"Improvidence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the man whom they were asked to convict. These unfortunate wives and children were an important scenic feature in our defence, and if the prisoner was unmarried Gottlieb had little difficulty in supplying the omission due to such improvidence. Some buxom young woman with a child at the breast and another toddling by her side could generally be induced to come to court for a few hours for as many dollars. They were always seated beside the prisoner, but Gottlieb was scrupulous ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... the labour of the nation or of the individual be misapplied, and much more if it be insufficient,—if the nation or man be indolent and unwise,—suffering and want result, exactly in proportion to the indolence and improvidence—to the refusal of labour, or to the misapplication of it. Wherever you see want, or misery, or degradation, in this world about you, there, be sure, either industry has been wanting, or industry has ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... without ruining the people. The condition of my loss would be scarcely worse. As to the rest, you there lose all; and even your friends will be more ready to accuse your want of vigilance and your improvidence, and your ignorance of and indifference to your own business, than to pity you. That so many garrisoned houses have been undone whereas this of mine remains, makes me apt to believe that they were only lost by being guarded; ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Neglect. — N. neglect; carelessness &c. adj.; trifling &c. v.; negligence; omission, oversight, laches[Law], default; supineness &c. (inactivity) 683; inattention &c. 458; nonchalance &c. (insensibility) 823; imprudence, recklessness &c. 863; slovenliness &c. (disorder) 59, (dirt) 653; improvidence &c. 674; noncompletion &c. 730; inexactness &c. (error) 495. paralipsis, paralepsis, paraleipsis [in rhetoric]. trifler, waiter on Providence; Micawber. V. be negligent &c. adj.; take no care of &c. (take care of &c. 459); neglect; let slip,let go; lay aside, set aside, cst aside, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... light, and portable property in that house in Clapham that has escaped my lamentable improvidence, but there are one or two things—the iron-bound chest, the bureau with a broken hinge, and the large air pump—distinctly pawnable if only you can contrive to get them to a pawnshop. You have more Will power than I—I never could get ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... four-post bedsteads, often of the native mahogany, sometimes mahogany chairs, and corresponding articles. If a white family, on removing, expose their furniture to sale, it is caught up by the people with eagerness at almost any price asked. The very improvidence of the negroes stimulates their industry. They are exceedingly litigious, and exceedingly ostentatious on the few grand occasions they enjoy.[10] These luxuries, especially the former, cost them dear, but their ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... also that he is recognising it as something foreign to himself it is not easy to see). As for the action and interaction that goes on in the non-ego, he refers it to fate, fortune, chance, luck, necessity, immutable law, providence (meaning generally improvidence) or to whatever kindred term he has most fancy for. In other words, he is so much impressed with the connection between luck and cunning, and so anxious to avoid contradiction in terms, that he tries to abolish cunning, and dwells, ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... names in their language to distinguish such ills, the offspring of a luxury to them unknown. The diseases of the savage, however, though few, are violent and fatal; the severe hardships of his mode of life produce maladies of a dangerous description. From improvidence they are often reduced for a considerable time to a state bordering on starvation. When successful in the chase, or in the seasons when earth supplies her bounty, they indulge in enormous excesses. These extremes of want and abundance prove equally pernicious, ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... chamber until she died! There was no more joy for her; her sun was set, the lustre of her life was gone; the lute had lost its tone, the flower its perfume, the bird its airy wing. What a fleet, as well as fatal, tragedy! How swift upon her improvidence had come her heart-breaking pang! There was an end of faith, for he was faithless; there was an end of love, for love had betrayed her; there was an end of beauty, for beauty had been her bane. All that hitherto made life delightful, all the ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... Louisiana.[2] Denouncing the policy of getting all one could out of the slaves and of giving back as little as possible, Jones undertook to show how their spiritual improvement would exterminate their ignorance, vulgarity, idleness, improvidence, and irreligion; Jones thought that if the circumstances of the Negroes were changed, they would equal, if not excel, the rest of the human family "in majesty of intellect, elegance of manners, purity of morals, and ardor of piety."[3] He feared that white men might cherish a contempt for Negroes ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... free companions rode together and pooled their gains. Then the thrift of some and the improvidence of others set in motion the immutable laws of distribution. Soon a class of rich and powerful individual owners was created, who employed great outfits of ten to fifty men each, splendidly mounted and armed. These outfits were in continually moving camps, and travelled light, without wagons or ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... assured, say of myself, that no mortal could reap more perfect happiness from the tender passion than my fortune had decreed me. I married a charming young woman for love; she was the daughter of a neighboring beggar, who, with an improvidence too often seen, spent a very large income which he procured by his profession, so that he was able to give her no fortune down; however, at his death he left her a very well accustomed begging-hut, situated on the side of a steep hill, where travelers could not immediately ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... three hundred pounds; she must have supposed the occasion pressing. Thus fortified against paternal improvidence, I expended a hundred in the purchase of a horse, and staked the remainder on him in a match, and was beaten. Disgusted with the horse, I sold him for half his purchase-money, and with that sum paid a bill to maintain my father's credit in the town. Figuratively speaking, I ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... not lie in the "Charity-Ball" direction; her funds were not lavished in encouraging hypocrisy and improvidence among the idle and worthless; and the quality of her charity was, in fact, as admirable as its quantity. Her chief aim was the extension and improvement of popular education; but there was no kind of misery that she ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... classes in Massachusetts were locked in a struggle which menaced the peace of the country. Here as elsewhere hard times had forced the small farmers of the interior counties to the wall. No doubt their difficulties were caused in part by their own improvidence, but they were increased by the prevailing scarcity of money. So dire was the want of a medium of exchange that many communities resorted to barter. The editor of a Worcester paper advertised that he would accept Indian corn, rye, wheat, ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... "obstinately idle and wilfully improvident," as if it had not been proved again and again that the only ground on which such appellations can be applied to them in Ireland is, that their obstinacy consists in objecting to work without fair remuneration for their labour, and their improvidence in declining to labour for the benefit of their masters. It is the old story, "you are idle, you are idle,"—it is the old demand, "make bricks without straw,"—and then, by way of climax, we are assured that these "poor creatures" are assisted to emigrate with ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... the mere removal of that great obstacle to regular industry and commerce, would in any very short space of time produce considerable or extensive improvements. The ignorance, the profligacy, the improvidence and the various other moral evils, which necessarily accompany the slave trade, will, it is to be feared, long survive the extinction of that traffic which produced and fostered them. The whole history of mankind shews that the ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... prodigious, consisting of twelve sometimes fourteen hours, and the occupation extremely unwholesome, owing to the smell of the oil and the perpetual noise of machinery. The pay is low, beginning at three francs and reaching to four or four and a half a day. We may blame the artizan class for improvidence, insobriety, and many other failings, but none who calmly compare the life of a clock-maker, for instance, condemned to spend twelve hours of the twenty-four in this laborious, unwholesome, and ill-remunerated labour, ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... individual, ma'am,' said Bitzer, dropping his voice and drawing nearer, 'he is as improvident as any of the people in this town. And you know what their improvidence is, ma'am. No one could wish to know it better than a ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... The errors entered into the folkways, formed a part of them, and were protected by them. Error, accident, and luck seem to be the only sense there is in primitive life. Knowledge alone limits their sway, and at least changes the range and form of their dominion. Primitive folkways are marked by improvidence, waste, and carelessness, out of which prudence, foresight, patience, and perseverance are developed slowly, by pain and loss, as experience is accumulated, and knowledge increases also, as better methods seem ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... indifference, negligence, heedlessness, remissness, incaution, nonchalance, inadvertence, laxity, improvidence, inattention, dereliction, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... effects from the segregation and the privacy of the home, even of the good kind. For there are very many bad homes; those in which drunkenness, immorality, quarreling, selfishness, improvidence, brutality, and crime are taught by example. After all, we like to speak too much in generalities—the Home, Woman, Man, Labor, Capital, Mankind—forgetting there is no such thing as "the Home." There are homes of all kinds with every conceivable ideal of life ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... provided himself. You can neglect your billiard-table, your books, or even your wine-cellar,—because they eat nothing. But your horses soon eat their heads off their own shoulders if you pass weeks without getting on their backs. Hampstead had endeavoured to mitigate for himself this feeling of improvidence by running up and down to Aylesbury; but the saving in this respect was not sufficient for his conscience, and he was therefore determined to balance the expenditure of the year by a regular performance of his duties at Gorse Hall. But the other matter was still more important to him. ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... to place, observing certain symptoms which in England mean undeserved poverty and suffering. His diagnosis would be right for England, but for Ireland it is hopelessly wrong. What he sees is not so often symptomatic of undeserved misfortune, as of laziness, improvidence, and rank dishonesty. The Irish are a complaining people. Self-help is practically unknown among them, at any rate, among the Catholic population. They have reduced complaining to a system, or, if you will, they have elevated it to the level of a fine art. The recent agitations have demolished any ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... them have shown me their little treasure of a few shillings, and have told me it was their intention to save more until they had enough to buy a horse, a gun, or some wished-for article, but their improvidence has always got the better of their thriftiness, and this sum has eventually been spent in treating their friends to ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... socks that she had so carefully made and darned. A pile of his clothing lay at her feet. He had carried nothing but his fiddle and the clothes he stood in, and if she had had more tears she could have wept for his improvidence, for the prospective tatters and rents that must needs befall him in that unknown patchless life to which he ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... be. It sounds better to lay all the blame upon the oppressor than to lay it upon the oppressed; and yet, as a rule, the cowardice or folly of the oppressed has generally been one cause of their misfortunes, and cannot be overlooked in a true estimate of the case. That drunkenness, improvidence, love of gambling, and so forth, do in fact lead to pauperism is undeniable; and that they are bad, and so far disgraceful, is a necessary consequence. In such cases, then, pauperism is a proof of bad qualities; and the fact, like all other ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... mercantile community rejected. In its progress, the want of discipline, forts, ships, munitions of war, credit abroad, and frugality at home, was most severely felt; and the principal honor derived from it arose from the exploits of the few frigates left to us by improvidence and parsimony, from the achievements of the Northern troops of Scott, Brown, and Miller, disciplined during the war, and the courage and sagacity of the veteran Jackson and his Western volunteers behind their cotton ramparts at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... D.W.]—and he had always his temperament against him, as well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of his muse. He would no doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did for the money, but actually if not literally he could not do more. When it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and be became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... condition of the Erie at this time manifested the beginning of that general policy of improvidence and recklessness which afterward, for nearly a generation and a half, made the company a speculative football in some of the most disreputable games of Wall Street stock-jobbers. For though the original estimate had been three millions and the highest estimate of the cost during construction ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... eternal babble of the economists about the improvidence of laborers, their idleness, their want of dignity, their ignorance, their debauchery, their early marriages, etc.? All these vices and excesses are only the cloak of pauperism; but the cause, the original cause which inexorably holds four-fifths of the human race in disgrace,—what is it? Did ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... brought prosperity in place of waste and improvidence. Profits were devoted to the purchase of additional lines, thus enlarging their domain and strengthening their position. Prosperity increased with rapid strides; and the beneficial effects of extirpating wasteful rivalry and building up a substantial system with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... of the improvidence of the Indians generally, the habits of the tribes along the Columbia River may be cited. The Columbia River has often been pointed to as the probable source of a great part of the Indian population of this country, because of the enormous supply of salmon furnished by it and its tributaries. ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... and which had further aggrandised every one of the three powers of which they were most jealous, I found them in a perfect phrensy of rage and indignation: not that they were hurt at the shocking and uncoloured violence and injustice of that partition, but at the debility, improvidence, and want of activity, in their government, in not preventing it as a means of aggrandisement to their rivals, or in not contriving, by exchanges of some kind or other, to obtain their share of ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... expenditures. With the southerner it is "easy come, easy go." He therefore suffers more frequently in a crisis. The low cost of living keeps down his wages, so that as a laborer he is poorly paid. This fact, together with his improvidence, tends to swell the proletariat in warm countries of the Temperate Zone; and though here it does not produce the distressing impression of a proletariat in Dublin or Liverpool or Boston, it is always degrading. It levels society and economic status downward, while in the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... fifty is sometimes as blind as love at twenty-five. With an improvidence that belied his nationality, Alick Henderson married after a courtship as brief as it was happy. For a year he shared the hap-hazard life of his wife and father-in-law; then Nature saw fit to alter the small menage. The artist died, and almost ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... in which he found the people was mainly due to their own improvidence and gregarious incapacity is also tolerably clear. On the west coast of Norway, dear to the heart of the salmon-fisher, you find people living under conditions certainly no more favourable than here exist. North of the Hardanger Fjord, the spring opens only in ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... numerous and more destructive ones engendered by the pestilential effluvia that float in the atmosphere of more favoured climes, the diversity of their maladies is, as might à priori be inferred, very limited. But, unfortunately, that improvidence which is so remarkable in their kindred tribes is also with them proof against the repeated lessons of bitter experience they are doomed to endure. Alternate excesses and privations mark their progress through life, and consequent misery ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... disreputable, a pure spirit of Philistinism among the waifs and strays of thy Bohemia. For lo! thy very gravediggers talk politics; and thy castaways kneel upon new graves, to discuss the cost of the monument and grumble at the improvidence of love. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... St.-Ange, in response, "I thing you is juz right. I believe, me, strong-strong in the improvidence, yes. You know my papa he hown a sugah-plantation, you know. 'Jules, me son,' he say one time to me, 'I goin' to make one baril sugah to fedge the moze high price in New Orleans.' Well, he take his bez baril sugah—I nevah see a so careful man ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... almost everywhere marred by poverty or negligence of execution. In short, the whole place was the true emblem of an understanding and talents run to waste, and become more dangerous than advantageous to society, by the want of steady principle, and the improvidence of the possessor. ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... with utter improvidence, although deprived of sufficient food. Three or four couples there have some four or ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... is once in the net, the oppression of him, and making the most of his distress, are ours. The nets which we use against the poor are just those worldly embarrassments which either their ignorance or their improvidence are almost certain at some time or other to bring them into: then, just at the time when we ought to hasten to help them, and disentangle them, and teach them how to manage better in future, we rush forward to pillage them, and force all we can out of ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... cannot divest himself of the idea, that in virtue of his rank he is entitled to deference and submission; and the workman conceives that, in virtue of his comparative poverty, he is entitled to assistance in difficulty, and to protection from the consequences of his own folly and improvidence. Each party expects from the other something more than is expressed or implied in the covenant between them. The workman, asserting his equality and independence, claims from his employer services which only inferiority can legitimately ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... interesting memoir of the ruins of Persepolis, under the title of "An Archaiological Journey in Persia." On his route to the ruins he witnessed melancholy evidence, in the condition of the surface and population, of the improvidence and noxiousness of Oriental despotism. He tells us that the remains of the magnificent palace of Darius are dispersed over an immense plateau, which looks down on the plain of Merdacht. "Assuredly, they are not much, compared with what they must have been in the time of the last Prince ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... the side from which Plato regarded it is that from which we turn away. Population is the most untameable force in the political and social world. Do we not find, especially in large cities, that the greatest hindrance to the amelioration of the poor is their improvidence in marriage?—a small fault truly, if not involving endless consequences. There are whole countries too, such as India, or, nearer home, Ireland, in which a right solution of the marriage question seems to lie at the foundation of the happiness of the community. There ...
— The Republic • Plato
... he replied, "our people are prosperous and happy. There is very little poverty and what there is is obviously the result of vice or improvidence. Our labor is light and all the necessaries of life, many of the comforts and some of the luxuries are abundant and cheap. I hardly know what you mean by the tyranny of the trusts; they do not seem to care to ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... usual improvidence, the Australians, when they take a turtle, feast upon it until all has been consumed and the cravings of hunger induce them to look out for another; but the Torres Strait Islanders are accustomed to dry the flesh to supply them with food during their voyages. The meat is cut into thin slices, ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... early, and go out of season last. Such conditions, of course, would furnish motives for skill and industry, and demand of the people frugal and temperate habits. The luxuriance of a tropical climate tends to improvidence and indolence. Where nature pours her fullness into the lap of ease, forethought and providence are little needed. There is none of that struggle for existence which awakens sagacity, and calls into exercise the active powers of man. But in a country where nature only yields her fruits as the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... other. The water of the Mayenne is so harsh, that it cannot be drunk or used for cookery, and were it not for the proximity of the Loire, and some aqueducts, Angers, though built on a river, must necessarily become desolate for want of water. The same improvidence is visible in many towns in France, and ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... money. In this rich and poor were alike. They were all ahead of their income, and it seems as if, from one cause or another, from extravagance or improvidence, from horses or the gaming-table, every Virginian family went through bankruptcy about once in ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... plots, any one who cared for rag-picking and hole-picking might find a good deal of indebtedness. It is the old jealousy of a clever and unscrupulous self-made man towards an improvident seigneur and his somewhat robustious son. The seigniorial improvidence, however, is not of the usual kind, for M. le Marquis de Clairefont wastes his substance, and gets into his enemy's debt and power, by costly experiments on agricultural and other machinery, partly due to the fact that he possesses on his estate a huge marl-pit ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... greatness; and he has watched, with such emotions as none but a gentleman of the old school can feel, the infusion and gradual diffusion of those principles of plebeianism and ruffianism, from discontented improvidence, immigration, and other causes, which threaten to destroy whatever has justified the wisest pride; and to sink—not raise—all the mob of people to a common level. He has his whims, and though they have won for him little popularity, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... or trace of cultivation was visible; we had no corn for our cattle, but fortunately the more sheltered spots in the vicinity of water were clothed with luxuriant grass, which the horses greedily eat. Our followers had, with the improvidence of Asiatics, brought but a scanty supply of food, and indeed we were all to blame for having trusted too much to the wild mountains for supplies. There were plenty of chikore, however, and as I had succeeded in shooting two or three in the ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... which it would be rash to pronounce a positive judgment without a much longer and closer investigation than we have bestowed upon it, that the labouring classes of this island, though they have their grievances and distresses, some produced by their own improvidence, some by the errors of their rulers, are on the whole better off as to physical comforts than the inhabitants of an equally extensive district of the old world. For this very reason, suffering is more acutely felt ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... very rich families, however, are not numerous. The lavish expenditure in which Russian nobles often indulge indicates too frequently not large fortune, but simply foolish ostentation and reckless improvidence. ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... River—then called the Subhavastu—but which perhaps applies more particularly to the upper end of the valley, was famous for its forests, flowers and fruit. But though the valley retains much of its beauty, its forests have been destroyed by the improvidence, and its flowers and fruit have declined through the ignorance, of the fierce conquerors into whose hands ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... the daughter of Lord Spencer, afterwards first Earl Spencer; but her impulsiveness, her waywardness, and improvidence were a legacy from her grandfather, "Jack" Spencer, the grandson and special favorite of the beautiful Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. Her "Torismond," she called him. His was a career of profligacy, a course of error ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... well paid for his services, and succeeded in acquiring, partly by the sale of his influence, partly by gambling, and partly by pimping, an estate of three thousand pounds a year. For under an outward show of levity, profusion, improvidence, and eccentric impudence, he was in truth one of the most mercenary and crafty of mankind. He was now no longer young, and was expiating by severe sufferings the dissoluteness of his youth: but age and disease had made no essential change in ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for them to drink it. All which it takes to support the paupers, and prosecute the crimes which ardent spirit occasions, is, to those who pay the money, utterly lost. All the diminution of profitable labor which it occasions, through improvidence, idleness, dissipation, intemperance, sickness, insanity, and premature deaths, is to the community so much utterly lost. And these items, as has often been shown, amount in the United States to more than $100,000,000 a year. To this enormous and wicked waste of property, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... was eighteen, he had had enough of his shiftless surroundings, and struck out for himself, journeyed across the mountains to Greenville, Tennessee, met there a girl of sixteen named Eliza McCardle, and, with youth's sublime improvidence, married her! As it happened, he did well, for his wife had a fair education, and night after night taught him patiently, until he could read fairly well and write a little. I like to think of that family group, so different from most, and to admire that girl-wife teaching her ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... child, grown an adult, as the most atrocious crimes are to any of your lordships. Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding truth, of carefully respecting the property of others, of scrupulously abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can involve him in distress, and he will just as little think of lying or cheating or stealing, or running in debt, as of rushing into an element in ...
— Reflections on the Operation of the Present System of Education, 1853 • Christopher C. Andrews
... charming young woman for love; she was the daughter of a neighbouring beggar, who with an improvidence too often seen, spent a very large income, which he procured from his profession, so that he was able to give her no fortune down. However, at his death he left her a very well-accustomed begging hut ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... and keen reckoner, began quickly to put the dilapidated Castlewood accounts in order, of which long neglect, poverty, and improvidence had hastened the ruin. The business of the old gentleman's life now, and for some time henceforth, was to advance, improve, mend my lord's finances; to screw the rents up where practicable, to pare the expenses of the establishment down. He could, somehow, look to every yard ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Socialist regime the earth would, as by a magician's wand, be transformed into a paradise. Over-population, bad harvests, the maladjustment of international demand and supply, and individual folly, laziness, wastefulness, improvidence, and passion would apparently no longer have the same unfortunate consequences which they have now. "The struggle for individual existence disappears...."[60] "The words 'poor' and 'charity' will be ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... Providence: it was his improvidence with our money, and he ought to be punished. Can't we go to law and recover our fortune? My uncle ought to take measures, and not sit down by such wrongs. We ought ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... were suffering from the famine that their waste and improvidence had brought upon them; and perhaps Smith might have said something on the white man's side. But he had nothing to say when rebuked for smiling at Tecaughretanego's sacrifice of the last leaf of his tobacco to the Great ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... men were left to their fate. At the last moment an effort was made to organise some defence and twelve or fourteen pieces of artillery were mounted around the storehouse, but when they came to examine the powder, it was found—oh, Spanish improvidence!—to be so damp that it was useless. At sunrise they thought to dry it, but they were too late, for with fierce war-whoops, the Indians were upon them; three of their number were killed and the store-house, in which the others ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... to the mountain air of St. Moritz, where they were frozen out and driven back to Paris—but always spending freely and thinking little of the vague tomorrow. Durkin, indeed, recognized that taint of improvidence in his veins. He was a spendthrift; he had none of the temperamental foresight and frugality of his wife, who reminded him, from time to time, and with ever-increasing anxiety, of their ever-melting letter of credit. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... clothing. Or fuel to feed the big stove they had always enough without cost, for their mother's father was alive, and sold wood and fir cones and coke, and never grudged them to his grandchildren, though he grumbled at Strehla's improvidence and hapless, dreamy ways. ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... of the testator, another. The third was General MacKelpie, a poverty-stricken Scotch laird who had a lot of valueless land at Croom, in Ross-shire. I remember father gave me a new ten-pound note when I interrupted him whilst he was telling me of the incident of young St. Leger's improvidence by remarking that he was in error as to the land. From what I had heard of MacKelpie's estate, it was productive of one thing; when he asked me "What?" I answered "Mortgages!" Father, I knew, had bought, not long before, a lot of ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... With the improvidence of the true traveller I had consumed my stock of provisions ere reaching the town of Taverna after a march of nine hours or thereabouts. A place of this size and renown, I had argued, would surely be able to provide a meal. But Taverna belies its name. The only tavern discoverable was a composite ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... worth mentioning, in advance. Now, he was short of flour; then, the potatoes were out; next, the pork was consumed; and always there was a great scarcity of groceries, and other necessaries of that nature. This neglect on the part of the parishioners, coupled with a certain improvidence on that of the pastor, left the clergyman's family completely in that state which is usually described as being in the "from hand to mouth" condition, and which consequently occupied so large a portion of the good ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... apt to have the readiest sense of the intention of Providence to care for him, to send him bread well buttered; the foolish and thoughtless depend on heaven to do their thinking, and many court bankruptcy while praying for solvency. But the improvidence of man does not disprove the providence of God. So far from encouraging sloth and recklessness this truth provokes to progress by the assurance of the cooeperation of infinite powers ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... only—for the arm holes; but be careful that the quantity of material be very ample—say four times as much as is positively necessary, for nothing is so characteristic of a perfect gentleman as his improvidence. This garment must be constructed without buttons or button-holes, and confined at the waist with cable-like bell-ropes and tassels. This elegant deshabille had its origin (like the Corinthian capital from the Acanthus) in accident. A set of massive window-curtains ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... The improvidence of the poor is a most distressing spectacle to all right-minded students of sociology. But please spare me your homily this time. It does not apply. The poor are the poor in spirit. Those who are rich in spiritual endowment will never ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... understood. On the other hand a normal year will see him well started and safe for another two or three seasons, while a really good year will place him in a position which means that only carelessness and improvidence can prevent him from attaining comfortable and ...
— Wheat Growing in Australia • Australia Department of External Affairs
... the noble, close heart and eyes to the sweet allurements of domestic life, lest posterity suffer physically or mentally by them. But the criminal has no restraints but what the law enforces. Ignorance, poverty and disease, huddled in dens of wretchedness, where they multiply with reckless improvidence, sometimes fostered ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... with game, and it was killed from mere wantonness, such was their improvidence, that they were obliged to resort to their salt pork and other provisions; and as, in thirty days, forty large casks of whisky were consumed, it is easy to suppose, which was indeed the fact, that every night that they halted, the camp was a ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... was a bubble, besides that, instead of being prompted to this on a principle which so far raised him above other men, must have been prompted by a principle that sank him to the level of the brutes, viz., acquiescing in total ventrine improvidence, imprescience, and selfish ease (if ease, a Pagan must have it cum dignitate), but above all he must have made proclamation that in his opinion all disinterested virtue was a chimera, since all the quadrifarious virtue of the scholastic ethics was founded either on personal self-sufficiency, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... sacrifice too great to repair the damage which their unwitting neglect may have allowed to become irreparable. So it is, I think, with the people of the United States. Capable of every devotion in a recognized crisis, we have yet carelessly allowed the habit of improvidence and waste of resources to find lodgment. It is our great good fortune that the harm is ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... burden on his family or his friends or the public. Just in the same way, we condemn the other man, who, rather than sacrifice his immediate gratification, will incur the risk of forfeiting his self-respect and independence in after years as well as of making others suffer for his improvidence. A man who, by the exercise of similar economy and forethought, makes provision for his family or relations we esteem still more than the man who simply makes provision for himself, because the sacrifice of passing pleasures ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... upon Honora in vehicles of all descriptions, in proportion to the improvidence or prosperity of the owners. And Honora returned the calls, and joined the Sewing Circle, and the Woman's Luncheon Club, which met for the purpose of literary discussion. In the evenings there were little dinners of six or eight, where the men ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... banishing from his frivolous mind the memory of every sorrow; what had just failed to kill him would leave him as thoughtless and unconcerned as if it had never crossed his path. Such irrational elasticity and innocent improvidence would never put two and two together. Every morning there would be a new world with the same fool to live in it. But let some sobering passion, some serious interest, lend perspective to the mind, and a point of reference will immediately be given for protracted observation; then ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... say with becoming modesty that he took no credit for planting the trees that have made such a substantial income for his family, because "I had to be slapped in the face in the dark before I became wise, and then the natural improvidence of mankind came near spoiling Nature's tip when the children gratified their little stomachs in preference to planting for the future. Men are but children of an older growth, a wise man said. That ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... Autocrat has already noted as attending advanced years in their race. They seem the natural human interest of a street so largely devoted to old clothes; and the thoughtful may see a felicity in their presence where the pawnbrokers' windows display the forfeited pledges of improvidence, and subtly remind us that we have yet to redeem a whole race, pawned in our needy and reckless national youth, and still held against us by the Uncle of Injustice, who is also the Father of Lies. How gayly are the young ladies ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... and it was some time before I had my facts arranged in proper sequence. I could not forget that Madame la Vicomtesse was looking at me fixedly. I reviewed Nick's neglected childhood; painted as well as I might his temperament and character—his generosity and fearlessness, his recklessness and improvidence. His loyalty to those he loved, his detestation of those he hated. I told how, under these conditions, the sins and vagaries of his parents had gone far to wreck his life at the beginning of it. I told how I had found him again with Sevier, how he had ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in a camping season as they can. Their own rule, they say, is to kill a deer only when they need venison to eat. Their excuse is specious. What right have these sophists to put themselves into a desert place, out of the reach of provisions, and then ground a right to slay deer on their own improvidence? If it is necessary for these people to have anything to eat, which I doubt, it is not necessary that they should have ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... without it, however great the wealth or exalted the position of the married pair may be, while the worst evils of life are lightened and made bearable by its presence. Marrying for love need not mean improvidence. Only an unreasoning passion based on selfishness will plunge the beloved into privation and want. The highest, truest love has its substratum of common sense, self-restraint, and thought ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... the counterfeit of virtues, contrived so cunningly that it was hard to distinguish their true texture. The fidelity of the clansmen to their leaders was faultlessly beautiful; extravagance appeared like generosity, and improvidence like unselfishness; anarchy disguised itself under the name of liberty; and war and plunder were decorated by poetry as the honourable occupation of heroic natures. Such were the Irish with whom the Norman conquerors ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... strode the carpet more fiercely. "Wicked improvidence! Shameful profligacy; callous-hearted man! To live a rogue and die a beggar—leaving his daughter ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... responsibility of labor, in both ways, its fruition and its penalty. Once declare in New York that Government would take care of poverty and old age, so as to make it honorable, and it would be a premium upon improvidence. With us, it is expected that every man will work, will earn, will lay up, will deliver his family from public charity. There is, to be sure, an Alms House to catch all who, by misfortune or improvidence, ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... envy on the government which detained so large a proportion of the mechanical power: they forgot that the unproductive employment of large numbers created the demand for their crops, without which no dollar had been theirs to spend. Their outcries rung in the ears of the Commissioner: he blamed the improvidence of the Governor, who had rejected their applications, and threw some ridicule on his architectural ambition. The Commissioner only saw a gaol, but Macquarie believed, that when he erected an edifice he was forming a model; and that in aiming at symmetry ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... providers as to be scarcely felt. So men now, in this generation, ought clearly to be laying up a store, or, what is still more powerful, arranging and organising that the generations which follow may enjoy comparative freedom from useless labour. Instead of which, with transcendent improvidence, the world works only for to-day, as the world worked twelve thousand years ago, and our children's children will still have to toil and slave for the bare necessities of life. This is, indeed ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... We can afford to allow ourselves every species of luxury; and I counsel Luis and Pepita to make the tour of Germany, France, and Italy, as soon as Pepita is over her trouble, and once more in her usual health. The children may, without improvidence or folly, throw away a few thousands of dollars on the expedition, and bring back many fine books, pieces of furniture, and objects of art, to adorn ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... provoked ridicule; their poverty often threw them upon the community; the large percentage of illiteracy among them evoked little sympathy; their inclinations towards intemperance and improvidence were not neutralized by their great good nature and open-handedness; their religion reawoke historical bitterness; their genius for politics aroused jealousy; their proclivity to unite in clubs, associations, and semi-military companies made them the objects of official ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... us so enormous that it never could be spent. Like a young rake coming into a very large inheritance, we attacked this noble fauna with characteristic American improvidence, and with a rapidity compared with which the Glacial advance was eternally slow; the East went first, and in fifty years we have brought about an elimination in the West which promises to be even more radical than that ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... deuce would you call good? Just because I've been born and bred a mechanic, does that say I've got no common sense or self-respect? Are you afraid I shall go and drink myself to death? You talk like the people who make it their business to sneer at us—the improvidence of the working classes, and such d—d slander. It's good news for me, and it'll be good news for many another man. ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... Brussels. Even in the Flemish part, the city has none of that winsome sympathetic air which usually surrounds a quaint mediaeval bourg. Rather it gives one the impression that old traditions are all but dead and that it is mere improvidence and laisser-aller that allows them ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... United States has the negro the same opportunity to become self-sustaining, but his improvidence keeps him poor. Too often he allows what little garden he has to be choked with weeds through his shiftlessness. One of the shrewdest observers and fairest critics of the negro, Alfred Holt Stone, says of the Mississippi negro: "In a plantation experience of more than twelve years, ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... income, but according to the assets of which he is possessed. The effect of such a tax would be that he who has spent everything that he has earned on his own enjoyment would go scot free in the matter of the capital tax, and would be rewarded for his improvidence by being asked to make no sacrifice; while his thrifty brother who, out of a smaller income, has set aside a certain proportion during the last twenty or thirty years, would have to hand over a portion of his current income assessed upon the value of the assets into which he has put ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... astonishing that his pupils should have felt for him a special admiration and affection. He not merely supplied all their wants, but he endeavoured to make them self-reliant, and to raise them above the sordid and narrow conditions of the life to which they were either born or reduced by the improvidence or misfortune of their parents. Of course Gordon was often deceived, and his confidence and charity abused; but these cases were, after all, the smaller proportion of the great number that passed through his hands. ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... some inexplicable manner, Goldsmith, the pilgrim of improvidence and knight errant from the Order of Chivalrous Carelessness, still pursued his medical studies, and carried this training for the vocation of a doctor to some kind of completion. Italy is supposed to have conferred his diploma as a physician upon Goldsmith, and either ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... improvident in him to consecrate such intensity of feeling upon relations who, however deeply they were attached to him, could not always be in a position to requite him with the whole of their time and the whole of their heart. He suffered much for that improvidence, but he was too just and kind to permit others to suffer with him; and it is not for one who obtained by inheritance a share of his inestimable affection to regret a weakness such ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... my sad old improvidence?" said Bones. "Why chuck away two thousand a year for six ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... the herbage of the desert, the fierce winds which sweep over it will yet, especially in late spring or early summer, drive a fire (which has obtained a start in some fairly grassed vale or nook) through its dead, tinder-like remains. How far human improvidence and recklessness—especially that of our own destructive Caucasian race—has contributed to denude the Plains of the little wood that thinly dotted their surface at a period not very remote, I can not pretend to decide; but it is very evident that there are far fewer ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was looking nervous. But it was not by the images which his ordinary stock in trade would naturally cause to arise that he was disturbed,—images though they were of folly, improvidence, and distress. There was indeed hardly an article in the shop, except the new plated jewelry in the window, that was not suggestive of misery or of sin. But in Mr. Isaacs's well-poised mind no morbid fancies arose. "Those hard winters makes ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth in such matters; but what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks. True, that with child-like improvidence, good times will often dissipate his grumbling, and make him forget all prudence ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Lablache, with one of those deep whistling breaths which made him so like an ancient pug, "since you mention him, for want of a better specimen of improvidence, his name will do." ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... without first satisfying myself whether what I had seen was a solitary instance or a sample of its general state, or whether the extremity of poverty I had just beheld had arisen from peculiar improvidence and want of management in one wretched family, I went into an adjoining habitation, where I found a poor old woman of eighty, whose miserable existence was painfully continued by the maintenance of her granddaughter. ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... to our fellow men is not charity as we use the word—a bill dropped into the contribution box, or a subscription to a charitable society; but [Greek: charis] in the old meaning of love and help. Poverty springs from two causes—improvidence, a lack of the savoir-faire in the affairs of life, or overwhelming circumstances, which have broken the spirit of the man and made him sit down discouraged and despairing. In either case, money is no remedy. If the man be improvident, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... all his reformation, Legard might not have the self-denial to enforce. After some consideration, he resolved to add secretly to the remains of Evelyn's fortune such a sum as might, being properly secured to herself and children, lessen whatever danger could arise from the possible improvidence of her husband, and guard against the chance of those embarrassments which are among the worst disturbers of domestic peace. He was enabled to effect this generosity unknown to both of them, as if the sum bestowed were collected from the wrecks of Evelyn's own wealth and the ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... c. i. The letter of Beza to Calvin from Meaux, March 28, 1562, shows, however, that even before the prince left that city it was known that the triumvirs had set out for Fontainebleau. Beza, not apparently without good reason, blamed the improvidence of Conde in not forestalling the enemy. "Hostes, relicto in urbe non magno praesidio, in aulam abierunt quod difficile non erat et prospicere et impedire. Sed aliter visum est certis de causis, quas tamen nec satis intelligo nec ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... undisciplined manhood explain Marcus Clarke's failure to render to his adopted country the service which, as a distinctly gifted writer of the realist school, he seemed well fitted to perform. He was a Bohemian, who, while resisting the worst vices of his class, shared its carelessness and improvidence to a degree that left ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... the cause of considerable anxiety to Lincoln. It was with him that their parents resided, and frequent were his appeals to Lincoln to extricate him from some pecuniary strait into which he had fallen through his confirmed thriftlessness and improvidence. "John Johnston," Mr. Herndon says, "was an indolent and shiftless man, one who was 'born tired.' Yet he was clever, generous and hospitable." The following document affords a hint of Lincoln's kindly patience as well ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... times during that period, he had been the subject of conversation between parties, one or both of which were looking out for a man, of thorough business qualifications, against which capital would be placed; nor the fact, that either his first failure, his improvidence, or something else personal to himself, had caused him to be set aside for some other one not near ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... indicating the true remedy for the evil, Southey regards it with horror as declaring the evil to be irremediable. Chalmers, a shrewd Scot actively engaged in parochial work, had his attention fixed upon the reckless improvidence of the 'excrescent' population, and welcomed a doctrine which laid stress upon the necessity of raising the standard of prudence and morality. He recognised and pointed out with great force the inadequacy ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... end of September, Wassili returned from the woods. Daria had a prospect of several months before her before the return of Aphanassi, if ever he should return at all; and she gave herself up to her love with pleasing improvidence. ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... statutes, as to place fathers and mothers on equal footing in regard to the guardianship of their children. Especially do we invite the Legislature instantly to pass laws, entitling mothers to become their children's guardians, in all cases where, by habitual drunkenness, immorality, or improvidence, fathers are incompetent ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... He simply resented the notion of leaving it behind for the vocal entertainment of Silas, who would likely get up again with the roosters and roar into it at "hoboes." Yes, the corncrib would revert to Silas, from whom he had merely rented it for one night at a most appalling price. The improvidence of it shocked him. Kenny retraced his footsteps in a blaze of indignation and made a bonfire on the corncrib floor to which in a reckless spasm of disgust he consigned the remainder of his supper. The crazy structure caught at once, with a smell ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... delay. Later the King discovered that he wanted the property for his own purposes. Alarmed at his own propensity for indulging the caprice of the moment, and mindful of the extent to which the Scottish Crown had been pauperized by royal improvidence, he had accepted a self-denying ordinance. By this he bound himself not to grant away the patrimony of the Crown. For the endowment of favourites he had to rely, therefore, on windfalls from attainders ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... is now becoming scarce; we therefore determined to jerk it, and issue it in small quantities, instead of dividing it among the four messes, and leaving to each the care of its own provisions; a plan by which much is lost, in consequence of the improvidence of the men. Two hunters had been despatched in the morning, and one of them, Drewyer, had before evening killed seven elk. We should scarcely be able to subsist, were it not for the exertions of this most excellent hunter. The game is scarce, and nothing is now to be ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... betokened the smouldering remains of emotion in the frieze coats and gaudy shawls assembled for'ard: the wisest of the party were arranging their goods and chattels 'tween-decks, where they must encamp for a month or more; but the majority, with truly Celtic improvidence, will wait till they are turned down at nightfall, and have a ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... receipts, of seventy-five millions of our money. But a large revenue becomes of diminished value unless it is associated with sound finance. The public expenditure showed a steady increase; the emperor and his advisers were incapable of checking the outlay, and extravagance, combined with improvidence, soon depleted the exchequer. Internal troubles occurred to further embarrass the executive, and the resources of the state were severely strained in coping with more than one serious rebellion, among which the most formidable was the mutiny of ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... posts on the plains of the Saskatchawan. A good many potatoes are also raised at this post, and a small supply of tea and sugar is brought from the depot at York Factory. The provisions obtained from these various sources were amply sufficient in the winter of 1819-20; but through improvidence this post has in former seasons ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... poor of her neighborhood and relieved their wants with such indiscriminate and munificent generosity as to draw down upon herself the rebuke of the clergy for encouraging habits of improvidence and dependence in the laboring classes. As for the subjects of her benevolence, they received her bounty with the most extravagant expressions of gratitude and the most fulsome flattery. This was so distasteful to Berenice that she oftened turned ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... feasted undisturbed on the tall stalked mapira ears, and we easily secured plenty of fine fat guinea-fowls—now allowed to feed leisurely in the deserted gardens. The reason assigned for all this listless improvidence was "There are no women to grind the corn—all ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... several respects a curious test of modern feeling. For the sake of the general reader, it may be well to state the occasion and character of it. It will be remembered by all that early in the winter of 1854-5, so fatal by its inclemency, and by our own improvidence, to our army in the Crimea, the late Emperor of Russia said, or was reported to have said, that "his best commanders, General January and General February, were not yet come." The word, if ever spoken, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... even in his radicalisms. A human nature totally fluid would of itself have proved anarchical; but in order to stem that natural anarchy it was fortunately possible to invoke the conditions of prosperity and happiness strictly laid down by the Creator. The improvidence and naughtiness of nature was called to book at every turn by the pleasures and pains divinely appended to things enjoined and to things forbidden, and ultimately by hell and by heaven. Yet if rewards and punishments were attached to human ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... negroes depend for their living on an advance of supplies (as they need food, clothing, or tools during the year) upon the pledge of their growing crop. This is a generic imitation of the white man's improvidence during the slavery times; then the planters mortgaged their crops and negroes, and where one used the advances to extend his plantation, ten squandered the money. The negro's necessities have developed an offensive race, called merchants by ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... however, would have defied the most squeamish mind, the most shadowy susceptibility. The panegyrist unrolls with emotion the frightful misfortunes that assailed France during the reign of King John. The temerity, the improvidence of that monarch; the disgraceful passions of the King of Navarre; his treacheries; the barbarous avidity of the nobility; the seditious disposition of the people; the sanguinary depredations of the great companies; the ever recurring insolence of England; all this ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... well doing, but which, faithful to the cause of truth, must ever teem with the harrowing evidence of the depravity of our fellow-beings. And again turn to the scene that so frequently closes upon the career of the convict. Consider the helpless pauperism of improvidence; constitutions ruined by vice and profligacy; asylums and hospitals overflowing with degraded and wretched outcasts, descending to the grave without respect and without sympathy, quitting a world which they had ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... his gravity to reply to a question of M. Moriaz concerning Poland. "Unhappy Poland!" cried he. "To-day the Jew is its master. Active, adroit, inventive, little scrupulous, he makes capital out of our indolence and our improvidence. He has over us one great advantage, which is simply that, while we live from day to day, he possesses a notion of a to-morrow; we despise him, and we could not do without him. We are always thirsty, and he supplies us with drink; we never have ready money, ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... which it made him master was exactly of that treacherous kind which not only deceives a man himself, but enables him to deceive others, and thus combined all that a person of his carelessness and ambition had most to dread. An uncertain income, which, by eluding calculation, gives an excuse for improvidence, [Footnote: How feelingly aware he was of this great source of all his misfortunes appears from a passage in the able speech which he delivered before the Chancellor, as Counsel in his own case, in the year ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... is clear that the publisher was Mrs. Fleming's paymaster, punctually deducting his disbursements from the account current between himself and Goldsmith, an arrangement which as plainly indicates the foresight of the one as it implies the improvidence of the other. Of the work which Goldsmith did for the businesslike and not unkindly little man, there is no very definite evidence; but various prefaces, introductions, and the like, belong to this time; and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... evicted therefrom. The charge should fall exclusively upon the rent receivers, and in no case should the tiller of the soil have to pay this charge either directly or indirectly. It is continued by the inadequacy of wages, and the improvidence engendered by a social system which arose out of injustice, and produced its ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... Big Joe drew, such as they were, he was unable to communicate intelligibly until the morrow, for the train was late and they drank of the liquor until the Colonel had time to lament his improvidence in bringing away so little of it. And by the time Big Joe's report was abroad, both the Banner and the Argus were out. The item in the latter concerning Mrs. Potts had been ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... women free as men to seek and choose, Banish the senseless inequality, And you make marriage less a vulgar game In which one tries to circumvent the other. Oh! all this morbid ribaldry of men, And all this passive imbecility, And superstitious inactivity, Dissimulation and improvidence, False shame and lazy prejudice of women, Where the great miracle of sex concerns us, And Candor should be innocently wise, And Knowledge should be reverently free,— Is against nature,[9]—helps to hide the way Out of the social horrors that confound us, And launches thousands ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... he had his foibles. It was no secret among our contemporaries at Cambridge that he was like too many other men of genius, a little deficient in economy—shall I say it? a little extravagant. The difficulties into which he brought himself by his improvidence were, however, always to him matters of jest and raillery; and often, indeed, proved subjects of triumph, for he was sure to extricate himself, by some of his many talents, or by some ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... Congdon fell into hot argument (their usual method of conversation), leaving the young people to themselves, and, Ben with intent to provoke the grave little wife to laughter, told a funny story which reflected on Congdon's improvidence. ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... had been done in the case of their compatriots in Manitoba. Many of the Saskatchewan settlers had actually received this scrip before they left the province, but nevertheless they hoped to obtain it once more from the government, and to sell it with their usual improvidence to the first speculators who offered ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... She had scarcely reappeared there when she was again thrown into prison for debt; but, by entering into an agreement to sing at the theatre every night, under surveillance, she was enabled to obtain her release. Her recklessness and improvidence had brought her to a pitiable condition; and in her latter days, after a career of splendor, caprice, and extravagance, she was obliged to subsist, it is said, by button-making. She died in frightful indigence, ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... barefooted and scantily clothed. Their main want was corn, weevil-eaten corn, which they carried away in their aprons. They made tortillas of it for their men laboring in the hacienda fields, or on the hacienda coffee hills. The store was a curious epitome of thrift and improvidence. One wench grumbled boldly of short measure. She dared, because she was comely and buxom, and her chemise fell low on her full, olive breast. She counted her purchase of frijoles to the last grain, using her fingers, and glaring at the clerk half coaxingly, half resentfully. But an intensely ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... succeed in winning a majority in the council of chiefs over to his opinion as to the necessity for a speedy departure for Egypt; it was decided to pass the winter in Cyprus, and during this leisurely halt of seven months, the improvidence of the crusaders, their ignorance of the places, people, and facts amidst which they were about to launch themselves, their headstrong rashness, their stormy rivalries, and their moral and military irregularities aggravated the difficulties of the enterprise, great as they already were. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... by the feudal system, which stripped the soil of the last grain of fertility and gave nothing in return. La Pontoise was aforetime a grand estate, possessed by a branch of the Foix family, the great ducal house of Nemours. Its farms wasted by the improvidence of the ancien regime, its park and chateau destroyed by desperate peasantry during the frenzy of '93, there remains nothing now but pine-barrens and furze-patches, with a pile of blackened ruins as a monument of former ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... back to him: Mina Raff's parents had died when she was a young girl, and the Groves had rescued her from the undistinguished evils of improvidence; she had lived with them until, against their intensest objections, she had gone into moving pictures. Probably the Groves' opposition had lasted until Mina's success; or, in other words, their support had been ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... committed by the French nearly one hundred years ago, to descendants, three generations removed, of merchants and ship owners, who, with all their losses, enjoyed the most profitable commerce in the history of our mercantile marine. Their payment is, perhaps, the most striking evidence of the improvidence of Congress in dealing with ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... about the aborigines of the soil. But how marvellously they differ! Dr. Palfrey discredits the romance of Indian character and life. His mind dwells upon the squalor and wretchedness of their existence, the shiftlessness and incapacity of their natural development, their improvidence, their beastliness and forlorn debasement; and he is wholly skeptical about the savage virtues of constancy, magnanimity, and wild-wood dignity. He sighs over them another requiem, toned in the deep sympathy of a true Christian heart; but he does not lament in their sad method of decay the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... formerly a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. In various places in his correspondence Swift criticises the failings of Dr. Anthony Raymond, who was, says Scott, "a particular friend." His unreliability in money matters, the improvidence of his large family, his peculiarities in grammar, his pride in his good manners, all these points are noticed in the journal and elsewhere. But when Dr. Raymond returned to Ireland after a visit to London, Swift felt a little melancholy, ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... has been responsible for so much of the achievement of the Nordic race; it is alleged that his sexual impulses are strongly developed and inhibitions lacking; that he has "an instability of character, involving a lack of foresight, an improvidence, a lack of persistence, small power of serious initiative, a tendency to be content with immediate satisfactions." He appears to be more gregarious but less apt at organization than ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... not the term I intended to imply," he condescended to explain. "I meant to say that improvidence is the prevailing fault of ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... by name, but universally called "Teter," an odd nickname, the reason of which he did not seem to understand himself. This Teter was one of those good-natured, obliging, reckless, happy-go-lucky individuals who never fail to win the love of boys. His generosity was equalled only by his improvidence, and both were surpassed by ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... aforesaid three acts of reason, it follows that all the opposite defects are reducible to the four parts mentioned above. Thus incautiousness and incircumspection are included in "thoughtlessness"; lack of docility, memory, or reason is referable to "precipitation"; improvidence, lack of intelligence and of shrewdness, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... pantaloons to the chiefs who visited us, when they wished to enter our houses, never allowing them to do it in a state of nudity. They possess, in an eminent degree, the qualities opposed to indolence, improvidence, and stupidity: the chiefs, above all, are distinguished for their good sense and intelligence. Generally speaking, they have a ready intellect and a tenacious memory. Thus old Comcomly recognised the ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... been said, narrowly escaped extinction in the winter of 1609. The colonists found none among their number to fill Smith's place, and soon relapsed into the idleness and improvidence which he had so resolutely counteracted. They ate all the food which he had laid up for them, and when it was gone the Indians would sell them no more. Squads of hungry men began to wander about the country, and many of them were murdered by the savages. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... of our own day are based to a considerable extent. He was also the author of the story of "Rasselas,"—that notable satire on discontent and the search after happiness. Next stands Johnson's friend, Oliver Goldsmith, famous for his genius, his wit, and his improvidence,—which was always getting him into trouble,—but still more famous for his poems, and his ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... had long before pointed out that the remedy for these disorders must be a radical one. Improvidence among the poorer classes is familiar to economists in more experienced societies than that of Newfoundland, and may be accepted as a permanent element in the difficulty. The real hope lay in opening up, on remunerative lines, industries which would occupy ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead |
