"Unprofitable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two hours of warm, and, as it seemed to me, unprofitable discussion, we were summoned to our repast in the adjoining room. But before we rose from our seats, our host requested to know of each of us if we were hungry; and, whether it were from modesty, perverseness, ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... including the two senior military dignitaries of the island. The batteries, it was known, were manned; and although it would have puzzled the acutest mind of Elba to give a reason why the French should risk so unprofitable an attack as one on their principal port, long ere Raoul was seen among them such a result was not only dreaded, but in a measure anticipated with confidence. As a matter of course, then, every eye followed his movements as he went with bounding steps up the narrow terraces ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... enjoy himself. After you have spent nine months in an unprofitable attempt to combine practical machine-gun tactics with a scrupulous respect for private property, the realisation that you may now gratify your destructive instincts to the full comes as a ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... Greece—the virtue has gone out of her. A man or a nation is not placed upon this earth to do merely what is pleasant and what is profitable. It is often called upon to carry out what is both unpleasant and unprofitable, but if it is obviously right it is mere ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not tell; the very speculation upon it was unprofitable, since it could lead to no certainty. Lucy turned ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... buckboard the fates laid plans, spun yarns, and rearranged many things. Hartigan opened his heart and life. He told of his mother, of his happy childhood; of his losses; of his flat, stale, unprofitable boyhood; of Bill Kenna and his "word as a man"; of his own vow of abstinence, kept unbroken till he was eighteen. He gave it all with the joyous side alone in view, and when a pathetic incident intruded, the pathos was in the things, ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... But should I once return, and with these eyes Again behold my native land, my sire, My wife, my stately mansion, may the hand, 250 That moment, of some adversary there Shorten me by the head, if I not snap This bow with which I charged myself in vain, And burn the unprofitable tool to dust. To whom AEneas, Trojan Chief, replied. 255 Nay, speak not so. For ere that hour arrive We will, with chariot and with horse, in arms Encounter him, and put his strength to proof. Delay not, mount my chariot. Thou shalt see With what rapidity the ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... for a great rarity, he asked those about him what they thought fittest to be laid up in it; and when they had delivered their various opinions, he told them he should keep Homer's Iliad in it. Nor did Homer prove an unprofitable companion to him in his expeditions. For, after he had become master of Egypt he determined to found a great and populous city, and give to it his own name. And when he had measured and staked out the ground with the advice of the best architects, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... the class of writers, most of them terribly unprofitable, who merely say literary things about social organisation, its institutions, and their improvement. Her feeling about society was less literary than scientific: it was not sentimental, but the business-like ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... of riches must not sometimes have recourse to the protection of courage? and whether, if it be necessary to preserve in some part of the empire the military spirit, it can subsist more commodiously in any place, than in remote and unprofitable provinces, where it can commonly do little harm, and whence it may be called forth ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... it would be a dull world if we could not criticise our friends, but the most unprofitable and unsatisfactory criticism is that by comparison. Criticism is not necessarily uncharitableness, but a wholesome exercise of our powers of analysis and discrimination. It is, however, a very idle exercise, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... rewarded by the charge of more such wealth. We, as a people, are entrusted with living wealth, and, whilst we demand more, we go and bury much of it in the earth—whence, alas! it cannot be recovered. Not an increase of opportunity, thus wasted, was the reward of the unprofitable servant, but to be cast into outer darkness. Is there no ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... servants in the old countries, how should we like to have specially trained and educated farmers drive us out of our homes and farms, such as they were, making use of the same argument, that God could never have intended such ignorant, unprofitable, devastating farmers as we were to occupy land upon which scientific farmers could raise five or ten times as much on each acre as we did? And I well remember thinking that Mr. Mair had the better side of the argument. It then seemed to me that, ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... Archie found highly diverting. He sheepishly confessed that the net reward of a fortnight of diligent labor in his specialty was only three hundred dollars. The Governor was very stern with "Gyppy," advising him to abandon porch-climbing as a hazardous and unprofitable vocation. Archie was dragged from the hardest bed he had ever slept in early the ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... helpless invalid; and on the 8th of August, 1743, his short, unprofitable, brilliant, unhappy life was closed. He died at Ickworth, attended and deplored by his wife, who had ever held a secondary part in the heart of the great wit and beau of the court of George II. After his death his son George returned to Lady Mary all ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... labourer, he was nevertheless in easy circumstances at home. When he on this occasion saw his son-in-law come to him in such distress, he forthwith felt at heart considerable displeasure. Fortunately Shih-yin had still in his possession the money derived from the unprofitable realization of his property, so that he produced and handed it to his father-in-law, commissioning him to purchase, whenever a suitable opportunity presented itself, a house and land as a provision for food and raiment against days to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... manhood, in the life of men of refined aspirations and enthusiastic mettle, is oftener than not an unconsciously miserable period—one which more mature years recall as hollow, deceiving, bitterly unprofitable. ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... them! The Yankees relieved us of the burden of a few unprofitable slaves. They slew the best and the bravest of our men. They took our wealth and reduced us to unimaginable poverty and hardship. But, thank God, we saved our women! We returned to them ragged, wounded, footsore, and despairing, and ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... novelty of the work stimulates them to activity, and the methods or habits learned in other trades are available for application to the new tasks. When the novelty wears off, however, they become wearied and cast about for a fresh and therefore more alluring field. Such nomads prove unprofitable employees even when they are the means of introducing new methods or short cuts into a business. They strike a plateau and lose interest and initiative just at the point where more industrious and less superficial men would begin to be ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... realization of its social value. As the boy in school contracted the habit of doing his work in certain hours and taking his pleasure in certain other hours, so in the factory he earns his money by ten hours of dull work and spends it in three hours of lurid and unprofitable pleasure in the evening. Both in the school and in the factory, in proportion as his work grows dull and monotonous, his recreation must become more exciting and stimulating. The hopelessness of adding evening ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... body is to the soul, that is exterior devotion to interior. From the soul interior devotion springs, and through the body it manifests itself. Exterior devotion, without the inward spirit that quickens it, is worship unprofitable and dead: it tends at once to corruption, like the body when the soul has left it. Interior devotion, on the other hand, can exist, though not with its full complement, without the exterior. So that it is only in the union of the two ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... are doing in the desert, Professor. I should think you would find this part of the country a most unprofitable field." ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... followed by more overwhelming misfortunes. Let us, then, dwell a little longer upon the rejoicings which preceded 1812. I feel that I need to be fortified before entering upon reminiscences of that time of unprofitable sacrifices, of bloodshed without preserving or conquering, and of glory without result. On the 25th of August, the Empress's fete was celebrated at Trianon; and from early in the morning the road ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... twenty-three days of ten hours, and that the net income from such an area was a little more than 16 yen, and that thus the return for a day's labour was 73 sen. It was demonstrated, therefore, that labour was recompensed very well, and that instead of farming being "the most unprofitable of industries"—for in Japan as in the West there are sinners against the light who ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... man, may be," said Darby. "He is, I would trust—sooner, I say, than that precious vessel should be broken up as unprofitable." ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... occasionally. He translated De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, introducing some reveries of his own, but the work attracted no attention. During this period his father, naturally anxious about his son's unprofitable courses, one morning informed him that he had obtained a clerkship for him in an office connected with the military commissariat. Alfred did not venture to demur, but the confinement and routine of an office were intolerable, and he resolved to conquer his liberty by every effort of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... that redundancy of the blood which is natural to all women; and which, flowing out at certain periods of time (when they are not pregnant) are from thence called terms and menses, from their monthly flux of excrementitious and unprofitable blood. Now, that the matter flowing forth is excrementitious, is to be understood only with respect to the redundancy and overplus thereof, being an excrement only with respect to its quantity; for as to its quality, it ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... that it was an unprofitable employment, trying to help on Axel's cause. She could not but see what he thought of Anna; and after the touching manner of widows, was convinced of the superiority of marriage, as a means of real happiness for a woman, over any and every ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... colleague now lost all patience; since the others persisted in following them, they determined to give them an unprofitable chase, and to sacrifice the hunting season rather than share the products with their rivals. They accordingly took up their line of march down the course of the Missouri, keeping the main Blackfoot trail, and tramping doggedly forward, without stopping to set a single trap. The others ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... the signal-boxes with green paint. To add to all our miseries Radish began to pay us very irregularly. All the painting on the line was given to one contractor, who subcontracted with another, and he again with Radish, stipulating for twenty per cent commission. The job itself was unprofitable; then came the rains; time was wasted; we did no work and Radish had to pay his men every day. The starving painters nearly came to blows with him, called him a swindler, a bloodsucker, a Judas, and he, poor ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... (afterwards Sir James Scarlett), Raincock, and Richardson. Sergeant Cockle, in opening the case highly lauded Messrs. Lewis and Banks as actors, men, and citizens, and pointed out to the jury how monstrous the conduct of the prisoners had been, in attempting to force an unprofitable movement upon anyone. I recollect he made use of this remarkable expression, "that every person resorting to a theatre has a right to express his dissatisfaction against any thing he sees, either of the plays performed or the actors, and that he must do this honestly: but if he conspire ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... Cowley, who with the learning and acuteness of Donne, possessed the more poetical qualities of a fertile imagination, and frequent happiness of expression, and who claims the highest place of all who ever plied the unprofitable trade of combining dissimilar and repugnant ideas, was not indeed known to the king during his prosperity; but his talents recommended him at the military court of Oxford, and the [Transcriber's note: word missing ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... to explain. Had it been for Crime or Misconduct as a Magistrate, of course Trial and Conviction should have preceded my Removal. As it is, I feel, as I have publicly declar'd, no shame in the removal. I have held an office honorable because extensively useful; because unprofitable and burthensome to the individual; because independently and conscientiously exercis'd, with a devotion, such as it requir'd, of my time, my thoughts, and my best faculties, daily to its discharge. My Collegues,—and they are and have been, during a course ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... to the home of a farmer, who was trying to make a living out of his isolated holdings, eking it out, as he informed them while his wife was getting up the best meal possible, by doing some terrapin hunting, and even trapping muskrats and such fur-bearing animals during the otherwise unprofitable ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... than it is like Job, and describes rather the restlessness of a largely-gifted nature which, missing the guidance of the heart, plays experiments with life, trying knowledge, pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable mockery. The temper exhibited here will probably be perennial in the world. But the remedy for it will scarcely be more clear under other circumstances than it is at present, and lies in the disposition of the emotions, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... and a comparison between different degrees of merit is quite another. The former is the essence of criticism; the latter, one of the most futile pastimes that can readily be imagined. That each man should have his own preferences is right enough. It would be a nerveless and unprofitable mind to which such preferences were unknown. More than that, some rough classification, some understanding with oneself as to what authors are to be reckoned supreme masters of their craft, is hardly to be avoided. The mere fact that the critic lays stress ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... his distinctly unorthodox ones. He had read a good deal of Aristotle and something of the Schoolmen, which probably no one else in Oxford had done except Blanco White; and the temptation of having read what no one else knows anything about sometimes leads men to make an unprofitable use of their special knowledge, which they ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... eats the blessed bread of life, who drinks of the blessed cup of immortality and incorruptibility, and anoints himself with the fragrant oil of holiness, should kiss a woman of a strange people, who blesses dead and unprofitable idols, and eats the putrid bread of idolatry, which chokes the soul of man, who drinks the libations of deceit, and anoints herself ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... our societies, from the broad-brimmed Society of Friends downwards, have something in them of a homespun, humdrum, plain, flat—not unprofitable, perhaps, but unattractive character. They may be good and useful, but they have no dignity or splendour, and are quite destitute of the strange meteoric power and grandeur which have accompanied the career of Clubs. Societies there are, indeed, which identify themselves through their ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... whose names will be rever'd When you, and I, and all the venal herd, Weigh'd in Nemesis, just impartial scale, Are mark'd with infamy, till time blot out And in oblivion sink our hated names. But 'twas a poor unprofitable path, Nought to be gain'd, save solid peace of mind, No pensions, place or title there I found; I saw Rapatio's arts had struck so deep And giv'n his country such a fatal wound, None but his foes promotion could expect; ...
— The Group - A Farce • Mercy Warren
... daughter of a thriftless, honest man, whose energy in the effort to recover some hundreds of acres of woodland deeded to her in jest, and supposed to be unprofitable, leads to comfort for her father, and a happy marriage for ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... or what Thaddeus would have done next if the conversation had been continued, can be a matter of unprofitable speculation only, for at this point a wail from above- stairs showed that Master Perkins had awakened, and the ladies, considerate of Bessie's maternal feelings, promptly rose to take their leave, and in ten minutes she and Thaddeus ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... hull was made near the site of the Winslow warehouse. The engine, of sixty to seventy horse power, was brought from Pittsburgh. Johnson ran her between Buffalo and Detroit until 1828, when hard times coming on and business threatening to be unprofitable, he sold his interest in her, and left the lakes. In company with Goodman and Wilkeson, he built the Commodore, on the Chagrin river, in the year 1830, and that closed his ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... the Almighty in his wondrous works, and to remark how he has scattered his precious gifts far and wide over the face of the globe for the benefit of his creatures. Our midnight watches have not been unprofitable. Often and often in the calm night we have gazed upward at the starlit sky and thought upon God. We have had time for reflection. We have felt our own unworthiness. We have asked ourselves the serious question, ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... to be an unprofitable trade now-a-days," returned the young fellow, shaking his head. "I think I will be the namesake of Hiram, the brass-smith, for it is said of him that he was 'filled with wisdom and understanding' and that is what I want to be if I am going to ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... defied each other like a congress of kings; each of whom had a realm to rule, and a way of his own that made concert unprofitable. What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! One apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another that no man should buy or sell; that the use of money was the cardinal evil; another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... turned from the subject: it seemed to grow more and more unprofitable. "I shall go and hear what Jan says, if he is there," she ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... when we speak of the "laws of motion," we may imperceptibly include, in our conception of them, that force or power which impels the body, as well as the mere law or rule which regulates its movements. It were a mere unprofitable dispute about words, did we entertain and discuss the question, whether the import of the term "law" might not be so extended as to include under it powers, properties, and causes, as well as the rules and conditions of their operation: for, even were this question answered ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... air, both with fist and foot. He wrestled, ran, jumped—not at three steps and a leap, called the hops, nor at clochepied, called the hare's leap, nor yet at the Almains; for, said Gymnast, these jumps are for the wars altogether unprofitable, and of no use—but at one leap he would skip over a ditch, spring over a hedge, mount six paces upon a wall, ramp and grapple after this fashion up against a window of the full height of a lance. He did swim in deep waters on his belly, on his back, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... ashamed of myself? I do not think so. I have been hammering letters ever since, and got three ready and a fourth about half through; all four will go by the mail, which is what I wish, for so I keep at least my start. Days and days of unprofitable stubbing and digging, and the result still poor as literature, left-handed, heavy, unillumined, but I believe readable and interesting as matter. It has been no joke of a hard time, and when my task was done, I had little taste for anything but blowing on the pipe. A few necessary ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they encountered another gentleman, this time a real one, with high hat and distinguished cape coat, whom Jennie immediately recognized. This was the honorable Senator himself, newly returned from Washington, and anticipating a very unprofitable Christmas. He had arrived upon the express which had enlisted the attention of the children, and was carrying his light grip for the pleasure of it to the hotel. As he passed he thought ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... Gabrielle, a very small baby of eighteen months with coal black eyes and hair, playing like a kitten with the foot of a dead rabbit on the kitchen floor. "Only to think what poor Laura would have felt!" they sighed, not realising that such a train of thought was in the nature of things unprofitable. ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... visit at Hull-House. He said that the stronghold of such a man was not the place in which to start municipal regeneration; that good aldermen should be elected from the promising wards first, until a majority of honest men in the city council should make politics unprofitable for corrupt men. We replied that it was difficult to divide Chicago into good and bad wards, but that a new organization called the Municipal Voters' League was attempting to give to the well-meaning voter in each ward throughout the city accurate information ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... date at which I heard of him anew. It seemed that, with Stagers and others, he had formed a band of counterfeiters in the West, where he had thus acquired a fortune so considerable that I was amazed at his having allowed his passions to seduce him into unprofitable crime. In his agony he unfortunately thought of me, and had bribed Stagers largely in order that he might be induced to find me. When the narration had reached this stage, and I had been made fully to understand that I was now and hereafter under the sharp eye of Stagers and his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... the imposts laid on for the maintenance of this corps, and in enforcing the black mail, Rob Roy had already gained the confidence of the better classes, whilst, by his exploits, he had taught the freebooter to tremble at his name. His journeys to England had not, either, been unprofitable to him in gaining friends. By a strict regard to his word, a true Highland quality, he had gained confidence; whilst his open and engaging demeanour had procured ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... pieces after the death of Aurungzebe. The pitiable and despicable successors of a great prince, worse than Sardanapalus, worse than the degraded Caesars of the basest days of Byzantium, squandered their unprofitable hours in shameful pleasure while the great empire fell to pieces, trampled by the {258} conquering feet of Persian princes, of Afghan invaders, of wild Mahratta chiefs. Between the fierce invaders from the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... cleave to more reliable? Have they not their moths and their rusts? Is it pleasure? Well, I say nothing about the diseases that fill the bones of many a young man who flings himself into dissipation; but I remind you of just this one thing, that all that pleasure tends to become flat, stale, and unprofitable. That which the poet said of his own class, that it 'begins in gladness, and thereof cometh in the end despondency and madness,' is true of every delight of sense, ay! and of more than sense, of taste and of intellect. As the Book of Proverbs has it, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the little Jacobin said to herself fiercely as she waltzed; 'it is foolish, unprofitable. I do not belong to them, nor ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Suppose that we had to choose, with all these friends of yours, with our position, yes, even the place I have won in my profession, my place as editor—all that we now have on the one side; and on the other side a thankless, unprofitable, apparently useless standing up for the right. Wouldn't you ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... ignorance of actual life not only keeps us at a distance from the people of our own time but renders our ideas of history equally vague, abstract and unprofitable. I believe it would be an excellent thing if, beginning with the age of about ten years, no child were allowed to eat anything until he was able to tell where it was produced, what it cost and how it was prepared. If this were carried out in every department of the child's existence he would ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... The weariness . . . fret. Cf. 'The fretful stir unprofitable and the fever of the world' in Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... alliance, and bestowed his sister upon Charles.[**] A league, which Edward at the same time concluded with the duke of Brittany, seemed both to increase his security, and to open to him the prospect of rivalling his predecessors in those foreign conquests, which, however short-lived and unprofitable, had rendered their reigns ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... horrors that he had witnessed there, had aroused in his superstitious mind a distaste for possessions and titles in that devastated Paradise. Instead, he accepted a measure of relief from the obligations incurred by his eighth share in the many unprofitable expeditions that had been sent out during the last three years, agreeing for the next three years to receive an eighth share of the gross income, and a tenth of the net profits, without contributing anything to the cost. His appointment of Bartholomew ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... when the people, in their endeavour to shake off a few links of their fetters, refused to bend their bodies in the dust before their lords and their minds before their priests—when the seeds of liberty, till then lying in unprofitable ground, though watered for centuries by the tears of tyranny and oppression, first germinated and rose above the earth, who gave the signal of resistance in France?—the inhabitants of Vezelay. Yes; it is to her citizens that the honour belongs of having first ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... most audacious privateering exploit was that of the privateers "Hero," "Hope," and "Swallow," in July, 1782. The captains of these craft, meeting after an unprofitable season upon the high seas, conceived the idea of making a descent upon the Nova Scotian town of Lunenberg, some thirty-five miles from Halifax. Little time was wasted in discussion. Privateers are not hampered by official red tape. So it happened ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... and I are not men of war. We prefer the peaceful occupation of the merchant, and, to say truth, it is not unprofitable." ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... were men whose minds revolted at the possibilities that swarmed about human slavery. Georgia was the only one of the Original Thirteen Colonies in which slavery was prohibited, and we have seen how this prohibition was repealed at the demand of the planters. Seven Northern States, finding slavery unprofitable, abolished the system, and a majority of the slaves were sold to the Southern States. But the emancipation movement went on in the South. There were more than fifty thousand free negroes in Virginia in 1856, and there were a great many in Georgia. ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... quality was their sombreness of tone. He invariably got them hopelessly muddy in color, despite their resembling the color dreams of a young impressionist painter at the start. He worked at them so long until they became blurred and blotchy, dark like his life, a sad reflection of his unprofitable career. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... knew, the man might have been out in front by this time, observing the veranda. As a matter of fact, after flinging away the cheroot, Heyst had gone indoors with the feeling of a man who gives up an unprofitable occupation. But Ricardo fancied he could hear faint footfalls on the open ground, and dodged quickly into the room. There he drew breath, and meditated for a while. His next step was to feel for the matches on the tall desk, and to light the candle. He had to communicate to his governor ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... Government to which they had loyally paid taxation without representation — driven from their homes, because they do not want to become servants; and when you know that half of these homeless ones have perforce submitted to the conditions and accepted service on terms that are unprofitable to themselves; if you remember that more would have submitted but for the fact that no master has any use for a servant with forty head of cattle, or a hundred or more sheep; and if you further bear in mind that many landowners are anxious to live at peace with, and to keep your people ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... that former Worth stand fast, Looks forward, persevering to the last, From well to better, daily self-surpast: Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth For ever, and to noble deeds give birth, Or he must fall, to sleep without his fame And leave a dead, unprofitable name— Finds comfort in himself and in his cause: And while the mortal mist is gathering, draws His breath ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Free State. This enterprise was not at all popular in Belgium. But the king had a will of his own and saw it through, much to the final advantage of his country. By a will made in 1889 he left the Congo State to Belgium, which annexed it in 1908, and which has found it not an unprofitable investment. The Congo question—its finances, development, and administration—is the main feature of internal politics of Belgium in modern times. Of course there were other questions—electoral reform, financial legislation, military ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... McEachern's observant eye had not failed to notice certain peddlers who obstructed the traffic, divers tradesmen who did the same by the side-walk, and of restaurant keepers not a few with a distaste for closing at one o'clock in the morning. His researches in this field were not unprofitable. In a reasonably short space of time, he had put by the three thousand dollars that were the price of his promotion to detective-sergeant. He did not like paying three thousand dollars for promotion, but there must be sinking of capital if an investment is to prosper. Mr. McEachern "came ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... characteristic expression to the motive which prompted him in its establishment. "The state of conversation and business in this town," says Steele, "having been long perplexed with pretenders in both kinds, in order to open men's eyes against such abuses, it appeared no unprofitable undertaking to publish a Paper which should observe upon the manners of the pleasurable, as well as the busy, part of mankind." He goes on to say that "the general purpose of this Paper is to expose the false arts of life, to pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity, and ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... and wenches, whose chief employment was stone-picking in the fields, geography and the use of the globes. Even the churchwardens shook their heads, and privately thought the Rector a little out of his seven senses for wasting his learning upon such unprofitable scholars. Nevertheless, he continued his self-imposed task, without meeting any reward beyond the satisfaction of his own conscience. It was not till he added to his pupils myself and young Reichardt, that he felt he was doing his duty with ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... Mme. du Barry and her clique looked on as Piccini's enemy, astonished both cabals by appointing Piccini her singing-master, an unprofitable honor, for he received no pay, and was obliged to give costly copies of his compositions to the royal family. He might have quoted from the Latin poet in regard to this favor from Marie Antoinette, whose faction in music, among other ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... little isles in the North Sea ventured and blundered into world-wide empire; of how at first they endeavoured to rule this vast domain in the approved fashion, for the power and profit of the motherland; of how this policy was slowly abandoned because unprofitable and impossible; of how, when this change took place, most men looked to the ending of a connection which no longer paid; of how acquired momentum and inherited obligations on the one side and instinctive loyalty on the other prevented this result; of how the new ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... liberty should be my grave. What I could not do myself, if I should fall, I should leave as a last charge to my countrymen to accomplish; because I should feel conscious that life, any more than death, is unprofitable when a foreign nation holds my country in subjection. But it was not as an enemy that the succours of France were to land. I looked, indeed, for the assistance of France; but I wished to prove to France and to the world ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... Methuselah were very holy men, full of the Holy Spirit. Accordingly they performed their office by teaching, admonishing, urging and entreating, in season and out of season; as Paul says, 2 Tim 4, 2. But they reproved flesh and did unprofitable labor, for the flesh would not yield to sound teaching. Should I, says he, endure forever such ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... impossibility for Dumont to believe that Scarborough could really be sincere in a course which was obviously unprofitable. Therefore he attached even more importance to Arabella's cordiality than did Gladys herself. And, when the Legislature adjourned and Scarborough returned to Saint X for a brief stay, Dumont sent Gladys post-haste ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... us to invest billions in what are termed Liberty Bonds. It has the 'liberty' to lend these billions to irresponsible or bankrupt nations of Europe, who are fighting an unprofitable war. Some of our dollars will equip an army of Amer- ican boys to fight on Europe's battle- fields. This may be good business. Our excited politicians down at Washington may think they are acting for our best good. But what becomes of the money, finally? Will our millionaire government contractors ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... month, and twenty-five colonists at sixty-two and a half cents a day, besides their food. This year, they make about thirty barrels of sugar (which will cost at least twenty-five cents per pound), and two pipes of molasses. The cane, now in process of manufacture, is very small and unprofitable, all of the larger kind having been already ground. The sugar-house is a wretched building, with a thatched roof, and the sides roughly boarded like a cow-shed. There were four boilers in full bubble, and ten thousand bees in full buzz about the establishment; ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... Henry is doubtless not the man, as old Auchindrane expresses it in the noble and strangely neglected tragedy which bears solitary but sufficient witness to the actual dramatic faculty of Sir Walter Scott's genius, to do the devil's work without his wages; but neither is he, on the like unprofitable terms, by any manner of means the man to do God's. No completer incarnation could be shown us of the militant Englishman—Anglais pur sang; but it is not only, as some have seemed to think, with the highest, the purest, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... fourpence was his maximum). It may appear strange to suggest that the higher the sum paid for a book (assuming it to be worth the money), the slighter the risk grows of the purchase proving pecuniarily unprofitable. Yet at the same time outlay on a library is a relative term, and one individual may account himself as frugal in expending L30,000 in the course of a lifetime, as another may do in expending L300. The late Earl of ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... finding that no good result followed their violent pounding upon the inside of the companion doors, soon abandoned so unprofitable an amusement, and I was just beginning to hope that they had philosophically made up their minds to submit with a good grace to the inevitable, when crash came a bullet through the teak doors and past my head in most uncomfortable proximity to ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... of the globe in his hopes and aspirations, that in his old age he would be likely to endure a master. The king wanted not Hannibal as a general: as an attendant and a counsellor in the business of the war, he might properly employ him. A moderate use of such abilities would be neither unprofitable nor dangerous; but if advantages of the highest nature were sought through him, they, probably, would be the destruction both of ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... about two weeks later, Kirk, returning to the studio from an unprofitable raid into the region of the dealers, found on the table a card bearing the name of Mrs. Robert Wilbur. This had been crossed out, and beneath it, in a straggly hand, the name Miss Wilbur had ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... it is in the shadow, where the sun shines not, to be peeled and its rind pulled off. Then are the fibres and strings thereof to be parted, wherein, as we have already said, consisteth its prime virtue, price, and efficacy, and severed from the woody part thereof, which is unprofitable, and serveth hardly to any other use than to make a clear and glistering blaze, to kindle the fire, and for the play, pastime, and disport of little children, to blow up hogs' bladders and make them rattle. Many times some use is made thereof by tippling sweet-lipped ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Treatment, I must still add the pleasantest Insolence of all, which I have once or twice seen; to wit, That when a silly Rogue has thrown away one Part in three of his Life in unprofitable Attendance, it is taken wonderfully ill that he withdraws, and is resolved to ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... throughout the country. The Danish measure for land is a Tonde Land (Td. L.), which is equal to 1.363 statute acres. Of the best ploughing land a little over 6 Td. L., or about 8 acres, go to a Td. Htk., but of unprofitable land a Td. Htk. may represent 300 acres or more. On the islands and in the more fertile part of Jutland the average is about 10 Td. L., or 13 acres. Woodland, tithes, &c., are also assessed to Td. Htk. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... venture was abandoned. About the same time the owners of one of the most famous packet lines, the Black Ball, tried the experiment of supplementing their sailing service with a steamship, but it proved unprofitable. Shortly after the New York and Havre Steamship Company, with two vessels and a postal subsidy of $150,000, entered the field and continued operations with only moderate success ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... mine, for my travels this summer, is finally settled; and I now communicate it to you that you may form your own upon it. I propose being at Spa on the 10th or 12th of May, and staying there till the 10th of July. As there will be no mortal there during my stay, it would be both unpleasant and unprofitable to you to be shut up tete-a-fete with me the whole time; I should therefore think it best for you not to come to me there till the last week in June. In the meantime, I suppose, that by the middle of April, you will think that you have had ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... acquaintances were country- town editors and provincial politicians, very like the ilk of a hundred other States and provinces in the raw corners of the world. He lived and died in that stale, flat, and literarily unprofitable expanse of prairie between Lake Michigan and the Rio Grande, where man's most pretentious achievement was the Ead's Bridge at St. Louis, Nature's most spectacular effort, the Ozark Mountains, and literature's most worthy resident representative, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?"[220] and we are answered that the old process has an imperishable value, only we have not yet made clear its connection with other contributions. And all the work is young, liable to be drawn into unprofitable excursions, side-tracked by self-deceit and pretence; and it fatally attracts, like the older mysticism, the curiosity and the expository powers of those least in sympathy with it, ready writers who, with all ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... already taught her many pretty devices in this art; and when she found that at the school they were admired—that she was praised instead of blamed—her vanity was pleased, and she learned so readily all that they could teach in this not unprofitable accomplishment, that Mrs. Boxer slyly and secretly turned her tasks to account and made a weekly perquisite of the poor pupil's industry. Another faculty she possessed, in common with persons usually deficient, and with the lower species— viz., a most accurate and faithful recollection of places. ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... unhappy, Hugh Alston had returned to Hurst Dormer, to find there that everything was flat, stale, and unprofitable. He had an intense love for the home of his birth and his boyhood, but just now it seemed to mean less to him than it ever had before. He watched moodily the workmen at their work on those alterations and restorations that he had ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... in his attic, Rodd was pacing up and down his empty room, surveying the impotence to which he had reduced both his life and his work by his refusal to accept the social system of his time. His work was consciously subversive, and therefore unprofitable: his life was nothing. He was a solitary in London, as though he spoke a language which no one understood. So indeed he did. His words had meanings for him to which no one else had the smallest clue, for they referred rather to his imagined ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... seem to some a strange and unprofitable subject on which to preach. It ought not to be so in fact. All Scripture is given by Inspiration of God, and is profitable for teaching, for correction, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness. And so will this Vision be to us, if we try to understand it aright. We shall find in it fresh knowledge ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... course, bungled over it. This will be seen in the irregularity of the fitting of the ribs, which have been ruthlessly cut or torn out of the groove, some portions being left in. Taking them out was found to be unprofitable work, with a general result of a wretched wreck remaining, instead of the whole original being there but shifted a little, from the glue losing its hold while perishing from the action ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... I was a distinct improvement over the Count, who had been their master for a dozen very lean and unprofitable years. Things might be expected to look up a bit, with me at the head of the house. Was it not possible for a new and mighty race to rise and take the place of the glorious Rothhoefens? A long line of Baron Schmarts? ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... cease from a strife, which was only destroying themselves, and unite their energies against the Alleghans, the Adirondacks, the Eries, and other ancient and warlike tribes, who were their superiors in their isolated and divided condition. Already weary of their unprofitable conflicts, the proposal was received with favor, and Ato-tar-ho, an Onandaga chieftain, unequalled in valor, and the fame of whose skill and daring was known among all the tribes, became the leading spirit of this confederacy, and ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... on affairs of business. I find, in a letter which I wrote to Madame Guizot during one of these journeys, the impressions I experienced. "At the first moment I feel pleasure at mixing again and conversing with the world, but soon grow weary of unprofitable words. There is no repetition more tiresome than that which bears upon popular matters. We are eternally listening to what we know already; we are perpetually telling others what they are as well acquainted with as we are: this ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of Congress, with its ten thousand followers, would hardly be considered as elevating anywhere. There is an odor of tobacco—of rum—of discredit—of anything but sanctity about the American politician that makes his vicinage unpleasant and unprofitable. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... wholly lose their interest. The mere words, "There was once a battle fought here" make the traveller stop and think, even if he does not know by what men of what race it was fought. But the parliamentary struggles of one generation seem passing stale and unprofitable to the next. Yet the history of nations depends as much on their civil as on their warlike contests. In Piedmont the strife always turned on the same point: whether the State or the Church should predominate. ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... knows to be foolish things, by way of continuing a dispute, to see what a man will answer,—to make him your butt!' (angrier still.) BOSWELL. 'My dear Sir, I had no such intentions as you seem to suspect; I had not indeed. Might not this nobleman have felt every thing "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable[1039]," as Hamlet says?' JOHNSON. 'Nay, if you are to bring in gabble, I'll talk no more. I will not, upon my honour.'—My readers ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... carried up and down by fantastical error without any order at all. And if at any time they assail us with great force, our captain retireth her band into a castle,[84] leaving them occupied in sacking unprofitable baggage. And from above we laugh them to scorn for seeking so greedily after most vile things, being safe from all their furious assault, and fortified with that defence which aspiring folly cannot ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... disposition: the defect to which I allude being no direct result of the time, but of living at the beck and call of passion, and following each object as it rises. For to them that are such the knowledge comes to be unprofitable, as to those of imperfect self-control: but, to those who form their desires and act in accordance with reason, to have knowledge on these points must ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... It may not be unprofitable to give the history of one more case of this sort. Miss E—— had an hereditary right to a good brain and to the best cultivation of it. Her father was one of our ripest and broadest American scholars, and her mother one of ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... even though not consulted, to volunteer a little advice to the young man. The reason of this may be inferred. Jordan was beginning to be rather particular in attention to Edith, his daughter; and apart from the fact that he had wasted his money in an unprofitable scheme, and had not been prudent enough to consult him, old Matthew Page had no particular objection to him as a son-in-law. His family stood high in the State, and his father, previous to his death, had been for many years in the State senate. The idea that Jordan would ...
— Lessons in Life, For All Who Will Read Them • T. S. Arthur
... also forms a substantial part of this meal, though ordinarily it should not be taken more than once a day. Much is heard nowadays about the dangers of excessive meat-eating and the objections are well-founded in the case of brain-workers. The undesirable effects are "an unprofitable spurring of the metabolism— more particularly objectionable in warm weather—and the menace of auto-intoxication." Too much protein, found in meat, lays a burden upon the liver and kidneys and when the burden is too great, wastes, which cannot be taken ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... me, then or after. I don't think we spoke on the way to the ranch; I was busy wishing I'd been around in that part of the world thirty years before, and thinking what a lot of fun I had missed by not being as old as dad. A quarrel thirty years old is either mighty stale and unprofitable, or else, like wine, it improves with age. I meant to ride over to King's Highway some day, and see how he would have welcomed dad ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... Endbury, Lydia was fond of having people about her, "to try to get really acquainted with them" she said, and during that summer the Hollister veranda in the evening became a rendezvous for their Bellevue neighbors. Paul rather deplored the time wasted in this unprofitable variety of informal social life which, in his phrase, "counted for nothing" but he was always glad to see Walter. "At the rate he's going and the way he's taking hold, he'll be a valuable business friend in a few years," he ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... have kindly flung over his vices and his follies, or that fine and delicate veil which Christian humility draws over his virtues and acts of benevolence. To scrutinize and dissect the character of others is an idle and unprofitable task; and the most skilful anatomist will often be forced to withhold his hand when he unexpectedly meets with something he does not understand—some confirmation of the character of his patient which is not explicable on his theory of human nature. To become operators on ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... spent some unprofitable hours up in the air. One of the captive balloons, in charge of an engineer officer, was just being prepared ready to ascend when the officer, whom I knew well, invited me to go up with him. I handed my horse to the orderly and jumped into the basket, and we were soon up some hundreds ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... him, softened her voice, sharpened her glance, gracefully inclined her head, rubbed against him with her sleeve, and called him Monsiegneur, embraced him with the loving words, trifled with his hand, and finished by smiling at him most affably. He, not imagining that so unprofitable a lover would suit her, for he was as poor as a church mouse, and did not know that his beauty was the equal in her eyes to all the treasures of the world, was not taken in her trap, but continued to ride the ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... and freedom of your fathers if you would be your own soldiers and own commanders, confiding no longer your affairs in foreign or mercenary hands—if you would charge yourselves with your own defense, employing abroad, for the public, what you waste in unprofitable pleasures at home, the world might once more behold you making a figure worthy of Athenians. "You would have us, then, (you say,) do service in our armies in our own persons; and, for so doing, you would have the pensions we receive in time ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... of thoughts, and not unprofitable ones. Her best feelings were stirred up, and she could not see Arthur, in this new light, without tenderness untainted by jealousy. Percy had brought her to a sense of her injustice—this was the small end of the wedge, and the discovery of the real state of things was another blow. While watching ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... need to wait for dissection for the bequest," said I, "for many a fellow after amputation has said to you, 'a-leg-I-see.' But why is sawing off a leg an unprofitable thing? Do you give it ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... he continued, "rather than with that inspired teacher, Savonarola. The Protestants, spite of so-called 'ecclesiastical authority,' persist in denying them. With the Protestants, I hold that the entire machinery of modern miracles is false and unprofitable. With the Apostles ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... up to that inn, which, as all frequenters of Margate know, stands near the landing-place, and commands a fine view of the harbour. Mr. Creed, the landlord, was airing himself at the door, or, as Shakespeare has it, "taking his ease at his inn," and knowing Green of old to be a most unprofitable customer, he did not trouble to move his position farther than just to draw up one leg so as not wholly to obstruct the passage, and looked at him as much as to say "I prefer your room to your company." ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... was loth to resort to this expedient; but what could he do in the necessitous circumstances to which he was reduced? He first sold off his slaves, those unprofitable mouths, which would have been a greater expense to him than in his present condition he could bear. He lived on the money for some time; and when it was spent, ordered his goods to be carried into the market-place, where they were sold for half their value, though there were among them ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... earnest, fervid, full of zeal, and who, like him, have slackened in their work; who were Sunday-school teachers, workers amongst the poor, I know not what, when they were young men and women, and who now are idle and unprofitable servants. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... alone in his sacred car he should at once assail them with the spear and hold his fleet horses. Then at last espied him a comrade, even Alkimedon son of Laerkes, son of Haimon, and he halted behind the car and spake unto Automedon: "Automedon, what god hath put into thy breast unprofitable counsel and taken from thee wisdom, that thus alone thou art fighting against the Trojans in the forefront of the press? Thy comrade even now was slain, and Hector goeth proudly, wearing on his own shoulders ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... the soldiers of Alaric and Genseric were stimulated by the passions of a victorious army; amidst the wanton indulgence of lust or cruelty, portable wealth was the object of their search; nor could they derive either pride or pleasure from the unprofitable reflection that they had battered to the ground the works of the consuls and Caesars. Their moments were indeed precious: the Goths evacuated Rome on the sixth, the Vandals on the fifteenth day, and tho it be far more difficult ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... returned the Fair Havener in a tone of agreeable reminiscence, as if it had been a not unprofitable occupation. "Found there wasn't a glass-blower in all Californy. Bought 'n old machine, put up to the mines with it, blew all sorts 'f jigmarigs 'n' thingumbobs, 'n' sold 'em to the miners 'n' Injuns. Them critters is jest like sailors ashore; they'll buy anything they set eyes ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Yard. The man to deal with that side of the business was Loudon the factor, and to him he was bound in the first place. He had made a clear picture in his head of this Loudon—a derelict old country writer, formal, pedantic, lazy, anxious only to get an unprofitable business off his hands with the least possible trouble, never going near the place himself, and ably supported in his lethargy by conceited Edinburgh Writers to the Signet. "Sich notions of business!" he murmured. "I wonder that ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... chaplain, his vicar, and his friend. However, he willingly accepted a friend of Mr. Hamilton's to supply his place, a clergyman not much beyond the prime of life; one who for seven years had devoted himself, laboriously and unceasingly, to a poor and unprofitable parish in one of the Feroe Islands; in the service of Mr. Hamilton he had been employed, though voluntarily he had accepted, nay, eloquently he had pleaded for the office. To those of our readers who are acquainted with the story of Home Influence, the Rev. Henry Morton is no stranger. ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... on their affection and regard were first established. As Hindus we ought never to forget the labor of scholars. We owe them our life as a nation, our freedom as a recognized society, and our position in the scale of races. It is the fashion with many to decry the labors of those men as dry, unprofitable, and dreamy. We should know that it is to the study of the roots and inflections of the Sanskrit language that we owe our national salvation.... Within a very few years after the discovery of Sanskrit, arevolution took place in the history of comparative science. Never were so many ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... word "sleveless," in the sense of unprofitable, has defied the most careful research. It is frequently found allied to other substantives. Bishop Hall speaks of the "sleveless tale of transubstantiation," and Milton writes of a "sleveless reason." Chaucer uses it ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... could not draw him away from the scene of his father's death, but at last, by repeated arguments and reasonings, I succeeded in making him realise how useless and unprofitable any further efforts on our part must necessarily prove, and in inducing him to ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... numerous business transactions of Captain Paget's life had brought him in contact with a very respectable little French gentleman called Fleurus, who had begun his career as a notary, but, finding that profession unprofitable, had become a hunter of pedigrees and heirs-at-law—for the most part to insignificant legacies, unclaimed stock, and all other jetsam and flotsam thrown up on the shadowy shores of the Court of Chancery. M. Fleurus had not often been so fortunate as to put his industrious fingers into any large ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... in the way of fruit, flower, grain or garden vegetables was anything but wild and unproductive, or bitter, tasteless or unprofitable. Chemical changes are made in the plant by the soil in which it grows, because it is from the soil that it gets its food. The large and juicy carrot found at home is nothing but the woody spindle of the wild carrot, and I ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... suppose that you will, or to think it right that you should, always be in company with senators and philosophers; but of the juvenile kind let me advise you to be choice. It is easy to make acquaintances, but very difficult to shake them off, however irksome and unprofitable they are found, after we have once committed ourselves to them. The indiscretions, which very often they involuntarily lead one into, ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... might be recorded to their honour in after ages. The king of China said: 'I have more power over that which I have not spoken than I have to recall what has once passed my lips.' The king of India: 'I have been often struck with the risk of speaking; for if a man be heard in his own praise it is unprofitable boasting, and what he says to his own discredit is injurious in its consequences.' The king of Persia: 'I am the slave of what I have spoken, but the master of what I conceal.' The king of Greece: 'I have ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... general subject to which persons can refer for the authoritative settlement of any of these points, either absolutely or proximately; and while a simple statement of facts, acknowledged by all steamship-men, may tend to dispel much misapprehension on this interesting subject, it will also be not unprofitable, I trust, to review some of the prominent arguments on which the mail steamship system is based. That system should stand or fall on its own merits or demerits alone; and to be permanent, it must be based on the necessities of the community, ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... maintaining themselves nobody seems to know how. The belief appears to be unanimous, however, that they are capable of any deviltry under the sun, and that, while their great specialty and favorite occupation is stealing horses, if this becomes slack or unprofitable, or even for the sake of a little pleasant variety, these freebooters from the Caucasus have no hesitation about turning highwaymen whenever a tempting occasion offers. All sorts of advice about the best way to avoid being robbed is volunteered by the people of Ismidt. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... interest and attention is as important in polite society as to converse well, and it is in the character of listener that the elegant refinement of a man accustomed to society will soonest prove itself. No matters how "flat, stale and unprofitable," the remarks of another may be, the well-bred man will listen with an appearance at least of interest, replying in such a manner as to show that he entirely "follows ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... into the symmetry of the Great Reformation. The armies of the Lord had enlisted man by man before he came; it was for his clarion blast to marshal them in companies and battalions, and lead them to the battle. We must again thank Mr. Gillett for his timely, serviceable book. It is never unprofitable to look back and see who have kept the sacred fire of Christianity burning when it seemed in danger of extinguishment. And in that fifteenth century its flames certainly burned low. Whenever the Church is on the side of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... manuscript that was afterwards a highly successful book, mistakes of this kind have been extremely few; whereas the mistakes made by the same houses in accepting manuscripts that were afterward found to be unprofitable have been numerous. A further fact, which is seldom borne in mind, although it ought always to be remembered in any discussion of literary success, is that highly successful books usually bring to their publishers as much surprise ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... now, Marina," said the dissembling Dionysia, "do you weep alone? How does it chance my daughter is not with you? Do not sorrow for Lychorida, you have a nurse in me. Your beauty is quite changed with this unprofitable woe. Come, give me your flowers, the sea-air will spoil them; and walk with Leonine: the air is fine, and will enliven you. Come, Leonine, take her by the arm, and walk with her." "No madam," said Marina, "I pray you let me not deprive ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... for which was not in violent denunciations. He did not abuse the South; he simply pleaded for harmony in the Republican ranks, and avoided giving offence to extreme partisans on any side, contending that if slavery could be excluded from the Territories it would gradually become extinct, as both unprofitable and unjust. He would tolerate slavery within its present limits, and even return fugitive slaves to their owners, according to the laws, but would not extend the evil where it did not at present exist. As it was a wrong, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... me in no other character. None of them, I presume, had ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me, if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a custom-house officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson—though it may often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
