"Idler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other things, that her strong nature needs. Madeline has much to unlearn, much to forget; and she knows this. She is growing to understand her strong, brave self, to value her strength. She will never be an idler, never sink into the ranks of the commonplace. If, after a time, she finds for herself a worthy love, she will be the tenderest, the truest of wives. But she is sufficient unto herself. She has beauty, genius, force, a strong will, a splendid ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... ideal fortune is to find an old garden, once very richly cared for, since sunk into neglect, and to tend, not repair, that neglect; it will thus have a smack of nature and wildness which skilful dispositions cannot overtake. The gardener should be an idler, and have a gross partiality to the kitchen plots: an eager or toilful gardener misbecomes the garden landscape; a tasteful gardener will be ever meddling, will keep the borders raw, and take the bloom off nature. Close adjoining, if ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... area railings and under the steps. Not a dignified position, perhaps, nor a pleasant one in which to be caught in the event of a sudden opening of the area door; but other men have risked as much for a much idler curiosity! ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... notably Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of being Earnest, Pinero's Second Mrs Tanqueray, The Princess and the Butterfiy, His House in Order and The Thunderbolt; C. Haddon Chambers's The Idler; H. A. Jones's Masqueraders; Alfred Sutro's John Glayde's Honour and The Builder of Bridges; Carton's Liberty Hall and The Tree of Knowledge; Anthony Hope's Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau; and Stephen Phillips's ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... just as full of good sights and good odours for the worker as for the idler, and it depends only upon the awareness, the aliveness, of our own spirits whether we toil like dumb animals or bless our labouring hours with the beauty of life. Such enjoyment and a growing command of our surroundings are possible, after a little practice, ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... idler parts of Nibelungen discussions perhaps the idlest are the attempts made by partisans of Icelandic and German literature respectively to exalt or depress these two handlings, each in comparison with the other. There is no real question of superiority or inferiority, but only ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... "I suppose there are idler boys," announced Fillet grudgingly; and it was open to anyone to hear in his words the further meaning; "but, on the other hand, there are many more studious and more deserving." The fact is, the little man ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... levied an additional charge upon him, in the form of two pretty mulattos, whose infantile pranks amply repaid the additional toil. A few years, and a severe cough and pain in his side compelled him to be an idler for weeks together, and Mag had thus a reminder of by-gones. She cared for him only as a means to subserve her own comfort; yet she nursed him faithfully and true to mar- riage vows till death released her. He became the victim of consumption. ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... myself—Marian is tapping the floor restlessly with her boot and I must hasten—I may say that I am no idler. It was I who carried on the work of finishing Glenarm House, and I manage the farms which my grandfather has lately acquired in this neighborhood. But better still, from my own point of view, I maintain in Chicago an office as consulting ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... of Winchester. The morning after his arrival, he found a crowd in the public square and learned that an auction sale of personal effects was about to take place. Everyone from the administrator of the estate to the village idler, was eager for the sale to begin. But a clerk to keep record of the sales and to draw the notes was wanting. The eye of the administrator fell upon Douglass; something in the youth's appearance gave assurance that he could "cipher.". ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... had been in Petersburg, Paris, Vienna, all over civilised Europe during the last five weeks, whether on business or on pleasure bent, nobody knew. He affected to be an elegant idler; but it was said by the initiated that wherever Smithson went the markets rose or fell, and hides, iron, copper, or tin, felt the influence of ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... emblem of truth, in token of our belief in the blessed trinity of God—is simply putting on the harness for work in the Lord's vineyard. It is also the act of putting on the Christian soldier's armor and entering the service. But of what use is a helmet, sword and shield to an idler in the camp? Of what account is harness, unless the horse that carries it is trained and made ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... sign! The bowed blinds are not stirred. I dare not cry, lest from the common street Some passing idler catch one sacred word That's dedicate to her. How may I greet My love to-day? how may I lure her near? Ah! I will write my message on her wall In living sunshine. She shall see and hear: The silent fire of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... that Tonsard was disappointed from the start in the hope he had indulged of increasing his comfort by an increase of property in marriage. The idle son-in-law had chanced, by a very common accident, on an idler father-in-law. Matters went all the worse because Tonsard's wife, gifted with a sort of rustic beauty, being tall and well-made, was not fond of work in the open air. Tonsard blamed his wife for her father's short-comings, and ill-treated her, with the customary revenge of the common people, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... during the winter months, is the lounge of the English idler at Naples, and then looks as flowerless and dingy as Kensington in an east wind—assumes a very different appearance in spring. On the 7th of May, we, who had passed the winter at Rome, were at once struck with the brilliancy of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... had given out there, and he had been obliged to leave in the middle of his junior year, though he had kept up a pleasant intercourse with the members of his class, with whom he had been a great favorite. He was a good deal of an idler in the world. I do not think his ambition, except in the case of securing Mary Dunn for his wife, had ever been distinct; he seemed to make the most he could of each day as it came, without making all his days' ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... am getting absolutely tired and sick of doing nothing. Ever since I left college I've been an idler, and I can't say I'm enjoying it. I arise in the morning and wonder how I can manage to get through the day. I read the papers, go down to the store, up to the club, down to your office, back to the club to lunch, and maybe play pool ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... had made at Naples—chiefly artists, like himself, men of letters, and the rich commercialists, who were already vying with the splendour, though debarred from the privileges, of the nobles. From these he heard much of Zanoni, already with them, as with the idler classes, an object of ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... V. Let no Idler who hath no particular calling, or vagrant Person under pretence of a calling, be suffered to perform worship in Families, to or for the same: Seeing persons tainted with errours or aiming at division, may be ready (after that manner) to creep into ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... can lure him into its nets. To watch one of these small horse-dealers at a fair, and to observe the manner in which he conducts his bargains, is very curious. He lounges about all day, apparently doing nothing; he is the only idler around. Once in a while somebody approaches him and mutters something, to which he gives a brief reply. Then he goes to a tap-room or stable-yard, and is merged in a mob of his mates. But all the while he is doing sharp clicks of business. There is somebody talking ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... on. The fields began to whiten with the ripening grain. I grew uneasy, feeling myself only an idler in a land so able to fend for itself. I now was much disposed to discuss means of getting back over the long trail to the eastward, to carry the news that Oregon was ours. I had, it must be confessed, nothing new to suggest as to making it firmly and legally ours, beyond what had already been ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... crudest, and least fruitful form of this rebellion was that of crime. The working-man lived in poverty and want, and saw that others were better off than he. It was not clear to his mind why he, who did more for society than the rich idler, should be the one to suffer under these conditions. Want conquered his inherited respect for the sacredness of property, and he stole. We have seen how crime increased with the extension of manufacture; how the yearly number of arrests bore a ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... unpleasant, prosperous or adverse. Ask Him; and He will give you true knowledge to know what a serious position you are in, what a serious thing life is, death is, judgment is, eternity is; that you may be no trifler nor idler, nor mere scraper together of gain which you must leave behind you when you die: but a truly serious man, seriously intent on your duty; seriously intent on working God's work in the place and station to which He has called you, ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... to go no further. He engaged a room at the inn, dismissed his vehicle, and gave himself up to the contemplation of French sea-side manners. These were chiefly to be observed upon a pebbly strand which lay along the front of the village and served as the gathering-point of its idler inhabitants. Bathing in the sea was the chief occupation of these good people, including, as it did, prolonged spectatorship of the process and infinite conversation upon its mysteries. The little world of Blanquais appeared to form a large family party, of highly developed amphibious habits, which ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... which I am grateful now come to think of it, since otherwise I should not be here to-night. I wish to make the worst of myself, the very worst, for whatever I am not, at least I am honest. Now having told you that I am, or was half an hour ago, an idler, a good-for-nothing, prospectless failure, I ask you—if you care ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... the sentence, when he observed moving along the ramparts towards him a figure he knew. It was Grio. There was nothing strange in the man's presence in that place, for he was an idler and a sot; but Claude did not wish to meet him, and debated in his mind whether he should retreat before the other came up. Pride said one thing, discretion another. He wanted no fracas, and he was still hanging doubtful, measuring the distance between them, when—away ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... was the mask, smooth and sterile, of the hunger for adornment, for gold bands and jewels and perfume, for goffered linen and draperies of silk and scarlet. She was the naked idler stained with antimony in the clay courts of Sumeria; the Paphian with painted feet loitering on the roofs of Memphis while the blocks of red sandstone floated sluggishly down the Nile for the pyramid of Khufu the King; she was the ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... error that has resulted in the production of this anti-social phenomenon which we meet with every day; namely, that the degradation of the workman is the greater as his labor is more severe, and the elevation of the idler is higher as his idleness is more complete. But the study of the laws which maintain order in nature, released from the fetters of preconceived ideas, has led the Freemasons to that doctrine, far ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... dignified, but after he had had a few glasses he would talk loud and emphatically, and made no secret of the fact that he had money enough to live a fine gentleman's life—but that one man was a thick-headed idler and another a genius and a man of business, that he belonged to the latter class and had no idea of sitting down to rest until he was able to write six ciphers after the figures that denoted ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Maryland there were indentured white slaves. When the system was abolished the same conditions plagued the colonists that annoy us now. Mr. Doyle, in his work entitled English Colonies in America, says, "The liberated servant (white) became an idler, socially corrupt and often politically dangerous." The whites became an irresponsible, shiftless, and criminal class, just as the Negroes have become to an alarming extent since freedom. There are to-day in certain sections of the South whole neighborhoods ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... the good-looking, amusing, well-dressed idler, was living down at the "Savoy," and was daily in her company, driving, motoring, picnicking, making excursions in the mountains, or taking trips over to "Monte" by the train-de-luxe. He had left the villa early in the afternoon, ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... of Idlenes[196] be it enacted, that if any men be founde to live as an Idler or renagate, though a freedman, it shalbe[197] lawfull for that Incorporation or Plantation to w^{ch} he belongeth to appoint him a M^r to serve for wages, till he ...
— Colonial Records of Virginia • Various
... escape from it. They fulfil the great law of labor in the letter, but break it in the spirit; fulfill it with the muscle, but break it with the mind. To some field of labor, mental or manual, every idler should fasten, as a chosen and coveted theatre of improvement. But so he is not impelled to do, under the teachings of our imperfect civilization. On the contrary, he sits down, folds his hands, and blesses himself in his idleness. This way of thinking is the heritage of the absurd and unjust ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... promontories comes very easily back upon one who submits himself long to the eternal influences of sky and sea which made them sing. It is all one,—to be a Roman poet in his villa, a lazy friar of the Middle Ages toasting in the sun, or a modern idler, who has drifted here out of the active currents of life, and cannot make up his ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... swung off the Biera Mar to thread its way through many tree-lined streets—it is a misdemeanor, punishable by fine, to cut down a tree in Rio de Janeiro—it carried a young American with the air of an accomplished idler, who has been mildly bored by the incomparable view from the waterside boulevard. When it stopped at the foot of one of the slum covered morros that dot all Rio, and a liveried doorman came out of a splendid residence to ask the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... money to hoard, and leave for his heirs to spend foolishly. If I do this, most will commend me as an industrious and hard-working man; but if I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler. Nevertheless, as I do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me, and do not see anything absolutely praise-worthy in this fellow's undertaking, any more than in many an enterprise of our own or foreign governments, however amusing it may be to him or them, I prefer ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... gray building, upon whose walls the idler's knife had carved many a rude inscription, was the village school. There, amid those carvings, were seen the rough-hewn initials of many a man now "well-to-do in the world." Some, high above the rest, seemed as captains, ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... the majority of men make their mark and disappear in the field of humanity. A little earth effaces it, and the furrows we have made succeed one another like graves in the cemetery. Is not the furrow of the ploughman as valuable as that of the idler, who has a name, however, a name that will live, if, by reason of some peculiarity or some absurd exploit, he makes a little noise ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... before a stranger; partly because his search after effusions which had so little value in their eyes, and his attempt to fix them by writing, seemed to them an idle and useless occupation. The only reason which they could conceive for it was, that the learned idler meant to ridicule them; and his request was frequently answered by the words: "We are no blind men to sing or ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... task, directly I had become settled on board the "Medora," was to send word to my friends of my arrival in the Crimea, and solicit their aid. I gave a Greek idler one pound to carry a letter to the camp of the 97th, while I sent another to Captain Peel, who was hard at work battering the defences of Sebastopol about the ears of the Russians, from the batteries of the Royal Naval ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... the old teamster wanted to keep the young folks with him as long as he could. There were still numberless questions he hadn't put to Melvin and he had taken a fancy to Dorothy. If she was simply a "towerist" she was, of course, an idler and it was of no consequence her wasting her time. He hadn't learned yet why Melvin was here and if he didn't find that out he felt he "couldn't bear it." So now ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... costumes, linger about the music-stand, losing themselves in the arbors and shrubberies. The kiosks are almost all occupied: charming little Chinese pagodas these—eight-sided, with lattice screens on all sides—screens so tightly woven that no curious idler can see in, and yet so loosely put together that each hidden inmate can see out. Even the trees overhead have a hand in the villany, spreading their leaves thickly, so that the sun itself has a hard time to find out what is going on beneath their branches. All this you become ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Major had been but an idler about deck; but finding the crew of a gun short-handed, he volunteered his services, and was immersed in the business of loading when a hand clapped him on the shoulder. ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... goes in ten minutes—what is to be done?"—"Ma foi—it is too late!" "Try, ma bonne—it's a pity he should lose his passage—voici." The Englishman gave his fee. Desiree looked about her, and then taking the idler by the arm, she hurried him through the crowd, this way and that way, ending by putting him aboard without any passport at all. "It is too late to get one," she said; "and they can but send you back." He passed undetected. France has a plenty of these managing females, though Desiree ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in the world; I was sure that he had. He has a little income of his own, but he is too proud and ambitious to be an idler. He looked so manly when he talked about it, standing up straight and strong in his knickerbockers. I like men in knickerbockers. Aunt Celia doesn't. She says she doesn't see how a well-brought-up Copley can go about with his legs in that condition. ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... character, joined to all his talents, astonished at first those who saw him." It is said to have been through her zeal that he was admitted to the Academy so young. Among others who formed her familiar circle were her devoted friend Pont de Veyle; the Chevalier d'Aydie; Formont, the "spirituel idler and amiable egotist," who was one of the three whom she confesses really to have loved; and President Henault, who brought always a fund of lively anecdote and agreeable conversation. This world of fashion and letters, slightly seasoned with ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... out of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain under-bred and pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes the idler, who began life along with them—by your leave, a different picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book in very recondite places, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... relentless interference. The morning sunshine was slowly thickening again in an indolent mist that seemed to rise from the saturated plain. A stray lounger shuffled over from the blacksmith's shop to the store to take the place of another idler who had joined an equally lethargic circle around the slumbering forge. A dull intermittent sound of hammering came occasionally from the wheelwright's shed—at sufficiently protracted intervals to indicate the enfeebled progress of Sidon's vehicular repair. A ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... Furthermore, I am persuaded that if every man could see in a flash the burning history of the one who is down, the whole of our reasonable population would take thought for the morrow—drink-shops would be closed, the dice-box would rattle no more, and the sight of a genuine idler would be unknown. Not a few of us have seen tragedies enough in the course of our pilgrimage, and have learned to regard the doomed weaklings—the wreckage of civilisation, the folk who are down—with mingled compassion and dismay. I have ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... is it to me whether he be on the roll or no? Petrousha shall not go to Petersburg! What would he learn there? To spend money and commit follies. No, he shall serve with the army, he shall smell powder, he shall become a soldier and not an idler of the Guard, he shall wear out the straps of his knapsack. Where is his commission? ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... husband the 1st Earl of B., with whom she travelled much on the Continent, where she met Lord Byron, her Conversations with whom she pub. in 1834. This is the only one of her books which has any value. The others were slight works on Travel, such as The Idler in Italy, annuals, and novels. She became bankrupt and went to Paris, where she lived under the ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... him an idler. He feared this accusation, and wept over it in secret, though he was convinced that he was no idler, but something different, that ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... working world, with no place for the idler, whether he be high or low, rich or poor. The measure of a man is the service he renders humanity. Actions are measured by the same rule. The value of religion to life, its right to time and place, is measured by this, Does it help or inspire men to service, does it increase the quantity or improve ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... called El Mariane, related a number of notable tricks and swindles; others, who displayed prodigious skill and ingenuity, roused the gathering to enthusiasm. After this theme had been exhausted, a few suggested a game of cane, and the idler with the long black locks, whom they called El Canco, sang in a low ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... won so unique a place in the personal regard of the everyday man? Ford is one of the richest men in the world; yet he is not hated. What is the reason for his general popularity? He is not an idler. He has celebrated each success by taking on another job. And he always has given a hand-up to the other fellow instead of kicking him down so that he might climb higher because of his failure. He has understood and sympathized with the ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... he begged, "you spoke of yourself a little time ago as though you might have a personality at which I ought to have guessed. Are you a woman of Society, or an artist, or merely an idler?" ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... some object (evidently precious) in his right hand with a mother's care; concealing it under the skirts of his coat to keep it from collisions in the crowd, and still more, when you remarked that important air always assumed by an idler when intrusted with a commission, you would have suspected him of recovering some piece of lost property, some modern equivalent of the marquise's poodle; you would have recognized the assiduous gallantry of ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... as he strode away, and I fancy there was a new light in my eyes,—certainly there was a new purpose in my heart. For I had been often sadly puzzled as to what I should do when once I was out of college. I had no mind to become an idler at Riverview, but was determined to win myself a place in the world. Yet when I came to look about me, I saw small prospect of success. The professions—the law, medicine, and even the church—were overrun with vagabonds who had brought them so low that no gentleman could ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... good for us; and our much talking, writing, and thinking about them characteristic, and therefore good. And he was not one of those who do penance for that sweating indolence in the fits of desperate panic. Beauchamp's argument that the rich idler begets the idling vagabond, the rich wagerer the brutal swindler, the general thirst for a mad round of recreation a generally-increasing disposition to avoid serious work, and the unbraced moral tone of the country an indifference to national responsibility (an argument doubtless extracted ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dear man; what work is there—work that will bring in money—for a decorative, untrained idler like Helen? And what time would she have left to live the only life she's fit to lead if she had to make money? I'm not worried about bare life for Helen; I'm worried about what kind of life it's to be. Helen was brought up to be an idler and to ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the mill; why, only in the mill was I happy. But could you imagine a man as proud as he, David, taking help from me? He answered rather curtly; said that some day I should see what he was worth; that he was not the idler he seemed. He said that again to me face to face, that once when I have seen him in all ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... over that letter, and folded it so that even the candle-droppings would not be creased and fall away! He was happy, though wretched because he could not see her. It was the life he had longed for. At last (and most pathetic!) he was proving his usefulness in this world. He was no longer the mere idler ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... we've spoilt you, and instead of getting better as you grow up, you're getting worse. Now let me hear no more of this, please. I wish you would imitate your sister a little more. Of course if you won't do your share in the shop, no one can make you. If you choose to be an idler about the house, we shall have to endure it. We can only advise you for your own good. But as for this ..." She stopped, and let silence speak, and then finished: "Let me hear no ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... put a sudden stop, for a time, to all these labors. The mother wrote, in the utmost distress, to say that DIETRICH had disappeared from his home, it was supposed with the intention of going to India "with a young idler not older than himself." His brother immediately left the lathe at which he was turning an eye-piece in cocoa-nut, and started for Holland, whence he proceeded to Hanover, failing to meet his brother, as he expected. Meanwhile ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... he always insisted that they should ride into the stream far enough for him to discern their features, holding torches to their faces by night and by storm. The wooing of those days was prompt and practical. There was no time for the gradual approaches of an idler and more conventional age. It is related of one Stout, one of the legendary Nimrods of Illinois, who was well and frequently married, that he had one unfailing formula of courtship. He always promised the ladies whose hearts he was besieging that "they should live in the timber where they ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... stand up and take what the class called a "dead set;" that is, he could not recite at all. Sometimes he would make such ludicrous blunders that the whole class would burst into a laugh. Such are the applauses an idler gets. He was wretched, of course. He had been idle so long that he hardly knew how to apply his mind to study. All the good scholars avoided him; they were ashamed to be seen in his company. He became discouraged, ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... eyes seemed to turn involuntarily to the window where Margaret sat, her pale face bending still lower over her work. This last speech of Lady Redmond's perplexed him still more. The Hugh who had courted Margaret had been a good-natured idler in his eyes; he had heard him talk about his shooting and fishing with something like enthusiasm; he had been eager to tell the number of heads of grouse he had bagged, or to describe the exact weight of the salmon he had taken last year in Scotland, ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... have still something to show for their money, and that something, bad though it be in one form, may be decidedly good in another form, or if put to another use. The gambler alone—except, perhaps, the absolute idler—enjoys the unenviable position of a thorough, out-and-out, unmitigated drone. He does absolutely nothing, except produce unhealthy excitement in himself and his fellows! He has nothing whatever to show for the money he has obtained except 'risk,' and that can ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... our republic was founded teach that one person has no right to trample on the rights of another—that we can have no aristocratic order—that he who labors with head or hand is intrinsically more honorable than the mere idler and pleasure seeker, however wealthy—that legally neither birth nor riches confer any special privileges. And in all this the spirit of our American government is in direct opposition to the spirit of monarchical ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... not believe God ever made an idler," she said, with high gravity that widened the gulf between them. "To whom much is given, much ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... Thou shalt not steal, is this: Thou shalt live of thine own work, that thou mayest have to give to the needy. This is your bounden duty, and if you do not so God will pronounce you not a Christian but a thief and robber. In the first place, because you are an idler and do not support yourself, but live by the sweat and toil of others; in the second place, because you withhold from your neighbor what you plainly owe him. Where now shall we find those who keep this commandment? Indeed, where should ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... Rome for a winter, an idler by necessity for six weeks. It is the very place of all the world ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... of K'ang, her name being Hwa-mei, though from the nature of her charm she is ofttime called the Golden Mouse. But touching this affair of your own immediate danger: we being both but common men of the idler sort, it is only fitting that when high ones threaten ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... he heard must have taken place at least twenty years before he wrote the poet's life, and his recollection of such a conversation must at least have been very hazy. Johnson's opinion is further deprived of weight when we read what he wrote of the History in the "Idler," in 1759, the year after its publication, that "the history had perished had not a straggling transcript fallen into busy hands." If the straggling manuscript were worth anything, it must have had some claims to authenticity; and if it had, then ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... persuade the rich that the difference of conditions arises from an error in the accounts; and how can the poor, in their beggary, conceive that the proprietor possesses in good faith? To investigate the sufferings of the laborer is to the idler the most intolerable of amusements; just as to do justice to the fortunate is to the miserable the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... certainly quite incorrigible as an idler, if that can be called a purpose, and, Flip, don't change; I love you for it; you are one of the most restful things ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... to be done, and what man can do; and he makes them do it too. There's no shirking work or being slack in stays when he carries on the duty, and there's not a smarter ship in the service, nor a happier one either, though he won't allow an idler on board. The fact is, my boy, both officers and men know that no one can shirk their work, so it comes easy to all, and we have more leave and less punishment than nearly any ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... race, a certain measure of the teaching of God and of the Spirit of God was ready, promised, sure as the oath of Him that made heaven and the earth, and all things therein. That was Solomon's belief. We do not find that it made him a fanatic and an idler, waiting with folded hands for inspiration to come to him he knew not how nor whence. His belief that wisdom was the revelation and gift of God did not prevent him from seeking her as silver, and searching for her as hid treasures, from applying his heart to seek and search out ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... society resembled nature. For does not society modify Man, according to the conditions in which he lives and acts, into men as manifold as the species in Zoology? The differences between a soldier, an artisan, a man of business, a lawyer, an idler, a student, a statesman, a merchant, a sailor, a poet, a beggar, a priest, are as great, though not so easy to define, as those between the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow, the shark, the seal, the sheep, etc. Thus social species have always ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... some one who will attend to the affairs honestly and painstakingly. There must be no idler about the house; and any young man . ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... State. We hang upon the word of the first servant Whom we may please to punish. Then he bethought him To take from us our privilege of hiring Our serfs at will; we are no longer masters Of our own lands. Presume not to dismiss An idler. Willy nilly, thou must feed him! Presume not to outbid a man in hiring A labourer, or you will find yourself In the Court's clutches.—Was such an evil heard of Even under tsar Ivan? And are the ...
— Boris Godunov - A Drama in Verse • Alexander Pushkin
... his hour of peace, Must pay for it with hours of strife and care, Must win by toil the evening's sweet release, The rest that may be portioned for his share; The idler never knows it, never can. Peace is the glory ever of ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... accepted himself as the guardian of the great classical tradition (which never existed); and he wrote more and more dull music. It is idle to tell me he is austere when my inner consciousness tells me he is merely barren, and idler to ask me feel beauty when my ears report no beauty to me. He had no original emotion or thought: whenever his music is good it will be found that he has derived the emotion from a poem, or else that there is no emotion but only very fine decorative work. In most of his ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... have no idea of the educational uses of a vacation, Uncle Peter," said I. "You are an unsystematic person, an incorrigible idler." ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... pale-eyed rat of a man, with ferrety eyes and a goatee beard, quiet and peaceable in his ways and inoffensive enough, but a rare hand at gossiping about the beach and the walls—you might find him at all odd hours either in these public places or in the door of his shop, talking away with any idler like himself. And how I came to get into talk with him on that particular night was here: Tom Dunlop, Maisie's young brother, was for keeping tame rabbits just then, and I was helping him to build hutches for the beasts ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... of the features may certainly be easily reorganized; if we substitute sherry, a chop, and a club in Pall-Mall, for white spruce beer, sandwiches, and a tavern; replacing the curricle and footman by a cab and tiger, the remainder, with trivial alterations, may stand good of the fashionable idler of to-day, as of him ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Englishmen to believe that any real danger to liberty could come from an idler and a voluptuary such as Charles the Second. But in the very difficulty of believing this lay half the king's strength. He had in fact no taste whatever for the despotism of the Stuarts who had gone before ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... Freedom's house, going in and out of Wildman's, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim way she knew that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from the things of which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John Telfer, the talking, laughing idler. Now, out of the storm, the boy had come back to her, his hands and his clothes covered with the mud of the road, and talked to her, a woman old enough to be his mother, of marriage and of coming to live with him in his house. She stood, chilled, looking into the ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... the ominous paper in the Bible, and determined to make known the whole mysterious case at once to Mr. Craigie, the chief magistrate of Aberdeen. Not for a single instant did Mr. Comyn suspect a hoax, or imagine the affair to be only the mischievous trick of some idler. Indeed, such was not likely; the times were superstitious, nor were there any persons connected or at variance with the family who were liable to be suspected of having played off such a foolish and wicked jest at the expense of the minister, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... because of idleness. He did not fail because he was lazy. Of course idleness will wreck anybody. Laziness is a deadly sin unless it is overcome. I know something about it because I have had to fight it all my life. But this man was not an idler. This man was a worker. He failed, but he did not fail because he refused to put his hand to any task or to bend ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... upon a wooden tablet, the size of a common slate. One or two, who appeared to be more advanced in their studies, were furnished with a copy-book, an expensive article in that place. Some were busy at arithmetic, while, every moment, whack went the rod upon the crown of the idler ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... the routine of classes and repetitions, nor could the desultory mode of schooling enforced upon him by ill-health answer much purpose by way of discipline. According to his own account he was at college, as he had been at school, an inveterate idler and truant. But outside the field of school and college routine he showed an eager curiosity and activity of mind. "He was of a conversable temper," so he says of himself, "and insatiably curious in the aspects of life, and spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of men ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on the rare and gala occasions when, at his own plainly expressed desire, he was placed again in temporary service. With that liberty he made it his business to see that no dog was shirking. A glance at a slack strap was enough to betray the idler; and an admonishing nip on the culprit's ear or flank was the cause of a reformation that was sudden and abject for a while ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... done with the Grand Monarque in one of his caustic sketches,—this would be as exciting, one might suppose, as to sit through a play one knows by heart at Drury Lane or the Theatre Francais, and might furnish occupation enough to the curious idler who was only in search of entertainment. The mechanical obstacles of half-illegible manuscript, of antiquated forms of speech, to say nothing of the intentional obscurities of diplomatic correspondence, stand, ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... farmers, led by that unerring instinct which is the unconscious result of long experience, know the tramp at once, and can immediately distinguish him from the bona-fide 'harvester,' in quest of honest employment. The tramp, indeed, is the sturdy idler of the roads—a cousin-german of the 'beach-comber,' who is the plague of consuls and aversion of merchant skippers. In almost every port of any size the harbour is beset by a gang of idle fellows, whose pretence ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... of whom the country has rung for some brief time past. Fools asked her for charms to make them beloved, misers for means to increase their store; some demanded to know the future—an idle wish, since it cannot be altered; others would have an explanation of the past—idler still, since it cannot be recalled. I heard their queries with scorn, and demanded the means of avenging myself of a deadly enemy, for I grow old, and may trust no longer to Bilboa blade. She gave me a packet—'Mix that,' said she, 'with any liquid, and ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... not a soul there save the two whom I had followed, and a surpliced clergyman, who seemed to be expostulating with them. They were all three standing in a knot in front of the altar. I lounged up the side aisle like any other idler who has dropped into a church. Suddenly, to my surprise, the three at the altar faced round to me, and Godfrey Norton came running as hard ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... patience, labor and good sense. Steel and the mind grow bright by frequent use; In rest they rust. A goodly recompense Comes from hard toil, but not from its abuse. The slave, the idler, are alike unblessed; Aye, in loved labor only is there rest. But he will read and range and rhyme in vain Who hath no dust of diamonds in his brain; And untaught genius is a gem undressed. The life of man is short, but Art is long, And labor is the lot of mortal man, Ordained ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... service at a common centre—not by letting the readers scatter themselves about the library shelves. To one speaker who held that every one in a free public library had the right to go to the shelves, and choose his books for himself, it was answered that this was equivalent to saying that it is the idler's right to stroll about in every place devoted to a special business, and interrupt that ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... that no animal ever yet lost his senses through blighted love, which proves abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of a know-nothing, of a knave. An employment from which Jesus abstained, in imitation of whom folks of great understanding ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... the honour in being in command of the riff-raff of the land? Dost not know that the most of their officers are made out of tapsters and tinkers and the like? Does it make a tavern idler or a bankrupt the less of either, that a pack of dunghills choose to dub him by another title? Once peace and law are come again, this same scalawag Brereton, or Fownes, or whatever he will then be, must return to my service and fulfil his bond, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... Connoway, the village do-nothing, enterprising idler and general boys' abettor, beckoned us across the road. He was on the top of a little knoll, thick with the yellow of broom and the richer orange of gorse. Here he had stretched himself very greatly at his ease. For Boyd Connoway knew how to wait, ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... the daily papers, increased interest in gardening, several more pipes a day, and so forth. Breakfast comes finally to its long-deferred end about ten; then there is a consultation with the gardener, which is, of course, business, and makes the idler feel that really his active habits are returning; then two letters have to be answered; then, just as he means to go to his study, he sees Mr. Fritterday passing, and before he has finished his colloquy over the hedge with him, it is past midday. When he does get to his ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker |
