"Unprofitable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this most unpleasant theme—unpleasant to all parties, for no one likes to teach, and no one likes to learn,—I cannot help remarking how excessively au fait we find most elderly maiden ladies upon every point connected with the rearing of our unprofitable species. They are erudite upon every point ab ovo, and it would appear that their peculiar knowledge of the theory can but arise from their attentions having never been diverted by ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... a thriftless, honest man, whose energy in the effort to recover some hundreds of acres of woodland deeded to her in jest, and supposed to be unprofitable, leads to comfort for her father, and a happy marriage ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... and separated from us by deep forests of these trees, might be seen a long ridge of snow-capped mountains—the lofty Sierra Nevada. But we were too anxious to reach the gold to care much about the more unprofitable beauties of Nature, and accordingly urged our horses to the quickest speed they could put forth. We were now travelling along the river's banks, and towards evening came in sight of the lower mines, here called the "Mormon" diggings, which occupy a surface of two or three miles along ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... prescribing a rule by which the national character of the works is to be tested, and by which the greatest practicable equality of benefits may be secured to each member of the Confederacy. The effects of such a regulation would be most salutary in preventing unprofitable expenditures, in securing our legislation from the pernicious consequences of a scramble for the favors of Government, and in repressing the spirit of discontent which must inevitably arise from an unequal distribution of treasures which belong ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... case," Aynesworth answered, "I am not his judge. Mr. Barrington," he added, "You must forgive me if I remind you that this is a somewhat unprofitable discussion." ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was liable, of L3700 to clear the title. So shrewd a man of business would hardly have thus defrauded himself. He is sure to have had an excellent bargain. But it does not follow that the arrangement was unfair to a speculative absentee like Ralegh. In his hands the land was notoriously unprofitable. Lady Ralegh's estimate of it as worth L2000 a year at the time ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... toils of chemistry, and still contemplating, amidst tribulation and persecution, and approaching death, his "Tree of Life," which he imagined he had discovered in the cedar. But with a sublime melancholy his spirit breaks out; "My mind breathes some unheard-of thing within; though I, as unprofitable for this life, shall be buried!" Such were the mighty but indistinct anticipations of this visionary inventor, the ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... explain. Had it been for Crime or Misconduct as a Magistrate, of course Trial and Conviction should have preceded my Removal. As it is, I feel, as I have publicly declar'd, no shame in the removal. I have held an office honorable because extensively useful; because unprofitable and burthensome to the individual; because independently and conscientiously exercis'd, with a devotion, such as it requir'd, of my time, my thoughts, and my best faculties, daily to its discharge. My Collegues,—and they are and have been, during a course of seventeen ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... if she could be of any use helping to entertain his guests, he felt it imperative to draw the line, and wrote a grateful effusion to his aunt, saying that he could not think of asking her to leave a place where he felt sure she was deriving spiritual and temporal benefit, in order to assist at so unprofitable a festivity as a shooting-party. He mentioned casually that Lady Grace Lawrence, Miss Deyncourt, and Miss Wyndham were to be of the party, which details he imagined might have an interest for ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... different dispositions and habits of life, was an arduous task. Mr. James Wilkinson was with the boys the whole afternoon, as well as his father, to whose utmost endeavors he joined his own, that the day might not be wholly unprofitable. In spite, however, of all diligence, it could not fail of often being grossly misspent with many of the pupils; for it is not possible for human power effectually to influence the heart, and, until that is done, any thing else can be but an ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... drunken; and afterward thou shalt eat and drink?' Doth he thank the servant because he did the things that were commanded? Even so ye also, when ye shall have done all the things that are commanded you, say, 'We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which it was ...
— His Life - A Complete Story in the Words of the Four Gospels • William E. Barton, Theodore G. Soares, Sydney Strong
... Ollie Chase's father, lately had given over his unprofitable struggle with the soil. He had taken a house near the Methodist church and gone into the business of teaming. He hauled the merchants' goods up from the railroad station, and moved such inhabitants of Shelbyville ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... not be unprofitable to examine in detail Tasso's use of the phrase to which so much importance has been assigned in the foregoing paragraph. We meet it first in the episode of Olindo and Sofronia. Sofronia, of all the heroines of the Gerusalemme, is the least interesting, notwithstanding her magnanimous mendacity ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... is not only distinguishable, but different from them all. Yet when we speak of the "laws of motion," we may imperceptibly include, in our conception of them, that force or power which impels the body, as well as the mere law or rule which regulates its movements. It were a mere unprofitable dispute about words, did we entertain and discuss the question, whether the import of the term "law" might not be so extended as to include under it powers, properties, and causes, as well as the rules and conditions of their operation: for, even were this question ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... number of vessels frequenting the West African rivers in search of slaves; and finally, a year or two later, the appearance of fast steamers in the slave-squadron rendered the chances of success so remote that but a few of the most enterprising had heart to continue the pursuit of so risky and unprofitable a business. And when these were one by one captured and their vessels condemned, the infamous trade dwindled more and more, until it finally died out altogether, never, let us ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... we fain would shun We do, and leave the wished-for good undone Our strength to-day Is but to-morrow's weakness, prone to fall; Poor, blind, unprofitable servants all ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... abode, had a comfortable homeliness about it, but it had always been a costly house to keep, and now that it was less than ever needful to him to save money, he did not want to hear recriminations concerning such petty matters as the too frequent tuning of the schoolroom piano, and the unprofitable fabrics which had been bought ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... said Uncle Chris solemnly, "if there is a dollar lying loose in this city, rest assured that I shall have it! And, if it's not loose, I will detach it with the greatest possible speed. You have only known me in my decadence, an idle and unprofitable London clubman. I can assure you that, lurking beneath the surface, there is a business acumen given to few ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... would these tortured fields regain their tranquillity. Where were rises, now lay depressions; the loamy top soil was blown into dust and scattered to the winds, while sterile clay and pebbly strata had been boiled up from below to take its place. Mixed with this mass of unprofitable earth, strewn over its surface and buried for a depth of thirty feet, were thousands of tons of other wire, iron stakes, and wire stanchions; cartridge cases, rifles, and gas gongs; sand bags, iron ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... their interest, smuggling began to lose its respectability and to grow disreputable, hazardous, and debased. In certain onslaughts made upon them by officers of the law, some of the smugglers became murderers. The business became unprofitable for a time until the enterprising Lafittes—thinkers—bethought ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... attempt the grand style. In this he was more like Gainsborough, but Gainsborough invested his portraits, even of prosaic sitters, with a strange, penetrating, poetic charm such as no other painter has been able to convey. Ranking artists in the order of their merit is an unprofitable business, but it may gratify some methodical minds to have it stated that these canvases by Stuart are not in the same class as good Gainsboroughs or Reynolds. With the best of other contemporary portraits they stand approximately on a footing of equality. In ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... my body, and the sky Drops ointment of thick darkness, till mine eye Is all unprofitable grown to me, Like service done to them who cheat ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... cannot live without brain-work. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-colored houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them? Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sport." When tenderness fails us, it is—"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time." When humour fails us, it is—"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... of the earth brings to us at least once during its period the threadbare, thriceworn, stale, flat, and academic discussion of critic and artist. We believe comparisons of creator and critic are unprofitable, being for the most part a confounding of intellectual substances. The painter paints, the composer makes music, the sculptor models, and the poet sings. Like the industrious crow the critic hops after these sowers of beauty, content to peck up in ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... with Justine she felt more than usually disturbed, as she always did when her unprofitable impulses of self-exposure had subsided. Bessy's mind was not made for introspection, and chance had burdened it with unintelligible problems. She felt herself the victim of circumstances to which her imagination attributed the ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... a folded paper was uncovered. The patient picked it up and carelessly opened it. It was a letter three months old, signed "Julia." Catching sight of his name in it he read it. It was nothing very remarkable—merely a weak woman's confession of unprofitable sin— the penitence of a faithless wife deserted by her betrayer. The letter had fallen from the pocket of Captain Armisted; the reader quietly ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... Mr. Ryan, apart from the number of hippopotamuses I saw on it, was that the people living along the Congo say that it is of no value. They told me that two years ago, after working it for some time, Leopold abandoned it as unprofitable, and they added that, when Leopold cannot whip rubber out of the forest, it is hard to believe that it can be obtained there legitimately by any one else. On the bank I saw the "factories" to which the unprofitable rubber had been carried ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... height and power. At the same time, he was a most vigilant guardian of the public purse, and he was incessantly on the alert to prevent the national wealth, which his finance had done so much to increase, from being squandered on unnecessary and unprofitable objects. This jealousy of foolish expenditure combined with his love of peace to make him very chary of spending money on national defences. When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Palmerston, his eagerness ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... leave it. To thin the crop early is, however, of great importance, no matter how wasteful the process may seem, for wherever the plants are crowded they will make large useless tops, and small worthless roots, and prove altogether unprofitable. For the earliest sowings we have choice of many sorts, round, oval, and long; but the long Radishes are not well adapted for late sowing, whereas the round and oval sorts stand pretty well in hot weather, if on good ground in a cool situation, with ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... the domestic of Don Mariano de Silva had conducted his master, certain of finding there a secure resting-place for the night. He knew that the country surrounding the lake was entirely uninhabited; and the brigands of Arroyo would scarce extend their excursions to such an unprofitable foraging ground. The southern end of the lake was bordered by a strip of forest; and it was in this forest that Don Mariano had determined to make ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... party—which poor Lucy certainly failed in doing—by telling stories or cracking jokes, though he soon gave up the attempt when he saw none of us responded. Indeed, I must confess that both his jokes and stories were stale, and it might be added "flat and unprofitable." They did not flow naturally from him. At length he discovered that the time was passing on; the shades of evening were already stealing over the broad surface of the magnificent stream. The boat belonging ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... world, landlocked Burkina Faso has few natural resources, a fragile soil, and a highly unequal distribution of income. About 90% of the population is engaged in (mainly subsistence) agriculture, which is vulnerable to variations in rainfall. Industry remains dominated by unprofitable government-controlled corporations. Following the African franc currency devaluation in January 1994 the government updated its development program in conjunction with international agencies, and exports and economic growth have increased. Maintenance of macroeconomic progress ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... pantaloons and waistcoat, whom we saw at Saratoga a year ago, and who always had such a beautiful sanctimonious look, and such small white hands; well, he is a minister, as we supposed, "an unworthy candidate, and unprofitable husbandman," as he calls himself in that delicious voice of his. He has been quite taken up among us. He has been asked a good deal to dinner, and there was hope of his being settled as colleague to the Doctor, ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... of his world, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable! What was his life? An emptiness. Himself? A shuttlecock, the helpless sport of his own failings, a vain thing alternately strutting and stumbling, now swaggering in the guise of an avenger self-appointed, now sneaking in the shameful ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... him to direct them; and, on the other hand, revolve as seriously on the consequences which would inevitably result from an indisposition to this measure, or from an idle habit of hankering after unprofitable amusements at your time of life, before you have acquired that knowledge which would be found beneficial in every situation—I say before, because it is not my wish that, having gone through the essentials, you should ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... scholastic guise. Aristotle, who had been so long held at bay as the most dangerous foe of mediaeval faith, was now turned by the adoption of his logical method in the discussion and definition of theological dogma into its unexpected ally. It was this very method that led to "that unprofitable subtlety and curiosity" which Lord Bacon notes as the vice of the scholastic philosophy. But "certain it is"—to continue the same great thinker's comment on the Friars—"that if these schoolmen to their great thirst of ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... the impression from the present discussion that fancy poultry breeding always proves unprofitable, he certainly has failed to get the key-note of the situation. There are numbers of fancy poultry breeders making incomes of several thousand dollars per year, but these are ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... of the future, the tabula rasa that may never be anything else. I remember a confused hotch-potch of unconnected events, a "chaos without form, and void"; but nothing salient or striking rises from the dead level of "flat, stale, and unprofitable" generality. When we are looking at a landscape we think ourselves pleased; but it is only when it comes back upon us by the fire o' nights that we can disentangle the main charm from the thick of particulars. It is just so with what is lately past. It is too much loaded with detail ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn;'" and Paul tells them, that they must not think from this place, that God takes care for oxen, "for, (says he,) it was undoubtedly written for our sakes." Thus we see that the gospel was by no means altogether unprofitable, and many men daily risk their lives for less gain ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... blubber and whalebone and ambergris. But all this was changed now. Steam had come to supplant the white wings that had borne the old ships on their wide ocean ways. As Captain Jeb said, "the airth had taken to spouting up ile," and made the long whale hunts needless and unprofitable. But, though it had died to the busy world of commerce and trade, the quaint old island town had kept a charm all its own, that drew summer guests from ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... may be, is always interesting,—if the woman is endowed in the first place with the power to feel. How Margaret Lawton may have come to marry Lawrence Pole, we can defer for the present, as a matter of post-mortem psychology, unprofitable, melancholy, and inexact, however interesting. How does any woman come to marry any man? Poets, psychologists, and philosophers have failed to account for the accidents ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... by giving another his due. But by all the good we do, we cannot make sufficient return to God, since yet more is His due, as also the Philosopher says (Ethic. viii, 14). Hence it is written (Luke 17:10): "When you have done all these things that are commanded you, say: We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which we ought to do." Therefore a man ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... in like manner divers collegiat churches, as Windsor, Wincester, Eaton, Westminster (in which I was sometime an unprofitable Grammarian under the reverend father, master Nowell, now dean of Paules) and in those a great number of pore scholers, dailie maintained by the liberality of the founders, with meat, bookes, and apparell; from whence after they have been well entered in ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... A new religious atmosphere surrounds her life when the very work of her hands becomes hallowed in its purpose. The old crotchet and insertion—we use words to us more mysterious than intelligible—become flat, stale, and unprofitable by the side of the book-marker and the colored stole; and a flutter of excitement stirs even the stillness of a life which is sometimes offensively still at the sight of the new chasuble with "aunt's real lace, you know, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... first adventure had proved unprofitable except in works of charity. But he was not one to be easily put down, having in his nature an abundance of the perilous stuff of ambition. He was not the man to sit down and wait for fortune to come to him. Rather, he belonged to those who go to seek fortune. He was determined, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... temperamental impossibility for Dumont to believe that Scarborough could really be sincere in a course which was obviously unprofitable. Therefore he attached even more importance to Arabella's cordiality than did Gladys herself. And, when the Legislature adjourned and Scarborough returned to Saint X for a brief stay, Dumont sent Gladys ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... of reading?"[220] and we are answered that the old process has an imperishable value, only we have not yet made clear its connection with other contributions. And all the work is young, liable to be drawn into unprofitable excursions, side-tracked by self-deceit and pretence; and it fatally attracts, like the older mysticism, the curiosity and the expository powers of those least in sympathy with it, ready writers who, with all the air of extended research, have ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... days in the land here, and a happy portion hereafter in a better country. He prayed farther, that the bridegroom might be weaned from those follies which seduced youth from the path of knowledge; that he might cease to take delight in vain and unprofitable company, scoffers, rioters, and those who sit late at the wine (here Bucklaw winked at Craigengelt), and cease from the society that causeth to err. A suitable supplication in behalf of Sir William and Lady Ashton and their family concluded this religious address, which thus ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... themselves many taunts and jests at the fiery Warwick, which they would have bitten out their tongues ere they would have vented before the earl himself. But though the Nevile sufficiently controlled his native candour not to incur unprofitable quarrel by ill-mannered and unseasonable defence of the hero-baron when sneered at or assailed, he had enough of the soldier and the man in him not to be tainted by the envy of the time and place,—not to lose his gratitude to his patron, nor ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ruin of their old. It being the fate of Poetry, though of no other good parts, to be wholly separated from Interest: and there are few that know me but will easily believe, I am not much concerned in an unprofitable Reputation. ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... father, was the beginning of true kingship! The Lord would rather wash the feet of his weary brothers, than be the one only perfect monarch that ever ruled in the world. It was empire he rejected when he ordered Satan behind him like a dog to his heel. Government, I repeat, was to him flat, stale, unprofitable. ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... the unfortunate waiter fell full length into the room. It had never entered his head that so much trouble might be saved by means of a hammer and half a dozen tacks, until his fall taught him that makeshift is a very unprofitable kind of shift. There are a good many houses in England where a similar practical lesson might be ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... intercourse with Arabia, Persia, and India seemed almost to be forced upon their notice and adoption. It is certain, however, that in the earliest periods of their history, the Egyptians were decidedly averse to the sea, and to maritime affairs, both warlike and commercial. It would be vain and unprofitable to explain the fabulous cause assigned for this aversion: we may, however, briefly and, incidentally remark that as Osiris particularly instructed his subjects in cultivating the ground; and as Typhon coincides exactly in orthography and meaning with a word still used in the East, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... appeared that Kit Carson was now at Bent's Fort. Also, that his occupation as a trapper of beaver had become unprofitable. His services were however immediately put into requisition by Messrs. Bent and St. Vrain, the proprietors of what was called Bent's Fort, which was a trading-post kept by those gentlemen. The position which he accepted ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... the historian who records them. Anthropologically they belong to a wider grouping, reveal a connection with each other which is otherwise unsuspected, and prepare themselves for treatment on a larger platform. The historian has used them for the unprofitable controversy ranging round the question of early Celtic civilisation, whereas they clearly belong to the history of early man, and even the folklorist does not disdain to cast them on one side when they do not ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... of many of his pieces from poetic suggestion. One of the most famous and best known of this kind is the first "Peer Gynt" suite. Peer Gynt is a ne'er-do-weel in Ibsen's poem. He had a variety of adventures in the course of his unprofitable life, a few of which are alluded to in the suite here under consideration. For example, it begins with a prelude in 6/8 time—a movement somewhat pastoral in character, designated "Morgenstimmung," or, in English, "The Morning ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... Christ in the Lord's Supper, Schmucker, in his Popular Theology, distinguishes between the substantial, the influential, and the symbolical presence and the bald symbolical representation. Then he continues: "After a protracted and unprofitable struggle, the Lutheran Church has long since settled down in the happy conviction that on this, as on all other subjects not clearly determined by the inspired Volume, her sons shall be left to follow the dictates of their own conscience, having none to ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... Government of the Union I do not conceive it expedient to call upon you for information officially, yet I have supposed that some informal communications from the Office of Foreign Affairs might neither be improper nor unprofitable. Finding myself at this moment less occupied with the duties of my office than I shall probably be at almost any time hereafter, I am desirous of employing myself in obtaining an acquaintance with ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 10. • James D. Richardson
... forth. Then the fish lie glittering in the shallow pools, as good as caught, and happy children go home with strings of sunfish,—"pumpkin-seeds" they call them,—cat-fish, and the like picturesque unprofitable spoils, while graver fisher-folk take count of pickerel and bream. This merry festival was over and gone, and the canal was all brimming with the lustral renewal of its waters, its depths flashing now and again with the passage of wary survivors ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... from a strife, which was only destroying themselves, and unite their energies against the Alleghans, the Adirondacks, the Eries, and other ancient and warlike tribes, who were their superiors in their isolated and divided condition. Already weary of their unprofitable conflicts, the proposal was received with favor, and Ato-tar-ho, an Onandaga chieftain, unequalled in valor, and the fame of whose skill and daring was known among all the tribes, became the leading spirit of this confederacy, and by common consent was placed at its head. ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... him. But theirs was a far higher intelligence than his. They knew the almost impenetrable toughness of his hide, his Berserk rage, his imperviousness to reasonable fear; and they had no care to engage themselves without cause in so uncertain and unprofitable ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... said, "tap the table with your forefinger. Personally, I will admit that I have had my doubts of the Baroness, but on the whole I have come to the conclusion that they were groundless. She is not the sort of woman to take up a vendetta, especially an unprofitable one." ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... eagerness of contest to its importance seems too hard a task for human wisdom. The pride of wit has kept ages busy in the discussion of useless questions, and the pride of power has destroyed armies, to gain or to keep unprofitable possessions. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... lethargy, you would assume the ancient spirit and freedom of your fathers if you would be your own soldiers and own commanders, confiding no longer your affairs in foreign or mercenary hands—if you would charge yourselves with your own defense, employing abroad, for the public, what you waste in unprofitable pleasures at home, the world might once more behold you making a figure worthy of Athenians. "You would have us, then, (you say,) do service in our armies in our own persons; and, for so doing, you would have the pensions ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... unprofitable to the "hero." He was unable to see Alix crown. He made daily visits to her home but always with the same result. Miss Crown was in no ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her—it almost consoled her ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... going back to the line are always rather dreary and unprofitable, spent chiefly in packing up and deciding what to leave behind. Valises of course were left behind with all 'spare parts' in the Q.M.'s stores. But in winter a fairly heavy load of things was necessary, and the weather was wet and stormy. We had no steel helmets in these days and ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... to respond, it is time that she went into hospital for a few centuries, like Spain or Greece—the virtue has gone out of her. A man or a nation is not placed upon this earth to do merely what is pleasant and what is profitable. It is often called upon to carry out what is both unpleasant and unprofitable, but if it is obviously right it is mere shirking not to ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... means an idle or unprofitable member of the humble household. Partly by dint of Barnaby's tuition, and partly by pursuing a species of self-instruction common to his tribe, and exerting his powers of observation to the utmost, he had acquired a degree of sagacity which rendered him famous for ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... children under the pretence of sending them to Boston to be educated; and the colonists were all gone when the men from Barbadoes visited the Cape Fear. Whether the New Englanders were driven from the settlement by the Indians, or left because their enterprise was unprofitable, is not known with certainty. These men left attached to a post a writing discouraging "all such as should hereafter come into these ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... ease and harassed—a condition opposed to his usual line of demeanour. He made a patent-medicine almanac into a roll and fitted it with unprofitable ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... propagator of nut trees to reduce the number of varieties it has been necessary to carry in the past. It is imperative that any growing business have a broad commercial base. The nurseryman is seeking information on the most desirable varieties because it is unprofitable for him to carry a huge inventory of varieties he feels are most desirable, yet are called for the least. It has been my experience that the nurserymen in Iowa are limiting the number of species for propagating purposes. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... obtained a long private interview with Lane. Went over the whole ground of his hostility to Genl. S. during the past year. Showed him the injustice he had done Genl. S., and how foolish and unprofitable to himself his hostility had been. He stated with apparent candor that he had bent the whole energies of his soul to the destruction of Genl. S.; had never labored harder to accomplish any object in his life. Said he had ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... of the dog; which, though with some reluctance, he complied with. Keeper was therefore taken to the city, where he was caressed and fed by everybody; and the disgraced Jowler was left at the cottage, with strict injunctions to the man to hang him up, as a worthless unprofitable cur. ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... of the objections which prominently exist against the details of the bill. Others might be urged of much force, but it would be unprofitable to dwell upon them. Suffice it to add that this charter is designed to continue for twenty years without a competitor; that the defects to which I have alluded, being founded on the fundamental law of the corporation, are irrevocable, and that if the objections be well founded it would be ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... speculation, in which we have no thought of following him to any considerable distance. A metaphysical discussion of this character would scarcely be appropriate to the pages of THE CONTINENTAL; and our readers would doubtless find the controversy uninteresting, if not altogether unprofitable. We, however, cheerfully insert the paper offered by Lieutenant Phelps, on account of the spirit of earnest piety and love of truth which seem to pervade it; and we shall confine ourselves here to the briefest possible comment which will enable us to make understood ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... Bremen the German Navy was so busy sewing mines off these harbours to keep the English fleet away that they failed to notify the American skippers where the open channels were. As a result so many American ships were sunk trying to bring goods into German harbours that it became unprofitable for American shippers to try ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... Phantasm, where cunning beggary or thievery may sometimes find good victual. That God is a lie; and that Man and his Life are a lie.—Alas, alas, who of us is there that can say, I have worked? The faithfulest of us are unprofitable servants; the faithfulest of us know that best. The faithfulest of us may say, with sad and true old Samuel, "Much of my life has been trifled away!" But he that has, and except 'on public occasions' professes to have, no function but ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... the young lady referred to became affected about a year ago, and after what was regarded by her parents as an unprofitable period of treatment for two and a half months in a hospital for the insane she has been apparently cured by fasting—some would call it starvation. The case has been attracting attention and discussion lately in a growing circle that has included ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... peering round in the dimly-lighted street in search of those mysterious incidents and persons with which the streets of London teem in every quarter and every hour. Villiers prided himself as a practised explorer of such obscure mazes and byways of London life, and in this unprofitable pursuit he displayed an assiduity which was worthy of more serious employment. Thus he stood by the lamp-post surveying the passers-by with undisguised curiosity, and with that gravity known only to the systematic diner, had just enunciated in his mind the formula: "London has been called ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... pleased the eyes of many men. What good should follow this, if this were done? What harm, undone? Deep harm to disobey, Seeing obedience is the bond of rule. Were it well to obey then, if a king demand An act unprofitable, against himself? The King is sick, and knows not what he does. What record, or what relic of my lord Should be to aftertime, but empty breath And rumors of a doubt? But were this kept, Stored in some treasure-house ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... those designs are still more frequently removed, its undertakings are often ill conducted or left unfinished: in the former case the State spends sums out of all proportion to the end which it proposes to accomplish; in the second, the expense itself is unprofitable. *f ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... persons can refer for the authoritative settlement of any of these points, either absolutely or proximately; and while a simple statement of facts, acknowledged by all steamship-men, may tend to dispel much misapprehension on this interesting subject, it will also be not unprofitable, I trust, to review some of the prominent arguments on which the mail steamship system is based. That system should stand or fall on its own merits or demerits alone; and to be permanent, it must be based on the necessities of the community, and find its support in the common ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... went on working an unprofitable business, borrowing money on the credit of the joint proprietors; and in the face of all the advantages upon which they plumed themselves, plunged deeper and deeper into debt, until, being forced to borrow ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... had returned to Hurst Dormer, to find there that everything was flat, stale, and unprofitable. He had an intense love for the home of his birth and his boyhood, but just now it seemed to mean less to him than it ever had before. He watched moodily the workmen at their work on those alterations and restorations that he had been planning with interested enthusiasm for many months past. ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... route last mentioned is the best; and that, in fact, it may, without a very great expense, be effected by water. To carry on the communication across the Pacific, from and to the places mentioned, by steam, would be unprofitable, unadvisable, and unnecessary. To give two mails each month to the places specifically mentioned, would require, even fixing a central point in the Pacific as in the Atlantic, thirteen steamers, at a cost of 223,000l.; while no more than fifteen ...
— A General Plan for a Mail Communication by Steam, Between Great Britain and the Eastern and Western Parts of the World • James MacQueen
... that still call for an answer by the chemist and dietitian. The nutritive value of the individual nuts should be firmly established in all its phases. The causes that have made the use of certain nuts unprofitable commercially, should be studied with the view of correcting these stumbling blocks. For example, the freeing of the horse-chestnut from its poisonous saponins and enable us to use this starch rich nut as food is well within the range of possibility as indicated by experiments conducted in Austria ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... course—a grievous sin no doubt the Pater would call it. She shed many tears of contrition, listened eagerly to a kind homily from the old priest on the subject of unnecessary and unprofitable searchings of conscience, and went ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... end of his work just as wise as we were at the beginning. It was doubtless some philosophical wild-goose chase of the kind that made the old poet Macrobius rail in such a passion at curiosity, which he anathematises most heartily as "an irksome, agonising care, a superstitious industry about unprofitable things, an itching humor to see what is not to be seen, and to be doing what signifies nothing when it is done." ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Chou. Although only a labourer, he was nevertheless in easy circumstances at home. When he on this occasion saw his son-in-law come to him in such distress, he forthwith felt at heart considerable displeasure. Fortunately Shih-yin had still in his possession the money derived from the unprofitable realization of his property, so that he produced and handed it to his father-in-law, commissioning him to purchase, whenever a suitable opportunity presented itself, a house and land as a provision for food and raiment ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... rather than to inspiration. He had been concerned for a long time in company with a number of men of business in a series of cotton speculations, and in others connected with Western lands. In both cases the ventures were unprofitable, and the desire of retrieving his losses was one of the causes that led to this constant literary production. There were other circumstances, too, besides his mere unpopularity that had tended to reduce the amount gained from what he wrote. ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... way or another pretty freely to raise the revenues for a good many years, without giving much in the way of a quid pro quo, beyond the vague hopes and airy promises which pledged the Maasaun government to little or nothing. But now, he explained, the Powers were growing weary of so unprofitable a speculation, and were inclined to expect some ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... find the void. She reached the gate all right, got out, and, once on the road, discovered that she had not the courage to look back. The rest of that day she spent with the Fyne girls who gave her to understand that she was a slow and unprofitable person. Long after tea, nearly at dusk, Captain Anthony (the son of the poet) appeared suddenly before her in the little garden in front of the cottage. They were alone for the moment. The wind had dropped. In the calm evening air the voices of Mrs ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... himself. After you have spent nine months in an unprofitable attempt to combine practical machine-gun tactics with a scrupulous respect for private property, the realisation that you may now gratify your destructive instincts to the full comes as a welcome ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... been dust a thousand summers, But my dear unprofitable dreams Shall be part of all the good that thrills you ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... the highest eminence as yet recognised by his countrymen; and, consequently, whatever impression may be made upon our readers by the present essay at a transfusion of his works into the English language, will be necessarily a very imperfect one. In the prosecution of the arduous but not unprofitable enterprise which the translator set before himself three years ago—viz. the communication to his countrymen of some true ideas of the scope and peculiar character of Russian literature—he met with so much discouragement in the unfavourable predictions of such of his friends ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... islands, both English and French, in about two years. He became during this time a planter, though he did not continue long in this situation; and he superintended also Messrs. Bosanquets' and J. Fatio's sugar-plantation in their partners' absence. Finding at length the unprofitable way in which the West Indian planters conducted their concerns, he returned to the East Indies in 1776, and established sugar-works at Bencoolen on his own account. Being in London in the year 1789, when a committee of privy council was sitting to examine into the question of the slave ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... Despair is an unprofitable thing; it will make a man weary of waiting upon God; 2 Kings vi. 33; it will make a man forsake God, and seek his heaven in the good things of this world; Gen. iv. 13-18. It will make a man his own ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan
... this young Sherwood hooked," said Old Jimmie, who had been impatient during this unprofitable bickering. "Seems to me it's time to settle just how we're going to get his dough. ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... with descriptions of places, journals of our voyages, variations of the compass, latitudes, meridian distances, trade-winds, situation of ports, and the like; such as almost all the histories of long navigation are full of, and which make the reading tiresome enough, and are perfectly unprofitable to all that read, except only to those who are to go to those ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... Like all the land here it is cultivated as long as it borders the river and thickly planted with date groves. Then lies a nondescript belt that just divides the desert from the sown, and then, a mile or so inland, scorched and unprofitable wilderness. ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... Dulberry was interrupted by a hedge which it was necessary to leap; and Bertram remarked, that in spite of the contempt which he professed for unprofitable show and "mummery," the reformer bestirred himself as actively and took a hedge as nimbly as the youngest lad could have done under the fear of missing any part of the spectacle. On reaching the inn however they ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... whole to amount to more than one-fourth of its ordinary annual income, at a time when the Governments of Europe, although involved in debt and with their subjects heavily burthened with taxation, readily obtained loans of any amount at a greatly reduced rate of interest. It would be unprofitable to look further into this anomalous state of things, but I can not conclude without adding that for a Government which has paid off its debts of two wars with the largest maritime power of Europe, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Tyler • John Tyler
... flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the eternal, which must glow Through time and change, unquenchably the same. Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep! He hath awakened from the dream of life. 'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... deck some time, thinking about her, but presently decided that this was an unprofitable occupation. He was a marked man, with a lonely road to travel, and, though he found some amusement by the way it led him apart from the society of women of the kind ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... two spent most of the dark hours remaining in unprofitable discussion as to whether Virginia were at last engaged to her cousin, and in vain queried over another unsolved mystery. This mystery was taken up at the breakfast table the next morning, when Miss Carvel ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... rising continually beyond, caused me many a heart break, many disillusions, journeyings, pathless and lampless, many apprenticeships to unprofitable masters. I explored the unknown because it was unknown and because I knew not what I wanted. There was disappointment wherever the pursuit ended. I would go on—never arriving. "Stay, thou art so fair", is not the wish of boys. The mountains were not so ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... because here you are, the pair of you, after one lone pigeon. (aside) Damnation! The limed twigs are brushing my wings! (aloud, stiffly) Madam, I consider this an unprofitable business for me ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... investigation and the fullest exhibition of proofs could do it, the multitudinous and vexatious disputes which have hitherto divided the sentiments of teachers, and made the study of English grammar so uninviting, unsatisfactory, and unprofitable, to the student whose taste demands a reasonable ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... congratulate Gustavus on his success, and either to conciliate his favor or to appease his indignation. Among them was the fugitive King of Bohemia, the Palatine Frederick V., who had hastened from Holland to throw himself into the arms of his avenger and protector. Gustavus gave him the unprofitable honor of greeting him as a crowned head, and endeavored, by a respectful sympathy, to soften his sense of his misfortunes. But great as the advantages were, which Frederick had promised himself from the power and good fortune of his protector; and high as were the expectations he had built on his ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... some a strange and unprofitable subject on which to preach. It ought not to be so in fact. All Scripture is given by Inspiration of God, and is profitable for teaching, for correction, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness. And so will this Vision ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... ways of thought; as e.g., when Margaret's soul is weighed in one scale, against the fiend, "and a great long worm with him," in the other; the worm of conscience, in fact. But the work has not been included in this volume, lest it should prove wholly unprofitable to a generation which if it be not readily disturbed by sin, is easily and quickly shocked by crude suggestions concerning its possible consequences and reward. They will find enough, perhaps, in the treatise on ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... is past. The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable. A policy of good will and friendly trade relations will prevent reprisals. Reciprocity treaties are in harmony with the spirit of the times; measures of retaliation are not. If, perchance, some of our tariffs are no longer needed for revenue or to encourage and protect our industries at ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... satisfaction to the consumer and credit to the maker. Give your customers something to please the eye as well as the palate, so that every sale may be looked upon as an advertisement. Cheap, bulky, insipid stuff is unprofitable and damaging to the trade as well as to the seller. I venture to assert that more would-be makers have come to grief trying to cut each other in price for rubbishy candies than through any other cause. Look at ...
— The Candy Maker's Guide - A Collection of Choice Recipes for Sugar Boiling • Fletcher Manufacturing Company
... baskets, brooms, clothes-lines, and other small wares. Most families have their regular 'beats' or rounds, and confine themselves to certain districts. In winter the men begin to chiv the kosh, or cut wood—i.e., they make butchers' skewers and clothes-pegs. Even this is not unprofitable, as a family, what between manufacturing and selling them, can earn from twelve to eighteen shillings a week. With this and begging, and occasional jobs of honest hard work which they pick up here and there, they contrive to feed well, find themselves in beer, and pay, as they ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... result. The capture of these towns removed all their most serious causes of doubt, and enabled them to repay themselves for the losses and hardships they had undergone, while it also showed that the enterprise they had in hand was not likely to prove unprofitable. After one month's rest at Hankow, and having been joined by many thousands of new followers, the Taepings resolved to pursue their onward course. To tell the truth, they were still apprehensive of pursuit from Tseng Kwofan, who had been joined by the Triad loader, ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... American war an unfortunate blunder; and, as early as September, 1812, he offered his mediation through young John Quincy Adams, Minister at St. Petersburg. The news reached America in March, 1813, and Madison revealed his willingness to withdraw from a contest already shown to be unprofitable by immediately accepting and nominating Adams, with Bayard and Gallatin, to serve as peace commissioners. Without waiting to hear from England, these envoys started for Russia, but reached there only to meet an official refusal on the part of England, dated July 5, 1813. The Liverpool Ministry ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... the treasures of the Tolosan temples.(16) But their stories were not pure fictions. It may well be believed that in and near the rivers which flow from the Alps and the Pyrenees gold-washing and searches for gold, which are unprofitable at the present value of labour, were worked with profit and on a considerable scale in ruder times and with a system of slavery; besides, the commercial relations of Gaul may, as is not unfrequently the case with half-civilized peoples, have favoured the accumulation of a dead ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... thy last purpose, and for those unprofitable truths of thy teaching,—thine heart hath already put them away, and it needs not that I lay my bidding upon thee. How is it that thou, a man, wouldst say coldly to the mind what God hath said to the heart warmly? Thy will was honest and ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... said to have called every line spurious which he did not like; but everything that we can learn of him leads us to believe that he executed his task with judgment. From these men sprang the school of Alexandrian grammarians, who for several centuries continued their minute and often unprofitable studies ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... of them, before their conversion, had bestowed much time and attention on the barren speculations of the pagan philosophers; and, after their reception into the bosom of the Church, they still continued to pursue the same unprofitable studies. Cyprian, one of the most eloquent of these fathers, had been baptized only about two years before he was elected bishop of Carthage; and, during his comparatively short episcopate, he was generally in a turmoil of excitement, and had, consequently, little ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... not the noblest work, perhaps, in which one can be engaged; but it is necessary, not altogether unprofitable, and at times highly exciting. In the war time, the smugglers had large armed vessels, which set the king's cruisers at defiance, and seldom failed to show fight. When I was in the Serpent, they were frequently armed; but their business was to run, and they never fired ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... and fro in his hammock one warm September afternoon, wondering what his neighbors were about, but too lazy to go and find out. He was in one of his moods, for the day had been both unprofitable and unsatisfactory, and he was wishing he could live it over again. The hot weather made him indolent, and he had shirked his studies, tried Mr. Brooke's patience to the utmost, displeased his grandfather ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... barren and unprofitable ground, what can we say of the plays themselves? Even after making due allowance for the hopeless decline of dramatic taste and for the ruin wrought by the schools of rhetoric, it is hard to speak with patience of such productions, when we ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... by the members of his own profession with a cordiality generally frank, and in no case much reserved. The colored population of the city was large, but in the main poor, and the white physicians were not unwilling to share this unprofitable practice with a colored doctor worthy of confidence. In the intervals of the work upon his hospital, he had built up a considerable practice among his own people; but except in the case of some poor unfortunate whose pride had been lost in poverty or sin, no white patient had ever ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... M. de Hamal was persuaded to leave the army as the surest way of weaning him from certain unprofitable associates and habits; a post of attache was procured for him, and he and his young wife went abroad. I thought she would forget me now, but she did not. For many years, she kept up a capricious, fitful sort ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... rush off impatiently to the card-room, and sit there placidly from five o'clock in the afternoon till one or two o'clock in the morning! When I asked my friends why they devoted so much time to this unprofitable occupation, they always gave me pretty much the same answer: "What are we to do? We have been reading or writing official papers all day, and in the evening we like to have a little relaxation. When ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... one, and was extremely silent. So evidently was he a piece of the true frontier that curious and hopeful fellow-passengers, after watching him with diversion, more than once took a seat next to him. He met their chatty inquiries with monosyllables so few and so unprofitable in their quiet politeness that the passengers soon gave him up. At Springfield he sent a telegram to his brother at the great dry-goods ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... absence of certain knowledge, conjectural opinions, such as the writer has here educed, are not unprofitable; rather the reverse. To form them, the writer and the reader place themselves perforce nearly in Cervera's actual position, and pass through their own minds the grist of unsolved difficulties which confronted him. The result of such a process is ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... there is no such thing as an honest private journal, even where the entries are punctually made under present impressions. There is so much of positive, active evil always at work in the mind, that to give a fair transcript of idle unprofitable thoughts and corrupt imaginings, is out of the question: evil is dealt with in generals, good in particulars, and the balance cannot be fairly struck. Those confessions of indwelling sin that remorse will wring from us, and which perhaps are penned ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... sound the most abstruse scores of Richard Strauss—then the popular and bewhistled music maker. And yet it is difficult for us, so wedded are we to that tragic delusion of earthly glory and artistic immortality, to conjure up a day when the music of Chopin shall be stale and unprofitable to the hearing. For me the idea is inconceivable. Some of his music has lost interest for us, particularly the early works modeled after Hummel. Ehlert speaks of the twilight that is beginning to ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... is, dear; between ourselves—but this, of course, is strictly entre nous—I rather think that it is I who interest him: but I encourage him, poor fellow; it may wean him from the unprofitable life he is leading, and turn his mind to higher things. Oh! I almost forgot,—-then there is my ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... interests of France in that country[532]." But, as trade depended on the maintenance of order, this vague compact involved difficulties. Clearly, if disorders continued, the task of France would be onerous and relatively unprofitable, for she would be working largely for the benefit of British and German traders. Indeed, the new Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, admitted to the French ambassador, Jules Cambon, that thenceforth Morocco was a fruit destined to fall into ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... are not commanded by God. They are peculiar, something devised by the monks and priests themselves. Hence there is division. Because of the different beliefs, numerous sects exist, each striving for first place. Consequently, all the orders become unprofitable in God's sight. The love and faith and harmony which unite ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... Alexander for a great rarity, he asked those about him what they thought fittest to be laid up in it; and when they had delivered their various opinions, he told them he should keep Homer's Iliad in it. Nor did Homer prove an unprofitable companion to him in his expeditions. For, after he had become master of Egypt he determined to found a great and populous city, and give to it his own name. And when he had measured and staked out the ground with ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... the wit aboute renne, 3100 Be every weie to compasse How that he mihte alle othre passe, As he which thurgh unkindeschipe Envieth every felaschipe; So that thou miht wel knowe and se, Ther is no vice such as he, Ferst toward godd abhominable, And to mankinde unprofitable: And that be wordes bot a fewe I schal be reson prove and schewe. 3110 Envie if that I schal descrive, He is noght schaply forto wyve In Erthe among the wommen hiere; For ther is in him no matiere Wherof he mihte do plesance. Ferst for his hevy ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... talks of sacrificing the interests of humanity to the interests of science, as if this were a question about the squaring of the circle, or the transit of Venus. This is not a mere question of science: it is not the unprofitable exercise of an ingenious mind: it is a question between health and sickness, between ease and torment, between life and death. Does the honourable gentleman know from what cruel sufferings the improvement of ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a dull, dawdling, stupid, unprofitable day; and toward dusk Mr. Audley proposed that they should stroll down to the Court, and ask Alicia to take them over ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... were the largest chimneys in New Amstel. The Widow Cloos lived in a huge log building with brick ends, long and rather low, which had been built by the commissary of the colony at the expense of the city of Amsterdam as a magazine of food and supply for her colonists; but after several years of unprofitable experiment with the colony, it was resolved to give no more provisions away, and the director, great Captain Hinoyossa, when Van Swearingen became the schout, allowed the latter's sister to inhabit one end of the warehouse, and that the farthest end from the ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... fleet Singing, and footprints of thy fleeter feet, Some dim derision of mysterious laughter From the blind tongueless warders of the dead, Some gainless glimpse of Proserpine's veiled head, Some little sound of unregarded tears Wept by effaced unprofitable eyes, And from pale mouths some cadence of dead sighs— These only, these the hearkening spirit hears, Sees only such ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... her voice, sharpened her glance, gracefully inclined her head, rubbed against him with her sleeve, and called him Monsiegneur, embraced him with the loving words, trifled with his hand, and finished by smiling at him most affably. He, not imagining that so unprofitable a lover would suit her, for he was as poor as a church mouse, and did not know that his beauty was the equal in her eyes to all the treasures of the world, was not taken in her trap, but continued ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac |
