and respectful followers of the gallery; singing at sixes and sevens if without gallery leaders; never interfering with the ordinances of these practised artists—having no will, union, power, or proclivity except it was given them from the established choir ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... meet and clapper their friendly old tongues, can hardly believe that once upon a time they were all at sixes and sevens,—and that Ernest himself was once in that very place ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... with flowers—blue larkspur and white Canterbury bells. And at about three there was a noise of people walking in the road, and presently the Antiquities began to come in at the front gate, and stood about on the lawn by twos and threes and sixes and sevens, looking shy and uncomfy, exactly like a Sunday-school treat. Presently some gentlemen came, who looked like the teachers; they were not shy, and they came right up to the door. So Albert's uncle, who had not been too proud to be up in our room with us watching the people on the lawn through ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... said that he was putting West in this position. West had put himself there. It was he who had written the article, and it was he who had kept silent about it. Every man must accept the responsibility for his own acts, or the world would soon be at sixes and sevens. In telling Miss Weyland the truth about the matter, as far as that went, he would be putting himself in an unpleasant position. Nobody liked to see one man "telling on" another. He did not like it himself, as he remembered, ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... children of those who are too young are imperfect both in body and mind, so also those whose parents are too old are weak in both: while therefore the body continues in perfection, which (as some poets say, who reckon the different periods of life by sevens) is till fifty years, or four or five more, the children may be equally perfect; but when the parents are past that age it is better they should have no more. With respect to any connection between a man and a woman, or a woman and a man, when either of the ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... by the fairy Inconstancy. Now the fairy Girouette had a kind heart, but she was a very trying person to live with, for she never knew her own mind for two minutes together, and as she was the sole ruler at Court till the prince grew up everything was always at sixes and sevens. At first she determined to follow the old custom of keeping the young king ignorant of the duties he would have to perform some day; then, quite suddenly, she resigned the reins of government into his hands; ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... something still more pernicious, namely a pair of dice, which the gentleman took out of his waistcoat-pocket, and put into the glass. Then giving the glass a graceful wave which showed that his hand was quite experienced in the throwing of dice, he called sevens the main, and whisking the ivory cubes gently on the table, swept them up lightly again from the cloth, and repeated this process two or three times. The other men looked on, Pen, of course, among the number, who had never used the dice as yet, except to play a ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... half in; chairs, tables, bed, were strewed; and boxes and portmanteaus were gaping open on the floor. John Massingbird, the elder brother, was stowing away some of this litter into the boxes; not all sixes and sevens, as it looked lying there, but compactly and artistically. John Massingbird possessed a ready hand at packing and arranging; and therefore he preferred doing it himself to deputing it to others. He was one year older than his brother, ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... is spoken of as an ingredient of the universe, absolutists interpret it to mean that double sevens are as likely to be thrown out of a dice box as double sixes are. If free-will is spoken of, that must mean that an english general is as likely to eat his prisoners to-day as a Maori chief was a hundred years ago. It is as likely—I am using Mr. McTaggart's ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... care of as it ought to be," observed Mrs. Fisher, "is one thing, and when it's all sixes and sevens because a girl doesn't have time to brush it, is another. Your hair is all right now, Polly, There, go, child;" and she dismissed her with a final loving pat. "I can trust you, and when your worry gets too big for you, why, bring ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... sixes and sevens. But a fire was made in the kitchen, the hearth-rug put down, the kettle set on the hob, and Mrs. Brangwen began towards sunset to prepare the first meal. Ursula and Gudrun were slaving in the bedrooms, candles were ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... to-night; things all sevens and sixes; Motion is that Anglo-German Agreement Bill be read Second Time. Opinion very mixed on merits of measure; on the whole, no particular objection to it, even though with it goes Heligoland. Still, an Opposition ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 2, 1890. • Various
... ordinary flirtations. Now the rule is that not a word shall be spoken that does not refer to business. "Miss O'Brien, where is the salmon-coloured sarsenet? or, Mr. Green, I'll trouble you for the ladies' sevens." Nothing is ever spoken beyond that. "Morals, morals, above everything!" Mr. Brown was once heard to shout from his little room, when a whisper had been going round the shop as to a concerted visit to the Crystal Palace. Why a visit to the Crystal Palace should be immoral, ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... went on, their fame went on, And they went on — from bad to worse; Till, goaded hot with nothing done, And each accoutred with a curse, The friends of Old King Cole, by twos, And fours, and sevens, and elevens, Pronounced unalterable views Of doings that were ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse |
