"Profitless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but a single day, or be deep and prolonged, Man's sorrow is always barren and profitless. It cannot restore to a disconsolate mother, bemoaning her untimely loss, the son for whom she weeps, or give him back to his friends.... Let the words written by Dujarier: 'I am about to fight a duel for the most absurd and futile of causes,' never be effaced from our memory. Farewell, Dujarier! ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... strange the absolute lethargy which had come upon us as a reaction after our tremendous emotions of the last twenty-four hours. It was both mental and physical, a deep-lying feeling that nothing mattered and that everything was a weariness and a profitless exertion. Even Challenger had succumbed to it, and sat in his chair, with his great head leaning upon his hands and his thoughts far away, until Lord John and I, catching him by each arm, fairly lifted him on to his feet, receiving only the glare ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... September 12th is received, and has been carefully perused. I agree with you that this discussion by two soldiers is out of place, and profitless; but you must admit that you began the controversy by characterizing an official act of mine in unfair and improper terms. I reiterate my former answer, and to the only new matter contained in your rejoinder add: We have no "negro allies" ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... of mind is clearly evidenced by the present division and perplexity of Christian thought concerning the Christian miracles. Many seem to regard further discussion as profitless, and are ready to shelve the subject. But this attitude of weariness is also transitional. There must be some thoroughfare to firm ground and clear vision. It must be found in agreement, first of all, on the real meaning of a term so ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... vessels to profitless danger, the Vice-Admiral ordered the torpedo-boats to retire from the front, and the whole line of them proceeded to a point north of the fleet, ...
— The Great War Syndicate • Frank Stockton
... Wycombe's or Tony's chances of doing something in the world other than what I am doing. That, of course, is sheer vulgar covetousness and grab. It comes on sometimes when I am tired, or bored, and the parish seems stale, and the conferences and committees I attend unutterably profitless, and I want more clever people to talk to, and bigger and more educated audiences to preach to, and I want to have leisure to write more and to make a name.... It is merely a vulgar disease—a form of Potterism. One has to face it ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... stupid, incompetent in every fibre, and yet there as factors in the problem no man has yet solved. If this was civilization, better barbarism with its chance of sunshine and air, free movement and natural growth. What barbarism at its worst could hold such joyless, hopeless, profitless labor, or doom its victims to more lingering deaths? Admitting the almost impossibility of making them over, incased as they are in ignorance and prejudice, this is simply another count against the social order which has accepted such results as part of its story, ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... more years were past his head fell as a forfeit to the stern demands of Spain. And Prince Charles often declared that naught indeed could come from meddling with luck saving burnt fingers, "even," he said, "as came to me that profitless night when I sought a boon for snatching the lucky raisin from ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... one on Nature's part, but it was well calculated to effect the purpose. But for it, owing to the natural and rational reluctance of the child-bearing sex to assume a burden so bitter and so seemingly profitless, the race might easily have been exposed to the risk of ceasing utterly during the darker periods ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... that it would require a surgical operation to get a joke into some particular Scotchman's head. But we have some persons of the sort even in our own country. Many of the British humorists have been either Scotch or Irish, and it is rather profitless to attempt distinctions as to the humorous sense of these as contrasted with the English. Usually, stories of thrift and penuriousness are told of the Scotch without doing them much injustice, while bulls are designated ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... still "go out to days' work," but, no matter how numerous the family, such life for any daughter is despised and discouraged from the beginning. Work in a bag-factory or any one of the thousand, but to the employes profitless, industries of a great city is eagerly sought, and hardships cheerfully endured which if enforced by a mistress would lead to a riot. To be a shop-girl seems the highest ambition. To have dress and hair and expression a frowsy and pitiful copy of the latest Fifth ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... thank you for your chivalrous and courteous letter. Believe me, I would as lief judge of the strength and splendour of sun and sea by the dust that dances in the beam and the bubble that breaks on the wave, as take the petty and profitless vulgarity of one or two insignificant towns as any test or standard of the real spirit of a sane, strong and simple people, or allow it to affect my respect for the many noble men or women whom it has been my privilege in this great ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... source or test of all that he has to say. Moral experience—the actual possession and exercise of good character—is necessary truly to understand moral principles and profitably to apply them. The mere intellectual apprehension of them is not possible, or if possible, profitless. ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... with such indolent impatience of the claims and ignorances of others, he had not the least talent for explaining this or anything unknown to them; and you swam and fluttered in the mistiest wide unintelligible deluge of things, for most part in a rather profitless uncomfortable manner. ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... having been so long accustomed to the sight of an almost universal forest of dark-green trees. I took much delight in examining the structure of these mountains. The complicated and lofty ranges bore a noble aspect of durability—equally profitless, however, to man and to all other animals. Granite to the geologist is classic ground: from its widespread limits, and its beautiful and compact texture, few rocks have been more anciently recognised. Granite has given rise, perhaps, to more discussion concerning its origin ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... early hatchings from my brooders, for pullets help out with winter eggs when prices are high, laying double what a yearling does during the cold months. My yellow-beaks and two-year-olds I shall kill off as we're able to eat them, for an old hen is a useless and profitless possession and I begin to understand why lordly man has appropriated that phrase as a term of contempt for certain of my sex. I'm trading in my eggs—and likewise my butter—at Buckhorn, selling ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... benevolent regard towards him. You cannot do any man in the world any good unless there is a shoot of love in your heart towards him. You may pitch him benefits, and you will neither get nor deserve thanks for them; you may try to teach him, and your words will be hopeless and profitless. The one thing that is required to bind Christian men together is this common affection. That being there, everything will come. It is the germ out of which all is developed. As we read in that great chapter to the Corinthians—the lyric praise of Charity,—all kinds of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... to Spain some time before to ask aid for the Philippine colony and the missions there. A council assembled by the king, after discussing the matter, recommended that Spain abandon the islands as costly and profitless; Moraga's entreaties induced the king to disregard this advice, and to send a fleet with troops and supplies, in which embarked Moraga with thirty friars of his order. See La Concepcion's account, in Hist. de ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... drew from husbandry the best blood of the land, the young men of strength, initiative, and perseverance. It wrecked the health and character of thousands. It drew the Church and the civil government into profitless quarrels. The bishop flayed the governor for letting this trade go on. The governor could not, dared not, and sometimes did not want to stop it. At any rate it was a great obstacle to agricultural progress. With it and other distractions ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... answered, "yet I cannot see what we gain by raking up this miserable history. It is both painful and profitless." ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... which had been noted by early Jewish scholars. E.g., there is nothing better than to eat and drink, ii. 24; it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting, vii. 2. In iii. 1-8 times are so fixed and determined that human labour is profitless, iii. 9, while in iii. 11 this inflexible order is not an oppressive but a beautiful thing. In viii. 14, ix. 2 (cf. vii. 15) the fate of the righteous and the wicked is the same, in viii. 12, 13, it is different: it is well with the one and ill with the other. ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... years in the penitentiary, it's easy to say but hard to do. So much time, seemingly, has to be wasted in profitless study to find a few kernels amid much chaff. Napoleon said at one point that the trouble with books is that one must read so many bad ones to find something really good. True enough but, even so, there are perfectly practical ways to advance rapidly without undue waste motion. Consider this: Among ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... seigneur's dwellings, a source of wealth simply displayed; here similar activities were banished to unseen regions, and scrupulously kept avenues, close cut lawns and immaculate flower-beds formed evidence of constant labour whose results charmed the eye but were materially profitless. The formal grandeur appealed to her. She was not altogether alien, she reflected, with a curious smile—despite his subsequent downfall John Locke had sprung from just such stock as the owner of this wonderful ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... entered into the body of this infant who was his son, and whose mother was the Witch-Queen; and to-day in this modern London, a wizard of Ancient Egypt, armed with the lost lore of that magical land, walks amongst us! What that lore is worth, it would be profitless for us to discuss, but that he possesses it—all of it—I know, beyond doubt. The most ancient and most powerful magical book which has ever existed was the ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... in the form of snuff. In those days, as in our own, this French-Canadian tobacco was strong stuff, cured in the sun till the leaves were black, and when smoked emitting an odor that scented the whole parish. The art of smoking a pipe was one of several profitless habits which, the Frenchman lost little time in acquiring from ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... profession. I can bring forth arguments and proofs to support this conviction; but I fail utterly to see why I should do so. To people who have a sense of that which is sincere and fresh in fiction, these facts will be apparent. To them my arguments and illustrations would be profitless. As for those honest persons to whom the excellencies of Merrick are not apparent, I can only think that nothing which I or any other man could say would render them obvious. "Happiness is in ourselves," ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... evidence that the third Edward was one whit more sensitive to the charms of the Muses than the third William, three hundred years after. Indeed, the condition with which the appointment of this illustrious custom-house officer was hedged evinced, if anything, a desire to discourage a profitless wooing of the Nine, by so confining his mind to the incessant routine of an uncongenial duty as to leave no hours of poetic idleness. Whatever laurels Fame may justly garland the temples of Dan Chaucer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... he replied; "and because it may serve to keep your mind busy during hours when otherwise it would be engaged with profitless sorrows, I invite you to puzzle out this business for yourself. You have nothing else to do until late to-night, and you can work undisturbed, here, ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... question I wish the reader's mind to be fixed throughout all our subsequent inquiries. It will give double interest to every detail: nor will the interest be profitless; for the evidence which I shall be able to deduce from the arts of Venice will be both frequent and irrefragable, that the decline of her political prosperity was exactly coincident with that ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... us in our ignorance that we confided all things to The Jupiter? Would it not be wise in us to abandon useless talking, idle thinking, and profitless labour? Away with majorities in the House of Commons, with verdicts from judicial bench given after much delay, with doubtful laws, and the fallible attempts of humanity! Does not The Jupiter, coming forth daily with fifty thousand impressions full of unerring decision on every mortal ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... pocket, whistling meanwhile Larry Donovan’s favorite air, the Marche Funèbre d’une Marionnette. My heart went out to Larry as I scented adventure, and I wished him with me; but speculations as to Larry’s whereabouts were always profitless, and quite likely he was in ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... the ground about it is all beaten into blinding dust, wherein no reasonable man can now desire to cloud his eyes and clog his lungs. It is, indeed, one of the cheerful signs of our times, that there is a growing relish for clear air and open skies, a growing indisposition to mingle in old and profitless controversies. It commonly happens in such controversies, as it undoubtedly has happened in the dispute about free-will, that both parties have been trying to pull up Life or Spirit by the roots, and make a show, a la Barnum, of all its secrets. The enterprise was zealously prosecuted, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... repeating their stirring watchwords of endeavour. We are told that no word spoken ever dies, but goes reverberating through space for ever. It is my fancy that only evil words escape into the outer void, which eternally engulfs their profitless message, while words of hope and helpfulness are not thus lightly sundered from the world that needs them, but hover still near above us, descending with every lull of the tumult into those ears which are strained towards them. The laden ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... to be badly hurt. He was stretching away like a hare, shaping his course toward the ranch as true as a pigeon. If they overtook him they would have to ride harder than they ever rode in their profitless lives before. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... eident, be eident, fleet time rushes on, Be eident, be eident, bricht day will be gone; To stand idle by is a profitless sin: The mair that ye work, aye the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... as inaccessible as it now seemed, for the carrying trade would some day realize that the entire waterway of the Great Lakes offered an unrivalled outlet. With that elementary discovery would begin a rush to the new country. Tiring of a profitless employment further south he resolved to anticipate it, and by acquiring his holdings before general attention should be turned that way, to ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... poorer man than ever. He had no heart to go about his daily concerns, which appeared so paltry and profitless; but sat all day long in the chimney-corner, picturing to himself ingots and heaps of gold in the fire. The next night his dream was repeated. He was again in his garden, digging, and laying open stores of hidden wealth. There was something very singular in this repetition. He passed another ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... and increased daily till it burst all bounds and overwhelmed him utterly. Despair lay in wait for him at every turn. The mere flight of time became an intolerable burden. His regrets were less for the happy days gone by than for those that were passing all profitless for love. Those, at least, had left him a memory, these nothing but profoundest regret—nay, almost remorse. His life was preying upon itself, consumed in secret by the inextinguishable flame of one desire, by the unconquerable distaste ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... acknowledged, what man could remain unconcerned, uninterested in the development of such possibilities? Not Siward, amused by her sagacious and impulsive prudence, worldliness, and innocence in accepting Quarrier; and touched by her profitless, frank, and unworldly friendliness ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... and a believing skeptic; so long, in fact, as booksellers shall wait—say twenty-live years—for a new gospel; so long as paper shall remain cheap and ink three sous a bottle, I have no hesitation in saying that such books as these are not utterly profitless. ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... after reading the invitation, tossed it, together with a note from Dick, across to Barney without comment, the color of his entire world changed for that favorite son of Broadway. The surly gloom of the end of a profitless enterprise became magically an aurora borealis of superior hopes:—no, something infinitely more substantial than any heaven-painting flare ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... upon the bread, while it may baffle a philosopher to analyze its constituents, and expound its nutritive qualities. A devout reader may get the meaning of the parable in power upon his heart, while the logical interpreter expends much profitless labour in the dissection of ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... prize within his grasp; yet here the reward is of infinitely greater value, a prize compared with which riches are as dross in comparison with gold. It is Health, without which the acquisition of Wealth, is well-nigh impossible, and its possession as profitless to the ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... and profitless task to go over the bickerings and quarrels that occurred between the inhabitants and the soldiers. The high-spirited citizens, on being challenged in their walks, could not keep their temper; the roughs, here as in every ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... Alesia was betrothed, and would be married six months thence. It did not, however, trouble her that she had heard of this through a servant; she never looked for anything else. Had she been addicted (which, fortunately for her, she was not) to that most profitless of all manufactures, grievance-making,—she might have wept over this little incident. But except for one reason, the news of her sister's approaching marriage was rather agreeable to Philippa. She would have ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... him the sad story at once, as he had heard it from the doctor. He disliked secrets extremely, especially when he happened to be the custodian of them; and painful as the discovery of this one might be to his ward, it might be best that he should know it now, instead of hovering indefinitely in profitless mystery. ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... but I fear it will be profitless. I do not trust that woman. Faithless in all, without doubt she betrays us. Still at the worst you have the sword, and ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... human nature, there is nothing does one's heart so much good as the sight of waste and barren land reclaimed to the uses and wants of man; to see vegetation clothe the idle space, and the cursed and profitless soil teeming with the means of life and bringing forth abundant produce to requite the toil that fertilized it; to see the wilderness crowned with bounteous increase, and the blessing of God rising from the earth to reward the labor ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... a profitless task to draw out a parallel of the crimes committed on both sides. Two facts only need be recorded: that although from 1798 to 1800, not less than sixty-five places of Catholic worship were demolished or burned in Leinster, (twenty-two of which were ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... by the cooeperation of the industrial forces of the continent. Finally, says Cramb, we see the characteristic thought of the twentieth century in the position that war is bad because it is contrary to social well-being and is economically profitless, alike to the victor and the vanquished. This is the pacifism of the socialist who holds that the ties of common labor and economic state are fundamental, and divisions into nationality are secondary and unimportant; and that militarism belongs to the pernicious ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... accent appealing, caressing, insinuating. But he gave Rowland an odd sense of looking at a little waxen image, adjusted to perform certain gestures and emit certain sounds. It had once contained a soul, but the soul had leaked out. Nevertheless, Rowland reflected, there are more profitless things than mere sound and gesture, in a consummate Italian. And the Cavaliere, too, had soul enough left to desire to speak a few words on his own account, and call Rowland's attention to the fact that he was not, after all, a hired cicerone, but an ancient Roman gentleman. Rowland felt ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... lived threescore years and ten in the desert, without human voice or human sympathy to cheer him, because he had not learned that man was made for man, those old ascetics went into the wilderness, and built cells, and occupied themselves in solitary meditation and profitless thought. They prayed much, but they did no work. And thus they passed their lives, giving no pity, aid, or consolation to their fellow-men, adding no mite to the treasury of human knowledge, and leaving the world, when their selfish pilgrimage was finished, without a single ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... flowed they carried desolation. The fields through which the river ran were useless to the farmer. Are there not some whom we know who might be thus described—perhaps someone who reads these lines among the number? First the schoolboy, then the youth, and now the man, profitless and sour, so that all cultivation has been ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... occasionally Bowman's smooth periods and his wife's eager enjoyment of the discourse. His sense of worldly loneliness deepened; Flavilla seemed far away. All life was inexplicable—yes, and profitless, ending in weariness and death. The hunger for perfection, for God, that had been a constant part of his existence, the longing for peace and security, were almost unbearable. He had had a long struggle; ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and efforts of Mrs. Wheelwright, in the other branch of the institute, were presently discovered to be equally, even if not more, defective and profitless. She was an Irish lady by birth—had resided for a time in Scotland, and likewise in England—previous to her visit across the channel to complete her education in the capital of la grande nation. When she left the emerald ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... obeyed him and looked up to him in the heroic time, he loved him tenfold now. He told his friend how much Lucy's mere womanly sweetness and excellence had done for him, and Richard contrasted his own profitless extravagance with the patient beauty of his dear home angel. He was not one to take her on the easy terms that offered. There was that to do which made his cheek burn as he thought of it, but he was going to do it, even though it lost her to him. Just to see her and kneel to her was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... no feeling beyond idle curiosity. Although I well know how much experience evaporates in passing from one generation to another, I cannot believe that it becomes altogether extinct, or that a correct knowledge of the mistakes of our fathers, and of the causes of their failures, can be totally profitless to their descendants. I wish to transmit to those who may succeed me, and who also will have their trials to undergo, a little of the light I have derived from mine. I have, alternately, defended liberty against absolute power, and order against the spirit of ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... family. My advice to you would be to miss a few meetings and go and try to find something to do. Think how we have denied ourselves in order to have a place of our own, and now it's all to be taken from us, and all because of this senseless and profitless strike." ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... face was still there, peering at me through a flood of moonlight. The effect was ghastly, and for hours I could not sleep, imagining that face still staring down upon me, illuminated with the unnatural light and worn with a profitless and unmeaning vigil. ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... taught, or supposed to be taught, in our schools, in a term or two, perhaps at the rate of an hour's practice a week, is not drawing at all. It is only the performance of a few dexterous (not always even that) evolutions on paper with a black-lead pencil; profitless alike to performer and beholder, unless as a matter of vanity, and that the smallest possible vanity. If any young person, after being taught what is, in polite circles, called "drawing," will try to copy the commonest piece ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... With these profitless meditations I tormented myself much. I also carried the mysterious letter into the appearance and pursuits of the deceased; wondering whether he dressed in Blue, wore Boots (he couldn't have been Bald), was a boy ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... river. They crowded Broad street, the unburned stores on Main, and even the alleyways, with great piles of every known thing that could be put up in tin. They had calculated on a rich harvest; but they had reckoned without their host. There was no money in Richmond to spend with them; and after a profitless sojourn, they took up their tin cans, and one by one returned North—certainly wiser and, possibly, better men. It was peculiar to note the universality of southern sympathy among these traders. There was scarcely one among them who didn't think the war "a darned shame;" ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... up, but it was at no time really put into operation. The supporters of the new regime were far from agreed as to the kind of republic, federal or (p. 610) centralized, that should be established;[843] the republican leaders were mutually jealous and prone to profitless theorizing; the nation was lacking in the experience which is a prerequisite of self-government.[844] At home the republic was opposed by the monarchists of the various groups, by the clergy, and by the extreme particularists, and abroad it won the ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... he must image the past to himself most vividly before he could expound his subject; and that effort and strain cost him sleepless nights and days of concentrated thought. Nor was he an easier companion when his work was finished and he could take his ease. Then life seemed empty and profitless; and in its emptiness his voice echoed all the louder. The ill was within him, and outward circumstances were powerless ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... with him. The gold he handled stung him to hatred and envy, and every feeling which he had resolved to combat as worse than profitless. He could not speak to his fellow-workmen. From morning to night it had rained. St. John's Arch looked more broken-spirited than ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... Combined with this was another perversity—an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether they WERE or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless question. There were other considerations, the first of which was that I already had two or three recruits in use, notably a young person with big feet, in alpaca, from Kilburn, who for a couple of years had ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... children, as Raphael did. Some again, confounding Art with their own inordinate vanity, grow stern and harsh with making sacrifices to the stone idol, grinding down their own hearts in vain experimenting after properer pigments, whereby themselves may attain to a chill and profitless immortality. But there are others still, who, elevating Art into a grand divinity, bow down and worship it, devote their lives to its priesthood, and, as a reward, only ask the god to reveal to them once his unveiled effulgence, content with the one communion, though their rashness be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Altogether France has enough to occupy her in Central Africa for some time to come: and even when the long task is finished, the conquered regions are not likely to be of great value. They include the desert of the Great Sahara and wide expanses of equally profitless scrub or marsh. Only one important river, the Shari, flows through them, and never reaches the sea: and even Lake Chad, into which the Shari flows, appears to be leaking through some subterranean exit, and is rapidly changing from a lake ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... interrupted the chairman, who, from profitless watching of Frona's immobile face, had turned to her hand, the nervous twitching and clinching of which revealed what her face had hidden. "That will do, Mr. Bishop. I think we ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... in the delectable highlands of the intellect. The fact that his work is almost wholly decorative is not at all accidental. His talent, his genius, if one chooses, requires large spaces, vast dimensions. There has been a good deal of profitless discussion as to whether he expressly imitates the Primitives or reproduces them sympathetically; but really he does neither, he deals with their subjects occasionally, but always in a completely modern as well as a thoroughly personal way. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... hardly fail to note, if at least you believe idleness and effeminacy and reckless negligence to be baseness. Then, too, there are other treacherous beldames giving themselves out to be innocent pleasures, to wit, dicings and profitless associations among men. [19] These in the fulness of time appear in all their nakedness even to them that are deceived, showing themselves that they are after all but pains tricked out and decked with pleasures. These are they who ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... alliance with thee, knowing that the alliance is dangerous. And, since it is more valiant to go to a doom knowingly than blindfold, so I do show myself more valiant than thou. For well I know—since I saw my mother die—that virtue is a thing profitless, and impracticable in this world. But you—you think it shall set up temporal monarchies and rule peoples. Therefore, what you do you do for profit. I ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... liable to be wrecked when landing in anything but fine weather. Those who might have sunk their money in airship building thereupon patted themselves upon the back and rejoiced that they had been so far-seeing as to avoid being engaged upon such a profitless industry. ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... fellow! he who changes his county every three years, his farm every six months, and his occupation every season! an agriculturist yesterday, a shoemaker to-day, and a school master to-morrow! that epitome of all the unsteady and profitless propensities of the settlers without one of their good qualities to counterbalance the evil! Nay, Richard. this is too bad for ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... the dismal disaster that overtook us at the very opening of the campaign I cannot say. Some ascribe it to the rashness of the Prince, who was certainly a very impetuous leader; but it is ill work buffeting the dead, and profitless also. And if his fiery temper did, indeed, bring about the mischance, he exerted himself as a gallant gentleman to ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... not so interpret their work in life that in so many cases they are discovered to be in effect living for the sake of their leisure and regarding their daily work as uninteresting drudgery, with the result that life as a whole comes to be for them dreary and profitless and stale. A Christian man's life-work ought not to have the character of drudgery, but of ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... bends o'er Yarrow vale, Save where that pearly whiteness Is round the rising sun diffused A tender hazy brightness; Mild dawn of promise! that excludes All profitless dejection; Though not unwilling here to ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... warlike tribes, the work for their advancement thus far accomplished would promptly be lost; for they would instantly offer armed resistance to Filipino control, and the old haphazard intermittent warfare, profitless and worse than profitless for both peoples, ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... marvelous intellectual awakening, the moral revival, the discoveries and inventions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The human mind at last had aroused itself from a long repose, or turned from a profitless activity into broad and fruitful fields. The corruption of the monasteries meant the laxity of vows, the cessation of ministration to the poor and the sick. Then arose the tender and loving Francis, with his call to ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... condition of indifference which made conversation extremely difficult as well as profitless, he began to consider her physical condition. I knew him well enough to gather from his manner alone as he went on that what had seemed at the start to be merely a curious case, because it concerned the Athertons, was looming up in his mind as unusual in itself, and was interesting him ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... in the first instance, to Cooper's Creek, whither Mr. Howitt had already gone. This I thought a mistaken direction, as Howitt would be there before us, and the north and east search being amply provided for, it appeared profitless. The Government also proposed a surveying tour on their own account, in conjunction with the search for the missing explorers. These plans not exactly falling in with my view of the business, I gave up my intention of forming one of the party. Mr. McKinlay was a fine ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... That same efternoon, I expeckit him i' the leebrary as I hae said, and whan he didna come, I took my hat—that was about a half-hoor efter the laird left me—and gaed oot to luik for him. I gaed ower the links; for my man had the profitless habit at that time, whilk he's gien up for a mair profitless still, o' stravaguin' aboot upo' the seashore, wi' 's han's in 's pooches, and his chin reposin' upo' the third button o' 's waistcoat—all which bears hard upo' what the laird says aboot's jealousy. The mune was jist risin' ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... in a suburban neighbourhood. It was useless. He married a sweet girl with various spiteful relations. In vain. He changed his name to PUMPDRY, and conducted a local newspaper. Profitless striving. STARLING was always at hand, always ready with the patent filter, and as punctual in his appearances as the washing-bill or the East wind. I repeat, he was a devil ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 13, 1890 • Various
... fascination of Kitty, and a kind of venomous pleasure in the commotion produced by his pursuit of her; inter penetrated, moreover, through and through with the memory of his one true feeling, and of the woman who had died, alienated from and despising him. He and Mary passed a profitless half-hour. He would have liked to propitiate her, but he had no notion what he should do with the propitiation, if it were reached. He wanted her money, but he was beginning to feel with restlessness that he could not pay the cost. ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nothing more for him to do in Paris. His intended attempt in England was given up, for Kollontaj received a broad hint from the British representative in Saxony that Kosciuszko's presence would be both unwelcome to George III and profitless to the Polish cause. Kosciuszko may then have gone on from France to Brussels, but in the summer of 1793 he was back in Leipzig in close consultation with ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... lips, almost before it was tasted. When he was first told as a certainty that the decision of the committee was against him, he bore up against the misfortune like a man. He laughed heartily, and declared himself well rid of a very profitless profession; cut some little joke about Mr Moffat and his thrashing, and left on those around him an impression that he was a man so constituted, so strong in his own resolves, so steadily pursuant of his own work, that no little contentions of this ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... my Transatlantic booksellers in the way of money has been some L80 (three thousand dollars) which Herman Hooker of Philadelphia gave me for the exclusive privilege—so far as I could grant it—of being my publisher. For aught else, I have nothing to complain of in the way of praise, however profitless, of kindliness, however well appreciated, and of boundless hospitality, however fairly reimbursed at the time by the valuable presence of a foreign celebrity. No doubt the public are benefited by the cheapness of books unprotected ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... me dim regards, Love of ladies, love of bards, Marked forbearance, compliments, Tokens of benevolence. What then, can I love myself? Fame is profitless as pelf, A good in Nature not allowed They love me, as I love a cloud Sailing falsely in the sphere, Hated mist if it ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... following. During this excursion he suffered great privation,—which few men could have endured, and which few men indeed, would have undertaken with only one companion. Mr. Cormack did not succeed in the main object he had in view, yet was his trouble anything but profitless. We now possess through his means a general knowledge of the interior of our Island—together with a specific account of its soil—its geological and mineralogical aspect—its varied natural productions—of trees, shrubs, plants, flowers, &c., all named and methodically described—the kind ...
— Lecture On The Aborigines Of Newfoundland • Joseph Noad
... displeasing—to the majority of those to whom you will read it. If you conclude that my letter will obstruct, and not facilitate the advancement of the cause you have so faithfully labored for these many years, you have my most cheerful consent to deliver it over to that general asylum of profitless productions—the waste-basket. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... communication from one whom you have never personally known, and who, when this comes into your hands, will be beyond the reach of your knowledge. Perhaps I am the loser by this life-long mutual ignorance. Perhaps I am much to blame for it; perhaps not. But such reflections are profitless at this date: I have written with quite other views than to work up a sentimental regret on such an amazingly remote hypothesis as that the fact of a particular pair of people not meeting, among the millions of other pairs of people who have never met, is a great calamity ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... me with pity; so often I have obeyed the thoughts that have been misleading and profitless. Make me more careful of what I think and say, and may I learn from my mistakes the forbidden paths. Help me to keep my mind in unity ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... destroy and outlive the New Italy, as it had destroyed and outlived the Old Rome,—offering the daily sacrifice amid the murmur and solitude of the woods,—confident, peaceful, unstained; while the new men in the valleys below peculated and bribed, swarmed and sweated, in the mire of a profitless and purposeless corruption. ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... diverted from a trend of profitless conjecture when shortly after breakfast time my 'phone bell rang. It was the editor of the Planet, to whom I had been indebted for a number of special commissions—including my fascinating quest of the Giant Gnu, which, generally supposed to be extinct, was reported ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... maintained its ancient aspect. He had bought lands, and engaged in trade, and made sundry efforts in various and honorable ways, but without success. Vocation after vocation had with him a common and certain termination, and after many years of profitless experiment, the ways of prosperity were as far remote from his knowledge and as perplexing to his pursuit, as at the first hour of his enterprise. In worldly concerns he stood just where he had started fifteen ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... with the deliberate approval of both the great parties between whom the country was divided. Reconsidered under Elizabeth, the same law was again formally passed; and it was, therefore, the expressed conviction of the English nation, that it was better for a man not to live at all than to live a profitless and worthless life. The vagabond was a sore spot upon the commonwealth, to be healed by wholesome discipline if the gangrene was not incurable; to be cut away with the knife if the milder treatment of the cart-whip failed ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... intent upon discovery of some way out of their predicament, left for a long walk. Alone in the little house, the Major brooded half the morning over the plight in which the old chief's dictum had placed them, then dismissed the profitless forebodings and went out to the ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... Subsequently, I placed thee as the tutor to young Fonseca, then heir to great fortunes. The second marriage of his uncle, and the heir that by that marriage interposed between him and the honour of his house, rendered the probable alliance of the youth profitless to us. But thou hadst procured his friendship. He presented thee to the Duke of Lerma. I was just then appointed confessor to the king; I found that years had ripened thy genius, and memory had blunted ...
— Calderon The Courtier - A Tale • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the penalty of her mistaken policy; the North will reap its reward in retribution, if it persists in making the price of a saloon in the North the same as the price of a slave in the South. When the value of a world is profitless compared with the worth of a soul then even if every saloon were a Klondyke of gold this republic could not afford to legalize the liquor ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... wild-horse hunters for the sake of trades and occasional sales. But Lin Slone never traded nor sold a horse he had captured. The excitement of the game, and the lure of the desert, and the love of a horse were what kept him at the profitless work. His type was ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... India who have thoroughly studied the nature of such entities (called Pisacham). I do not know much about them experimentally, as I have never meddled with this disgusting, profitless, and dangerous branch ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... as we were in expectation every day of falling in with whales, and the men were on the look-out from the mastheads from dawn until dark, in the hopes of seeing them. I longed to see a whale caught, for as yet the voyage had been profitless, and every one was out of spirits. The captain, who still remained perfectly blind, notwithstanding the assurances of Dr Cockle that he would recover, was so especially. He seemed like a heartbroken man; his countenance gloomy, as if troubled with melancholy ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... return to Greenfield after this delightful but profitless tour he became the local editor of his home paper and in a few months "strangled the little thing into a change of ownership." The new proprietor transferred him to the literary department and the latter, not knowing what else to put in the space allotted him, filled ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... left the Indies, avoiding the toils consequent upon the enterprise, and speaking evil of it and me, have since returned with official appointments,—such is the case now in Veragua: it is an evil example, and profitless both as regards the business in which we are embarked, and as respects the general maintenance of justice. The fear of this, with other sufficient considerations, which I clearly foresaw, caused me to beg your Highnesses, previously to my coming to discover ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... no one had ever heard of, and where apparently no one ever stayed. A few cranky institutions, existing under the excuse of charity, had their offices there, and a firm of publishers, whose glory was of the past, still dragged out their uncomfortable and profitless existence in a building whose dusty windows and smoke-stained walls sufficiently proclaimed their fast approaching extinction. They found the name of Mr. Bentham upon a rusty brass plate outside the last ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... be so for us when we contemplate it in forgetfulness of that spring of potential freedom which underlies it, and of the law of duty correlative to freedom. To the exclusive consideration of it we owe those profitless recipes for eliciting moral health from circumstances which are the plague of modern literature, and which one of our ablest writers has lately condescended to dispense, in an essay on "organisation in daily life." This circumstantial view of life, if we may use the term, ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... and it may be noticed that abstruse as are many of his discourses they generally go straight to the heart of some contemporary interest. Here he says that self-indulgence is low and self-mortification crazy: that both are profitless and neither is the religious life. That consists in walking in the middle path, or noble eightfold path defined in a celebrated formula as right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right rapture. He then enunciates ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... person in the world that one would take for the disciple of any transcendental philosophy; though, indeed, something about his sharp nose and shaved chin seemed to hint that if mysticism, as a lesson, ever came in his way, he might, with the characteristic knack of a true New-Englander, turn even so profitless a thing ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... observing vision notes each emotional clew. Many unspoken queries find vocal reply. Delicate points are cleared by suggestive indirection. Neither completely yields to profitless conjecture. They ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... was spending this present hour—bending over the glowing crucible, that he might avert the shock of the antagonistic properties which he had purposely combined, in order that his mind might be engaged in preventing the collision. None knew better than himself how profitless and miserable was this existence he had made, but except he fed, even with this food of ashes, the serpent thought that haunted him, it would have preyed on him to madness. Truly that dark fluid, beneath ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... precious metals by one half; and those imports thus became inadequate to the ordinary expenses of government. Greater efforts were then made to obtain them from the mines. Still, as the more that was obtained the less was the general value, the operation became more profitless still; and at length both Spain and Portugal were reduced to borrow money, which they had no means to pay—in other words, were bankrupt. And this is the true solution of the problem—why have the gold and silver mines of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... come from over-eating—bloated stomach and burning bowels. Obediently, then, with bowed head and brown finger alert to follow the pointer, did the chela study; but when they came to the Human World, busy and profitless, that is just above the Hells, his mind was distracted; for by the roadside trundled the very Wheel itself, eating, drinking, trading, marrying, and quarrelling—all warmly alive. Often the lama made the living pictures the matter of his text, bidding Kim—too ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... her to take her wreak of the favours she did show. For know that her blows fall sudden and swift and unawares, though long The time of forbearance be and halt the coming of fate and slow. So look to thyself, lest life in the world pass idle and profitless by, And see that thou fail not of taking thought to the end of all below. Cast loose from the chains of the love and the wish of the world and thou shalt find Guidance and help unto righteousness and ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... perhaps, and certainly in rational and philosophical contemplation, the loftiest and most stupendous pillar or pyramid ever raised by human art and industry, for little other purpose than to attract the gaze of profitless admiration, with the vain attempt of mocking the powers of tempests and of time, by which the proudest of these trophied monuments must necessarily be bowed to subjection, and finally crumbled into ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... have lunched in the pantry where some choice viands had been placed. The robber had certainly been very considerate, and had done no mischief either for plunder or diversion. He had evidently, in the opinion of Mrs. Passford and her son, undertaken a profitless enterprise. ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... rareness of the occurrence with the mass of mankind, we cannot regard as a very practical inquiry. We well remember our disappointment, when, at the usual stage in the college curriculum, we were promised "metaphysics" and were set to grind in Stewart's profitless mill, where so few problems of either practical or theoretical importance are brought to the hopper, and where, in fact, the object is rather to show how the upper mill-stone revolves upon the nether, (reflection upon sensation,) ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that? 95 Speak as they please, what does the mountain care? Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-gray Placid and perfect with my art: the worse! I know both what I want and what might gain, 100 And yet how profitless to know, to sigh "Had I been two, another and myself, Our head would have o'erlooked the world!" No doubt. Yonder's a work now, of that famous youth The Urbinate who died five years ago. 105 ('Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me.) Well, I can fancy how he did it all, Pouring ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... himself before the peg from which dangled her shabby wraps and stubbornly refused to have her hat and cloak removed from the nail. There, figuratively speaking, they had hung ever since, the inventor reasoning that life without this paragon of capability was a wretched and profitless adventure. ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... sick-bed or hurries off with blankets and broth down the lane. In some such peace the Fading Flower commonly finds her rest—a peace unromantic, utilitarian, and yet not perhaps unbeautiful. She has found—as she tells us—her work at last; and yet in the life that seems so profitless she has been doing a work after all. She has at any rate vindicated her sex against the charge of what Mr. Arnold calls Hebraism. She has displayed in Hellenic roundness the completeness of ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... whom they did not desire and yet kept. And of the young women and the things of flesh and spirit they desired with every life-beat in them and yet did not take. Was this terrible denial which, for reasons beyond their incomplete brains, they imposed upon themselves, a meaningless, profitless business? The bland interne was dead and unfortunately beyond their punishment. Yet the fact that he had lived at all called for a protest—some definitely framed expression which would throw a halo about their ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... sweet, sad visions of the night came to me less often. Thus life became a weary round, in which month followed month, season followed season, year followed year, and brought always the same eternal profitless-work. And yet the work was merciful, for it dulled the biting edge of thought, and the unchanging evenness of life gave wings ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner |
