"Remissness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the blockade dragged on for a long time, and the Athenians learned to what straits their army was reduced, they became angry with Kleon. He threw the blame upon Nikias, asserting that it was through his remissness and want of enterprise that the Spartans still held out, and declaring that, were he himself in chief command they would soon be captured. Upon this the Athenians turned round upon him and said, "Why, then, do not you yourself proceed thither ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... DEAR LIZZIE:—I am nearly ashamed of myself for neglecting to acknowledge the receipt of your letter, and the very acceptable box of patterns, some weeks ago; but you will pardon my remissness, I know, for you can imagine what a busy time I've had all summer, with a house full of company most of the time, and with very inefficient servants, and in some departments none at all; so I have had to be at times dining-room servant, house-maid, ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... we turn from our path to treat it; we refer to it by any clear utterance that distinctly turns the mind or attention to it; as, marginal figures refer to a parallel passage; we mention a thing by explicit word, as by naming it. The speaker adverted to the recent disturbances and the remissness of certain public officers; tho he mentioned no name, it was easy to see to whom he alluded. One may hint at a thing in a friendly way, but what is insinuated is always unfavorable, generally both hostile and cowardly. One may indicate his wishes, intimate his plans, imply ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... had the pleasure of making Mrs. Osborne Hamley's acquaintance yet,' said Mrs. Gibson, suddenly aware of a duty which might have been expected from her, 'and I must beg you to apologize to her for my remissness. But Molly has been such a care and anxiety to me—for, you know, I look upon her quite as my own child—that I really have not gone anywhere, excepting to the Towers perhaps I should say, which is just like another home to me. And then ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... say. I don't think it was my nature to: circumstance hindered me, perhaps. I have regretted it for another reason. This great remissness of mine has had its effect upon me. The older I have grown, the more distinctly have I perceived that it was absolutely preventing me from liking any woman who was not as unpractised as I; and I gave up the expectation of finding a nineteenth-century young lady in my ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... to be returned within three or four days. A longer delay than a week is considered an intimation that you are unwilling to accept the new acquaintance, unless some excuse for the remissness is made. ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... Prague. The travelling carriage was at the door, and he was about to step into it when the mysterious stranger suddenly appeared, and inquired after the Requiem. Startled by the suddenness of the man's appearance, and at a loss to explain his remissness, Mozart could only promise to fulfil the commission on his return, and, hastily entering his carriage, ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... to look upon him with respect, as a person possessed of the spirit of command; and it would, I am persuaded, stifle a hundred cabals, both in parliament and elsewhere, which, if they were cherished by his apparent remissness and indecision, would produce to him a vexatious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... themselves, for their lives were most laborious — teaching and preaching, and acting as overseers to the Indians in their labours continually, from the first moment of their arrival at the missions till their death. Thus, if the mayor of the township complained of any man for remissness at his work, he received no rations ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... place he met with many oppositions in the regulation of Church affairs, which were much disordered at his entrance, by reason of the age and remissness of Bishop Grindal,[18] his immediate predecessor, the activity of the Non-conformists, and their chief assistant the Earl of Leicester; and indeed by too many others of the like sacrilegious principles. With these he was to encounter; ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... it was only that ephemeral fictitious kind of goodness which springs from temper or disposition, which has no value in the eyes of Heaven, cannot stand the shocks of time and circumstance. It was not through any remissness of her own; she had never ceased her efforts, yet now after many months she was fain to confess that this young girl, who had promised such great things, seemed further than at the beginning from that holiness which is not of the earth, and which delights only in the contemplation ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... letter had Nick written to Carmen Gaylor—the one he had promised to write, telling her of his arrival in New York; that he was "pretty lonely, and didn't know how long he could stand for seeing no home sights." It never occurred to him to write again; and Carmen was not surprised at his remissness. She knew that Nick was not the sort of man who likes to write letters or can put his feelings upon paper. But when she received her invitation to visit Rushing River Camp, she could have ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... allowance for her illness. And as she had ever been in poor health and not strong enough to resist any annoyance, they did not find the least fault with her, despite even any lack of propriety she showed in playing the hostess with them, or any remissness on her part in observing the prescribed ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... spoke, however, the young soldier seized his rifle, and advancing toward the front, prepared to atone for his venial remissness, by freely exposing his life in ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... not to take place till the Father comes, would it?" asked the Senora, hesitatingly, as if the thing were evenly balanced in her mind. "The Father has not that hold on the younger men he used to have, and I have thought that even in Juan himself I have detected a remissness. The spirit of unbelief is spreading in the country since the Americans are running up and down everywhere seeking money, like dogs with their noses to the ground! It might vex Juan if he knew that you were waiting only for the ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... time, comprehends the peril in which he had brought his friends by his own remissness, and his self-accusation was so great, that, for a few moments, he forgot the fact that he was exposed to the greatest danger ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... lasts, slackens and unbraces the Mind, weakens the Faculties, and causes a kind of Remissness and Dissolution in all the Powers of the Soul: And thus far it may be looked upon as a Weakness in the Composition of Human Nature. But if we consider the frequent Reliefs we receive from it, and how often it breaks the Gloom which is apt to ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... associated individuals had to fear them together in a common cause, from one another. It is the sentinel they will begin to relax in their duty who watches, in order that the common and attachment to each other, and this labourers be not disturbed." remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... Monterey recommends that this be allowed to a limited extent, and that no restrictions be placed on the use of Chinese goods in Nueva Espana. He has used severe measures in regard to infringements of the ordinances regarding commerce, but there is evidently remissness in the customs inspection at Manila. Another paper gives an abstract of certain points in a petition sent from the Philippines. It is requested that the officers of vessels trading with Nueva Espana be inhabitants of the islands; that no space in the ships be sold; that ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... All in vain! Not a single servant that I have ever taken into my house have I allowed to leave me; to each one I have paid double wages and closed my eyes to all remissness, in order to buy their silence! And yet—the false, ungrateful creatures! Oh, my poor children! Only for your sake did I seek to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... for kindness for which he hoped to be the better all his life. He enclosed a long letter to his father, which he said would, he hoped, entirely exonerate his kind and much-respected tutor from any remissness or any participation in the scheme which he had thought it better on all accounts to conceal ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to him, and requested my position might be changed. The other second heard me do so, and very handsomely agreed that I was entitled to what I asked, and the colonel immediately apologised for his remissness to my interests. The ground was then marked out in another direction, and the colonel took me to my place, where I observed that one of the white-washed posts was exactly behind me, making me a sure mark ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... presented so agreeable a contrast to the domains of study at the good College of William and Mary. Let it not, however, be imagined that the boy Hoffland was in the habit, as Panurge said, of "breaking his head with study." Not at all. The remissness of that young gentleman in his attendance upon the lectures of the professors, had become by this time almost a proverb. Indeed, his attendance was the exception—his absence the rule. Buried in his quarters, in the neighborhood of Gloucester street, he seemed ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... invasion of the Bastonnais had become a reality, he felt himself imbued with the energy demanded by the occasion. Some of the ancient chroniclers, Sanguinet more particularly, have accused Mr. Cramahe of remissness in preparing for the defence of Quebec, but the researches we have made, in the composition of the present work, convince us that the charge is only partially true. He acted slowly in the earlier stages of the campaign because he shared the general disbelief in the seriousness of the Continental ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... wonder that a Battle should have married a woman who did not know how to behave in a crisis—who could even chant her wrongs from the housetop. At the moment this seemed to her the weightier share of the family remissness. The loyalty of the Battle wives had been as a lasting memorial to the Battle breeding—which, after all, was more ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... afterwards gives audience on the business of his government. The chiefs of the Vaisyas [4] also make their offerings before they attend to their family affairs. Every day it is so, and there is no remissness in the observance of the custom. When all of the offerings are over, they replace the bone in the vihara, where there is a vimoksha tope, of the seven precious substances, and rather more than five cubits high, sometimes open, sometimes shut, to contain it. In front of the door of the ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... answer to the darky's last cheerful good night, but if so he spoke without knowing it. The boatman let him go, willingly; Mr. Heatherbloom hadn't asked for his last bill back again and the other overlooked reminding him of his remissness. The greenback was ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... of her health favoured remissness and postponement. An hour of mental agitation left her with headache and a sense of bodily feebleness. Emma Vine she felt in the end obliged to dismiss from her thoughts; the difficulty concerning Alice she put ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... the ablutions practised by the Hindoos, under the belief that they would be injurious to my constitution, which, though healthy, had never been robust. A foundation was thus laid with me for habitual remissness in these ceremonies; and after I grew up, I persuaded myself that they were of less importance than they were deemed by my countrymen. My chief delight had ever been in books; and although, when engaged in active pursuits, ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... long as it is not blotted out.... Who is there who keeps, so constant a guard upon his heart and whole conduct as to avoid all sensible self-deceptions? Who is there upon whose heart no inordinate attachments steal; into whose actions no sloth, remissness, or other irregularity ever insinuates itself?... The Blessed Virgin was preserved by an extraordinary grace from the least sin in the whole tenor of her life and actions; but, without such a singular privilege, even the saints are obliged to say that they sin daily.... The Church of Christ is ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... and she had told him that the Colonel had been right not to come to Manchester Street. "I have told Emily," said Lady Rowley, "that she must not meet him, and she is quite of the same opinion." Nevertheless, there had been remissness. Sir Marmaduke felt that it was so, in spite of his wife's excuses. In this way he was becoming sore with everybody, and very unhappy. It did not at all improve his temper when he was told that his second daughter had refused ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... (somewhere in the modern Transylvania), and, attracting to his wild encampment as many fugitives as he could, by degrees he succeeded in training a very formidable troop of freebooters. Partly from the energy of his own nature, and partly from the neglect and remissness of the provincial magistrates, the robber captain rose from less to more, until he had formed a little army, equal to the task of assaulting fortified cities. In this stage of his adventures he encountered and defeated several ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... it. And sometimes he himself would inspect them, and, forming an opinion of each man's character from the condition of his farm, would raise some to honours and offices of trust, and blaming others for their remissness, would lead them to do better ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... resident aliens, and so forth; while in the event of war you will, I am aware, have further obligations laid upon you in the shape of pay [5] to carry on the triearchy, ship money, and war taxes [6] so onerous, you will find difficulty in supporting them. Remissness in respect of any of these charges will be visited upon you by the good citizens of Athens no less strictly than if they caught you stealing their own property. But worse than all, I see you fondling the notion that you are rich. Without ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... well able to figure to himself the feelings with which your Majesty will have welcomed the termination of the Mutiny and Rebellion in India, and of the chief miseries which these have brought in their train. He hopes that your Majesty will not have thought that there has been remissness in not marking this happy event by an earlier public acknowledgment and thanksgiving in India, as has already been done in England.[55] The truth is, that although this termination has long been steadily and ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... The King is much criticized' (you know, he's told to be quite frank) 'for taking no steps about his marriage. From enquiries among the entourage of the Princess Flavia, her Royal Highness is believed to be deeply offended by the remissness of his Majesty. The common people are coupling her name with that of the Duke of Strelsau, and the duke gains much popularity from the suggestion.' I have caused the announcement that the King gives a ball tonight in honour of the princess to be widely diffused, and ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope |
