"Idler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Idler who hath no particular calling, or vagrant Person under pretence of a calling, be suffered to perform worship in Families, to or for the same: Seeing persons tainted with errours or aiming at division, may be ready (after that manner) to creep into ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... letter-writers whose epistles have taken their places in English literature. If we must "place" our great men, there are not wanting critics who would accord Lamb a position at the very head of those in this particular branch. "To an idler like myself, to write and receive letters are both very pleasant;" thus Lamb in one of his earliest letters to Coleridge, and there can be little doubt that in this occupation he frequently found ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... thick ink refuse to flow from the pen, it offered a fold. You saw traced in the long black lines upon it how many a service it had rendered me. Those long lines announced the man of letters, the writer, the workman. And now I have all the mien of a rich idler; you know not who I may be. I was the absolute master of my old robe; I am the slave of my new one. The dragon that guarded the golden fleece was not more restless than ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... whole family, ancestors and posterity, by suggesting that I can't make my own living. I only want a little time to take breath, don't you see, and a crust and a bed for a few days, such as you might give any wayfarer. Meanwhile, I will look after things around the place. I fancy I was never an idler here since the day ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... overwork yourselves, and waste all you can."—"They demoralize the worker, they want to kill our industry!" cried those same people who the day before inveighed against the immorality of the worker and the bad quality of his work. But if the workers were what they are represented to be—namely, the idler whom the employer is supposed continually to threaten with dismissal from the workshop—what ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... of a child, and to direct the bent of his character in after years. The little disappointments of schoolboy life, and the somewhat less childish ones of an uneventful and undistinguished academic career, should not have sufficed to turn me out at one-and-twenty years of age a melancholic, listless idler. Some weakness of my own character may have contributed to the result, but in a greater degree it was due to my having a reputation for bad luck. However, I will not try to analyse the causes of my state, for I should satisfy nobody, least of all myself. Still less ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... never so ungracious barbarous a way, to get forward with some work, you will hasten out with furtherances, with encouragements, corrections; you will say to him: "Welcome; thou art ours; our care shall be of thee." To the Idler, again, never so gracefully going idle, coming forward with never so many parchments, you will not hasten out; you will sit still, and be disinclined to rise. You will say to him: "Not welcome, O complex Anomaly; would thou hadst stayed out of doors: ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... idler!" announced Butch, generously, "But for thee! I prithee, since you pritheed me a few moments hence, let that so-called colossal intellect of yours stride back along the corridors of Time, until it reaches ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... physical exertion, a continual instancy of toil; here was what had been hitherto lacking in that misdirected life, and the true cure of vital scepticism. To get the train through: there was the recurrent problem; no time remained to ask if it were necessary. Carthew, the idler, the spendthrift, the drifting dilettant, was soon remarked, praised, and advanced. The engineer swore by him and pointed him out for an example. "I've a new chum, up here," Norris overheard him saying, "a young swell. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... the sentence, when he observed moving along the ramparts towards him a figure he knew. It was Grio. There was nothing strange in the man's presence in that place, for he was an idler and a sot; but Claude did not wish to meet him, and debated in his mind whether he should retreat before the other came up. Pride said one thing, discretion another. He wanted no fracas, and he was still hanging doubtful, measuring the distance ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... necessity for industry ceased; and instead of a hard-working student, Douglas became one of the upper million, who have nothing to think of but the humour of the moment—now Alpine tourist, now Norwegian angler; anon idler in clubs and drawing-rooms; anon book collector, ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... except under extraordinary circumstances, without some return being made in labour. Even where relatives and friends supply money to the Colonists, the latter must take their share of work with their comrades. We shall not have room for a single idler throughout ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... are suggested, though not described, the lives of a hard-working, prosperous population, filling the countryside, laying the foundations of fortunes which are to-day enriching descendants. It was a community without an idler, with trades and occupations so many as to be independent of other communities, hopeful, abounding in credit, laying plans for generations to come, and living bountifully, ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... as he was supposed to be only an idler, or an apprentice who was airing himself and taking a day or two's holiday from the smithy, the shareholders in the different businesses down there were both agreeable and talkative. But when—and that not once only—he suddenly turned to, and ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... until they had at least given his genius a hearing. He is now, and has for some time been, a fashionable cult. It is not likely that in the broad sense he will ever be a popular writer, for the mass of novel-readers are an idle and pleasure-loving folk, and no mere idler and pleasure-seeker will read Meredith often or read him long at a time. The little book which the angel gave to John of Patmos, commanding that he should eat it, was like honey in the mouth, but in ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... exempt from the necessity of industry, till vanity and envy, growing rank in her vacant mind, makes her far more an object of compassion than those who work hardest for a living? The unemployed, then, are not the most peaceful. The labourer has a deeper peace than any idler ever knew. His toils make his short pauses refreshing. Were those pauses prolonged they would be invaded by a miserable ennui. Perfect peace will be found here or hereafter, not when we sink down into torpor, but only when the soul is wrought into ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... policy has depended on causes which have had little relation to the individual character of convicts. A mild or severe governor, or secretary of state; a great increase or decrease of numbers; the book of some literary idler, or of an angry colonist; instances of extraordinary good fortune, or an insurrection against tyranny; the fluctuations of feeling at home, sometimes wrath against crime, sometimes compassion for the criminal. Such are the causes, traced in the ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... conduct. Yet occasionally there will be someone to whom the self-examination that follows conversion will reveal an entirely wrong and evil way of living. It may be that the light has come to some rich idler doing nothing but follow a pleasurable routine. Or to someone following some highly profitable and amusing, but socially useless or socially mischievous occupation. One may be an advocate at the disposal of any man's purpose, or an actor or actress ready to fall in with any theatrical ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... building, upon whose walls the idler's knife had carved many a rude inscription, was the village school. There, amid those carvings, were seen the rough-hewn initials of many a man now "well-to-do in the world." Some, high above the rest, seemed as captains, and almost over-shadowed the diminutive ones of the little school-boy, ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... north winds blew But he who, with industrious zeal, Contributes to the common weal, Has the true secret understood Of private and of public good. Be off with you!" He raised his hand, Which the vain insect dared withstand; It smote the parasite of pride And there the idler ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... and not the time of repair. The busiest man needs no more hours of rest than the idler. Some years ago Professor Patrick, of the Iowa State University, kept three young men awake for four days and nights. When his observations on them were finished, the subjects were permitted to sleep themselves out. All awoke from this ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Better go down upon your marrow bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper in all kinds of weather; For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs ...
— In The Seven Woods - Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age • William Butler (W.B.) Yeats
... different; that at, rare intervals he used to call at Grandmamma's house; and that by some people he was said to be the outcast son of rich parents and a pure, saintly soul, while others averred that he was a mere peasant and an idler. ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... Trifler, idler, Cheat, drunkard, whoremaster, and prodigal. —Think this, and think that you ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... Theo at last,' he cried, when he saw me. 'You idler! dawdle! sloth! gee up, do make haste! You ought to have been here an hour ago! To-morrow I am going to read to Harel a ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... sunshine. Where can the small, lonely creature have heard so many tunes, and airs, and snatches of old songs—as if some fairy bird had taught her melodies of fairyland? She is now in her tenth year, nor an idler in her solitude. Do you wish for a flowery bracelet for the neck of a chosen one, whose perfumes may mingle with the bosom-balm of her virgin beauty? The orphan of Wood-edge will wreath it of blossoms cropt before the sun hath melted the dew on leaf or petal. Will you ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... The Idler: "A striking volume of ballad poetry. A volume to console one for the tantalising postponement of Mr. Kipling's promised ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... now at New-Tarbat, once more returned to the scenes of calm retirement, and placid meditation, as Mr. Samuel Johnson says in the Idler.[41] We all wish to have you here, and we all agree in thinking that there is nothing to hinder ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... perform. The priests denounce the bill as "spoliation and robbery" of course, and prophesy all manner of things against so wicked a kingdom. Doubtless it is daring impiety in the eyes of Rome to forbid a man with a shaven crown and a brown cloak to play the idler and vagabond. We are only surprised that the people of Piedmont have so long suffered their labours to be eaten up by an order of men useless, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... emancipation of the working class from its present subjection to the capitalist class. To this end the Social Democratic Federation proclaims and preaches the Class War."[237] "There is no way in which the Class War can be avoided. You cannot have the reward of your labour and the idler have it too. There is just so much wealth produced every day. It may be more, it may be less; but there is always just so much, and the more the capitalist gets the less you will get, and vice versa. We preach ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... from one hand to another.(540) When, therefore, the debtor employs the capital that he has borrowed, more productively than the creditor would have done, the whole country is a gainer; as it is a loser, on the contrary, when a person engaged in industry advances to the idler, the frugal man to the spendthrift, the solid man to the wild speculator. In declining nations, where every new development hastens decay, the latter alternative may be the prevailing one; and, especially here, may the usurious giving of credit by the shrewd ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... the idler; "and I remember his father when he was just at that age—as like this one as one sheep is like another. Nor have I forgotten the story which ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... measure of the teaching of God and of the Spirit of God was ready, promised, sure as the oath of Him that made heaven and the earth, and all things therein. That was Solomon's belief. We do not find that it made him a fanatic and an idler, waiting with folded hands for inspiration to come to him he knew not how nor whence. His belief that wisdom was the revelation and gift of God did not prevent him from seeking her as silver, and searching for her as hid treasures, ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... a great deal, and say nothing; but if the young Pontalba, who now studies type-setting with the Prince Imperial, was not the baby whose clothes I once saw examined at a cafe there is no truth in these "Leaves of an Idler." ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... IDLER. A general designation for all those on board a ship-of-war, who, from being liable to constant day duty, are not subjected to keep the night-watch, but must go on deck if all hands are called during the night. Surgeons, marine-officers, paymasters, and the civil department, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... he made a snare and caught partridges. Over the fire, by this time burning brightly, he cooked so many kinds of food that the question arose in the Officials' minds whether they shouldn't give some to this idler. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... after that Master Hawkins departed from hence, I, having nothing to do, as an idler went to Lambeth to the bishop's palace, to see what news; and I took a wherry at Paul's Wharf, wherein also was already a doctor named Crewkhorne, which was sent for to come to the Bishop of Canterbury. And he, before the three Bishops of Canterbury, Worcester, and Salisbury, confessed that ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... can you escape being reproached for idleness by merely working? Are you going to waste your time and power in useless unproductive labour, carrying dates to Hajar (or coals to Newcastle, which is the English equivalent), that you might not be called an idler, a loafer?" ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... spring, a jour vastly becoming to the various complexions of the wild flowers that cover the waysides. I have never seen these untended parterres in such lovely exuberance; the sturdiest pedestrian becomes a lingering idler if he allows them to catch his eye. The pale purple cyclamen, with its hood thrown back, stands up in masses as dense as tulip-beds; and here and there in the duskier places great sheets of forget- me-not seem to exhale a faint blue mist. These are the commonest plants; ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... any real need to do. Some of them were going to foreign lands when they were through, had already been assigned to their mission stations, and were planning with a special view to the needs of the locality. Courtland felt an idler and drone among them that he did not yet know what ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... to my feeling, is as much of a necessity to man as eating and sleeping. Even those who do nothing which to a sensible man can be called work, still imagine that they are doing something. The world possesses not a man who is an idler in ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... play all day in the streets and public places. When he was old enough, his father tried to teach him the tailor's trade, but Mustapha no sooner turned his back than the boy was gone for the day. He was frequently punished, but in vain; and at last the father gave him up as a hopeless idler, and in a few months died of the grief ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... poet.'"—Milnes' Life of Keats, vol. i. p. 200, and compare pp. 193, 194. It may perhaps be said that I attach too much importance to the evil of base criticism; but those who think so have never rightly understood its scope, nor the reach of that stern saying of Johnson's (Idler, No. 3, April 29, 1758): "Little does he (who assumes the character of a critic) think how many harmless men he involves in his own guilt, by teaching them to be noxious without malignity, and to repeat objections which ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... as he strode away, and I fancy there was a new light in my eyes,—certainly there was a new purpose in my heart. For I had been often sadly puzzled as to what I should do when once I was out of college. I had no mind to become an idler at Riverview, but was determined to win myself a place in the world. Yet when I came to look about me, I saw small prospect of success. The professions—the law, medicine, and even the church—were overrun with vagabonds who had brought them so low that no gentleman could ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... tapping the floor restlessly with her boot and I must hasten—I may say that I am no idler. It was I who carried on the work of finishing Glenarm House, and I manage the farms which my grandfather has lately acquired in this neighborhood. But better still, from my own point of view, I maintain in ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... kept him from the office, and he was a martinet; lastly, Mr. Nicholson was ambitious for his family (in which, and the Disruption Principles, he entirely lived), and he hated to see a son of his play second fiddle to an idler. After some hesitation, he ordered that the friendship should cease - an unfair command, though seemingly inspired by the spirit of prophecy; and John, saying nothing, continued to disobey the ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... share. To the pampered love of ease, there is no resting place. What is pleasant today, is repulsive tomorrow; what is soft now, is hard at another time; what is sweet in the morning, is bitter in the evening. Neither to the wicked, nor to the idler, is there any solid peace: "Troubled, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... as a rule. She smiled at him. "Good man, Jack! No one can say you're an idler, anyway. I've got rather a nice supper for you. I shouldn't wonder if Fletcher Hill turns up to share it. I hear he is ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... The lady had refused to do so. Courtlandt chuckled and gave him a ten-franc piece. In other days, in other circumstances, he would have liked to know more about the unknown who scribbled notes on composition paper. She was not an idler in the Rue Royale, and it did not require that indefinable intuition which comes of worldly-wiseness to discover this fact. She might be a friend of the Desimone woman, but she had stepped out of another sphere to become so. He recognized the quality that could adjust itself to ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... inferred from his labours, and from his private friendships. His preface to Shakspeare—his illustrations and characters of the bard's plays—his tragedy of Irene, of which he diligently superintended the rehearsal and representation—his friendship for Garrick and for Murphy—his letters in the Idler and Rambler, from one of which we have taken our motto for the Dramatic Censor, and his constant attendance on the theatre, loudly proclaim his opinion of the stage. To him who would persist to think sinful that which the scrupulous ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... not many lustrums since curiosity induced an idler, a traveler, and one possessed of much attainment derived from journeys in distant lands, first to inquire closely into all the traditions connected with these two peculiarities of the Seneca, and, having thus obtained ...
— The Lake Gun • James Fenimore Cooper
... air over the tree-tops. No available or profitable craft navigate these waters, and animated gentlemen from the city who run up for "a mouthful of fresh air" cannot possibly detect the final cause of such a river. Yet the dreaming idler has a place on maps and a ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... that the teaching of Christ was authorized of heaven—no man who believes this only, that his doctrine has obtained and preserved its heavenly character from the successful, unanswerable, appeal which it makes to the human heart—can dispute this fact. Is he an idler, then, or a dreamer in the land, who comes forth, and on the high-road of our popular literature, insists on it that men should assume their full moral strength, and declares that herein lies the salvation of the world? But what can he do if the external circumstances of life are against ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... rifle, taken one last, silent look at the cabin on Bayou des Acadiens, stood for a few moments with his hand in Bonaventure's above one green mound in the churchyard at Grande Pointe, given it into the schoolmaster's care, and had gone to join his son. Of course, not as an idler; such a perfect woodsman easily made himself necessary to the engineer's party. The company were sorry enough to lose him when Claude went away; but no temptation that they could invent could stay him from following Claude. Father and son went in one ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... me off with allegories," his companion objected petulantly. "The eternal blackness exists surely enough, even if my metaphor is faulty. I am disposed to be philosophical. Let me ramble on. Here am I, an idler in my boyhood, a harmless pleasure-seeker in my youth till I ran up against tragedy, and since then a drifter, a drifter with a slowly growing vice, lolling through life with no definite purpose, with no definite hope or wish, except," he went on a little drowsily, "that ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... light and witchery of so glorious a creature. Little did he understand himself or her, or the life before him. It would have been a woful match for both. In a certain sense he would be like the ambitious mouse that espoused the lioness. The polished and selfish idler, with a career devoted to elegant nothings, would fret and chafe such a nature as hers into almost frenzy, had she ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... O dear stream, what volumes thou couldst tell To all who know thy language as I do, Of life and love and jealous hate! But now to tattle were too late,— Thou who hast ever been so true. Tell not to every passing idler here All those sweet tales ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... upon which our republic was founded teach that one person has no right to trample on the rights of another—that we can have no aristocratic order—that he who labors with head or hand is intrinsically more honorable than the mere idler and pleasure seeker, however wealthy—that legally neither birth nor riches confer any special privileges. And in all this the spirit of our American government is in direct opposition to the spirit of monarchical institutions. But how is it with American society, in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Not idler now are they Than when their cunning fashioner first blew The pith of music from them: Yet for you And me their notes are blown in many a way Lost in our murmurings for that old day That fared so well, without us.—Waken to The pipings here at ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... said that he was somewhat of a book-binder himself, as his brother Charles had worked at the armourer's smithy, and as some of his successors were to take up the technicalities of the barber, the cook, and the locksmith. Being an extravagant idler himself, he passed laws against extravagance in his subjects; but though furs and heavy chains might be forbidden, he allowed gilt edges and arabesques on books, and only drew the line at massive gold stamps. His own ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... a long breath, but without taking her eyes from Everychild. "Just an idler," she said, "like all the rest of the young ones. I don't know what's the matter with them these days—children. When I was young I had to work. I expected nothing less. And I tell mine what was good enough for me is good enough ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... through. She saw all at once the long series of temptations to which he must be subjected before he became a man. Yes, it was possible that this sweet child might grow up to disappoint her bitterly, to be far worse than an honest sailor,—a useless idler, or even a criminal. She shuddered at the very thought of the last, and with a great leaping of the heart she resolved that, if God should see fit to spare the child, her own life should be devoted to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... moments, but he was far too practical to let the poet in him rule his life. One sensed, by the most cursory glance, that here was a type of virile young American who could not only dream, but make his dreams come true. No idler he! And he had no use for idlers. He had dared to come to this far country, establish himself on a ranch, and seek to win out in the ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... denounced against these frivolous and paid trades by the narrowminded earnestness of the Roman character. "The trade of a poet," says Cato, "in former times was not respected; if any one occupied himself with it or was a hanger-on at banquets, he was called an idler." But now any one who practised dancing, music, or ballad-singing for money was visited with a double stigma, in consequence of the more and more confirmed disapproval of gaining a livelihood by services rendered for remuneration. While ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Life and Career. London. Rambler and Idler. The Dictionary. Other Works. Lives of the Poets. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... we tell what work he may have to do here? He is not an idler travelling for his pleasure. His time may not be his own—nor ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... was back at the bank corner, like a guard at his sentry-box. He kept watch there, with that pertinacious alertness peculiar to the idler, until he had the satisfaction of witnessing Heeney's early departure from the cellar, with a ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... from Trieste, which takes a little over twenty-four hours, is a revelation of beauty, for the Dalmatian coast is sadly unknown to the traveller. The journey can also be made from Fiume, whence the "Ungaro-Croata" send a good and very frequent service of steamers. But the idler should take a slow boat and coast lazily down the Dalmatian archipelago, visiting all the smaller towns and islands, which the fast line is bound to avoid. It is one of the most beautiful sea-trips ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... though it acts as a feeder of the boats that busily ply here. Quite obviously this is no resort of mere pleasure, and it is all the more pleasurable for that; it has set itself to live sturdily, not troubling to attract the idler and the luxurious. Fowey is not altogether content to repose on its memories, though these are great. Generations of those who laboured on deep waters have nestled in these riverside homesteads, these nooks and corners and precipitous byways; they were lusty fighters and dauntless ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... should grow carelessly in corners. Indeed, the ideal fortune is to find an old garden, once very richly cared for, since sunk into neglect, and to tend, not repair, that neglect; it will thus have a smack of nature and wildness which skilful dispositions cannot overtake. The gardener should be an idler, and have a gross partiality to the kitchen plots: an eager or toilful gardener misbecomes the garden landscape; a tasteful gardener will be ever meddling, will keep the borders raw, and take the bloom off nature. Close adjoining, if you are in the south, an olive-yard, if in the ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to their succor! What except shame could I feel, when I entered into communion with these people? The very weakest of them, a drunkard, an inhabitant of the Rzhanoff house, the one whom they call "the idler," is a hundred-fold more industrious than I; [his balance, so to speak, that is to say, the relation of what he takes from people and that which they give him, stands on a thousand times better footing than my balance, ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... Christian Brothers' school, who came there in their playtime, or with lesson-books to be conned; emblems of a past that had sunk down and well-nigh vanished under the earth, that lay by the water's edge now, like an idler taking the air, yet giving me strong food for thought, making the name of Combray connote to me not the little town of to-day only, but an historic city vastly different, seizing and holding my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the beautiful emblem of truth, in token of our belief in the blessed trinity of God—is simply putting on the harness for work in the Lord's vineyard. It is also the act of putting on the Christian soldier's armor and entering the service. But of what use is a helmet, sword and shield to an idler in the camp? Of what account is harness, unless the horse that carries it is trained and made ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... of any occupation./ This probably means not only a mechanic or user of cutting-tools, but also a man of business and of action, as distinguished from a gentleman of leisure, or an idler.] ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... the honour in being in command of the riff-raff of the land? Dost not know that the most of their officers are made out of tapsters and tinkers and the like? Does it make a tavern idler or a bankrupt the less of either, that a pack of dunghills choose to dub him by another title? Once peace and law are come again, this same scalawag Brereton, or Fownes, or whatever he will then be, must return to my service ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... reached his nostrils as Mrs Yabsley passed the hot iron over the white fronts. The small black iron ran swiftly over the clean surface, leaving a smooth, shining track behind it. And he watched, with an idler's ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... "Reader," the "Lover," and the "Theatre!" Succeeding writers were as unfortunate in their titles, as their works; such are the "Universal Spectator," and the "Lay Monastery." The copious mind of Johnson could not discover an appropriate title, and indeed in the first "Idler" acknowledged his despair. The "Rambler" was so little understood, at the time of its appearance, that a French journalist has translated it as "Le Chevalier Errant;" and when it was corrected to L'Errant, a foreigner drank Johnson's health one day, by innocently ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... important in the actual state of Europe. The temporal power now lost by the Church in Germany had been held in such sluggish hands that its effect was hardly visible except in a denser prejudice and an idler life than prevailed under other Governments. The first consequence of its downfall was that a great part of Germany which had hitherto had no political organisation at all gained the benefit of a regular system of taxation, of police, of civil and of criminal justice. If harsh ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... sufficiency of this world's goods to live on without working for my bread. But although my dear father at his death left me a small fortune, which yields me three hundred a year, I do not feel entitled to lead the life of an idler in this busy world, where so many are obliged to toil night and day for the bare necessaries of life. I have therefore taken to my favourite studies as a sort of business, and flatter myself that I have made one or two not unimportant ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... love! He wrought not thus: A little hint He gives us and no more. Alone the willing see. Thus they sin less Who, if they saw, seeing would disbelieve. Hark to that note! O foolish woodland choirs! Ye sing but idle loves; and, idler far, The ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... not a soul there save the two whom I had followed, and a surpliced clergyman, who seemed to be expostulating with them. They were all three standing in a knot in front of the altar. I lounged up the side aisle like any other idler who has dropped into a church. Suddenly, to my surprise, the three at the altar faced round to me, and Godfrey Norton came running as hard as ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... the space of one year, during which time he was an idler and a drunkard, I then discharged him as such; but how far his having been five years at sea may have mended his manners, I leave to the penetration of those who may hereafter ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... otherwise might have been tempted to despair, and at the end of the two years we were still at our posts. We had, however, learned something. We had learned that we could not make the slightest impression on Drury Lane proper. Now and then an idler, or sometimes a dozen, lounged in, but what was said was strange to them; they were out of their own world as completely as if they were in another planet, and all our efforts to reach them by simplicity of statement and by talking about things which we supposed would interest them ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... restore the confidence of a people, in those countries in which civilization is so new, that they are not yet considered sufficiently advanced to be the guardians of their own security. There are few artifices so shallow that many will not be their dupes. The idler, the curious, the really discontented, the factious, the designing, with a suitable mixture of the unthinking, and of those who only live for the pleasure of the passing hour, a class not the least insignificant for numbers, had lent ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... You know every girl that has ever kept company with him has been talked about. I don't like him. I can't stand him. He's a bad man, mother—a gambler, a drunkard, and an idler. He doesn't care for the characters he has ruined. He's fast running through the money his mother left him; ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... disappear in the field of humanity. A little earth effaces it, and the furrows we have made succeed one another like graves in the cemetery. Is not the furrow of the ploughman as valuable as that of the idler, who has a name, however, a name that will live, if, by reason of some peculiarity or some absurd exploit, he makes a little ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... club-moss, so richly inlaid with partridge-berry and curious shining leaves—with here and there in the bordering a spire of false wintergreen strung with faint pink flowers and exhaling the breath of a May orchard—that it looks too costly a couch for such an idler, I recline to note what transpires. The sun is just past the meridian, and the afternoon chorus is not yet in full tune. Most birds sing with the greatest spirit and vivacity in the forenoon, though there are occasional bursts later in the day in which nearly all voices ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... the variety of their life; abounding in weird and beautiful pictures which even the landsman can appreciate. Alban rarely tired of that panorama of swirling waters and drifting hulks and the majestic shapes of resting ships. And upon such a day as this which had made an idler of him, their interest increased tenfold; and to this there was added a wonder which had never come into his life before. For surely, he argued, this great river was the high road to an El Dorado of which he had often dreamed; to that shadowy land of valley and of mountain ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... smooth and sterile, of the hunger for adornment, for gold bands and jewels and perfume, for goffered linen and draperies of silk and scarlet. She was the naked idler stained with antimony in the clay courts of Sumeria; the Paphian with painted feet loitering on the roofs of Memphis while the blocks of red sandstone floated sluggishly down the Nile for the pyramid of Khufu the King; she was the flushed voluptuousness relaxed ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... a good student. Here is none of your heavy-sides, a student who studies, a greenhorn pedant, strong on letters, theology, science, and sapience, one of those dull wits cut by the square; a pin by profession. He is an honorable idler who lounges, who practises country jaunts, who cultivates the grisette, who pays court to the fair sex, who is at this very moment, perhaps, with my mistress. Let us save him. Death to Blondeau!' At that moment, Blondeau dipped his pen in, all black with erasures in the ink, cast his ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Voyage to the several Islands of the Great World, "is in a frame-work of the adventures of Sir Heedless Headlong, who neither reaches the Great World by a balloon, nor Perkins's steam-gun. He cruises about St. James's Straits, makes for Idler's Harbour, in Alba; is repulsed, but with a friend, Jack Rashleigh, journeys to Society Island, lands at Small Talk Bay, and makes for the capital, Flirtington. He first visits a general assembly of the leaders of the isle. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... wish to know, I'll tell you; being a trifler, an idler, a cheat, a glutton, a debauchee, a spendthrift— Believe me, and believe that you ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... slaves—and tongues are ever ready For base betrayal, thieves bribed by the State. We hang upon the word of the first servant Whom we may please to punish. Then he bethought him To take from us our privilege of hiring Our serfs at will; we are no longer masters Of our own lands. Presume not to dismiss An idler. Willy nilly, thou must feed him! Presume not to outbid a man in hiring A labourer, or you will find yourself In the Court's clutches.—Was such an evil heard of Even under tsar Ivan? And are the people The better off? Ask them. Let the pretender But promise them ...
— Boris Godunov - A Drama in Verse • Alexander Pushkin
... immense commentaries; he was the president of the Committee on Biblical Revision, and he crossed the ocean fourteen times as a fraternal internuncio between the churches of Europe and America. His prodigious capacity for work made Dr. Samuel Johnson seem an idler, and his varied attainments and activities were fairly a match ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... determined to make known the whole mysterious case at once to Mr. Craigie, the chief magistrate of Aberdeen. Not for a single instant did Mr. Comyn suspect a hoax, or imagine the affair to be only the mischievous trick of some idler. Indeed, such was not likely; the times were superstitious, nor were there any persons connected or at variance with the family who were liable to be suspected of having played off such a foolish and wicked jest at the expense of the minister, even if any motive ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... They carp at one another, but let a man make a mess of things, and he is gently treated. I have never heard Tony admit that any man—even one who had robbed him—had not his very good points. Is a man a ne'er-do-well, a drunkard, an idler? "Ah," they say, "his father rose he up like a gen'leman, an' that's what comes o'it." In their dealings, they curiously combine generosity and close-fistedness—close-fistedness in earning, and generosity in spending and lending. A beachcomber, ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... inquire, Who is responsible for their destruction? Many ask the question that Cain impudently put to the Lord, "Am I my brother's keeper?" We can be guilty of other men's sins. This is a mysterious fact, but it is nevertheless true. If you are an idler in the Master's vineyard, you are, to a certain extent, responsible. Oh, that the Holy Spirit would show us our duty ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... Among the idler parts of Nibelungen discussions perhaps the idlest are the attempts made by partisans of Icelandic and German literature respectively to exalt or depress these two handlings, each in comparison with the other. There is no real question of superiority ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... sapping the primitive energy of their natures, expect to scale the fortresses of knowledge by leaps and not by ladders, and who count on success in such perilous gymnastics, not by the discipline of the athlete, but by the dissipation of the idler. Indolence, indeed, is never at a loss for a smooth lie or delicious sophism to justify inaction, and, in our day, has rationalized it into a philosophy of the mind, and idealized it into a school of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... is the ammunition room from which the guns carried in the two side turrets are fed. At the rear is the engine room. From two or four gasoline engines are used—these driving the rear axle and its integral sprockets over which the caterpillars run. The latter run an idler pulley or sprockets at the extreme front ends and are supported by means of rollers attached to the upper portion of the frame on each side when passing over the top. This movement of the caterpillar belts is exactly analogous to that of ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... was bitterly disappointed that his only son should choose to be what he called "an idler"—generous to a fault and always out of money, dressing in a careless and eccentric way, which both amused and annoyed his friends and caused him to be ridiculed by strangers, preferring to roam the streets of old Edinburgh scraping acquaintance with the fishwives and dock hands, rather ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... unlooked-for, and unexpected, and now he could not get over it, could not recover himself. He had lived hitherto in unruffled calm, as though in drunken half-consciousness, knowing neither grief nor joy, and now he was suddenly aware of a dreadful pain in his heart. The careless idler and drunkard found himself quite suddenly in the position of a busy man, weighed down by anxieties and haste, and even ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... he generously sought to secure for little Robin the advantages he did not himself possess; Robin, accordingly, received daily instruction in penmanship from a run-away merchant's clerk, the clerk and bookkeeper, the lubber and idler of the crew. ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... with their Saturday pennies. I entered the town early enough to see what its normal condition must be, and there was something rude and unkind in the din of the multitude breaking on this quiet place where the bees sang loud in the streets, and the midday idler slumbered upon ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... peculiarly—and on the warm afternoons, they bask up and down the thoroughfares in the gaudiest of orange and scarlet bandannas. But their day is fast passing away; and in place of the simple, happy creatures of a few years gone, we find the discontented and besotted idler—squalid and dirty. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... house of K'ang, her name being Hwa-mei, though from the nature of her charm she is ofttime called the Golden Mouse. But touching this affair of your own immediate danger: we being both but common men of the idler sort, it is only fitting that when high ones threaten I ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... had been but an idler about deck; but finding the crew of a gun short-handed, he volunteered his services, and was immersed in the business of loading when a hand clapped him on the shoulder. Turning, ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... radiant May day. A saint has said that "peace is the tranquillity of order;" and such a peace brooded over the happy farm as I crossed its sunny meadows, heard the bleating of its lambs, the lowing of its kine, met its labourers coming and going. An idler was piping somewhere in the fields, the rooks were cawing, the leaves on the boughs just winked in the breeze, the Hall door lay open as usual. I did not see a soul about, and I walked in without summoning anyone. ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... Penelope—for I was lonely. I had nothing but the mill; why, only in the mill was I happy. But could you imagine a man as proud as he, David, taking help from me? He answered rather curtly; said that some day I should see what he was worth; that he was not the idler he seemed. He said that again to me face to face, that once when I have seen him in all the ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... Read, too, if you can lay your hand on it, Bishop Horne's paper on conversation, in the Olla Podrida. In these two essays you will find many of the sentiments which I have expressed, only given in a much more engaging manner. In the 78th and 83d Numbers of the Idler, many common faults in conversation are exposed with a degree of humour, in which our great moralist did not very ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... had been appointed bridge tender for a period of three years, and the son applied for the balance of his parent's term. His application was objected to by Squire Paget, who wished to put Dan Pickley, a village idler, in the place, but the bridge board overruled him, and Mrs. Nelson was appointed to fill her husband's situation—every one knowing that Ralph was to do ...
— The Young Bridge-Tender - or, Ralph Nelson's Upward Struggle • Arthur M. Winfield
... card tricks, and they are scattered on the floor because he had just been practising one of those dodges of sending them flying through the air. He merely kept his trade secret, because he had to keep his tricks secret, like any other conjurer. But the mere fact of an idler in a top hat having once looked in at his back window, and been driven away by him with great indignation, was enough to set us all on a wrong track of romance, and make us imagine his whole life overshadowed by the silk-hatted spectre ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... tradesman who pass him on their road to wealth with a smile of scornful pity have never known. He has forsaken comparatively all for knowledge, and the busy world meets him with a blank stare, and surmises shrewdly that he is but an idler, with an odd taste for wasting his time over books. It says much for Gibbon's robustness of spirit that he did not break down in these trying years, that he did not weakly take fright at his prospect, and make hasty and violent efforts to mend it. On the contrary, ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... insulted by this plain speaking, and very promptly took himself off up-stairs to Cowan's room. Of late he spent a good deal of his time there and Neil was getting worried. For Cowan was notably an idler, and the wonder was how he managed to keep himself in college even though he was taking but a partial course. To be sure, Cowan's fate didn't bother Neil a bit, but he was greatly afraid that his example would be followed by his roommate, ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... my mortal fee, Some idler on my headstone grim Traces the moss-blurred name, will he Think me ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... rare and gala occasions when, at his own plainly expressed desire, he was placed again in temporary service. With that liberty he made it his business to see that no dog was shirking. A glance at a slack strap was enough to betray the idler; and an admonishing nip on the culprit's ear or flank was the cause of a reformation that was sudden and abject for a while ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... idler I am here!" said Markland, half to himself, in one of the conversational pauses, as there was presented to his mind a vivid contrast of his fruitless inactivity with the vigorous productive industry of others. "I half question, at times, whether, in leaving the busy ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... heart's desire. Look here, here's something I found the other day in John Masefield's preface to one of his plays: 'The truth and rapture of man are holy things, not lightly to be scorned. A carelessness of life and beauty marks the glutton, the idler, and the fool in their deadly path across history.' I tell you, I've done some pretty sober thinking as I've sat here in my bookshop during the past horrible years. Walt Whitman wrote a little poem during the Civil War—Year that trembled and reeled beneath me, said Walt, Must I learn to chant ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... even to the light touch of the crowd, which is inevitable amid the circulation of Parisian humanity. Oh, how deeply she feels the value of a minute! Her gait, her toilet, the expression of her face, involve her in a thousand indiscretions, but oh, what a ravishing picture she presents to the idler, and what an ominous page for the eye of a husband to read, is the face of this woman when she returns from the secret place of rendezvous in which her heart ever dwells! Her happiness is impressed even on the unmistakable disarray of her hair, the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... noiselessly to the door. His mouth had settled into a hard, unyielding, thin line; and a dangerous light flickered in his eyes. Temporarily the idler had stepped aside, giving place to the real man that was Maitland—the man ready to fight for his own, naked hands against firearms, if it need be. True, he had but to step into the gun-room to find weapons in plenty; ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... dull work; pottering; relaxation &c. (loosening) 47; Castle of Indolence. [Cause of inactivity] lullaby, sedative, tranquilizer, hypnotic, sleeping pill, relaxant, anaesthetic, general anaesthetic &c. 174; torpedo. [person who is inactive] idler, drone, droil[obs3], dawdle, mopus[obs3]; do-little faineant[Fr], dummy, sleeping partner; afternoon farmer; truant &c. (runaway) 623: bummer|!, loafer, goldbrick, goldbicker, lounger, lazzarone[It]; lubber, lubbard[obs3]; slow coach ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... what work is there—work that will bring in money—for a decorative, untrained idler like Helen? And what time would she have left to live the only life she's fit to lead if she had to make money? I'm not worried about bare life for Helen; I'm worried about what kind of life it's to be. Helen was brought up to be an ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Mother must have worried a good deal over my future. Garry was now the young Laird, and I was but an idler, a burden on the estate. At last I told her I wanted to go abroad, and then it seemed as if a great difficulty was solved. We remembered of a cousin who was sheep-ranching in the Saskatchewan valley and had done well. It was arranged that I should join him as a pupil, then, when I had learned ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... I ought, a fact for which I am grateful now come to think of it, since otherwise I should not be here to-night. I wish to make the worst of myself, the very worst, for whatever I am not, at least I am honest. Now having told you that I am, or was half an hour ago, an idler, a good-for-nothing, prospectless failure, I ask you—if you care to ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... as an idler, if that can be called a purpose, and, Flip, don't change; I love you for it; you are one of the most restful things ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... if one has inherited one's grandfather's characteristics as idler, loafer, lounger, dreamer, lover or picaroon, what then? Eh, one stays at home and tells it to the typewriter or, more likely, one gets run down, chewed up and bespattered while darting across State Street in quest of ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... library style, which I have carried with me from one place to another for over fifty years, and which in my youth I read and reread, and the style of which I tried to imitate before I was twenty. When I dip into "The Rambler" and "The Idler" now how dry and stilted and artificial their balanced sentences seem! yet I treasure them for what they once were to me. In my first essay in the "Atlantic," forty-six years ago (in 1860), I said that Johnson's periods acted like a lever of the third kind, and that the power applied ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... appearances and disappearances were so ordinary a matter, even that was unlikely. The usher's silence he had already secured. There was only one acquaintance who had met and spoken with him, and that by the best of good fortune was Harry Whittington,—the idler who took his banishment and his King's misfortunes with an equally light heart, and gave never a thought at all to anything ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... shrewdly suspect him of preaching. A hard worker, beginning early and ending late, he is an excellent stuffer of birds and beasts, and the good condition of our collection is owing entirely to him. His son, Kwasi Yau (Sunday Joe), is a sharp 'boy' in the Anglo-Indian sense. The carpenter, our model idler, who won't work and can't work, receives 3l. per mens., when $8 should be the utmost; we cleared him out on return to Axim. Meanwhile he saunters about under an umbrella, and is always missing when ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... by the sea the summer idler sitting beneath the jutting rock, gazing far out upon the sea, yet ignoring the white sails that pass up and down before him, as well as the open volume upon his knee, while his thoughts float outward and upward with the graceful wreaths ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... the sight to gird up his philosopher's cloak and begin rolling his tub-dwelling energetically up and down the Craneum; an acquaintance asked, and got, the explanation: 'I do not want to be thought the only idler in such a busy multitude; I am rolling my tub to be like ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... feel that he was the superior of this showy idler, that his own garments and dinner pail and used hands were the titles to a nobility which could justly look down upon those who filched from the treasury of the toiler the means to buzz and flit and glitter in dronelike ease. "As for these Whitneys," ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... that ensued when she began to warp out of dock, I had left the poop, along with the boatswain and the others, going down the ladder at the side on to the main-deck; but, when arrived there, I soon discovered that an idler like myself, standing by with nothing to do, was in the way alike of the ropes that were being thrown and dragged about and of the men handling them—this knowledge being brought home very practically by my getting tripped and knocked about from pillar to post by ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... is but justice to the memory of Cowley, to quote here an exquisite stanza which Johnson has inserted in the Idler, No. 77, where he says; "Cowley seems to have possessed the power of writing easily beyond any other of our poets; yet his pursuit of remote thought led him often into harshness of expression." The stanza is to ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson |
