"Hand to mouth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heart was with Falri in the sty, his fancy with Aladdin in the palace. To make a show was his darling object; he loved to create effect by his person, his talk, his dress, as well as by his talents. Living from hand to mouth, crimes through which it is not our intention to follow him had at times made him rich to-day, for vices to make him poor again to-morrow. What he called "luck," or "his star," had favoured him,—he was ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it is quite gone. We live now like other country people, and try to pay our debts, which that generation never did. They lived from hand to mouth. They kept a stable-full of horses. The young men were always riding about the country, betting on horse-races, gambling, drinking, fighting, and making love. No one knew exactly what he was worth until the crash came about fifty years ago, and the whole ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... honest earnings in cards and drunkenness, instead of laying them by against a time of need—has not thy sin found thee out? Then be sure it will some day, when thou hast to bring home thy bride to a cheerless, unfurnished house, and there to live from hand to mouth,—without money to provide for her sickness,—without money to give her the means of keeping things neat and comfortable when she is well,—without a farthing laid by against distress, and illness, ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... about finding his way down to her. The Palace seemed to be full of servants, all apparently busy about something which brought them for a moment in sight of the newly arrived Prince, and then whisked them off, hand to mouth and shoulders shaking. By one of these, with more control over her countenance than the others, an annoyed Udo was ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... of the past were accumulated, after all, by comparatively few of the workers; not by the many, who lived from hand to mouth, happy-go-lucky, spending and enjoying in time of abundance, suffering in time of poverty and stress, making no provision even for their own future, still less recognizing any duty to their country ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman
... the attention of the god, and ever and anon falling on their knees and praying —"O Great Dragon! send us rain.'' It was pitiful. This country is fertile but the population is so enormous that, in the absence of any manufacturing or mining, the people even in the most favoured seasons live from hand to mouth, and a drought means the starvation ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... to me?" muttered Hogan to himself. "That green country boy has made a fortune, while I, an experienced man of the world, have to live from hand to mouth. It's ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... this kind. He had been able a score of times to demonstrate to the House of Commons how silly it was to consider probabilities. In fact, he was opposed heart and soul to prophetic legislation; he would live, legislatively, from hand to mouth. ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... government which represented rather a fusion of the moderate and radical wings of the Left. By reason of the disintegrated condition of parties Depretis had been able to override habitually the fundamental principles of parliamentarism and to maintain through many years a government which lived from hand to mouth on petty manoeuvers. The franchise, it is true, had been broadened by the law of 1882, and some of the more odious taxes, e.g., the much complained of grist tax, had been abolished. But electoral corruption had been condoned, if not encouraged; ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... lady ardently, but by no means passionately. From what he says it is plain enough that she did not respond to his feeling, and that presently she left London and went to Paris, for her family was well-to-do, while Dickens was living from hand to mouth. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the condition of these people with that of the Australian blacks, a considerable portion of whose time, at certain periods of the year, is spent in shifting about from place to place, searching for food, living from hand to mouth, and leading a hard and precarious life. But here, on this little island, the coconut-tree alone would be sufficient to supply many of the principal wants of man. The fruit serves both for food and drink—the shell is used to carry about water in*—the ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... barred the way. And at such moments, when the mind is driven into a swift-running channel that ends in a cataract, elemental passions are apt to strive with elemental fears. Few among these rough sailors had ever given thought to the future. They had lived from hand to mouth, the demands of a hard and dangerous profession alternating with bouts of foolish revelry. Most of them had looked on death in the tempest, in the swirling seas, in the uplifted knife. But then, there was always a chance of escape, an open door for the stout heart ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... everything to Luigi," said Angelo, affectionately. "But for him I could not have survived our boyhood days, when we were friendless and poor—ah, so poor! We lived from hand to mouth-lived on the coarse fare of unwilling charity, and for weeks and weeks together not a morsel of food passed my lips, for its character revolted me and I could not eat it. But for Luigi I should have died. He ate ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... who live in a consciousness of sufficiency, are not troubled about supply. Their circumstances reflect their type of mind and mental attitude. It does not follow that they will be rich, for many of them prefer to live from hand to mouth, and quite large numbers of people have no desire whatever to possess wealth of any kind, but they have no worry about supply, for their needs are ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... Clarendon, and the rest of the King's advisers. He wrote but seldom to Cyril; he had no wish to have the boy with him until he could take him down with him in triumph to Norfolk, and show him to the tenants as his heir. Living from hand to mouth as he did, he worried but little as to how Cyril was ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... difficult to balance to be instantly restored. Moreover, wars, socialism, and economic conflicts hold in store for us a profusion of other catastrophes in the period of universal disintegration we are traversing, and it is necessary to be resigned to living from hand to mouth without too much concern for ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... living by doing nothing. Every city, town, and village in the land is filled to overflowing with young men who are idle—hunting clerkships, or some place where they hope to obtain a living without work. Numbers are hanging around, living from hand to mouth, living upon some friend, waiting for a vacancy in some overcrowded store; and, when a vacancy occurs, offering to work for a salary that would cause a shrewd business man to suspect their honesty; and when remonstrated with by friends, and advised to go to work, they invariably ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... smiled at him, all quaint drollery again. "And now wait." He put hand to mouth and hallooed down the lane. ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... the charge of a former clerk in their service, and of another man, a heartless vagabond, whom they had happened to get acquainted with at a boarding-house on their first arrival, and took a fancy to, nobody ever knew why. He was an Englishman, had probably been upon the stage, and lived from hand to mouth, nobody knew how, until we took him up, and he took us ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... Everything which is in the market goes to Milverton, and there are hundreds in this great city who turn white at his name. No one knows where his grip may fall, for he is far too rich and far too cunning to work from hand to mouth. He will hold a card back for years in order to play it at the moment when the stake is best worth winning. I have said that he is the worst man in London, and I would ask you how could one compare the ruffian, who ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... difficult to keep things together. Living from hand to mouth and nothing at your back—'tis a poor life. And the worst of it is, we poor folk have to turn that way; it seems better not to know where your bread's to come from day by day and go hunting it here, there and everywhere. It's that that makes us go a-roving. ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... the principal sources of revenue to the railway. That more products of the soil are not sent in this way is rather the fault of the wretched government than of the rayahs or agricultural laborers. They are ground to the very earth by iniquitous taxation, and only manage to live from hand to mouth in what should be a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... failure, the sale of a few cattle or sheep more than served to clear scores with the landlord, and enabled him to purchase his winter and spring supply of meal in the Lowlands. He was thus a capitalist, and possessed the capitalist's peculiar advantage of not "living from hand to mouth," but on an accumulated fund, which always stood between him and absolute want, though not between him and positive hardship, and which enabled him to rest, during a year of scarcity, on his own resources, instead of throwing himself on the charity ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... demi-monde, not composed, like that other in France, of simple courtesans, but of men and women of indolent habits and aesthetic tastes, artists, literary persons, novel writers, actors, men of genius and men of talent, butterflies and gadflies of the human kind, leading a lazy existence from hand to mouth." It was to this Bohemian fringe of society that the writer attributed the "gross and vulgar conceptions of life which are formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism." Dealing with ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... in these emergencies and in her general course of management, than one who had not. There would be more chance of her taking pains to consider. She would not work so blindly, so aimlessly, so "from hand to mouth," as do some ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... as it went, but Carl was sensible that he was making no progress in his plan of earning a living. He was simply living from hand to mouth, and but for good luck he would have had to go hungry, and perhaps have been obliged to sleep out doors. What he ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... fifteen thousand youths were brought to grief because the adult population assumed that the young would be able to grasp only that which is presented in the form of sensation; as if they believed that youth could thus early become absorbed in a hand to mouth existence, and so entangled in materialism that there would be no reaction against it. It is as though we were deaf to the appeal of these young creatures, claiming their share of the joy of life, flinging ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... the same with nations. The nations which consume all that they produce, without leaving a store for future production, have no capital. Like thriftless individuals, they live from hand to mouth, and are always poor and miserable. Nations that have no capital, have no commerce. They have no accumulations to dispose of; hence they have no ships, no sailors, no docks, no harbours, no canals, ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... breakfast; but how about their dinner? And after that their supper? Even should something turn up for the next meal, they might not be so fortunate in obtaining the next after that; and this precarious way of subsistence—living, as it were, from hand to mouth—would be a constant exposure of their lives to the ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... towns there is a numerous class of 'roughs' known as the kullah-numdah (felt-caps; they wear a brown hard-felt low hat without a brim), excitable and reckless, and always ready for disturbance. They are the 'casuals', who live from hand to mouth, those to whom an appeal can be made by the careful working class when the price of bread is run up to famine figure, owing to the 'cornering' of wheat, which of late years has been much practised in Persia. The baker used to be the first victim of popular ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... gifts of land and sea, then must follow and ensue a dreadfull scarsity of victuals, whereupon the inhabitants are sometimes vexed with grieuous famine. And therefore it is likely that they amongst vs which vsed to liue from hand to mouth, and had not some prouision of former yeeres remaining, haue beene driuen to great extremities, so often as need hath enforced them thereunto. But whether this thing ought woorthily to minister occasion to a publike and perpetuall reproch against the Islanders, more then other nations, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... minds of their barbarian visitors, and had they set themselves loyally and patiently to foster the peaceful agricultural instincts of the Teuton, haply the Roman Empire might still be standing. As it was, the statesmen of the day, men of temporary shifts and expedients, living only as we say "from hand to mouth", saw, in the changing moods of the Germans, only the faithlessness of barbarism, which they met with the faithlessness of civilisation, and between the two the Empire—which no one really wished to ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... war, Bill lived from hand to mouth, like most frontier dwellers. It was at Springfield, Missouri, that another duel of his long list occurred, in which he killed Dave Tutt, a fine pistol shot and a man with social ambitions in badness. It was a fair fight in the town square by appointment. Bill ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... combat did not, however, bring him to ruin. At each annual stock-taking they managed to make both ends meet fairly well; if they suffered any loss during one season, they recouped themselves the next. However, it was precisely this living from hand to mouth which exasperated Felicite. She would, by far, have preferred a big failure. They would then, perhaps, have been able to commence life over again, instead of obstinately persisting in their petty business, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... some thirty years after the period of which we are writing, tells us that the native Irish were behind the rest of Europe in the knowledge of those things that tended to their material improvement—indifferent agriculturists, living from hand to mouth—caring more for the sword than the plough—good Catholics, though by nature barbarous—and placing their hopes of deliverance from English rule on foreign intervention. For this they were constantly straining their eyes towards France or Spain, and, no matter ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... are an abomination in the eyes of the Englishman; and the natives having been once subjected to the tender mercies of the white man, not understanding the use of freedom, or the benefits of self-government, live literally from "hand to mouth," in constant dread of recapture, and being forced, under the eyes of intelligent ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... before that young nobleman's death. The hunchback passed hastily over this period; but his reticence was lit by the angry flash of his eyes. After the Marquess's death he had lived for a while from hand to mouth, copying music, writing poetry for weddings and funerals, doing pen-and-ink portraits at a scudo apiece, and putting his hand to any honest job that came his way. Count Trescorre, who now and then showed a fitful recognition ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... suffrage States women are guaranteed equal rights to property; but of what avail is that right to the mass of women without property, the thousands of wage workers, who live from hand to mouth? That equal suffrage did not, and cannot, affect their condition is admitted even by Dr. Sumner, who certainly is in a position to know. As an ardent suffragist, and having been sent to Colorado by the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League of New York State to collect material in favor of suffrage, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... such work as that a man cannot do more than live from hand to mouth. Rasmus Berg, who is a scholar, can do our family more good, with his brain, in an hour than the other ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... himself in looking out for a new engagement Plenty were to be had, but he aimed at something better than had satisfied him hitherto. He must get a "permanency"; at his age it was time he settled into a life of respect able routine. But for his foolish habit of living from hand to mouth, now in this business, now in that, indulging his taste for variety, Mrs. Clover would never, he felt sure, have "put her foot down" in that astonishing way. The best thing he could do was to show himself in ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... to a gay tune sin' we could put by for a rainy day. It's hand to mouth now, on'y the mouth's allus ready ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... of his military dictatorship, found it impossible to secure the proper resumption of the provincial remittances. Fresh loans became more and more sought after; by means of forced domestic issues a certain amount of cash was obtained, but the country lived from hand to mouth and everybody was unhappy. Added to this by March the formidable insurrection of the "White Wolf" bandits in Central China—under the legendary leadership of a man who was said to be invulnerable—necessitated the mobilization of a fresh army which ran into scores of battalions ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... it was hand to mouth with Dudley: he had no cash to call on but the mine output, and immediate payments had to be made on the machinery we were using. But I was not excited about being held up on the Caraquet road,—after I'd once been to Skunk's Misery. ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... us this: the need of having a clear consciousness of what is our object in life. The most of men have never answered that question. They live from hand to mouth, driven by circumstances, guided by accidents, impelled by unreflecting passions and desires, knowing what they want for the moment, but never having tried to shape the course of their lives into a consistent whole, so as to stand up before God in Christ when He puts ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... curtains revealed a bed. The furniture was not what one would expect to find in a garret. It was good and solid but undusted and the upholstery was faded. The general appearance was higgledy-piggledy—hand to mouth domesticity mixed up with the work by which the young man earned, or tried to earn, his living. No signs of a woman's neatness and touches of decoration could ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... but his legs and arms may expect to become rich by industry and frugality, it is not very decidedly even for the immediate advantage of the poor to plunder the rich; and the punishment of doing so would very speedily follow the offence. But in countries in which the great majority live from hand to mouth, and in which vast masses of wealth have been accumulated by a comparatively small number, the case is widely different. The immediate want is, at particular seasons, craving, imperious, irresistible. In our own time it has steeled ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
