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More "Well-meaning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but I will not recall too many, lest you cry, "Hands off!" I cannot desist, however, from this word-game until I have set down a few. Whatever is not one's own by first possession is second-hand. That is what I am told my knowledge is. But my well-meaning friends come to my defence, and, not content with endowing me with natural first-hand knowledge which is rightfully mine, ascribe to me a preternatural sixth sense and credit to miracles and heaven-sent compensations ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... myself;" after a pause he added, "I die in the faith, that the truths of God, which he hath helped the church of Scotland to own, shall be owned by him as truths so long as sun and moon endure, and that independency, tho' there be good men and well-meaning professors of that way, will be found more to the prejudice of the work of God than many are aware of, for they evanish into vain opinions. I have had my own faults as well as other men, but he made me always abhor shews. I have, I know, given offence to many, through my slackness ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... the Bogie Man. All good things come from him: Spielplatze to play in, furnished with swings and giant-strides, sand heaps to fight around, swimming baths, and fairs. All misbehaviour is punished by him. It is the hope of every well-meaning German boy and girl to please the police. To be smiled at by a policeman makes it conceited. A German child that has been patted on the head by a policeman is not fit to live with; its ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... a conviction that increased with his experience of life, preached the gospel of Laodicea, urging people to be temperate in what they called goodness as in everything else? Why is it that I, when I hear some well-meaning person exhort young people to make it a rule to do at least one kind action every day, feel very much as I should if I heard them persuade children to get drunk at least once every day? Apart from the initial absurdity ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... know all about wrestlin' down yonder. I tell you, 'twon't do. You're a well-meaning man, no doubt; but you're terribly wrong on some points. You'd do an amazing amount of mischief if we let you run loose. But we couldn't take no such responsibility—indeed we couldn't: and the long and short of it ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... only sixty-five dollars this month, instead of eighty-five. Some of the boarders are behind in their payments. The Darlings have gone away, and "she hopes to do better next month." Mamma cannot bear to press her, she is so kind and well-meaning; so do not for the world mention the matter to Dr. George. I will write to him when I must, ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... beginning ought to be) when it receives heavy and serious treatment. I should therefore explain that this serious treatment has been given under protest, and that its primary intention has been to deal with those well-meaning critics who believe that Chesterton can write fiction, in the ordinary sense of the word. His own excellent definition of fictitious narrative (in The Victorian Age in Literature) is that essentially "the story is told . . . for the sake of some study of ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... apple- tree. Nebbie followed him, disconsolately snuffing the ground in the trail of the departed Plato, who doubtless, to the smaller animal's mind, represented a sort of canine monarch who ruthlessly disdained the well-meaning attentions of his inferiors. Bainton, having finished his task of training the vines across the walls of the rectory, descended his ladder, making as much noise as he could about it and adding thereto a sudden troublesome cough which would he considered, probably excite his master's sympathy ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... voice, something in her manner, warned the spinster that her well-meaning inquisitiveness had received a set-back and that it would be dangerous to press it forward again. What she had termed illuminative now appeared to be only another phase of the mystery which enveloped the child. A sinister thought edged in. Who could say that the girl's father ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... a simple-hearted, honest, well-meaning man, who, during a copartnership of twelve years, had gradually become impoverished, while his partner (his former clerk) having no funds but his share of the same business, into which he had been admitted without any ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... in addressing a girl of seventeen in this tender fashion; but the truth was, her short skirts and the two long braids of yellow hair were in his mind associated with that age toward which you may, without offence, assume the role of a well-meaning protector, and where even a kiss need not necessarily be resented. So far from feeling flattered by the unwished-for recollection of Elsie's feeling for him, he was rather disposed to view it as a pathological phenomenon,—as a sort of malady, of which he would like to cure her. It ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... on this day the situation seemed to have changed greatly, for the brawlers of Hardy Baker's class were now in the minority, and it was sober, well-meaning citizens who occupied the space under ...
— Under the Liberty Tree - A Story of The 'Boston Massacre' • James Otis
... laws! Yet they call this a free country! When I think of the martyrdom—yes, the mental and moral martyrdom, of the men who have made this country—What are the few millions a man may amass, in compensation for what he has to endure? Why, Sayler, I've not the slightest doubt you could find well-meaning, yes, really honest, God-fearing people, who would tell you I am a scoundrel! I have read sermons, delivered from pulpits against me! ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... that have a right to question me. I will go with you.—Bab, go and tell Giles to leave the saddle on Jenny.—Doll, here be my keys; take them, and do the best thou canst. I believe thee honest and well-meaning, but I'm feared the house shall ne'er keep up its credit. Howbeit, that cannot be helped. Do thy best, and the Lord be with you! As to directions, I were best to leave none; maybe they should but hamper thee, and set thee in perplexity. Keep matters clean, and pay ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... attendance is less than fifty, and often one sees only fifteen or twenty peers in their seats. Two or three leading members of the Ministry, as many prominent members of the opposition, a bishop or two, a score of deluded, but well-meaning gentlemen, who obstinately adhere to the unfashionable notion, that, where great political powers are enjoyed, there are certain serious duties to the public closely connected therewith, a few prosy and pompous peers who believe that their constant presence is essential to the welfare ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... warrant that The Angel's Song, a Christmas Token, is work of still more serious character, even though the author had not told his readers, in his Envoy, that the tale was written to correct the mistake into which many well-meaning people have fallen on the subject of Christmas merriment; and to suggest the spirit in which this sacred season should be celebrated. That the book will be favourably received by the large class of readers to whom it is addressed, there can be little doubt; and to their attention we accordingly ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... when there was a general expectation of a total subversion of the one, and abolition of the other, they thought only removing what was offensive, unnecessary, or burthensome, an easy composition. Thus the well-meaning were, by degrees, prevailed on, towards ends they extremely abhorred, and what, at first, seemed prophane and impious to them, in a little time ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... but well-meaning hints concerning the respectability of my paternity, and the immense wealth of my relations, did this really honest-hearted but foolish friend of mine, prevent me from getting three dollars in advance, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... the disposition was to laugh. Judge Thayer was a well-meaning man, but easy. He believed he was bringing a doctor in to cure the country's sickness, where all of his hopes were staked out in town lots, when he had brought only a quack. A hundred dollars, even if the faker made no more, was pretty good pay for seven days' work, they said. A dollar's worth ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... little gin in it. In a pitiable state of "nerves" he sat at the extreme end of a bench, and felt that he was an object of unwholesome interest to his acquaintances. The finishing touch was put to his discomfiture when a well-meaning friend in a vague and disjointed way advised him to give up drink, swearing, and any other bad habits which ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... with the only result that Eugenie soon grew a little vexed and tremulous, and begged him to go home. He might be a master of brewing finance, and a dear, kind, well-meaning brother, but he really did ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... protest is called for against those exaggerated sensational statements on this subject, so persistently forced on public attention by well-meaning but mistaken persons. A tendency has shown itself of late, in many quarters, to attribute that increase of sensual vices imagined to mark the age, not to temporary outward causes, provisional phases of our civilization, but to a growth of depravity in character, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... very tolerable lawyer, to whom I paid twenty-five dollars in consideration of his conversing five minutes with a jury of my peers, the said jury consisting of twelve hungry individuals who wanted to go out to dinner. When my legal adviser had made a few well-meaning remarks, the jury retired to talk the matter over among themselves; and, after about fifteen minutes absence, they returned and expressed their opinion that I was "not guilty." This opinion induced me to believe that ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... an Eye to my following Correspondent, Mr. Timothy Doodle, who seems a very well-meaning Man, that I have written this short Preface, to which I shall subjoin a Letter from the said ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Lady Anstruthers, who was left to trot after her husband, smiled again at the ruddy, kind-looking fellow, this time in conscious deprecation. In the simplicity of her republican sympathy with a well-meaning fellow creature who might feel himself snubbed, she could have shaken him by the hand. She had even parted her lips to venture a word of civility when she was startled by hearing Sir Nigel's voice raised in ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... The men were well-meaning enough and meant the travelers no harm, but after a while they began to drink and quarreled and fought among themselves, and little Nell sat all night, wet with the rain, and sang to them to ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... next round of toasts was a fancy quite new, For we drank—and you'll own 'twas benevolent too— To those well-meaning husbands, cits, parsons or peers, Whom we've any time honored by courting their dears: This museum of wittols was comical rather; Old Headfort gave Massey, and I gave your father. In short, not a soul till this morning would budge— We were all fun and frolic, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the relative values of all the factors, and their relations to each other ("sizing them up" is the expressive slang), and then perceiving with more or less correctness what the answer is. Some men do not have good judgment; some men highly educated, brilliant, and well-meaning, seem never to get quite the correct answer to any problem in life. They are said to be unsuccessful and no one knows why. Perhaps they lack that instinctive sense of proportion that some men have—a sense as real as an "ear for music"; or perhaps ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... daughter—who possessed sufficient sympathy with the poetic and dreamy nature to be of real help to him; for true help, she knew, can only come from true understanding. And Miss Lake was a good girl. She was entirely well-meaning—which is the beginning of well-doing, and her principal weakness lay in her judgment, which led her to obey the Colonel ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... ideas were altogether old-fashioned on the subject, and as the minister did not object, and Graeme herself had great delight in it, she made no objections. Her first opinion on the schoolmaster had been that he was a well-meaning, harmless lad, and it was given in a tone which said plainer than words, that little more could be put forth in his favour. But by and by, as she watched him, and saw the influence for good which he exerted over ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... affairs of the universe properly. Persons I'd designed for each other were given to others, and a great deal of unhappiness resulted. There were nine thousand six hundred and seventy-six divorces as the result of that week's work. It's a terrible situation for a well-meaning chap to have to decide between his ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... labors of generations, subverting the fundamental principles of honesty, justice, and morality on which the organized public life of the community and the private life of the individual must rest, and rapidly changing even the well-meaning and reasonable among the peasants into frenzied madmen, Luther recognized that conciliatory measures and arbitration would not avail with these mobs. His duty as a teacher of God's Word and as a loyal subject of his government demanded prompt and stern action ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... a young man of high aims and noble purposes: and the writer believes that it is unpardonable to awaken the interest and sympathy of his readers for any other than high-minded and well-meaning characters. But he is not faultless; he makes some grave mistakes, even while he has high aims. The most important lesson in morals to be derived from his experience is that it is unwise and dangerous for young people to conceal their actions from their parents and friends; and that ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... an impatient foot on the Byrds' bottom step, glanced from Chas to Hen, smiling a little. Her cousins were well-meaning young people, and she liked them in a way, but she often found their breezy assurance ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... insisted the well-meaning woman. "He will know that you forgot it, and all will be well in ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... criticism of Tom Jones must be as mystical as the Faery Queen. Hence it is unavoidable in speaking of a fine book like Great Expectations that we should give even to its unpretentious and realistic figures a certain massive mysticism. Pip is Pip, but he is also the well-meaning snob. And this is even more true of those two great figures in the tale which stand for the English democracy. For, indeed, the first and last word upon the English democracy is said in Joe Gargery and Trabb's boy. The actual English populace, as ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... tile decoration. Later tiles still cover the aisle walls and altar recesses, but beautiful examples of the Mozarabe or Moorish style which once covered the piers of the nave, as well as the wooden choir gallery with its finely panelled under side, have been swept away by a recent well-meaning if mistaken restoration. The outside of the church is more unusual than the inside. The two remaining original apses are much hidden by the sacristy, built probably by Bishop Jorge de Castello Branco in 1593, but in their details they are greatly like ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... terms all personal service (that is, forced labour) amongst the Indians, not only of the Jesuit missions, but of Peru and Mexico. With a touching confidence in his own powers, and absolute right Divine, the well-meaning King added to his orders a paragraph commanding all to be done as he had ordered within six months. Strange to find Philip IV., whom Velasquez has immortalized and shown us as he sat upon his horse ineffable, so far away from the Museo del Prado, where alone he ever seems ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... his policy as his adviser. Yet it was part of his weakness to be unwilling to believe himself under the guidance of any particular person; he set a high value on his own authority, and was inordinately jealous of it. No one, therefore, could acquire a permanent influence. Thus a well-meaning man became the worst of sovereigns; for the first virtue of a master is consistency, and no subordinate can follow out with intelligent zeal today a policy which he knows may ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... lessons were ill-learned, Juliet's mamma had always a great deal to say about the battle of Agincourt or any other event that it was necessary to impress on her memory. I am afraid Flurry at last took a great dislike to that well-meaning lady, and begged to hear more about Juliet's little brother and sister. When I came to a very uninteresting part she would propose a game of ball or a scamper with Flossy; but all the same next day we would ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... again, we cannot apprize the reader. New light, and new perceptions of duty certainly came into his mind; and we may hope that, as he was a well-meaning and conscientious man, he was led to act wisely ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... their Bibles, yet the pen is too dangerous an instrument to trust to their hands. The art of writing he disapproves,—"Better women can naught of it." Religious observances he strictly recommends; but we shudder at some of the stories which even this well-meaning father relates as illustrations of the efficacy of religious austerities. Extravagance in dress prevailed at that time among men and women to such a degree that Parliament was appealed to on the subject in 1363. From the Knight's exhortations on the subject, this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... the evening. She was one of those small, ill-shapen women whose infirmities are thrown into more conspicuous relief by dress and jewels and decolletage. Seated at the head of her table, she produced the impression of a Goddess of Discord at a feast of well-meaning, hapless mortals. ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... back into college in the Fall, cannot pass those examinations equally with a rich man's son of equal mind, who can take a tutor to the seashore or the mountains and coach up all summer. Thus foundations, established by well-meaning people to help poor boys self-respectingly through college, become intellectual prizes for those who do not need them. That is ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... appeared. Only on the second visit were the ghost-seers scared; but then they were scared enough for twice, and they rarely mustered up courage enough to risk a third interview. One of the most curious characteristics of this well-meaning spook was that it had no face—or at least that nobody ever ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... under your roof, those whom Jasper has induced to institute a search, that he has no means to institute very actively himself, might make statements which (as you are already aware) might persuade others, though well-meaning, to assist him in separating her from you. He might publicly face even a police-court, if he thus hoped to shame the rich man into buying off an intolerable scandal. He might, in the first instance, and more probably, decoy her into his power through stealth; and ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... would be a good thing to begin on," said Mr. Fairfield. "Broadcloth is so tractable, so easy to fit; and that tailor-made effect can, of course, be attained by any well-meaning beginner." ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... has yielded up the old life to a welcome death, and the old man is crucified with Christ, then the world, which knows nothing better than that previous life, if it only goes on well and easily, uses all kinds of efforts to hinder the rising up of the new life, some of them well-meaning, others self-interested and therefore hostile. Some, with good intentions, like those friends of the Savior, consult together, and try all in their power, keeping away all extraneous influences, to preserve at least the appearance of their friend from being defaced, and ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... freedom in continental countries—the exercise of arbitrary power by irresponsible authority in other lands—they would turn their eyes homeward and examine the treatment and the sufferings of their own political prisoners. I would in all sincerity suggest that humane and well-meaning men who exert themselves for the remission of the death-penalty as a mercy would rather implore that the doom of solitary and silent captivity should be remitted to the more merciful doom of an immediate relief from ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... of classes to one another in an industrial district, and especially with the faults of the class that rose to power with the development of manufacturing. Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the well-meaning pedant and the offensive parvenu, preach the same gospel. Political economy, as they understand it, is to rule life, and this dismal science is not concerned with human well-being and happiness, but ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... while it is to him a sealed book, are responsible for much juvenile delinquency. Jacob Riis has told us, in compelling description, the story of the evolution of the "gang" and of the "tough" from the children of parents who, well-meaning and in their own ancestral land capable of parental control, here lose command of the family life because the children have to become the interpreters and representatives of the family in the new country to a degree that reverses the natural order ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... one of those in loving attendance on Chopin, and, as Franchomme told me, present, like himself, when the pianist-composer breathed his last. From the above we gather, at least, that it is very uncertain whether Chopin's desire to see George Sand was frustrated by her heartlessness or the well-meaning interference of ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... amicable. Sewell said that he had been delighted to hear of Lemuel's whereabouts from his old friend Evans, and to know that they were housed together. He said that he used to know Mrs. Harmon long ago, and that she was a good-hearted, well-meaning woman, though without much forecast. He even assented to Lemuel's hasty generalisation of her as a perfect lady, though they both felt a certain inaccuracy in this, and Sewell repeated that she was a woman of excellent heart and turned to a more ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... The well-meaning letter, written by the kindly editor, and full of wholesome advice, cut like a surgeon's knife in some desperate case when it is a question whether the patient can endure the heroic treatment necessary. Haldane's stilted and unnatural tales had been projected into being by such fiery and ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... What else has ever been the 'umble petition of your honest but well-meaning friend, Roman, and fellow-countryman? I know the Deacon's your man, and I know he's a cut above G. S.; but he won't ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... converted from evil-disposed boys into well-meaning ones. Shuffles and Pelham were not the only ones who had been turned aside from the error of their ways, though their individual experience has not been detailed. The moral results of the voyage were very good. If the discipline ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... Crispus followed Marcellus, and, though both were angry, their expressions were very different. Marcellus marched out with flashing eyes, Crispus with a smile on his face. Eventually their friends went and brought them back. Thus the struggle grew more and more heated between a well-meaning majority and a small but powerful minority; and since they were both animated by irreconcilable hatred, the day was spent ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... told, from head to foot. She knew not, at first, whether to be angry or pleased.—At length, 'I thought at first,' said she, 'that you might have a bolder and freer motive—but (as my Mamma says) you may be a well-meaning man, though generally a little wrong-headed—however, as the world is censorious, and may think us nearer of kin than I would have it supposed, I must take care that I am not seen abroad in ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... say that this harm is wrought wilfully—on the contrary, I know it is not. They are noble and well-meaning men and women who carry the gospel into the North. Many of them I know and respect and admire—Father Desplaines, Father Crossett, the good Father O'Reiley, and Duncan Fitzgilbert, of my mother's faith. These men are good men; noble ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... this omnipresent appearance of that first projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature? One look at the face of heaven and earth lays ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... ever heard of who was disappointed and unrewarded for his labour in attempting to eternize the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte, was a German of the name of Schumacher. It is, indeed, allowed that he was more industrious, able, and well-meaning than ingenious or considerate. He did not consider that it would be no compliment to give the immortal hero a hint of being a mortal man. Schumacher had employed near three years in planning and executing in marble the prettiest model of a sepulchral monument I have ever seen, read ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... way of Alan's expectations. Moreover, at table d'hote that evening, a slight episode occurred which roused to the full once more poor Herminia's tender conscience. Talk had somehow turned on Shelley's Italian wanderings; and a benevolent-looking clergyman opposite, with that vacantly well-meaning smile, peculiar to a certain type of country rector, was apologizing in what he took to be a broad and generous spirit of divine, toleration for the great moral teacher's supposed lapses from the normal rule of tight living. Much, the benevolent-looking gentleman ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... to parental instructions; there is the same proportion of self-willed damsels among them as among the whites, who by obdurately refusing to enter into the marriages arranged for them cause pain and trouble to their well-meaning parents. ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... in Norway since the nation regained its independence to interest one's self in a lofty, condescending way in the life of the peasantry. A few well-meaning persons, like the poet Wergeland, had labored zealously for their enlightenment and the improvement of their economic condition; but, except in the case of such single individuals, no real and vital sympathy and fellow-feeling had ever existed between the upper and the lower strata of Norwegian ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... ugly. So I made up some gas of another sort, about never meaning to marry anyone who hadn't carved his way in the world. I said it was a point of principle with me not to live on money that was just inherited like theirs. Two days after I had talked in this well-meaning sort of way, the whole trouble began. The first thing I heard was that both of them had gone off to seek their fortunes, as if they were ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... keenly on reaching her late aunt's very neat dwelling in Fourteenth Street, New York. But the manly tenderness of Mulford was a great support to her, and a little time brought her to think of that weak-minded, but well-meaning and affectionate relative, with gentle regret, rather than with grief. Among the connections of her young husband, she found several females of a class in life certainly equal to her own, and somewhat superior to the latter in education and habits. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... he was a great hand to smoke, and I was calc'latin' on his being pleased: old folks like to be thought of, and then he set more by me than by the other boys. I know I used to be sorry for him when I was a little fellow. My father's second wife she was a well-meaning woman, but an awful driver with her work, and she was always making of him feel he wasn't no use. I do' know as she meant to, either. He never said nothing, and he was always just so pleasant, and he was fond of his book, and used to set round reading, and tried to keep himself ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... an officious though well-meaning fellow, had sent away for the neighbouring clergyman; and when my gentleman began to speak of it to him, and talk of sending for him, 'Sir,' says he to him, 'my friend is in the house'; so without any more words he brought them together. When he came to the minister, he asked him if he would venture ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... was about. 'Master Hore' did not. Hore was a well-meaning, plausible fellow, good at taking up new-fangled ideas, bad at carrying them out, and the very cut of a wildcat company-promoter, except for his honesty. He persuaded 'divers young lawyers of the Innes of Court and Chancerie' to go to Newfoundland. A hundred and twenty men set ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... evil, though, which I could not guard against, and this was the clumsy though well-meaning stupidity of a plantation negro. One afternoon the house became offensive with the odor of burning wool. I followed up the scent and, after opening several doors, I finally traced it to the dining-room. It was filled with smoke, and there, in front ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... adventure to the New World in aid of American independence, and some who were to follow in another long procession equally adventurous and as likely to be fatal—the Revolution in their own country. During the Terror some of them, including their beautiful and well-meaning queen, were to lose their lives. Of any such danger as this, these young nobles, in the present state of seemingly joyous and abundant prosperity, were farthest ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... leave my little kingdom here. And I don't think they'd approve of my small son at a University lecture. He is only two, and very busy always. I feel that, if I could talk to you, I should see a great light; you seem such a very shining person to me. And I'm a duffer. A well-meaning duffer with a task before her that needs brains. You talk of the socialization of knowledge—will you begin the socialization on my behalf? I wonder if you would like to see what life in the Bush is like, you who are a student of life? Then you could ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... equivalent to what used to be called a rebellion in the older days, and I believe no such event has occurred for the last fifty years. The nearest to it was a case which arose in the senior class when I was a freshman. One of the seniors, who was a rather dull-witted but well-meaning youth, concluded that it was his duty to inform the Faculty of offences committed by his classmates, a proceeding it is needless to say contrary to all the boys' sentiments as to honorable conduct. Some windows had been broken, including his. He informed the Faculty of the person who had broken ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... without flinching. If he were wounded, as I read the telegram I should receive a wound myself, and try to be as brave as he. All which came direct from the war, would unite me to Michael. But interfering friends, however well-meaning, would come between. If he had not been shielded from a bullet or a sword-thrust, why should I be shielded from the ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... "My name, translated, means gracious or kindly or well-meaning." His voice became brisker. "The translation is apropos. I'm here to do you a service. Now, about these monthly ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... our camp at night with fire and sword to keep them from biting us as they grazed. Actually one of them half-scalped a teamster as he lay dreaming of home with his long fair hair commingled with the toothsome grass. His utterances as the well-meaning beast lifted him from the ground and tried to shake the earth from his roots were neither wise nor sweet, but they made a profound impression on the herd, which, arching its multitude of tails, absented itself to pastures new like an army ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... to set forth on a walk through ways unknown to him, and to trust to the guidance of anybody who will take the trouble; the different characters who would undertake it: some mischievous, some well-meaning, but incapable; perhaps one blind man undertakes to lead another. At last, possibly, he rejects all guidance, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... to his well-meaning friend, "Think you I have not spent my whole life in preparing for this one thing?" And he handed back the smoothly polished manuscript with a smile. Montaigne says, "Should a suppliant voice have been heard out of the mouth of Socrates now; should that lofty virtue strike sail in the very ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... Daniel Schubart was born at Obersontheim in Swabia, on the 26th of April 1739. His father, a well-meaning soul, officiated there in the multiple capacity of schoolmaster, precentor, and curate; dignities which, with various mutations and improvements, he subsequently held in several successive villages of the same district. Daniel, from the first, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Gibellines, and France by those who were for and against the League: but it is very unhappy for a man to be born in such a stormy and tempestuous season. It is the restless ambition of artful men that thus breaks a people into factions, and draws several well-meaning persons to their interest, by a specious concern for their country. How many honest minds are filled with uncharitable and barbarous notions, out of their zeal for the publick good? What cruelties and outrages would they ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... daughter making their way slowly down the companionway towards the dining room. Chester saw at a glance that neither of them was strong, but both tried to appear able and were bound to help each other. He smiled at their well-meaning endeavors, then without asking leave, took the man's free arm and helped him down ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... ally, he would accomplish absolutely nothing. As it is, however, the two gentlemen fabricate a public opinion, supported by a multitude of uninformed members of the Lutheran Church. The mass of all influential, well-meaning members, preachers as well as laymen, whatever their views may otherwise be, are indignant at Schmucker, Kurtz, Observer, and the whole Platform affair. I would not be astonished if the matter ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... well-meaning but misguided singer reached its height about twenty years ago, when new discoveries about Villon threw a glamor over the poet of checkered life. [Footnote: See Edwin Markham, Villon; Swinburne, Burns, A Ballad of Francois Villon.] At the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... stirred to quarrel among themselves. The Rights of Man! How many wrongs have been done under that clause! The Bastille stormed; the Swiss Guard slaughtered; the Reign of Terror, with its daily procession of tumbrels through the streets of Paris; the murder of that amiable and well-meaning gentleman who did his best to atone for the sins of his ancestors; the fearful months of waiting suffered by his Queen before she, too, went to her death. Often as I lighted my candle of an evening in my ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in the house, or wandered in the fields, plunged in the deepest humiliation and despair. One look at his wife's sad face would drive him to the barn or the woods, where he would sit, Job-like, and curse the day he was born. Like Job, too, he had three comforters who, though well-meaning and kind, served only to deepen his spiritual gloom. Neither Store Thompson's solemn admonitions nor Praying Donald's hints of stern retribution were calculated to relieve his mind; and when Long Lauchie came across the fields on a ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... cease,' said Emily, wishing to interrupt this ill-judged, but well-meaning harangue; Theresa's loquacity, however, was not to be silenced so easily. 'And when you used to grieve so,' she added, 'he often told you how wrong it was—for that my mistress was happy. And, if she was happy, I am sure he is so too; for the prayers of the poor, they say, reach ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... unfolding a newspaper, which he never read. He was dressed like a bourgeois of the old school in a gold-laced cocked hat, a plum-coloured coat and blue waistcoat embroidered in silver. He looked well-meaning enough, and was something of a musician to judge by a flute, one end of which peeped from his pocket. Never for a moment did his eyes wander from the supposed stripling, on whom he bestowed continual smiles, and when he saw him leave his seat, he would get up himself and ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... One may be aiming at portraying the dignity and simplicity of a wedding or the unmarred happiness of the occasion, but if one attempts to equal the joy of the event with the bigness of his words, one will produce upon the reader an effect of revulsion rather than interest. An ignorant, but well-meaning, reporter on an Eastern weekly concluded a wedding story with the ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... threshold sudden distaste seized him; after what he had been through, the thought of the well-meaning, brutish chatter of Nicodemus and his wife was not to be endured. He turned back again and went as far from them as he could get, down to the river-ford. Here he sat upon the beach, away from the passing of the people; and the waters rippled at his feet. The west had cleared; ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... fruitless effort of converting a poet into a merchant, and that content with the independence he had realised, he would abandon his dreams of founding a dynasty of financiers. From this moment all disquietude ceased beneath this always well-meaning, though often perplexed, roof, while my father, enabled amply to gratify his darling passion of book-collecting, passed his days in tranquil study, and in the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... who was more well-meaning than diplomatic, and who, besides (a rarer thing with old teachers than is generally supposed) was esteemed by his former pupils, went and took the student without ceremony by the arm, saying: 'Come, shall we two take a ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... him knock Jarman down, or at least openly defy him; whereas he seemed to back him up, although much against his will. The net result to me was that I had three hundred lines to write on my third day at school, and that, for a well-meaning ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... knows thoroughly, and whom he paints exactly as he is,—a careless, good-natured but essentially selfish person, who goes through life intent on his own interests. Pendennis is a profound moral study, and the most powerful arraignment of well-meaning selfishness in our literature, not even excepting George Eliot's ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... invited, are the best things of the sort we have. The archdeacon is intimate there, and they have always a good kind of people staying in the house. Mrs. Arrowpoint is peculiar, certainly; something of a caricature, in fact; but well-meaning. And Miss Arrowpoint is as nice as possible. It is not all young ladies who have mothers as handsome and ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... not enough that the knowledge of the physician simply decide beforehand on a definite course of psychical treatment and leave the carrying out to a well-meaning minister or any other medical amateur who schematically follows the indicated path. The finest adjustment has to come in during the treatment itself and the response of the patient often has to suggest entirely new lines ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... and with the same expectation, and that the rich and beneficent person who (according to the latest report) has come to the rescue of the one, and is an active agent in looking for the other, is in reality the foolish though well-meaning victim of ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... doubtless well-meaning person (M. P. Follet) of Quincy, Mass., in 1896 published a small volume on the Speaker of the House, in which she gathered up these stories. She says Keifer appointed on the elections Committee "eleven Republicans and two Democrats"; that he appointed one nephew ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... favorable reception, the Squire soon repeated his visit, and by adroitly flattering the elder lady, he continued to ingratiate himself into her favor. Mrs. Wildegrave was a kind well-meaning woman, but she had struggled so long with poverty, that wealth had acquired, as a natural consequence, too great an ascendancy over her mind. The possession of these coveted riches gave to Mark Hurdlestone an importance in her eyes, which made her blind to the defects ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... Ignorance; a pilgrim who never stuck in the Slough of Despond, nor met Apollyon in the Valley of the Shadow, nor was captive in Doubting Castle, nor stoned in Vanity Fair. And of Bunyan, Walton would have said that he was among those Nonconformists who 'might be sincere, well-meaning men, whose indiscreet zeal might be so like charity, as thereby to cover a multitude of errors.' To Walton there seemed spiritual solace in remembering 'that we have comforted and been helpful to a dejected or distressed family.' Bunyan would have regarded ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... path of duty led to the garden. But that card-party? No, let the cutworm work his will, and let the brown-tailed moth corrupt; I must take refuge in flight, however inglorious. It was then that the good angel, who never forsakes a well-meaning man, whispered to me that far back in a quiet corner of New England was the little village where I had passed my boyhood, which I had deserted for five and twenty years, but which still remembered me as "Johnny" Stanhope, thanks ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... honest attempts, on the part of some well-meaning popes, to punish the confessors who destroy the purity of their penitents, have failed to touch the guilty parties, they are, in the good providence of God, infallible witnesses to tell to the world that auricular confession is nothing else than a snare to the confessor and his dupes. Yes, ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... not, my brother Edward's son, For that I was his father Edward's son. That blood already, like the pelican, Hast thou tapp'd out, and drunkenly carous'd: My brother Gloucester, plain well-meaning soul,— Whom fair befall in heaven 'mongst happy souls!— May be a precedent and witness good That thou respect'st not spilling Edward's blood: Join with the present sickness that I have; And thy unkindness be like crooked age, To crop at once a too-long withered flower. Live in thy shame, but ...
— The Tragedy of King Richard II • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... near, to receive his repeated expressions of gratitude for the route she had counselled. Without personal objections to a well-meaning orderly man, whose pardonable error it was to be aiming too considerably higher than his head, she did but show him the voluble muteness of a Frenchwoman's closed lips; not a smile at all, and certainly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... never seen," would ask some well-meaning tale-bearer, "any of those poor brutes, whose wealed and mangled coats, proclaimed how savagely they had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various
... stormy night and the simple old man who sought food and shelter, with the devoted little dog that "wasna 'is ain." Sick unto death he was, and full of ignorant prejudices and fears that needed wise handling. And there was the well-meaning landlord's blunder, humbly confessed, and the obscure and tragic result of it, in a foul and swarming rookery ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... particular." He looked at the girl with a sort of urgency which she scarcely comprehended. "Miss Sessions," he said, "I wear my hair longer than most men, and the barber is always deeply grieved at my obstinacy. I never eat potatoes, and many well-meaning persons are greatly concerned over it—they regard the exclusion of potatoes from one's dietary as almost criminal. But you—I expect in you more tolerance concerning my peculiarities. Why must you care at all what I think, or what my views are in ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... estimate of what is strictly necessary to keep a workman from dying of hunger. And, down in the sphere below, the evil increases, the workmen agonise with hunger and exasperation, while above them discussion still goes on, systems are bandied about, and well-meaning persons exhaust themselves in attempting to apply ridiculously inadequate remedies. There is much stir without any progress, all the wild bewilderment which precedes great catastrophes. And among the many, Catholic ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... destroyed, and a respectable bag of captives brought over. But the element of surprise, upon which so much insistence was laid above, was visited upon both attackers and attacked. To the former the contribution came from that well-meaning but somewhat addlepated warrior, Private Nigg, who formed one of ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... light of a husband. He is very kind, I think—really very good about the cottages. A well-meaning man." ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... permanent career. No doubt, if a man is thoroughly conscientious, or thoroughly ambitious, or thoroughly enthusiastic, a temporary pursuit may prove as absorbing as if it were taken up for life; but the majority of men, however well-meaning, are not thorough at all. How often one hears the apology made by volunteer officers, even those of high rank,—"Military life is not my profession; I entered the army from patriotism, willing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... to our own time; the powerful lever which has been put into the hand of unscrupulous quacks; the suffering, dread, and remorse experienced in silence by many thousands of ignorant and often innocent young people may all be traced in large measure back to these four well-meaning, but (on this question) ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... chivalry is attested, alas! by the very character of the reformers by which this well-meaning Utopian attempted to oppose it. The good knight complains of the great advances of sensuality, and permits and advises the marriage of all knights. He complains of the accursed riches which the Hospitallers themselves were putting to a bad use, and forbade them in his Institutions; but nevertheless ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... public treasury. He abhors all forms of political favoritism including nepotism. He not only would not appoint kinsmen to office; he would discountenance their appointment by others. He resisted the efforts of well-meaning friends to have his brother, Mr. Joseph R. Wilson, Jr., who had rendered a substantial service to the 1912 campaign by his effective work as a trained journalist, elected secretary of the United States Senate, saying that his brother in this position would inevitably ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... came and stood silently by his side. Taking note of her friendly presence, after awhile he put out his hand without looking up and took hers as it hung by her side. He had taken quite a liking to the sweet-tempered little lassie, and had felt particularly kindly towards her since her well-meaning, if rather inadequate effort to console him that ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... the case silently for a few minutes. He was a well-meaning man, but a doctor of the old school. He believed that if medicine was a good thing, the more one took the better. Also, if dieting ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine
... it may be added, we have as well-meaning an array of oaths as was ever set out in literature. When Mr. Kipling repeats a soldier's oath, he seems to do so with a chuckle of appreciation. When Mr. Masefield puts down the oaths of sailors, he does so rather as a melancholy duty. He swears, not like a trooper, but ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... was immediately directed to an investigation of the cause of the general distress. This was right and proper, and precisely what a cautious and well-meaning government ought to do under such circumstances, in order to prevent, if possible, the recurrence of a similar disaster. But unfortunately the ministers of the day, though well-meaning, were any thing but cautious. The majority of them were imbued with speculative notions of political economy. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... would deny that the idea of immortality is a well-meaning idea and pleasantly inclined and intended to be appreciative of a God, but it does seem to me that it is one of the most absent-minded ways of appreciating Him that could be conceived. I am infinite at 88 High Street. I have all ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... of women, and to prevent the supply from running short thoughtful parish officials—church-wardens and other well-meaning but sadly misguided people—added constantly to the number by consigning to such doubtful reformatories the undesirable females of their respective petty jurisdictions. The practice of admitting women on board the ships of the fleet, too—a practice as old as the ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... or chancellor and announce the failure of some professor to prepare himself for recitations by fresh study of his subject. It would be well if students in eastern colleges would sometimes put on a similar boldness; they would help heads of colleges out of very trying difficulties with well-meaning but incompetent or indolent professors. Undergraduate popularity is often illusive and unstable, but undergraduate perception of incompetency is often very ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... cart was hired walked by the horse's head and did not speak to him, and when he baited the horse spoke but in a whisper respecting that mute agony. But when he stopped for the night, he and the landlord made a well-meaning attempt to get the mourner away to take some rest and food. But Gerard repulsed them, and when they persisted, almost snarled at them, like a faithful dog, and clung to the cold lead all night. So then they drew a cloak over him, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... of finding that there is a moral for everything; that the whole great frame of the Universe has a key, like a box; has been contrived and set going by a well-meaning but humdrum Eighteenth-century Creator. It would be a kind of Hell, surely, a world in which everything could be at once explained, shown to be obvious and useful. I am sated with Lesson and Allegory, weary of monitory ants, ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... what the colleges can be thinking of, turning loose such stale foolishness and old canned stuff on a mellow, sunny little home town like Green Valley that's full of plain, blundering but well-meaning, God-fearing people who work joyfully at their business of living and turn up more religion when they plow a furrow or make over the wedding dress for the baby than these ministers can dig up out of all their musty books. I've prayed for all kinds ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... the offender be admonished and given time to think: but if, for all warning to the contrary, the wilful man will have his way, and still propagate his error to the confusion of society, he must be treated like any other virtuous and well-meaning criminal: he must be restrained and coerced to the extent that the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... premature," she replied, with a forced smile, "to congratulate you before I know anything about the salary or the prospects held out to you? Besides, I cannot feel as enthusiastic about your friend Ralph as you do. I don't doubt that he is a well-meaning youth, but he is reckless. If he had only been a man like your former friend, poor Charlie Brooke, it would ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... Provision of this sort makes treatment both more attractive and more available to large numbers of people whose pride keeps them away from the public provision for charity cases, and whose limited means leave them at the mercy either of quackery or of well-meaning but ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... on himself had been either discussed or mooted. Some ordinary business was transacted, and it was disclosed that the number of subscriptions had shown a sudden falling off for that quarter. One member—a really well-meaning and upright man—began speaking in enigmas about certain possible causes: that it behoved them to look well into their constitution; for if the committee were not respected, and had not at least, in their differences, a common standard of CONDUCT, they would bring the institution to ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... the matter was neither more nor less noble than are the average feelings of well-meaning people towards such enterprise. He would have been glad to find an excellent excuse to think no more of this mission—very glad indeed to have a more attractive opening for work set before him; but, on the other hand, the thought of movement and of ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... crowd of armed prayers Knock'd at the gates of heav'n, and knock'd aloud; The first well-meaning rude petitioners All for his life assail'd the throne; All would have brib'd the skies by off'ring up their own. So great a throng not heav'n itself could bar; 'Twas almost borne by force, as in the giants' war. The pray'rs, at least, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... was I ever an apostle? O Buddha! Buddha! how hard are the paths of saintliness! How prone to error are the well-meaning! How huge is the absurdity of ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... that which is beautiful in form and expression, inspiring and helpful in spirit, noble and righteous in sentiment can be called literature as we are considering it. There may be weak and frivolous books, well-meaning but inept books, and really bad books, but none of them can be ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... concerted effort was made to induce Mr. Nelson to become Bishop. It was refreshing to find the office seeking the man, especially a man who had never sought for himself positions of prestige, a man never found in the society of office seekers. Although he was gratefully aware of the well-meaning intentions of his friends, and felt in the proposed honor the warmth of their personal affection, he did not want it said that he had permitted the election and then declined it. In as tactful a manner as possible ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... honour, than that he should prefer Henrietta to Louisa, or Louisa to Henrietta. Either of them would, in all probability, make him an affectionate, good-humoured wife. With regard to Charles Hayter, she had delicacy which must be pained by any lightness of conduct in a well-meaning young woman, and a heart to sympathize in any of the sufferings it occasioned; but if Henrietta found herself mistaken in the nature of her feelings, the alternation could not ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... mischievous as they were cowardly; they would not come out and be killed, but they skulked in the desert, and hid in masquerade. But why should gentlemen in office, opulent and happy, set about worrying a handful of idiots, old, or poor, or boys, or women, or obscure, or amiable and well-meaning men, who were but a remnant of a former generation, and as little connected with the fanatics of Carthage, Alexandria, or Rome, as the English freemasons may seem to be with their namesakes on the continent? ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... eyeing Hull dubiously. It was bad enough for him to have taken her time in a well-meaning attempt to enlighten her as to a new phase of local politics; to take her time, to waste it, in flirting—that ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... Louisa," he went on quizzically, when he had seated himself opposite her and was helping himself to the potatoes, "when a young lady invades strange territory, and hides behind strange doors, and jumps out at an unsuspecting but terribly well-meaning young man, she's apt to get a surprise. ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... themselves and for their children and children's children. There has been, of course, opposition to this work; opposition from some interested men who desire to exhaust the land for their own immediate profit without regard to the welfare of the next generation, and opposition from honest and well-meaning men who did not fully understand the subject or who did not look far enough ahead. This opposition is, I think, dying away, and our people are understanding that it would be utterly wrong to allow a few individuals to exhaust for their own temporary ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... hand, believe in obedience, but have little faith in a higher life as attainable here. Hence a Unitarian congregation usually consists of intelligent, virtuous, well-meaning people, but destitute of enthusiasm, and with little confidence in the new birth or ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... scars. But it becomes us to wrap ourselves in silence, and not to show to the miserable, pitiful, and drivelling world, which envies and abuses, even while applauding us, that a king can also suffer. I thank you, madame, and from this hour you will find in me a true friend, a well-meaning brother, ever ready to serve you. Give me your hand to this contract, which shall be more lasting and holier than that blessed by priests, to which our hearts did ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... intelligent and sympathetic understanding, no less than with justice and firmness; and until they become citizens, absorbed into the general body politic, they must be the wards of the nation, and not of any private association, lay or clerical, no matter how well-meaning. ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... 'Vicar of Wakefield,' just at the critical moment of his mental development; and he attributed to it much of his best education. The reading of a prose 'Life of Gotz vou Berlichingen' afterwards stimulated him to delineate his character in a poetic form. "The figure of a rude, well-meaning self-helper," he said, "in a wild anarchic time, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... be permitted to record the thanks of all well-meaning people for the noble action of Messrs. Gilmore and Baldwin. The two artists mentioned were not the only members of their race who took a part in the memorable Jubilee concerts. Several others in a vocal way occupied even prominent positions at these concerts. Some sang as artists on the stage, and ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... the earlier part of this chapter to stand in order to show how a man quite well-meaning, although a trifle irascible, may be wanting in Christian charity and ordinary understanding; and of how many tangled knots of human motive, impulse, and emotion this war is a solvent. You see, she defended her son to the last, adopting ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... either in good humour or out of the way. It was her certain belief that my brother William would have returned to his country, and my eldest brother would not have looked so high, if they had had a little less learning." Poor, purblind, well-meaning, obstructive old dame Herschel! what a boon to the world that children like yours are sometimes seized with this incomprehensible fancy ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... men would make me their king. If such a thing befall me, all the great work I hoped to do must go undone, for who is there unfreer than a king? I pray you speak with them and persuade their kind well-meaning hearts that what they plan to do would ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... to the great company of human beings technically known to so many of us as the poor, there would have been friendly neighbours ready to help them, and the same would have been the case had they belonged to the class of smug, well-meaning, if unimaginative, folk whom they had spent so much of their lives ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... laughter-holding sides, but more especially at this merry season—fraught with humour—and when reminiscences of the past make up for lack of realities of the present. To "notice" such a work is ten times more (we had almost said) trouble than to despatch half a dozen dull books, or a dozen harmless, well-meaning satires on human nature. But we will do our best to detach some of the good things from Mr. Croker's volumes, although the humour of the sketches which adorn them, is of too subtle a quality for our ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... the hands of a layman might be also tithe-free. So that there was an object which a layman might become seized of equitably and bona fide; there was something on which a prescription might attach, the end of which is, to secure the natural well-meaning ignorance of men, and to secure property by the best of all ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... created naturally within the boy a desire to emulate the good deeds of the hero in the everyday life of the camp, which is much better than the parrot-like vocalization unfortunately many times encouraged by well-meaning men. ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... appeared for the first time in his life as a leader, he was in reality still only a follower,—a follower, not of the public opinion of the North, but of the wishes of its capitalists. And probably many thousands of well-meaning men, not versed in the mysteries of politics, were secretly pleased to find themselves provided with an excuse for yielding once more to a faction, who had over us the immense advantage of having made up their minds to carry their point or fight. If his was the shame of this speech, ours ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... the particular to the general—though it lead to a fine crop of errors, should at least help to counterbalance the psychological superficiality of the deductive method; to counterbalance, for example, the nonsense of those well-meaning persons who go routing about among the poor in search of evil, and suppose that they can chain it up with little laws. ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... whom he had taken to himself was a well-meaning little thing. She tried for a time to meet her husband's moods and to be a real companion to him. But what could one expect from such a union? Shelley's father withdrew the income which he had previously given. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... had been faithfully carried out. I had found Ivery's post office. I had laid the lines of our own special communications with the enemy, and so far as I could see I had left no clue behind me. Ivery and Gresson took me for a well-meaning nincompoop. It was true that I had aroused profound suspicion in the breasts of the Scottish police. But that mattered nothing, for Cornelius Brand, the suspect, would presently disappear, and there was nothing against that rising ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... admittance into good company will make thee good; though, doubtless, if thou be willing and try, these and all other best helps will be given thee. There is no clothing in a robe of imputed righteousness, that poorest of legal cobwebs spun by spiritual spiders. To me it seems like an invention of well-meaning dulness to soothe insanity; and indeed it has proved a door of escape out of worse imaginations. It is apparently an old 'doctrine;' for St. John seems to point at it where he says, 'Little children, let no man lead you astray; he that doeth righteousness is righteous even as he is righteous.' ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... to guard our camp at night with fire and sword to keep them from biting us as they grazed. Actually one of them half-scalped a teamster as he lay dreaming of home with his long fair hair commingled with the toothsome grass. His utterances as the well-meaning beast lifted him from the ground and tried to shake the earth from his roots were neither wise nor sweet, but they made a profound impression on the herd, which, arching its multitude of tails, absented itself to pastures new like ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... of his senses. He shines no more that day. The clouds have no notion of being caricatured, and the trees keep cautiously away from the brink of such streams—save, perchance, now and then, here and there, a weak well-meaning willow—a thing of shreds and patches—its leafless wands covered with bits of old worsted stockings, crowns of hats, a bauchle (see Dr Jamieson), and the remains of a pair of corduroy breeches, long hereditary in the family of the Blood-Royal of ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... was upheld. Taney and his associates were for the most part patriotic men and eminent lawyers, proud of the Court and its history and anxious to add to its prestige. It is regrettable that the merits of some of them have been so obscured and their memory so clouded by a well-meaning but unfortunate excursion into the field of political passions. In the Dred Scott case[3] they thought to quiet agitation and contribute to the peace of their country by passing judgment upon certain angrily mooted questions of a political character. The effort was a failure and brought ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson
... my brother Edward's son, For that I was his father Edward's son. That blood already, like the pelican, Hast thou tapp'd out, and drunkenly carous'd: My brother Gloucester, plain well-meaning soul,— Whom fair befall in heaven 'mongst happy souls!— May be a precedent and witness good That thou respect'st not spilling Edward's blood: Join with the present sickness that I have; And thy unkindness ...
— The Tragedy of King Richard II • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... contributed to hasten the approach of that cloudy reverse at which I have already hinted. For some time the ruin of my father's affairs had been prevented by the sums which his eloquence had wrung from the well-meaning Mr. Elford. Hugh was no contemptible orator on these occasions. Hope seldom forsook him, and he built so securely on what he hoped might come to pass as sometimes to assert the thing had already happened. Such ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... to do with the boys unless the Saturdays were conceded to her, he owned that he thought the clergyman had the first right to his lads, and had only not claimed them before out of deference for the feelings of a well-meaning parishioner. ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... feelings of others, do as you would be done by, meet halfway. treat well; give comfort, smooth the bed of death; do good, do a good turn; benefit &c. (goodness) 648; render a service, be of use; aid &c. 707. Adj. benevolent; kind, kindly; well-meaning; amiable; obliging, accommodating, indulgent, gracious, complacent, good-humored. warm-hearted, kind-hearted, tender-hearted, large-hearted, broad- hearted; merciful &c. 914; charitable, beneficent, humane, benignant; bounteous, bountiful. good-natured, well-natured; spleenless[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... ever he laid eyes on either of us, should come to have this here dream about us. After falling in with Harry, when the lubber and I parted company, my old mate saw I was cast down, and he told me as much in his own gruff, well-meaning way; upon which I gave him the story, laughing at it. He didn't laugh in return, but grew glum—glummer than I ever seed him; and I wondered, and fell to boxing about my thoughts, more and more (deep sea sink that cursed thinking and thinking, say I!—it sends many an honest fellow out ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... who are jealous of his success, envious of his position, hostile to his politics, dwarfed by his reputation, or hate him by the divine right of idiosyncrasy, always liable, too, to questioning comment from well-meaning friends who happen to be suspicious or sensitive in their political ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had suffered so unjust a death. To all appearance, they were a quiet, honest, well-meaning race of people, cherishing no malice against individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them; or if, at their own fireside, they transmitted from father to child any hostile recollection of the wizard's fate and ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for the ears of the sublime Emperor, who is at this moment awaiting this unseemly one's arrival in Peking with every mark of ill-restrained impatience, tempered only by his expectation of being the first to hear the story of the well-meaning but ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... mother of a baby every year or two has been forced into unwilling motherhood, so far as the later arrivals are concerned. It is not the less immoral when the power which compels enslavement is the church, state or the propaganda of well-meaning patriots clamoring against "race suicide." The wrong is as great as if the enslaving force were the unbridled passions of her husband. The wrong to the unwilling mother, deprived of her liberty, and all opportunity of self-development, ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... author's usual fault of inability to "round out" character. We do not sufficiently realise the poet himself. But his brother, Marie-Joseph, requiring slighter presentment, has it; and so, on a still smaller scale, has the well-meaning but fatuous father, who, hopelessly misunderstanding the signs of the times, actually precipitates his elder son's fate by applying, in spite of remonstrance, to the tiger-pole-cat Robespierre for ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... instructive political lesson England can learn. Europe has always had, and most assuredly England has been over-rich in those alarm-monger critics, watchdogs for ever baying at Slav cupidity, treachery, intrigue, and so on and so on. It is useful to have these well-meaning animals on the political premises, giving noisy tongue whenever the Slav stretches out his long arm and opens his drowsy eyes, but how rare it is to find a man who can teach us to interpret a nation's aspirations, to gauge its inner force, its aim, its inevitability. ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... admonished and given time to think: but if, for all warning to the contrary, the wilful man will have his way, and still propagate his error to the confusion of society, he must be treated like any other virtuous and well-meaning criminal: he must be restrained and coerced to the extent that the interests of ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... and the desert scenery and the general feeling of romance; but this in time would have palled if I had not also had the serious work of collecting and preparing my specimens. Doubtless the family had their moments of suffering—especially on one occasion when a well-meaning maid extracted from my taxidermist's outfit the old tooth-brush with which I put on the skins the arsenical soap necessary for their preservation, partially washed it, and left it with the rest of my wash kit for my own personal use. I suppose that all growing ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... condemned in the strongest terms all personal service (that is, forced labour) amongst the Indians, not only of the Jesuit missions, but of Peru and Mexico. With a touching confidence in his own powers, and absolute right Divine, the well-meaning King added to his orders a paragraph commanding all to be done as he had ordered within six months. Strange to find Philip IV., whom Velasquez has immortalized and shown us as he sat upon his horse ineffable, ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... selling whiskey by the glass, rather frequent ten years ago in New York, are seldom now heard of. The American people are sober! It looks like a monstrous and incredible folly that we read of, that, once, even otherwise sensible and well-meaning gentlemen would, ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... government, who, on the great constitutional question of general warrants, had voted with the minority, was Henry Conway, brother of the Earl of Hertford, a brave soldier, a tolerable speaker, and a well-meaning, though not a wise or vigorous politician. He was now deprived of his regiment, the merited reward of faithful and gallant service in two wars. It was confidently asserted that in this violent ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I warrant 'em: A cuckold has the signification of an honest well-meaning citizen; one, that is not given to jealousies or suspicions; a just person to his wife, &c.; one that, to speak the worst of him, does but to her, what he would be content should be done to ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... Police Department. The conditions under which it must be done were dishearteningly unfavorable. In the first place, the whole scheme of things was wrong. The Police Department was governed by one of those bi-partisan commissions which well-meaning theorists are wont sometimes to set up when they think that the important thing in government is to have things arranged so that nobody can do anything harmful. The result often is that nobody can do anything at all. There were four Commissioners, two supposed to belong ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... the pale; one could lie to them remorselessly. When his first wife was seized, he had promised to take her down into Hertfordshire, but meanwhile arranged with a nursing-home instead. Helen, too, was ill. And the plan that he sketched out for her capture, clever and well-meaning as it was, drew its ethics ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... was in the state of mind not unusual to many well-meaning, unoccupied people, when this modern necromancy was thrust upon them by those pecuniarily or socially interested in its advocacy. The upheaval to the air of that dark inward nature which is ever working in us,—the startling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... capacity, and cannot be expected in every case to take the same interest in a pupil's progress that a friend may. If you are to have the help of a relative or friend, try to get competent help. There are well-meaning persons whose instruction had better be ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... purposes of order, they allowed the means of vindication to fall into disuse. The regulator system, for example, was directed to the stern and thorough punishment of evil men, but no sooner was society freed from their depredations, than the well-meaning citizens withdrew from its ranks; and, though regulator companies still patrolled the country, and, for a time, assumed as much authority as ever, they were not supported by the solid approbation of those who alone could give them lasting strength. ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... themselves. The effort has succeeded in accomplishing all that it could accomplish, namely, a deluge of emotional demonstrations and slogans, a verbal and not a real contract ostentatious fraternity skin-deep, a well-meaning masquerade, an outpouring of feeling evaporating through its own pageantry—in short, an agreeable ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of avoiding fallacies, a general increase of sincerity and candour amongst mankind may be freely recommended. With more honesty there would be fewer bad arguments; but there is such a thing as well-meaning incapacity that gets unaffectedly fogged in converting A., and regards the refractoriness of O., as more than flesh and blood can endure. Mere indulgence in figurative language, again, is a besetting snare. "One of the fathers, in great severity called poesy vinum ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... the Marshalsea condescended towards his brother as an amiable, well-meaning man; a private character, who had not arrived at distinction. 'Frederick,' said he, 'you and Fanny sup at your lodgings to-night, I know. What have you done with Fanny, Frederick?' ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... prayer at the bedside of the sick is utterly out of place. It may become necessary, in order to prevent such abuses, to exclude from the sick-room some who will be greatly offended thereby; but courage to defend a patient against well-meaning intruders is one essential qualification of a good nurse. Oil doors that squeak, fasten windows that rattle, but above all keep quiet the tongues that clatter. Let all whispering in the sick one's hearing ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... d'Estournelles de Constant inquiring what the French were fighting for, implying that to the reasonable onlooker there was no clear issue involved in the whole business, merely the passions of misguided patriotism. The well-meaning agitation for peace, which as I write has been lifted into the grotesque by the Ford peace ship, is based largely on this inability to realize the reality of the issue between the belligerents. And there is our national attitude of strict neutrality, which fairly represents ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... oneself; one's got to be in with one camp or another. The world's full of different and opposing camps—worse luck. There are the beauty-lovers and the beauty-scorners, and all the fluctuating masses in between, like most of us, who love some aspects of it and scorn others. There are the well-meaning and the ill-meaning—and again the incoherent cross-benchers, who mean a little good and a little harm and for the most part mean nothing at all either way. Again, there are what people call the well-bred, the ill-bred, and of course the half-bred. An idiotic division that, because what ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... necessary. But the President of the Board, a bond slave of Political Economy, would not sanction even this very mild departure from the precepts of the Dismal Science. The distress was peculiarly acute at the Docks, where work is precarious and uncertain in the highest degree. Some well-meaning people at the West End instituted a plan of "Free Breakfasts" to be served at the Dock-Gates to men who had failed to obtain employment for the day. On one of these occasions—and very pathetic they were—I was the host, and ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... set one to dreaming and thinking, so devised that it would not fall down though the storms of centuries charged against it. And it was a relief to think of him and his work; it took her mind from an ugly little fear lurking in her heart. Her throat did not always behave as a well-meaning throat should. ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... coffee escape from the mysteries of the pharmacopoeia and become "a simple and refreshing beverage" that any one might obtain for a penny in the coffee houses, or, if preferred, might prepare at home. In this they were aided and abetted by many well-meaning but misguided persons (some of them men of considerable intelligence) who seemed possessed of the idea that the coffee drink was an unpleasant medicine that needed something to take away its curse, or else that it required a complex method of preparation. Witness "Judge" Walter Rumsey's ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... to thank you for a kind, short note of the 27th inst., which I received on Sunday. I gave your kind message to the King of Prussia, who was much touche by it. He is a most amiable man, so kind and well-meaning, and seems so much beloved. He is so amusing too. He is very anxious that Belgium should become liee with Germany, and I think, dearest Uncle, that it would be for the real good of Belgium if it could be so. You will ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... much, and allowed the press to get ahead. It would now be very difficult to check it. I added that he went to make great reductions and had made some. That that had rendered him unpopular. He was honest and well-meaning. The King said he should go down to Bushey soon, and as I was living near he would have me over at eleven o'clock some morning, and give me some hours to make him acquainted with the state of India. I told him of ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... infancy. There has never been much illness among them. Most of them did well in school. The family physician says the boys show a "queer streak,'' but nothing, evidently, at all well defined as compared with the career of Emma, whom he characterizes as a "moral pervert.'' The mother is a well-meaning, hard-working, moderately intelligent woman of about 45. She is said to be somewhat slack in her household, but perfectly honest. The father is desperately alcoholic and peculiar at times. It is not known that his aberrations are ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... constant in human care for the lives which make it fruitful. Such care may perchance avail, in some degree, to counteract the restless tendency of the time; the dweller in a pleasant cottage is not so likely to wish to wander from it as he who shelters himself in a hovel. Well-meaning folk talk about reawakening love of the country by means of deliberate instruction. Lies any hope that way? Does it seem to promise a return of the time when the old English names of all our flowers were common on rustic lips—by which, indeed, they were first uttered? The fact that flowers ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... consequence of the unusual warmth of the weather. For the same reason, probably, a neighbouring bee-hive had swarmed, and the new colony, pitching on the window-sill, was making its way into the room when the horrified nurse shut down the sash. If that well-meaning woman had only abstained from her ill-timed interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence which, in this country, leads far more surely than worth, capacity, or honest ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... feared had come to pass. A reaction had taken place. A large body of moderate and well-meaning men, who had heartily concurred in the strong measures adopted before the recess, were inclined to pause. Their opinion was that, during many years the country had been grievously misgoverned, and that a great reform had been necessary; but that ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... before him, with the vision of all those thousands of bleeding forms with which his errors had cumbered the earth; perhaps, again, it was but the compassionate impulse of the tender-hearted dreamer, of the well-meaning man whose mind was stocked with humanitarian theories. At the moment when he beheld utter ruin staring him in the face, in that frightful whirlwind of destruction that broke him like a reed and scattered his ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... playing at war; "Captain George."—But young Washington was not always copying good sayings; for he was a tall, strong boy, fond of all out-door sports and games. He was a well-meaning boy, but he had a hot temper, and at times his blue eyes flashed fire. In all trials of strength and in all deeds of daring, George took the lead; he could run faster, jump further, and throw a stone higher than any one in ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery
... move for the rescue of the faithful in Spain—a crusade against the infidels triumphing there, was preached throughout Europe by all the most eloquent clergy; and thousands and thousands of valorous knights and nobles, accompanied by well-meaning varlets and vassals of the lower sort, trooped from all sides to the rescue. The Straits of Gibel-al-Tariff, at which spot the Moor, passing from Barbary, first planted his accursed foot on the Christian soil, were crowded with the galleys of ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... them. She felt so proud and happy to think that fate had given her the power to help William, and that he had consented to avail himself of the power. Once more he had begun to lean on her. As in the past, so in the future, he would derive support from his poor little misunderstood, but always well-meaning Mavis. ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... the solemn teaching of the Lord Jesus, one of the company, well-meaning, but dim and confused in his conceptions, made the remark, "Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God." Observing that this man and the Pharisees around him were clinging to the notion that ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... to pick out the boys for the clubs that we are interested in. This is a serious mistake. It is this sort of thing that causes the failure of so many well-meaning attempts to redeem the children of the "slums" or of the street. We must let the groups form spontaneously; the boys' instincts are keener in detecting the sneak and the coward and the traitor than yours are, and if the club has the right start, the undesirable citizen will either adopt ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... wife and children in health, and for the sick little ones no proper treatment. It is not capital we need to guard, but helpless labor. If I returned to business to-morrow, fear of labor troubles would not enter my mind, but tenderness for poor and sometimes misguided though well-meaning laborers would fill my heart and soften it; and thereby ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... gone; y' have watched your time: He fights this day unarmed,—without his rhyme;— And brings a tale which often has been told; As sad as Dido's; and almost as old. His hero, whom you wits his bully call, Bates of his mettle, and scarce rants at all; He's somewhat lewd; but a well-meaning mind; Weeps much; fights little; but is wond'rous kind. In short, a pattern, and companion fit, For all the keeping Tonies of the pit. I could name more: a wife, and mistress too; Both (to be plain) too good for most of you: The wife well-natured, ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... these last eight years of his life. He seems to have drawn the pension which George III. had settled on him, for not more than one year. We do not know why he refused to receive it afterwards. A well-meaning friend, when the arrears amounted to between six and seven thousand francs, applied for it on his behalf, and a draft for the money was sent. Rousseau gave the offender a vigorous rebuke for meddling in affairs that did not concern him, and the draft was destroyed. Other ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... she wanted a proper application of that force. Wisdom is not the purchase of a day, and it is no wonder that we should err at the first setting off. From an excess of tenderness, we were unwilling to raise an army, and trusted our cause to the temporary defence of a well-meaning militia. A summer's experience has now taught us better; yet with those troops, while they were collected, we were able to set bounds to the progress of the enemy, and, thank God! they are again assembling. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... to that question, and I am sure that very many well-meaning people would make the wrong one. They would answer POVERTY, when they ought to answer SLAVERY. Face to face every day with the shameful contrasts of riches and destitution, high dividends and low wages, and painfully conscious of the futility of trying to adjust the balance by means ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... Some well-meaning Christians tremble for their salvation, because they have never gone through that valley of tears and of sorrow, which they have been taught to consider as an ordeal that must be passed through before they can arrive at regeneration. To satisfy such minds, it may be observed, ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... visitors, who wished to look at him, to advise him, and to secure promises of office; fortunately the tedious procession had lost part of its offensiveness by touching his sense of humor. Anxious people made well-meaning but useless efforts to induce him to say something for effect upon the popular mind; but he resolutely and wisely maintained silence. His position and opinions, he said, had already been declared in his speeches with all the clearness ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... with the relation of classes to one another in an industrial district, and especially with the faults of the class that rose to power with the development of manufacturing. Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the well-meaning pedant and the offensive parvenu, preach the same gospel. Political economy, as they understand it, is to rule life, and this dismal science is not concerned with human well-being and happiness, but only with the profit and loss on commercial ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... oxy-acetylene torches. It shows in their writings. Why can't they think of something original? Why can't they make their stories logical? The merits of a story are not dependent on the number of people wiped out by one blast of a death ray! But they all stick to the same old plot. A merciless but well-meaning scientist, or hordes from a foreign planet, wipe out thousands of American citizens at one blow. Hundreds of airplanes are disintegrated before they discover that the enemy is invulnerable. An ultimatum in domineering tones gives the terror-stricken ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... Munodi was a person of the first rank, and had been some years governor of Lagado; but, by a cabal of ministers, was discharged for insufficiency. However, the king treated him with tenderness, as a well-meaning man, but of ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... going to a watering-place with a gay young Frenchwoman; but he has no objection, after raising twenty pounds by the sale of that extraordinary work "Joseph Sell," to set off into the country, mend kettles under hedge-rows, and make pony and donkey shoes in a dingle. Here, perhaps, some plain, well-meaning person will cry—and with much apparent justice—how can the writer justify him in this act? What motive, save a love for what is low, could induce him to do such things? Would the writer have everybody who is in need of recreation go into the country, mend kettles under ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... But any good criticism of Tom Jones must be as mystical as the Faery Queen. Hence it is unavoidable in speaking of a fine book like Great Expectations that we should give even to its unpretentious and realistic figures a certain massive mysticism. Pip is Pip, but he is also the well-meaning snob. And this is even more true of those two great figures in the tale which stand for the English democracy. For, indeed, the first and last word upon the English democracy is said in Joe Gargery and Trabb's boy. The actual English ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... his ill-advised, but well-meaning hints concerning the respectability of my paternity, and the immense wealth of my relations, did this really honest-hearted but foolish friend of mine, prevent me from getting three dollars in advance, which I greatly ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... houses was very distracting even to the occupants, with whom it was a feat of arithmetic to identify their homes in the daytime, and much more so at night, when the landmarks were shadowy and indistinguishable. Occasionally, well-meaning tenants found themselves pulling at wrong doorbells; and there was one man who got tipsy every Saturday night, and rang himself quite through the row before he tumbled in on his own hall carpet. It was in counting the spruce trees, he said, which had a perplexing ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... woman. "Why, she's in that there back room now, miss, an' has been for a month, an' a decent, well-meaning girl she's going to turn out, an' such a help to me in the day shop, an' in the kitchen, as you'd scarce believe, knowing how ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Liturgy, now when there was a general expectation of a total subversion of the one, and abolition of the other, they thought only removing what was offensive, unnecessary, or burthensome, an easy composition. Thus the well-meaning were, by degrees, prevailed on, towards ends they extremely abhorred, and what, at first, seemed prophane and impious to them, in a ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... "you were never young. You are a good woman, Frances, an excellent, well-meaning woman; but you were never either child or girl. Now, this little thing—how long is it since she and her mother were ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... and paintings to puzzle Rosicrucian simpletons; nor, again, the feeble imagery of the wealthy idlers or the worthy youths who fancy that if they paint a woman larger than life, that makes her mystical. Silence would befit the subject, only that, unluckily, a well-meaning publisher was struck by the idea of mobilizing the clerical forces to hail James Tissot as an evangelical painter. His Life of Christ is one of the least religious works conceivable, for, in fact, it might be regarded as a hesitating paraphrase of the Life of Jesus as narrated ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... yet unconquered Dutch colony, was likely to be taken up with his duties to such an extent as to preclude his sharing prominently in the diplomatic part of his mission; Colonel George Cartwright, a soldier, well-meaning but devoid of sympathy and ignorant of the conditions that confronted him; Sir Robert Carr, the worst of the four, unprincipled and profligate and without control either of his temper or his passions; and, lastly, Maverick himself, opposed to the existing order in Massachusetts ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... fidelity, full of obstinacy, enemies of philosophy, buried in literalities—have always mistaken for the last word of science that which was only the inconsiderate aspiration of men who, to be sure, were well-meaning, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... deliberately in a light-minded, even frivolous, manner, toying airily with a sugar biscuit, as he leaned back in his chair, which stood opposite to Madame Sagittarius's. To his great surprise his well-meaning remarks were received with every symptom of grave dissatisfaction by his illustrious companions. Madame Sagittarius threw herself suddenly forward with a most vivacious snort, and her husband's face was immediately overcast by a threatening gloom that seemed to ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... around I can be of some use. You say it's fifty miles to the nearest doctor. But that needn't make a grass widow necessary. I can keep house—it looks better than when I came, and you know it." Which remark would have hurt the feelings of several well-meaning cow- ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... feet, still in the mire, Go crushing blossoms without end; These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust Among the heart-strings of ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... seemed so dull and so unlike yourself? And did that person time after time return to the charge, till you would have liked to poison him? There is nothing more disagreeable, and few things more mischievous, than a well-meaning, meddling fool. And where there was no special intention, good or bad, towards yourself, you have known people make you uncomfortable through the simple exhibition to you, and pressure upon you, of their own inherent disagreeableness. You ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... will collapse and cease like an overlain infant, without a shot fired. They have now been months here on their big salaries—and Cedercrantz, whom I specially like as a man, has done nearly nothing, and the Baron, who is well-meaning, has done worse. They have these large salaries, and they have all the taxes; they have made scarce a foot of road; they have not given a single native a position—all to white men; they have scarce laid out ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... regret for the rupture between the two countries, that he evidently saw, too late, his error in having secretly encouraged the Hohenzollern candidature, and that the result of all these unhappy complications had left the well-meaning chancellor inconsolable. Such a candid confession of remorse and regret moved the Frenchman's compassion to a degree that ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... other on the Cob struck me as in indifferent taste. The thing had been definitely arranged (half down and half when it was over), and there was no need for any cloak and dark-lantern effects. I objected strongly to being treated as the villain of a melodrama. I was merely an ordinary well-meaning man, forced by circumstances into doing the work of Providence. Mr. Hawk's ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... blunt and plain-spoken to a fault; otherwise she was a brisk, well-meaning, but very ignorant girl. She had not been with us a week before Miss Matilda and I were astounded one morning by the receipt of a letter from a cousin of hers, who had been twenty or thirty years in India, and who had lately, as we had seen by the "Army List," returned to England, ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Celtic nature. Has not the Irish Celt, he asks, achieved distinguished success in every country of Europe but his own? The state in which he is to be found in Ireland to-day must be, therefore, accounted for on some other theory than the inherent good-for-nothingness of his nature. "The sluggish, well-meaning mind of the English nation," he continues, "so willing to do its duty, so slow to discover that it has any duty to do, is now perforce rousing to ask itself the question, after five centuries of English ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... cut out dolls' clothes for those who want them! When she has grown up, she will very soon look out for other diversions." "My dear child," he would sometimes say to her, "do exactly as you like. I only beg of you one thing: whenever you are tired of these innocent, well-meaning illusions and return to rough, prosaic, brutal reality; whenever you feel yourself deceived or wounded by those whom you may have implicitly trusted, pray recollect that you have a natural protector, ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... lived, the mode of life he adopted, and the silence or loss of contemporary writers, are circumstances sufficiently favourable, indeed, to romance, but altogether inimical to historical truth.' In these words Joseph Ritson, the first and most painstaking of those well-meaning scholars who have tried to associate the outlaw with 'historical truth,' begins his 'Life of Robin Hood,' an account which occupies ten pages of his book, and is annotated and illustrated through the following one hundred and five pages. The Dictionary ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... a very well-meaning woman. She could not prevent her son from going to the heretical University, but she hoped by her admonitions and warnings that she might prevent him from imbibing the dangerous principles which she understood ...
— Count Ulrich of Lindburg - A Tale of the Reformation in Germany • W.H.G. Kingston
... him to run with humility, to tell what he has won and what overcome and done. He has not destroyed All—root and branch. For reasons of personal policy, he has given quarter. And the Priest, for God, will have none of his well-meaning excuses, of his good intentions, his policy, his burnt offerings of half-way measures;—"Behold to obey is better than sacrifice," begins his fierce anathema, "and to hearken ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... we should be held up to!) ... The Reverend author insolently adds,—"It is time for divines to recognize these things, since with their opportunities of study, the current error is as discreditable to them, as for the well-meaning crowd, who are taught to identify it with their creed, it is a matter of grave compassion." (p. 77.) "When so vast an induction on the destructive side has been gone through, it avails little that some passages may be doubtful; one perhaps in Zechariah, and one in Isaiah, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... desired not to be understood as saying that "there are no well-meaning men among those who are compromised in the Rebellion. There are many, but neither their number nor their influence is strong enough to control the manifest tendency of the popular spirit." Apprehending that his report ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... every household has, near or remote, some such burden, which Heaven only can lift off or help to bear. And sometimes, looking round the world outside, these two congratulated themselves, in a half sort of way, that theirs was as light as it was; that Selina was after all, a well-meaning well-principled woman, and, in spite of her little tempers, really fond of her family, as she truly was, at least as fond as a nature which has its centre in self can ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... the Naval Observatory, and other scientific associations. At this juncture the discoveries of Captain Inglefield, R. N., in Smith Sound, afforded to Kane a new route for his activities. The scheme, as far as the search for Franklin was concerned, was well-meaning, but none the less fallacious and illogical. Kane was personally cognizant of the fact that Franklin had gone into Lancaster Sound, and had wintered in 1845-46 at Beechy Island, plainly following the direct and positive orders of the Admiralty, that he ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... your pretty china and your lovely fanciful articles for the table only so long as you can take all the care of them yourselves. As soon as you get tired of doing this, and put them into the hands of the trustiest servants, some good, well-meaning creature is sure to break her heart and your own and your very pet, darling china pitcher all in one and the same minute; and then her frantic despair leaves you not even the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... disapprobation with which she sometimes felt, though Annie heeded it not, Mrs. Hamilton regarded her child. It was admiration, almost veneration, which Lady Helen felt for Mrs. Hamilton, and no one could have imagined how very frequently the indolent but well-meaning woman had regretted what she deemed was her utter inability to act with the same firmness that characterised her friend. She was delighted at the notice Lilla ever received from her; but blinded by the artful manners of her elder girl, she often wished that Annie had ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... light, but equally glorious and successful when considered in another point of view; An expedition that has demonstrated to the whole world that a train of unforeseen and most disastrous accidents may be remedied, and even turned to advantage, by an honest, skilful, brave, experienced, and well-meaning officer; An expedition which shews that there are no hazards, no difficulties, no distresses capable of depressing the courage of English seamen under a proper commander; an expedition which makes it evident that discontent, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... some to a country I will not name. I may say frankly that I have other and greater interest in the matter than that of the captain's friend. For the present that is in strict confidence between us; the police are well-meaning, but they sometimes blunder. Did I understand you to say that you have copies of the ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... belief in the possibility of anything like what this man has believed possible of me, had cast a shade of vice and depravity over my whole life: for this noble being has hitherto been the mirror of my own worth, by looking at which I became conscious of my own well-meaning and integrity. Can everything, everything in our heart be thus transformed in a single moment? Yes, my dear, my fatherly friend, I shall evermore honour and love you; I admire you while I mourn over you; but even without ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... the wiser. For we have done something, and this (which is purely a business letter) is to tell you that the credit does not all belong to Mr. Robbie, or to your Mr. Romaine (who by Mr. Robbie's account must be quite a tiresome old gentleman, though well-meaning, no doubt). But on the Tuesday after you left us I had a talk with Major Chevenix, and when I really felt quite sorry for him (though it was no use and I told him so), he turned round in a way I could not but admire and said he wished ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... i. 168), in a letter dated May 22, 1781, says that during the past winter several of these Sunday religious debating societies had been established. 'The auditors,' he was assured, 'were mostly weak, well-meaning people, who were inclined to Methodism;' but among the speakers were 'some designing villains, and a few coxcombs, with more wit than understanding.' 'Nothing,' he continues, 'could raise up panegyrists of these societies but what has lately happened, an attempt to suppress ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... has just died again, in Arkansas. This makes six times that he is known to have died, and always in a new place. The death of Washington's body-servant has ceased to be a novelty; it's charm is gone; the people are tired of it; let it cease. This well-meaning but misguided negro has not put six different communities to the expense of burying him in state, and has swindled tens of thousands of people into following him to the grave under the delusion that a select and peculiar distinction was being conferred upon them. Let him stay buried for good now; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that keeps us clear of the adventurer decides also our attitude to the well-meaning man of half-measures. He says separation from England is not possible now and suggests some alternative, if not Home Rule, Grattan's Parliament, or leaving it an open question. In the general view this ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... glared at him, and then, shortly declining Mrs. Bowman's invitation to accompany them home, on the ground that he required exercise, proceeded on his way. He carried himself so stiffly, and his manner was so fierce, that a well-meaning neighbor who had crossed the road to join him, and offer a little sympathy if occasion offered, talked of the weather for five minutes and inconsequently faded ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... enemy to be crushed, but a god-send to be welcomed." The governor, Colonel Gore-Browne, was weak; but he felt that if he could have Sir William Martin and Bishop Selwyn on his council for native affairs, he might be able to walk uprightly. His proposal, however, was declared "inadmissible," and the well-meaning governor was soon hurried into a policy from which he ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... domestic enough. A selfish companion must, doubtless, be a great trial amid the hardships of military life, but when a soldier is kind-hearted, he is often a much more helpful and thoughtful and handy husband than any equally well-meaning civilian. Amid the ups and downs of their wanderings, the discomforts of shipboard and of stations in the colonies, bad servants, and unwonted sicknesses, the Captain's tenderness never failed. If the life was rough the Captain was ready. He had been, by turns, in one strait or another, sick-nurse, ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... which had already exercised the wits of two redoubted champions of the church—but that our object, and the object of all rational and manly discussion, was to state opinions with frankness, without intending to wound the feelings, or call forth the animadversions, of well-meaning and respectable characters. "I know," continued he, "that you, Philemon, have been bred in one of these establishments, under a man as venerable for his years as he is eminent for his talents and worth; who ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of the ministry was immediately directed to an investigation of the cause of the general distress. This was right and proper, and precisely what a cautious and well-meaning government ought to do under such circumstances, in order to prevent, if possible, the recurrence of a similar disaster. But unfortunately the ministers of the day, though well-meaning, were any thing but cautious. The majority of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... difficulties had arisen in the course of that fateful March which those colleagues of his in the Cabinet—well-meaning, inferior men, to be sure—had not the subtlety to comprehend. Of course the matter of evacuation remained what it always had been, the plain open road to an ultimate diplomatic triumph. Who but a president out of the West, or a minor ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Sometimes it is the well-meaning but unthinking father; again it is the solicitous but inquisitive mother; but more often it is the unregenerate and disrespectful young brother or sister. In this case it was Miss Rosa Very, who burst into the room, bright and rosy, after her trip upon the ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... most just and impartial in her treatment of the fifty scholars under her supervision, but, possessed of about as much imagination as a cat, she failed to analyze or understand the dispositions of her charges; and well-meaning Peace was ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... is not that he was a careless man, he was a most careful one; it is not that he was a morally lax man, he was almost morbidly the reverse. Neither was he morose or eccentric in his motives or bearing; he was genial, conversational, and well-meaning. But he had some sort of blindness towards his fellow-men, so that he never entirely grasped the spirit of everyday life, so that he, who was so copiously intelligent in the things of the study, misunderstood, blundered, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... found Lord Castlewood sitting in a high-backed chair, uncushioned and uncomfortable. When he saw me near him he got up and took my hand, and looked at me, and I was pleased to find his face well-meaning, brave, and generous. But even to rise from his chair was plainly no small effort to him, and he leaned upon a staff or crutch as he offered me a small ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... scandalized one or two innocent and patriotic critics who regarded the prowess of the British army as inextricably bound up with Highcastle prestige. But our Government departments knew better: their problem was how to win the war with Augustus on their backs, well-meaning, brave, patriotic, but obstructively fussy, ...
— Augustus Does His Bit • George Bernard Shaw
... to our apparent discourtesy, just as in some places—Granada especially—spoiled by long intimacy with tourists, the beggars have become importunate, and to some extent impudent; but in places a little removed from such a condition of modern "civilisation," the effect produced by many a well-meaning but ordinary Saxon priding himself on his superiority, and without any intention of being ill-bred or ill-mannered, is that of disgust and ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... and recluse always leads a placid life. I never cared for excitement, you know. I came down here to attend a sale of some rare editions, and a well-meaning friend dragged me out to see the races. I find it rather interesting, I must confess, much more so than I should have fancied. Sorry I can't stay until the end. I must go as soon as the free-for-all is over, if not before. I have backed ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Master Heriot," said Sir Mungo, throwing himself into a chair with an air of atrabilarious importance; "the other was a well-meaning hint to yourself, as the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... make when we reason out our lives is this: we reason as though we were planning for reasonable creatures. It is a big mistake. Well-meaning ladies and gentlemen make it when they picture their ideal worlds. When marriage is reformed, and the social problem solved, when poverty and war have been abolished by acclamation, and sin and sorrow rescinded by an overwhelming parliamentary majority! Ah, then the world will be worthy of ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... have to re-live the horrors of the next hour. In spite of my bluff and hearty ways, in times of trouble I am as reticent as a clam. I was determined to hide my agony and anxiety from the well-meaning people of the Moose Hotel. I hurried to the railway station to send a telegram to the Professor's address in Brooklyn, but found the place closed. A boy told me it would not be open until the afternoon. ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... Sire," said De Luynes in his turn, when this officious but well-meaning counsellor had withdrawn; "your Majesty will not be obeyed so readily as many would lead you to anticipate. Concini is too rapacious willingly to leave the country while there remains one jewel to be filched from your royal crown; and he is too ambitious to abandon ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... take all the pains in the world with a well-meaning but slow workman, but he disposed of shirkers and double-dealers without needless words. Neither did he encourage discussion and idle talk ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... a terrible temptation to many men. I do not mean to hypocrites, but to really well-meaning men. They like religion. They wish to be good; they have the feeling of devotion. They pray, they read their Bibles, they are attentive to services and to sermons, and are more or less pious people. But soon—too soon— they find that their piety is profitable. Their business increases. ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... woolly-brained young person,—having absolutely no ear for music or time, silently but vigorously worked her jaws through the chorus, and affably ambled about, under everybody's feet, through the dance, displaying all the stiff-kneed grace of a young, well-meaning calf. ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... other. "My name is Will, too. Though certain well-meaning persons have always preferred to refer to me as William. I used to write plays, ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... took the cloth or salt offered in return without grumbling. About midday we reached the commencement of the Yakoma village, which extends for some miles along the bank. Most of the crew were evidently well known here and several lived in the village. Their well-meaning friends therefore, jumped on to the canoes as they passed or swam out to them and took the paddles and poles from their tired comrades. With a greatly augmented company, with the canoes dangerously deep in the water, with tom-toms beating, bells ringing, bugles sounding and people ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... probably would have remained insoluble, had not the statement I made that the main element in the difficulty was the mother-in-law vs. daughter-in-law situation come to the ears of the old lady. Conscientious and well-meaning, that lady announced her determination to take up her residence with a married daughter who already had a well-organized household, and whose husband was a favorite of the mother's. Despite the mother-in-law joke of the humorists, the mother-in-law ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... is flat, and that the sun, which once 'stood still,' must move round its parasite. The manner of this pestilence is right worthy of its matter, and the style would be scouted in a decent housekeeper's room. All well-meaning men, of either colony, declare that it has done more harm in West Africa than the grossest abuse yet written. Its tactic is to set black against white, to pander for the public love of scandal, and systematically to abuse all the employes of Government. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... little Lady Anstruthers, who was left to trot after her husband, smiled again at the ruddy, kind-looking fellow, this time in conscious deprecation. In the simplicity of her republican sympathy with a well-meaning fellow creature who might feel himself snubbed, she could have shaken him by the hand. She had even parted her lips to venture a word of civility when she was startled by hearing Sir Nigel's voice ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... passed through the legislature. Dr. Ryerson, a power among the Methodists, denounced it, after he had at the outset shown an inclination to support it, and the Bishop of Toronto was also among its most determined opponents. Lord Sydenham's well-meaning attempt to settle the question was thwarted at the very outset by the reference of the bill to English judges, who reported adversely on the ground that the power "to vary or repeal" given in the Constitutional Act of 1791 was only prospective, and did not authorize the provincial legislature ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... you wits his bully call, Bates of his mettle, and scarce rants at all; He's somewhat lewd, but a well-meaning mind, Weeps much, fights little, but ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... speculative class. It is not from men excellent in any kind, that disparagement of any other is to be looked for. With such, Talleyrand's question is ever the main one; not, is he rich? is he committed? is he well-meaning? has he this or that faculty? is he of the movement? is he of the establishment?—but, Is he anybody? does he stand for something? He must be good of his kind. That is all that Talleyrand, all that State-street, all that the common ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... parents have to pinch and save and his brothers bide at the plough-tail all their lives in consequence—a law whose chief merit lies in the splendid sacrifices which its faithful fulfilment involves, and whose vital principle well-meaning but misguided philanthropy is now endeavouring to dole out of existence—he had been sent to Edinburgh to make the most of this, ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... any virtue of courage. Most healthy people dismiss these moral dangers as they dismiss the possibility of bombs or microbes. Modern realists are indeed Terrorists, like the dynamiters; and they fail just as much in their effort to create a thrill. Both realists and dynamiters are well-meaning people engaged in the task, so obviously ultimately hopeless, of ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... enthusiastic the less they understood the real scope of Christ's teaching. The disciple who pressed forward with his excited and unasked 'Master, I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest!' was one of such—well-meaning, perfectly sincere, warmly affected, and completely unreliable. Lightly come is lightly go. When such people forsake their fervent purposes, and turn their backs on what they have been so eagerly pursuing, they are quite consistent; for they are obeying the uppermost ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... for a few minutes. He was a well-meaning man, but a doctor of the old school. He believed that if medicine was a good thing, the more one took the better. Also, if dieting was good, semi-starvation ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine
... they are retained for patching on occasion. Because the loose, go-as-you-please organization of the so-called "empire" has revealed almost incredible unity of sentiment and purpose, practiced statesmen regard it as a prodigious success. They are mighty shy of affiliating with any of the well-meaning doctrinaires who have been explaining any time within the last century that the system is essentially incoherent and absurd and urgently needs profound change with ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... such an impression upon Camacho, that he instantly banished her from his heart. The persuasions, therefore, of the priest, who was a prudent, well-meaning man, had their effect; Camacho and his party sheathed their weapons and remained satisfied, blaming rather the fickleness of Quiteria than the cunning of Basilius. With much reason Camacho thought within himself that if Quiteria loved Basilius when a virgin, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of life. There is a vast deal of genuine charity in humble life, and the poor of every city derive a large part of their support from those but moderately blessed with worldly goods themselves; but many a well-meaning man will unintentionally make a remark that wounds your feelings and makes you uncomfortable for hours afterwards, while a person whose perceptions and sympathies have been more nicely trained would spare you the infliction. A certain fortune ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... his client as a simple-hearted, honest, well-meaning man, who, during a copartnership of twelve years, had gradually become impoverished, while his partner (his former clerk) having no funds but his share of the same business, into which he had been admitted without any advance of stock, had become ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... to a succession of bad Head-prefects, and partly to Leicester himself, who was well-meaning but weak. His spirit was willing, but his will was not spirited. When things went on that ought not to have gone on, he generally managed to avoid seeing them, and the things continued to go on. Altogether, unless Gethryn's rule ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... supreme, and by his wisdom, that has proved to be almost infallible in working out the salvation of the Union. After Lee's surrender, the interests of the South could have sustained no severer blow than the death of Lincoln. His successor, Andrew Johnson, was a well-meaning man, but a very narrow-minded one in some respects, and a very weak one in others. It is but justice to him to say that he did his best to carry out Lincoln's policy of pacification, and his failure was no greater than that of any other leading politician ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... that you have exposed yourself to heavy penalties. I prefer, however, to think of you as a well-meaning but misguided person. What good do you think you can do? I can assure you that the Government are fully aware of the distress which prevails, and will do all they can to alleviate it. If you have any grievances, why not seek their redress by ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... dull, well-meaning man, who utterly failed to comprehend the real tendency of the age. He was the son of a commoner who had been raised to the peerage. He had always had a reputation for honest obstinacy, and for little else. After he became Premier, a ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... awhile he put out his hand without looking up and took hers as it hung by her side. He had taken quite a liking to the sweet-tempered little lassie, and had felt particularly kindly towards her since her well-meaning, if rather inadequate effort to console him that ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... hurry up their autograph, or make haste to copy that poem they wish to have in the author's own handwriting, or it will be too late; but I have never before been huddled out of the world in this way. I take this rather premature obituary as a hint that, unless I come to some arrangement with my well-meaning but insatiable correspondents, it would be as well to leave it in type, for I cannot bear much longer the load they lay upon me. I will explain myself on this point after I have told my readers ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... exist no longer, they are all profaned, and emptied, and vulgarized. An army of 'collectors' has passed over them, and ravaged every corner of them. The fairy paradise has been violated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning, idle-minded curiosity. That my Father, himself so reverent, so conservative, had by the popularity of his books acquired the direct responsibility for a calamity that he had never anticipated became clear enough to himself before many years had passed, and cost him great ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... up and down. There is one other phrase which will soon come to be decisive of a man's social STATUS, if it is not already: "That tells the whole story." It is an expression which vulgar and conceited people particularly affect, and which well-meaning ones, who know better, catch from them. It is intended to stop all debate, like the previous question in the General Court. Only it doesn't; simply because "that" does not usually tell the whole, nor one half ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... more than another who wore out Miss Beach's patience it was her niece and goddaughter, Mrs. Woodward. She had a sincere affection for her, but their two personalities were at absolutely opposite poles. She admitted that Florita was amiable, well-meaning, and thoroughly affectionate, but for the rest she considered her weak, foolishly helpless, liable to extravagance, a poor housekeeper, and a perfect jelly-fish in her methods of bringing up her family. In vain did Aunt Harriet, on ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... that it befitted all governesses to keep their proper place, and forgetting altogether that she was granddaughter not only of Sir Walpole Crawley, but of Mr. Dawson of Mudbury, and so had a coal-scuttle in her scutcheon. There are other very well-meaning people whom one meets every day in Vanity Fair who ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... were very polite and well-meaning,' said the secretary. 'I sent word that I was coming to the city and asked the national banks, as intimately related to the treasury department, to select persons to meet me. I also notified the members of the old syndicate ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... was a free man, and the Southern white man found himself face to face with the problem of dealing with the negro as a free laborer. To most of the Southern whites this problem was utterly bewildering. Many of them, honest and well-meaning people, admitted to me, with a sort of helpless stupefaction, that their imagination was wholly incapable of grasping the fact that their former slaves were now free. And yet they had to deal with this perplexing ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... my part in trying. The great heart of the people is honest and well-meaning: I think we all admit that. And there is intelligence, too. But human nature is the same as it used to be when they set up a man who could and called him a king. Gentle or simple, it ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... equality," said Dr. Latimer, "is only a bugbear which frightens well-meaning people from dealing justly with the negro. I know of no place on earth where there is perfect social equality, and I doubt if there is such a thing in heaven. The sinner who repents on his death-bed cannot be the equal of St. Paul ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... attractive and more available to large numbers of people whose pride keeps them away from the public provision for charity cases, and whose limited means leave them at the mercy either of quackery or of well-meaning but entirely ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... wrathful force of this voice which, with so little courtesy, bade the intruder begone, as fairly to stagger the well-meaning visitor. ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... on the Denes; and the little Band-master, who played with his Troop here last summer, joined us as we were walking, and told Posh not to lag behind, for he was not at all ashamed to be seen walking with him. The little well-meaning ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... should punish her so severely, for that very same day he received a letter (it was brought to the house by a liveried servant), which the nobleman so frequently alluded to wrote him with his own hand, and in which he expressed his grief that his innocent, well-meaning advances should have occasioned such a misunderstanding. He declared, moreover, that he regarded the whole family with the greatest respect, and as to his intercourse with Matilda, it was simply dictated by his enthusiasm for ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
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