"Wild oats" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to its fullness of fire and fruition. There were days when the crowded forest seemed choked and impeded with its own foliage, and pungent and stifling with its own rank maturity; when the long hillside ranks of wild oats, thickset and impassable, filled the air with the heated dust of germination. In this quickening irritation of life it would be strange if the unfortunate man's torpid intellect was not helped in its awakening, and he was allowed to ramble at will ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... be a fast horse, but quite some time ago he stopped eating his wild oats and now leads ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... at Salt Lake, the transit of the dreary Alkali desert, even the wild passage of the Sierras, were but a blurred picture in his memory. The sight of eternal snows and the rolling of endless ranks of pines, the first glimpse of a hillside of wild oats, the spectacle of a rushing yellow river that to his fancy seemed tinged with gold, were momentary excitements, quickly forgotten. But when, one morning, halting at the outskirts of a struggling settlement, he found the entire party eagerly gathered around a passing stranger, ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... comrade! Well, manners have changed. All these notions of lawful order, Kantism, and liberty have spoilt the young men. You have no Guimard now, no Duthe, no creditors—and you know nothing of heraldry; why, my dear young friend, you are not fully fledged. The man who does not sow his wild oats in the spring sows them in the winter. If I have but eighty thousand francs a year at the age of seventy, it is because I ran through the capital at thirty. Oh! with my wife—in decency and honor. However, your imperfections will ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... throw away his inheritance before he has had the chance to touch it? Will you turn over to him a brain distorted, a mind diseased, a will untrained to action, a spinal cord grown through and through with the devil grass of that vile harvest we call wild oats? Will you let him come, taking your place, gaining through your experiences, hallowed through your joys, building on them his own, or will you fling his hope away, decreeing wanton-like that the man you might have been shall ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last, as to more vulgar companions. In this lonely glen, with its brook draining the slopes, its creased ice and crystals of all hues, where the spruces and hemlocks stand up on either side, and the rush and sere wild oats in the rivulet itself, our lives are more serene and worthy ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... said grimly. "He had an idea some of us'd turn up. An idea ... I suppose a little bird told him. Oh, take me away, somebody, and let me die. Let me have one last imitation meal, and die. Where do they sell wild oats?" ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... was slipping out of his hands. He would have all the drunkards to become moderate drinkers, if not total abstainers; and all the sensualists to become, if need be, ascetics; and all those who had sowed out their wild oats to settle down as heads of houses, and members, if not ministers and elders, in his set-up church. But we are too well taught, surely; we have gone too long to another church than that which Diabolus ever sets up, to be satisfied with his superficial doctrine and his skin-deep discipline. ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... thought I, is why the west gets all the credit for the wild oats gathered in old lands and sown in the new world. I pulled him up to the log on which I was balanced, and seating himself he dangled his feet down and began to souse ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... to go back a little. When Randall reached America on his return from Germany, he immediately began to sow his wild oats, and gave his whole mind to it. Answering Ida's letters got to be a bore, and he gradually ceased doing it. Then came a few sad reproaches from her, and their correspondence ceased. Meanwhile, having had ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... step-son, Stephen Philipson, had disappointed him grievously, developing idle, dissipated, and extravagant habits as he grew into manhood. Mr Burke bore with him for some years, hoping that he would sow his wild oats and reform. But instead of this, he became worse and worse, till at last it was evident that he would make the worst possible use of any money ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... be a good thing for you—you have sown wild oats enough, Louis, and it is time that you began to think of settling down in life. If you please me you know that a brilliant future awaits you, for you are my only heir," Mrs. Montague concluded, as she searched his ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... of everything that was worth while; of doing something and being something worth while; believing something that made the next world worth while; or gaining the love of a woman that would have made this life worth while—in the eyes of his own people he was merely sowing his wild oats after the fashion of his race, and would settle down, after the same fashion, by and by—that was the indulgent summary of his career thus far. He had been a brilliant student in the old university and, ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... book is to impart the ideas which are most likely to be lacking in the conventional Englishman's equipment. I came by them myself much as Wagner did, having learnt more about music than about anything else in my youth, and sown my political wild oats subsequently in the revolutionary school. This combination is not common in England; and as I seem, so far, to be the only publicly articulate result of it, I venture to add my commentary to what has already been written ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... first to you:— I do confess you a most gallant knight, A worthy soldier, and an honest man: But honesty maintains not a french-hood, Goes very seldom in a chain of gold, Keeps a small train of servants: hath few friends.— And for this wild oats here, young Flowerdale, I will not judge: God can work miracles, But he were better make a hundred new, Then thee a thrifty and ...
— The London Prodigal • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... good—in fact, he will be quite rich. If you care for him there is nothing against him as I can see. He is healthy, has a good character, and comes of a high family. Being a bit wild won't matter. Very often, after they sow their wild oats, some of those scampy young fellows settle down and marry a nice young girl and turn ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... grass tall as ripe wheat and when my father stopped his team and came back to us and said, "Well, children, here we are on The Big Prairie," we looked about us with awe, so endless seemed this spread of wild oats ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... prouder.'... I have not forgotten all Jack's former failings, but I am forgetting them, little by little. For dad's sake I'm overjoyed. For Jack's I am glad. I'm convinced now that he's had his lesson—that he's sowed his wild oats—that he has become ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... was a household word throughout all England for every sort of mischief. Wine, women, dice, cards, racing—in all forms of debauchery he had earned for himself a terrible name. He was of an old and noble family, and it had been hoped that he had sowed his wild oats when he married ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... just the fellow to do rash things and come to glory—climbing the Matterhorn, taking a "header" into Niagara, or finding a big nugget. That's his way of sowing wild oats, and perhaps it's better than ours,' said Tom thoughtfully; for he had gained a good deal of experience in that sort of agriculture since ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... of the home; the selfish politicians, who betrayed their country; the men who read the Bible and believed only the parts that didn't hurt their sensitive feelings; the young men who lived fast lives and sowed wild oats because a wicked and false public sentiment made them think it was excusable and perhaps necessary; and all other men and women who lived as they pleased, regardless of God and eternity—when all these shall appear before ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... maybe, the blessings we long for will turn to a curse in the end. I doubt whether our little cottage will be the restful place it was before Uncle Mat came home. He has gone to a bad school to learn manners; and wild oats and tares and the husks that the swine did eat are poor crops, after all, Miss Ross,' finished Priscilla a ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... this perennial beau—of how he had been in love with every woman in and around Kennedy Square, from Miss Clendenning down to the latest debutante, and of how he would tell you over his first toddy that he had sown his wild oats and was about to settle down for life, and over his last—the sixth, or seventh, or eighth—that the most adorable woman in town, after a life devoted to her service, had thrown him over, and that henceforth all that was left ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... sin. The world requires that unmarried women should be chaste, while it gives almost unbridled license to men. A girl detected in amours is disgraced and often made an outcast. In young men such irregularities are freely tolerated. They are "a little wild"; they "sow their wild oats"; but open profligacy, the seduction of innocence, the ruin of poor girls, adultery, harlotry and its diseases do not hinder men from marrying, nor from requiring that those they marry should have spotless reputations. It is not for a moment permitted that women ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... experiences of young men and women. "They are sung by young men when in each other's company, and are seldom overheard by women, almost never by women of high character;" they "belong to that season in a man's career when 'wild oats' are said to be sown." Some of ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... cutter: it was supposed that a shot from the gun-boat must have sunk her, and that the whole crew were drowned. Captain Wilson and Mr Sawbridge seriously regretted the loss of our hero, as they thought that he would have turned out a shining character as soon as he had sown his wild oats; so did Mr Asper, because our hero's purse went with him; so did Jolliffe, because he had taken an affection for him; so did little Gossett, because he anticipated no mercy from Vigors. On the other hand, there were some ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... with Mrs. Quickly and haply with Doll Tearsheet. All the whimsical miscellany of the Bohemians must have been known to him. We need not doubt that he had sowed wild oats. Doubtless, if he lived the same life now, he would be looked upon askance by good people who knew nothing of his temptations. But he was no neurotic; no genius of the first rank ever is or was. He never lost control of himself, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Bjorn and Kari that they ride down on the Sand, and lead their horses under the banks where the wild oats grew, and cut the oats for them, that they might not die of hunger. Kari made such a near guess, that he rode away thence at the very time that they gave over seeking for him. He rode by night up through the Hundred, and after that he took to the fell; and so on all the ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... captured by the French at Fort Chanseau and released to live at Boston on parole until the war should end; Mr. Fynes, the Collector's Secretary; Mr. Bythesea, Deputy-Collector; young Shem Hacksteed and young Denzil Baynes, sons of wealthy New Englanders, astray for the while, and sowing their wild oats in a society openly ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... they could not resist the appeal to their sympathies. Such is the difficulty of entirely respectable and decorous "parlour" Socialists, in their dealings with the wayward children of the movement, the "impossibilists" and "direct actionists" and other sowers of proletarian wild oats. Dr. Service produced a wad of bills and bailed out all the prisoners, and delivered himself of impressive indignation to the police-sergeant, while waiting for an ambulance to carry "Wild Bill" to the hospital. Jimmie Higgins, who had always hitherto shouted with the "wild" ones, realized ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... unrivalled precocity. As a child he had been his father's friend rather than his father's plaything; as a {143} lad he was his father's travelling companion, and learned from that father the pleasant art of sowing wild oats not with the hand but with the whole sack. He returned to England a proficient gambler, a finished rake, the dear friend of famous men, the darling of beautiful women, to enter, before he was of age, upon that political ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and the good conduct of the men when on shore was the great object to be obtained, this system may be, so far as the navy is concerned, pronounced a decided failure. Whatever may be said about the policy of sowing a man's wild oats, nobody, so far as I know, ever hinted that the crop ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... has come to his senses respecting the sex, or, according to the vulgar adage, sown his wild oats, he naturally seeks a sincere friend to whom he can unbosom himself with confidence. Experience warns him that few men are to be trusted; and unless he has had the good fortune to meet with a virtuous wife, blessed with an engaging temper ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... 'The Road to Ruin' has eclipsed 'Duplicity' and 'The Deserted Daughter.' We all know 'The Honeymoon,' but who has seen, how many have read, 'The Curfew' and 'The School for Authors'? We flock to 'Wild Oats,' but alas for 'The Agreeable Surprise'! 'The Man of the World' keeps Macklin's name before us, but we have said good-bye to ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... head with that air which almost invariably bespeaks a stormy youth, and looked out over mankind from his great height as over a fine standing crop of wild oats. As a matter of fact, he had grown to manhood in the years immediately preceding those wild early sixties, when all Europe was at loggerheads, and Poland seething in its midst, as lava seethes in the crater ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... vegetable and animal food. During the months of September and October, the weeds and wild oats swarm with them. They feed on the nutricious seeds, small snail shells, worms and larvae of insects, which they extract from the mud. The habits of the Sora Rail, its thin, compressed body, its aversion to take wing, and the dexterity with which it runs or conceals itself among ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... and such domestic duties as repairing rents in our breeches and tunics, and a little laundry work. Some of your "gentlemen rovers abroad" are finding that sewing the tears in one's tunic is a far different and more difficult matter than sowing one's wild oats at home. Owing to having baked the back of one of my boots in drying it at a fire, after my fourth immersion in a bog, I have had rather a bad heel, but am easier in that vulnerable part now, having cut out the back ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... cockpits and gaming houses, the night clubs and rings sacred to the "fancy"; when it was still the thing for a gentleman to spend his nights in drinking champagne and playing practical jokes that were forgiven him as a high-spirited young man who must sow his wild oats and garnish each word of conversation with an oath. From the comparative respectability of Cremorne and Motts, and the frankly shady precincts of the "Pie" and the "Blue Posts" down to places considerably worse, London was an enormous gamut of ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... spendthrift on record. How he set about it, in a place where there are no luxuries for sale, and where the board at the best inn comes to little more than a shilling a day, is a problem for the wise. His son, ruined as the family was, went as far as Paris to sow his wild oats; and so the cases of father and son mark an epoch in the history of centralisation in France. Not until the latter had got into the train was the work ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that our mass of celibates should sow their wild oats? And who is deceived on this point? as Figaro asks. Is it the governments or the governed? The social order is like the small boys who stop their ears at the theatre, so as not to hear the report of the firearms. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... has sown his wild oats at his age puts himself out of court. He has no pluck; he puts money in the ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... together we talk of a new heaven and a new Russia. But it will not come in our time. We are only the sowers, and the harvest is not yet. But I tell Paul that he has not sown wild oats, nor ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... fathers. Bored in their own homes, these young fellows found little or no distraction elsewhere in the city; and as, in the language of that region, "youth must shed its cuticle" they sowed their wild oats at the expense of the town itself. It was difficult to carry on such operations in open day, lest the perpetrators should be recognized; for the cup of their misdemeanors once filled, they were liable to be arraigned at their next peccadillo before the police courts; and they ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... bay, the Sierras of Santa Cruz lift their virgin crests (plumed with giant redwoods) to the brightest skies on earth. Flashing brooks wander to the sea unvexed by mill, unbridged in Nature's unviolated freedom. Far to north and south the foot-hills stand shining with their golden coats of wild oats, a memorial of the seeds cast over these fruitful mesas by Governor Caspar de Portala. He left San Diego Mission in July, 1769, with sixty-five retainers, and ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... man, somebody's son, starts out with the determination that the world is indebted to him for a good time. "Dollars were made to spend. I am young, and every man must sow his wild oats and then settle down. I want to be a 'hail fellow well met' with every one." So he is ever ready to drink a social glass, to give a pun and to be a "masher on the girls." With this determination uppermost ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... asceticism in the young men. Believe me, it is necessary to manhood that men when they are young should drink a little, gamble a little, and sow a few wild oats—as necessary as that a nation should found itself by the law of the strongest. How else can we look for the moderation to follow with responsibilities? The vices that are more than excusable in the young, are very properly ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... a local reputation as a chicken expert, mainly, I believe, because he's a butcher. He recommended a breed called Wild Oats (by which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... thousands in the broad daylight of legitimate enterprise. Chicanery in the blood, one might imagine, has to be worked out. Urban Vanes are to be found in all callings. They commence as scamps; years later, to one's astonishment, one finds them ornaments to their profession. Wild oats are of various quality, according to the soil from which they are preserved. We sow them in ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... admitted, in moments of expansion which they probably regretted afterwards, that he might, after all, be as devoted to his country as they were. For years now his life had been without blemish. It was impossible to believe that even in his youth he could have sown any wild oats; terrible to think that these wild oats might now ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... waters of the river spread out wide at every high tide over marshes and meadows, turning them twice a day for a few hours into lakes, grown up in summer with red and yellow flowers and the graceful wild oats, or reeds, ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... covers a multitude of sins and weaknesses. Should a young lady raise one or two slight objections in regard to the young millionaire's character, her mother says: "Why, dear, all young men must sow their wild oats. You must not expect to find a pure young man. All young men are fast more or less. It would be hard to find an unmarried man that is moral. After they are married they get steady ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... in his hands. If infection with a venereal disease meant simply the death of the infected individual, it would really be very much less deleterious to society than is the present condition. When the young man "sows wild oats" and catches incidently gonorrhea, that twenty years ago was considered a sort of a "good joke," he will, in a large proportion of cases, lay the foundation for broken health and will run a serious risk of transmitting the disease to an innocent, ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... person so pleased as Lady Armine is,' continued Mrs. Montgomery Floyd. 'The truth is, Captain Armine has been wild, very wild indeed; a little of a roue; but then such a fine young man, so very handsome, so truly distinguished, as Lady Bellair says, what could you expect? But he has sown his wild oats now. They have been engaged these six months; ever since he came from abroad. He has been at Bath all the time, except for a fortnight or so, when he went to his Place to make the necessary preparations. We all so missed him. Captain Armine was quite the life of Bath I am almost ashamed ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... the foolish boy had no love to his father to keep him from emigrating. He wanted to be his own master, and to get away into a place where he thought he could sow his wild oats and no news of it ever reach the father's house. He wanted to have the fingering of the money, and to enjoy the sense of possession. And so he went off on his unblessed road to the harlots and the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... they have done him much harm. He sowed his wild oats—then got married, and settled down into a good, substantial citizen. A little too religious and pharisaical, I always thought; but upright in his dealings. He had his pleasures in early life, as was befitting the season of youth—why not let his son taste of the same agreeable fruit? ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... careless morally, I think. He's had too much conviviality about the Club. I'm afraid he's blossoming over young. They can say all they want about wild oats, but in this city it's a mistake to sow them all at once. That's one reason why I've been so good to him. I flatter myself that a house like this is a ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... he invariably spent on the Continent or in more remote places. He smoked Indian cheroots from choice—he had once filled a civil position in Bombay for eighteen months—and his favorite wine was port. He was generous and kind-hearted, and believed that every young man must sow his crop of wild oats, and that he would be the better for it. But there was another and a deeper side to his character. In his sense of honor he was a counterpart of Colonel Newcome, and he had a vast amount of family pride; a sin against that he could neither ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... a comparative failure; but that description of oats, called wild oats, promises well in the neighbourhood of Oxford. Turn-ups have had a favourable season at the ecarte tables of several dowagers in the West-end district. Beans are looking poorly—particularly the have-beens—whom we meet with seedy frocks and napless hats, gliding ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the Fourth, has left the high-water mark of his poetry in the soliloquy which represents royalty longing vainly for the toiler's sleep; while the popularity, the showy heroism, of Henry the Fifth, is used to give emphatic point to the old earthy commonplace about "wild oats." The wealth of homely humour in these plays, the fun coming straight home to all the world, of Fluellen especially in his unconscious interview with the king, the boisterous earthiness of Falstaff ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... There were many things respectable thirty years ago that are absolutely disreputable now. Then, a middle-aged man might drink at a bar with a boy of twenty. If he did it to-day he would be marked at once. Then, drinking and gambling were looked upon as the wild oats a young man might sow, without losing caste. To-day, the young man who drinks and gambles is looked upon as of doubtful social position, by both men and women. To-day, in making their lists of invitations, leaders ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... attacks even those who seem to be out of his reach. Remember this; all the indignities put on Greece by Sparta or ourselves were at least the work of genuine sons of the land; they may be likened to the wild oats of some heir to a great estate—if they were the excesses of some slave or changeling we all would have considered them monstrous and scandalous. But that is not our attitude to Philip and his diplomacy, ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... wouldst be a fool for thy pains," said my lord. "Tut, tut, man. Go and see the world. Sow thy wild oats; and take the best luck that fate sends thee. I wish I were a boy again, that I might go to college ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... gashes of red soil, the piles of brush and undergrowth, the bared boulders, and heaps of stone—melted away, and were lost under a carpet of lighter green, which made an oasis in the tawny desert of wild oats on the hillside. Water was the only free boon denied this Garden of Eden; what was necessary for irrigation had to be brought from a mining ditch at great expense, and was of insufficient quantity. In this emergency Mulrady thought ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... life depends upon habits formed in early life. The young man who sows his wild oats and indulges in the social cup, is fastening chains upon himself that never can be broken. The innocent youth by solitary practice of self-abuse will fasten upon himself a habit which will wreck his physical constitution and bring suffering and misery and ruin. Young ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... timothy and wild oats and gama grass, mingled with flowers. Along the trickle were willows, too. With the aspens and the willows and the seed grasses and the water this was a fine place for grouse. I looked for sign, on the edge of the wetness, ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... Nemo, is that a gentleman farmer makes no profit on his crops. Now my friends say I'm losing an awful lot of money and am sowing an awfully big crop. And according to them, instead of practicing sensible crop rotation, I'm a foolish one-crop farmer—and my one crop is wild oats." ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... yourself every pleasure, and live the life of a hermit, you can't take any rank. My father expects me to get a hundred and one per cent. in every study, and thinks I ought to rise with the lark and go to bed with the chickens. I don't know whether he ever sowed any wild oats; if he did, it was so long ago that he has quite forgotten I must sow mine some time. He ought to be thankful they are ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... He had sown his wild oats and had already reaped a crop of knowledge. "I have put the past behind me," he said. And he ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... gum creek coming from the south of west, and running to the south-east. It was a fine creek. These courses of water spread over a grassy plain a mile wide; the water holes were long and deep, with numerous plants growing on their banks, indicating permanent water. The wild oats on the bank of the creek were four feet high. The country gone over to-day, although stony, was completely covered with grass and salt bush; it was even better than that passed yesterday. Some of the grass resembled the drake, ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... remarkable one in this respect, that from beginning to end he seems to have been dominated by a single impulse, the impulse of poetry. He had no large or remarkable experiences, no wild oats to sow, no great successes or reverses, no business cares or public offices. For sixty-six years, from the appearance of the Poems by Two Brothers, in 1827, until his death in 1892, he studied and practiced his art continually and exclusively. Only Browning, his fellow-worker, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... led a bad life, that is to say, he had squandered a little money, which action, in a poor family, is one of the greatest crimes. With rich people a man who amuses himself only sows his wild oats. He is what is generally called a sport. But among needy families a boy who forces his parents to break into the capital becomes a good- for-nothing, a rascal, a scamp. And this distinction is just, although ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant • David Widger
... lady; of the fact that no one of the young nobles of the place was permitted to visit her—except, indeed, the young Marchese Ludovico; and how people did say that half-a-dozen would be safer company than one; and that the young Marchese was finishing the sowing of his wild oats before becoming a married man by a flirtation with one of the ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... worry the people, and won't leave off until they are pitched out with a fork,—as will happen some day to our members of Parliament. There was a time when the people were embarked upon great enterprises. Perhaps that will happen again, although they sowed their wild oats long ago: in any case their embarkations are never for long: very soon they return to their age-old companion: the earth. It is the soil which binds the French to France, much more than the French. There are so many different races ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... had spent a little time on the way in the Mediterranean and in the West Indies. I did not want to present myself to the British Merchant Service in an altogether green state. It was no use telling him that my mysterious vocation was so strong that my very wild oats had to be sown at sea. It was the exact truth, but he would not have understood the somewhat exceptional psychology of my ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Slocum gravely. "It's the finest thing in the world that you sowed your wild oats ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... London, and left him all the money he wanted. From that moment his life loses its legendary character, and becomes more a matter of history. He settled accounts with the money-lenders, abandoned his crop of wild oats to the harvesting of others, and became in his turn a patron. He patronized the Arts. It was not only usurers who discovered that Mark Ablett no longer wrote for money; editors were now offered free contributions as well ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... was a very unfrequented one, twisting like a mountain river—indeed, it was the bed of an old watercourse—between brown hills of wild oats, and debouching at last into a broad blue lake-like expanse of alfalfa[162-2] meadows. In vain I strained my eyes over the monotonous level; nothing appeared to rise above or move across it. In the faint hope that she might have lingered at the hacienda, I was spurring on again when I heard a slight ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... silent. He did not deign to hide his grief or pleasure under disguises. His error, perhaps, was in forgetting that Ethel was very young; that her conduct was not design so much as girlish mischief and high spirits; and that if young men have their frolics, sow their wild oats, and enjoy their pleasure, young women may be permitted sometimes their more harmless vagaries of gaiety, and ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... starchness is indispensable for a railway director, if he means to go forward in his high calling and prosper; he must abandon all juvenile eccentricities, and aim at the appearance of a decided enemy to free trade in the article of Wild Oats. Accordingly, as the first step toward respectability, I eschewed coloured waistcoats and gave out that I was a marrying man. No man under forty, unless he is a positive idiot, will stand forth as a theoretical bachelor. It is all nonsense to say that there is ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... Warden too, a kind of client,' said the careless visitor, 'and no bad one either: having played the fool for ten or twelve years. However, Mr. Michael Warden has sown his wild oats now - there's their crop, in that box; and he means to repent and be wise. And in proof of it, Mr. Michael Warden means, if he can, to marry Marion, the Doctor's lovely daughter, and to carry her ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... right you have to do. That's the way we learn my dear, that's the way we learn! Well—you've been a good child ever since I've known you. A remarkably good child. If you have to sow this kind of wild oats—" they both smiled at this, "I guess we can't stop you. I'll keep ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... it, is considerably larger than the Coscumnes. The soil of the bottom appears to be very rich, and produces the finest qualities of grasses. The grass on the upland is also abundant, but at this time it is brown and dead. We passed through large tracts of wild oats during the day; the stalks are generally from three to five feet ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... attar, soap, scents, and all the etceteras of the toilet, than the rest of his house with prints, pictures, carvings, and curiosities of every sort. Jack and I went to school together, and sowed our slender crop of wild oats together; and, indeed, in some sort have been together ever since. We both have our own collections of rarities, such as they are, and each criticises the other's new purchases. On the present occasion there was a new Van Somebody's old painting awaiting my judgment; and no sooner did ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... been all you should have been," pursued Tom in his friendly tones, "but as I told Susan yestiddy, a body can't sow wild oats in one generation without havin' a volunteer crop spring up in the next. Now, yo' wild oats were sown long befo' you were born. ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... York, and I was merely mentioned with some trifling gift. I contested the will and lost the case. It was an undoubted will, and in my father's own handwriting, and dated more than a year before he died and when I was rusticating from college. I thought I must needs sow my wild oats, and day after to-morrow I pay for them all by total beggary. The devisee, by the will, acted very strangely about the property. He did not disturb me for a very long time. He probably feared to do so; and then he made a mortgage ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... days for California. The vagrant keels of prying Commerce had not as yet ruffled the lordly gravity of her bays. No torn and ragged gulch betrayed the suspicion of golden treasure. The wild oats drooped idly in the morning heat, or wrestled with the afternoon breezes. Deer and antelope dotted the plain. The watercourses brawled in their familiar channels, nor dreamed of ever shifting their regular tide. ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... for the man oats for the woman? It's the men that sow the wild oats and the women—us women that's got to ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... in and nail fast the head, and roll the man down hill a hundred feet or more. They could run down a lean and hungry wild pig, catch it, heat a ten-plate stove furnace hot, and putting in the pig, could cook it, they dancing the while a merry jig." Wild oats of this kind seem hardly compatible with a harvest of civilization, but it is contended that such of these roysterers as survived their stormy beginnings became decent and serious citizens. Indeed, Mr. Herndon insists than even ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... of his going off to the services. Had Frank become a Christian like Mr. Lloyd? He would not be sorry if he had, although it was rather a pity that he had not waited until he had had his fling first, sowed a few wild oats, seen something of the world, and then settled down. Here was a good chance to find out. So with some relaxing of his ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... V.," and in the popular mouth, Shakespeare found roistering Prince Hal. The madcap Prince, like Harry Percy, was a creature of popular sympathy; his high spirits and extravagances, the vigorous way in which he had sown his wild oats, had taken the English fancy, the historic personage had been warmed to vivid life by the ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... prudence we mean those in which both parties have sown their wild oats already. That's like scarlatina—one has to go through it and ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... still "possessed," Aunt Merce said, and mother called me "lawless." "What upon earth are you coming to?" asked Temperance. "You are sowing your wild oats ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... bud can a voice be sent?— 'Let us hope the Captain's wild oats are sown; A pretty young wife should make him content'— Only a word in ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart
... they eat the fish, when they throw the offal away. Their food is chiefly beeves, turtle, several species of snakes, broth made of deer's humbles, peas, beans, &c. They have no set meals: they eat when they are hungry, and drink nothing but water. Their bread is made of Indian corn, wild oats, or the seed of the sun-flower; they eat it ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... think that it matters so much what he does till a baby arrives; He sows his wild oats an' he has his gay fling an' headlong in pleasure he dives; An' a drink more or less doesn't matter much then, for life is a comedy gay, But the moment a crib is put in the home, an' a baby has come there to ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... to keep, and I rather preferred keeping it and losing several pleasures that other men managed to enjoy, apparently with free consciences. I confess I used to rather envy them. It is no particular virtue on my part; the thing struck me as rather more vulgar than wicked, and so I have had no wild oats to speak of; and no woman, if that is what you mean, can write an anonymous letter, and no man can tell you a story about me that he could ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... a kind of inaugural feast, at which good trade advice was to flow from the elders, and good wine to be drunk to the success of the converts to Commerce from Agriculture in its unremunerative form—wild oats. So Margaret had come over to help her mother-in-law, and also to shake off her own deep languor; and both their faces were as red as the fire. Presently in came Joan with ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... thing to do. Do not oppress those of your companions who are weaker than yourself, and do not be rude to them, for that would be a cowardly act.' These are excellent principles. But when the child has become a young man his mother says, 'He must sow his wild oats.' And sowing his wild oats means that he must perforce be a seducer, an adulterer, and a frequenter of brothels. What? Is this mother, who told her boy not to tell lies, the same person who permits him now that he is a man, to betray a woman like herself? And, although she taught her child not ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... some people do. Occasionally he says some very true things and shows that he is acquainted with human nature in its brighter and darker aspects. But, on the whole, the story of marriage and giving in marriage—selling your daughter for money or a title—the picture of young men who sow their wild oats and then repent and marry innocent ladies and live virtuously and die in the odour of sanctity—on the whole the story does not seem to correspond to the ideals which haunt me, even though I do not act up to them. Surely life is something utterly different from all this. Surely somewhere ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... day he'll stoop to raise her to his throne, Look tame and tired of wild oats—for a time; And, when They reap the whirlwind he has sown, We'll talk of his misfortune ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various
... was by birth a Carian. This prince had incurred his father's displeasure by his prodigality, and an influential party desired that he should be set aside in favour of his brother Pantaleon, the son of Alyattes by an Ionian. Croesus, having sown his wild oats, was anxious to regain his father's favour, and his only chance of so doing was by distinguishing himself in the coming war, if only money could be found for paying his mercenaries. Sadyattes, the richest banker in Lydia, who had already ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... situation, where vice or crimes are not alleged, the follies of youth should not obstruct the fair prospects of advanced manhood. God help us all if some such modification of censure is not extended to us, since most men have sown wild oats enough! Wilson was made a professor, as you know, has one of the fullest classes in the University, lectures most eloquently, and is much beloved by his pupils. The other was the case of John Williams, now Rector of our new Academy here, who was opposed most violently upon what on ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... the hills where they spread into the level country, and by this means we got excellent feed for our horses; generally the same rich succulent herbage I have mentioned before, occasionally mixed with wild oats. It was only in places of this description that we could expect to find anything for our horses. In the plains or on the hills there was not a blade of of anything green; at night we encamped upon a small dry channel with tolerable ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... question, inasmuch as having lost my reputation for youth, I have never acquired one for wisdom—hereby raise my voice against the intolerable cant, which assumes every man to be a hare-brained scapegrace at twenty, and Solomon at forty-five. Youth sows wild oats, it may be; too many men in more advanced life seem to me to sow no crop of any kind. There are empty fools at all ages; but "an old fool," &c., (musty as the proverb is, it is rather from neglect than over-application.) I have known men by the dozen, who in their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... though some licence was to be allowed to young men whose fathers could afford it, people shook their heads at the courses of the second son, Dunstan, commonly called Dunsey Cass, whose taste for swopping and betting might turn out to be a sowing of something worse than wild oats. To be sure, the neighbours said, it was no matter what became of Dunsey—a spiteful jeering fellow, who seemed to enjoy his drink the more when other people went dry—always provided that his doings did not bring ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... voice, to be heard, without minding her, Pray, Madam, (provokingly interrogated I), was he not known to have been as wild a man, when he was at first introduced into our family, as he now is said to be? Yet then, the common phrases of wild oats, and black oxen, and such-like, were qualifiers; and marriage, and the wife's discretion, were to perform wonders—but (turning to my sister) I find I ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... that of twenty-four. If you bind him with leading-strings at college, he will break loose while eating for the bar in London; bind him there, and he will break loose afterwards, when he is a married man. The wild oats must be sown somewhere. 'Twas thus that Tom Staple would argue of young men; not, indeed, with much consistency, but still with some practical knowledge of the subject ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... acquaintances, too, in all parts of the country that were invaluable to me in after days, and though I had not finished sowing my wild oats I think the folly of it all had begun to dawn on my mind as I saw player after player disappear from the arena, the majority of them being men who had given promise of being shining lights ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... old dean, that intimacy ought not to aggravate any unfavorable inference as to Young's Oxford life. It is less likely that he fell into any exceptional vice than that he differed from the men around him chiefly in his episodes of theological advocacy and rhapsodic solemnity. He probably sowed his wild oats after the coarse fashion of his times, for he has left us sufficient evidence that his moral sense was not delicate; but his companions, who were occupied in sowing their own oats, perhaps took it as a matter of course that he should be a rake, and were only struck with the exceptional ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... rose before his eyes. It had happened in a far western land—a land that now remained in his memory as a pool of gold beneath a turquoise sky. He was lying there in the wild oats, upon his back, and above him in the sky a hawk circled free. He watched it long thus, relaxed in a sort of droning somnolence; then suddenly, to a particularly fine spiral of the bird in the air, something ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... leaf, and become more frugal and respectable. He would not give up his social pleasures, but would stick to his business, and employ his leisure time in profitable reading. This, Mr. Parton calls his "regeneration." Others might view it as the completion of "sowing his wild oats." He certainly made himself very useful to the old visionary Keimer, who printed banknotes for New Jersey, by making improvements on the copper plate; but he soon left this employment and set up for himself, in partnership with another ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... and you'll knock the man down that brushes your wife too closely in a crowd, and because of your attitude toward all but your own women you'll suspect every man who even approaches your daughter. In the eyes of the world you're entitled to your wild oats. That's what I am, a wild oat to be sown at your pleasure. If you haven't any letters, Mr. Visigoth, ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst |
