Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Sluggard   Listen
Sluggard

noun
1.
An idle slothful person.  Synonym: slug.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Sluggard" Quotes from Famous Books



... ancestors, Meroveus, from whom it got its name, and Clodion, the first, it is said, of the long-haired kings, a characteristic title of the Frankish kings, are scarcely historical personages; and it is under the qualification of sluggard kings that the last Merovingians have a place in history. Clovis alone, amidst his vices and his crimes, was sufficiently great and did sufficiently great deeds to live forever in the course of ages; the greatest part of his successors belong only to genealogy or chronology. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... amount of appreciation they will allow themselves to give to anything. They shrivel—body and soul. Economy is waste: it is waste of the juices of life, the sap of living. For there are two kinds of waste—that of the prodigal who throws his substance away in riotous living, and that of the sluggard who allows his substance to rot from non-use. The rigid economizer is in danger of being classed with the sluggard. Extravagance is usually a reaction from suppression of expenditure. Economy is likely to be a reaction ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford

... hurried. Loving, true, and faithful Valentines are ye, and the rest as Heaven and opportunity shall permit. Come, prithee, have done: wring not thy tiny hands, nor fear farther persecution now. Thou hast done bravely, excellently. And now, away to Dorothy, and call up the old sluggard; we must have a substantial breakfast, after a night of confusion and a morning of joy, and thy hand will be needed to prepare for us some of these delicate cakes which no one can make but thyself; and well hast thou a right to the secret, seeing who taught it thee. Ah! health to the soul of thy ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... Lost, we must accept no Limitations to human brotherhood. If the Scheme which I set forth in these and the following pages is not applicable to the Thief, the Harlot, the Drunkard, and the Sluggard, it may as well be dismissed without ceremony. As Christ came to call not the saints but sinners to repentance, so the New Message of Temporal Salvation, of salvation from pinching poverty, from rags and misery, must be offered to ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... understanding? Whence that abundance that even furnishes our luxury? Think of all the trees in their rich variety, the many wholesome herbs, and such diversity of foods apportioned among the seasons that even the sluggard might find sustenance from the casual bounty of earth. Whence come living creatures of every kind, some bred on solid dry land, some in water, others speeding through the air, to the end that every ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... to resort to physical coercion. Even just men, who have the deepest theoretical respect for human rights, are apt to be carried away by the consciousness of superior strength, and to become despotic, if not harsh. To escape this fault, a man must be either a saint or a sluggard. And the tendency to race enmity lies very deep in human nature. Perhaps it is a survival from the times when each race could maintain itself only by ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce

... Which a worse night than Midnight holds in keeping, Thou sleepest sottish—lost to life and fame— While the stars stare on thee, and pale for shame. Stir! rouse thee! Sit! if thou know'st not to rise; Sit up, thou tortured sluggard! ope thine eyes! Stretch thy brawn, Giant! Sleep is foul and vile! Art fagged, art deaf, art dumb? art blind this while? They lie who say so! Thou dost know and feel The things they do to thee and thine. The heel That scratched thy neck in passing—whose? ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... the Sluggard, I hear him complain, You have waked me too soon—an unpleasant surprise! In an hour or so later pray call me again, When, if feeling refreshed, I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various

... reason. But for the time the subject again drops. It is, however, reopened at night, and some small pity comes on one for the recreant Gerard, inasmuch as she keeps him awake by wailing about her love. At last she "draws" the sluggard to some extent. "Has not he been in love, and does not he know all about it? But he was never such a fool as Conrad, and he is sure that Conrad's lady is not such either." Another try, and she gets the acknowledgment of treason out of him. He tells her (what she knows ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... even by the feeblest of all the creatures. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise." "The sluggard will not plow, by reason of the cold;" that is, he will not break up the fallow ground of his heart, because there must be some pains taken by him that will do it; "therefore he shall beg in harvest;" ...
— The Heavenly Footman • John Bunyan

... the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... in which he half forgets even such a yoke as yours. Still let the maiden's beauty swell the father's breast with pride; Still let the bridegroom's arms enfold an unpolluted bride. Spare us the inexpiable wrong, the unutterable shame, That turns the coward's heart to steel, the sluggard's blood to flame; Lest when our latest hope is fled ye taste of our despair, And learn by proof in some wild hour, how ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.

... the watchman lark, In his clear reveillee: 'Hearken, oh hark! 110 Press to the high goal, fly to the mark. Up, O sluggard, new morn is born; If still asleep when the night falls dark, Thou must ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti

... subside to one; Church, state, and faction wrestle in the dark, Tossed by the deluge in their common ark. Shorn of her bishops, banks, and dividends, Another Babel soars—but Britain ends. And why? to pamper the self-seeking wants, 650 And prop the hill of these agrarian ants. "Go to these ants, thou sluggard, and be wise;" Admire their patience through each sacrifice, Till taught to feel the lesson of their pride, The price of taxes and of homicide; Admire their justice, which would fain deny The debt of nations:—pray ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... alertness. All his life he had had insatiable intellectual curiosity. It had kept him from wasting his time at play when he was a boy. It had kept him from plunging deeply into dissipation when youth was hot in his veins. It was now keeping him from the sluggard's fate. ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)

... securing specific results, and these can never be recovered if the stage is past; so mortal life, as a whole, is the time for entrance, and if it is not used for that purpose, entrance is impossible. If the youth will not learn, the man will be ignorant. If the sluggard will not plough because the weather is cold, he will 'beg in harvest.' If we do not strive to enter at the gate, it is vain to seek entrance when the Master's own ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... on its way to join the Vltava, passing through the rocky gorge and the winding valley of the Sharka, was very emphatic on the subject of spring's arrival, and its voice must have penetrated to secluded nooks and crannies, rousing sluggard forms of life from winter sleep. Spring was asserting itself with all the glorious certainty of youth, and was calling aloud to all and sundry to come out and witness a brave display in the many ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker

... slaved there day and night, and lights were moving to and fro amongst them as the guards watched them at their toil. They were singing a weird refrain—a chorus—ever and again interrupted by yells and curses as the lash of the task-master fell on some victim of his hatred or sluggard at work. ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats

... worker disappears down a hole with his hard-earned bit of leaf. He drops it and goes on his way. We do not know what this way is, but my guess is that he turns around and goes after another leaf. Whatever the nests of Attas possess, they are without recreation rooms. These sluggard-instructors do not know enough to take a vacation; their faces are fashioned for biting, but not for laughing or yawning. I once dabbed fifteen Mediums with a touch of white paint as they approached the nest, and within five minutes thirteen of them ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... only find scope on the great stage of action which power creates. But when the State renounces all extension of power, and recoils from every war which is necessary for its expansion; when it is content to exist, and no longer wishes to grow; when "at peace on sluggard's couch it lies," then its citizens become stunted. The efforts of each individual are cramped, and the broad aspect of things is lost. This is sufficiently exemplified by the pitiable existence of all small States, ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi

... "no barriers be, For you no sluggard rest; Each street leads downward to the sea, Or landward to ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)

... prudent Ant thy heedless eyes, Observe her labours, Sluggard, and be wise; No stern command, no monitory voice, Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice; Yet, timely provident, she hastes away To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day; When fruitful Summer loads the teeming plain, She crops the harvest, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... with the Persian, one with his own unheroic allies, and the last was the harder. Three hundred and seventy Greek triremes rode off Salamis, half from Athens, but the commander-in-chief was Eurybiades of Sparta, the sluggard state that sent only sixteen ships, yet the only state the bickering Peloponnesians would obey. ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... all very well to laugh at such fears, but they are not natural fears at all, they just indicate a low vitality; they are the symptoms and not the causes of a disease. It is the frame of mind of the sluggard in the Bible who says, "There is a lion in the way." Younger people are apt to be irritated by what seems a wilful creating of apprehensions. They ought rather to be patient and reassuring, and compassionate to the weakness of ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... it is Serpice at last!" cried out Margot in joyous excitement as she and the others crowded round him. "Soul of a sluggard, don't waste time in laughing and capering like this! Speak up, speak up, you hear? Are we to fly at once to the mill and join him? Has he succeeded? ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew

... forty-five years, during which discoveries have been in progress all around them, which they have refused to look at, and refused to test by experiment. Still, if the march of mind for half a century can finally rouse the sluggard class, it is well. For "while the lamp holds out to burn," etc. It was a Dr. Bowditch who, in 1843, certified as secretary of a committee to the facts which demonstrate the science of Anthropology, and then relapsed into an agnostic slumber and forgot ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various

... must have been a little above, and others a little below our own height, in their lifetime; that some must have been very corpulent, and others very thin persons; that one of them, having a protuberance on his head remarkably like a night-cap in stone, was possibly a sluggard as well as a Sabbath-breaker, and might have got out of his bed just in time to "hurl;" that another, with some faint resemblance left of a fat grinning human face, leaned considerably out of the perpendicular, ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins

... upward," is ordained by the Creator as a stimulus to endeavour, because "where least man suffers, longest he remains." Some of you may remember that he argues in that appendix that the old man who had learnt Chinese to distract his mind would have played but a sluggard's part in life if no affliction had befallen him, since he had never taken the pains to learn how to tell the time from a clock. "Nothing but extreme agony," says Borrow, "could have induced such a man to do anything ...
— George Borrow - A Sermon Preached in Norwich Cathedral on July 6, 1913 • Henry Charles Beeching

... numbness in the nerve cells which guide those muscles, so that they disobey the will or act unreasonably and without direction. But too much sleep, like over-indulgence in any anaesthetic, is only shirking that duty and avoiding that effort to which the higher life calls us, and the sluggard who sleeps more than the tired nerves need is allowing himself to sink deeper and deeper into a slough of despond. He forgets his toil in sleep, but it is only by active, conscious effort when awake that his work may be lifted to the higher plane where the brain is active, where work ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden

... run faster than another? Mr. Redfield thinks it is because the sprinter has, by previous work, stored up energy in his body, which carries him over the course more rapidly than the sluggard who has not been subjected to systematic training. But the differences in men's ability are not due to the amount of energy they have stored up. It is due rather to differences in their structure (using ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... Ruet, my excellent progenitrix, were beginning to spread their green tendrils and goodly branches, and to hang out their clusters to the gracious sunshine, as it were in demonstration to the heavens that the labourer was no sluggard, and as an assurance that in due season, under its benign favour, they would gratefully repay his care with sweet fruit. But there is yet one thing to be told, which, though it may not be regarded as germane to the mighty event of the Reformation, grew so plainly out ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt

... colouring. A gathering call ran among the faculties, their bugles sang, their trumpets rang an untimely summons. Imagination was roused from her rest, and she came forth impetuous and venturous. With scorn she looked on Matter, her mate—"Rise!" she said. "Sluggard! this night I will have my will; nor shalt ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... thy selfe (O man) canst thou brooke a sluggard in thy worke, if thou bee of any spirit thy selfe? is not a slothfull messenger as vinegar to thy teeth, and as smoake to thine eyes? Hast thou any sharpnesse of wit, is not dulnesse tedious unto thee? And shall hee that is ...
— A Coal From The Altar, To Kindle The Holy Fire of Zeale - In a Sermon Preached at a Generall Visitation at Ipswich • Samuel Ward

... till you remember where you are—in one of Nature's hottest and dampest laboratories. Nearly eighty inches of yearly rain and more than eighty degrees of perpetual heat make swift work with vegetable fibre, which, in our cold and sluggard clime, would curdle into leaf-mould, perhaps into peat. Far to the north, in poor old Ireland, and far to the south, in Patagonia, begin the zones of peat, where dead vegetable fibre, its treasures of light and ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... his breakfast. He was no sluggard; and he liked to devote the whole hour, from eight to nine, to his breakfast and his Times. Occasionally, as on this morning, he would sit down before eight, in order that he might have nearly finished breakfast before ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood

... in fraud and imposture, will ever claim to accomplish any thing of the kind. The bee-moth infects our Apiaries, just as weeds take possession of a fertile soil; and the negligent bee-keeper will find a "moth-proof" hive, when the sluggard finds a weed-proof soil, and I suspect not until a consummation so devoutly wished for by the slothful has arrived. Before explaining the means upon which I rely, to circumvent the moth, I will first give a brief description ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... had breathed no word of my lost dreams to Isobel but had congratulated her with the rest, often and bitterly I had cursed myself for a sluggard. Too late I had learned that she had but awaited a word from me; and I had gone off to Mesopotamia, leaving that word unspoken. During my absence Coverly had won the prize which I had thrown away. He was heir to the title, for his cousin, Sir Marcus, was unmarried. Now here, a bolt from the ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... were armed alike. Constans's thoughts reverted to the fire artillery of the ancients; with that at his disposal he would hold the balance of power. The possession of a single score of rifles should enable him to demonstrate the feasibility of the attempt to his sluggard kinsmen, the Stockaders, and to the even more reluctant townsmen. He determined to take the first opportunity to make a careful search of the city armories and ammunition depots; in the mean time, it was his business to acquaint himself ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... voice, smothered to a hissing whisper, answer something. Two distinct words, "the hop," carried to her ears. There was a long-drawnout baritone, "Oh-h!" then, in the same key, "I knew Lauzanne was a sluggard, and couldn't make out why he ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser

... irretrievable, revolving in his Mind, all his Disappointments from his first Adventure with the Court-Coquet, who had entertain'd an utter Aversion to a blind Eye, down to his late Loss of his white Armour. See! said he, the fatal Consequence of being a Sluggard! Had I been more vigilant, I had been King of Babylon; but what is more, I had been happy in the Embraces of my dearest Astarte. All the Knowledge of Books or Mankind; all the personal Valour that I can boast of, has only prov'd an Aggravation of my Sorrows. ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire

... he believes himself enjoined to do so by the Chinese inscription, but he cannot tell the hour of the day by the clock within his house; he can get on, he thinks, very well without being able to do so; therefore from this one omission, it is easy to come to a conclusion as to what a sluggard's part the man would have played in life, but for the dispensation of Providence; nothing but extreme agony could have induced such a man to do anything useful. He still continues, with all he has acquired, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow

... speckled umber and mottled white breast, with coal-black collar and neck and head of cinnamon. His golden tail droops far below his perch, and, running downward along the tree-trunk, it flashes in the air like a sceptre over the wood-lice he devours with his pickaxe bill. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard!" was an instigation to murder in the flicker, who loves young ants as much as wild-cherries or Indian corn, and is capable of taking any such satire seriously upon things to eat. Not so elfin and devilish as the small black ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... is for the interest of the drunkard to quit his cups; for the glutton to curb his appetite; for the debauchee to bridle his lust; for the sluggard to be up betimes; for the spendthrift to be economical, and for all sinners to stop sinning. Even if it were for the interest of masters to treat their slaves well, he must be a novice who thinks that a proof that the slaves are well treated. The whole history of man is ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise. 2. The fear of a king is as the roaring of a lion: whoso provoketh him to anger sinneth against his own soul. 3. It is an honour for a man to cease from strife: but every fool will be meddling. 4. The sluggard will not plough by reason of the cold; therefore shall he beg in harvest, and have nothing. 5. Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water; but a man of understanding will draw it out. 6. Most men will proclaim every one his own goodness: but a faithful ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... very well in the turret room. He was aroused early by noises which he interpreted as caused by the arrival of the London detectives. But he only turned round, like the sluggard, and slumbered till Logan aroused him at eight o'clock. He descended about a quarter to nine, breakfast was at nine, and he ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... gesticulating—little regarding the troubled and drowsy figure by the fireside. His throat rumbled thunderously; the words came with stormy bitterness. "You think this is a time for young men to be lyin' on beds of ease? I tell you there never was such a time before; there never was such opportunity. The sluggard is despoiled while he sleeps—yes, by George! if a man lays down they'll eat him before he wakes!—but the live man can build straight up till he touches the sky! This is the business man's day; it used to be the soldier's day and the statesman's day, but this ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington

... sides, and calling on us to help him and ourselves and one another. And so, wearily and little by little, but surely and steadily on the whole, was brought home to the young boy, for the first time, the meaning of his life: that it was no fool's or sluggard's paradise into which he had wandered by chance, but a battle-field ordained from of old, where there are no spectators, but the youngest must take his side, and the stakes are life and death. And he who roused this consciousness in them showed them, at the same time, by every word he spoke in ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous

... reduced to three loads, and I had four "pull-a-boys," one a Mpongwe, Mwaka alias Captain Merrick, a model sluggard; and Messrs. Smoke, Joe Williams, and Tom Whistle- -Kru-men, called Kru-boys. This is not upon the principle, as some suppose, of the grey-headed post-boy and drummer-boy: all the Kraoh tribes end their names in ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... coil, From the prison where clay confined thee, The hands of the flame unbind thee! O Soul! thou art free—all free! As the winds in their ceaseless chase, When they rush o'er their airy sea, Thou mayst speed through the realms of space, No fetter is forged for thee! Rejoice! o'er the sluggard tide Of the Styx thy bark can glide, And thy steps evermore shall rove Through the glades of the happy grove; Where, far from the loath'd Cocytus, The loved and the lost invite us. Thou art slave to the earth no more! ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... neighing of horses, and the lowing of cattle resounded from hill to hill across the wide bottom-lands and up and down the river upon either hand. Nature was waking from slumber—not to the full, boisterous wakefulness which greets the broad day, but the half-consciousness with which the sluggard turns himself for the light, sweet ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... want me to get all hot?" drawled one fat sluggard of a friend. "I'll keep alive when the time comes." And he and his kind set the standard for all. Sometimes a chap who could warm up, who had the real stuff in him, would "loosen up" about his life on some long tramp with me alone. ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole

... But observe this sluggard who issues from his door! He knows he is suspected—that the finger is uplifted and the chin is wagging. And so he takes on a smarter stride with a pretense of briskness, to proclaim thereby the virtue of having risen early despite his belated appearance, and what ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... reach it to-night!" And there, sure enough, were Penny's brigs sailing past our squadron, which showed no sign of vitality beyond that of the officer of the watch visiting the ice-anchors to see all was right. "That fellow, Penny, is no sluggard!" we muttered, "and will yet give the screws a hard ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn

... inadequate warfare against them with a crooked hoe, but he is only a quarter in earnest, and stops to groan and take snuff so often that the result is that our garden is precisely in the condition of the garden of the sluggard, gate and all. This hingeless condition of the gate, however, is, I must in fairness state, neither Jack's nor our fault. It is a new gate, but no one will come out from the town to hang it. That is my standing grievance. Because ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various

... ourselves in these few months to come. Shame, shame on the man who fails his country in this its hour of need! I would not force him to serve. I could not think that the service of such a man was of any avail. Let the country be served by free men, and let them deal with the coward or the sluggard who flinches. ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various

... the fray again. I must be. You would not have your husband a sluggard among men, and that will sometimes take me from you, though never for long, because I'm afraid I shall be selfish and have you with me when there are long journeys. And it will change, too, you know—because you see, dear, there ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... Further, solicitude for the necessary means of livelihood is by nature instilled into man, and this solicitude even other animals share with man: wherefore it is written (Prov. 6:6, 8): "Go to the ant, O sluggard, and consider her ways . . . she provideth her meat for herself in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest." But every command issued against the inclination of nature is an unjust command, forasmuch as it is contrary to the law of nature. Therefore ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas

... depended on each individual's particular bustling. There are white ant hills like ragged heaps of raw chocolate—very hard and strong. I don't know what they are built for—I must consider the matter like the sluggard some day, if I have time, or read about them if that is not a bigger order. What strikes you at first about the white ant is that you never see it unless you lay its works open. His hard-sun-baked ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... more closed, which I remember thinking odd; and the house, with its white walls and green venetians, looked spruce and habitable in the morning light. Hour after hour passed, and still no sign of Northmour. I knew him for a sluggard in the morning; but, as it drew on toward noon, I lost my patience. To say the truth, I had promised myself to break my fast in the pavilion, and hunger began to prick me sharply. It was a pity to let the opportunity ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various

... Birds' Nesters Unknown "Sing on, Blithe Bird" William Motherwell "I Like Little Pussy" Jane Taylor Little Things Julia Fletcher Carney The Little Gentleman Unknown The Crust of Bread Unknown "How Doth the Little Busy Bee" Isaac Watts The Brown Thrush Lucy Larcom The Sluggard Isaac Watts The Violet Jane Taylor Dirty Jim Jane Taylor The Pin Ann Taylor Jane and Eliza Ann Taylor Meddlesome Matty Ann Taylor Contented John Jane Taylor Friends Abbie Farwell Brown Anger Charles and Mary Lamb "There Was a Little Girl" H. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various

... we rise Ere Aurora's peeping, Drink a cup to wash our eyes. Leave the sluggard sleeping; Then we go To and fro, With our knacks At our backs To such streams As the Thames If ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

... Here I howl and tear my hair and rail at fortune because I lose something that I never had; she was never mine—this girl of millions—I had no right to her. But the sufferings of that poor child-wife are real, deep, heartrending; and there are thousands of others like her in this world. Get up, sluggard, get up! Go out and comfort them; go out into the world and mend broken hearts. It is your trade! You have qualified, for your ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein

... world was a good place when it produced such a woman. And even when she had lashed him with her tongue, as she did sometimes, he still laughed—after the smart was over—because he liked spirit. He would never have a horse that had not some blood, and he had never driven a sluggard in his life more than once. But wife and child and world, and all that therein was, existed largely because they ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... art a sluggard, a fool, and a coward; curses! curses! curses upon thee!" And he made an effort to rush against his comrade, as if to strike him; and, when the guards seized him and dragged him back, he shook his fist at Cicero, and gnashed his teeth, and howling out, "Thou too! thou ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... ceiling and float there in quasi-angelic posture, but perhaps, as one of your feminine adepts is said to have done, flit swifter than train or telegram to "still-vexed Bermoothes," and twit Ariel, if he happens to be there, for a sluggard? We have not the presumption to deny the possibility of anything you affirm; only, as our brethren are particular about evidence, do give us as much to go upon as may save us from being roared down by their ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... advance, upon a velocipede, rode a tin-sworded personage, shrieking incessant commands but not concerning himself with whether or not any military obedience was thereby obtained. Here was a revivifying effect upon young Ramsey; his sluggard eyelids opened electrically; he leaped to his feet and, abandoning his grandfather without preface or apology, sped across the lawn and out of the gate, charging headlong upon the commander ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington

... just traversed this garden of the sluggard, and were within a few steps of the door of the mansion, when Lambourne had ceased speaking; a circumstance very agreeable to Tressilian, as it saved him the embarrassment of either commenting upon or replying to the frank avowal which his companion had just made ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott

... not a man with many friends be your steward, Nor a woman with sons and foster-sons your housekeeper, Nor a greedy man your butler, Nor a man of much delay your miller, Nor a violent, foul-mouthed man your messenger, Nor a grumbling sluggard your servant, Nor a talkative man your counsellor, Nor a tippler your cup-bearer, Nor a short-sighted man your watchman, Nor a bitter, haughty man your doorkeeper, Nor a tender-hearted man your judge, Nor an ignorant man your leader, Nor ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston

... what a sluggard nature must be, as Rutherford here says she is, if she can lull us into security about ourselves in such a life as this! And what a noble field does this snare-filled life supply for all a ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte

... of the Constitution" was no sluggard. It was his habit to "Rise with the lark and greet the purpling east," to use one of his favorite quotations, and the carriage had hardly stopped when he appeared, and, exchanging kindly greetings with the Colonel, took his ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various

... The wretch, devoted to the entangling snares Of Bacchus and of Comus. Him she leads To Cynthia's lonely haunts. To spread the toils, To beat the coverts, with the jovial horn At dawn of day to summon the loud hounds, She calls the lingering sluggard from his dreams, And where his breast may drink the mountain breeze, 180 And where the fervour of the sunny vale May beat upon his brow, through devious paths Beckons his rapid courser. Nor when ease, Cool ease and welcome slumbers have becalm'd His eager bosom, does the queen of health Her ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... which animates the hand of industry, few would toil in cultivating and planting the land, if they did not expect to reap the fruit of their labour: Were it otherwise, the industrious man would be in a worse state than the idle sluggard. I frequently saw parties of six, eight, or ten people, bring down to the landing place fruit and other things to dispose of, where one person, a man or woman, superintended the sale of the whole; no exchanges were made but with his or her consent; and whatever we gave in exchange was always ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook

... that disposition best Because no better comes unto her view. The drunkard drunkennesse, the sluggard rest, Th' Ambitious honour and obeisance due. So all the rest do love their vices base 'Cause virtues beauty comes not ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More

... to learn that the next sound he heard was a happy laugh, as Patsy appeared at the open door of the barn with "Awake, thou sluggard" upon ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett

... reduced to mere pensioners upon our caprice—not bounty—and so satisfy them and their claims that the business of human life may be carried on safely in their vicinity and actual presence. 'Who art thou that saith 'there is a lion in the way'? Rise, sluggard, and slay the lion! The road has to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... Cador, who was a merry man, saw the king before him. "Fair king," said the earl gaily, "for a great while the thought has disturbed me, that peace and soft living are rotting away the British bone. Idleness is the stepdame of virtue, as our preachers have often told us. Soft living makes a sluggard of the hardiest knight, and steals away his strength. She cradles him with dreams of woman, and is the mother of chambering and wantonness. Folded hands and idleness cause our young damoiseaux to waste their days over merry tales, and dice, raiment to catch a lady's fancy and ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace

... alone, or in thy Harlot's Lap, When thou wouldst take a lazy Morning's Nap; Up, up, says AVARICE; thou snor'st again, Stretchest thy Limbs, and yawn'st, but all in vain. The rugged Tyrant no Denial takes; At his Command th' unwilling Sluggard wakes. What must I do? he cries; What? says his Lord: Why rise, make ready, and go streight Aboard: With Fish, from Euxine Seas, thy Vessel freight; Flax, Castor, Coan Wines, the precious Weight Of Pepper and Sabean Incense, take With ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... for that he was going to Milan. Protheus, unwilling to part with his friend, used many arguments to prevail upon Valentine not to leave him; but Valentine said, "Cease to persuade me, my loving Protheus. I will not, like a sluggard, wear out my youth in idleness at home. Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits. If your affection were not chained to the sweet glances of your honoured Julia, I would entreat you to accompany me, to see the wonders of the world abroad: but since you are a lover, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... be troublesome to the overworked and the idle gardener, while the best-kept land will be full of seeds blown upon it from the sluggard's garden, and the first shower will bring them up in terrific force. All that we have to say about them is that they must be kept down, for they not only choke the rising crops in seed-beds and spoil the look of everything, ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... labour, for none but the industrious can hope to obtain that reward. In fact, idle and indolent persons will not change their natures by going out to Canada. Poverty and discontent will be the lot of the sluggard in the Bush, as it was in his native land—nay, deeper poverty, for "he cannot work, to beg he is ashamed," and if he be surrounded by a family, those nearest and dearest to him will share in his ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland

... result of frozen winter-rains, Of hard, white snows, of dull, loud-dripping thaw, Of showers and shine of spring, of March blasts raw, Of glaring August heats,—these dainty grains, This fruitage delicate. O sluggard soul! What harvest reapest thou as seasons roll? Mayhap to thee the slow results of time Bring also profit, though thy fruit, hung high, Escape the glance of careless passers-by, A seeming fragile husk ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various

... I have been forth into the world, and have learnt to see that monasteries have become mere haunts for the sluggard, who will not face the world; and that honour, glory, and all that is worth living for, lie beyond. Ah, lady! those eyes first taught ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge

... so the active breath of life Should stir our dull and sluggard wills; For are we not created rife With health, that stagnant ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... such as Marshal Murat knew to lead. Those methods were entirely foreign to him. He has even been accused of cowardice, though, so far as I can judge, without justice. His circumstances—the lack of armies; the sluggard patriotism of his countrymen; his constant negotiations, not to say intrigues, with many persons; his perpetual efforts to raise moneys to equip forces to carry on the patriotic warfare—seem to have left ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... of the sluggard would be a more appropriate quotation, I think. Does Annabel still pine for you?" asked Rose, recalling certain youthful jokes upon the subject ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott

... I'm no sluggard, you know," said the lawyer. "I thought we might want a word or two before the meeting at ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. —Prov. ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth

... sluggard, did not turn out so early on the morning after he had seen Sol Gills, through the shop-window, writing in the parlour, with the Midshipman upon the counter, and Rob the Grinder making up his bed below it, but that the clocks struck six as ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... met! I plead for the future. A new horoscope I would cast: will you read it? I plead for a hope: I plead for a memory; yours, yours alone, To restore or to spare. Let the hope be your own, Be the memory mine. "Once of yore, when for man Faith yet lived, ere this age of the sluggard began, Men aroused to the knowledge of evil, fled far From the fading rose-gardens of sense, to the war With the Pagan, the cave in the desert, and sought Not repose, but employment in action or thought, Life's strong earnest, in all things! oh, think not of me, But yourself! for I plead for your ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith

... there were myriads of them—added to the enjoyment of my ease. With my ear so close to the ground the grass seemed fairly to buzz with them. Everywhere there were crazily busy ants, and I, patently a sluggard and therefore one of those for whom the ancient warning was intended, considered them lazily. How they plunged about, weaving in and out, rushing here and there, helter-skelter, like bargain-hunting women darting wildly from ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... College complains that college faculties are concerned with the mental slacker and the laggard, that they have geared their machinery to the sluggard's pace. True enough, but not only true of educational institutions. In a democracy everything is geared to the pace ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor

... prudent ant thy heedless eyes, Observe her labours, sluggard! and be wise. No stern command, no monitory voice Prescribes her duties or directs her choice; Yet, timely provident, she hastes away, To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day; When fruitful Summer loads the teeming plain, She crops ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett

... antique character. In them Arthur dwells in Cornwall, and not as in the others at Caerleon on the Usk. In them he appears with an individual character, hunting and taking a personal part in warfare, while in the more modern tales he is only an emperor all- powerful and impassive, a truly sluggard hero, around whom a pleiad of active heroes groups itself. The Mabinogi of Kilhwch and Olwen, by its entirely primitive aspect, by the part played in it by the wild-boar in conformity to the spirit of Celtic mythology, by the wholly supernatural and magical ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... us. The torch has been handed on from nation to nation, from civilization to civilization, throughout all recorded time, from the dim years before history dawned down to the blazing splendor of this teeming century of ours. It dropped from the hands of the coward and the sluggard, of the man wrapped in luxury or love of ease, the man whose soul was eaten away by self-indulgence; it has been kept alight only by those who were mighty of heart and cunning of hand. What they worked at, provided it was worth doing at all, was of less matter than how they worked, whether ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... people who are intemperate with regard to sleep, seeing that the sluggard with his eyes shut cannot do himself or see that others do ...
— The Economist • Xenophon

... they must understand the principle; and whatever was attempted, that was to be done thoroughly. If it was but play, if it was but a puppetshow they were to build, he set them the example of being no sluggard in play. When Frewen, the second son, embarked on the ambitious design to make an engine for a toy steamboat, Fleeming made him begin with a proper drawing - doubtless to the disgust of the young engineer; but once that foundation laid, helped in the work with unflagging gusto, ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson

... When these sluggard princes or effeminate republics send forth any of their Captains, it seems to them that the wisest instruction they can give him is to charge him on no account to give battle, but, on the contrary, to do what he can to avoid ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli

... rather than see the gradual dying out and deterioration of this army during a winter," etc.; but, when it was proposed to cross into eastern Maryland on a steamer in our possession for a partial campaign, difficulties arose like the lion in the path of the sluggard, so that the proposition was postponed and never executed. In like manner the other expedition in the Valley of Virginia was achieved by an officer not of this ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... listen to his overtures, but sits up in bed, dolefully rubbing his eyes, and bemoaning the evanishment of his protectionist dream— altogether realising tolerably, he and his land, Dr. Watts' well- known moral song concerning the sluggard ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... her every morn at two, And having gained her ear, In vivid colours AARON drew The sluggard's ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert

... falling-asleep, he had let it drop. "The way must have suddenly become smooth as a road in Venice, for I've felt no jolting this half hour. Flowers, Evelyn? and Haward afoot? You've been on a woodland saunter, then, while I enacted Solomon's sluggard!" The worthy parent's eyes began to twinkle. "What flowers did you find? They have strange blooms here, and yet I warrant that even in these woods one might come across London pride and none-so-pretty ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... living in country houses. In all these things people who can afford it try to imitate them. We say, with a full consciousness of the responsibility which the avowal entails on us, that they do right. It is well in any art to watch and imitate the man who has best succeeded in it. The sluggard has been exhorted even to imitate the ant, and anyone who wishes to ride or drive well, or dress appropriately, or entertain in a country house, ought to study the way the English do these things, and follow their example, for anything ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin

... Fame may flout and scorn, Or brand me with the sluggard's name! With cheerful hands I'll plant my upland corn, And live to ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus

... door of the cabin and stared at us; a tap-room sluggard, a-sunning on the west fence-rail, chewed his cud solemnly and watched us with ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers

... Land of Nod, in that part of it known as the state of Dreams, and in the county of Sleep, and in Doze township, not far from the village of Shuteyetown, in Sleepy Hollow, where stands the Church of the Seven Sleepers, on the corner of Snoring Lane and Sluggard Avenue, near Slumber Hall, owned by the Independent Association ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston



Words linked to "Sluggard" :   do-nothing, idler, bum, loafer, layabout, slug



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com