"Toil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you'll hand me my little maid, I'll take her, and rear her, and spare you toil. Think it more than a friendly act none can; I'm a lonely man, While you've ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... must not be a country without ideals. They are useless if they are only visionary; they are only valuable if they are practical. A nation can not dwell constantly on the mountain tops. It has to be replenished and sustained through the ceaseless toil of the less inspiring valleys. But its face ought always to be turned upward, its vision ought always to be ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Calvin Coolidge • Calvin Coolidge
... and make way for the troops, the Romans dragged aside, with hooks, the bodies of such of the inhabitants as had been slain, or precipitated headlong from the houses, and threw them into pits, the greatest part of them being still alive and panting. In this toil, which lasted six days and as many nights, the soldiers were relieved from time to time by fresh ones, without which they would have been quite spent. Scipio was the only person who did not take a wink of sleep all this time; giving orders in all places, and scarce allowing himself ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... by the happiness it brings. But for a working conception it is far better. Self-realization has never been the aim of the saints and heroes. Imagine a patriot dying for his country's freedom, or a mother giving years of sacrificing toil for her child, on the ground of self-development! The patriot may feel that through his sacrifice and that of his comrades his countrymen will be freer or more united or rid of some curse i.e., ultimately, happier. The mother thinks consciously of the happiness ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... not feeling a limp and wretched creature, unfit for any exertion? What was wrong with her? She hated her drawing—she hated everything. And there was Arthur, proposing to go yachting with Lady Dunstable!—while she might toil and moil—all alone—in this August London! The tears rushed into her eyes. Her pride only just saved her from a ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... in the sweet stillness of summer-scented noons, in the solemn quiet of autumn nights. Her days were beset with visions like these—visions of a cool, quiet, tranquil world; of conditions of peace; of yearnings satisfied; of toil that did not lacerate. Yes! that world was, somewhere. Her heart was convinced of it, as her father's had been convinced of the reality of paradise. That which she had never been, that which she could not be now—it must exist somewhere. Singularly childish it seemed even to herself, this ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... men's souls. Wealth flowed in upon them; the world, in its instinctive loyalty to greatness, laid its lands and its possessions at their feet; and for a time was seen the notable spectacle of property administered as a trust, from which the owners reaped no benefit, except increase of toil. The genius of the age expended its highest efforts to provide fitting tabernacles for the divine spirit which they enshrined; and alike in village and city, the majestic houses of the Father of mankind and his especial servants towered ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... was a most famous naturalist and zoologist. He arrived by a flash of genius at the same conclusions which Darwin had reached after sixteen years of most minute toil and careful observation.... It was a unique example of the almost exact concurrence of two great minds working upon the same subject, though in different parts of the world, without collusion and without rivalry.... Between ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... students have numbered 55,656. If an answer is desired to the question, "Is such an institution needed," that number answers is most emphatically. That more than fifty thousand people, the majority of them wording men and women, will give their nights after a day of toil, to study, proves that the institution that gives them the opportunity to study ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... right intention at starting, but that constant pains and perseverance are requisite,—as in the matter of Caesar; secondly, that a privilege earned is sweeter than one bestowed as a favour,—as in the spending of the half-crown, which his own toil had procured; thirdly, that even for a good object we must not use bad or doubtful means,—as in the matter of the gravel; and fourthly, that hard work—digging, or what not—from a right motive, becomes a much greater pleasure than any that can be procured by idleness. And he had ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford
... fringes it to the east, in the few glades that remain of Epping and Hainault,—glades ringing with the shouts of school-children out for their holiday and half mad with delight at the sight of a flower or a butterfly; poetry of the present in the work and toil of these acres of dull bricks and mortar where everybody, man woman and child, is a worker, this England without a "leisure class"; poetry in the thud of the steam-engine and the white trail of steam from the tall ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... soldiers of the British army. He had fought with distinction all through the Great Mutiny, earning the Victoria Cross and rapid promotion; he had served in the Abyssinian campaign of 1868, and been chosen by Napier to carry home his final despatches; and he had worthily shared in the toil, fighting, and honours of the Umbeyla and Looshai expeditions. In his command of the Kuram field force during the winter of 1878-9 he had proved himself a skilful, resolute, and vigorous leader. The officers and men who served under him believed in him enthusiastically, and, what with soldiers is ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... on thy bench, and muse Anticipative of the feast to come; So shall delight make thee not feel thy toil. Lo! I have set before thee, for thyself Feed now: the matter I indite, henceforth Demands entire my thought. Join'd with the part, Which late we told of, the great minister Of nature, that upon the world imprints The virtue of the heaven, and doles out Time for us with ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... of his mother in her boy's progress! the joy over the first English-French letter that went to the great-uncle baker; the constant toil of both parents that the savings might be sufficient to educate their one child—that the son might have what the parents lacked. Already the mother had begun to speak of the priesthood: she might yet see her son Jean ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... and, during several days, the troops of Julian were obliged to contend with the most discouraging hardships. But every obstacle was surmounted by the perseverance of the legionaries, who were inured to toil as well as to danger, and who felt themselves animated by the spirit of their leader. The damage was gradually repaired; the waters were restored to their proper channels; whole groves of palm-trees were cut down, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Stanley's will, gave an outline of his client's wanderings, and was very particular with names and dates. The sailor's return was then described in the most pathetic colours. "He brought with him, gentlemen, nothing but the humble contents of a sailor's chest, the hard-earned wages of his daily toil; he, who in justice was the owner of as rich a domain as any in the land!" The attempts of this poor sailor to obtain his rights were then represented. "He learned the bitter truth, gentlemen, that a poor seaman, a foremast hand, with a tarpaulin hat and round-jacket, stood little ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... possesses in rare degree the faculty of being amused and interested. The British workman, who insists on his day's labour being limited by eight hours, would go into armed revolt if he were called upon to toil through so long a day as the Prince habitually faces. Some of its engagements are terribly boring, but the Prince smiles his way through what would kill an ordinary man. His manner is charmingly unaffected, and through all the varying duties and circumstances of the day ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... freemen, who own their houses and farms and gardens, upon single pieces of furniture that would take six months to complete. Our time is too valuable for this. The pauper labor of Europe will, I hope, long continue to be cheaper, than the toil of American mechanics. I do not want to see a man working for thirty cents a day. The people of England must laugh in their sleeves when they see every steamer bringing out our specie from America, and when they see us sacrificing our true interests to aid the destructive policy ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... profited nothing—nothing at least to him that began it. The very fact that it was left unfinished told of the unknown worker's death. Unless his devoted toil was to be wasted for ever, his successor must have some knowledge of Arabic, but I had studied Oriental languages at the Armenian Convent. A few words written on the back of the stone recorded the unhappy man's fate; he had fallen a victim to his great ...
— Facino Cane • Honore de Balzac
... was that in her talk which amazed him; flashes of insight, of profound and passionate experience, which seemed to fashion her anew before his eyes. The hard peasant life, in contact with the soil and natural forces; the elemental facts of birth and motherhood, of daily toil and suffering; what it means to fight oppressors for freedom, and see your dearest—son, lover, wife, betrothed—die horribly amid the clash of arms; into this caldron of human fate had Kitty plunged her light soul; and in some ways ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... recruits, enlisted at Montreal, were fit to vie with the ragged regiment of Falstaff. Some were able-bodied, but inexpert; others were expert, but lazy; while a third class were expert and willing, but totally worn out, being broken-down veterans, incapable of toil. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... despair when he perceived that in consequence of an insensible movement of the ice-field the Forward had, during the night from the 18th to the 19th, lost all the advantage she had gained with so much toil? On the Saturday morning they were once more opposite the ever-threatening Devil's Thumb, and in a still more critical position. The icebergs became more numerous, and drifted by in the fog like phantoms. Shandon was in a state of complete demoralisation, for fright had taken ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... "I solemnly vow, own, and confess, that I want a good husband. Where's the harm of one? My face is my fortune. Who'll come?—buy, buy, buy! I cannot toil, neither can I spin, but I can play twenty-three games on the cards. I can dance the last dance, I can hunt the stag, and I think I could shoot flying. I can talk as wicked as any woman of my years, and know enough stories ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fireplaces are removed to each end of the room. The most interesting change is in the windows. When you reach Chartres, the great book of architecture will open on the word "Fenestration,"— Fenestre,—a word as ugly as the thing was beautiful; and then, with pain and sorrow, you will have to toil till you see how the architects of 1200 subordinated every other problem to that of lighting their spaces. Without feeling their lights, you can never feel their shadows. These two halls at Mont-Saint-Michel are antechambers to the nave of Chartres; their ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... be confessed, that thou art the most pitiful, paltry, beggarly, blind—" I shall say no more. Thy whole munificence, thy whole magnanimity, thy whole generosity, to the living lights of thy sullen region of toil, trimming, and tribulation, of the dulness of dukes and the mountainous fortunes of pinmakers—is exactly L1200 a-year! and this to be divided among the whole generation of the witty and the wise, of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... a wage-earner had a good deal of a family—and they all have that, for God is very good to these poor natives in some ways—he would save a profit of fifteen cents, clean and clear, out of his year's toil; I mean a frugal, thrifty person would, not one given to display and ostentation. And if he owed $13.50 and took good care of his health, he could pay it off in ninety years. Then he could hold up his head, and look his creditors in the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... kings or queens, Mix'd in a nation's broil, They nivver benefit the poor— The poor mun ollas toil. An' thou gilded spectre, royalty, That dazzles folks's een, Is nowt to me when I'm wi thee, Sweet Lass o' ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... afternoon as if it really were crystal under the bright rays. But it was concealed by mist when the ploughs in the months gone by were guided in these furrows by men, hard of feature and of hand, stooping to their toil. The piercing east wind scattered the dust in clouds, looking at a distance like small rain across the field, when grey-coated men, grey too of beard, followed the red ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... in severe bodily labour. But the Scotch who settled at Darien must at first be without slaves, and must therefore dig the trench round their town, build their houses, cultivate their fields, hew wood, and draw water, with their own hands. Such toil in such an atmosphere was too much for them. The provisions which they had brought out had been of no good quality, and had not been improved by lapse of time or by change of climate. The yams and plantains did not suit stomachs accustomed to good oatmeal. The flesh of wild animals ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... upon it; but in the very moment of saying this to himself, Philip thought of the life which had been in store for her, the bearing of children, the dreary fight with poverty, the youth broken by toil and deprivation into a slatternly middle age—he saw the pretty face grow thin and white, the hair grow scanty, the pretty hands, worn down brutally by work, become like the claws of an old animal—then, when the man was past his prime, the difficulty ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... in their letters, was, however, sensible that a considerable time must elapse before they could make any thing by law or medicine. They were as yet only in the outset of their professions, the difficult beginning, when men must toil often without reward, be subject to crosses and losses, and rebukes and rebuffs, when their rivals push them back, and when they want the assistance of friends to help them forward, whilst with scarcely the means to live they ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... his worship is Asia; Europe is the precocious, self-centered, forward-striving child; but the land of the mother is and was Africa. In subtle and mysterious way, despite her curious history, her slavery, polygamy, and toil, the spell of the African mother pervades her land. Isis, the mother, is still titular goddess, in thought if not in name, of the dark continent. Nor does this all seem to be solely a survival of the historic matriarchate through which all nations pass,—it appears to be more than this,—as ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... cultivate calmness, my son, and the art of relaxation. With those qualities your race can easily double its present span of useful life. Physical exercise to maintain the bodily tissues at their best, and mental relaxation following mental toil—these things are the secrets of a long and productive life. Why attempt to do more than can be accomplished efficiently? There is always tomorrow. I am more interested in that which we are now building than you can possibly be, since many generations ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... useless and his explanations are pitiable; the painter helps still less; and the decorator, unless he works in glass, is the poorest guide of all, while, if he works in glass, he is sure to lead wrong; and all of them may toil until Pierre Mauclerc's stone Christ comes to life, and condemns them among the unpardonable sinners on the southern portal, but neither they nor any other artist will ever create another Chartres. You had better stop here, once for all, unless you are willing ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Whose hardened hands did long in tillage toil, Neglect the promised harvest of the soil. Should I, who cultivated love with blood, Refuse ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... Jones, as he spoke, seized a torch, extinguished it, and handed it to Dick. Equipped as he had directed, they set out, half crawling, half swimming, to avoid the volumes of smoke hovering in the thick, cactus-like leaves of the wild laurel. Presently they emerged, after toil and misery, that excitement alone enabled the boy to support, into what seemed a cleared space. But as soon as their eyes could distinguish clearly, they found themselves on the edge of a wide pond. The fire was now behind ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... masculine spirit and a policy, he left eight children: the three daughters multiplied the Comnenian alliance with the noblest of the Greeks: of the five sons, Manuel was stopped by a premature death; Isaac and Alexius restored the Imperial greatness of their house, which was enjoyed without toil or danger by the two younger brethren, Adrian and Nicephorus. Alexius, the third and most illustrious of the brothers was endowed by nature with the choicest gifts both of mind and body: they were cultivated ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... to remain standing and keep my hold of it (for one devil is mightier than all men put together, and not a single man would be saved), but because, even if there were no dangers and no adversities and no devils, I should still be compelled to toil forever uncertainly, and to beat the air in my struggle. For though I should live and work to eternity, my own conscience would never be sure and at ease as to how much it ought to do in order to satisfy God. No ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... no terrors. Dangers will be welcomed as the spice of life. My restless energies crave occupation, but there must be no menial taint. Mental and physical toil are not to be shunned, but my hands ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... secret of her father's strange guest in the poverty-stricken walls, in the mute evidences of menial handicraft performed in loneliness and privation, in this piteous adaptation of an accident to save the conscious shame of premeditated toil. She knew now why he had stammeringly refused to receive her father's offer to buy back the goods he had given him; she knew now how hardly gained was the pittance that paid his rent and supported his childish vanity and grotesque pride. From a peg ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... After three days' toil and trouble, wherein they mostly wore their shoon off their feet, going first up one close and syne down another, up trap-stairs to garrets and ben long trances that led into dirty holes—what think ye did they collect? Not one bodle—not one coin of copper! This one was out of work;—and ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... give me not the worthless dust, For which vain, anxious mortals toil, To treasure up where moth and rust, Doth soon corrupt the ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... them, thanks to the process of specialization, these advantages can only be enjoyed to the full by comparatively few. To the majority specialization has brought a life of mechanical and monotonous toil, with little or none of the pride in a job well done, such as was enjoyed by the savage when he had made his bow or caught his fish; those who work all day on some minute process necessary, among many others, to the turning out of a pin, can never feel the ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... lad, I am no friend to the Company, a set of stiff-necked, ignorant, grasping, paunchy peddlers who fatten at home on the toil of better men. No, I am an adventurer, I own it; I am an interloper; and we interlopers, despite the Company's monopoly, yet contrive to keep body and ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... were not distinguished citizens, nor fair to look upon. They were roughly dressed, and some of them were pale and worn as if with long sickness or exhausting toil. Yet this ship and these passengers startled the whole English-speaking world. Swift as electricity could fly, the magical word GOLD went forth like a brazen eagle across the continent to turn the faces of millions of earth's toilers toward a region which, up to that time, had been unknown ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... of the weary is sweet. Long hours passed, ere any one there awoke; but no sooner did the Chippewa move than all the rest were afoot. It was now late in the day, and it was time to think of taking the meal that was to sustain them through the toil and fatigues of another arduous night. This was done; the necessary preparations being made for a start ere the sun had set. The canoes were then shoved as near the mouth of the inlet as it was safe to go, while the light remained. ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Thomas's Hospital, she asks herself, "Are you more above those with whom you will have to mix than our Saviour was in every thought and sensitive refinement?" It was by such self-teaching that these high-spirited girls made their life-toil redound to their own purification, as it did to the cause of humanity. The purpose served by binding in one volume the district experiences of Miss Dutton and the hospital record of Miss Jones is that of indicating to the average young lady of our period a diversity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... daily in her compassionate toil for others the divine efficacy of simple love to redeem the lives, that were most estranged from virtue, and most ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... contests bore Alcides brave, Through the thorny path of suffering led; Slew the Hydra, crushed the lion's might, Threw himself, to bring his friend to light, Living, in the skiff that bears the dead. All the torments, every toil of earth Juno's hatred on him could impose, Well he bore them, from his fated birth To life's grandly mournful close. Till the god, the earthly part forsaken, >From the man in flames asunder taken, Drank the heavenly ether's purer breath. Joyous in the ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... destroyed a palace, that he might build a cottage with its materials. However highly we may think of the original, we can hardly suppose such an expression applicable to Gil Blas. Of the name of the author whose toil Le Sage thus appropriated, charity obliges us to suppose that he was ignorant; but we should not forget that the case of Le Sage is not precisely that of a person who publishes, as an original, a translation from a printed work, as Wieland did with his copy of Rowe's Lady Jane Grey, and Lord Byron ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... it given in the story of life, to those who work greatly or love greatly, to gather the fruit of their toil or passion. But it is given those others, perhaps—those for whom it could not be— to know a happiness greater, it may be, ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... man and woman remained conscious of their wrong-doing, though defiant, to abide in Jehovah's presence was for them intolerable. Are toil and pain essential to the moral development of sinners who refuse to confess their crime? Are toil and pain in themselves curses or blessings to those who have done wrong? The picture in Genesis 3 clearly implies that God's intention was not that man should suffer but that he should ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... minister groaned aloud. He longed to snatch her forever from that hard, unwomanly toil and fold her safely away from jeers and scorn in the shelter of his love. He knew it was madness—he had told himself so every hour in which Min's dark, rebellious face had haunted him—yet none the less was ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... for enjoyment of life; for though their members must work hard in order to procure the necessary luxuries of an advanced civilisation, they are endowed with so large a store of energy that, when their daily toil is over, enough of it remains unexpended to allow them to pursue their special hobbies during the remainder of the day. In a decadent community the men tire easily, and soon sink into drudgery; there is consequently much languor among them, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... of a great life to suppose that this purpose, though transformed, was ever forgotten or laid aside. The poet knew not, indeed, what he was promising, what he was pledging himself to—through what years of toil and anguish he would have to seek the light and the power he had asked; in what form his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... book. We want for the present to fix our attention on the COMMENCEMENT of that process by which man lapsed away from his living community with Nature and his fellows into the desert of discord and toil, while the angels of the flaming sword closed the gates of Paradise ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... out of the kitchen, followed by a delicious smell of crisping wheat, and sat down upon the step of the porch to watch Jed polishing the harness of Washington and Lincoln—the grave, reliable team upon whom Jed spared no toil. ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... thy wonted smile! O! suppress thy fears, lassie! Glorious honor crowns the toil That the soldier shares, lassie; Heaven will shield thy faithful lover Till the vengeful strife is over; Then we'll meet nae mair to sever; Till the day we dee, lassie. 'Midst our bonnie woods and braes We'll spend our peaceful, happy days, As blithe's yon lightsome lamb that ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... knew was the case, before I spoke. I wish I had had my wits about me!" somewhat irascibly went on Mrs. Jenkins: "I should have had his bed brought down to the parlour here, before he was so ill. I don't speak for the shop, I have somebody to attend to that; but it's such a toil and a trapes up them two pair of stairs for every ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... placed in the master's hand a pure white lily. The rich perfume filled the room; and bending over the flower, and inhaling the delicious fragrance, the master softly said—'My children, the blessed Word of God says—Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of ...
— The Big Nightcap Letters - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... Labor is grand officer in the palace of Art; that at the root of all ease lies slow, and, for long, profitless-seeming labor, as at the root of all grace lies strength; that ease is the lovely result of forgotten toil, sunk into the spirit, and making it strong and ready; that never worthy improvisation flowed from brain of poet or musician unused to perfect his work with honest labor; that the very disappearance of toil is by the immolating ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... came, marking the sixteenth hour that the men, imprisoned below the sea-swept decks, had struggled to save the ship. Sundown followed, and the second night of their unbroken toil began. They stuck to it, stood up somehow under the racking grind, their nerves quivering, their bodies craving food, their eyes gritty from the urge of sleep, while always the hideous noises of the gale screamed in their ears. The machine-gun roar of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... prey to mortal terrors. Trained to bravery, as a dog is to sport, I bore myself well enough before others. Spurred by vanity, indeed, I was foolishly bold when I had spectators; but left to myself, in the middle of the night, exhausted by toil and hunger, though with no longing for food, unhinged by the emotions I had just experienced, certain that my uncles would beat me when I returned, yet as anxious to return as if I were going to find paradise on earth ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... in vain To shame us unto toil, But they are spent and we remain, And we shall share the spoil According to our several needs As Beauty shall decree, As Age ordains or Birth concedes, And, Hey then up ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... did not look on the garden, but on the steep mule-path leading up the cliff, where all day long the sun beat as if with flails of fire, and I saw the sweating peasants toil up and down behind their thirsty asses, and the beggars whining and scraping their sores in the heat. Oh, how I hated to look out through the bars on that burning world! I used to turn away from it, sick with disgust, and lying on my hard bed, stare up by the ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... lived generously, in a kind of patriarchal simplicity, and many of his conversations interested me intensely. His reticence gradually yielded, and he gave me much information regarding his earlier years: they had been full of toil and struggle, but through the whole there was clear evidence of a noble purpose. Whatever worthy work his hand had found to do, he had done it with his might: the steamers of Cayuga Lake; the tunnel which carries the waters of Fall Creek to ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... of the stage) While Marie is in a convent the sunlight cannot warm me. I am bearing up a world, yet fear I am no Titian. No, I shall never succeed; all is against me. And this work which cost me three years of thought and ten months of toil will never cleave the ocean! But now, I am heavy with sleep. (He lies ...
— The Resources of Quinola • Honore de Balzac
... by possibility form an adequate notion of what Sunday really is to those whose lives are spent in sedentary or laborious occupations, and who are accustomed to look forward to it through their whole existence, as their only day of rest from toil, ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... sower's shirt, I had not kept the children warm, If I had found a wearing harm In my monotonous toil alert. ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... have one face for the public, rife with the saws and learned gravity of the profession, and another for themselves, replete with broad mirth, sprightly wit, and gay thoughtlessness. The intense mental toil and fatigue of business give them a peculiar relish for the enjoyment of their hours of relaxation, and, in the same degree, incapacitate them for that frugal attention to their private concerns which their limited means usually require. They ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... feared. In secret he exalted and deified her as something almost too holy for him to aspire to. She was his ideal of all that was beautiful and good; he was jealously careful over all his words and thoughts and actions that not one might make him more unworthy of her. In all the hardship and toil of his life his love was as his guardian angel, turning his feet from every dim and crooked byway; he trod in no path where he would not have the girl he loved to follow. The roughest labour was glorified if it lifted him a step nearer the altar ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... some search found what appeared to be the dead body of his son. He hastily tore off the jacket, which was soaked with blood and snow, and wrapping Halbert in his great cloak, took him upon his shoulders, and with much toil and difficulty reached the path again, and soon had his boy ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... watch upon their labours, but left them with Forbes in charge, and joined the Desmond party in a ramble over the island. This, by following the ravines, the bottoms of which were comparatively free from undergrowth, we found less difficult of accomplishment than we had anticipated; and although the toil of clambering up the steep acclivities, and over the smooth boulders that in many places encumbered the way, proved rather trying to our unaccustomed limbs, we nevertheless managed to make our way to the summit of ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... for silk and broadcloth to shrink from contact with the briers of an uncleared thicket; hence our sole recourse is to appeal to those only who are dressed for the service. We are conscious that we have entered upon no easy task; but, ashamed of having so long left our Northern sisters to toil and endure alone in a cause which is not one of section but of humanity, we come forward at last to assume our share of the hardship, trusting that what we have lost in our tardiness may be made up in earnestness ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... afterwards Christopher Columbus had travelled over the island and had subjugated the poor savages, by means of those terrible dogs which had been trained to hunt Indians, and unaccustomed as the natives were to any hard work, he had forced them to toil in the mines. Both Bovadilla and Ovando treating the Indians as a herd of cattle, had divided them among the colonists as slaves. The cruelty with which this unfortunate people was treated became more and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... nerve, it took stomach to patch together the bloody wrecks on the field of battle. It had taken tenacity to an ideal to starve and toil for his profession as he had done in Baltimore. Whence had come these qualities to Jason? He thought once more of his father on that trip on the West Virginian circuit, of the boys expelled from the church, of Sister Clark, of his own sense of mortification and his own contempt. And he dropped ...
— Benefits Forgot - A Story of Lincoln and Mother Love • Honore Willsie
... stood after his forty years journey, castin' wishful eyes onto the Promised Land, not bein' able to enter in because of some past error and ignorance. And I thought, as I stood there, how many happy restin' places we plan and toil for and then can't enter in and possess through some past error and mistake caused by ignorance as dense as Moseses ignorance. What a lot of emotions I had thinkin' this, and how on top of another mount the great prophet and law-giver wuz not, ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... would now and then fall asleep while trying to study; but he did not grow discouraged. The new machinery that he was compelled to use on the farm interested him because it taught him that the farm work could be stripped of much of the old-time drudgery and toil, and seemed to awaken his sleeping intellect. Soon he began asking the farm-instructors such questions as where the Jersey and Holstein cattle came from, and why they produced more milk and butter than the common long-tailed and long-horned cows that he ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... the solemn style, Nor one light sentence claims a transient smile. Hence, in these times, untouch'd the pages lie, And slumber out their immortality: They HAD their day, when, after after all his toil, His morning study, and his midnight oil, At length an author's ONE great work appeared, By patient hope, and length of days, endear'd: Expecting nations hail'd it from the press; Poetic friends prefix'd each kind address; Princes and kings received the pond'rous gift, And ladies read ...
— The Library • George Crabbe
... seated upon the tombstone, wrapped in thought, and apparently quite unconscious of the moonlight which now fell upon his chest and legs. He was of middle stature, rather thick-set, with over-developed arms and a labourer's hands, already hardened by toil; his feet, shod with heavy laced boots, looked large and square-toed. His general appearance, more particularly the heaviness of his limbs, bespoke lowly origin. There was, however, something in him, in the upright bearing of his neck and the thoughtful gleams of his eyes, which seemed ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... idle young scut! I'll larn ye to go round leaving bars down. You go an' tend to your work." So instead of hiking back gloriously laden with Calfskins, Guy was sent to ignominious and un-Injun toil in ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... scenes of peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close and noisy places, and carry their own freshness, deep into their jaded hearts! Men who have lived in crowded, pent-up streets, through lives of toil, and who have never wished for change; men, to whom custom has indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks; even they, with the hand of death upon them, have been known ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... from the vantage summit which humanity has reached—thanks to the toil and sacrifices of those who have preceded us—it may seem doubtful whether premature peace in the Netherlands, France, and England would have been an unmitigated blessing, however easily it might have been purchased by the establishment all over Europe of that holy institution called the Inquisition, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... concurrent benevolence of purpose and will. Did she learn any novelty in invention that would be useful to the practitioner of some special art or craft? she hastened to communicate and explain it. Was some veteran sage of the College perplexed and wearied with the toil of an abstruse study? she would patiently devote herself to his aid, work out details for him, sustain his spirits with her hopeful smile, quicken his wit with her luminous suggestion, be to him, as it were, his own good genius made visible as the strengthener and inspirer. ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... surf drove me against the beach and washed me out again. I praised God, and got on board, where my company was amazed to see me. So that night I sent all that were able to crawl to save the bark, which they did with much toil and small help of the natives; the country not permitting any one to assist in saving her,[314] expecting us to forsake her, that they ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... bind us together go back many, many years. We were boys together in sunny months full of frolic, plans and hopes. The merriment and the seriousness, the toil and the ambition of those days all cluster round him as memory brings him to me in the flush of his youth. I have seen little of him of late years, as you know, but the roots of our friendship needed no constant care; they were too ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... understand quite what you say, friend Spena," said the old man; "but surely God does not intend to give us the blessings of heaven without our doing anything to merit it? He intends us to labour, and toil, and pay the priests, and perform penances, and go to mass, and make confession of our sins to the priests, before He could think of letting ...
— The Woodcutter of Gutech • W.H.G. Kingston
... a partie carree," said the chaplain. "In these days of toil and tumult one has great needs of the country and its message of purity. Andate via! andate presto, presto! Ah, the town! Beautiful as it is, it is ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... inhuman places—for all of mankind that one sees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the industrial monsters that snort and toil there—mix up inextricably with my memories of my first days as a legislator. Black figures drift by me, heavy vans clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a motor bicycle, and presently, on the Albert Embankment, every seat has ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... of the gospel, we lay every laudable snare to induce men to learn to read and write. In doing this, spare time is occupied to the best account, and the enemy is foiled in some of his thousand-and-one ways of ensnaring the toil-worn navvy at the close ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... Premature toil did not bend him; what he is the others had it in them to be, and by their labour helped to make him. Because his spirit has never been so buffeted, let alone broken, by hard times, he is also the most self-reliant. And like the majority of lucky men, he takes fate's forbearance as ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... in the indefinite and unknown. The discovery of the binomial theorem was an effort of genius; but there was none shown in Jedediah Buxton's being able to multiply 9 figures by 9 in his head. If he could have multiplied 90 figures by 90 instead of 9, it would have been equally useless toil and trouble.(3) He is a man of capacity who possesses considerable intellectual riches: he is a man of genius who finds out a vein of new ore. Originality is the seeing nature differently from others, and yet as it is in itself. It is not singularity or affectation, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... various times and in various capacities with the "Southern Literary Messenger" in Richmond, Va.; "Graham's Magazine" and the "Gentleman's Magazine" in Philadelphia.; the "Evening Mirror," the "Broadway journal," and "Godey's Lady's Book" in New York. Everywhere Poe's life was one of unremitting toil. No tales and poems were ever produced at a greater ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... couch the Monk arose, With toil his stiffen'd limbs he rear'd; A hundred years had flung their snows On his thin ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... of pain to elevate and to discipline is simply not true. One has only to look to see that in countless cases the effect of pain is disaster. The world's best work is not born of pain but of pleasure. There is no pain and no suffering, there is hardly even toil, in the work of a genius. In all the higher walks of music, of art, of literature, the work is perfect in proportion as the worker finds himself in agreeable and pleasant surroundings. And what is true of the higher ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... than an hour. My companion moved forward, without lifting his eyes or opening his lips. He had become quite an old man since I had seen him last; his deeply furrowed, copper-coloured face stood out sharply against his white hair. Signs of a life of toil and suffering, of continual struggle, could be seen in Baburin's whole figure; want and poverty had worked cruel havoc with him. When everything was over, when what was Punin had disappeared for ever in the damp ... yes, undoubtedly damp earth of the Smolensky cemetery, Baburin, after ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Act, as brave in the Captain; but I will spare my Sense of it, and leave it to my Reader to judge as he pleases. It may be easily guess'd, in what Manner the Prince resented this Indignity, who may be best resembled to a Lion taken in a Toil; so he raged, so he struggled for Liberty, but all in vain: And they had so wisely managed his Fetters, that he could not use a Hand in his Defence, to quit himself of a Life that would by no Means endure Slavery; nor could he move ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... her eyes. Cynthia bent over and kissed among the stitches the poor fingers had toiled at day after day, sorry for the toil, glad for the love ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... contempt which Milton shares with nearly all saints and heroes and most philosophers; a little ungratefully, perhaps, as if forgetting that, compared with the mass of men, he had himself always been rich, and that what he owed to the toil of his father had not proved in his case a snare or a cumbrance, but the necessary condition of the learning and the leisure he had used so nobly. Finally, to give no more instances, there is the confession at once so personal and so representative of the feeling of all men who have ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... in with a sigh. "I can not deny you in anything, my child. Let me press your hand. Let us toil and labour together ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... and crew took refuge in one of the caravels. The natives, especially the cacique Guacanagari, offered him every assistance. The Spanish mariners regarded with a wistful eye the easy and idle existence of these Indians, who seemed to live in a golden world without toil, and they entreated permission ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... have been so happy; so happy in their daily toil, with its lofty aims and fair surroundings; so happy in the sense of duty done; so happy, above all, in their own Heaven-sent genius, with its noble opportunities and splendid achievements. They should have emulated the satisfaction told of Franklin Pierce. It is related that an enemy ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... similar syllables near together was a frequent source of error. Copying has always a tendency to become mechanical: and when the mind of the copyist sank to sleep in his monotonous toil, as well as if it became too active, the sacred Text suffered more or less, and so even a trifling mistake might be the ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... and look earnestly, for there is indeed much to be seen. That central figure, standing with hands folded on His bosom, so gentle, so majestic, so perfect in blameless humanity, oh what labour of reverent thought; what toil of ceaseless meditation; what changes of fair purpose, oscillating into clearest vision of ideal truth, must it have cost the great painter, before he put forth that which we see now! It is as impossible to ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... of grinding toil and the complete lack of sympathy at home could not extinguish the divine fire of genius in the youthful Murgatroyd. Exhausted and hungry as he often was at the end of the day's work, he devoted his leisure to the study of bricks and mortar, and out of his scanty pocket-money he bought for himself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... paths. The one was wide and curving, the other narrow and straight; the one was bordered with rich foliage, the other was bare and sandy. He might have run lightly along the one, he would have to toil wearisomely along the other. What wonder that his foot was turning in the direction of the first! But a queer pricking in his bosom and ...
— Dreamland • Julie M. Lippmann
... you pray oft and well, Soon will these angel-messengers arrive And make their home with you, and where they dwell All worthy toil and ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the night and, occasionally, the thin mists of dawn had begun to break on the narrow city pavements before their labours would cease. No one could truthfully say that theirs was not a hard-earned pillow. Sometimes they did not toil in vain. It depended largely ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... feature in Mr. Stoddard's labors was his tact in setting others to work for Christ. He taught his pupils that they must toil as well as pray, and soon after the first converts were brought to Christ, definite labor for others was assigned to them, not only among their schoolmates and those who visited the premises, but also in gathering in those not ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... followed the coast round to the Fitzroy River, which empties into King's Sound, and journeyed up that river until they reached a range which gave the explorers some trouble; in fact, they spent six weeks of constant toil and trouble ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... offices to such men; and, with this end in view, a sufficient salary is given you to enable you to help them—it is not right for men who are but new arrivals, and have done no work, to enjoy the fruit of another's toil. If rewards are bestowed justly, all will serve willingly in the hope of attaining reward. Therefore it is my will that you observe this order; and, that it may be thus inviolable, I declare that, now and henceforth, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... deserted an indulgent father, a fond and tender mother, who must want your aid; now, perhaps, unable to toil for bread; now, possibly laid upon the bed of sickness, calling, in anguish or delirium, for the filial hand of their only son to administer relief."——All the parental feelings of Alonzo were now called into poignant action.——"You have left a country, ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... upon the heights of Truth beyond the day's illusions, on the other its invisible urns pour down a silent and tranquil peace, a penetrating calm, upon our souls that weary of Life's fever. It makes us forget the struggles, perfidies, intrigues, the miseries of the hours of toil and noisy activity, all the conventionalities of civilization. Its domain is that of rest and dreams. We love it for its peace and calm tranquillity. We love it because it is true. We love it because it places us in communication with the other worlds, because it gives us the presage ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... were as white as lime-juice and constant holystoning could keep them. The brasswork about the cabins and the breeches of the guns was dazzling in its brilliancy. White canvas lined the breechings of the carronades. Her decks everywhere showed signs of constant toil in the cause of cleanliness. The result of the battle, however, seemed to indicate that Capt. Peakes had erred, in that, while his ship was perfect, his men were bad marksmen, and poorly disciplined. While their shot were harmlessly passing through the rigging of the "Hornet," ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... sits in long array a reverend troop Teaching the mystic truths of law divine: 'Mid these by right takes Agapetus place Who built to guard his books this fair abode. All toil alike, all equal grace enjoy— Their words are different, but their faith ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... the processes of collaboration have yet to begin. The serious work of the dramatist is over, but the most desolating part of his toil awaits him. I do not refer to the business of arranging with a theatrical manager for the production of the play. For, though that generally partakes of the nature of tragedy, it also partakes of the nature of amusing ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... Demming closed his eyes wearily, and the Bishop knelt by the bedside. Talboys and Louise left them, thus. After a while, the wife stretched forth her toil-worn hand and took her husband's. She thought she was aware of a weak pressure. But when the prayer ended there came no Amen. Demming was gone where prayer may only faintly follow; nor could the Bishop ever decide how far his vagabond had joined in his ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... lighten the burdens that may be laid on human spirits, and to induce the most favourable view of the worst circumstances. The toil which the party now undertook was such a blessed relief to them after the prolonged exposure to cold and comparative inaction in the boat, that all returned to the camp-fire in a much more cheerful ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... scorn. "Is this then the glorious return of Dante Alighieri to his country after nearly three lustres of suffering and exile? Did an innocence, patent to all, merit this?—this, the perpetual sweat and toil of study? Far from a man, the housemate of philosophy, be so rash and earthen hearted a humility as to allow himself to be offered up bound like a school-boy or a criminal! Far from a man, the preacher of justice, to pay those who have done him wrong as for a favor! This ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... described their exploits and recorded their motives and feelings with startling frankness. When a task of this kind has been performed by a capable and conscientious historian, it would be a work of supererogation for another enquirer to undergo the wearisome toil, even if he could. I have, therefore, for the purpose of my argument, freely availed myself of the materials given to the public by Mr. Froude, the Rev. C.P. Meehan, and Mr. Prendergast, not, however, without asking their permission, which was in each case ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... HILSE is a bearded man of strong build, but bent and wasted with age, toil, sickness, and hardship. He is an old soldier, and has lost an arm. His nose is sharp, his complexion ashen-grey, and he shakes; he is nothing but skin and bone, and has the ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... happily with his wife and children on a very moderate patrimony, has suddenly the misery to have a large fortune left him.—Time pressed. I set off at day break for London; plunged into the tiresome details of legateeship; and after a fortnight's toil, infinite weariness, and longings to breathe in any atmosphere unchoked by a million of chimneys, to sleep where no eternal rolling of equipages should disturb my rest, and to enjoy society without being trampled on by dowagers fifty deep, I saw ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 348, December 27, 1828 • Various
... cried Zeyn, in astonishment, "where could my father find such rarities?" The ninth pedestal redoubled this amazement, for it was covered with a piece of white satin, on which were written these words, "Dear son, it cost me much toil to procure these eight statues; but though they are extraordinarily beautiful, you must understand that there is a ninth in the world, which surpasses them all: that alone is worth more than a thousand such as these: if you desire to be master of it, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin; yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... room. No hiding-place could be better—unless the merchant chanced to come to visit his store. Well, that must be risked. Down she sped, and with much toil and difficulty carried her still swooning mistress up the steps and into the chamber, where she laid her ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... mechanics, and laborers, in other countries, seem to have a perfect passion for such pursuits, and take the greatest interest and pride in breeding and perfecting the lesser animals, though often obliged to toil for the very food they feed to them. Here, too, home influences are perceived to be good, and are encouraged by the employer, as supplying the place of other and much more questionable ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... a monstrous reptile inhabiting a marsh, with a number of heads, that grew on again as often as they were chopped off, and the destruction of which was one of the twelve labours of Hercules, an act which symbolises the toil expended in draining the fens of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Goodness of the Climate, and Fertility of the Country, may be produced with less Labour and more Plenty than in Great Britain; and innumerable Commodities might there be made by our own People, that are now imported at extravagant Prices, and excessive Toil and Danger from other Nations: Nay, we might supply other Nations with most of those Things which we now fetch from Abroad; so that though our Imports might decrease a little, yet would our Exports be abundantly augmented, which undoubtedly ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... rode high in the sky, monarch of all, and men smiled as they went about their daily toil, and thanked the good God who was sending them favourable weather. Here and there, dotted about the hillsides, the tiny white-washed cabins were full of life; the cocks crowed proudly as they strutted in and out among ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... has successively risen to some elevation above the prevalent idolatry; and then gradually, as by some irresistible gravitation, it has sunk back into the mare magnum of Hinduism. If we regard experience, purification from within is hopeless; the struggle for it is only a repetition of the toil of Sisyphus, and always with the same sad issue. Deliverance must come from without—from the Gospel of ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... happened a year or two before I went to sea, and so doesn't come under the ordinary designation of a "yarn," which, I take it, should only be about the doings of seafaring men and those who have to toil over the ocean for a living; still, as it concerns myself, I give it in pretty nearly the exact words I told it the other day to a party of youngsters who had just come in from cricketing and asked ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... man is after self-rule, spiritual purification, the attainment of the supernatural. A few rarely-gifted individuals press up this steep path with ease; by far the greater number follow slowly and with toil. Before deliverance from the fetters of earth, no one achieves a complete victory. This world is a school not the home of perfection. They, who are nearest the goal, know best how far they are yet distant from it. The following reflections are ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... sort of affectation of confidence; "but the fact is, Lord Marchmont used to know her husband, or his father, or his great grandfather, sometime in the dark ages, and so be wants me to make much of her. She is one of the people that it is real toil to make talk for; but by good fortune I remembered that I had heard some legend about her once knowing my uncles, and so I thought that a cross-examination of you about Gerald and Fern Torr would be a famous way of filling ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... strains of martial music, Their mighty thoughts suggest Life's endless toil and endeavour; And to-night ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... begins, for Jack rarely has an idle minute while he is on deck. Landsmen can call in help when their house needs repairing, but sailors must be able to keep every part of their house in perfect order; and there is always something to be done. But we are lazy; we toil not, neither do we tar ropes, and our main business is to get up a thoroughly good appetite while we watch the deft sailor-men going about their business. It is my belief that a landsman might spend a month without a tedious hour, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... been abandoned as worthless, every man was a land-owner in a small degree, and the patrimony of Millet sufficed for a numerous family of which he was the eldest son. Sufficed, that is, for a Spartan subsistence, made up of unrelaxing toil, with few or no comforts, save those of a spiritual nature which came in the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... Bitter toil of many days often proved to be a sad mistake, for the men who wrought there had more courage in endeavor than good understanding ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... for me all goes awry,— My efforts fond go unrequited then. "Why, surely it is but a trifle, this," They cry amazed, in sweet unknowing bliss. A trifle, yes, for Shelley or for Blake, They had not many extra marks at stake; I toil in vain toward a retarding goal,— I fear the poet's part is not ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... sets a higher value on work than on fighting. "Toil unsevered from tranquillity," "Labour, accomplish'd in repose"—is his ideal of happiness ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... of his own troops to his aid. They found a hot battle raging round Marcius, and many slain, but by the shock of their charge they drove off the enemy in confusion. As they began to pursue them, they begged Marcius, now weary with toil and wounds, to retire to the camp, but he, saying that "it was not for victors to be weary," joined in the pursuit. The rest of the Volscian army was defeated, many were slain, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... demise was an example of a general law, the workings of which few in the army failed to notice. It was always the large and strong who first succumbed to hardship. The stalwart, huge-limbed, toil-inured men sank down earliest on the march, yielded soonest to malarial influences, and fell first under the combined effects of home-sickness, exposure and the privations of army life. The slender, withy boys, as supple and weak as cats, had apparently ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... in Johnson's whole way of life. For the first time since his boyhood he no longer felt the daily goad urging him to the daily toil. He was at liberty, after thirty years of anxiety and drudgery, to indulge his constitutional indolence, to lie in bed till two in the afternoon, and to sit up talking till four in the morning, without fearing either the printer's devil ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... sing, and if one of you linger Over my pages in the Long, Long Night, And on some lone line lay a calloused finger, Saying: "It's human-true—it hits me right"; Then will I count this loving toil well spent; Then ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... days of factories and machinery, all forms of work were literally manual labour, and all the world over the labourer, obeying a primitive instinct, sang at his toil: the harvester with his sickle, the weaver at the loom, the spinner at the wheel. Long after machinery had driven the labour-song from the land it survived at sea in the form of shanties, since all work aboard a sailing vessel was ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... on subjects known my verse so frame, So follow it, that each may hope the same; Daring the same, and toiling to prevail, May vainly toil, and only dare to fail! Such virtues order and connection bring, From ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... philosophically and with too real a bitterness, too seriously, and too often, "Well, what is it, after all?" not to have plunged to her waist in the deep disgust which all men of genius feel when they try to complete by intense toil the work to which they have devoted themselves. Her youth and her rich nature alone kept Modeste at this period of her life from seeking to enter a cloister. But this sense of satiety cast her, saturated as she still was with Catholic spirituality, into the love ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... immovable foot of the foremast, and still striving, tooth and nail, to force the impossible passage. That these tortoises are the victims of a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical enchanter, seems in nothing more likely than in that strange infatuation of hopeless toil which so often possesses them. I have known them in their journeyings ram themselves heroically against rocks, and long abide there, nudging, wriggling, wedging, in order to displace them, and so hold on their inflexible path. Their crowning curse is their drudging impulse to straightforwardness ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... filled the sky. The horizon lay low and black against the afterglow. Beneath it the river shone like silver. Only the groaning, the heave and shrugging of the jam, and the low threatening gurgle of hurrying waters reminded the toil-weary men of the enemy's continued activity. Over beyond the rise of land that lay between the river and Stearn's Bayou could be seen the cloud of mingled smoke and steam that marked the activities of the dredge. For ten minutes they rested in the solace of tobacco. Orde was apparently ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... warring or quarrelling governments mining and sapping under me and shooting over me)—two years of universal ambassadorship in this hell are enough—enough I say, even for a man who doesn't run away from responsibilities or weary of toil. And God knows how it has changed me and is changing me: I sometimes wonder, as a merely ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... that I could not watch them, nor could you, reader, if you had been sitting by Doris. I had risen and come away from long months of toil; and I remember how I told Doris as we drove across those fields towards the hills, that it was not her beauty alone that interested me; her beauty would not be itself were it not illumed by her wit and her ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... If he had choice of angels and stars and a good woman, he'd choose the woman. The star is mighty far away and cold and steely. The angel's a deal too perfect to know sympathy with faults and blunders. I tell you, Little Statue, life is only moil and toil, unless love transmutes the base metal of hard duty into the pure gold of ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... beau, showing thereby the number of his valets. The same holds good of trees, water, mountains, and their representation in poetry and painting; their dignity takes no account of poverty or riches. Even the lilies of the field please us, not because they toil not neither do they spin, but because they do not require, while Solomon does, that other folk should toil and spin to ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee |
