"Prodigality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be seen through a shadowy lens, which magnifies their stature. Let us hope that the crimes of the three or four generations immediately succeeding Clovis have been in like manner expanded; for it is sickening to read of such monstrous prodigality of wickedness; whole families butchered—husbands, wives, children, anything obstructing the path to the throne—with an atrocity which makes Richard III. seem a mere pigmy in the art of intrigue and killing. The chapter closes with the daughter and mother of kings (Brunhilde ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... proclaim that Italy can afford to make nothing of what would elsewhere be judged worthy of shrines. We say to ourselves, "If such be the things she throws away, what must be her jewels?" A similar feeling rises in me while exploring Shakespeare's prodigality in apa? ?e?? mue?a. His exchequer appears more exhaustless than the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... the foresight of that misery, attendant on a life of debauchery, which is, in fact, the offspring of prodigality, our author has, in the scenes before us, attempted the reformation of the worldling, by stopping him as it were in his career, and opening to his view the many sad calamities awaiting the prosecution of his proposed scheme of life; he has, in hopes of reforming ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... things the most precious, wasting of Time must be (as POOR RICHARD says) the greatest prodigality; and since, as he elsewhere tells us, Lost time is never found again; and what we call Time enough! always proves little enough, let us then up and be doing, and doing to the purpose: so, by diligence, ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... singular dislike to causing anybody pain that it may be said, his gentleness, his humanity, his easiness, had become faults; and I do not hesitate to affirm that that supreme virtue which teaches us to pardon our enemies he turned into vice, by the indiscriminate prodigality with which he applied it; thereby causing himself many sad embarrassments and misfortunes, examples and proofs of which will ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... a bitter resentment, paragraphs of encomium upon his hated guest. Had he ever indulged himself in the luxury of profanity it would have gushed now in torrents of curses over Stuart Farquaharson, upon whom life seemed to lavish her gifts with as reckless a prodigality as that of a licentious ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... "Monstrous prodigality and wastefulness!" cried Saunders, as Eve passed on towards her own cabin, willing to escape any more of Sir George's complaints. "Just be so kind, Miss Effingham, ma'am, to look into this here pantry, once! Them niggers, I do believe, have had their fingers ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... beauty that I once deemed angelic—is possessed by devils whose name is legion; her heart is the receptacle of a monstrous, hideous crowd of vices—vices the most opposite, there nestle together: brazen effrontery and cringing cowardice; sordid cupidity and the most lavish, reckless prodigality. With her, every act is the result of deep, cool calculation. No generous impulse ever beat within her breast; and love, except for self, never yet was awakened from its deathlike torpor. She married me because I was reputed rich; she deserted me because she ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... contained only some sailors' dresses and some linen, both wetted with sea-water; but likely to be very useful as our own clothes decayed. I found Fritz and Jack had been shooting ortolans; they had killed about fifty, but had consumed so much powder and shot, that I checked a prodigality so imprudent in our situation. I taught them to make snares for the birds of the threads we drew from the karata leaves we had brought home. My wife and her two younger sons busied themselves with these, while I, with my two elder boys, began to construct the sledge. ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... has led to habits of prodigality and extravagance in our legislation. It has induced Congress to make large appropriations to objects for which they never would have provided had it been necessary to raise the amount of revenue required ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... clime which have followed his discovery. His genius and faith gave succeeding generations the opportunity for life and liberty. We, the heirs of all the ages, in the plenitude of our enjoyments, and the prodigality of the favors showered upon us, hail ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... and the ropes and oars from others. There they lay, thirty-eight in number, up against the mud banks of the Ohio, under the boughs of the half-clad, melancholy forest trees, as sad a spectacle of reckless prodigality as the eye ever beheld. But the contractor who made them no ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... correspondent on the spot, the enemy resisted vigorously and with his heavy artillery. He treated us to shells with a veritable prodigality, but without causing us very serious losses. In the forward movement, led by the —— infantry regiment, on an important position that had to be taken, practically every soldier engaged was saluted by six shells. There was, ...
— The Illustrated War News, Number 15, Nov. 18, 1914 • Various
... aside the metaphysical analogy and the moral teaching which are presented by every tree and plant, he enjoys, I know, the simple beauty of the flower itself, the exhilarating freshness of the bright spring morning, the prodigality of the summer foliage, the ripe autumnal glow of the harvest-field, and the sparkling frost of a winter's day. But he very rarely expresses his enthusiasm in superlatives: "a usefulish lot," and "a smartish few," meaning in ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... to the Hall, but as it was some time before Frank could get any one to attend to his own horse and Diana's mare, which she had left in his charge, he had time to look about him and take in the old castle and its rough, wasteful prodigality of service. By and by, however, there arrived Sir Hildebrand, who, among his sons, seemed, by comparison at least, both intelligent and a gentleman. He gave Frank a rough but ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... diction, we are here instructed how to avoid the evils contingent upon bold commercial enterprise—how to guard against excesses of the accumulative instinct—how to exercise a thoroughly conscientious mode of regulating expenditure, eschewing prodigality, that vice of a weak nature, as avarice is of a strong one—how to be generous in giving; 'for the essence of generosity is in self-sacrifice, waste, on the contrary, comes always by self-indulgence'—how to withstand solicitations for loans, when the loans are to accommodate weak men in sacrificing ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... making of a Baron;" that is to say, he might raise money by bargaining with some one who wanted a peerage; when, however, later on, he asked Buckingham for a repetition of the favour, Buckingham gave him a lecture on the impropriety of prodigality, which should make it seem that "while the King was asking money of Parliament with one hand he was giving with the other." How things were in Chancery in the days of the Queen, and of Bacon's predecessors, we know little; but Bacon himself implies that there was nothing new ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... sequence of flowers without a gap is not the result of chance, or even of California's floral prodigality, but of McLaren's hard-headed calculation. He actually rehearsed the whole floral scheme of the Exposition for three seasons beforehand. To a day, he knew the time that would elapse between the planting ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... leagues of huge rhododendron trees in blossom that give whole mountain-sides the aspect of a giant garden, flowering amid peaks that even dwarf the Alps. For here the original garden of the world survives, run wild with pristine loveliness. The prodigality of Nature is bewildering, almost troubling. There are valleys, rarely entered by the foot of man, where monstrous lilies, topping a man on foot and even reaching to his shoulder on horseback, have suggested to botanists in their lavish luxuriance a survival of the original ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... thirty calves, seven hundred chickens, two hundred pigeons, and many other things besides. The expenses for the king were set down at two hundred and thirty livres a day, without counting the presents which the large towns felt bound to make him." But Charles was himself magnificent even to prodigality, and he delighted in the magnificence of which he was the object, without troubling himself about their cost to himself. Between 1389 and 1390, for about six months, he travelled through Burgundy, the banks of the Rhone, Languedoc, and the small principalities bordering ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... thence by lord Timon; these young prodigals thenceforward fastened upon his lordship, as if by common sympathy he were necessarily endeared to all such spendthrifts and loose livers, who, not being able to follow him in his wealth, found it easier to copy him in prodigality and copious spending of what was their own. One of these flesh-flies was Ventidius, for whose debts, unjustly contracted, Timon but lately had paid down the ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Charles II imposed the iniquitous window-tax, and so heavily did this fall upon the owners of some Elizabethan houses that the poorer ones were driven to the necessity of walling up some of the windows which their ancestors had provided with such prodigality. You will often see to this day bricked-up windows in many an old farm-house. Not every one was so cunning as the parish clerk of Bradford-on-Avon, Orpin, who took out the window-frames from his interesting little house near the church and inserted numerous ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... Munn was a very handsome boat, fitted up with that prodigality which I have elsewhere described as characteristic of the American steamers; but in the course of investigation I came upon the steerage, or that part of the middle floor which is devoted to the ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... is indicated there, bringing food to mankind. The woman's figure, unfortunately, is too small for the niche, 'Abundance.' The horn of plenty on either side indicates her character. She's reaching out her hands to suggest her prodigality. The head of the eagle on the prow of the ship where she is sitting, gives the idea an American application, suggesting our natural prosperity and our reason for keeping ahead in the march of progress. In one sense, those figures ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... Tschun held the money in his hand, his love for prodigality once more awoke. He rode pampered steeds, clothed himself in the finest furs, went back to his wine, and led such an extravagant life that the money gradually came to an end. Instead of wearing brocade he had to wear cotton, and instead of riding horseback ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... of prudence, and moroseness, in despising pleasures, wishes to be taken for temperance; and pride, which puffs a man up, and which affects to despise legitimate honours, seeks to vaunt itself as magnanimity; prodigality calls itself liberality, audacity imitates courage, hardhearted sternness imitates patience, bitterness justice, superstition religion, weakness of mind lenity, timidity modesty, captiousness and carping at words wishes to pass for ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... Christmas-day, he obtained permission to give a Christmas feast to the six Poor Travellers; how he ordered the materials for the feast to be sent in from his own inn; how, when the feast was set upon the table, "finer beef, a finer turkey, a greater prodigality of sauce and gravy," he never saw; and how "it made my heart rejoice to see the wonderful justice my travellers did to everything set before them." All this and much more, including "a jug of wassail" ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... for the future. He ruled a little set of newcomers, he had friendships—or rather, habits of fifteen years' standing, and men with whom he supped, and dined, and indulged his wit. He earned from seven to eight hundred francs a month, a sum which he found quite insufficient for the prodigality peculiar to the impecunious. Indeed, Lousteau found himself now just as hard up as when, on first appearing in Paris, he had said to himself, "If I had but five hundred francs a month, I should ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... did nothing for a whole year but feast and make merry, wasting and consuming, with the utmost prodigality, the great wealth that his predecessors, and the good vizier his father, had with so much pains ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... in the most exact and punctual manner. I never saw a finer turkey, finer beef, or greater prodigality of sauce and gravy;—and my Travellers did wonderful justice to everything set before them. It made my heart rejoice to observe how their wind and frost hardened faces softened in the clatter of plates and knives and forks, and mellowed in the fire and supper heat. ...
— The Seven Poor Travellers • Charles Dickens
... in the year 1707; he had already reached celebrity when Alfieri saw the light for the first time, in 1749, at Asti. Goldoni's grandfather was a native of Modena, who had settled in Venice, and there lived with the prodigality of a rich and ostentatious 'bourgeois.' 'Amid riot and luxury did I enter the world,' says the poet, after enumerating the banquets and theatrical displays with which the old Goldoni entertained his guests in his Venetian palace and country-house. Venice ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... But I see people working and worrying over quince-marmalade and tucked petticoats and embroidered chair-covers, things that perish with the using and leave the user worse than they found him. This I call waste and wicked prodigality. Life is too short to permit us to fret about matters of no importance. Where these things can minister to the mind and heart, they are a part of the soul's furniture; but where they only pamper the appetite or the vanity or any foolish and hurtful lust, they are foolish and hurtful. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... pounds were discovered. In certain diggings men picked pure gold from the rock crevices with a spoon or a knife point. As to values, they were guessed at, the only currency being gold dust or nuggets. Prodigality was universal. All the gamblers of the world met in vulture concourse. There was little in the way of home; of women almost none. Life was as cheap as gold dust. Let those who liked bother about statehood and government ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... had been a prodigal; I had been taken back to my parents' arms again. It was not a very great crime as yet, or a very long career of prodigality; but don't we know that a boy who takes a pin which is not his own, will take a thousand pounds when occasion serves, bring his parents' gray heads with sorrow to the grave, and carry his own to the gallows? Witness the career of Dick Idle, upon whom our friend Mr. Sala has been ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... supremacy, holding her own so long against Christian's famous speed. So long, so long that his love and admiration grew more and more boundless, and his grief and indignation therewith also. Whenever the track lay clear he ran, with such reckless prodigality of strength, that it soon was spent, and he dragged on heavily, till, sometimes on the ice of a mere, sometimes on a wind-swept place, all signs were lost; but, so undeviating had been their line that a course straight on, and then short questing ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... magnificence of her style of living, though her fortune was problematical, and her household conducted in the most frugal style. Her attire suggested a continual conflict between elegance and economy—between real poverty and feigned prodigality. She wore a corsage and overskirt of black satin; but the upper part of the underskirt, which was not visible, was made of lute-string costing thirty sous a yard, and her laces were Chantilly only in appearance. Still, her love ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... materials, tools, and provisions for the employment of an additional industry, a part also may be taken back in foreign wines, silks, &c. to be consumed by idle people who produce nothing; and so far the substitution promotes prodigality, increases expense and consumption, without increasing production. So far also, then, it lessens the capital of the nation. What may be the amount which the conversion of the part exchanged for productive goods, may add to the former productive mass, it is not easy to ascertain, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... said Lester, "London will, I suppose, be your first destination. I can furnish you with letters to some of my old friends there: merry fellows they were once: you must take care of the prodigality of their wine. There's John Courtland—ah! a seductive dog to drink with. Be sure and let me know how honest John looks, and what he says of me. I recollect him as if it were yesterday; a roguish eye, with a moisture ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... reason Mrs. Page gives Mrs. Ford for declining to share the honour of knighthood with Sir John: "These knights will hack; and so thou shouldst not alter the article of thy gentry"; which can scarce bear any other sense than as referring to the prodigality with which the King dispensed those honours in the first year of his English reign; knighthood being thereby in a way to grow so hackneyed, that it would rather be an honour not to have been dubbed. As for the reasons urged by Knight and Halliwell for dating the first writing as far back ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... fields of South Africa, and had come home to enjoy them according to his lights; how he went to work will scarcely be forgotten by any reader of the halfpenny evening papers, which revelled in endless anecdotes of his original indigence and present prodigality, varied with interesting particulars of the extraordinary establishment which the millionaire set up in St. John's Wood. Here he kept a retinue of Kaffirs, who were literally his slaves; and hence he would sally, with enormous diamonds ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... laboriously. He scattered his patrimony gaily and then when the last inherited cent was gone, turned with, equal gayety to earning, not only enough to support himself, but the wife and family that, with the royal and reckless prodigality of genius, he provided himself with at the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... best lands, the best stock, the best barns, not because they have the secret of making more money, but because they have the resolution to spend less. As soon as they become thoroughly Americanized they begin to show the national prodigality. The old folks wear home-made clothes and stick to the farm; the native-born children order their garments from mail-order tailors and expose themselves in the chautauquas and at the great orgies of Calvinism and Wesleyanism. The old ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... in detail will be gratified to stroll at leisure through the dim vastness of the great Flemish churches, where the eye is satisfied everywhere with the wealth of brass and iron work, and where the Belgian passion for wood-carving displays itself in lavish prodigality. Such wealth, indeed, of ecclesiastical furniture you will hardly find elsewhere in Western Europe—font covers of hammered brass, like those at Hal and Tirlemont; stalls and confessionals and pulpits, new and old, that are mere masses of sculptured wood-work; tall tabernacles for the reception ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... attempt has been made, since his day, to provide a humane protection for the unfortunate debtor. But has it not, at the same time, exposed the confiding tradesman to deception and to consequent ruin, by destroying all adequate punishment, and therefore removing every check upon vice and prodigality? In a Dictionnaire des Gens du Monde, insolvency has been, not unaptly, defined, a mode of getting rich by infallible rules! See Idler 38, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... ridicule by appearing as an actor in the theatre at Naples, which theatre, as soon as the audience dispersed, tumbled to pieces,—a little late so far as Nero himself was concerned. Returning to Rome, he indulged in every species of vice and folly, lavishing the wealth of the state with the utmost prodigality. On the lake of Agrippa he had a pavilion erected on a great floating platform, which was moved from point to point by the aid of boats superbly decorated with gold and ivory, while to furnish the banquet here given, animals of the chase were ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... more of it. Enclosed is a letter to a Russian nobleman, an old lover of mine, who, I understand, is in favour. He will certainly be at your command. He is a man possessed by the desire of having reputation among foreigners, vain of the preference of our sex, generous even to prodigality. By his means you will be immediately placed on an easy footing with all the leading persons of the Russian court. You will go on from one step to another, till you are at the height which I have in view. Now for my grand object.—No, not now—for I have forty little notes about nothings to write ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... the best regulated families," and so it chanced that, in the autumn of the same year, our bachelor met at the Springs a charming belle of Baltimore, to whom he lost his heart incontinently. His person and address were attractive, and though his prodigality had impaired his fortune, still a rich old maiden aunt, who doted on him, Miss Persimmon Verjuice, promised to do the handsome thing by him on condition of his marrying and settling quietly to the management of his estate. So, under these circumstances, he proposed, was accepted, ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... darkness of many portions of the buildings. It is also noteworthy that the expenditure of materials and labour is greater in proportion to the effect attained than in any other style. The pyramids are the most conspicuous example of this prodigality. Before condemning this as a defect in the style, it must be remembered that a stability which should defy enemies, earthquakes, and the tooth of time, was far more aimed at than architectural character; and that, had any mode of construction less lavish ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... becoming, practical hat she could obtain and maintain in freshness. She was "well-groomed" and made a sort of point of looking competent, as if she felt mistress of herself and her circumstances; she could even make herself dainty for a little dinner, but the silks and furs, the prodigality of yard-long gloves, the fetching boots and whimsical jewels of the ladies who made a fine art of feminine entertainments, were quite beyond her. So, sensibly, she counted it ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... and satisfying sound. Fifty dollars seems little enough for a month's work, but a thousand reals has the look of a most respectable salary. In Portugal, however, you can have all the delightful sensations of prodigality at a contemptible cost. You can pay, without serious damage to your purse, five thousand reis for ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... course of the great emergency and after it was over, the Office of Works perhaps, upon the whole, took precedence over all rivals. Its prodigality was, to do it justice, tempered by extortion. Did the system of commandeering hotels and mammoth blocks of offices create new Departments of State? Or did the creation of new Departments of State precede the commandeering of the hotels and blocks of offices? Were the owners and occupiers of the blocks ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... doors open to the air. There were singing-birds in cages; and plants of rosemary, iris, and arundo sprang carelessly from holes in the floor. A huge vase filled to overflowing with oranges and lemons, the very symbol of generous prodigality, stood in the midst, and several dogs were lounging round. The outer twilight, blending with the dim sheen of the lamps, softened this pretty scene to picturesqueness. Altogether it was a strange and unexpected place. Much experienced as the nineteenth-century ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... the heart of one of the royal princesses. The historical reader must strike a sort of balance for himself in getting at an estimate of Hervey's character. No man has been more bitterly denounced by his enemies or more warmly praised by his friends. Affectation, insincerity, prodigality, selfishness, servility to the great, contempt for the humble, are among the qualities his opponents ascribe to him. According to his friends, his cynicism was a mere affectation to hide a sensitive and generous nature; his bitterness arose ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... female, talk well; give their opinions with readiness and vivacity; often striking out ideas as original as they are brilliant; highly suggestive to more profound thinkers, but which they dispense with as much prodigality as a spendthrift throws away his small coin, conscious of having more at his disposal. Quick of perception, they jump, rather than march, to a conclusion, at which an Englishman or a German would arrive leisurely, enabled to tell all the particulars of the route, but which the Frenchman would ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... generations are to continue to find sufficient food and other means for sustaining life, a great many individuals of each generation must perish very early, and even as germ and seed, and only a minority will be preserved and reproduced. This exuberant prodigality of life-germs, of which proportionately only a few are preserved and reproduced, takes place in the plant and {40} animal world in a very marked degree. There a continual struggle for existence prevails; each individual has to get access to his conditions of life by wresting them from a whole ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... The true value of love is this, that it can ever bless the unworthy with its own prodigality. For the worthy there are many rewards on God's earth, but God has specially ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... habits of extravagance, to introduce a clause into the marriage-contract providing for the separation of property and settling the wife's fortune upon herself. In this way he gave security against any return to his old habits of prodigality. As for himself, it was his affair to obtain such empire over his wife by the power of sentiment that he could recover practically the marital power of which the contract ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... to exist a few years longer, sometimes in Madrid, or again in the great foreign cities, until at last his administrator brought this period of merry prodigality to an end by sending his resignation, with his accounts and his ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... streets of science and gather up whatever I can find." The comparison was singular, but it was apt; he was, indeed, the ragpicker of physiology. With a scavenger's sense of honour he endeavored to rob Sir Charles Bell of the credit for his discovery concerning the functions of the spinal nerves, by a prodigality of torment, from which the nobler nature of the English scientist instinctively recoiled. When there came to him an opportunity of experimenting on man, he embraced it with avidity, and again and ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... the prodigality of his master. An hour later they ate, and McKay drank a quart of hot coffee before he was done. Half of his fatigue was gone and he sat back for a few minutes to finish off with the luxury of his pipe. Peter, gorged with caribou meat, stretched himself out to sleep. But ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... contrasted by, his soberer intellect, and made him disproportion his vast ends to his unsteady means, by the proud fallacy, that where man failed, God would interpose. Cola di Rienzi was no faultless hero of romance. In him lay, in conflicting prodigality, the richest and most opposite elements of character; strong sense, visionary superstition, an eloquence and energy that mastered all he approached, a blind enthusiasm that mastered himself; luxury and abstinence, sternness and susceptibility, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... confidence in Harry's influence with Wall street, and with congressmen, to bring about the consummation of their scheme, and he waited his return in the empty house at Hawkeye, feeding his pinched family upon the most gorgeous expectations with a reckless prodigality. ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... had dried in Mr. Blithers' eyes but he wiped them time and again as he read this amazing letter,—this staggering exhibition of prodigality. He swore a little at first, but toward the end even that prerogative failed him. He set out in quest of his wife. Not that he expected her to say any more than he had said, but that he wanted her ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... he dreams of thieves, and runs to the door and names more men than he hath. The least sheaf he ever culls out for tithe, and to rob God holds it the best pastime, the clearest gain. This man cries out above others of the prodigality of our times, and tells of the thrift of our forefathers: how that great prince thought himself royally attired, when he bestowed thirteen shillings and fourpence on half a suit. How one wedding gown served our grandmothers till they exchanged it for a winding-sheet; and praises plainness, not ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... had taken quick note of the surroundings, the location of the home itself, the arrangement of the grounds. There was a spreading lawn on all four sides, unbroken by plant or bush or tree—sheer prodigality of space, the better to display a rambling but most artistic pile of gray granite. Masking the road and the adjoining grounds was thick, impenetrable shrubbery, a ring of miniature forest land about the estate. There was a garage, set back, and tennis courts, and a practice golf green. In ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... and mother were both great lovers and honourers of clergymen, but all of Cambridge, and chiefly Doctor Bamberge, Doctor Howlsworth, Broanbricke, Walley, and Mickelthite, and Sanderson, with many others. We lived in great plenty and hospitality, but no lavishness in the least, nor prodigality, and, I believe, my father never drank six glasses of wine in his life ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... pod, there is a superabundance of consumers. Dividing the sum of the eggs upon such or such a pod by that of the peas contained therein, I find there are five to eight claimants for each pea; I have found ten, and there is no reason why this prodigality should not go still further. Many are called, but few are chosen! What is to become of all these supernumeraries, perforce excluded from the banquet for want ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... sports on that day, but from labouring the ground, and from other works of their calling upon other days? What should I speak of the lusts and uncleanness, gluttony and drunkenness, chambering and wantonness, prodigality and lavishness, excess of riot, masking, and balling, and sporting, when Germany and the Palatinate, and other places, were wallowing in blood, yea, when there was so much sin and wrath upon this same kingdom? Will not you say now, that for this the Lord God hath caused ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... charm will depend on very complex conditions in the artist's mind. What treatment is in Art, composition is in Philosophy. The general conception of the point of view, and the skilful distribution of the masses, so as to secure the due preparation, development, and culmination, without wasteful prodigality or confusing want of symmetry, constitute Composition, which is to the structure of a treatise what Style—in the narrower sense—is to the structure of sentences. How far Style is reducible to law will be examined ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... the slim girl with the tumbled hair, at the head of the dreary procession that toiled slowly up to the bleak cemetery behind the church, had, indeed, been worthy of some discussion. The spendthrift prodigality of the white roses which rumor whispered he had gone to place the next day over the new mound of raw earth had not gone unspoken. Even the resemblance of the girl who John Anderson had named Dryad in his hunger for the beautiful—even the ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... in ministry is, and inconsistent with all just policy, it is still true to itself, and faithful to its own perverted order. Those who are bountiful to crimes, will be rigid to merit, and penurious to service. Their penury is even held out as a blind and cover to their prodigality. The economy of injustice is, to furnish resources for the fund of corruption. Then they pay off their protection to great crimes and great criminals by being inexorable to the paltry frailties of little men; and these modern flagellants are sure, with a rigid fidelity, to whip their own enormities ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... our parsimonious ancestors have informed us, that the fatal waste of fortune is by small expenses, by the profusion of sums too little singly to alarm our caution, and which we never suffer ourselves to consider together. Of the same kind is the prodigality of life; he that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years, must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... it, Billy. The one secure asset is a big capital. Money rules this world. Some men have been lucky enough to rise and stay risen, without money. But not a man of all the men who have been knocked out could have been dislodged if he had been armed and armored with money. My prodigality was my fatal mistake. I shan't make it again—if I get the chance. You don't know, Tetlow, how hard it is to get money when you are tumbling and must have it. I never dreamed what a factor it is in calamities of every sort. ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... prodigality we have scattered these primary sources of wealth precisely as we scattered transportation and other franchises upon which dangerous private monopolies were built. The kind of mistakes that have been made with the franchises, we ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks
... whom he otherwise cared nothing, merely because through them he got an insight into Alphonse's expensive mode of life and rash prodigality. He sought the same cafes and restaurants as Alphonse, but at different times; he even had his clothes made by the same tailor, because the talkative little man entertained him with complaints that Monsieur Alphonse ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... such turbulence were not infrequent, and they account in part for the reckless prodigality shown by Shirakawa in building and furnishing temples. The cenobites did not confine themselves to demonstrations at the palace; they had their own quarrels also. Kofuku-ji's hand was against Kimbusen and Todai-ji, and not a few ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... that the dollar wasn't his, either to give away or to throw away. Such prodigality, or impulsive benevolence, would be at the expense of another, and this could not mend ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... characteristic peculiarities of any Californian assemblage in 1856,—it was quick to take a hint, and generous to the point of prodigality in its response to any charitable appeal. No matter how sordid or avaricious the individual, he could not resist the infection of sympathy. I doubled the points of my handkerchief into a bag, dropped a coin into it, and, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... where more degraded; cruelty to the helpless animal creation any where more remorselessly practised; or the pride of pedantry, and the vain-glory of human learning, any where more vaunted? In short, are the vices of gluttony, drunkenness, pugilism, and prodigality, any where more indulged? Yet, may we not say, as in the days of William of Wykeham, that "Manners make the man!"—and, on the subject of public duties, might we not derive a lesson even from the ancient ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... of levying the taxes be taken from those who make the appropriations and thrown upon a more distant and less responsible set of public agents, who have power to approach the people by an indirect and stealthy taxation, there is reason to fear that prodigality will soon supersede those characteristics which have thus far made us look with so much pride and confidence to the State governments as the main-stay of our Union and liberties. The State legislatures, instead of studying to restrict their State expenditures to the smallest ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... rewarded with the first palatinate of the kingdom. He gave a masquerade on the empress's birthday to near three thousand masks; and it was calculated that, besides the other wines, they drank a thousand bottles of champagne." The prodigality of a Polish feast exceeds all comprehension. This prince kept open house on such a scale, that his five-and-twenty cooks were scarcely able to supply his table. The great article of luxury in Poland was Hungary wine, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... avarice sometimes leads to prodigality, and prodigality to avarice; we are often obstinate through weakness ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... know nothing of it. They live chiefly from without, not from within. Only gradually as they approach maturity do they cut loose from the scaffolding and depend upon their own centre of gravity. Appearances are very strong in school. Money and prodigality have great weight there, notwithstanding the democracy of attainments and abilities. If I live a thousand years, I do not believe I shall ever do a more virtuous deed than I did long ago in staying at home for the sake of a quarter of a dollar ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... half-hour or so, we had eyes for nothing but the varied beauties of nature which lay spread before us in such luxuriant prodigality. ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... great amount of patience would be necessary to bring them round to my way of thinking, I began to distribute gifts, especially tobacco, freely and frequently amongst them, only mentioning my wish occasionally, as if by chance. And my prodigality had its reward. ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... property to you, I explained the necessity of curbing your reckless extravagance. Were I possessed of Rothschild's income, it would not suffice to keep upon his feet a man who sells himself to the Devil of the gaming table, and entertains with the prodigality of a crown prince. I never dreamed until last night that the real estate at home is encumbered by mortgages, and it will be an everlasting shame if the homestead should be sacrificed; but I can do no more for you. This failure ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... dish-covers, where we had, what I considered both then and now to be, the best dinner I had ever eaten in my life, winding up with an apple tart that had Devonshire cream spread over it like powdered sugar—a most unparalleled prodigality of luxury to ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... With the characteristic prodigality of the breeds, an enormous fire was built on the shore, over which their tea was furiously boiled in an iron pail, and their dried moose meat stewed a little less tough than moccasins. At a little distance ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... This is by no means the first of the species that we have had in Germany. I can assure you that the plain traveller feels seriously the inconvenience of following such a caravan; their money flows with such unwise prodigality that real liberality ceases to be valued; and many of your nobility have complained to me that in their travels they are now often expostulated with on account of their parsimony, and taunted with the mistaken extravagance of ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... soon, though Mr. John Heron had awaited its arrival impatiently and with watch in hand. He seemed grimmer and gaunter than ever that morning, and as he looked around the great Hall, he shook his head at its faded grandeur reprehensively, as if he could, if time permitted, deliver a sermon on the prodigality, the wicked wastefulness, which had brought ruin on the house, and rendered it necessary for him to extend his ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... Necho's oracle came with terrible force, and generations of Nile husbandmen must toil early and late to pay the interest on the public debt incurred through Ismail's prodigality. This degraded man in his exile persistently maintained that he believed he was doing right when borrowing for the canal, for it was to elevate Egypt to a position of honor and prominence in the list of nations. And it ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... and a hundred years before, and ever since; all the marriages, deaths, births, elopements, law-suits, and casualties of her own times, her father's, grandfather's, great-grandfather's, nephews', and grandnephews', has she detailed with a minuteness, an accuracy, a prodigality of learning, a profuseness of proper names, a pedantry of locality, which would excite the envy of a county historian, a king-at-arms, ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... poet of the faubourg Saint-Germain, who did not choose to bow before this social dictum, was made before long to feel that an insulting provincial indifference had succeeded to the dazed fascination of the earlier evenings. The prodigality of his wit and wisdom had produced upon these worthy souls somewhat the effect which a shopful of glass-ware produces on the eye; in other words, the fire and brilliancy of Canalis's eloquence soon wearied people who, to use their own words, "cared ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... upwards to the darker crests of pines. For two months she was dazzled and bewildered with color. She had never before been face to face with this spendthrift Californian Flora, in her virgin wastefulness, her more than goddess-like prodigality. The teeming earth seemed to quicken and throb beneath her feet; the few circuits of a plow around the outlying corral was enough to call out a jungle growth of giant grain that almost hid the low walls ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... room. This book is written out of a mind so full of wit and wisdom that it overflows at the gentlest touch. It has more sense and learning and power than go to the making up of a dozen ordinary novels. The very prodigality of its resources is a stumbling-block. Its great fault is its muchness, if we may borrow a term from Hawthorne's mint. It is like a young minister's first sermon, into which he frantically attempts to cram the whole body of divinity. Especially in the early part of the book, we are constantly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... reckless avidity of a needy spendthrift, rather than with the ceaseless longings of a miser. In short, the motive that urged them both so soon to go against the Hurons, was an habitual contempt of their enemy, acting on the unceasing cupidity of prodigality. The additional chances of success, however, had their place in the formation of the second enterprise. It was known that a large portion of the warriors-perhaps all—were encamped for the night abreast of the castle, and it was hoped that the scalps of helpless ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... have been just perfectly awfully horrible, Em," she said with a characteristic prodigality of adjectives when the other had finished her recital. "You just ought to give Aunt Sharley a piece of your mind about the way she behaves. And the worst of it is she gets worse all the time. Don't you think you're the only one she picks on. Why, don't ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... Waiters were scurrying up and down the wide stairway; the general hubbub was punctuated by the sound of exploding corks as the Klondike spendthrifts advertised their prosperity in a hilarious contest of prodigality. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... distributing among themselves and their friends. Your friend the Comte de Cambray would no doubt have come in too for his share in this distribution. But M. de Talleyrand is a very wise man! always far-seeing, he knows the improvidence, the prodigality, the ostentation of these new masters whom he is so ready to serve. Ere Dudon reached Paris with his booty, M. de Talleyrand had very carefully eliminated therefrom some five and twenty million francs in bank-notes and bankers' drafts, which he felt would come in very usefully ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... the importance of checking at its beginning any tendency in public or private station to regard frugality and economy as virtues which we may safely outgrow. The toleration of this idea results in the waste of the people's money by their chosen servants and encourages prodigality and extravagance in the home life ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... if so," Simonides said, in a low voice; then louder, "Malluch, the curse of the time is prodigality. The poor make themselves poorer as apes of the rich, and the merely rich carry themselves like princes. Saw you signs of the weakness in the youth? Did he display ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... and future. He is not obliged to take part in another festival of the kind unless another near relative dies. He pays off all old scores of hospitality and lays his friends under future obligations by his presents. He is often beggared by this prodigality, but he can be sure of welcome and entertainment wherever he goes, for he is a man who has discharged all his debts to society and is therefore deserving of honor for the rest of ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... this party, of the bread and meat that had gone into the oranges and doughnuts, of the fires that should have warmed Mr. Demry's chilled old bones for weeks to come, that went roaring up the wide chimney in one glorious burst of prodigality. ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... but dissolute cardinal, and the prodigality of his charity, rendered him almost as popular as his warlike brother. When he went abroad, his valet de chambre invariably prepared him a bag filled with gold, from which he gave to the poor most freely. His reputation for charity was so exalted that a poor blind mendicant, to whom he gave ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... their welfare, soon felt the blessings of the new organisation of a regenerating Government. They were at once presented with; the stamp-duty, registration, the lottery, the droits reunis, the tax on cards, and the 'octroi'. This prodigality of presents caused, as we may be sure, the most lively gratitude; a tax for military quarters and for warlike supplies was imposed, but this did not relieve any one from laving not only officers and soldiers; but even all the chiefs of the administration and their officials ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... could be made of a bad business was to hurry on some decision, before the means of even partially satisfying the most urgent claims were dissipated by the King's reckless prodigality. ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... time around the tables, following the winners and getting douceurs from them. These were by no means small—most of them being gifts pure and simple, given from mere goodness of heart or sheer prodigality for there were too many gay and beautiful women flocking around ready to smile on winners in the game for the Countess now to make even a temporary conquest. However, at this period she lived well—even extravagantly—but, of ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... and who is aware of the plot, is requested to take his place.—Besides appointing Norina heiress of half his wealth, Don Pasquale at once makes her absolute mistress of his fortune. Having succeeded in attaining her aim, Norina throws aside her mask, and by her self-willedness, prodigality and waywardness drives her would-be husband to despair. She squanders his money, visits the theatre on the very day of their marriage ignoring the presence of her husband in such a manner, that he wishes ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... La Sablonniere, and came to the Marquis Neuville de Villeroy, Superintendent of Finances, who built on the spot a sort of fortified chateau, which, if not of palatial dimensions, was of a palatial prodigality ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... mistress. Of this parsimonious allotment it is again a hopeless search to inquire the reason. The queen was not naturally bountiful, and, perhaps, did not think it necessary to distinguish, by any prodigality of kindness, a man who had formerly deserted her, and whom she might still suspect of serving rather for interest than affection. Graunt exerts his rhetorical powers in praise of Ascham's disinterestedness and contempt of money; and declares, that, though he was often reproached by his ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson |
