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More "Sloth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when inspection is scarce possible, it must seem a vain toil to polish the brass hand-rail of the stair, or to keep an unrewarded vigil in the light-room; and the keepers are habitually tempted to the beginnings of sloth, and must unremittingly resist. He who temporises with his conscience is already lost. I must tell here an anecdote that illustrates the difficulties of inspection. In the days of my uncle David and my father there was a station which they regarded with jealousy. The two engineers compared notes ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... harvests; and yon squalid form, Leaner than fleshless misery, that wastes A sunless life in the unwholesome mine, Drags out in labour a protracted death, 115 To glut their grandeur; many faint with toil, That few may know the cares and woe of sloth. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... of liberty. The patriot will see little to cheer him in this "golden age" of the national history, whose outward show of glory will seem to his penetrating eye only the hectic brilliancy of decay. He will turn to an earlier period, when the nation, emerging from the sloth and license of a barbarous age, seemed to renew its ancient energies, and to prepare like a giant to run its course; and glancing over the long interval since elapsed, during the first half of which the nation wasted ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... yet, by a wonderful diversity of nature, (according to the remark of a writer who had pierced into its darkest recesses,) the same barbarians are by turns the most indolent and the most restless of mankind. They delight in sloth, they detest tranquility. [30] The languid soul, oppressed with its own weight, anxiously required some new and powerful sensation; and war and danger were the only amusements adequate to its fierce temper. The sound that summoned the German to arms was grateful to his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... off all this dull sloth, away with sluggishness, yes, and get back that old gift of guile of yours! Save your master: mind you don't do the same as other servants that use their wily wits ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... latter part of the summer she went to Colhassett, quite by herself according to her own desire, and spent a month with her grandfather, now in charge of Albertina's aunt. She found Albertina grown into a huge girl, sunk in depths of sloth and snobbishness, who plied her with endless questions concerning life in the gilded circles of New York society. Eleanor found her disgusting and yet possessed of that vague fascination that the assumption of ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... pledged himself. Through her ministry he had received illumination. To the work of her awakening he had given all his young enthusiasm. How then could he desert her? Her rites might be maimed. The scandal of schism might tarnish her fair fame. Accusations of sloth and lukewarmness might not unjustly be preferred against her. All this he admitted; and it was very characteristic of the man that, just because he did admit it, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... diligence and the old hag, it belongs to!Diligence, quoth I? Thou shouldst have called it the SlothFly, quoth she? why, it moves like a fly through a glue-pot, as the Irishman says. But, however, time and tide tarry for no man, and so, my young friend, we'll have a snack here at the Hawes, which is a very decent ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... these vows do not always avail against some of the worst forms of sensuality, it would be foolish and wrong to generalize from unworthy exceptions. In its moral aspects the revolt of young Bengal represents very frequently a healthy reaction against sloth and self-indulgence and the premature exhaustion of manhood which is such a common feature in a society that has for centuries been taught to disregard physiological laws in the enforcement of child marriage. To this extent it is a revolt, though ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... Desidiae valedixi; syrenis istius cantibus surdam posthac aurem obversurus.—I bid farewell to Sloth, being resolved henceforth not to listen to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the name of coach was heathen Greek. Who ever saw, but upon extraordinary occasions, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Francis Drake ride in a coach? They made small use of coaches; there were but few in those times; and they were deadly foes to sloth and effeminacy. It is in the memory of many when, in the whole kingdom, there was not one! It is a doubtful question whether the devil brought tobacco into England in a coach, for both appeared at the same time." ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... my stand on the broad moral ground that every human being, from the highest to the lowest, has two sides to his life—his work and his leisure. To be without work in life is selfishness and sloth. But if a man or woman is so entangled in routine duties as never to command leisure, we have a right to say to such persons that they are leading an immoral life. Such an individual has no claim to the title ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... the border,— And fading away from our view; All idleness, sloth, and disorder, All hatred and spite go with you. All bitterness, gloom, and repining Down into your stronghold are cast. Sail out where the sunsets are shining, Sail out with them ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... frosty and grim and menacing, men stripped off the sloth of the south and gave battle greatly. And they stripped likewise much of the veneer of civilization—all of its follies, most of its foibles, and perhaps a few of its virtues. Maybe so; but they reserved the great traditions and at least lived frankly, laughed honestly, ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... into almost unnatural ripeness, I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys that were at all near my own age, and before I was eight years old I was a "character". Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my understanding, were even then ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... exercise a little of the wisdom of the serpent in time. Be it remembered that, although the ruined and blameless man is not subjected to such moral scorn as falls to the lot of the wastrel, the practical consequences of being down are much the same for him as for the victim of sloth or sin. He feels the pinch of physical misery, and, however lofty his spirit may be, it can never be lofty enough to relieve the gnawing pains of bodily privation. Moreover, he will meet with persecution just as if he were a villain or a cheat, and that ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... peace as heavenly visitants bequeath, O'er-spread his spirit, gradual, like a sea: Forth from the bosom of that peace upsoared Hope, starry-crowned, and winged, that liberates oft Faith, unextinct, though bound by Powers accursed That o'er her plant the foot, and hold the chain— Terror and Sloth. To noble spirits set free Delight means gratitude. Thus Laurence joyed: But soon, remembering that unworthy past, Remorse succeeded, sorrow born of love, Consoled by love alone. 'Ah! slave,' he cried, That, serving such a God, could'st dream of flight: How many a babe, too ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... as they do know they fight on as bravely as though no others existed; and these men will be often victorious. We shall have added most strangely to our safety and happiness and peace the day that our sloth and our ignorance shall have ceased to term fatal. What should truly be looked on as human and natural by ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... lives from year to year in his thatched hut, looking after a few cows, and making cheese from their milk. He perhaps plants a small patch of maize once a year, and grows a few plantains, content to live on the plainest fare, and in the rudest style, so that he may indulge in indolence and sloth. So he vegetates and drops into his grave, and in a year or two no mark or sign tells where he was laid. The graves of the old Indians are still to be found, but no mounds mark the spots where the inhabitants of the valley since the conquest have been laid to rest. They have passed ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... every aspiring soul. Not until such condition is mine shall I be able to regard life as a godlike gift, except in the hope that it is drawing nigh. Let him who understands, understand better; let him not say the good is less than perfect, or excuse his supineness and spiritual sloth by saying to himself that a man can go too far in his search after the divine, can sell too much of what he has to buy the field of the treasure. Either there is no Christ of God, or ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... the dignity of her buildings to the false god of Speed. Why men worship Speed, a demon who lies in wait to destroy them, it is impossible to understand. It would be as wise and as profitable to worship Sloth. However, the men of New York, as they tell you with an insistent and ingenuous pride, are "hustlers." They must ever be moving, and moving fast. The "hustling," probably, leads to little enough. Haste and industry are not synonymous. ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... eye could discover The sign of the sloth on you, From the last mane-lock laid over To the last nail tight in the shoe; A blast, and your ranks stood ready; A shout, and your saddles filled; A wave, and your troop was ready To wheel where ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... that juncture, and, in fact, up to the present moment, there was, and is, a most fierce and bitter outcry, and detraction loud and low, against General McClellan, accusing him of sloth, imbecility, cowardice, treasonable purposes, and, in short, utterly denying his ability as a soldier, and questioning his integrity as a man. Nor was this to be wondered at; for when before, in all history, do we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... attain'd, would brand thee deep with shame; Life was not made to rust in idle sloth Until the canker eat its gloss away, But like a falchion to grow bright with use, And hew a passage to eternal bliss! Canst thou stand 'fore that glory of the sun, That like God's beacon on Eternity Wakeneth up Creation unto Act, And sheddeth strength and hope, to cheer them on, Yet ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... scarce any-body here knows either its origin or constitution. I have in vain endeavoured to procure some pieces in the antient Provencal, that I might compare them with the modern Patois: but I can find no person to give me the least information on the subject. The shades of ignorance, sloth, and stupidity, are impenetrable. Almost every word of the Patois may still be found in the Italian, Spanish, and French languages, with a small change in the pronunciation. Cavallo, signifying a horse ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... have not only this frivolous ambition of being thought masterly inciting them on one hand, but also their natural sloth tempting them on the other. They are terrified at the prospect before them, of the toil required to attain exactness. The impetuosity of youth is distrusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, and desires, from mere impatience of labour, to take the citadel by storm. They wish to find ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... Rhetoric who were in the first structure—in both their location and altitude, and in the proportions and excellence of their sculpture. It was a glorious blazon for our prince, who, although of so tender years, was able, having cast aside sloth and childish amusements, to give himself up to the exercise of branches of learning so useful, thus preparing for success in the monarchical government of his kingdoms. Arithmetic had an inscription on the placard of her pedestal, which ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... harness hardly halfway to the goal—should, year after year, send off swarms of men to roam the world, and to seek out danger for the mere thrill and enjoyment of it, is significant of the indomitable pluck and spirit of the race. There is scant danger that the rust of sloth will eat into the virtue of English steel. The English do the hard work and the travelling of the world. The least revolutionary nation of Europe, the one with the greatest temptations to stay at home, with the greatest faculty for work, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... the subject of deliberation. Now I am well aware, that by disapproving of this excessive eagerness to pass over into Africa, I subject myself to two imputations: one grounded on the caution inherent in my disposition, which young men may if they please call cowardice and sloth, so long as we have the consolation to reflect, that though hitherto the measures of others have always appeared on the first view of them the more plausible, mine on experience have proved the sounder. The other imputation is that of jealousy and envy towards the daily increasing ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... long sick to death, is dead. Too long Have sloth and doubt and treason bidden us be What Cromwell's England was not, when the sea To him bore witness given of Blake how strong She stood, a commonweal that brooked no wrong From foes less vile ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... love, hearken unto me. The Nine-bow barbarians overrun the ancient land of Khem; nine nations march up against Khem and lay it waste. Hearken unto me, my son, and I will give thee victory. Awake, awake from sloth, and I will give thee victory. Thou shalt hew down the Nine-bow barbarians as a countryman hews a rotting palm; they shall fall, and thou shalt spoil them. But hearken unto me, my son, thou shalt not ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... robes of sloth and inertness, and put on the dress of zeal and earnestness. We belong to the nineteenth century, which exceeds all the ages of mankind in light and knowledge. Why shall we not show to men the need of giving us the highest education, that we may at ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... aids to the maintenance of purity. So also is the avoidance of the habit of lying in bed in a semi-somnolent condition after true sleep has finally departed. A Christian's body is meant to be a temple of the Holy Ghost, and no other spirit, whether of impurity or of sloth, should be allowed ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... them about their various cousins: the Black Bear, the Syrian bear, the Grizzly bear of America the Thibetan sun bear, the Polar bear of the Arctic regions, the Aswail hear of India, the Bruany bear (also of India), the Sloth bear, the White bear, and the Brown bears ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... with so much pride on this collection of virtues, but rather bring yourself to account for your faults. Take just one, the first that comes, impatience, sloth, gossip, uncharitableness, sulkiness, whatever it may ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B.
... action; but that freedom is best exercised when it leads them to trust and depend on the Lord of all things: not that He who seeth even beyond the confines of light is pleased with idleness, or giveth encouragement to the sons of sloth; the spirit which He has infused into mankind He expects to find active and industrious; and, when prudence is joined with religion, Allah either gives success to its dictates, or, by counteracting its motions, draws forth the brighter virtues of patience and ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... by-the-bye would not prove me a Tory), but felt no vocation—perhaps no right—-to print them. I have always reproached myself as sorely amenable to the condemnations of a very fine poem by Barberino, On Sloth against Sin, which I translated in the Dante volume. Sloth, alas! has but too much to answer for with me; and is one of the reasons (though I will not say the only one), why I have always fallen back on quality instead of quantity in the little I have ever ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... unclassified sects. Truly, a religious babel! and 10% of all the inhabitants of the globe, about the same number of people who profess to Protestantism, are Animists. This is the lowest stage of primitive religion, and millions of humans are still quagmired in the sloth of a primitive faith which once must have been the ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... son-of-a-gun within sound of his voice to challenge this to his face or take the consequences of being swept into oblivion by the high tide of a people's indignation that would sweep everything before it on the third day of November next, having been aroused in its might at last from the debasing sloth into which the corrupt hell-hounds of a venal opposition had swept them, but a brighter day had dawned, which would sweep the onrushing hordes of petty chicanery to where they would get theirs; and, as one who had heard the call of an oppressed people, he would accept this ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... unusual and skilled mimics is the Indian sloth, whose colour pattern and unique eclipsing effects seem almost incredible to those unfamiliar with the real facts. His home is in the trees, and he has a deep, orange-coloured spot on his back, which would make him very conspicuous ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... may be dulled by neglect of duty, by sloth in prayer, by inattention to the Bible, by indefinite, hesitating testimony, and by carelessness, when we should be careful to walk soberly and steadfastly with ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... nerve heroic boys To hazard all in Freedom's fight,— Break sharply off their jolly games, Forsake; their comrades gay, And quit proud homes and youthful dames, For famine, toil, and fray? Yet on the nimble air benign Speed nimbler messages, That waft the breath of grace divine To hearts in sloth and ease. So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... differentiation for a long time, still turning, but it turned slowly and hesitantly and was close to coming to a standstill. Slowly, like humidity entering the dying stem of a tree, filling it slowly and making it rot, the world and sloth had entered Siddhartha's soul, slowly it filled his soul, made it heavy, made it tired, put it to sleep. On the other hand, his senses had become alive, there was much they had learned, much ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... those minds which instead of exercise give themselves up to sloth. They are like the razor here spoken of, and lose the keenness of their edge, while the rust of ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... failure be written in every angle and nook of the homestead, it is the failure of large-hearted enterprise, of daring to attempt, of striving to make the desert bloom, and not the failure of indolence or sloth. ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... directions. The inadequacy of its work in these centuries appears in the lack of spiritual activity and in the predominance of the material side of religion. The mediaeval Church suffered badly from excessive conservatism, which led towards sloth and a complacent inactivity. The morbid element showed itself during the fifteenth century mainly in lack of real earnestness, in the enjoyment of luxurious laziness, and in the steady neglect of the age to revise its Christianity. The Church moreover, with its complete segregation from other estates ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... answered she; "for if you were really in love with me, you would not have turned to see another woman." And the Persian poet Jami, in his Baharistan, relates that a man with a very long nose asked a woman in marriage, saying: "I am no way given to sloth, or long sleeping, and I am very patient in bearing vexations." To which she replied: "Yes, truly: hadst thou not been patient in bearing vexations thou hadst not carried that nose ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... love that you may loathe Intrigue and darkness, that you may disperse The ranks of ugly tyrannies and, worse, The sodden languor and complacent sloth. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... by profitable topics, roams on forbidden ground. Folded arms are accompanied by a distempered imagination. The tongue of the idle often setteth a world on fire; for scandal and gossip vegetate to rankness in the garden of sloth. The degradation, therefore, is not on the side of work. Be not ashamed to labor; for it is Heaven's decree that all should labor. Conceal not your industry. It is honorable, and honored by all good minds. In a republic especially, where the ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... the artist's temperament in youth when he is not possessed of the greater qualities of genius—his imaginative visions, his aspirations, his pride in apartness from men, his self-contentment, his sloth, the presence in him of barren imagination, the absence from it of the spiritual, nothing in him which as yet desires, through the sorrow and strife of life, God's infinitude, or man's love; a natural life indeed, forgiveable, gay, sportive, dowered with happy self-love, good to pass through ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... you dream; you sleep away your hours In desperate sloth, miscalled philosophy. Up, up, for honour's sake; twelve legions wait you, And long to call you chief: By painful journeys, I led them, patient both of heat and hunger, Down from the Parthian marches to the Nile. 'Twill do you good to see their sun-burnt ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... know Mr. Somers's aunt lived to an extreme old age in the place. Miss Meigs 'did' for her. And since then she has been living on there. No one wanted the house—the poor Somerses!—and she was used to it. She's an old thing herself, and of course she hasn't the nerves of a sloth. Now she 'does' for Kathleen. Of course later there'll have to be a nurse again. Kathleen mustn't die with only Melora Meigs. I'm not sure, either, that Melora will last. She all crooked over ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... hour our Lord Jesus cried with a loud voice, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" He cried with a loud voice, that He might be easily heard by all, and also that by this wondrous word He might shake off from our souls the sleep of sloth, and cause them to wonder and marvel at the immeasurable goodness of God to us. Therefore He saith, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" For the sake of vile sinners, for evil and thankless servants, for sinful and disobedient deceivers, Thou hast forsaken ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... Sometimes like the sempstress's sister, they throw aside their work altogether, and take up their abode with the man of their choice, should he be able to support the expense. It is during this season of pleasure and idleness that the incurable leprosy of sloth takes lasting ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... one thing, gluttonish sloth another. And even if you have once again overestimated the capacity of your stomach, why advertise your intemperance in a public place?" He lifted his hand from my shoulder to look at his watch. "It's now ten minutes to three. Do you ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... Toryism of a stolid clownish type still held the thrones of collegiate power. Yet the eye of an imaginative scholar as he gazed upon the grey walls, reared by piety, munificence, and love of learning in a far-off time, might well discern behind an unattractive screen of academic sloth, the venerable past, not dim and cold, but in its traditions rich, nourishing, and alive. Such an one could see before him present days of honourable emulation and stirring acquisition—fit prelude of a man's part to play in a strenuous future. ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... say. For certain of these doughty Pacifists having told you how much their one object is to secure peace, then proceed to tell you that this thing which they hope to secure is a very evil thing, that under its blighting influence nations wane in luxury and sloth. And of course they imply that our own nation, about a third of whom have not enough to eat and about another third of whom have a heart-breaking struggle with small means and precariousness of livelihood, ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... passed the test very well, according to Mr. Britt's notion. Young Mr. Vaniman had secured a business education piecemeal, and was a bit late in getting it, but Mr. Britt promptly perceived that the young man had not been hung up by stupidity or sloth. So he hired Vaniman, finding him a strapping ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... country, what is it? In my opinion, it is the sort of instruction he has received, not that this instruction is necessarily bad in itself, but bad from being unsuited to the sort of man to whom it has been given. It has the tendency to develop his emotionalism, his sloth, and his vanity, and it has no tendency to develop those parts of his character which are in a rudimentary state and much want it; thereby throwing the whole character of ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... success may show Destruction to the rest: this pause between (Unanswerd least thou boast) to let thee know; At first I thought that Libertie and Heav'n To heav'nly Soules had bin all one; but now I see that most through sloth had rather serve, Ministring Spirits, traind up in Feast and Song; Such hast thou arm'd, the Minstrelsie of Heav'n, Servilitie with freedom to contend, As both thir deeds compar'd this day shall prove. 170 To whom in brief thus Abdiel stern repli'd. Apostat, still thou errst, nor end wilt ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... labourer, struggling on on twelve shillings a week, and learning obedience, self-denial, self- respect, and trust in God, by the things suffered in that hard life here at home, than be a Negro in Tropic islands, fattening himself in sloth under that perpetual sunshine, and thinking nought of God, because, poor fool, he can get all he wants ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the king's servants, his bailiffs and overseers, as being in nothing better men than themselves, they despised and slighted, nor were the least concerned at their commands and menaces. They used honest pastimes and liberal studies, not esteeming sloth and idleness honest and liberal, but rather such exercises as hunting and running, repelling robbers, taking of thieves, and delivering the wronged and oppressed from injury. For doing such things, they ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... outburst. The original mistake, which was responsible for all this misery, was committed when our scientists began to create a new world of steel and iron and chemistry and electricity and forgot that the human mind is slower than the proverbial turtle, is lazier than the well-known sloth, and marches from one hundred to three hundred years behind the small ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... probably little more than an appendix to (c), and also containing a continuous piece (cf. vv. 30-34 on sloth). ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... long the ignoble sloth, how long The trust in greatness not thine own? Surely the lion's brood is strong ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... cannot be done with the tips of the fingers. We want more crowbars and fewer gold toothpicks. The obstacles before you cannot be looked out of countenance by a quizzing glass. Let sloth and softliness go to the wall, but three cheers for Push & Pull, and ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... him speech: "Yea verily for this hour, dread Achilles, we will still bear thee safe, yet is thy death day nigh at hand, neither shall we be cause thereof, but a mighty god, and forceful Fate. For not through sloth or heedlessness of ours did the men of Troy from Patrokios' shoulders strip his arms, but the best of the gods, whom bright-haired Leto bore, slew him in the forefront of the battle, and to Hector gave renown. We even with the wind of Zephyr, swiftest, they ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... gratitude oblige you to accept, as pay in defence of your benefactors, what you receive, in peace, as mere bounty. Thus, without any innovation—without altering or abolishing anything but pernicious novelties, introduced for the encouragement of sloth and idleness—by converting only for the future, the same funds, for the use of the serviceable, which are spent, at present, upon the unprofitable, you may be well served in your armies—your troops regularly paid—justice duly ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... they stayed and built themselves houses and kraals, and set about gathering the hay and catching cattle. But everything fell out so easily and all they needed came so plentifully that there grew over them a sort of sloth, and they slept without shame in the hours of work, and gave no ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... should not protect our sloth with the patronage of difficulty. It is a false quarrel against nature that she helps understanding but in a few, when the most part of mankind are inclined by her thither, if they would take the pains; no less than birds to fly, horses to run, etc., which if they lose it is through their own sluggishness, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... the successive outward circumstances in which he finds himself, and he varies with them. He changes suddenly, when their change is sudden, and is as unlike what he was just before, as one fortune or external condition is unlike another. He moves when he is urged by appetite; else, he remains in sloth and inactivity. He lives, and he dies, and he has done nothing, but leaves the world as he found it. And what the individual is, such is his whole generation; and as that generation, such is the generation before and after. ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... for thy love and thy rest And though little troubled with sloth Drunken lark! thou would'st be loth To be such a traveller as I. Happy, happy liver! With a soul as strong as a mountain river Pouring out praise to th' Almighty giver, Joy and jollity be with us both! Hearing thee ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... bravely fighting, should valiantly protect their country, their property, wives and children, and, what is dearer than these, their liberty and lives; that they should not suffer their hands to be tied behind their backs by a nation which, unless they were enervated by idleness and sloth, was not more powerful than themselves, but that they should arm those hands with buckler, sword, and spear, ready for the field of battle; and, because they thought this also of advantage to the people they were about to leave, they, with the help of the ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas
... conspicuous in history, that of Heraclius is one of the most extraordinary and inconsistent. In the first and last years of a long reign, the emperor appears to be the slave of sloth, of pleasure, or of superstition, the careless and impotent spectator of the public calamities. But the languid mists of the morning and evening are separated by the brightness of the meridian sun; the Arcadius of the palace arose the Caesar of the camp; and the honor ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... folk—grown, healthy men and women who honestly rejoice in doing evil. These four classes acting together might conceivably produce a rather pernicious democracy; alien hysteria, blood-craze, and the like, reinforcing local ignorance, sloth, and arrogance. For example, I read a letter in a paper sympathising with these same Doukhobors. The writer knew a community of excellent people in England (you see where the rot starts!) who lived ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... very young minister be to many ministers of the gospel, who have been many years in the vineyard, but fall far short of his labours and progress! God thinks fit now and then to raise up a child to reprove the sloth and negligence of many thousands of advanced years, and shews that he can perfect his own praise out of ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... seemed to promise them the greatest advantage, gave the final stroke to their ruin and destruction. "Their courage," says Justin,(217) "did not survive that illustrious Theban. Freed from a rival, who kept their emulation alive, they sunk into a lethargic sloth and effeminacy. The funds for armaments by land and sea were soon lavished upon games and feasts. The seaman's and soldier's pay was distributed to the idle citizen. An indolent and luxurious mode of life enervated ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... most matured consideration I can give the subject, are, that the institution of slavery is a most serious injury to the habits, manners and morals of our white population—that it leads to sloth, indolence, dissipation, and vice." ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... a most dangerous man," replied the hunter. "His name, which the Indians have given him, indicates he works by night, though he's no sloth in the day, either. But he has another name, also, the one by which he was christened. It's Charles Langlade, a young Frenchman who was a trader before the war. I've seen him more than once. He's mighty shrewd and alert, uncommon popular among the western Indians, who consider him as one of them ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... high-road! From out a mass of rich verdure grew lovely scarlet begonias, and spotted caladiums, shaded by graceful tree-ferns and overhung by trees full of exquisite parasites and orchids. Among these, the most conspicuous, after the palms, are the tall thin-stemmed sloth-trees, so called from their being a favourite resort of the sloth, who with great difficulty crawls up into one of them, remains there until he has demolished every leaf, and then passes on to the ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... and to some extent in North America also, a marvellous group of extinct Edentates, representing the living Sloths and Armadillos, but of gigantic size. The most celebrated of these is the huge Megatherium Cuvieri (fig. 260) of the South American Pampas. The Megathere was a colossal Sloth-like animal which attained a length of from twelve to eighteen feet, with bones more massive than those of the Elephant. Thus the thigh-bone is nearly thrice the thickness of the same bone in the largest of existing Elephants, its circumference at its ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... they are sent with a message to any place, one must very patiently await some notable failure caused ordinarily by their natural sloth and laziness. [297] Sicut acetum dentibus, et fumus oculis, sic piger his qui miserunt ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... times distinguished by the same general features. A brave and adventurous prince, at the head of a population at once poor, warlike, and greedy, acquires dominion; while his successors, abandoning themselves to sensuality and sloth, probably also to oppressive and irascible dispositions, become in process of time victims to those same qualities in a stranger which had enabled their own father to seize the throne. Cyrus, the great founder ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... retire to bed on the verge of tears. The hearty bow-wow girl is conscious of being unpleasantly chastened by some invisible power; and the stupid young man sinks into a strange apoplectic condition, with his chin sunk on his waistcoat, and his mind drowned in the waters of forgetfulness. Sloth is in the air, and a decorous desultoriness pervades humanity. It is as if thunder was in the social atmosphere. The repose is not quite natural. Those who are in high positions, and therefore have something to live down to, ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... equally degrading to individuals as to nations. Sloth never made its mark in the world, and never will. Sloth never climbed a hill, nor overcame a difficulty that it could avoid. Indolence always failed in life, and always will. It is in the nature of things ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... the case of the widow Broadnax this natural feeling was not at all affected by the fact that she was too indolent to make the exertion to claim and fill her rightful place as mistress of the house. It did not matter in the least that she lay and slept like a sloth while poor little Miss Penelope was up and working like a beaver. No woman's claims ever have anything to do with her deserts; perhaps no man's ever have either; perhaps all who claim most deserve least. At all events, it was ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... set by the venerated leaders of thought exercised great influence throughout society, and all the more because it justified the carelessness and sloth to which ordinary humanity is prone. In the principal towns of Europe, as well as in the country at large, down to a recent period, the most ordinary sanitary precautions were neglected, and pestilences continued to be attributed to the wrath of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... substituted for the theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity, the ascending degrees of belief, resignation, money. This is partly due to our religious inheritance and partly to mental and spiritual sloth which dislikes the effort of thinking, preferring easy acquiescence in conditions that are the resultants of blinded vision. For dependency upon money is not something merely of the present, but a condition in the spiritual sphere that is largely a product ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... spoils, the first-fruits of the fray. And this my work, Mezentius. Now prepare To king Latinus and his walls to fare. Let hope forestall, and courage hail the fray, So, when the gods shall summon us to bear The standards forth, and muster our array, No fears shall breed dull sloth, nor ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... reddened again. But he had become accustomed to her ways; rather, perhaps, he had begun to recognize the quaint justice that underlaid them, or, possibly, some better self of his own, that had been buried under bitterness and sloth and struggled into life. "But whatever he says," he returned eagerly, "cannot alter my feelings to YOU. It can only alter my position here, and you say you are above being influenced by that. Tell me, Nelly—dear Nelly! have you nothing ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... He knew their backs by heart. And books in quantity no longer intimidated him. Despite his grave defects as a keeper of resolves, despite his paltry trick of picking up a newspaper or periodical and reading it all through, out of sheer vacillation and mental sloth, before starting serious perusals, despite the human disinclination which he had to bracing himself, and keeping up the tension, in a manner necessary for the reading of long and difficult works, and despite sundry ignominious backslidings into original ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... discovered that there was a new piano in the drawing-room, in addition to a number of those easier chairs which our grandmothers never knew. Cousin Peligros protested that they were unnecessary and even conducive to sloth and indolence. Still protesting, she took the most comfortable and sat with folded hands listening to Juanita finding out the latest waltz, with variations of her ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... farmers like yourselves—is to be divided this night, share and share alike, among such of his relatives as have found it convenient to be present here between the strokes of half-past seven and eight. If some of our friends have failed us through sloth, sickness, or the misfortune of mistaking the road, they have our sympathy, but they cannot have ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... and lingering seeks thy shrine, On him but seldom, Power divine, Thy spirit rests. Satiety, And sloth, poor counterfeits of thee, Mock the tired worldling. Idle Hope, And dire Remembrance, interlope, And vex the feverish slumbers of the mind: The bubble floats before: the spectre stalks ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... husband and wife in name only. It was logic on the march, it was the inevitable disorganization of a household reaching its climax, it was rebellion against nature's law and indulgence in vice leading to the gradual decline of a man of intelligence, it was a hard worker sinking into the sloth of so-called pleasure; and then, death having snatched away the only son, the home broke to pieces—the wife—fated to childlessness, and the husband driven away by her, rolling through ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... of Experience would be in literature a delicate Innocence. Not a passage of cheapness, of greed, of assumption, of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose love-poetry were thus true, and whose pudeur of personality thus simple and inviolate. This is the private man, in other words the gentleman, who will neither ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... but knew how you the purpose cherish Whiles thus you mocke it: how in stripping it You more inuest it: ebbing men, indeed (Most often) do so neere the bottome run By their owne feare, or sloth ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... natural inert laziness and ignorance of the people is their own and their country's bane. They are all totally unaware of the treasures at their feet. This dreadful sloth is in part engendered by the excessive bounty of the land in its natural state; by the little want of clothes or other luxuries, in consequence of the congenial temperature; and from the people having no higher object in view than the first-coming meal, and no other stimulus to ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... a shaven priest, For all his sloth-won tythe: But while to me this breath is leased, And these old limbs are lithe,— Ere Death hath marked me for his feast, And felled me with his scythe,— I'll troll my song, The leaves among, All ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... reward too great if he prevail, And labours to surpass him day and night, Less for improvement, than to tickle spite. The spur is powerful, and I grant its force; It pricks the genius forward in its course, Allows short time for play, and none for sloth, And felt alike by each, advances both, But judge where so much evil intervenes, The end, though plausible, not worth the means. Weigh, for a moment, classical desert Against a heart depraved, and temper hurt, Hurt, too, perhaps for ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... prayers to Jove, Until he took from her the heavy curse Of immortality. With closer vows, The knight then sealed his worship and forswore All other aims and deeds to serve her cause. Thus passed unnoted seven barren years Of reckless passion and voluptuous sloth, Undignified by any lofty thought In his degraded mind, that sometime was Endowed with noble capability. From revelry to revelry he passed, Craving more pungent pleasure momently, And new intoxications, and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... failed in a greater or less degree; that in some cases the Indians most neglected have done better for themselves than those who have received the care and bounty of the government; that many tribes and bands which had apparently emerged from their barbarous condition have miserably fallen back into sloth and vicious habits; that the meat-eaters, who constitute the bulk of the tribes with which the latest advances of our settlements and railways have brought us in contact, are exceptionally wild and fierce; that the experiment of Indian civilization ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... pavements, and kennels down which the muddy torrents hastened to precipitate themselves in the sewers below; armies of umbrellas, as far as the eye could reach, now rising, now lowering, to avoid collision; hackney-coaches in active sloth, their miserable cattle plodding along with their backs arched and heads and tails drooping like barn-door fowls crouching under the cataract of a gutter; clacking of pattens and pestering of sweepers; not a smile upon the countenance of one individual of the multitude which passed ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... render thanks to God Who hath deigned to call His faithful people out of such perilous darkness into His marvellous Light, and to pray for the illumination of the hearts of the Heathen. Hereby, also, the sloth of undevout Christians may be put to shame, when they see how much more ready the nations of the unbelievers are to worship their Idols, than are many of those who have been marked with Christ's Token to adore the True God. Moreover, the hearts of some members ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... give as a reason that, if the corsairs should discover that they were working these mines, they would come hither to take them captive; but even now, when no one can molest them, they do not work the mines, and hence we may infer that their poverty is mainly due to sloth. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... labor, and thereby render their manufactures too dear to be exported to foreign markets: that the indolent inhabitants of Ireland, finding provisions fall almost to nothing, would never be induced to labor, but would perpetuate to all generations their native sloth and barbarism: that by cutting off almost entirely the trade between the kingdoms, all the natural bands of union were dissolved, and nothing remained to keep the Irish in their duty but force and violence: and that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... darling! Come, let us be going, So soft is the breeze and so fragrant the air, New health and new strength through our veins will be flowing, And sorrow will vanish and sadness and care! O banish the charms with which sloth would ensnare us, Far purer the joy in the sunshine that lurks, All nature her pinions is spreading to bear us, And show us her ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... hours at a play, where all virtue and religion are openly reviled; and can they not watch one half hour to hear them defended? Is this to deal like a judge (I mean like a good judge), to listen on one side of the cause and sleep on the other? I shall add but one word more. That this indecent sloth is very much owing to that luxury and excess men usually practise upon this day, by which half the service thereof is turned to sin; men dividing their time between God and their bellies, when, after a gluttonous meal, their ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... that this singular quadruped, like the sloth, is not a walker on the ground of its own ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... be thought a hard government that should tax its people one-tenth part of their TIME, to be employed in its service, but idleness taxes many of us much more, if we reckon all that is spent in absolute sloth or doing of nothing, with that which is spent in idle employments or amusements that amount to nothing. Sloth, by bringing on diseases, absolutely shortens life. "Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears; while the used key is always bright," as ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... everyone was charged with the duty of achieving personal happiness, that great harm was done by encouraging habits of idleness, and that the presence of so much misery in the world was greatly due to sloth. This theory of hers was a sweeping condemnation of drunkenness, of all the legendary loafing ways of her father Macquart. But, though she did not know it, there was much of Macquart's nature in herself. ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Barker, and upon the head she tapped into sloth her rising resentment. "Nobody dead," she said, with a smack of the mouth, "but Liza Pruitt ain't ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... is firm enough for both," interrupted M. Desormeaux; "and it is more than probable that at this very moment he is correcting his daughter of the sin of sloth." ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... diet was perhaps too nice, But gluttony was ne'er his vice: In every turn of life content, And meekly took what fortune sent; Inquire through all the parish round, A better neighbour ne'er was found; His vigilance might some displease; 'Tis true, he hated sloth like pease. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... live with thee inclosed, I will loathe my pen and paper Art shall never be supposed, Sloth shall quench the ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... is the devil's motto. All history is strewn with its brilliant victims, the wrecks of half-finished plans and unexecuted resolutions. It is the favorite refuge of sloth and incompetency. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... no! I would not, were I fifty times a prince, be a pensioner on the dead! I honor birth and ancestry when they are regarded as the incentives to exertion, not the titledeeds to sloth! I honor the laurels that overshadow the graves of our fathers; it is our fathers I emulate, when I desire that beneath the evergreen I myself have planted, my own ashes may repose! Dearest! couldst thou but see with ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... life. She had let her arms fall by her sides—round, smooth arms with a pretty dimple at the elbow. Her wrists were delicate; her hands, which did not betray the servant, were embellished with a lady's fingernails. And lazily, with graceful sloth, she allowed her indolent figure to curve and sway;—a figure that a garter might span, and that was made even more slender to the eye by the projection of the hips and the curve of the hoops that gave the balloon-like roundness to her skirt;—an impossible waist, absurdly small but ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... broad Pacific, basking bright, And girdling lands of lustrous growth, Vast continents and isles of light, Dumb tracts of undiscovered sloth; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... look-out on your own side, and jamming all other varments slick through a stone wall, as the waggon-wheel used up the lame frog? (Hear, hear.) I say—and mind you I'll stick to it like a starved sloth to the back of a fat babby—I say, gentlemen, this country, the United States (particularly Kentucky, from which I come, and which will whip all the rest with out-straws and rotten bull-rushes agin pike, bagnet, mortars, and all their almighty fine artillery), I say, then, this country ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... our miseries, a protecting amulet to expel sin's venom, an attractive loadstone to draw God's mercy and graces unto us. [6771]Peccatum vulnus, poenitentia medicinam: sin made the breach, repentance must help it; howsoever thine offence came, by error, sloth, obstinacy, ignorance, exitur per poenitentiam, this is the sole means to be relieved. [6772]Hence comes our hope of safety, by this alone sinners are saved, God is provoked to mercy. "This unlooseth all that is bound, enlighteneth darkness, mends ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... ready to meet the Athabasca blacksmith, Albrecht Dumont, dying faster now, signed his last report to the Government at Berlin, which his daughter Ilse had written for him—something about Canadian canals and stupid Yankees and their greed, indifference, cowardice, and sloth. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... us. We all know what is likely to happen to an estate in the owner's prolonged or permanent absence—it deteriorates; his active interest and personal supervision are wanting, and the results are visible everywhere. Sloth and mismanagement, which his presence would check, go uncorrected, the daily duties are indifferently performed or remain undone, and soon the property as a whole bears unmistakeable traces of neglect. There is always the ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... and were I to visit your different places and huts, I fear I should find some of you spending the hours appointed for divine service in cultivating your gardens and grounds, others indulging themselves in mere sloth and idleness, others engaged in the most profane and unclean conversation, and others committing abominations, which it would defile my pen to describe. Now what must be the end of these courses? God says, Remember the sabbath day ...
— An Address to the Inhabitants of the Colonies, Established in New South Wales and Norfolk Island. • Richard Johnson
... too late. All ideas of peace on a basis of compromise had disappeared on either side. The end, it was seen clearly, must be either absolute slavery for all but the privileged, or a system of life founded on equality and Communism. The sloth, the hopelessness, and if I may say so, the cowardice of the last century, had given place to the eager, restless heroism of a declared revolutionary period. I will not say that the people of that time foresaw the life we are leading now, but there was a general instinct amongst them towards ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... keenest eye could discover The sign of the sloth on you, From the last mane-lock laid over To the last nail tight in the shoe; A blast, and your ranks stood ready; A shout, and your saddles filled; A wave, and your troop was ready To wheel where ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... an omelet Benny came out into the kitchen and stood regarding her, hands in pockets, making, as usual, one set of muscles rest upon another. His face was full of the utmost good nature, but it also convicted him of too much sloth to ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... riches, their numerous kinsmen, their wealth, and their arrogant and intolerable use of all these sources of influence; so that they may appear rather to trust to these circumstances than to the merits of their cause. They will be brought into contempt, if sloth, or negligence, or idleness, or indolent pursuits, or luxurious tranquillity can be alleged against them. Good-will will be procured, derived from the character of the hearers themselves, if exploits are mentioned which have been ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... not appear to know beef from mutton or rice from coffee. And in fact she was good for nothing; for even if he sent her on an errand, as on this occasion, she would stay forever and one day after, and charge her sloth upon her infirmities. She had been ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... the transports of his wrath, flung the power of attorney at the head of the innocent maidservant, and was only forcibly withheld from horse-whipping the rascally messenger by whose sloth and drunkenness the ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... maize, yucca, and anana fields, where they scratch up the root and eat the grain and fruit; but the slightest noise drives them back to their holes. In the deeper recesses of the forest resounds the monotonous, drawling cry of the sloth. Here we have a symbol of life under the utmost degree of listlessness, and of the greatest insensibility in a state of languid repose. This emblem of misery fixes itself on an almost leafless bough, and there remains defenceless; a ready prey to any assailant. ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... the mob accept our schemes with ease. Behold them! They will give us little trouble By wanting—well, to analyse the Bubble; So they get something for themselves more solid, They'll sit serene and stolid In titled sloth and coronetted slumber. I can secure them, friends, in any number; For Guinea Pigs are numerous and prolific And as decoys their influence is mirific. So whilst we work our Bubble-blowing rigs, Hurrah, for Guinea Pigs! They'll take our fees, assent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... "We palliate our sloth by the specious pretext of difficulty." Nothing, in fact, is too difficult to accomplish, which we set about, with a proper consideration of those difficulties, and pursue with perseverance. The Indian language ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Trappe were not only immersed in luxury and sloth, but were abandoned to the most scandalous excesses; most of them lived by robbery, and several had committed assassinations on the travellers who had occasion to traverse the woods. The neighbourhood shrunk with terror from the ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... parents. Once he blamed himself bitterly for not having gone to Mr. Lavington the moment he discovered Argemone's affection, and insuring—as he then might have done—his consent. But again he felt that no sloth had kept him back, but adoring reverence for his God-given treasure, and humble astonishment at his own happiness; and he fled from the thought into renewed examination into the state of the masses, the effect of which was only to deepen his own determination ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... fear The Giants caused us, that the way was lost By which we could pursue a fit career In search of Jesus and the saintly Host; And your departure breeds such sorrow here, That comfortless we all are to our cost; But months and years you would not stay in sloth, Nor are you formed to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the tan-bark sidewalk before he put his feet firmly down and squared himself on them to give the two-finger whistle for his chum, which is the terror to the nervous. Much of the boy had gone out of him. He moved with the motion and sloth of decrepit age. Next week you will not know him for the same boy. His feet will be hardened, he will dance over the macadam mixed streets with the callosity of a stone-crusher, and the fugacious cat will ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... seems as far removed from those that wear hoofs as it could be, but the philosopher, considering the point at which it has arrived, rather than the route by which it got there, will class it with them, for its idea of life is just theirs turned topsy-turvy. The nails of the sloth, instead of being hammered into hoofs on the hard ground, have grown long and curved, like those of a caged bird, and become hooks by which it can hang, without effort, in the midst of the leaves on which it feeds. A minimum of intellect is required ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... unlawful occupation probably, or sitting drinking his wages in an alehouse. That was what they saw, and what any man may see to-day for himself in his own village, whether in England or Australia, that working man's paradise. Drink, dirt, and sloth, my friends of the working orders, will produce the same ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... suddenly warmed up Jennie Stone, "they tell us about a two-toed sloth living in Central and South America. Believe me! the present-day shoemaker seems to have secured a last to fit ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... provoking, but such was the tiresome mode of travelling through this country. No consideration can induce the natives to shake off their habitual indolence, not if a voice from heaven were to be heard, would they do it. Pleasure and sloth are with them synonymous terms, and they are scarcely alive to any other gratification. In the mean time, the chief, who appeared to be a very good sort of man, although he had little authority over his people, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... the priests were awakened by the singing of birds and the chattering of monkeys (as if in derision at their sloth), they no sooner discovered their great loss than they set to berating each another right soundly; not because they cared a whit for what evil the fellow could do, but that, having set their hearts on the hanging, it only grieved them to find that they had lost so excellent ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... their precepts to the age in which they lived. Such monks as I have met[285] maintained that extreme forms of tapas were good for the nerves of ancient saints but not for the weaker natures of to-day. But in avoiding rigorous severity, they have not fallen into sloth or luxury. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... sometimes, after years of practice, finds it difficult to begin the composition of some simple reception or commemorative address; but the reading of a meagre outline, not one word or idea of which may be directly used, serves to break the spell of intellectual sloth or inertia, and starts him upon his ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... of Ireland appear in Spenser's account in all their well-known forms; some of them, as if they were what we were reading of yesterday. Throughout the work there is an honest zeal for order, an honest hatred of falsehood, sloth, treachery, and disorder. But there does not appear a trace of consideration for what the Irish might feel or desire or resent. He is sensible indeed of English mismanagement and vacillation, of the way in which money and force were wasted by not ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... have no knowledge of the Miocene mammalian fauna of the Australian and Austro-Columbian provinces; but, seeing that not a trace of a Platyrrhine Ape, of a Procyonine Carnivore, of a characteristically South-American Rodent, of a Sloth, an Armadillo, or an Ant-eater has yet been found in Miocene deposits of Arctogaea, I cannot doubt that they already existed in ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... who sweat and struggle to maintain the appearance of gentlemen; and, on the other hand, there are gentlemen of rank who seem industrious to appear mean and degenerate; the one sort raise themselves either by ambition or virtue, while the other abase themselves by viciousness or sloth; so that we must avail ourselves of our understanding and discernment in distinguishing those persons, who, though they bear the same appellation, are yet so different in point of character. All ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... therefore, technical in origin, the natural efflorescence of highly cultivated agilities of brain, and hand, and eye, is worthy of all commendation. But there is another kind that goes under the name of slang, the offspring rather of mental sloth, and current chiefly among those idle, jocular classes to whom all art is a bugbear and a puzzle. There is a public for every one; the pottle-headed lout who in a moment of exuberance strikes on a new ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... completed the survey of India, he opened his batteries on the sloth and selfishness of too many of Christ's professed followers; he poured contempt upon the men who said: "They are not so green as to waste their money on the farce of Foreign Missions." "No, no, indeed," he continued, "they are not green, for greenness implies verdure, and beauty, and there ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... the megatherium, of the elephant, and of the mastodon, which travellers have brought from South America, have all been found in the light soil of the valleys and table-lands. Excepting the megalonyx,* a kind of sloth of the size of an ox, described by Mr. Jefferson, I know not a single instance of the skeleton of an animal buried in a cavern of the New World. (* The megalonyx was found in the caverns of Green Briar, in Virginia, at the distance of 1500 leagues from the megatherium, which resembles it very much, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... between the end of the last chapter and the beginning of this. Meanwhile, I had moved to sociable chambers within sound of the city clocks, and had lived the life of a lonely man about town, sinking more and more into the comfortable sloth of bachelorhood. I had long come to look back upon my pilgrimage as a sort of Indian-summer youth, being, as the reader can reckon for himself, just on thirty-seven. As one will, with one's most serious experiences, hastening to laugh lest ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... there is no life. She had let her arms fall by her sides—round, smooth arms with a pretty dimple at the elbow. Her wrists were delicate; her hands, which did not betray the servant, were embellished with a lady's fingernails. And lazily, with graceful sloth, she allowed her indolent figure to curve and sway;—a figure that a garter might span, and that was made even more slender to the eye by the projection of the hips and the curve of the hoops that gave the balloon-like roundness to her ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... streets and squares, and founding congregation after congregation among the masses of its population. Another man, thus arrested in a career of ceaseless movement and immured within prison walls, might have allowed his mind to stagnate in sloth and despair. But Paul behaved very differently. Availing himself of every possibility of the situation, he converted his one room into a center of far-reaching activity and beneficence. On the few square feet ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... if a score of nobles were to take upon themselves to tell her to set her house in order, to adopt reforms, and to throw aside sloth and luxury; and yet the Church is stirring up a war, and raising and paying an army of fighting men—and for what? To settle which of two men shall be pope. The simple thing would be to hold a high tournament, and to let Urban and ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... to bring these beasts, birds, and insects all together in one spot? The task seems superhuman. Some species could be found only in very remote places—the kangaroo only in Australia, the sloth only in South America, the polar bear only in the Arctic regions. How could Noah, in those days of difficult locomotion, have journeyed in search of these across broad rivers, and over continents and oceans? Did he bring them singly to his dwelling-place in Asia, or ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... time in studies, is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar; they perfect nature and are perfected by experience— for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... violence of his appointed share of life, not because the law of the state requires him, nor yet under the compulsion of some painful and inevitable misfortune which has come upon him, nor because he has had to suffer from irremediable and intolerable shame, but who from sloth or want of manliness imposes upon himself an unjust penalty. For him, what ceremonies there are to be of purification and burial God knows, and about these the next of kin should enquire of the interpreters and of the laws thereto relating, and do according to their injunctions. They who ...
— Laws • Plato
... work in these centuries appears in the lack of spiritual activity and in the predominance of the material side of religion. The mediaeval Church suffered badly from excessive conservatism, which led towards sloth and a complacent inactivity. The morbid element showed itself during the fifteenth century mainly in lack of real earnestness, in the enjoyment of luxurious laziness, and in the steady neglect of the age to revise its Christianity. ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... he, "cannot be of God, that one of His saints, the founder of this house, should lead into sloth and luxury the children of the house he has founded. Sooner could I believe that this is a malignant snare of the most Evil One, who heals the bodily ailments of a few that he may wreck the ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... pervading the country like some spirit of unrest, threading the intricacies of city slums, north, south, east, and west, personally interviewing all manner of loathly creatures, damaged by vice and sloth and ignorance and crime almost out of all semblance of humanity. He had not dreamed that such beings existed upon the earth. Sometimes, unaware of the circumstances and the danger they courted, they caught up a child wherewith to deceive him, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... feel a passion for glory; give me leave to seek it amidst the perils of war. My father, the sultan of Harran, has many enemies. Why does he not call me to his assistance? Why does he leave me here so long in obscurity? Must I spend my life in sloth, when all my brothers have the happiness to be fighting by his side?" "My son," answered Pirouze, "I am no less impatient to have your name become famous; I could wish you had already signalized yourself ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... word, Another's chilly smile or peevish frown, I caught their talk—but added none of mine. They said how she still fumbled with her fate, How she had banished visitants divine, How long her sleep had been, her sloth how great, How others had drawn near and passed her by, While she luxuriously had dreamed, dreamed on, She, she her own eternal enemy, And wanting brain, brain, brain would be undone. The glasses ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part of their time, to be employed in its service. But idleness taxes many of us much more; if we reckon all that is spent in absolute sloth, or doing of nothing; with that which is spent in idle employments or amusements that amounts to nothing. Sloth, by bringing on disease, absolutely shortens life. Sloth, like Rust, consumes faster than Labor ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... the soul open to all external things, fills it with a thousand fancies and questionings, pleasing or vexatious, absorbing the mind, and making it quite impossible to retire within one's self and be recollected. Then follow distaste, sloth, and ennui for all that savors of silence, ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B.
... of extreme temperance and toil, and where it was often to be sought, sword in hand, from an enemy far superior in numbers. Whatever may have been the vices of the Spaniards, they cannot have been those of effeminate sloth. Thus a sober, hardy, and independent race was gradually formed, prepared to assert their ancient inheritance, and to lay the foundations of far more liberal and equitable forms of government, than were known to ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... more remarkable, because his slaves gave him constant annoyance by their wastefulness and sloth and dishonesty. Thus, "Paris has grown to be so lazy and self-willed" that his master does not know what to with him; "Doll at the Ferry must be taught to knit, and made to do a sufficient day's work of it—otherwise (if ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... wilt thou never cease The fathers from their tombs to summon forth? Why bring them, with this dead age to converse, That stifled is by enemies and by sloth? And why dost thou, voice of our ancestors, That hast so long been mute, Resound so loud and frequent in our ears? Why all these grand discoveries? As in a flash the fruitful pages come, What hath this wretched ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... a State has been corrupted by luxury and idleness, it may by its mere greatness bear up under the burden of its vices. But even while he wrote, Rome, of which he spoke, had played out her masquerade of freedom. Other causes than luxury and sloth destroy Republics. If small, their larger neighbors extinguish them by absorption. If of great extent, the cohesive force is too feeble to hold them together, and they fall to pieces by their own weight. The paltry ambition of small men disintegrates them. The want ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... bright, And girdling lands of lustrous growth, Vast continents and isles of light, Dumb tracts of undiscovered sloth; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... yours is worth its weight in gold, and it's not to me but to you a statue ought to be raised, and I would undertake it. There, as you are lying now, in that pose; one doesn't know which is uppermost in it, sloth or strength! That's how I would cast you in bronze. You aimed a just reproach at my egoism and vanity! Yes! yes! it's useless talking of one's-self; it's useless bragging. We have no one yet, no men, look where you will. Everywhere—either small fry, ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... itself with appetite, and so much the worse for those who die of indigestion. Envy is a low passion which no one ever avows; to punish it in any other way than by its own corroding venom, I would have to torture everybody at Court; and weariness is the punishment of sloth. But lust is a different thing altogether; my chaste soul could not forgive such a sin, and I declare open war against it. My subjects are at liberty to think women handsome as much as they please; women may do all in their power to appear beautiful; people ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... has a long time perceived that, in the direction of affairs relative to this war with England, there have been manifested an inconceivable lukewarmness and sloth; but they discover themselves still more, at this moment, by the little inclination which, in general, the Regencies of the Belgic Provinces testify to commence a treaty of commerce and friendship with the new Republic ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... Diogenes's hatching was not very discrepant, when he defined lechery the occupation of folks destitute of all other occupation. For this cause the Syconian engraver Canachus, being desirous to give us to understand that sloth, drowsiness, negligence, and laziness were the prime guardians and governesses of ribaldry, made the statue of Venus, not standing, as other stone-cutters had used to ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... to be one of them. They were so loyal and kind. It was they who would carry out her aspiration. Her campaign against village sloth was actually begun! On what specific reform should she first loose her army? During the gossip after the meeting Mrs. George Edwin Mott remarked that the city hall seemed inadequate for the splendid modern Gopher Prairie. Mrs. Nat Hicks timidly wished that the young people could have free dances ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... sole freebooters of the wood Since Adam Bell and Robin Hood— Kept every where asunder From other tribes—King, Church, and State Spurning, and only dedicate To freedom, sloth, and plunder. Your forest-camp—the forms one sees Banditti like amid the trees, The ragged donkies grazing, The Sibyl's eye prophetic, bright With flashes of the fitful ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... cold touched my hand. I started violently, and saw close to me a dim pinkish thing, looking more like a flayed child than anything else in the world. The creature had exactly the mild but repulsive features of a sloth, the same low forehead and ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... to endure a second travail, and the chances thereof, than to have defaced an enterprise of so great assurance, until I knew whether it pleased God to put a disposition in her princely and royal heart either to follow or forslow (neglect, decline, lose through sloth) the same. I will therefore leave it to His ordinance that hath only power in all things; and do humbly pray that your honours will excuse such errors as, without the defence of art, overrun in every part the following discourse, in which ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh
... to reflect on the changed state of the American continent without the deepest astonishment. Formerly it must have swarmed with great monsters: now we find mere pigmies, compared with the antecedent, allied races. If Buffon had known of the gigantic sloth and armadillo-like animals, and of the lost Pachydermata, he might have said with a greater semblance of truth that the creative force in America had lost its power, rather than that it had never possessed great vigour. ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Gillman's Coleridge, Vol. I., deals rashly, unjustly, and almost maliciously, with some of our own particular friends; and yet, until late in this summer, Anno Domini 1844, we—that is, neither ourselves nor our friends—ever heard of its existence. Now a sloth, even without the benefit of Mr Waterton's evidence to his character, will travel faster than that. But malice, which travels fastest of all things, must be dead and cold at starting, when it can thus have lingered in the rear for six years; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... highly-coloured and unflattering pictures of the typical booksellers of the period. Tom Nash has limned for us a vivid little portrait in 'Pierce Penilesse' (1592), in which he declares that if he were to paint Sloth, 'I swear that I would draw it like a stationer that I know, with his thumb under his girdle, who, if ever a man come to his stall to ask him for a book, never stirs his head, or looks upon him, but stands stone still, ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... however degraded he may be, Swedenborg tells us there is a shrine that cannot be defiled, through which heavenly influences may come down into his life, and yet save him, if he will receive them ere he passes from this world; but when sloth has become habitual and confirmed, there is almost as little room for hope that this will ever take place as that artesian tubes will ever make the Saharan ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... with thee inclosed, I will loathe my pen and paper Art shall never be supposed, Sloth shall quench the ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... To carry on the work of the Church by revivals is as unreasonable as it would be to carry on a school, or a cotton factory, by a revival system—alternations of violent study and work, followed by relapses into indolence and sloth. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... Romans, likewise, and our own fathers imitated them, not being satisfied with their temporary fortune nor content with what they had inherited, and they regarded sloth as their sure destruction but exertion as their certain safety. They feared that if their treasures remained unaugmented they would be consumed and worn away by age, and were ashamed after receiving so rich a heritage to make no further additions: thus they performed ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part of their time, to be employed in its service; but idleness taxes many of us much more; sloth, by bringing on diseases, absolutely shortens life. Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while 'The used key is always bright,' as Poor Richard says. 'But dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of,' as ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the first years of my profession usually allow, and which diligent men, even with moderate talents, might often employ in a manner neither discreditable to themselves, nor wholly useless to others. Desirous that my own leisure should not be consumed in sloth, I anxiously looked about for some way of filling it up, which might enable me, according to the measure of my humble abilities, to contribute somewhat to the stock of general usefulness. I had long been convinced that ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... 'In the heathen classics you find no consciousness of sin.' It is very true—God be thanked for it. They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of 'enmity against God,' and didn't sit down and whine and groan against non-existent ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... sort (which by-the-bye would not prove me a Tory), but felt no vocation—perhaps no right—-to print them. I have always reproached myself as sorely amenable to the condemnations of a very fine poem by Barberino, On Sloth against Sin, which I translated in the Dante volume. Sloth, alas! has but too much to answer for with me; and is one of the reasons (though I will not say the only one), why I have always fallen back on quality instead of ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... we have defined what early rising is; seven, to those who have nothing to do,—as soon as ever business calls, to those who have. Was ever bed of sloth more eloquently reprobated than in the following lines from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... night we were certain he was on the very point of choking to death, and sat up in bed praying he wouldn't, and offering our month's salary to charity if he would; and through all our fatiguing anguish he snorted undisturbedly on. In House 35 he was known as "the Sloth." It was a ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... an animal destined for an active and useful life, Providence has ordained that sloth shall bring with it its own punishment. He who passes nearly the whole of his life in the open air, inhaling a salubrious atmosphere, enjoys health and vigour of body with tranquillity of mind, and dies at the utmost limit allotted to mortality. He, on the contrary, who leads an indolent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... body of life, and are "sin." "Call sin a lump—none other thing than thyself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing."[67] Capitulation to it is often brought about by mere slackness, or, as religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul. Sometimes; too, sin is deliberately indulged in because of the perverse satisfaction which this yielding to old craving gives ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... it is the sole formative influence I shall be better prepared to believe when I see that beauty is not regarded in Nature, but is a mere casual attendant upon use. The artist Greenough did, indeed, strenuously maintain this last. But the sloth and the bird-of-paradise are equally useful to themselves; if beauty were but an aspect of use, these should be equally comely in our eyes. No; "the struggle for life" has not grooved the bill of the auk, and painted the tail of the peacock, any more, so far as I can see, than it has given ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... these words so readily uttered, without premeditation, to declare the world's vanity, full of ridiculous contrariety, he made answer, that necessity compelled men to many such actions, and divers wills ensuing from divine permission, that we might not be idle, being nothing is so odious to them as sloth and negligence. Besides, men cannot foresee future events, in this uncertainty of human affairs; they would not so marry, if they could foretell the causes of their dislike and separation; or parents, if ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... we stand, The laws we made and guard, Our honour, lives, and land Are given for reward To Murder done by night, To Treason taught by day, To folly, sloth, and spite, And ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... his wandering. But he had only gone a few steps when once again he sank upon the grass and fell asleep and dreamed. Again he saw the field full of folk , and to them now Conscience was preaching, and at his words many began to repent them of their evil deeds. Pride, Envy, Sloth and others confessed their sins and ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... falling into plain and manifest destruction, and wouldst constrain us also to descend into like peril. But as long as we were tried in the warfare of this world, we failed in no point of duty. Thou thyself will bear me witness that we were never charged with sloth or heedlessness. ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... woman"—wholly to be loved By either name she found an easy way Into my heart, whose sentinels all proved Unfaithful to their trust, the luckless day She entered there. "Prudence and reason both! Did you not question her? How was it pray She so persuaded you?" "Nor sleep nor sloth," They cried, "o'ercame us then, a CHILD at play Went smiling past us, and then turning round Too late your heart to save, a woman's face ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... ended, Mubarek said to Zein ul Asnam, "Come, O my lord, let us set out on our way, lest we waste the time in sloth, now we have found that whereof we were in search." And the prince answered him, saying, "Thou art in the right." So Mubarek arose and fell to equipping them for the journey; moreover, he let make the young lady a camel-litter [127] with a travelling couch, [128] and they set out. But ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... The Jewish law, whate'er in mystic book Moses has handed down,—to show the way To none but he who the same rites observes, And those athirst to lead unto the spring Only if circumcised. Whereof the cause Was he, their sire, to whom each seventh day Was one of sloth, whereon he took in hand ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... can fight like a bull-dog, it can capture prey under or above ground, it can swim fearlessly, and it can sink wells for the purpose of quenching its thirst. Take the mole out of its proper sphere, and it is awkward and clumsy as the sloth when placed on level ground, or the seal when brought ashore. Replace it in the familiar earth and it becomes a different being, full of life and energy, and actuated by a fiery activity which seems quite inconsistent with its dull ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... in metal and stone. Miss Comstock, perceiving her interest in these toys, encouraged Adelle to try her own hand at the manufacture of jewelry, and engaged a needy woman worker to give her the necessary lessons in the lapidary art. Adelle had acquired considerable sloth from her desultory way of living; nevertheless, when the chance was forced into her hands, she took to the new work with ardor and produced some bungling imitations of the new art, which were much admired at the Villa Ponitowski. ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... be restrained in their hurry forward, the leaders, shouting with tears, examples of diligence, a pair in the rear crying out instances of sloth. ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... succeeding ages, yes, periods of ages, either wholly unknown or obscured or blemished with fables." Why this is so the great poet did not pretend to tell, but he thought that it might be because people did not know how to write in the first ages, or because their records had been lost in wars and by the sloth and ignorance that followed them. Perhaps men did not think that the records of their own times were worth preserving when they reflected how base and corrupt, how petty and perverse such deeds would appear ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... judging that means were to be spent upon learning, and not learning to be applied to means. And as for the privateness or obscureness (as it may be in vulgar estimation accounted) of life of contemplative men, it is a theme so common to extol a private life, not taxed with sensuality and sloth, in comparison and to the disadvantage of a civil life, for safety, liberty, pleasure, and dignity, or at least freedom from indignity, as no man handleth it but handleth it well; such a consonancy it hath to men's conceits in the expressing, and ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... every day he gave Thanks for the fair existence that was his; For a sick fancy made him not her slave, To mock him with her phantom miseries. No chronic tortures racked his aged limb, For luxury and sloth had ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... exists, but from which it is believed to have spread to others, we are bound to repay them, above all things, what we received from them. For I shall not be ashamed to go so far—especially as my life and achievements have been such as to exclude any suspicion of sloth or frivolity—as to confess that, whatever I have accomplished, I have accomplished by means of those studies and principles which have been transmitted to us in Greek literature and schools of thought. Wherefore, over and above the general good faith which is due to ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... rightly Nash's line. All the images it had awakened were false. His mind bred vermin. His thoughts were lice born of the sweat of sloth. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... patient in extreame adversitie, (Mans chiefest credit growes by dooing well). Be not high-minded in prosperitie; Falshood abhorre, no lying fable tell. Give not thyselfe to sloth, (the sinke of shame, The moath of ...
— The Affectionate Shepherd • Richard Barnfield
... La Tremouille, a man who had a foot in either camp, so that neither English nor Burgundians had ever raided on his rich lands, when these lay in their power. So, what with the self-seeking, and sloth, and jealousy of La Tremouille; what with the worldly policy of the Archbishop of Reims, crying Peace, where there was no peace, the Maid and the captains were not listened to, or, if they were heard, their plans were wrought out with ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... away in hideous sloth the inestimable gift of time; his valuable life, every second of which he would have to account for hereafter, passing away from him, unused. He might have been up stuffing himself with eggs and bacon, irritating the dog, or flirting ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... therefore, of any man in the sloth and darkness of a prison, is a loss to the nation, and no gain to the creditor. For of the multitudes who are pining in those cells of misery, a very small part is suspected of any fraudulent act by which they retain what belongs ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Grecians, we find that the chace, that foot-races, and especially dancing, principally composed the amusement of the young ladies of that country; where, in the great days of Greece, no maxim ever more practically prevailed, than that sloth or inactivity was equally the parent of diseases of the body, as of vices of the mind. Agreeable to which idea, one of the greatest physicians now in Europe, the celebrated Tronchin, while at Paris, vehemently declaimed against ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... be asked in ridicule whether I suppose that the megatherium and other allied huge monsters, which formerly lived in South America, have left behind them the sloth, armadillo, and anteater, as their degenerate descendants. This cannot for an instant be admitted. These huge animals have become wholly extinct, and have left no progeny. But in the caves of Brazil there are many extinct species which are closely allied in size and in all other characters ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... the wants and cravings of a growing creature; and whatever be their efforts, they are always surrounded by more than they can appropriate. It is not the ruin of a few individuals which may be soon repaired, but the inactivity and sloth of the community at large which would be fatal to such a people. Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid progress, its strength, and its greatness. Commercial business is there like a vast lottery, by which a small number of men continually ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... ideas, and weak, both in body and in mind, as the unhappy Californians. Their characteristics are stupidity and insensibility, want of knowledge and reflection, inconstancy, impetuosity, and blindness of appetite, excessive sloth, abhorrence of all fatigue of every kind, however trifling or brutal,—in fine, a most wretched want of everything which constitutes the real man and makes him rational, inventive, tractable, and useful to himself and others." All of which goes to show that climate is not everything, ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... "Spurn it. Shun sloth. In the midnight oil set the wick of knowledge. Burn it, trim it, ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... show Destruction to the rest: this pause between (Unanswerd least thou boast) to let thee know; At first I thought that Libertie and Heav'n To heav'nly Soules had bin all one; but now I see that most through sloth had rather serve, Ministring Spirits, traind up in Feast and Song; Such hast thou arm'd, the Minstrelsie of Heav'n, Servilitie with freedom to contend, As both thir deeds compar'd this day shall prove. 170 To whom ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... every better faculty of his head and heart, to invest the chequered vicissitudes of his fortune with a dignity derived from himself. The zeal of his nature overcame the temptations to that loitering and indecision, that fluctuation between sloth and consuming toil, that infirmity of resolution, with all its tormenting and enfeebling consequences, to which a literary man, working as he does at a solitary task, uncalled for by any pressing tangible demand, and to be recompensed by distant and dubious advantage, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... a queen to a poor devil of a subject? By what particular mark of superiority are you exempt from work? For a time you have had the excuse of illness, but you no longer have that. I should say that making tortillas was better than sitting in sloth while they are made for you! Do you never have any sense of shame that you are forever taking and ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... them. They give as a reason that, if the corsairs should discover that they were working these mines, they would come hither to take them captive; but even now, when no one can molest them, they do not work the mines, and hence we may infer that their poverty is mainly due to sloth. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... however, is the number of similar, but apparently independent, structures, that we suffer from a perfect embarras de richesses. Thus, for example, we have the convoluted windpipe of the sloth, reminding us{83} of the condition of the windpipe in birds; and in another mammal, allied to the sloth, namely the great ant-eater (Myrmecophaga), we have again an ornithic character in its horny gizzard-like stomach. In man and ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... Marbolt," he said, in confusion. "I acknowledge the sloth, but not the implied laxness anent ranching. Believe me, I have learned an ample lesson to-day. I now have a fuller appreciation of our worthy foreman; a fair knowledge of the horse, most accurately termed 'outlaw', as the bruised condition of my ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... in one day, I spoke a hundred times in prayer, and in the night almost as often; and even when I passed the night on the mountains, or in the forest, amid snow and ice and rain, I would awake before daybreak to pray. And I felt no discomfort, there was then no sloth in me, such as I find in my heart now, for then the ...
— The Annual Monitor for 1851 • Anonymous
... to Jove, Until he took from her the heavy curse Of immortality. With closer vows, The knight then sealed his worship and forswore All other aims and deeds to serve her cause. Thus passed unnoted seven barren years Of reckless passion and voluptuous sloth, Undignified by any lofty thought In his degraded mind, that sometime was Endowed with noble capability. From revelry to revelry he passed, Craving more pungent pleasure momently, And new intoxications, and each ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... grief, for the daily sacrifice could not be brought on this very morning of the Temple dedication, because the Temple keys lay under Solomon's pillow, and none dared awaken him. Word was sent to Bath-sheba, who forthwith aroused her son, and rebuked him for his sloth. "Thy father," she said, "was known to all as a God-fearing man, and now people will say, 'Solomon is the son of Bath-sheba, it is his mother's fault if he goes wrong.' Whenever thy father's wives were pregnant, they offered vows and prayed that a son worthy to reign might be born ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... useful products still the same. Not so the loss. The man of wealth and pride 275 Takes up a space that many poor supplied; Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds, Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds: The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth Has robbed the neighboring fields of half their growth;[22] 280 His seat, where solitary sports are seen, Indignant spurns the cottage from the green: Around the world each needful product flies, For all the luxuries the world ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... that he was growing old; he would still, perhaps, have fought the man who said that he was failing. And such a statement would be beside the fact; no perceptible decay had yet set up at the heart of his manhood. But the inception of that process was imminent; the sloth consequent upon Lettice's money ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... fire, and found the bread burning on the other side. She immediately assailed the king with reproaches. 'Why, man, do you sit thinking there, and are too proud to turn the bread? Whatever be your family, with such manners and sloth, what trust can be put in you hereafter? If you were a nobleman, you will be glad to eat the bread which you neglect to attend to.' The king, though stung by her upbraidings, yet heard her with patience and mildness, and roused by her scolding, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... I lie there on the ground; cold, cold, and pale: That death, I die in Roderick, is far More pleasant than that life, I live in Julia.— —See how he stands—when he is bid dispatch me! How dull! how spiritless! that sloth possest Thee not, when thou ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... with respect to the old man who knew Chinese, but could not tell what was o'clock. This individual was a man whose natural powers would have been utterly buried and lost beneath a mountain of sloth and laziness had not God determined otherwise. He had in his early years chalked out for himself a plan of life in which he had his own ease and self-indulgence solely in view; he had no particular bad passions to gratify, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... invigorating effect from the tight grasp of the child's warm little hand. Feeble as he was, she seemed to adopt him willingly for her protector. And the Doctor never afterwards shrank from his duty nor quailed beneath it, but bore himself like a man, striving, amid the sloth of age and the breaking-up of intellect, to earn the competency which he had failed to accumulate even in his most ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... discovery, thrusting it down the public's greedy maw. The ruthlessness of it! This exquisite creature of innocence, this very Ariel, born at last in life to leap forth from the imagination that had created her, this delicious spirit of freedom, come to beckon the world on to an awakening from its sloth and shame! To be used to feed the appetite for ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... as pride and envy are spiritual sins, so are sloth, avarice, and anger. But spiritual sins are concerned with the spirit, just as carnal sins are with the flesh. Therefore not only can there be pride and envy in the angels; ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... or a Pin to her Sleeve; a Pot, a Spit, or any Utensil to cook her Victuals, might as well be found among the Tartars as with her. She took every thing from her Sister at what Price she pleased, unsight unseen, and bought the Pig in the Poke. Necessity roused her from Stupidity and Sloth, she encouraged her Tenants to apply to Trades, assured them of a ready Market, and rewarded those that did their Work the best; and, at present, has every thing within herself. And tho' it must be owned a very unreasonable, ...
— The True Life of Betty Ireland • Anonymous
... of the Grail. To attempt to realize in thought the rapture and purification of such a vigil is to wonder that we so seldom pay heed to such inner promptings. So much we lose of the best kind of joy by spiritual inertia, or plain physical sloth; and some day it will be too late to get up and see the sunrise, or to follow the white feet of the moon as she treads her vanishing road of silver across the sea. This involuntary conscience that reproaches us ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... the most horrible wars which history has ever recorded. Meantime there was apathy where there should have been enthusiasm; parsimony and cowardice where generous and combined effort were more necessary than ever; sloth without security. The Protestant princes, growing fat and contented on the spoils of the church, lent but a deaf ear to the moans of Truchsess, forgetting that their neighbour's blazing roof was likely soon to fire their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... indignation would grow till he could contain himself no longer—and then he would take that ship home where he lived and keep it there carefully, expecting the owners to come for it, but they never did. And he would try to get the idleness and sloth out of the sailors of that ship by compelling them to take invigorating exercise and a bath. He called it "walking a plank." All the pupils liked it. At any rate, they never found any fault with it after trying it. When the owners were late coming for their ships, the Admiral ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... his life. For this reward of all his constancy he had endured what had been wellnigh unendurable—loneliness, homesickness, isolation, discomfort. For this he had kept his body clean and his soul clean where all about him was sloth and slackness. He thought backward upon that which he had undergone; he thought forward upon the dreary purposeless prospect that stretched unendingly before him. Never now could he bring himself to go back to the spot of his shattered dreams. And to him that was the one place ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... if this Part of our Trade were well cultivated, we should gain from one Nation; and if another, from another. I have heard him prove that Diligence makes more lasting Acquisitions than Valour, and that Sloth has ruin'd more Nations than the Sword. He abounds in several frugal Maxims, amongst which the greatest Favourite is, 'A Penny saved is a Penny got.' A General Trader of good Sense is pleasanter Company than a general Scholar; and Sir ANDREW having a natural ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Palinuris, steering straight the gallant bark, By voice and exhortation keep your heroes to the mark. Cheer the plucky, chide the cowards who to do their work are loth, And forbid them to grow torpid by indulging selfish sloth. Fool! I know my words are idle! yet if any love remain; If my honour be your glory, my discredit be your pain; If a spark of old affection in your hearts be still alive! Rally round old Father Camus, ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... arouse us! We are sleeping, Dreaming we wake, while through the heavy night Hardly perceived, the foe moves on unchallenged, Glad of the dream that doth delay the fight. O Christ our Captain, lead us out to battle! Shame on the sloth of soldiers of ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... yet night." Early rising is a great trial to some, but I think those who are conscientious often make a mistake between sloth and conscientious care of health: and the Virtuous Woman should be very careful of her health. Some girls think it fine not to be; they say, "Oh, well, I shall only die the sooner! Better to wear out than rust out!" and they feel—and so do some of their friends—that they ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... will, or do not will, that, in the real world in which we ourselves have to live and struggle, certain forces shall be operative,—that there shall be the beauty of health, as in the "Discobolus;" material love which is divine, as in the "Sistine Madonna;" that war shall be horrible; that sloth unstriven against shall triumph over love, as in "The Statue and the Bust;" that defiance of the social organism shall involve self-destruction, as in "Anna Karenina." The person or the combination of events expressing this idea we do not seek in our personal experience, ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... impoverishment of the life. There can be no true giving of the life in service unless there is a wise enriching of the self, a thorough fitting for that service. The more of a man you are, the brighter your intellect, the broader your sympathies, the better your service to the world may be. The sloth that sinks the soul in indifference to its own development is the most sinful of all forms ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... their crime, you ask? Nay, listen: "We Were sullen—sad what time we drank the light, And delicate air, that all day daintily Is cheered by sunshine; for we bore black night And murky smoke of sloth, in God's despite, Within our barren souls, by discontent From joy of all fair things ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... never known you were there; but, luckily for the children who lived on earth when it did (if there were any), it did not eat flesh, but only the leaves of trees and other vegetable things. It was called the giant ground sloth, and, as you may judge from this name, was not very quick in its movements. It was not found in England, but in South America, and there are now no more like it in existence; and if we had not got its skeleton we should never have ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... Smithfield, born in Clapton, then a country village of the parish of Hackney, in 1727. As you will see by and by, Howard spent the last seventeen years of his life in fighting three giants who were very hard to beat, named Ignorance, Sloth, and Dirt; and it is all the more difficult to overcome them because they are generally to be met with together. Unfortunately, they never can be wholly killed, for when you think they are left dead on the field after a hard struggle, they always come to life again; but they have ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... hardy study, labouring under the morbi eruditorum, but great overgrown dignitaries and rectors, with rubicund noses and gouty ancles, or broad bloated faces, dragging along great swag bellies; the emblems of sloth ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... dwell therein, and the same nation that was sometime first in Ireland, and all according thereto in tongue, in manners, and in kind. The men are light of heart, fierce, and courageous on their enemies. They love nigh as well death as thraldom, and they account it for sloth to die in bed, and a great worship and virtue to die in a field fighting against enemies. The men be of scarce living, and many suffer hunger long time, and eat selde tofore the sun going down, and use flesh, milk, meats, fish, and fruits more than ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... conformity. Could the history of opinions be fully written, it would be seen how large a part in human proceedings the love of conformity, or rather the fear of non-conformity, has occasioned. It has triumphed over all other fears; over love, hate, pity, sloth, anger, truth, pride, comfort, self-interest, vanity, and maternal love. It has torn down the sense of beauty in the human soul, and set up in its place little ugly idols which it compels us to worship with more than Japanese devotion. It has contradicted Nature in the most obvious ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... protect their country, their property, wives and children, and, what is dearer than these, their liberty and lives; that they should not suffer their hands to be tied behind their backs by a nation which, unless they were enervated by idleness and sloth, was not more powerful than themselves, but that they should arm those hands with buckler, sword, and spear, ready for the field of battle; and, because they thought this also of advantage to the people they were about to leave, they, with the help of the miserable natives, built ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas
... winter months, when inspection is scarce possible, it must seem a vain toil to polish the brass hand-rail of the stair, or to keep an unrewarded vigil in the lightroom; and the keepers are habitually tempted to the beginnings of sloth, and must unremittingly resist. He who temporises with his conscience is already lost. I must tell here an anecdote that illustrates the difficulties of inspection. In the days of my uncle David and my father there was a station which they regarded with jealousy. The ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... citizens. America was still undiscovered; the overland route to India was the only one known; the people of the continent outside of Italy were unthrifty serfs, ruled and ruined by unthrifty lords. The whole world's ignorance, pride, and sloth were Venetian gain; and the religious superstitions of the day, which, gross as they were, embodied perhaps its noblest and most hopeful sentiment, were a source of incalculable profit to the sharp-witted ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... vogue—Cannes is charming, magnificent! Cannes, certainly, with her fields of jasmine and roses, her groves of orange-trees, her burning sun, blue skies and sea, and her warm pine-woods, is a delightful spot;—but Cannes is also a place of languor and sloth, a lavender-water country. If you have the gout, if you are old and rich, if you have delicate lungs, go to Cannes, your life will ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... with them. He changes suddenly, when their change is sudden, and is as unlike what he was just before, as one fortune or external condition is unlike another. He moves when he is urged by appetite; else, he remains in sloth and inactivity. He lives, and he dies, and he has done nothing, but leaves the world as he found it. And what the individual is, such is his whole generation; and as that generation, such is the generation before and after. No ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... of its wings. These two stages are associated with a buoyant exaltation (piti) and a steady inward bliss called sukha [Footnote ref 1] instilling the mind. The formation of this first jhana roots out five ties of avijja, kamacchando (dallying with desires), vyapado (hatred), thinamiddham (sloth and torpor), uddhaccakukkuccam (pride and restlessness), and vicikiccha (doubt). The five elements of which this jhana is constituted are vitakka, vicara, plti, sukham and ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... the passionate ardour of discoverers, the fiery enthusiasm of confessors. They stood alone, sustained but little by intercourse among themselves, and wholly misunderstood by the people round them. Italy, sunk in sloth, priest-ridden, tyrant-ridden, exhausted with the unparalleled activity of the Renaissance, besotted with the vices of slavery and slow corruption, had no ears for spirit-thrilling prophecy. The Church, terrified by ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... of fluids; 840 Each supples a dry brain, fills you its ins-and-outs, Gives your life's hour-glass a shake when the thin sand doubts Whether to run on or stop short, and guarantees Age is not all made of stark sloth and arrant ease. I have seen my little lady once more, Jacynth, the Gipsy, Berold, and the rest of it, For to me spoke the Duke, as I told you before; I always wanted to make a clean breast of it: And now it is made-why, my heart's blood, that went trickle, Trickle, but anon, in such ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... lovely scarlet begonias, and spotted caladiums, shaded by graceful tree-ferns and overhung by trees full of exquisite parasites and orchids. Among these, the most conspicuous, after the palms, are the tall thin-stemmed sloth-trees, so called from their being a favourite resort of the sloth, who with great difficulty crawls up into one of them, remains there until he has demolished every leaf, and then passes on to ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... the winter months, when inspection is scarce possible, it must seem a vain toil to polish the brass hand-rail of the stair, or to keep an unrewarded vigil in the light-room; and the keepers are habitually tempted to the beginnings of sloth, and must unremittingly resist. He who temporises with his conscience is already lost. I must tell here an anecdote that illustrates the difficulties of inspection. In the days of my uncle David and my father there was a station which they regarded with ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and well may they be proud of a social position, which is due to the honest industry and hereditary virtues of several generations. Whilst some of patrician extraction, crushed under the weight of vices, or made inert by sloth, or labor-contemning pride, and degenerating from pure gold into vile dross, have been swept away, and have sunk into the dregs and sewers of the commonwealth. Thus in Louisiana, the high and the low, although the country has never suffered from any political or civil convulsions, seem to ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... the way to public business, not only to the old noblesse, but to the aristocracy of the future; in continuing and exaggerating the work of absolute monarchy; in preparing for a community of officials and administrators; in lowering the level of humanity; in reducing to sloth and brutalizing or blighting the elite of the families which maintain or raise themselves; and in withering the most precious of nurseries, that in which ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... inadequacy of its work in these centuries appears in the lack of spiritual activity and in the predominance of the material side of religion. The mediaeval Church suffered badly from excessive conservatism, which led towards sloth and a complacent inactivity. The morbid element showed itself during the fifteenth century mainly in lack of real earnestness, in the enjoyment of luxurious laziness, and in the steady neglect of the age to revise its Christianity. ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... loitered in spite of all he could do, his indignation would grow till he could contain himself no longer—and then he would take that ship home where he lived and keep it there carefully, expecting the owners to come for it, but they never did. And he would try to get the idleness and sloth out of the sailors of that ship by compelling them to take invigorating exercise and a bath. He called it "walking a plank." All the pupils liked it. At any rate, they never found any fault with it after trying it. When ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... the survey of India, he opened his batteries on the sloth and selfishness of too many of Christ's professed followers; he poured contempt upon the men who said: "They are not so green as to waste their money on the farce of Foreign Missions." "No, no, indeed," he continued, "they are not green, for greenness ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... age in the place. Miss Meigs 'did' for her. And since then she has been living on there. No one wanted the house—the poor Somerses!—and she was used to it. She's an old thing herself, and of course she hasn't the nerves of a sloth. Now she 'does' for Kathleen. Of course later there'll have to be a nurse again. Kathleen mustn't die with only Melora Meigs. I'm not sure, either, that Melora will last. She all crooked ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... iv. p. 271, 272. His partial evidence is marked by an air of candor and truth. He observes these vicissitudes of sloth and activity, not as a vice, but as a singularity ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... "for if you were really in love with me, you would not have turned to see another woman." And the Persian poet Jami, in his Baharistan, relates that a man with a very long nose asked a woman in marriage, saying: "I am no way given to sloth, or long sleeping, and I am very patient in bearing vexations." To which she replied: "Yes, truly: hadst thou not been patient in bearing vexations thou hadst not carried that nose of ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... caught some of the forerunners of the Gothic host, the Uhlans, if we may call them so, of Theodoric: everything foreboded an encounter, more serious and perhaps more triumphant than any that had been seen since the days of Theodosius. Then, as in a moment, all was changed. Zeno's old spirit of sloth and cowardice returned. He would not undergo the fatigue of the long marches through Thrace, he would not look upon the battle-field, the very pictures of which he found so terrible; it was publicly ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... timbrels. Then the name of a coach was heathen Greek. Who ever saw, but upon extraordinary occasions, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Francis Drake ride in a coach? They made small use of coaches; there were but few in those times, and they were deadly foes to sloth and effeminacy. It is in the memory of many when in the whole kingdom there was not one! It is a doubtful question whether the devil brought tobacco into England in a coach, for both appeared at the same time." It appears that families, for the sake of their exterior show, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... yucca, and anana fields, where they scratch up the root and eat the grain and fruit; but the slightest noise drives them back to their holes. In the deeper recesses of the forest resounds the monotonous, drawling cry of the sloth. Here we have a symbol of life under the utmost degree of listlessness, and of the greatest insensibility in a state of languid repose. This emblem of misery fixes itself on an almost leafless bough, and there remains defenceless; a ready prey to any assailant. Better defended is ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... white-thorn laden home. Some have dispatch'd their cakes and cream, Before that we have left to dream: And some have wept, and woo'd, and plighted troth, And chose their priest, ere we can cast off sloth: Many a green-gown has been given; Many a kiss, both odd and even: Many a glance, too, has been sent From out the eye, love's firmament: Many a jest told of the keys betraying This night, and locks ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... are the Orientals of Europe, but St. Petersburg is a German town, German industry corrects the old Muscovite sloth and cunning. The immigrant strangers rise to the highest offices, for the crown employs them as a counterpoise on the old nobility; as burgher incorporations were used by the kings of three ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... her sloth and indifference, Rose caught, from the empty couch which had been destined for her own use, the upper covering, and dragging it with her into the inner ante-room, disposed it so as, with the assistance of the rushes ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... model as a food producer. His three pleasures are eating, sleeping, and growing fat. He follows these pleasures with such persistence that 250 days are enough to perfect him. It can certainly be no hardship to a pig to encourage him in a life of sloth and gluttony which appeals to his taste ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... buried fathom-deep in his pockets, as if part of his brain lay there to be rummaged; and he sucks at his old pipe as if his head, like other venerable hulks, must be smoked out at intervals. His walk is that of a sloth, one foot dragging heavily behind the other. I meet him as I go to the post-office, and on returning, twenty minutes later, I pass him again, a little farther advanced. All the children accost him, and I have seen him stop—no great retardation ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... sentimental nor unintelligent, neither nervous nor senseless. It is well known as a cure to all sorts of mental disease, occasioned by nervous disturbance, as a nourishment to the fatigued brain, and also as a stimulus to torpor and sloth. It is self-control, as it is the subduing of such pernicious passions as anger, jealousy, hatred, and the like, and the awakening of noble emotions such as sympathy, mercy, generosity, and what not. It is a mode of Enlightenment, ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... :Microsloth Windows: /mi:'kroh-sloth' win'dohz/ /n./ Hackerism for 'Microsoft Windows', a windowing system for the IBM-PC which is so limited by bug-for-bug compatibility with {mess-dos} that it is agonizingly slow on anything less than a fast ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... of any man in the sloth and darkness of a prison, is a loss to the nation, and no gain to the creditor. For of the multitudes who are pining in those cells of misery, a very small part is suspected of any fraudulent act by which they retain what belongs to others. The rest are imprisoned ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Eastern churches." For such an embassy, a time and character less propitious could not easily have been found. Benedict the Twelfth [3] was a dull peasant, perplexed with scruples, and immersed in sloth and wine: his pride might enrich with a third crown the papal tiara, but he was alike unfit for the regal ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... and indolence, that invests the hypocritical designer with a power almost absolute, that keeps justice muzzled on her throne-the natural offspring of that demon-making institution that scruples not to brunt the intellect of millions, while dragging a pall of sloth over the land. ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... the number of similar, but apparently independent, structures, that we suffer from a perfect embarras de richesses. Thus, for example, we have the convoluted windpipe of the sloth, reminding us{83} of the condition of the windpipe in birds; and in another mammal, allied to the sloth, namely the great ant-eater (Myrmecophaga), we have again an ornithic character in its horny gizzard-like stomach. In man and the highest apes the caecum has a ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... Byron at Missolonghi was not only hailed as a new era in the history of Greece, but as the beginning of a new cycle in his own extraordinary life. His natural indolence disappeared; the Sardanapalian sloth was thrown off, and he took a station in the van of her efforts ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal—these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... had no oil in their lamps: their way was material; thus they were in doubt and dark- ness. They heeded not their sloth, their fading warmth [5] of action; hence the steady decline of spiritual light, until, the midnight gloom upon them, they must borrow the better-tended lamps of the faithful. By entering the guest-chamber of Truth, and beholding the ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... three days myself to chat with you in a quiet way; so snug! and tell you how matters go upon 'Change, or in the House, or according to the blockhead's first pursuits, whether lucrative or politic, which thus he leaves; and lays himself down a voluntary prey to his own sensuality and sloth, while the ambition and avarice of the nephews and nieces, with their rascally adherents and coadjutors, reap the advantage, ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... then, that I was pleased with my duty as a guardian of the flock, for it seemed to me that in that way I ate the bread of industry, and that sloth, the root and mother of all vices, came not nigh me; for if I rested by day, I never slept at night, the wolves continually assailing us and calling us to arms. The instant the shepherds said to me, "The wolf! the wolf! ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Thou art laughing and scorning; Thou hast a nest for thy love and thy rest, And, though little troubled with sloth, Drunken Lark! thou would'st be loth 20 To be such a traveller as I. Happy, happy Liver, With a soul as strong as a mountain river Pouring out praise to the almighty Giver, Joy and jollity be with ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... to the press, but very poor patrons of booksellers. From various sources we get some highly-coloured and unflattering pictures of the typical booksellers of the period. Tom Nash has limned for us a vivid little portrait in 'Pierce Penilesse' (1592), in which he declares that if he were to paint Sloth, 'I swear that I would draw it like a stationer that I know, with his thumb under his girdle, who, if ever a man come to his stall to ask him for a book, never stirs his head, or looks upon him, but stands stone still, and speaks not a word, only with his little finger points backward to his ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... throwing away in hideous sloth the inestimable gift of time; his valuable life, every second of which he would have to account for hereafter, passing away from him, unused. He might have been up stuffing himself with eggs and bacon, irritating the dog, or flirting with ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... to the fellow whom we had designated the sloth,) said a half-naked lad, with a strong Irish accent, "Come, boy, ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... alike as the Italians and the Irish; and I ask myself, How is it that every one is so sanguine about the one, and so hopeless about the other? Why do we hear of the capacity and the intelligence of the former, and only of the latter what pertains to their ignorance and their sloth? Oh! unjust generation of men! have not my poor countrymen all the qualities you extol in these same Peninsulars, plus a few others not ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... was a great change from fertility to barrenness. From the moment we entered Bohemia we were oppressed by a sense of poverty, of sloth, or some worse curse resulting from Austrian domination, which seemed to have been enough to cripple even Nature herself as she stood about us. It was evident that we had got among another race of people, or else into contact with a quite different state ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... 'neath them lies, That fears to meet, yet will not fly, Your stranger spirit drawing nigh. What if our times seem sliding down? She lives, creation's flower and crown. What if your way seems dull and long? Each tiny triumph over wrong, Each effort up through sloth and fear, And she and you are brought more near. So rapping out these ashes light,— "My pipe, you've served ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... revelers by night! Stealthy companions of the downy moth— Diana's motes, that flit in her pale light, Shunners of sunbeams in diurnal sloth;— These be the feasters on night's silver cloth;— The gnat with shrilly trump is their convener, Forth from their flowery chambers, nothing loth, With lulling tunes to charm the air serener, Or dance upon the grass to ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... inaccessible straths and spots among the mountains, where they lived in family with their pigs and kyloes (cattle), in turf cabins of the most miserable description; they spoke only Gaelic, and spent the whole of their time in indolence and sloth. Thus they had gone on from father to son, with little change, except what the introduction of illicit distillation had wrought, and making little or no export from the country beyond the few lean kyloes, which paid the rent and produced wherewithal to pay for ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... among the mammals are known as the placentals, or those which bring forth mature young. In this class are found the ant-eaters, sloth, manatee, the whale and porpoise, the horse, cow, sheep, and other hoofed animals; the elephant, seal, the dog, wolf, lion, tiger, and all flesh eating animals; the hares, rats, mice, and ail other gnawing animals; the bats, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... birth, said one day to his mother: "Madam, I begin to grow weary of Samaria; I feel a passion for glory; give me leave to seek it amidst the perils of war. My father the sultan of Harran has many enemies. Why does he not call me to his assistance? Must I spend my life in sloth, when all my brothers have the happiness to be fighting by his side?" "My son," answered Pirouze, "I am no less impatient to have your name become famous; I could wish you had already signalised yourself against ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... one—whom English society in its folly unconsciously selected as a model, the knowledge would advance us little. The psychology of imitation is still impenetrable and likely to remain so. The simple interpretation of our troubles as a form of sloth—a travelling along lines of least resistance—can scarcely be maintained. For first there have been times when learning and science were the fashion. Whether society benefited directly therefrom may, in passing, be doubted, but certainly learning did. Secondly there are plenty of men who under ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... just defined the martial power as that "which punishes knaves and makes idle persons work." For that is indeed the ultimate and perennial soldiership; that is the essential warrior's office to the end of time. "There is no discharge in that war." To the compelling of sloth, and the scourging of sin, the strong hand will have to address itself as long as this wretched little dusty and volcanic world breeds nettles, and spits fire. The soldier's office at present is indeed supposed to ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... by music or eloquence, by book or newspaper, by trade and profession, many choose sloth and self-indulgence. These needy millions, blinded with sin and ignorance, stand forth as a great opportunity for loving hearts. Sympathy is making beautiful the pathway of knowledge, that young hearts may be allured along the shining ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... found an estimable sterling man of humane and firm character. He started from the fundamental principle that it was of little use freeing the people from this or that special superstition, but that we should do better by working for the future against sloth of thought and want of independent mental character from the very bottom—namely, by educating our young people. Therefore, he set great store by our undertaking. And when I told him of our downcast spirits and the absolute danger in which we lived at the ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... reared itself on its hind legs from the back of a chair to which it clung, and clawed out with its forepaws like a cat. Its manner of clinging with its claws, and the sluggishness of its motions, gave it a great resemblance to a sloth. It uttered no sound, and remained all night on the spot where I had placed it in the morning. The next day, I put it on a tree in the open air, and at night it escaped. These small Tamanduas are nocturnal in their habits, and feed on those species of termites ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... defended his world, and tried to force Hator to acknowledge loveliness and joy. But Hator, answering all his marvellous speeches in a few concise, iron words, showed how this joy and beauty was but another name for the bestiality of souls wallowing in luxury and sloth. Shaping smiled, and said, 'How comes it that your wisdom is greater than that of the Master of wisdom?' Hator said, 'My wisdom does not come from you, nor from your world, but from that other world, which ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... battle; sloth's determined foe; Of scholars chief, who to the Veda cling; Rich in the riches that ascetics know; Glad, gainst the foeman's elephant to show His valor;—such ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... aloft, sucking the juices from the fettered flies, teaching its spawn to prey and feed; content in squalor and in plenitude; in sensual sloth, and in the increase of its body ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... squirrel and the monkey, but under them. Suspended from the branches, it moves, and rests, and sleeps. So much of its anatomical structure as illustrates this peculiarity it is necessary to state. The arm and fore-arm of the sloth, taken together, are nearly twice the length of the hind legs; and they are, both by their form and the manner in which they are joined to the body, quite incapacitated from acting in a perpendicular direction, or in supporting it upon the earth, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... conscientious convictions. He had great self-control, and was both morally and physically courageous. Though as a youth he had been idle, he was never addicted to pleasure; his accession brought him work which was congenial to him, he overcame his natural tendency to sloth and, so long as his health allowed, discharged his kingly duties with diligence. His intellectual powers were small and uncultivated, but he had plenty of shrewdness and common sense; he showed a decided ability for kingcraft, not of the highest kind, and gained many successes over powerful ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... will tell you better, I suspect, than I can what is doing in the House of Representatives. The sloth with which things move is a daily source of vexation to me, as tending to protract the session. I dine with the president about once a fortnight, and now and then meet the ministers in the street. They are all very busy: quite men of business. The Senate and the vice-president are content ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... off, Jewish bread is to this day made without leaven. They are said to have devoted the seventh day to rest, because that day brought an end to their troubles.[475] Later, finding idleness alluring, they gave up the seventh year as well to sloth.[476] Others maintain that they do this in honour of Saturn;[477] either because their religious principles are derived from the Idaei, who are supposed to have been driven out with Saturn and become the ancestors of the Jewish people; or else because, ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... found France rent asunder, Sloth in the mart and schism in the temple; Broils festering to rebellion; and weak laws Rotting away with rust in antique sheaths. I have re-created France; and, from the ashes Of the old feudal and decrepit carcase, Civilisation on her luminous ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... still held the thrones of collegiate power. Yet the eye of an imaginative scholar as he gazed upon the grey walls, reared by piety, munificence, and love of learning in a far-off time, might well discern behind an unattractive screen of academic sloth, the venerable past, not dim and cold, but in its traditions rich, nourishing, and alive. Such an one could see before him present days of honourable emulation and stirring acquisition—fit prelude of a man's part to play in a strenuous future. It is from Gladstone's introduction ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... and shall we claim to be an exception? How do we judge as to the propriety of any course of life except by observation, experience or history? We see industry and integrity rewarded with competence or wealth—we see intemperance and sloth followed with disease, loss of reputation and poverty. These are sure grounds on which to predict respecting our neighbors, and by which to regulate our own conduct. On similar principles a wise ...
— Count The Cost • Jonathan Steadfast
... feet. The six legs looked as strong as steel cables, and were about a foot through, while a huge, bony proboscis nine feet in length preceded the body. This was carried horizontally between two and three feet from the ground. Presently a large ground sloth came to the pool to drink, lapping up the water at the sides that had partly cooled. In an instant the black armored monster rushed down the slope with the speed of a nineteenth-century locomotive, and seemed about as formidable. The sloth turned in ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... justice and determine controversies among their own people. Robberies which are committed beyond the boundaries of each State bear no infamy, and they avow that these are committed for the purpose of disciplining their youth and of preventing sloth. And when any of their chiefs has said in an assembly that "he will be their leader; let those who are willing to follow, give in their names," they who approve of both the enterprise and the man arise and promise their assistance and are applauded ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... skill to snare the souls of men and draw them after her, when all the while their comrades are calling to them on the easy downward way. [25] It is true there are degrees, and where the evil springs only from sloth and lethargy, I look on the creatures as mere drones, only injuring the hive by what they cost: but there are others, backward in toil and forward in greed, and these are the captains in villainy: for not seldom can they show that rascality has its advantages. Such as they ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... begin the composition of some simple reception or commemorative address; but the reading of a meagre outline, not one word or idea of which may be directly used, serves to break the spell of intellectual sloth or inertia, and starts him upon ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... Where thought meets thought ere words its form array, And all is sacred, elegant, and gay: Such pleasure leaves no sorrow on the mind, Too great to fall, to sicken too refined; Too soft for noise, and too sublime for art, The social solace of the feeling heart, For sloth too rapid, and for wit too high, 'Tis virtue's pleasure, ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... besides, it blends itself with appetite, and so much the worse for those who die of indigestion. Envy is a low passion which no one ever avows; to punish it in any other way than by its own corroding venom, I would have to torture everybody at Court; and weariness is the punishment of sloth. But lust is a different thing altogether; my chaste soul could not forgive such a sin, and I declare open war against it. My subjects are at liberty to think women handsome as much as they please; women may do all in their power to appear ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... she went anxious to the fire, and found the bread burning on the other side. She immediately assailed the king with reproaches. 'Why, man, do you sit thinking there, and are too proud to turn the bread? Whatever be your family, with such manners and sloth, what trust can be put in you hereafter? If you were a nobleman, you will be glad to eat the bread which you neglect to attend to.' The king, though stung by her upbraidings, yet heard her with patience and mildness, and roused by her scolding, took ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... were wont to be rested, stood a tall thin man, in a heavy broad-brimmed hat, large bands, crimson scarf, and buff coat, who was in fiery and eager words calling on all those around to awaken from the sleep of sloth and sin, break their bonds and fight for freedom and truth. He waved his long sword as he spoke and dared the armies of Satan to come on, and it was hard to tell which he really meant, the forces of sin, or the armies of men whom he believed to be ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... remain at Bidjie until the following day. This was very provoking, but such was the tiresome mode of travelling through this country. No consideration can induce the natives to shake off their habitual indolence, not if a voice from heaven were to be heard, would they do it. Pleasure and sloth are with them synonymous terms, and they are scarcely alive to any other gratification. In the mean time, the chief, who appeared to be a very good sort of man, although he had little authority over his people, sent them a fatted goat; ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... ranks, who have no calls to exertion in gaining the means of subsistence, and no objects of interest on which to exercise their mental faculties, and who, consequently, sink into a state of mental sloth and nervousness, which not only deprives them of much enjoyment, but subjects them to suffering, both of body and mind from the ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... in youth when he is not possessed of the greater qualities of genius—his imaginative visions, his aspirations, his pride in apartness from men, his self-contentment, his sloth, the presence in him of barren imagination, the absence from it of the spiritual, nothing in him which as yet desires, through the sorrow and strife of life, God's infinitude, or man's love; a natural life indeed, forgiveable, gay, sportive, dowered ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... juncture, and, in fact, up to the present moment, there was, and is, a most fierce and bitter outcry, and detraction loud and low, against General McClellan, accusing him of sloth, imbecility, cowardice, treasonable purposes, and, in short, utterly denying his ability as a soldier, and questioning his integrity as a man. Nor was this to be wondered at; for when before, in all history, do we find a general ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... killed before in him. I lie there on the ground; cold, cold, and pale: That death, I die in Roderick, is far More pleasant than that life, I live in Julia.— —See how he stands—when he is bid dispatch me! How dull! how spiritless! that sloth possest Thee not, when ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... be thought a hard government that should tax its people one-tenth part of their time, to be employed in its service; but idleness taxes many of us much more; sloth, by bringing on diseases, absolutely shortens life. 'Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears; while the used key is always bright,' as Poor Richard says. 'But dost thou love life, then do not ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... ears who ought to hear; Idle their hands, and dull their soul; While sloth, or ignorance, or fear, Fetters them ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... saw then in my dream, that he went on thus, even until he came at a bottom, where he saw, a little out of the way, three men fast asleep, with fetters upon their heels. The name of the one was Simple, another Sloth, ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan
... thee, because thou wert falling into plain and manifest destruction, and wouldst constrain us also to descend into like peril. But as long as we were tried in the warfare of this world, we failed in no point of duty. Thou thyself will bear me witness that we were never charged with sloth or heedlessness. ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... gruesome place was Elvidner (misery), the hall of the goddess Hel, whose dish was Hunger. Her knife was Greed. "Idleness was the name of her man, Sloth of her maid, Ruin of her threshold, Sorrow of her bed, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... him Nabis' palace and treasure, but he was known to hate bribes so much that nobody could at first be found to make him the offer. One man was sent to Megalopolis, but when he saw Philopoemen's plain, grave, hardy life, and heard how much he disapproved of sloth and luxury, he did not venture to say a word about the palace full of Eastern magnificence, but went back to Sparta. He was sent again, and still found no opportunity; and when, the third time, he did speak, Philopoemen thanked the Spartans, but said he advised ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to go to church on Sunday, and to confession sometimes; to have one's children baptized; to avoid giving offense to the clergy; and to make sure of their good offices when one came to die. But the belief in their heaven and hell was not strong enough to very much expel the greed, sloth, lust, avarice, pride to ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... tale for the young, illustrating "the battle which all must fight" with the Giants Sloth, Selfishness, Untruth, Hate, ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... in time; and yet when for one reason or another his pleasures fail him, he will be miserable, and you with him: and what is worse, perhaps in some capital encounter of life, you will be ready—you and he together—to sacrifice manly dignity, truth, and duty, from sheer sloth. ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... work them. They give as a reason that, if the corsairs should discover that they were working these mines, they would come hither to take them captive; but even now, when no one can molest them, they do not work the mines, and hence we may infer that their poverty is mainly due to sloth. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... Mrs. Barker, and upon the head she tapped into sloth her rising resentment. "Nobody dead," she said, with a smack of the mouth, "but Liza Pruitt ain't expected ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... to you!" cried the sailor, as, relieved of the boy's weight, he too swung head downwards for a moment or two, then with a quick effort wrenched himself upwards, got hold of the branch with both hands, and after hanging like a sloth for a few moments, succeeded in dragging himself upon the bough, which all the while was swaying heavily up and down and threatening to shake Rodd from where he hung, but at the same time inciting him so to fresh desperate action, that with all a boy's ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... thus to learn to depend upon God to work through our feeble resources, and yet, while so depending, to be absolutely faithful and diligent, and not allow our trust to deteriorate into supineness and indolence. We find no sloth or negligence in Gideon, or his three hundred; though they were weak and few, they were wholly true, and everything in them ready for God to use to the very last. "Faint yet pursuing" was their watchword as they followed and finished their glorious victory, and they rested ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... fight his way, the man of genius pushes forward, conquering and to conquer. But how often is he at last overcome by a Capua! Ease and fame bring sloth ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... children in the way they should go, in the hope that when they are old they will not desert it. The grown-up will not go to church; in manufacturing towns they will not even put on Sunday's clothes, but revel in intoxication or sloth in their working-dresses all the Lord's day; except when softened by misfortune, or roused by calamity, they will not listen, even at home, to the voice of religious counsel. Children may learn their catechism, and repeat ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... hurling the mighty thunderbolt of Alsace, an ell long, weighing two hundred and fifteen pounds? Did I not cause it to be hung up in the church of Encisheim, as a witness and warning of the plagues that hang over us? But no, nothing will quicken them from their sloth and drunkenness till the foe are at their doors; and, if a man arise of different mould, with some heart for the knightly, the good, and the true, then they kill him for me! But thou, Adlerstein, this pious quest over, thou wilt return to me. Thou hast head to ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in a world yielding enough and to spare for all, the endless succession of wise men, from the Contributing Editor of Proverbs unto this day, who have hymned the praise of diligence and docility, the scorn of sloth. Yet not one sage of the bountiful bunch has ever ventured to denounce the twin vices of industry and obedience. True, there is the story of blind Samson at ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... some that they know not; but against such as they do know they fight on as bravely as though no others existed; and these men will be often victorious. We shall have added most strangely to our safety and happiness and peace the day that our sloth and our ignorance shall have ceased to term fatal. What should truly be looked on as human and natural by ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... fall by her sides—round, smooth arms with a pretty dimple at the elbow. Her wrists were delicate; her hands, which did not betray the servant, were embellished with a lady's fingernails. And lazily, with graceful sloth, she allowed her indolent figure to curve and sway;—a figure that a garter might span, and that was made even more slender to the eye by the projection of the hips and the curve of the hoops that gave the balloon-like roundness to her skirt;—an ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... "And craven Sloth, moulting his sleepless plumes, Nods drowsy wonder at th' adventurous wing That soars the shining azure ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... head; Who, well provided with the secret key To that gold alphabet, himself made me, Himself, I say, the savage he fore-read Fate somehow should be charged with; nipp'd the growth Of better nature in constraint and sloth, That only bring to bear the seed of wrong And turn'd the stream to fury whose out-burst Had kept his lawful channel uncoerced, And fertilized the land he flow'd along. Then like to some unskilful duellist, Who having over-reached himself pushing too hard His foe, or but a moment off his guard— ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... man's gibe and that keen word, Another's chilly smile or peevish frown, I caught their talk—but added none of mine. They said how she still fumbled with her fate, How she had banished visitants divine, How long her sleep had been, her sloth how great, How others had drawn near and passed her by, While she luxuriously had dreamed, dreamed on, She, she her own eternal enemy, And wanting brain, brain, brain would be undone. The glasses tinkled as they talked and laughed, And if the door a moment hung ajar The noises ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... yourse'f, Jim Hart. You ain't complainin', 'cause you ain't got sense 'nuff to complain. You're plum' sunk so deep in sloth an' ig'rance that you're jest satisfied with anythin', no matter how bad it is. It's men o' intelleck like me who complain and look fur better things, who make the ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... that a great nation had cast aside the bonds of sloth and luxury, and was girding itself to join in the fight for the free democracy ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... his helmet laces. Great Agamemnon was, men say, amazed, On Priam's loose-trest daughter when he gazed. Mars in the deed the blacksmith's net did stable; In heaven was never more notorious fable. 40 Myself was dull and faint, to sloth inclined; Pleasure and ease had mollified my mind. A fair maid's care expelled this sluggishness, And to her tents willed me myself address. Since may'st thou see me watch and night-wars move: He that will not grow slothful, let ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... is well!" he cried. "It is a scratch—it is nothing. Pardieu, it takes more than that to put a St. Quentin out of the reckoning. To-day is no time for sloth; I must act." ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... watch one half hour to hear them defended? Is this to deal like a judge (I mean like a good judge), to listen on one side of the cause and sleep on the other? I shall add but one word more. That this indecent sloth is very much owing to that luxury and excess men usually practise upon this day, by which half the service thereof is turned to sin; men dividing their time between God and their bellies, when, after a gluttonous meal, their ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... I let a gust of wind or a sprinkling of rain turn me aside from these easy tasks, what preparation would such sloth be for the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... their being, and that foulness is painful as the accompaniment of disorder and decay, and always indicative of the withdrawal of Divine support. And the practical analogies of life, the invariable connection of outward foulness with mental sloth and degradation, as well as with bodily lethargy and disease, together with the contrary indications of freshness and purity belonging to every healthy and active organic frame, (singularly seen in the effort of the young leaves when first their inward energy prevails over ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... a gnu (or horned horse), two musk deer, a giraffe, a woolly horse, a five-legged calf and a moose. In the back yard there are two white bear cubs, a baby elephant, a nest of pythons, half a dozen ostriches, a learned pig, several alligators and crocodiles, and a giant sloth from South America. The stable is well stocked with monkeys, parrots, eagles, lizards, tortoises and other curiosities, and in the watering trough are a sea serpent and a mermaid (said to be the only specimens of these marvels in a ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... and girl has a bit of garden, and we are told in the good book to take good care of it, and see that the weeds of vice do not spread over it, and to be sure and have it covered with plants of goodness. This garden is the HEART. Such things as anger, sloth, lying and cheating, are noxious weeds. But if you are active and industrious, and keep cultivating this little garden, and keep out all the bad weeds, God will help you to make a good garden, full of pleasant plants, and flowers of virtue. I have seen some gardens ...
— The Pearl Box - Containing One Hundred Beautiful Stories for Young People • "A Pastor"
... and he who encountered his enemy could not choose but draw upon him. Chiaro waited a long time idle; and then knew that his model was gone elsewhere. When at his work, he was blind and deaf to all else; but he feared sloth: for then his stealthy thoughts would begin, as it were, to beat round and round him, seeking a point for attack. He now rose, therefore, and went to the window. It was within a short space of noon; and underneath him a ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... And yet, as shown in the rocks, in which, however, the aberrations appear early, the true typical number is five on both the fore and hinder limbs. And such is the number in man. There is also, in at least the mammalia, a typical number of vertebrae in the neck. The three-toed sloth has nine cervical vertebrae; the manati only six; but seven is the typical number. And seven is the human number also. Man, in short, is pre-eminently what a theologian would term the antetypical existence,—the being ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... is never rung; and the rectory is falling into decay. But they are merely outward signs of the real state of the community. The people do not worship any more, and the children never go to Sunday school. With this spiritual sloth has come a great moral decline, and there are all kinds of sins and evil things committed of which we, as a ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... seeks thy shrine, On him but seldom, Power divine, Thy spirit rests. Satiety, And sloth, poor counterfeits of thee, Mock the tired worldling. Idle Hope, And dire Remembrance, interlope, And vex the feverish slumbers of the mind: The bubble floats before: the spectre stalks ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... later there come to every man dreams of ambition. They may be covered with the sloth of habit, or with the pretence of humility; they may come only in dim, shadowy visions, that feed the eye like the glories of an ocean sunrise; but you may be sure that they will come: even before one is aware, the bold, adventurous goddess, whose name is Ambition, and whose dower ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... shall be interred. Then will I espouse the lady, whether or not she give consent: for never did I see any one so fair, nor desire any as I do her. Happy I am to have met with her. Now make quickly and without delay a proper bier for this dead knight. Halt not for the trouble, nor from sloth." Then some of his men draw out their swords and soon cut two saplings, upon which they laid branches cross-wise. Upon this litter they laid Erec down; then hitched two horses to it. Enide rides alongside, not ceasing ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... For this reward of all his constancy he had endured what had been wellnigh unendurable—loneliness, homesickness, isolation, discomfort. For this he had kept his body clean and his soul clean where all about him was sloth and slackness. He thought backward upon that which he had undergone; he thought forward upon the dreary purposeless prospect that stretched unendingly before him. Never now could he bring himself to go back to the spot of his ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... its wild state, spends its life in trees, and never leaves them but from force or accident. The eagle to the sky, the mole to the ground, the sloth to the tree; but what is most extraordinary, he lives not upon the branches, but under them. He moves suspended, rests suspended, sleeps suspended, and passes his life in suspense—like a young clergyman distantly related ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... Their line was then withdrawn to the brow of a steep hill; it had before been gathered together to storm, but on your appearance was not deployed for battle. Meanwhile you, having slain some of their best men whom not sloth but courage had made the rearmost of the troop, occupied the level ground alone, though such a fight gave you not so many comrades as your table is wont to contain guests. And when you returned to the town at your leisure what came to meet ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... yourselves)—is to be divided this night, share and share alike, among such of his relatives as have found it convenient to be present here between the strokes of half-past seven and eight. If some of our friends have failed us through sloth, sickness or the misfortune of mistaking the road, they have our sympathy, but they can not have ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... possesseth acres, But the landscape, I; Half the charms to me it yieldeth Money cannot buy; Cleon harbors sloth and dullness, Freshening vigor, I; He in velvet, I in ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... Comstock, perceiving her interest in these toys, encouraged Adelle to try her own hand at the manufacture of jewelry, and engaged a needy woman worker to give her the necessary lessons in the lapidary art. Adelle had acquired considerable sloth from her desultory way of living; nevertheless, when the chance was forced into her hands, she took to the new work with ardor and produced some bungling imitations of the new art, which were much admired at the Villa Ponitowski. ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... opinion, it is the sort of instruction he has received, not that this instruction is necessarily bad in itself, but bad from being unsuited to the sort of man to whom it has been given. It has the tendency to develop his emotionalism, his sloth, and his vanity, and it has no tendency to develop those parts of his character which are in a rudimentary state and much want it; thereby throwing the whole character of the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... named priests), lousengers, and lounderers are wrongfully made and called Hermits; and have leave to defraud poor and needy creatures of their livelihood, and to live by their false winning and begging in sloth and other divers vices. And also of these Prelates, these cokir noses [?] are suffered to live in pride and hypocrisy, and to defoul themselves both bodily ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... unfortunate that we have no knowledge of the Miocene mammalian fauna of the Australian and Austro-Columbian provinces; but, seeing that not a trace of a Platyrrhine Ape, of a Procyonine Carnivore, of a characteristically South-American Rodent, of a Sloth, an Armadillo, or an Ant-eater has yet been found in Miocene deposits of Arctogaea, I cannot doubt that they already existed ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... him on duty that you would feel, if you left a jug of water out of doors over night in a blizzard, that the jug, as a jug, would be no longer of value in the morning. He was, and is, routine impersonate, exponent of sound business personified; a living sermon against sloth and improvidence, and easy derelictions of ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... the Immortals, who have so many times preserved this republic in its greatest dangers. The aid of the Gods is not gained by prayers or womanish supplication. To those who watch, who act, who take counsel, wisely, all things turn out successful. Yield yourselves up to idleness and sloth, and in vain you shall implore the Gods—they are irate ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... again laughing; then the wood-woman kissed her and turned her heels to her, and was gone; but Birdalone strung her bow, and got to her woodcraft, and presently had a brace of hares, wherewith she went back home to the dame; who indeed girded at her for her sloth, and her little catch in so long a ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... learn nothing there but to believe: first to believe that others know that which they know not; and after [that] themselves know that which they know not. But indeed facility to believe, impatience to doubt, temerity to answer, glory to know, doubt to contradict, end to gain, sloth to search, seeking things in words, resting in part of nature; these, and the like, have been the things which have forbidden the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things, and in place thereof have married it to vain notions and blind experiments. And ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... saw the tigers sup at Exeter 'Change. Except Veli Pacha's lion in the Morea,—who followed the Arab keeper like a dog,—the fondness of the hyaena for her keeper amused me most. Such a conversazione!—There was a "hippopotamus," like Lord Liverpool in the face; and the "Ursine Sloth" had the very voice and manner of my valet—but the tiger talked too much. The elephant took and gave me my money again—took off my hat—opened a door—trunked a whip—and behaved so well, that I wish he was my butler. The handsomest animal on earth is one of the panthers; but the poor ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... 1646. "If the estate be so meane and inconsiderate that it will not reach to a free education, then that orphan [shall] be bound to some manuall trade ... except some friends or relatives be willing to keep them." 1660-61. "To avoid sloth and idleness ... as also for the relief of parents whose poverty extends not to giving [their children] breeding, the justices of the peace should ... bind out children to tradesmen or husbandmen to be brought up in some ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... setting such an example of sloth," she said, and squeaked at her own temerity and ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... become such a thorough Parisian, of such marked distinction in the most refined society on earth, and that other woman, the European enervated by the Orient, brutalized by Turkish tobacco and bloated by a life of sloth. His ambition, his pride as a husband were disappointed, humiliated in that union of which he now saw the peril and the emptiness, the last cruel blow of destiny which deprived him even of the refuge of domestic happiness against ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... immortality. With closer vows, The knight then sealed his worship and forswore All other aims and deeds to serve her cause. Thus passed unnoted seven barren years Of reckless passion and voluptuous sloth, Undignified by any lofty thought In his degraded mind, that sometime was Endowed with noble capability. From revelry to revelry he passed, Craving more pungent pleasure momently, And new intoxications, and each hour The siren goddess answered his desires. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... of a league which all but brought Philip to the ground; and the sudden revolt of England was parried by a shameless alliance with the Papacy. The closer study of John's history clears away the charges of sloth and incapacity with which men tried to explain the greatness of his fall. The awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that the king who lost Normandy, became the vassal of the Pope, and perished in a struggle of despair against English freedom, was no weak and indolent voluptuary ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... shorter. I am not ignorant how little I herein consult my own reputation, when I knowingly let it go with a fault, so apt to disgust the most judicious, who are always the nicest readers. But they who know sloth is apt to content itself with any excuse, will pardon me if mine has prevailed on me, where I think I have a very good one. I will not therefore allege in my defence, that the same notion, having different respects, may be convenient or necessary to prove or illustrate several parts of ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... up the White Man's burden— The savage wars of peace— Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch Sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hope ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshaling of affairs, come best from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience; for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning by study; and studies ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... Pendy, his orifice is a mere crevice comparatively. The charm is in seeing it classified—the recent sloth accounted for by ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... yolk on'ly proc'u ra tor scoff mon'grel mi cros'co py nonce be troth' drom'e da ry cost proc'ess zo ol'o gy won't doc'ile al lop'a thy wont prov'ost au tom'a ton shone grov'e1 hy drop'a thy sloth fore'head La oc'o on forge joc'und pho tog'ra phy doth don'key ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... his own case; and he who boasts that he can is no better than a fool, despite his wisdom; he is not even at the beginning of any really useful wisdom. But I do accuse my plain man of deliberately shutting his eyes, from pride and from sloth. I do say that he might know a great deal more about his case than he actually does know, if only he would cease from pitying and praising himself in the middle of the night, and tackle the business of self-examination ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... conduct. Try whether his ambition or his avarice have justled him out of the straight line of duty,—or whether that grand foe of the offices of active life, that master vice in men of business, a degenerate and inglorious sloth, has made him flag and languish in his course. This is the object of our inquiry. If our member's conduct can bear this touch, mark it for sterling. He may have fallen into errors, he must have faults; but our error is greater, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... whom I love, hearken unto me. The Nine-bow barbarians overrun the ancient land of Khem; nine nations march up against Khem and lay it waste. Hearken unto me, my son, and I will give thee victory. Awake, awake from sloth, and I will give thee victory. Thou shalt hew down the Nine-bow barbarians as a countryman hews a rotting palm; they shall fall, and thou shalt spoil them. But hearken unto me, my son, thou shalt not thyself go up against them. Low in thy dungeon ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... having seen large skeletons embedded in cliffs? I remember finding on the banks of the Parana a skeleton of a Mastodon, and the Gauchos concluded that it was a borrowing animal like the Bizcacha. (684/1. On the supposed existence in Patagonia of a gigantic land-sloth, see "Natural Science," XIII., 1898, page 288, where Ameghino's discovery of the skin of Neomylodon listai was practically first made known, since his privately published pamphlet was not generally seen. The animal was afterwards identified with a Glossotherium, closely ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the Grecians, we find that the chace, that foot-races, and especially dancing, principally composed the amusement of the young ladies of that country; where, in the great days of Greece, no maxim ever more practically prevailed, than that sloth or inactivity was equally the parent of diseases of the body, as of vices of the mind. Agreeable to which idea, one of the greatest physicians now in Europe, the celebrated Tronchin, while at Paris, vehemently ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... devote to each other's society and to work. She inquired in regard to the occupation which Leon intended to make for himself, and the hours which, of preference, he would give to study. This excellent little woman would have been ashamed to bear the name of a sloth, and unhappy in passing her days with an idler. She promised Leon in advance, to respect his work as a sacred thing. On her part she thoroughly intended to make her time also of use, and not to live with folded arms. At the start she would ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... and fooleries at home, wars abroad: sometimes terror, sometimes torpor, or stupid sloth: this is thy daily slavery. By little and little, if thou doest not better look to it, those sacred dogmata will be blotted out of thy mind. How many things be there, which when as a mere naturalist, thou hast barely considered of according to their nature, thou doest let pass without any ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... Garth in his Dispensary, a mock-heroic poem upon a dispute, in 1696, among doctors over the setting up of a Dispensary in a room of the College of Physicians for relief of the sick poor, houses the God of Sloth within the College, and outside, among other allegories, personifies Disease as a Fury to whom the enemies of the Dispensary offer libation. Boileau in his Lutrin a mock-heroic poem written in 1673 on a dispute between two chief personages ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... swore as many oaths as I spake words, and broke them in the sweet face of heaven: one that slept in the contriving of lust, and waked to do it: wine loved I deeply, dice dearly; and in woman out-paramour'd the Turk; false of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey. Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks betray thy poor heart to woman: keep thy foot out of brothel, thy hand out of placket, thy pen from lender's book, and defy the foul fiend.—Still through the hawthorn ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... No; 'tis you dream; you sleep away your hours In desperate sloth, miscalled philosophy. Up, up, for honour's sake; twelve legions wait you, And long to call you chief: By painful journeys I led them, patient both of heat and hunger, Down form the Parthian marches to the Nile. 'Twill do you good to see their sunburnt faces, Their scarred cheeks, and ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... to scan an author. This means to take a rapid observation of his thoughts. Much of one's common reading matter should be scanned. All local news, much magazine literature, and many books should be used in this way. It is mental sloth and waste of time to pore over a newspaper or a book of light fiction, as one would a philosophy of history or a work of science. As Bacon aptly puts it, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... for some kind of activity became a madness. His body shook with the strength of his desire to end the vast disorder of life. With all the ardour of youth he wanted to see if with the strength of his arm he could shake mankind out of its sloth. A drunken man passed and following him came a large man with a pipe in his mouth. The large man did not walk with any suggestion of power in his legs. He shambled along. He was like a huge child with fat cheeks and great untrained ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... disorganization of a household reaching its climax, it was rebellion against nature's law and indulgence in vice leading to the gradual decline of a man of intelligence, it was a hard worker sinking into the sloth of so-called pleasure; and then, death having snatched away the only son, the home broke to pieces—the wife—fated to childlessness, and the husband driven away by her, rolling through ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... freedom of action; but that freedom is best exercised when it leads them to trust and depend on the Lord of all things: not that He who seeth even beyond the confines of light is pleased with idleness, or giveth encouragement to the sons of sloth; the spirit which He has infused into mankind He expects to find active and industrious; and, when prudence is joined with religion, Allah either gives success to its dictates, or, by counteracting its motions, draws forth the brighter ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... on most minds Begets its likeness. Rank abundance breeds In gross and pamper'd cities sloth and lust, And wantonness and gluttonous excess. In cities, vice is hidden with more ease, Or seen with least reproach; and virtue, taught By frequent lapse, can hope no triumph there Beyond th' achievement of successful flight. I do confess them nurs'ries of the arts, In ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... bequeath, O'er-spread his spirit, gradual, like a sea: Forth from the bosom of that peace upsoared Hope, starry-crowned, and winged, that liberates oft Faith, unextinct, though bound by Powers accursed That o'er her plant the foot, and hold the chain— Terror and Sloth. To noble spirits set free Delight means gratitude. Thus Laurence joyed: But soon, remembering that unworthy past, Remorse succeeded, sorrow born of love, Consoled by love alone. 'Ah! slave,' he cried, That, serving such ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... the summons of the half-past-six bell next morning with nervous alacrity. For it was something more than a mere call to shake off "dull sloth"—it was a reminder that they were fags, and that their masters lay in bed depending on them to rouse them in time for ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... away, at some unlawful occupation probably, or sitting drinking his wages in an alehouse. That was what they saw, and what any man may see to-day for himself in his own village, whether in England or Australia, that working man's paradise. Drink, dirt, and sloth, my friends of the working orders, will produce the same ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... of any nation that has not full authority over its own ordnance. In 1653, according to Oppenheim, it was, owing to its inefficiency, placed under the admiralty. In 1632 it appears to have been independent, but "still retained that evil pre-eminence in sloth and incapacity it had already earned and has ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... conscience in him, which was in advance of his time, contended with these explicit conventional ideas. It is because this deeper conscience remains below the surface that he fails to recognise it, and fancies he is hindered by cowardice or sloth or passion or what not; but it emerges into light in that speech to Horatio. And it is just because he has this nobler moral nature in him that we admire and ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... her Jordan streams to be purified of our stains and fulfil all righteousness. And wheresoever our lodge, there is but the thin casement between us and immensity.... Nature without, Mind within, inviting us forth into the solacing air, the blue ether, if we will but shake our sloth and cares aside and step forth into her ...
— Three Unpublished Poems • Louisa M. Alcott
... ninth hour our Lord Jesus cried with a loud voice, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" He cried with a loud voice, that He might be easily heard by all, and also that by this wondrous word He might shake off from our souls the sleep of sloth, and cause them to wonder and marvel at the immeasurable goodness of God to us. Therefore He saith, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" For the sake of vile sinners, for evil and thankless servants, ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... I found a groove ripped in it, about midway between the pedestal of the sphinx and the marks of my feet where, on arrival, I had struggled with the overturned machine. There were other signs of removal about, with queer narrow footprints like those I could imagine made by a sloth. This directed my closer attention to the pedestal. It was, as I think I have said, of bronze. It was not a mere block, but highly decorated with deep framed panels on either side. I went and rapped at these. The pedestal ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... placed on the stage for Henry the Sixth; he in it asleep. To him the lieutenant, and a pursuivant (R. Cowley, Jo. Duke), and one warder (R. Pallant). To them Pride, Gluttony, Wrath, and Covetousness at one door; at another door Envy, Sloth, and Lechery. The three put back the four, and ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
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