"Shiftless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is water enough at times; only, those rivers of the great plains, like the Platte and the Kansas and the Arkansas, are so wasteful of their supply in the spring that by July they are gasping for a shower. So, part of the year they revel in luxury, and during the rest they go shabby—like shiftless people. ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... find it immovable, and turn with a groan to some farther cry. How or where were they to help? Others began to come in with white faces and terror-stricken eyes; and before long the sepulchral ruin had little groups all over it, endeavouring in shiftless fashion to bring rescue to the ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... bad in its streets, bad in its street-police, and but for the kindness of the tides would be worse than bad in its sanitary arrangements. No one as yet has approached the management of New York in a proper spirit; that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance. No one is likely to do so, because reflections on the long, narrow pig-trough are construed as malevolent attacks against the spirit and majesty of the great American people, and lead ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... Long Jim Hart," said the shiftless one indignantly. "Now an' then I hev to talk a long time, 'cause I know so much that I can't git it all out between sunrise an' sunset, an' the hours then are mighty crowded, too. I reckon that you'd never need more'n five minutes ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... cheaply by the Magdalena negro—excepting his own. Shiftless and improvident child of the tropics, his animal wants are readily satisfied by the fruits and fish which nature provides for him so bountifully. Spiritual wants he has none—until calamity touches him and he thinks he is about ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... young woman to dream that she is leading an idle existence, she will fall into bad habits, and is likely to marry a shiftless man. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... strange, but I'll explain—I want to learn who are my friends and who are not. I am afraid I wasn't very highly thought of when I left Burton. I was considered rather shiftless. ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger
... His suggestion that it was possible that she still cherished any sense of grievance against Gregory because he was going to marry Sally, however, brought a little scornful smile into her eyes. It was singularly easy to forgive Gregory that, for she now saw him as he was—shallow, careless, shiftless, a man without depth of character. He had a few surface graces, and on occasion a certain half-insolent forcefulness of manner which in a curious fashion was almost becoming. There was, however, nothing beneath ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... could swim and dive in the ocean for sport, she would not be much afraid to do the same in that so-called lake, to save life. As to her action on shore, the knowledge she used is given in books and manuals. What's more, she had seen it done. But most people are so pointless and shiftless that they never know just what to do in an emergency, no matter what their opportunities for ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... thousands who turned their faces toward the setting sun, comparatively few yielded to discouragement and went back East. Those who did so were usually the land speculators and people of weak, irresolute, or shiftless character. ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... days when the community is more prosperous and money less scarce, they were still not very great, and in the opinion of conservative people they barely sufficed to exclude from the suffrage such shiftless persons as had no visible interest in keeping down ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... lead-pencil. This maxim, while losing in sententiousness would gain in reason if it ran thus: "What is worth doing at all is worth doing as well as the situation demands." "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day," an excellent maxim for the shiftless, must not be taken too literally by the individual already obsessed to do to-day twice what he can and quadruple ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... on such facts and then consider for what Beethoven stands, we can only exclaim, "God works in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform." It was early seen that the young Beethoven had unusual ability, and so the shiftless father, with the example of Mozart's precocity before him, submitted the boy to a deal of enforced drudgery in the way of harpsichord and violin practice. He had one good teacher however, Neefe, who records that the boy of thirteen played ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... unavoidably stopped, but to whom idleness was so pleasant, and the fame of their misfortunes so gratifying, that they preferred to scramble on in dismantled homes, on the alms extracted by their woes, to setting about such labor as would place them in comfort. Then that large class—the shiftless— was now doubly large, and there were widows and orphans in abundance, and there was hardly a bed or a blanket ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... dead and buried and nobody cares very much; They have no use in Greylock for drunkards and loafers and such, But I always liked Dave Lilly, he was pleasant as you could wish, He was shiftless and good-for-nothing, but he certainly ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... a prospect he welcomed. He well knew the sort of dock rats he must put up with if he wished to make up his crew with city hands for a short trip. The sea tramps who are within reach of coasting skippers are the same kind of worthless material that shiftless farmers must ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... and less unsuitable for white men than that of Philadelphia, while there is not a river-bottom in the whole South in which the extremes of heat during the summer are so great as in St. Louis. Slave-labor cultivates, in a miserable, shiftless manner, less than two per cent, of the area of the Cotton States; and upon this insignificant portion a crop of cotton has been raised in one year worth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... situation in hand right then and there in the start; he also was aware of the fact that these negroes only yielded to force, and that any attempt to gain their good will would be absolutely wasted; for Southern boys learn that early in life, and so it is they can manage the shiftless population that is employed to work on the plantations, while Northern men make the mistake of treating such negroes ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... who died, had intended to enter that profession. Ben said the boys, John and the doctor, wanted him to go, but he wished he could be a newspaper man like Nora's father. His mother thought it a kind of shiftless business. They talked over their likes and dislikes in boy fashion, and Charles enjoyed it immensely. He thought it would be just royal to have a big brother who was a doctor, and a little sister ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... until sundown, that their barns may be in perfect order and everything connected with the business neat and clean, in order that their material may come into the hands of the manufacturer in a perfect condition—if heedless, lazy, shiftless, dishonest, ignorant, good-for-nothing D. keeps about him a herd of sick, disconsolated racks-of-bones, to wander over his arid and desolate fields in search of food and drink in summer, or with backs humped up, hover together for shelter ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... her effort, McElroy lay week after week in the back room, looking for hours together into the red heart of the fire, silent, uncomplaining, in no apparent pain, but shiftless as an Indian ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... one of the inspectors, settled the whole thing. It proved that this Dennis Shea was a harmless, amiable fellow, of the class known as shiftless, who had sealed his fate by marrying a dumb wife, who was at that moment ironing in the laundry. Before I left Stafford, I had hired both for five years. We had applied to Judge Pynchon, then the probate judge at Springfield, to change the ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... Nature re-asserted her influence—that the essences of the scene, subtle and pervasive, had recurred, creating a receptive spirit, so deep a religion of assent that shadow and substance intermingled to my bewilderment? I was permitted to be a sensitive percipient in the midst of the ashes of shiftless folk who had passed away, catching but a casual and deceptive glimpse of the coming of the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... with calm conviction. "A man couldn't be shiftless with you to do for, Hannah. He'd be obliged to ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the Falls, Tom Shocker told much about himself, and Nat learned that the fellow was one of those shiftless mortals who change from one situation to another. He had been a salesman on the road for five different concerns, had run a restaurant, a poolroom, and a moving-picture show, and had even been connected with a prize-fighting affair. He did not care what ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer
... destroyed by that scamp of a cow," she exclaimed in a tone bordering on despair. "I wish I'd a hit her. If I'd broken my broom over her back I wouldn't a cared so much. And it's all Mudge's fault. He's the most shiftless man I ever see. I'll give him a dressing ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... seamed face was of a brick-dust colour; the large check pattern of his flannel shirt and his old stained Panama hat were an established defiance to the conventionalities of Sulaco. Had it not been for the immaculate cleanliness of his apparel he might have been taken for one of those shiftless Europeans that are a moral eyesore to the respectability of a foreign colony in almost every exotic part of the world. The young ladies of Sulaco, adorning with clusters of pretty faces the balconies along the Street of the Constitution, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Ballarat, a dissipated, shiftless wretch. The loss of his gold ruined him, for he has not had ambition enough to do a day's ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... of Mr. Krome. My somewhat intimate association with workingmen for the last three months enables me to say that, so far as I have been able to observe, workingmen often have a precious poor opinion of one another. The plumbers talk of the carpenters as lazy and shiftless, the painters speak ill of the plumbers, the carpenters regard the tinners with derision, and so it ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... Portuguese—that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy. There is a civil governor, appointed by the King of Portugal, and also a military governor, who can assume supreme control and suspend the civil government at his pleasure. The islands contain a population of about 200,000, almost entirely ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to Widow Brown's; Her son, from the mines, has just got back. I don't believe he's a cent in his purse, Young men are so shiftless now, alack! ...
— Ballads • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... go 'bout three years back," Tom explained. "She got—shiftless and I been sort of batching it since. Clean, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... said, "to-day you ha' come to man's estate, and I ha' summoned those here who will have to do wi' your future to hear these few words. The charge of you left on my shoulders by your shiftless parents has been a heavy one, but to-day I am quit of it. The deacons of Feldwick chapel have agreed to appoint you their pastor, provided only that they be satisfied wi' your discourse on the coming Sabbath. See to it, lad, that ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... a poor and shiftless character, a thin, stoop-shouldered man. He was only thirty-five years of age, but, being married, that was enough to secure for him the title "Old Man." In Sanger, if Tom Nolan was a bachelor at eighty years of age he would ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... we lie, and deep we lie, and if I gave him place, My gentlemen that are so proud would flout me to my face; They'd call my house a common stews and me a careless host, And—I would not anger my gentlemen for the sake of a shiftless ghost." The Devil he looked at the mangled Soul that prayed to feel the flame, And he thought of Holy Charity, but he thought of his own good name:— "Now ye could haste my coal to waste, and sit ye down to fry: Did ye think of that theft for yourself?" said he; and Tomlinson said, "Ay!" The ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... my temper on the rack by standing with his hands in his pockets, or by looking meek, or, likely as not, peering into the shop-door after me with great staring eyes and parted lips; and this is the most provoking of all. If there is anything vulgar, slipshod, and shiftless, it is a man lounging about with his hands in his pockets. If you have paws, stow them away; but if you are endowed with hands, learn to carry them properly, or else cut them off. Nor can I abide a man's looking ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... T. "The Shiftless and Floating City Population," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, X (September, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... would soon claim it. Bill says his wife was a good woman, and, when no one claimed the boy, she kept it and loved it as her own. Bill admits that his part in the transaction was due to the hope of receiving a reward. After his wife died, Bill, it seems, went to the dogs, followed his naturally shiftless bent, and, from a common vagrant, became a drunkard and common thief. Yet Bill claims, with an air of a good deal of virtue, that he never stole anything he didn't really need, and that he brought Tag up ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... Rhoda. "I think it is all perfectly lovely but the negroes. There are so many of them, and they one and all look thoroughly shiftless." ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... dying and pathetic music. According to another school of writers—mainly authors of personal reminiscences at a time when growing antagonism was accentuating the difference in ideals—the "greaser" was a dirty, idle, shiftless, treacherous, tawdry vagabond, dwelling in a disgracefully primitive house, and backward in every aspect ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... human body are just as shiftless as the one that owns 'em. The systems o' these fair ladies couldn't do their own work. The physician an' the surgeon were added to the list o' their servants, an' became as necessary as the cook an' the chambermaid. ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... the second time to the widow West. She had brought with her to her new home a good-looking, long-legged, black-eyed, black-haired ne'er-do-well of a son, a year or so younger than Hiram. He was a shrewd, quick-witted lad, idle, shiftless, willful, ill-trained perhaps, but as bright and keen as a pin. He was the very opposite to poor, dull Hiram. Eleazer White had never loved his son; he was ashamed of the poor, slack-witted oaf. ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... not a tea-cup saver by nature. Could the time and scheming of those pioneer women to save water have been utilized in some water project, it would have watered the whole frontier. But gradually we were becoming listless, shiftless. We were in a stage of endurance in which there was no point in forging ahead. We merely sat and waited—for rain or wells ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... and the next I knew he was keepin' company with Patty Adams, now his wife. I remember I sniveled a little at being taken at my word, but it served me right for saying one thing when I meant another. However, it don't matter now. Joel is as clever as the day is long, but he is a shiftless critter, never splits his kindlin's till jest bedtime, and Patty is pestered to death for wood, while his snorin' nights, she says, is awful, and that I never could abide; so, on the whole, I'm better off ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... hours are spent in a large sun-bonnet. She is never idle for one minute, is severe and hard, and despises everything but work. I think she suffers from her husband's shiftlessness. She always speaks of me as "This" or "that woman." The family consists of a grown-up son, a shiftless, melancholy-looking youth, who possibly pines for a wider life; a girl of sixteen, a sour, repellent-looking creature, with as much manners as a pig; and three hard, un-child-like younger children. By the whole family all courtesy ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... During these shiftless and unhappy years as a listless medical student and laggard apprentice the poet's chief solace was the public library of Manchester. In his daily absences from home his misery suggested another solace ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... at her work by candle-light, and Mr Wrayburn, half amused and half vexed, and all idle and shiftless, stood by her bench looking on. Miss Wren's troublesome child was in the corner in deep disgrace, and exhibiting great wretchedness in the shivering stage of ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Pardee, in tan shoes and a brown derby. An 1890 Villon handicapped by a home-loving wife; an incurable romantic married to a woman who judged as shiftless any housewife possessed of less than two dozen bath towels, twelve tablecloths, eighteen wash cloths, and at least three dozen dish towels, hand-hemmed. Milly Pardee's idea of adventure was testing the recipes illustrated ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... led a shiftless, uneventful life, yet I envy no one, for I am the genius of a new art—but stay a moment! An uneventful life, did I say? Alas! my life has been one long, desperate effort to forget her, to forget ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... best cottages would not commend itself to the student of that art: in those where the woman is shiftless it would be deemed simply intolerable. Evidence of this is only too apparent on approaching cottages, especially towards the evening. Coming from the fresh air of the fields, perhaps from the sweet scent of clover or of new-mown grass, the odour which arises from ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... George Washingtons, Henry Clays, Patrick Henrys, and other equally illustrious names, are wandering aimlessly about our streets, shiftless, worthless, utterly unworthy the names they bear, simply because they bear them, when, had they been given plain, honest, common names, they might have been held in respect and esteem. The burden is too great for them. A ship with a drag attached to her cannot make progress, ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... A big lumbering company, impatient for immediate returns and not caring to look far enough ahead, will often deliberately destroy all the good timber in a region, hoping afterwards to move on to some new country. The shiftless man of small means, who does not care to become an actual home-maker but would like immediate profit, will find it to his advantage to take up timber land simply to turn it over to such a big company, and leave it valueless for ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... so fondly prepared would come, but as the days wore on she sank into a numb despondency. When she thought of the loss of her property, she groaned and turned her face to the wall. And Samuel Anderson sat about the house in a dumb and shiftless attitude, as do most men upon whom financial ruin comes in middle life. The disappointment of his faith and the overthrow of his fortune had completely paralyzed him. He was waiting for something, he hardly knew what. He had not even his wife's driving ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... the shiftless village is a hideous village, while the charm which we often realize without analyzing it comes of ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... 1796, in Burgundy, near Soulanges, Blangy and Ville-aux-Fayes; nephew of one of the masons who built Mme. Soudry's house. A shiftless farm laborer, exempt from military duty on account of smallness of stature; was at first the lover, then the husband, of Catherine Tonsard, whom he ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... lazy to take a long breath. He was tall and lank, his hair fell down upon his shoulders, his whiskers were as tangled and matted as a little brush heap—in short, he was as fine a specimen of a poor white as one could find anywhere in the seceded States. He looked stupid as well as shiftless, but the young pilot knew he wasn't. He was as sly as a fox and as cunning as well, and Marcy confessed to himself that he stood more in fear of him than he did of Captain Beardsley. When the man heard Marcy's step upon the porch, he tried to assume the servile air ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... ass! That's what for a man you've turned out to be, Stephen Packard. Come here empty-handed an' try to buck me, would you? Me who has busted better men than you all my life, me who has got my hooks in you deep already, me who ain't no pulin' ol' dodderin' softy to turn over to a lazy, shiftless vagabond all I've piled up year after year. Buck me, would you? Tuck in an' fire my men, butt on my affairs— Why, you impudent young puppy-dog, you: I'll make you stick your tail between your legs an' howl like a kiote before I'm ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... "How shiftless!" cried Annie, indignantly. "What do these men mean by letting their machinery lie out that way? I should think one winter of lying out would hurt it more than three summers ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... those parents who are zealous to maintain a high standard of living, those with talents which they are ambitious to develop, and those who realize keenly the care and expense that children need, are deterred from having many, or any; while the shiftless and happy-go-lucky propagate without scruple. There is, for all except the rich, a premium on childlessness, which the natural desire for parenthood cannot wholly discount. But this ought not to be so. Childbearing and rearing ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... are the signs of progress. New industries are opening up. Jungle is fast disappearing. Agriculture has wonderfully improved; and wherever an indigo factory has been built, progress has taken the place of stagnation, industry and thrift that of listless indolence and shiftless apathy. A spirit has moved in the valley of dry bones, and has clothed with living flesh the gaunt skeletons produced by ignorance, disease, and want. The energy and intelligence of the planter has breathed on the stagnant waters of the Hindoo intellect the breath of life, and the living tide ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... scuppers when the ship rolled to either side, and the men were almost washed off their feet with its rush. Some of them had climbed upon the island,—the main hatch,—where they sat and wrung the pieces of their apparel dry. Among these washers was my old third mate, now transformed into a somewhat shiftless sailor. ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... in Hardin County, Kentucky, on the Twelfth of February, and was the son of Thomas Lincoln, a carpenter. Thomas Lincoln was a good natured but shiftless man who never did any more work than was absolutely necessary to keep his family from starving. He had pioneer blood in his veins, as, indeed, all Lincoln's ancestors had, from the time when they first came to America in 1637; and this fact kept them pushing continually ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... by the blazing log fire they were cheerful in their occupation, singing songs and telling stories and having so much to do that there was no time to indulge in the morbid analysis of life and the things of life which in our present shiftless day perplex and ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... 'harmless critters.' Now, a bear ain't harmless, leastways, not as you'd notice it. Bear will take young stock, an' they're particularly partial to young pig, an' down among these here foothills we've been passin' through there's a lot o' shiftless hog-rustlers as depends on pork fer a livin'. As for bearskins, why, o' course you use the pelts. What's the idee o' leavin' them around? It ain't any kind o' good tryin' to spare an animal's feelin's when he's plenty good an' dead. But I've made this here section of the Sierras pretty ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... realized that he owned the land where they lay. It was worth, perhaps, a few cents an acre; it was utterly untillable, almost inaccessible, and his gratulation owed its fervor only to its spiritual values. He was an idle and shiftless fellow, and had known no glow of acquisition, no other pride of possession. He herded cattle much of the time in the summer, and he hunted in the winter—wolves chiefly, their hair being long and finer at ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Leigh Hunt, that amiable, shiftless, Radical man of letters, was coming out from England with his wife; on July 1st Shelley and Williams sailed in the 'Ariel' to Leghorn to meet them, and settle them into the ground-floor of Byron's palace at Pisa. His business despatched, ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... with that of the two great poets we have been studying, the contrast is startling. While Tennyson and Browning were being educated for the life of literature, and shielded most tenderly from the hardships of the world, Dickens, a poor, obscure, and suffering child, was helping to support a shiftless family by pasting labels on blacking bottles, sleeping under a counter like a homeless cat, and once a week timidly approaching the big prison where his father was confined for debt. In 1836 his Pickwick was published, and life was changed ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... with his brother's outbreak. Whereat Johnny, admitting the alleviation of an orange, a four-bladed knife, and the reversionary interest in much of Rupert's personal property, became more subdued. Sitting there with their arms entwined about each other, the sunlight searching the shiftless desolation of their motherless home, the few cheap playthings they had known lying around them, they beguiled themselves with those charming illusions of their future intentions common to their years—illusions they only half believed themselves and half accepted ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... hear you. (Smiles.) You step as lightly as a young foal. You are not hurt at what I said a moment ago? It was only for your own good. I won't have any shiftless straggler around here making eyes at you. The parish can gossip about something else. (Ljot goes to the fence, resting her hands on it.) But that was not what I wanted to talk to you about. (Goes to her.) You know Arne, the farmer at Skrida. You have seen his son Halfdan. ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... a lucky day for me, Arthur, when I became your companion. But for that I might have been the same shiftless fellow I was before, fit for nothing except to run errands ...
— Sam's Chance - And How He Improved It • Horatio Alger
... There are some boys I know who would do well if their mothers were not shiftless and intemperate. You remember Tommy ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... really wanted it; and after a while I made her understand that I actually meant to give it to her for her very own. But when she took it to her mother, the little woman called me to the bed and explained that it would do the child no good in that form, because the lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing father would take it to buy tobacco. 'The children can't save a penny,' she said sadly. 'When once he gets his hands on it, they never see it again. But if you really want Essie to have the money, won't you take ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... two or three weeks in Naples, although she said that she did not like it at all. "The people are so shiftless," she complained, picking up her skirts and walking round a group of girls who were sitting on the sidewalk combing their hair. "It is the dirtiest city in ...
— Rafael in Italy - A Geographical Reader • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... final judgment that is put on a man by other men depends on his value as a working hand. If he has other serious personality faults, they will be overlooked as somewhat beside the point, provided that he levels with his job. But if he embodies all of the surface virtues, and is shiftless, any superior with sense will mark him for the discard, and his coworkers will breathe a sigh of relief when he has gone on ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... of the suites we were directed. It was almost bare of furniture and in a peculiarly shiftless state of disorder. A half-finished picture stood in the centre of the room, and several completed ones were leaning against the wall. They were of the wildest character imaginable. Even the conceptions of the ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... currency for an unlimited estate at the nominal value of forty cents per acre, were irresistible to thousands of land-loving Virginians and Carolinians whose ambition of proprietorship was larger than their means. Accompanying this flood of emigrants of good faith was the usual froth and scum of shiftless idlers and adventurers, who were either drifting with a current they were too worthless to withstand, or in pursuit of dishonest gains in fresher and simpler regions. The vices and virtues of the pioneers were such as proceeded from their environment. They were careless of human ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... experiments on the human constitution; the pious, self- denying, laborious, and ill-paid missionary; the half-educated, litigious, envious, and disreputable lawyer, with his counterpoise, a brother of the profession, of better origin and of better character; the shiftless, bargaining, discontented seller of his betterments; the plausible carpenter, and most of the others, are more familiar to all who have ever ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... is nature's motto,—and it is written on the stars and the sod alike,—starve mentally, starve morally, starve physically. It is an inexorable law of nature that whatever is not used, dies. "Nothing for nothing," is her maxim. If we are idle and shiftless by choice, we shall be ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... commons. "With thrice great Hermes he has outwatched the Bear." Often have his candles been burned to the snuff, and glimmered and stunk in the sockets, whilst he grew pale at his constitutional studies; long, sleepless nights has he wasted, long, laborious, shiftless journeys has he made, and great sums has he expended, in order to secure the purity, the independence, and the sobriety of elections, and to give a check, if possible, to the ruinous charges that go nearly to the destruction of the right ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the same evening she had made up her mind to go, and now he seemed not so shiftless and worthless, but run down and beaten upon by chance. His eyes were not keen, his face marked, his hands flabby. She thought his hair had a touch of grey. All unconscious of his doom, he rocked and read his paper, while she ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... a place of shiftless poverty; of need, no doubt, but not of industry; Wych Hazel was humbly begged to supply deficiencies which ought not to have been. Inexperienced as she was, she scarcely understood it. Nevertheless she was glad when the visit was over and ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... always a poor, miserable, shiftless, narvy thing," said Miss Sophonisba, "and half the time you couldn't believe ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... "Still, dooms slow an' shiftless as they shore be, at the wind-up Silver Phil's found guilty, an' is put in nom'nation by the presidin' alcade to be hanged; the time bein' set in a crazy-hoss fashion for a month away. As Silver Phil—which he's that bad an' hard he comes mighty clost to bein; game—is leavin' the ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... Day homestead was very different now from what it had been when Janice first came there to live. Like many people of the town, the Day family had got into a rut. Uncle Jason was frankly shiftless, although he was a good farmer and able to earn a fair wage at carpenter's work if ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... to argue," Julia was saying as they came. "You did your marketing and simply and plainly left it out there because you were too shiftless to——" ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... Warren Hastings was born, the fortunes of the house had come to a very low ebb indeed. Pynaston Hastings, Warren Hastings's father, was, perhaps, as imbecile a man as ever yet was the means of bringing an illustrious son into the world. He seems to have been weak, foolish, shiftless, as {246} worthless as a man well could be who was not actually a criminal. He had married very young, before he was sixteen; his wife had died shortly after giving birth to Warren Hastings. Pynaston married ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the scalers, eying him sharply, and tendering his pouch. Thorpe filled his pipe deliberately, and returned it with a heavy-lidded glance of thanks. To all appearances he was one of the lazy, shiftless white hunters of the backwoods. Seized with an inspiration, he said, "What sort of chances is they at your camp for a little flour? Me and Charley's about out. I'll bring you meat; or I'll make you boys moccasins. I got some ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... to save, what inducements have greatest weight with him? First of all, he is likely to save for some definite and immediate object, because he cannot spend in any effective way until he has saved. In teaching shiftless families to put by small sums, therefore, it is well to keep some definite object in view. For instance, persuade the children to save to buy needed clothing, or the parents to save to buy proper clothing, bedding, etc., for the children. This strengthens family affection and leads the way ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... eighteen, who had been employed by the farmer to do chores. He was shiftless, and a week or two before had been sent away in disgrace. He had gone no one ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... file of the industrial classes. The training and the selection to which the latter are exposed in modern industrial life give a similarly decisive weight to this trait. Tenacity of purpose may rather be said to distinguish both these classes from two others; the shiftless ne'er do-well and the lower-class delinquent. In point of natural endowment the pecuniary man compares with the delinquent in much the same way as the industrial man compares with the good-natured shiftless dependent. The ideal pecuniary man is like the ideal delinquent ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... through this civilizing process. Their endless wars never gave an opportunity for the development of the purely civic virtues of respect and obedience to law. The people at large were too wretched, too harried by constant coming and going of the waves of war, to do more than live, in a shiftless, hand-to-mouth way, from the proceeds of their flocks and herds. There were no cities of importance within the Spanish lines. There was no opportunity for the growth of ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... Ross and the shiftless one, they proceeded to Wareville which was really at the bottom of the smoke spire, where they were received, as two risen from the dead, in a welcome that was not noisy, but deep and heartfelt. The cow, the ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to appear at the usual hour. The boys walked about nervously—they smoked many pipes, and took hurried drinks, and yet she did not appear. The boys looked suggestingly at her husband, and he himself appeared to be anxious; but being one of the shiftless kind, he found anxiety ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... with Mr. Holley, one of the inspectors, settled the whole thing. It proved that this Dennis Shea was a harmless, amiable fellow, of the class known as shiftless, who had scaled his fate by marrying a dumb wife, who was at that moment ironing in the laundry. Before I left Stafford, I had hired both for five years. We had applied to Judge Pynchon, then the probate judge at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... him, was a piece of extravagance. In all such regions there are broken-down, elderly men, who live by taking fish. Liquor has usually been their great enemy, and all have the same generic character of laziness, shiftless and ill-regulated exertions, followed by much idleness, and fits of intemperance, that in the end commonly cause their deaths. Such a man fished between Oyster Pond and Shelter Island, being known to all who dwelt within ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... down the stair," was all the reply given, but Katie said afterward that she had heard that Jennie was thrown or pushed down stairs by her drunken father. She said poor Mrs. Scott had had a very hard life with this shiftless, drunken husband, who abused her and the children. All the children were dead now except Jennie, who was about a year older than Marty, and early in the winter "old Scott," as Katie called him, died himself from the effects of a hurt received in a fight while "on a spree." As Mrs. Scott ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett
... Helen's chief fancy for the room, shaky and insecure as both floor and ceiling seemed, was that dim panel-portrait blistering there above the fire or peeling off with mouldy flakes in past days,—for she had still many a longing for the old family-pictures that once her shiftless father, when put to his trumps, had sold to adorn the halls of some ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... heartless and cruel manner thrown him overboard; and, with a cunning and artfulness which even then seemed incredible to me, laid herself out only too successfully to ensnare me, and by becoming my wife to secure for herself those comforts and luxuries which Merlani—poor shiftless scamp that he was—could ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... just," said Fordham. "I am sure you could do a great deal to help and brighten Allen; and," he added, smiling, "in the name of spoilt and shiftless heirs, I hope ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and in the shiftless life that they led in their new surroundings they became, if possible, more closely attached ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... a decided feeling of depression that Patty Sinclair approached the Watts ranch. Long before she reached the buildings an air of shiftless dilapidation was manifest in the ill-lined barbed wire fences whose rotting posts sagged drunkenly upon loosely strung wire. A dry weed-choked irrigation ditch paralleled the trail, its wooden flumes, like the fence posts, rotting where they ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... out tender green bloom toward whom they might reach, and clematis rioting over and binding together in flowery chains all the shrubs and weeds and young trees. What happiness to dwell in the grounds of the "shiftless" farmer! Since tidiness, with most cultivators, means the destruction of all natural beauty, and especially the cutting down of everything that interferes with the prosperity of cabbages and potatoes, blessed ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... their young wives until they felt brave enough to leave their mothers. Usually the female portion ruled the house, and were doubtless clannish enough about it. The stores were in common, but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pick up his blanket and budge, and after such orders it would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey; the house would become too hot for him, ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... replied Helene. "I have my work. There are two men as shiftless and helpless as babes to attend to, and none to help me ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... a satisfactory footing, the Squire had but little more trouble, and it soon came to be understood that he was not to be trifled with, and that Crowswood was no longer a place for the idle or shiftless. Two or three of the farmers left at the termination of their year, but better men took their places, and John Thorndyke, having settled matters to his satisfaction, now began to attend more to other affairs. He had been, when he first ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... the leader writer in Le Jour,—Jesen—a brilliant man, an absolutely wonderful writer, but shiftless. Do you know what Falkenberg has done? The paper was in the market, the controlling share of it, and he bought it, or rather he put the money into Jesen's hands to buy it with. The whole tone of the paper with regard to foreign affairs has turned ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... for good reasons, that I held myself very strictly aloof from the Bohemians, save in business affairs. This was partly because I was married, and I never saw the day in my life when to be regarded as a real Bohemian vagabond, or shiftless person, would not have given me the horrors. I would have infinitely preferred the poorest settled employment to such life. I mention this because a very brilliant and singular article entitled "Charles G. Leland l'ennemi des Allemands" ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... characters of the ore and by the success with which it may be made available for consumption. This view of valuation for taxing purposes is sometimes opposed by mining men on the grounds that it taxes brains, skill, and initiative, and that it puts a premium on shiftless management. The same argument might be applied to the valuing of any business or profession. To the writer the argument is not sound, in that it fails to recognize the element of human energy in resource values. If value were to be confined solely ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith |
