"Miser" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gained the day; but the Emperor, surrounded as he was by a large army of devoted followers, found ready listeners to his descriptions of the Bishop's character. Abouna Salama was never very popular; he was, without being a miser, far from liberal. Friendship in Abyssinia means presents: it is accepted as such by all; and every chief, every man of note, who courts popularity, lavishes with an unsparing hand. The Emperor naturally took advantage of ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... the vintage, when the showering grapes In Bacchanal profusion reel to earth, Purple and gushing: sweet are our escapes From civic revelry to rural mirth; Sweet to the miser are his glittering heaps, Sweet to the father is his first-born's birth, Sweet is revenge—especially to women, Pillage to soldiers, prize-money ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... by guesswork or by hook or crook, what shall we say of them? Were all of Clifford's works, except the Ethics of Belief, forgotten, he might well figure in future treatises on psychology in place of the somewhat threadbare instance of the miser who has been led by the association of ideas to prefer his gold to all the goods ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... a miser, who gave up every kind of comfortable living, all the pleasure of doing good to others, all the esteem of his fellow-citizens, and the joys of benevolent friendship, for the sake of accumulating wealth, Poor man, said I, you pay too ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... miser, as he caught sight of Stephen on the threshold; and he raised his withered arm as if to ward him from his treasures. 'Keep off! Stephen Fern, is it you? You've come to take your revenge. The robbers and murderers have got in! O God, have pity ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... the longing of your soul. You said, when you saw men going down into the dust and tussle of life, "Whatever god I worship, it won't be a golden calf." You saw men plunge into the life of a spendthrift, or go down into the life of a miser, like one of old smothered to death in his own money-chest, and you thought, "I shall be very careful never to be caught in these traps in which so many men have fallen, to ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... art, have been recovered. Many skeletons have also been found, in the exact positions in which the living men were caught by the deadly shower of suffocating ashes. The excavators came upon the skeleton of a miser, who had been attempting to escape from his house, and whose bony fingers were still clutching the purse which contained the treasure he loved. There were also found in the barracks at Pompeii the skeletons of two soldiers ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... building-up of the artist in him that he chiefly cared for. And to this he set himself with a moral fervour and a scientific tenacity. There was in Ibsen none of the abundance of great natures, none of the ease of strength. He nursed his force, as a miser hoards his gold; and does he not give you at times an uneasy feeling that he is making the most of himself, as the miser makes the most of his gold ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... your testimonials, and bring it to me here this evening at five. I'll see that it reaches our manager, Henderson Saheb." Pulin punctually followed his friend's advice, and dreamed all night of wealth beyond a miser's utmost ambition. ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... not be too dear a payment for a night with her. One must love well to love like that, eh? and there are many worldly ones, who mock at such affection. But he, still thinking of her, neglected his cases and his clients, his robberies and everything. He went to the palace like a miser searching for a lost sixpence, bowed down, melancholy, and absent-minded, so much so, that one day he relieved himself against the robe of a counsellor, believing all the while he stood against a wall. Meanwhile the beautiful girl was loved night and ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... lived only to scrape and hoard, moidering away her loveless life on the futile energies and sordid aims of a miser's wretched pleasures. But every now and then she had risen up out of the slough into which she had gradually sunk, and had done some grand things that marked her name with so many white stones. While she gloried in her skill in filching from the pig what would serve the chickens, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... in the state where Hedgeville is, Farmer Weeks is her legal guardian, and he could make her work for him until she was twenty-one. He's an old miser, and as mean as he can be. But once she is out of that state, he can't touch her, and Mr. Jamieson has had Miss Eleanor appointed her guardian, and mine too, for that state. The state where Miss Eleanor and all of ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the March - Bessie King's Test of Friendship • Jane L. Stewart
... think," she concluded, "that I never missed a clew! That it was really the nurse, Mrs. Orme—Mrs. Jones' old nurse—who stole Alora, according to our suspicions, and that her object was just what I thought, to get money from that miser Jason Jones! Daddy will be pleased with this triumph; I'm pleased; Mary Louise will be pleased, and—By the way, ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... certain-sure belief, And fear, and hope, and longing unexpressed, In pain most human, and in rapture brief Almost divine. Love would possess, yet deepens when denied; And love would give, yet hungers to receive; Love like a prince his triumph would achieve; And like a miser in the dark his joys would hide. Love is most bold: He leads his dreams like armed men in line; Yet when the siege is set, and he must speak, Calling the fortress to resign Its treasure, valiant love grows weak, And hardly dares his purpose to unfold. Less with his faltering lips than with ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... troubles, as well as his joys, he kept to himself. The miser puts his broken bank notes and his good gold under the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... a savoury and substantial meal, almost as cheap as the egg-broth of the miser, who fed his valet with the water in which his egg was boiled, or as the "Potage a la Pierre, a la Soldat,"[313-] mentioned by Giles Rose, in the 4th page of his dedication of the "perfect school of instruction for the officers of the mouth," 18mo. London, 1682. "Two soldiers were minded ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... boy of the family to go buy a candle, and his scrawny, unkempt mother bounded out of the hut with the snarl of a miser: ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... the annual election, old Hugh captures the whole concern, Mr. Ferris will be not only Hugh's son-in-law but the new managing vice-president in the East. The trick will double old Hugh's fortune. Once husband of the old miser's only child, he can be trusted to guard his own. So, look out for yourself!" Clayton's eyes burned ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... sisters. He was sent to a day school at Shrewsbury in the year of his mother's death, 1817. At this age he tells us that the passion for "collecting" which leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very strong in him, and was clearly innate, as none of his brothers or sisters had this taste. A year later he was removed to the Shrewsbury grammar school, where he profited little by the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... the first dish of peaches of the season for his table. He was as full of contradictions as he was of oddities, and no one knew how to take him. One moment he seemed to be hoarding his money like a miser, and the next scattering it with ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... money in a robbin', graspin' way; No words above my restin' place from any tongue or pen Would hev a deeper meanin' than "He helped his fellow-men." So ef you hev a fortune and you want to help the poor, Don't keep a-stavin' off until yon get a little more; Ef yer upon a miser's track you better turn about— Yer record keeps on burnin' When ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... was his heir, and the old boy is nearly eighty—cram full of gout, too. They say he could chalk his billiard-cue with his knuckles. He never allowed Godfrey a shilling in his life, for he is an absolute miser, but it will all come ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... these manifold shades that the artist-professor established characteristic differences in parts wherein so many actors had seen but the identical fact of a similar passion or a similar vice. To his mind, all misers were not the same miser, nor all seducers the same seducer. In singing particularly, with what art Delsarte ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... manufacturer who was spending his old age in unnecessary toil for the benefit of a spendthrift heir. The old man answered, "If it gives him half as much pleasure to spend my half million as it has given me to make it, I don't grudge it him." That is not the spirit of the real miser or Mammon-worshipper. It is the spirit of a natural idealist who from want of education has no rational standard of good. When such a man intervenes in educational matters, he is sure to take the standpoint of the so-called practical man, because ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... more notable miser and a better orator than them all, dishelming and leaning on his ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... all your knowledge of the world, you know not how a woman feels when she has been suddenly deprived of her beauty. The miser who loses his wealth—the fond mother from whom death snatches away her darling child; these bereaved ones do not feel their losses more acutely than does a once lovely woman feel the loss of her charms. Do not talk to me of philosophy, for such ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... ae bar to my pleasures, A bar that 's aft fill'd me wi' fear, He 's sic a hard near-be-gawn miser, He likes his saul less than his gear. But though I now flatter his failin', An' swear nought wi' gowd can compare, Gude sooth! it shall soon get a scailin', His bags sall be mouldie ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... a joy in hesitating, to keep back the words as a miser might keep back gold. She let her secret escape through her eyes instead. She was deliberately radiant and silent. Alicia looked at her as they might have looked, across the desert, at a mirage of ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... of a rising among the Peruvians were circulated, and the Spaniards were in apprehension of some general and sudden assault on their quarters. Their new acquisitions gave them additional cause for solicitude; like a miser, they trembled in the midst of ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... handbills of the selectmen would cause the commitment of all the vagabonds in the State, the paragraph in the Parker's Falls Gazette would be reprinted from Maine to Florida, and perhaps form an item in the London newspapers, and many a miser would tremble for his moneybags and life on learning the catastrophe of Mr. Higginbotham. The pedler meditated with much fervor on the charms of the young schoolmistress, and swore that Daniel Webster never spoke nor ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in at a house door: he seldom went there, because the miser to whom the house belonged almost starved himself, and so, of course, there was nothing over ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... place his hands upon his shoulders. The Oriental complied intelligently. For a third time Glaucon struggled across the raging flood. The passage seemed endless, and every receding breaker dragging down to the graves of Oceanus. The Athenian knew his power was failing, and doled it out as a miser, counting his strokes, taking deep gulps of air between each wave. Then, even while consciousness and strength seemed passing together, again beneath his feet were the shifting sands, again the voices encouraging, the hands outstretched, strange forms running down into the surf, strange ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... bow down to success, to pay homage to wealth and station, which virtue and genius should alone appropriate, is the person to whom the meanness of the crouching sycophant, the treachery of the trading politician, the brutality of the selfish tyrant, and the avarice of the sordid miser, in after life must ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... in cash, and each week you will send in your payroll to the treasurer, who will forward the money by express to cover it. The five hundred is for current expenses. Spend money with a lavish hand, where necessary to advance the interests of the show, and pinch every penny like a miser where it is not necessary. That is the way to ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... purpose—the satirizing of contemporary manners and affectations by frank portrayal and criticism. In the great plays that followed, "The School for Husbands" and "The School for Wives," "The Misanthrope" and "The Hypocrite" (Tartuffe), "The Miser" and "The Hypochondriac," "The Learned Ladies," "The Doctor in Spite of Himself," "The Citizen Turned Gentleman," and many others, he exposed mercilessly one after another the vices and ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... purge thy lasting stain away? All these, O King, must sink to hell, The regicide, the infidel, He who in blood and slaughter joys, A Brahman or a cow destroys, Untimely weds in law's despite Scorning an elder brother's right,(590) Who dares his Teacher's bed ascend, The miser, spy, and treacherous friend. These impious wretches, one and all, Must to the hell of sinners fall. My skin the holy may not wear, Useless to thee my bones and hair; Nor may my slaughtered body be The food of devotees like thee. These five-toed things a man may slay And feed upon the fallen ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... her husband more than once with imaginary stories about their neighbour. "He was a miser—a recluse—a misanthrope—he had a wife in a lunatic asylum—he had known some great trouble that had embittered his life; he had made a vow never to let a human being cross his threshold; he was a Roman Catholic priest in disguise, ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... call me a miser. They say that in this sea-chest of mine I hoard my gold. (He passes R. to chest, takes out key and unlocks it.) They think my treasure and my very soul are locked up here. They speak after the flesh, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of King Louis' gold," answered Charles. "We'll let him get it. We care not how much he has from this crafty miser of the Seine. Louis will buy the English ministers, and the army will suddenly vanish. When King Edward grows scarce of gold, he musters an army, or pretends to do so, and Louis fills the English coffers. The French king ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... to be a miser. He gives blindly whatever I wish for. The servants are content; it seems as though the bliss of Louis had let a flood of sunshine into the household, where love has made me queen. Even the old man ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... other is simply very generous, the Sages say that the preference should be given to the generous lover, but Vatsyayana is of opinion that the one who is really attached to the courtesan should be preferred, because he can be made to be generous, even as a miser gives money if he becomes fond of a woman, but a man who is simply generous cannot be made to love with real attachment. But among those who are attached to her, if there is one who is poor, and one who is rich, the preference is of course ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... miser, then? She had already more than she knew how to spend; why should she want to ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... Alice, with more spirit than she had hitherto displayed; "and would you but question your own heart, you would acknowledge—I speak with reverence—that your tongue utters what your better judgment would disown. My uncle Everard is neither a miser nor a hypocrite—neither so fond of the goods of this world that he would not supply our distresses amply, nor so wedded to fanatical opinions as to exclude charity for ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... run to the rescue." She picked up the cat and walked slowly down the hard-trodden path to the stable. "But there aren't any bandits, and dad hasn't any gold or anything else worth stealing—Ket, if dad isn't a miser, he's poor! And Lone Morgan is merely ashamed of the way I talked to him, and afraid I'll queer myself with the neighbours. No Western lead that I ever saw would act like that. Why, he didn't even want to ride home with me, ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... watched her in silence for some time. Then he said, "Honey-Bee, the most beautiful treasures will be safe in your keeping. You will possess them and they will not possess you. The miser is the prey of his gold, only those who despise wealth can be rich without danger; their souls will always be ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... two men, that robber or the respectable old miser Christian, finds more favour in ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... smiles touched her lips, the faintest shade of deepened color rested on her cheeks.... She was thinking of—him? As long as he dared, the young man, his heart in his own eyes, watched her greedily, taking a miser's joy of her youthful beauty, striving with all his soul to analyze the enigma ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... not herself, but the community she directed; for the spirit of association, when become a collective egotism, gives to corporations the faults and vices of an individual. Thus a congregation may dote upon power and money, just as a miser loves them for their own sake. But it is chiefly with regard to estates that congregations act like a single man. They dream of landed property; it is their fixed idea, their fruitful monomania. They pursue it with their most sincere, and warm, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... as if, miser-like, he had counted his bags of treasure. And then see the contrasted singular, Xemian: he finds them all ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... the life of ... of a clerk. I suppose, the finer a man is, the more willing he is to take his share in war, and if that's true, I'm not really a fine man. I'm simply a coward, hoarding up my life in a cupboard, like a miser hoarding up his money. I should have been the first to spend myself ... like Gilbert and Ninian. I'm the only one of the Improved Tories who hasn't gone! ... Oh, I couldn't offer you myself, dear. I'm too mean ... I'm a failure in fineness.... I used to feel contempt for Jimphy Jayne ... but he ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... when he was digging for roots, his poor sustenance, his spade struck against something heavy, which proved to be gold, a great heap which some miser had probably buried in a time of alarm, thinking to have come again and taken it from its prison, but died before the opportunity had arrived, without making any man privy to the concealment; so it lay, doing neither good ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... relief and significance went round the circle. The fame of Eli or "Skinner" Hemmings, as a notorious miser and usurer, had passed even ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of good that would do me, if I'd been killed!" muttered the miser. "I'm going to sue you for this. You might have put me ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... nothing well. They are the dead weights of society, that must be helped through life by their more active neighbors. If they are scholars, they are collectors of facts, which they pile up in their memories as a miser heaps his gold, for no end but the pleasure of heaping. They make physicians without resource, lawyers without discernment, preachers who dole out divinity in its ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... carelessly left open to expose a pile of gold and silver, of silk and gems, of curious and costly furniture, that was heaped, in seeming disorder, from the floor to the roof of the chamber. "What conquests," exclaimed the ambitious miser, "might not be achieved by the possession of such a treasure!"—"It is your own," replied a Greek attendant, who watched the motions of his soul; and Bohemond, after some hesitation, condescended to accept this magnificent present. The Norman was flattered by the assurance of an ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... tale of seduction, and there was alongside of this a popular sort of farce known as the Commedia dell' Arte, in which only the outline of the plot was sketched, and the characters, usually typical persons as the Lover, his Lady, the Bragging Captain, the Miser, would fill in the dialogue and such comic "business" as tickled the fancy of ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... destroys the fruit of his field. In like manner the care of the world and the deceitfulness of riches lacerate the man who permits them to grow rank in his heart. The vain man is continually meeting with slights, or suspecting that his neighbours are about to offer them. The miser is always losing money, or trembling lest he should lose it in the next transaction. The world itself knows, and in its proverbs confesses, that around the most coveted pleasures are set sharp thorns, which wound the hand that tries ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... has been sacrificed to the rolling up of money for its own sake, the very means by which it was acquired will prevent its being enjoyed; the chill of poverty will have entered into the very bones. The term Miser was happily chosen for such persons; they ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... get twenty different positions of a tigress playing with her kittens, Cadman had become a miser of material and an adept in noiseless movement. Finding that he was in danger of going short on sketching paper, he used it more and more as if it were fine gold, till his outlines were not larger than ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... to my thoughts as food to life, Or as sweet-season'd showers are to the ground; And for the peace of you I hold such strife As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found. Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure; Now counting best to be with you alone, Then better'd that the world may see my pleasure: Sometime all full with feasting on your sight, And by and by clean ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... after the funeral, my wages were duly paid by her second cousin, the heir, an avaricious-looking man, with pinched nose and narrow temples, who, indeed, I heard long afterwards, turned out a thorough miser: a direct contrast to his generous kinswoman, and a foil to her memory, blessed to this day by the poor and needy. The possessor, then, of fifteen pounds; of health, though worn, not broken, and of a spirit in similar condition; ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... home we met a woman who gave us a history of the house. An old miser lived there long ago. One night he was robbed and murdered, and his ghost still haunts the place. No one ventures in its vicinity, and she said most likely we were the first people who had gone there ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... plenty of good rice and excellent silkworms' eggs, but he was such a miser that he did not want to lend them. At the same time, he felt ashamed to refuse his brother's request, so he gave him some worm-eaten musty rice and some dead eggs, which he felt sure ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... is hungry, of the official who is in disgrace, of the drunkard till he recovereth from his drunkenness, and in the Yatimat ul Dehr it is said, Abul Casim al Kesrawi hated chess, and constantly abused it, saying, you never see a chess player rich who is not a sordid miser, nor hear a squabbling that is not on a question of the ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... window be, It is the wished, the trysted hour! Those smiles and glances let me see, That mak the miser's treasure poor. How blythely wad I bide the stoure, A weary slave frae sun to sun, Could I the rich reward secure, The ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... "incidentals." She contributed five dollars each quarter toward the Reverend Paul Stacey's salary. And she never, under any circumstance, gave more, no matter how urgent the appeal. She was suspected of being a miser. There was nothing else of which she could be suspected. So far as any one knew in Jordantown, she permitted herself only one luxury: this was a canary bird, not yellow, but green. It was a very old bird, as canaries go. Somebody once said: "Old Sarah's making her canary last as long as possible!" ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... is saving, so that by habit there may be some hopes (if I grow richer) of my becoming a miser. All misers have their excuses. The motive ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... the sake of future expenditure. Miserliness saves for the sake of saving. The spendthrift sacrifices the future to present enjoyment. The miser sacrifices present enjoyment to an imaginary future which never comes; and so misses enjoyment altogether. The prudent man harmonizes present with future enjoyment, and so lives a life of constant enjoyment. The spendthrift spends recklessly, regardless of consequences. The miser ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... besides, were boxes and trunks, some with covers, some without; the latter overflowing with rubbish. Evan wondered whimsically if the closed boxes were filled with shining gold eagles. It would be quite in keeping, he thought. But on second thoughts, no. Your modern miser is too sensible of the advantages of safe ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... has the most indifferent of characters. Every mouth is opened against him for his sordid ways—A foolish man, to be so base-minded!—When the difference between the obtaining of a fame for generosity, and incurring the censure of being a miser, will not, prudently managed, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... exclaimed Rust, fiercely; 'what cared I for gold? Ho! ho! Michael Rust values gold but as dross; but it is the world; the cringing, obsequious, miser-hearted world, that kisses the very feet of wealth, which set Michael Rust on; it was this that lashed him forward; but not for himself. I married a woman whom I loved,' said he, in a quick, stern tone; 'she abandoned me and became an outcast, ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... pleasure; from making money; from spending money; from right things; from wrong things; from things which are neither right nor wrong; on all these he may use abstinence. He may abstain for many reasons; for good ones, or for bad ones. A miser will abstain from all sorts of comforts to hoard up money. A superstitious man may abstain from comforts, because he thinks God grudges them to him, or because he thinks God is pleased by the unhappiness of His creatures, or because he has been taught, poor ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... boy shrugged his shoulders again. "I do not want pay for what I do—no. I want no money. I would not work a day for all my grandmother's wealth—and she is a miser," and Roberto laughed again, showing all his ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... the tears have stolen from my eyes in silence and in solitude, I thought on thee; I thought upon the chaste ardour of thy sacred friendship, which was softened, refined, and exalted into love. This was my hoarded treasure; and the thoughts of possessing this; soothed all my anguish with a miser's happiness, who, blest in the consciousness of hidden wealth, despises cold and hunger, and rejoices in the midst of all the miseries that make poverty dreadful: this was my last retreat; but I am now desolate and forlorn, and my soul looks round, with terror, ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... world is a world of imagination and vision. I see everything I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy, is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.... To the eye of the man of ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... disappointments I had, in being refused permission to pay a visit to her at her house. Some few times, however, at long intervals, I was allowed to go there; and then I found out that Mr. Barkis was something of a miser, or as Peggotty dutifully expressed it, was 'a little near', and kept a heap of money in a box under his bed, which he pretended was only full of coats and trousers. In this coffer, his riches hid themselves ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... as if he had. But you never can tell with such fellows as Crabtree— he was a good deal of a miser." ...
— The Rover Boys in Business • Arthur M. Winfield
... Christian men That roars through a thousand tales, Where greed is an ape and pride is an ass, And Jack's away with his master's lass, And the miser is banged with all his brass, The farmer with all ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... depict our hero with many new domestic virtues which had developed on the firm ground of the Berlin life, and among which Frau Volkstett had perceived (as a most remarkable phenomenon and a proof that extremes sometimes meet) the disposition of a veritable little miser—and it made ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... not for himself, but for the treasures that he had accumulated with such an earnest devotion and with so much perspicacity that the shrewdest merchant could not say that the Baron had ever erred in his taste or judgment. He loved them—his bibelots. He loved them intensely, like a miser; jealously, like a lover. Every day, at sunset, the iron gates at either end of the bridge and at the entrance to the court of honor are closed and barred. At the least touch on these gates, electric bells will ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... my ears. I thrust my hands into the box, delighting to bury my fingers amid the rich profusion of its contents; as the miser joys to revel among his heaps of gold. I thought I should never tire groping among them, feeling how thick and large they were, and drawing them out from the box, and putting them back into it, and ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... leopards into the shield of England, more proper to do it than his father, being more the thing he signified. Of him, therefore, torn by two natures, cast in two moulds, sport of two fates; the hymned and reviled, the loved and loathed, spendthrift and a miser, king and a beggar, the bond and the free, god and man; of King Richard Yea-and-Nay, so made, so called, and by that unmade, ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... No miser was ever made more happy by a bag of gold than she by this discovery. "Famous! famous! An honor ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... not Mistress Croale's the place, and the consumption of whisky the occupation? But alas for their would-be seeming indifference! Everybody in the lane, almost in the Widdiehill, knew every one of them, and knew him for what he was; knew that every drop of toddy he drank was to him as to a miser his counted sovereign; knew that, as the hart for the water-brooks, so thirsted his soul ever after another tumbler; that he made haste to swallow the last drops of the present, that he might behold the plenitude of the next steaming before him; that, like the miser, he ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... the etching of The Sergeant Introducing his Dutch Wife to his Friends in "St. James's, or the Court of Queen Anne," and I will undertake to point out at least half a dozen pretty faces in the course of illustrations to "The Miser's Daughter"; but after all, these are only exceptions to the general rule; and it may be safely conceded that as a delineator of female beauty, George could not hold a candle to John Leech, to John Tenniel, or even to his own ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... going through the form of dusting the huge metal-bound chest, which had attracted the mistress' eyes as a new article of furniture. Had her husband turned miser since Fortune had whirled on her wheel at his door as soon as she quitted it? It was not Hedwig's place, and it was not in her power to solve enigmas, ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... the Corner's miser, who has buried his money for the last six years near the big ash tree back of Cary's gin, lost half of it last week. The guilty person has not been apprehended. Tim Snyder went to Jonesville yesterday and bought himself a fine suit ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... miser[171]. But lodged so far off, in the other wing, 20 By which there's no communication with The baron's chamber, that it can't be he. Besides, I bade him "good night" in the hall, Almost a mile off, and which only leads To his own apartment, about the same time When this ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... isn't worth bothering about," declared Bruce Bennington. "Appleby is naturally sore at losing some of his crops, for he's a regular miser. I know him of old. Every time something happened on his farm he always complained that we boys did it or had a hand ...
— Tom Fairfield's Pluck and Luck • Allen Chapman
... cloth, and my only wish was naturally to expend as little as possible in mere preliminaries. The name of Manbuku Prata was duly thrown at him with but little effect: these demands are never resisted by the slave-dealers. After much noise and cries of "Mwendi" (miser, skin-flint) on the part of the myrmidons, I was allowed to proceed, having given up a cloth twenty-four yards long, and I felt really grateful to the "trade" which had improved off all the other riverine settlements. ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... got none.' Those were his words, as nearly as I can remember them. He put it still more strongly afterwards; he said, 'A man who hoards up a large fortune, from a purely selfish motive—either because he is a miser, or because he looks only to the aggrandisement of his own family after his death—is, in either case, an essentially unchristian person, who stands in manifest need of enlightenment and control by Christian law.' And then, if you remember, some of the people murmured; and ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... am all for letters in these matters. Not that we are either of us "impatient and irritable listeners"—oh dear, no! "I have my faults," as the miser said, "but AVARICE is not one of them"—and we have our faults too, but notoriously they lie in the direction of long-suffering ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... she screams. 'Don't you lay a finger on it! Ain't you got any self-respect at all, you miser'ble, low-lived—' and so forth and so on. All the way to the front gate I see Effie leanin' out, lookin' and ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... heaven, and forgot, for a moment, all earthly concerns. Then, suddenly starting from their lethargy, they began to look after their wealth, the merchandise they had in small ventures, utterly regardless of the elements which threatened them. The miser, thinking of the gold contained in his coffers, hastening to put it in a place of safety, either by sewing it into the lining of his clothes, or by cutting out for it a place in the waistband of his trousers. The smuggler was tearing his hair at not being ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... apathy cannot know the virtue. Remember, too, that one act of beneficence, one act of real usefulness, is worth all the abstract sentiment in the world. Sentiment is a disgrace, instead of an ornament, unless it lead us to good actions. The miser, who thinks himself respectable, merely because he possesses wealth, and thus mistakes the means of doing good, for the actual accomplishment of it, is not more blameable than the man of sentiment, without active virtue. You may ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... under the ground and in the walls of my den, yet would I have given a hundred ducats for a morsel of bread, it could not have been procured. Money was to me useless. In this I resembled the miser, who hoards, yet hives in wretchedness, having no joy in gentle acts of benevolence. As proudly might I delight myself with my hidden treasure as such misers; nay, more, for I ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... does not mean merely a love of money; and if it did, a love of money may mean a great many very different and even contrary things. The love of money is very different in a peasant or in a pirate, in a miser or in a gambler, in a great financier or in a man doing some practical and productive work. Now this difference in the conversation of American and English business men arises, I think, from certain much deeper things in the American which are generally not understood ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... discipline, and though his dominant passion was the love of military display he was yet one of the most pacific of princes. We are afraid that his aversion to war was not the effect of humanity, but was merely one of his thousand whims. His feeling about his troops seems to have resembled a miser's feeling about his money. He loved to collect them, to count them, to see them increase; but he could not find it in his heart to break in upon the precious hoard. He looked forward to some future time when his Patagonian battalions were to drive hostile infantry before them like sheep; but ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Margery or any other, I feared that love would have no word to say. Passion there might be, and that fierce desire to have and wear which burns like any miser's fever in the blood; but never love as lovers measure it. Why, then, had he proposed to Margery? The answer did not tarry. Since he was now but a gentleman volunteer it was plain that he had squandered his ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... elsewhere. His debut as a practitioner took place at Mannheim; and, knowing me to be a brother amateur, he freely communicated the whole of his maiden adventure. "Opposite to my lodging," said he, "lived a baker: he was somewhat of a miser, and lived quite alone. Whether it were his great expanse of chalky face, or what else, I know not—but the fact was, I 'fancied' him, and resolved to commence business upon his throat, which by the way he always carried bare—a ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... A mychare seems to denote properly a sneaking thief. Way. Prompt., p.336. Mychare, a covetous, sordid fellow. Jamieson. Fr. pleure-pain: m. A niggardlie wretch; a puling micher or miser. Cotgrave.] ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... one well-known figure in Massinger's gallery, and the 'New Way to Pay Old Debts' showed, in consequence, more vitality than any of his other plays. Much praise has been given, and not more than enough, to the originality and force of the conception. The conventional miser is elevated into a great man by a kind of inverse heroism, and made terrible instead of contemptible. But it is equally plain that here, too, Massinger fails to project himself fairly into his villain. His rants are singularly forcible, but they are clearly what ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... known by the names of Goldsched, Slowman, as well as by other noms de guerre; and he was altogether of a different cast from King, being avaricious, distrustful, and difficult to deal with. He counted upon his gains with all the grasping feverishness of the miser; and owing to his great caution he had an immense command of money, which the confidence of his brethren placed in his hands. To the jewellers, the coachmakers, and the tailors, who were obliged to give exorbitant accommodation to their aristocratic customers, and were eventually ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... reasons for facts, not for all, but for those belonging to the question; and last, to have characters answerable to the alleged facts which we would have believed; as, if one were guilty of theft, we should represent him as a miser; of adultery, as addicted to impure lusts; of manslaughter, as hot and rash. The contrary takes place in defense, and the facts must agree with time, ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... profligate spendthrift; he squandered thousands from vanity, and for paltry, contemptible purposes. It would look as if a number of ill-starred men bore a kind of malice and hatred against money, so that they have recourse to the strangest devices to drive it away from them on every side, while the miser hugs and cherishes it with a blind devotion, and lets himself be crusht by his idol. Elizabeth was weak enough to give up her property to him unconditionally, and, when his credit had already fallen, to declare herself bound by his debts; ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... Bertha Grace is on the threshold of young womanhood, she goes to stay with her grandfather in Ireland, with the trust from her mother of reconciling him and his son, Bertha's father. Bertha finds her grandfather a recluse and a miser, and in the hands of an underling, who is his evil genius. How she keeps faith with her mother and finds her own fate, through many strange adventures, is the subject of ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... large and antique house, with hooded windows, in Mercer's Lane, and was a dealer in antiques and curios. And his popular sobriquet was Simon the Saver (Anglice, miser). ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... Robin. Miriam he trusted not, for that she was a woman, and he held that no woman, however faithful, might be trusted with a secret. I have heard him say so a hundred times, and have seen her flinch beneath the words, whilst her eyes flashed fire. Methinks that Long Robin loved gold with the miser's greed—loved to hoard and not to spend—loved to feel it in his power, but desired not to touch it. Miriam was content so long as vengeance on the Trevlyns had been taken. She wanted not the ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... where extravagance was almost impossible, but where rigid economy was supposed to pile up tremendous wealth. Hitherto it had pained Uncle Loren to devote a penny to anything but the sweet uses of investment. Now it suddenly occurred to the old miser that he had invested nothing in the securities of New Jerusalem, Limited. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... mind ye; and I had the gig manned. We was out in the stream, just ready to sail. 'T was no use waiting any longer for the wind to change, and we was going north-about. I went ashore, and when I walks into his shop ye never see a creatur' so wilted. Ye see the miser'ble sculpin thought I'd never stop to open the goods, an' it was a chance I did, mind ye! 'Lor,' says he, grinning and turning the color of a biled lobster, 'I s'posed ye were a standing out to sea by this time.' 'No,' says I, 'and I've got ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... a meagre man was Aaron Stark, — Cursed and unkempt, shrewd, shrivelled, and morose. A miser was he, with a miser's nose, And eyes like little dollars in the dark. His thin, pinched mouth was nothing but a mark; And when he spoke there came like sullen blows Through scattered fangs a few snarled words and close, As if a cur were chary ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... the shelf; and then, to my great surprise, instead of drawing more beer, he poured an accurate half from one cup to the other. There was a kind of nobleness in this that took my breath away; if my uncle was certainly a miser, he was one of that thorough breed that goes near to make the ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the attachment which follows, are the chief actors in the plot. Gabriel Strong, the dreamy son of a prosperous English squire, falls in love with Joan Gildersledge, the equally dreamy daughter of a bestial and intemperate miser. Gabriel marries an unsatisfactory young woman in the vicinity, Ophelia Gusset, and retains Joan as his consoler and friend in a virtuous but high-strung companionship, out of which the country gossips, who hear of it through a spying ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... that fortitude is a virtue placed between the two extremes of cowardice and rashness: but it is better the valiant should rise to the extreme of temerity than sink to that of cowardice, for, as it is easier for the prodigal than the miser to become liberal, so it is much easier for the rash than the ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... as he left behind several works upon the subject. Those who knew him well, and who were incredulous about the philosopher's stone, give a satisfactory solution of the secret of his wealth. They say that he was always a miser and a usurer; that his journey to Spain was undertaken with very different motives from those pretended by the alchymists; that, in fact, he went to collect debts due from Jews in that country to their brethren in Paris, and that ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... deserve to be helped,' she answered; 'your eyes are still red because that miser Barbaik has forbidden you to speak to the young man from Plover. But cheer up, you are a good girl, and I will give you something that will enable you to see ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... steps up is old Miser, you'll see; She heaps up her white and her yellow money; She wears her old rags till she starves and she begs; And she's come here to ask for a dish of pace eggs. ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... seek it with a blazing sword, And some with old blue plates; Some with a miser's golden hoard; Some with a book of dates; Some with a box of paints; a few Whose loads of truth would ne'er pass through The first, white, fairy gates; And, oh, how shocked they are to find That truths are false when ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Laura and Violet had been perfectly certain that Billie's Aunt Beatrice had been some sort of miser who had piled up an immense fortune simply ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler |
