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Wasteful   Listen
adjective
Wasteful  adj.  
1.
Full of waste; destructive to property; ruinous; as, wasteful practices or negligence; wasteful expenses.
2.
Expending, or tending to expend, property, or that which is valuable, in a needless or useless manner; lavish; prodigal; as, a wasteful person; a wasteful disposition.
3.
Waste; desolate; unoccupied; untilled. (Obs.) "In wilderness and wasteful desert strayed."
Synonyms: Lavish; profuse; prodigal; extravagant.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Wasteful" Quotes from Famous Books



... infancy she had been indulged in all her wishes to the extreme of folly, and started habitually at the unpleasant voice of control. She was beautiful; she had been too frequently told the high value of that beauty, and thought every moment passed in wasteful idleness during which she was not gaining some new conquest. She had a quick sensibility, which too frequently discovered itself in the immediate resentment of injuries or neglect. She had, besides, acquired the ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald

... that the Turkish remedy for this form of insubordination is a wasteful means of keeping the peace. Plainly, to the home office, the High Command, the extinction of a village with its population is a more substantial loss than the unseasonable decease of one of its administrative ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... light for the same expenditure of current as carbon lights. This is a big advantage in the city, where current is costly; but it is not so much of an advantage in the country where a farmer has plenty of water-power—because his current costs him practically nothing, and he can afford to be wasteful of it to save money in lamps. Another advantage he has over his city cousin: In town, an incandescent lamp is thrown away after it has been used 1,000 hours because after that it gives only 80% of the light it did when new—quite an item ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson

... incidental expenses, were $26,111.11, the income being less than one-fourth of the expenses. To this pecuniary loss may be added the injury sustained by the public in consequence of the destruction of timber and the careless and wasteful manner of working the mines. The system has given rise to much litigation between the United States and individual citizens, producing irritation and excitement in the mineral region, and involving the Government in heavy additional ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... day was dissolving into the deeper dusk of the night, and put up his tent in the shelter of a clump of gnarled and storm-beaten spruce. Then he gathered wood and built himself a fire. He did not count the sticks as he had counted them for eighteen months. He was wasteful, prodigal. He had traveled forty miles since morning but he felt no exhaustion. He gathered wood until he had a great pile of it, and the flames of his fire leaped higher and higher until the spruce needles crackled and ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood

... that the time is near when our food supplies shall become inadequate if our present practices continue, but the enforced reduction in animal products will at least postpone the time of actual famine in America. I keep in mind always that we are feeding much grain to domestic animals, an extremely wasteful practice so far as economy of human food is concerned; because, as an average, animals return in meat and milk not more than onefifth as much food value as they destroy in the corresponding grain consumed; ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins

... pirates, but as invaders. Whilst the Britons contended with one body of their fierce enemies, another gained ground, and filled with slaughter and desolation the whole country from sea to sea. A devouring war, a dreadful famine, a plague, the most wasteful of any recorded in our history, united to consummate the ruin of Britain. The ecclesiastical writers of that age, confounded at the view of those complicated calamities, saw nothing but the arm of God stretched out for the punishment of a sinful and disobedient nation. And truly, when ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... roads, and for the imperial post. Nevertheless the emperor could handle all this latter money exactly as he chose, and it is upon this chest that Nero was drawing for all his lavish prodigalities and his undeserved and wasteful bounties. Yet even Nero was scarcely so bad as Caligula, who managed to spend L22,000,000 in ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... him to be away at such a time," said Katy, imposingly. "Suppose now his father wanted to make his last will in the testament, who is there to do so solemn and awful an act for him? Harvey is a very wasteful and ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... account. But at length they arrived at Moss Brow, and with a sudden sigh she quitted the subjects of her dreamy meditations, and followed her father into the great house-place. It had a more comfortable aspect by night than by day. The fire was always kept up to a wasteful size, and the dancing blaze and the partial light of candles left much in shadow that was best ignored in such a disorderly family. But there was always a warm welcome to friends, however roughly given; and after the words of this were spoken, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell

... building up large plantations was the wasteful system of agriculture adopted by the settlers. It soon became apparent to them that the cultivation of tobacco was very exhausting to the soil, but the abundance of land led them to neglect the most ordinary precautions to preserve the fertility ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker

... dead-house, where the still-born and deceased children of the press are exhibited, to challenge the pity of passers-by, and so escape the corner grocer and the neighboring trunk-maker. Here Murger purchased all the volumes of new poems he could discover. When his friends jested him upon his wasteful extravagance in buying verse good for nothing but to cheapen the value of the paper on which it was printed, he replied, that a poet should keep himself informed of the progress of Art. He has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... wanted to start in business. I am now paying it back to you and your mother instead of to him, because I know that he is not taking care of you as he ought, and also because I know that if I pay it to him he will merely make some bad and wasteful use of it. Enclosed you will find a memorandum of the date, the principal, rate, interest and amount. I shall tell him that I have sent ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly

... breathing opulence, and told me how hard it was for her to live—she, a lone woman with six servants to wait on her and a car and a chauffeur! 'I am not going to give to this War Memorial,' she said. 'At this time it seems rather a wasteful proceeding, and it won't do the men who have fallen any good.' ... I could have told her that surely it wasn't waste the men were thinking about when they poured out their youth like wine that she and her like might live ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)

... long time upon the roof, wondering at the grotesque changes of the day. I recalled my mental states from the midnight prayer to the foolish card-playing. I had a violent revulsion of feeling. I remember I flung away the cigar with a certain wasteful symbolism. My folly came to me with glaring exaggeration. I seemed a traitor to my wife and to my kind; I was filled with remorse. I resolved to leave this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony, and to go on into London. ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... protective tariff is the most wasteful and costly method ever designed for raising national revenue, because for every dollar obtained thereby for the public treasury at least three dollars pass into the pockets of the protected interests, thereby building up a privileged class ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse

... to 5s. per lb. The estate alluded to above yields from 30,000 to 40,000 lb. per annum; a uniform rate of 41/2 d. per lb. of finished bark is paid for the labor. Cinnamon oil is produced from this bark by distillation; the mode is very primitive and wasteful. About 40 lb. of bark, previously macerated in water, form one charge for the still, which is heated over a fire made of the spent bark of a previous distillation. Each charge of bark yields about three ounces of oil, and two charges are ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various

... drunken spilling of wine, and every apartment has blazed with lights and resounded with music and feasting, often had he retired by himself to some solitary spot, and wept faster than the wine ran from the wasteful casks within, to see the mad bounty of his lord, and to think, when the means were gone which brought him praises from all sorts of people, how quickly the breath would be gone of which the praise was made; praises won in feasting would be lost in ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... order to learn to fly, you must have a flying machine to begin with. Wilbur Wright, whose views on the point never varied from first to last, held that you must have a man to begin with. The brothers were impatient of 'the wasteful extravagance of mounting delicate and costly machinery on wings which no one knew how to manage'. When they began their experiments they had already reached the conclusion that the problem of constructing wings to carry the machine, and the problem of constructing a motor ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh

... intelligent farmer in the ranks, who has learned his superiority to 'Secesh,' as a soldier, and who knows himself to be superior to any Southern in all matters of information and practical creative power, looks with scorn at the worn-out fields, wasteful agriculture, and general shiftlessness of the natives, and says, with a contemptuous laugh: 'We will get better crops out of the land, and manage it in another fashion, when we settle down here.' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various

... it is so true. However, when he began to lay on with such rhetoric as "the treasures of the nation lavished in wasteful thoughtlessness,"—"thousands of our troops sacrificed wantonly in pestilential swamps of Walcheren," and gave the details we know so well, Ministers wriggled a good one, though 'twas no news to 'em. Castlereagh kept on starting ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... the surrounding air to its melting point, involving an increase in temperature of from one thousand to nearly three thousand degrees. To obtain this entire increase of temperature with the torch flame is very wasteful of fuel and of the operator's time. The total amount of heat necessary to put into metal is increased by the conductivity of that metal because the heat applied at the weld is carried to other parts of the piece being handled until the whole mass ...
— Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting • Harold P. Manly

... residuum of effective practice. The very principle of progress by trial and error will inevitably mean that certain practices that are possible and helpful and effective are perpetuated, and that certain other processes that are ineffective and wasteful are eliminated. To repudiate all this is the height of folly. If the history of progress shows us anything, it shows us that progress is not made by repudiating the lessons of experience. Theory is the last ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley

... a right, either moral or legal, to destroy or squander an inheritance of his children that he holds for them in trust. And man, the wasteful and greedy spendthrift that he is, has not created even the humblest of the species of birds, mammals and fishes that adorn and enrich this earth. "The earth is THE LORD'S, and the fulness thereof!" With ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... have oceans. I shall never eat what I have, and it is so wasteful!... No, my dear. You ask, 'What is it, then?' But I was going to tell you when you interrupted me." Here a pause for the Universe to settle down to attention. "There is always so much disturbance; but my meaning is plain. When I was a girl young women were different.... I dare say it is all right. ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... disappointed—she really shocked me. There was an absence of all lady-like restraint in her language and manner most painful to see. She was possessed by some feverish excitement which made her distressingly loud when she laughed, and sinfully wasteful and capricious in what she ate and drank at lunch. I felt deeply for her poor mother, even before the true state of the case had been confidentially ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins

... of the State was generally a wilderness. The earlier emigrants, principally of the poorer class of Southern farmers, shunned the prairies with something of a superstitious dread. They preferred to pass the first years of their occupation in the wasteful and laborious work of clearing a patch of timber for corn, rather than enter upon those rich savannas which were ready to break into fertility at the slightest provocation of culture. Even so late as 1835, writes J. F. Speed, "no one dreamed the prairies would ever be occupied." ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... display about it, Georgino, and you know how I hate display," she said. "Shakespeare was content with the most modest scenery for his masterpieces, and it would be a great mistake if we allowed ourselves to be carried away by mere wasteful opulence. In all the years I have lived here, and contributed in my humble way to the life of the place, I have heard no complaints about my suppers or teas, nor about the quality of entertainment which I offer ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... material thrown away. In the rest it was much less. In two cases there was almost none. It is worth noting, however, that the people in these two had the largest incomes of all. In other words the best-to-do families were the least wasteful. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various

... of you in America this may seem an unnecessary and wasteful quarrel, as other people's quarrels often are; but it comes to this that though we are all killed there will be songs again, but if we were to submit and so survive there could be neither songs nor dreams, nor any joyous free ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany

... of stones was available. On some of these heat had a peculiar effect, and the unwary one was sometimes startled by a loud report and the sight of his meal being hoist in the air. Usually two or more men combined in the cooking process, but the preparation of food by the individual was found to be wasteful and injurious to health in that it attracted many flies and lacked thoroughness. The company system was therefore reverted to, and the dixies brought into use in kitchens constructed outside the trenches. The dixies were then taken forward and the meal served out in equal shares according ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett

... inter-communion of several denominations. This exchange in the ministerial field now prevails among the Nonconformists and has also affected to a large extent the Anglican communion. But the multiplied divisions and multiplying sub-divisions among the conflicting creeds, a wasteful overlapping and disastrous competition in the mission field, the enlightening experience of the great war, have forced an ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... the iron chain of its mountain barriers, not yet the boundary of political communities; there rolled its mighty rivers unprofitably to the sea; there spread out the measureless, but as yet wasteful, fertility of its uncultivated fields; there towered the gloomy majesty of its unsubdued primeval forests; there glittered in the secret caves of the earth the priceless treasures of its unsunned gold, and, more than all that pertains to material ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... principles of the landscape gardener than the stiffly squared rectilinear fields of the agriculturist. They are ha-has of Nature's digging; and their bottom and sides in this part of the country we still find occupied in a few cases—though in many more they have been ravaged by the wasteful axe—by noble forest-hedges, tall enough to overtop, in at least their middle reaches, the tracts of table-land ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... manner they went on till Theodore was as much as fifteen years of age. In the meantime the old Baron had died and left all his money to his daughter; but the Marquis and Marchioness were none the better for all the riches left them by the Baron, for they became more and more wasteful, and more ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood

... righteous. So long as anyone perceives he knows A bare place for a weapon on my son His hand shall twitch to fit a weapon in. Indeed he shall lose nothing but his life Because a woman is made so evil fair, Wasteful and white and proud in harmful acts. I lose two sons when Gunnar's eyes are still, For then will Kolskegg never more turn home.... If Gunnar would but sail, three years would pass; Only three years of banishment said the ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various

... hundred tons of stone are broken up to get between three and four tons of good slate. Within the last few years the quarrymen have been using channeling machines and getting out the slate in great masses instead of small blocks. This is not so wasteful by any means; but even now there is room for ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan

... hat with the greatest respect, and walked forward to communicate this good news. The crew of the Yungfrau and the conspirators or smugglers were soon on the best of terms, and as there was no one, to check the wasteful expenditure of stores and no one accountable, the liquor was hoisted up on the forecastle, and the ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat

... reigns of terror. The poor perished like flies in a frost; the homeless orphans of the parents murdered by either faction roamed the streets, and herded in the corners like the vagrant dogs of Eastern cities; and meantime, the nobles and their partisans revelled in wasteful pomp. ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge

... few real friends. The old Earl, their father, was constantly disappointed and humiliated by them; his heir was no honor to his noble name, and did not promise to end in being anything but a selfish, wasteful, insignificant man, with no manly or noble qualities. It was very bitter, the old Earl thought, that the son who was only third, and would have only a very small fortune, should be the one who had all the gifts, and all the ...
— Little Lord Fauntleroy • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... which have enabled a favored class to appropriate for its purposes the results of the work of others. While these sources have not been absent in the development of our civilization, the great source of energy has come from the rapid, and usually wasteful and reckless, utilization of the stored energy of the earth. The almost incredible advance in medical and other forms of scientific knowledge and the utilization of this knowledge is largely due to the greater forces which ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman

... the wisdom possessed by one of her advanced age, Cis had told him several astonishing things about this field of sky. What Barber considered a troublesome, meddlesome, wasteful school law was, at bottom, responsible for her knowing much that was true and considerable which Johnnie held was not. And one of her unbelievable statements (this from his standpoint) was to the effect that his sky patch was constantly changing,—yes, as frequently as every minute—because ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates

... fairy poem than the Nymphidia. The fourth and tenth Nymphals are also touched with the sadder, almost satiric vein; the former inveighing against the English imitation of foreigners and love of extravagance in dress; while the tenth complains of the improvident and wasteful felling of trees in the English forests. This last Nymphal, though designedly an epilogue, is probably rather a warning than a despairing lament, even though we conceive the old satyr to be Drayton ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton

... magistrate during his year of office. And the body thus constituted was to have the entire government of the borough; of its police, its charities, and generally, and most especially, of the raising and expenditure of its funds,[239] which had been too often dealt with in a manner not only wasteful, but profligate. Cases had been brought forward in which "corporations had been incurring debts year by year, while the members were actually dividing among themselves the proceeds of the loans they raised." The revenue derived from charitable estates had been "no less scandalously mismanaged." And ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... at him, smiling intently, and went to the window again. "I expect to enjoy it," she said. "Don't be afraid; I am not wasteful." ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... world, the geography and the inhabitants of which are so confidently described in the so-called[16] Christianity of Catholicism—the long and bitter contest, which engaged the best intellects for so many centuries, may seem a terrible illustration of the wasteful way in which the struggle for existence is carried on in the world of thought, no less than in that of matter. But there is a more cheerful mode of looking at the history of scholasticism. It ground and sharpened the dialectic implements ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... them? "If I had only known!" she thought. And then she reflected that, if she had known, pleasure would have been impossible. She could see her bureau drawers, her closets at home. She had thought herself not any too well off. Now, how luxurious, how stuffed with shameful, wasteful unnecessaries those ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... learning to sail in a good breeze, strong enough for speed and conscious power but placable enough for dominion and liberty of soul. Then perfection in action can be attained and a self-justifying energy can emerge out of apathy on the one hand and out of servile and wasteful work on the other. Art has accordingly two stages: one mechanical or industrial, in which untoward matter is better prepared, or impeding media are overcome; the other liberal, in which perfectly fit matter is appropriated to ideal uses and endowed with ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... "Ah, wasteful woman!" said Mr. Peters, smiling fatuously as he wrestled with a hard piece of ham rather too big for his mouth. As soon as he had swallowed it, he went on, "That's the thing a man loves in a woman—a real man, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... rich before, To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smooth the ice, or add another hue Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess. ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris

... the forests of the country and the wasteful manner in which their destruction is taking place give cause for serious apprehension. Their action in protecting the earth's surface, in modifying the extremes of climate, and in regulating and sustaining the flow of springs and streams is now well ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson

... the wider ones are used for navigation purposes. Merna explained why this was so, saying that as the main use of the canals was for irrigation purposes very wide ones were not required; for not only would they be wasteful, but as it was necessary to force the water along by artificial means, it could more conveniently be accomplished in the case of narrow canals, as the wider the canal the more difficult it became to ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... you the cause of this difference of opinion between the two countries was the careless and wasteful way in which the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 49, October 14, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... were going out in the Tuileries, had nearly all gone out. I wondered if the suspicious and timid and wasteful Emperor would keep the gas burning all night in his room. The night-roar of Paris still went on, sounding always to foreign ears like the beginning of a revolution. As I stood there, looking at the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... sense and a sympathetic attitude toward childhood will not deny. Some rigid philosophers, who see no more of life than is to be found in logical science, condemn the imaginative tale. They regard the teaching of myths and stories as the telling of pleasant lies, which, if harmless, are wasteful. What the child acquires through them, he must sooner or later forget ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... associations—enormously rich people who, while they could be stingy enough in some respects, at the same time could and did fling away fortunes in gratifying selfish whims—for silly showy houses, for retinues of wasteful servants, for gewgaws that accentuated the homeliness of their homely women and coarsened and vulgarized their pretty women—or perhaps for a night's gambling or entertaining, or for the forced smiles and contemptuous caresses of some belle of the ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips

... scold those two bright, hard-working little men? I think their papa had to console himself with thinking if only they would work as well at something useful when they were grown up, he could forgive their rather wasteful business when they ...
— The Nursery, September 1877, Vol. XXII, No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various

... friend of whom I spoke to you. A deep, sure affection which I was foolish enough to throw away, like the wasteful idiot I am. I always used to invoke her memory in moments of perplexity, when there was some question to be decided or some sacrifice to be made. I would say to myself: 'What will she think about it?' as we pause in our work to think of some great man, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... have just now a very popular word for a nouveau-riche, it is a schieber, one who exchanges. Getting your money changed is one of the most wasteful processes for you and one of the most ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... leaving behind a harmful layer of chemical pesticides and natural salts; these substances are then picked up by the wind and blown into noxious dust storms; pollution in the Caspian Sea; soil pollution from overuse of agricultural chemicals and salination from poor infrastructure and wasteful irrigation practices ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... thing produces after its kind, that children become what their parents are. A simple people, virtuous and healthy, will produce virtuous, healthy, and true-hearted children, A luxurious people—lazy, sensual, wasteful—will produce children like themselves. If we go through the vicious quarters of a great city, where licentiousness and drunkenness and beastly vices prevail, we shall find that though all die before old age, the communities are abundantly recruited ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... something of its evenness; but, though a little rough to the foot, polished and cared for like a piece of silver, looked, as mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in old age. Most noticeable among the ancestral masks, each in its little cedarn chest below the cornice, was that of the wasteful but elegant Marcellus, with the quaint resemblance in its yellow waxen features to Marius, just then so full of animation and country colour. A chamber, curved ingeniously into oval form, which he ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... so guide the trade in the fundamental food commodities as to eliminate vicious speculation, extortion, and wasteful practices, and to stabilize prices in the essential staples. Second, to guard our exports so that against the world's shortage we retain sufficient supplies for our own people, and to cooeperate with the Allies to prevent inflation of prices; and, third, that we stimulate ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... migration can this upright human type be given its chance to emerge. In The New Ghetto Jacob Samuel is a hero because he knows how to choose an honorable death. Now the death of a useful man is criminally wasteful. For there are ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl

... reveal no cool side, since there is not the vestige of a breeze; but faint odors arrive, become stronger, and die away, or are wholly dissipated by an onrush of others, so musky or so sweet that one can almost taste them. These have their secret purposes, since Nature is not wasteful. If she creates beautiful things, it is to serve some ultimate end; it is her whim to walk in obscure paths, but her goal is fixed and immutable. However, her designs are hidden and not easy to decipher; at best, one achieves, not knowledge, but ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... prompt and practical, and unaccompanied by wasteful and delusive hope. Herein lies the explanation of many a deliberate and confessed killing, while to the meteor have the perpetrators looked for absolution and remission of their sin. That which in the eyes of the white man is regarded ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... language. Latimer could talk to her only in letters, for with her he shared no friends or interests, and he was forced to choose between telling her of his lawsuits and his efforts in politics or of his love. To write to her of his affairs seemed wasteful and impertinent, and of his love for her, after she had received what he told of it in silence, he was too proud to speak. So he wrote but seldom, and then only to say: "You know what I send you." Had he known it, his best letters were those ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis

... of cogitation,"—now grumbling a lament for his perished son, which, by a natural licence of affliction, he managed to intermingle with regrets for his lost liquor, and occasionally heaping maledictions upon the heads of his wasteful companions, or soliciting the prisoner's attention to an account, that he gave him at least six times over, of the peculiar ceremonies which would be observed in burning him, when once safely bestowed in ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird

... to look at the affair with calm, contemplative eyes. Was it sufficiently obvious that Levy counted on an adequate return? Might he calculate on reaping help by the bushel if he sowed it by the handful? The result of Randal's cogitations was that the baron might fairly deem himself no wasteful sower. In the first place, it was clear that Levy, not without reasonable ground, believed that he could soon replace, with exceeding good interest, any sum he might advance to Randal, out of the wealth which Randal's prompt information ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... obscure lodgings; and when in the country, though he hated all letter-writing, except letters of business, yet he regularly informed me of every thing that could be interesting to me. Glenthorn Castle he described as a scene of riotous living, and of the most wasteful vulgar extravagance. My poor foster-brother, the best-natured and most generous fellow in the world, had not sufficient prudence or strength of mind to conduct his own family; his wife filled the castle with tribes of her vagabond relations; ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... Wasteful, too, this cooking of food for two and only one to eat it. A roast of beef meant a visit, in Dr. Ed's modest-paying clientele. He still paid the expenses of the ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... self-same flight The self-same way, with more advised watch To find the other forth; and by adventuring both I oft found both. I urge this childhood proof, Because what follows is pure innocence. I owe you much; and, like a wasteful youth, That which I owe is lost: but if you please To shoot another arrow that self way Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt, As I will watch the aim, or to find both, Or bring your latter hazard back again, And thankfully rest ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare

... Peter of Amiens Council of Clermont The First Crusade Its miseries and mistakes The Second Crusade The Third Crusade The Fourth, Children's, Fifth, and Sixth Crusades The Seventh Crusade All alike unsuccessful, and wasteful of life and energies Peculiarities and immense mistakes of the Crusaders The moral evils of the Crusades Ultimate results of the Crusades Barrier made against Mohammedan conquests Political necessity of the Crusades Their effect in weakening ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord

... that her youth should thus fade over an invalid's couch, the bloom of her complexion be rubbed out by arduous vigils, and the lines prematurely etched in her skin by the strain of a self-denial proper, no doubt, to homely girls and professional nurses, but peculiarly wanton and wasteful in the case of a ...
— Different Girls • Various

... Fox very mysteriously. "Big White Bear is a very wasteful fellow. He has a big, big kitchen, and he has the greatest amount of food stored there. Oh! piles and piles of it! He doesn't like to eat his food in his kitchen. He brings some out every day and always leaves plenty. Now, if we can find him, we will just follow him about until his dinner ...
— Little White Fox and his Arctic Friends • Roy J. Snell

... in the proportion of its factors, but in no other respect, from what it is upon earth. The same desirable ends will be sought, the maintenance of public order and decency, the reduction of inducements to form this bad and wasteful habit to their lowest possible minimum, and the complete protection of the immature. But the modern Utopians, having systematised their sociology, will have given some attention to the psychology of minor officials, a matter altogether too much neglected by the social reformer ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... bananas, a pine-apple, and cocoa-nuts. After walking under a burning sun, I do not know anything more delicious than the milk of a young cocoa-nut. Pine-apples are here so abundant that the people eat them in the same wasteful manner as we might turnips. They are of an excellent flavour—perhaps even better than those cultivated in England; and this I believe is the highest compliment which can be paid to any fruit. Before going ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... very wasteful as regards space; for only a few volumes, say a couple of dozen, could be accommodated on a single desk. As books accumulated therefore some other form of case had to be devised, which would accommodate more volumes than could be consulted at once. The desk ...
— Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods - The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894 • J. W. Clark

... is wasteful of its subject; that is the whole objection to its loose, unstructural form. Criticism bases its conclusion upon nothing whatever but the injury done to the story, the loss of its full potential value. Is there so much ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock

... us that our methods of producing light are extremely wasteful since much of the energy is lost in heat and it is possible that through the lesson of the firefly we may some day be able to produce better light ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman

... to the other fields of the war, it seems logical to follow to its finally successful result the bloody, wasteful struggle for the recovery of the lost territory. This operation required large armies and long campaigns, together with the naval supremacy of Lake Erie, won in the next year by Oliver Hazard Perry, before the fugitive British ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine

... old man, was busy splitting a large tree into planks by means of wedges when our traveller came up. This wasteful method of obtaining planks is still practised by some natives of the South Sea Islands. Formerly the Malagasy never thought of obtaining more than two planks out of a single tree, however large the tree might be. They merely split the tree down the middle, and then ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne

... utilize more than from 5 to 10 per cent. of the energy contained in the fuel used. It will thus be seen that the process of converting static to dynamic caloric by luminous combustion, by means of the steam engine, is an exceedingly wasteful and costly method, and leaves ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various

... verdict could not be doubtful."—Buchez et Roux, XXXIII., 431, 436, 441. Speech by Robespierre, Thermidor 8, year II... ". Machiavellian designs against the small fund-holders of the State.. .. A contemptible financial system, wasteful, irritating, devouring, absolutely independent of your supreme oversight.... Anti-revolution exists in the financial department.... Who are its head administrators? Brissotins, Feuillants, aristocrats and well-known knaves—the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... of boiler efficiency, for example, as found from the test mentioned. Its value was 54 per cent. This is altogether too low and indicates wasteful operation. The efficiency of a hand-fired boiler ought not to be less than 65 per cent, and it can be increased to 70 per cent by careful management under ...
— Engineering Bulletin No 1: Boiler and Furnace Testing • Rufus T. Strohm

... of exchange that men were actually driven to doing more than one kind of work. All those advantages of specialisation which Adam Smith, supplemented by Babbage, had so laboriously pointed out were completely lost to a wasteful world. Rather than be without certain luxuries and necessaries men gave up moving their legs all day up and down in time with iron treadles, or feeding machines with bits of material exactly alike, or remaining doubled up ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... pointing it out with his fork, 'once overrun by soldiers - trespassers every man of 'em - and laid waste by fire and sword. He, he, he! The idea of any man exposing himself, voluntarily, to fire and sword! Stupid, wasteful, positively ridiculous; you laugh at your fellow- creatures, you know, when you think of it! But take this smiling country as it stands. Think of the laws appertaining to real property; to the bequest and ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens

... business-like woman!" exclaimed the widow, as we again proceeded; "likelies to turn a penny whiles other folks lay a bed snoring; but mortal wasteful um sure, for one that talks about saving! Meat indeed she may save; but lauk now, only consate the grase she gives 'em confounded brutes, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various

... a wasteful cock] [i.e. a cockloft, a garret. And a wasteful cock, signifies a garret lying in waste, neglected, put to no use. HANMER.] Hanmer's explanation is received by Dr. Warburton, yet I think them both apparently mistaken. A wasteful cock is a cock or pipe with ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson

... heard the stitches break; and then he pulled out my sleeves, to see how wide they were, though they were only half an ell. Madam ventured to speak a word to encourage me, for she saw I was much abashed and flustered, yet he did not heed her, but went on talking very loud against the folly and the wasteful wantonness of the times. Poor Madam is a quiet, sickly-looking woman, and seems not a little in awe of her husband, at the which I do not marvel, for he hath a very impatient, forbidding way with him, and, I must say, seemed to carry himself harshly at times towards her. Uncle ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... attained, the contrast resulting from the change has been rendered the more striking. Under the benign influence of our republican institutions, and the maintenance of peace with all nations whilst so many of them were engaged in bloody and wasteful wars, the fruits of a just policy were enjoyed in an unrivaled growth of our faculties and resources. Proofs of this were seen in the improvements of agriculture, in the successful enterprises of commerce, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson

... combined,—a very ancient game which is the basis of "trade." She took it for granted that Milly would play the game to the best advantage for all of them, and after a few attempts at the old slovenly, wasteful method of providing, Milly accepted the situation and did the best she knew how to meet Ernestine's idea. "Number 236" was to be well stocked with an abundance of wholesome food, but there was to be no waste and no "flummery." In a ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick

... determination, her first thought was to find some woman who would not dissipate her son's substance, and in her opinion—not expressed to Ginger—the advertised purpose of the contemplated marriage evidenced a wasteful disposition. ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford

... already stressed that filling this book with tables listing so-called precise amounts of C/N for compostable materials would be foolish. Even more wasteful of energy would be the composter's attempt to compute the ratio of carbon to nitrogen resulting from any mixture of materials. For those who are interested, the sidebar provides an illustration of how that might ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon

... good fellow, if you were to divide up the wealth of Judea equally today, before the end of the year you would have rich and poor, poverty and affluence, just as you have today; for there will always be the idle and the industrious, the thrifty and the wasteful, the drunken and the sober; and, as you yourself have very justly observed, the poor we shall have always with us." And we can hear the reply, "Woe unto you, liars and hypocrites; for ye have this very day divided up the wealth of the country yourselves, as must be done every day ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... respects his countrymen are nothing near so silly as they are supposed to be. There was a time when I used to sit with my legs stretched out before the English coal fire and listen with respectful attention while people who I thought knew all about it explained to me how wicked and how wasteful were our methods. ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome

... from his poems, when he tenderly speaks of "my mother Cambridge."* When he left college Spenser was twenty-three. He was poor and, it would seem, ill, so he did not return to London, but went to live with relatives in the country in Lancashire. And there about "the wasteful woods and forest wide"** he wandered, gathering new life and strength, taking all a poet's joy in the beauty and the freedom of a country life, "for ylike to me was liberty and life,"** he says. And here among the pleasant woods he ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... professor, "never put anything by. They are wasteful and improvident, almost to a man; and they learn nothing by experience, though they know as well as we do that it is simply a question of demand and supply, and that the day of overproduction is sure to come, when their work must stop unless the men that ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells

... wasteful in certain ways, for he never gave a garcon more than two sous after he had served a meal that cost ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... question of compulsory education is settled so far as Nature is concerned. Her bill on that question was framed and passed long ago. But, like all compulsory legislation, that of Nature is harsh and wasteful in its operation. Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful disobedience—incapacity meets with the same punishment as crime. Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first; but the blow without the word. It is left to you ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... larger scale seemed to occupy his every thought. It was he who reclaimed the marshy, waste ground in the valley, 'for,' he said, 'it is wrong that we on the seaboard leave our home acres and move farther and farther westward, looking for new land that is easy to till. It is a wasteful policy, even for a new country.' That was one of the things he had learned on his long journey across the West and ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs

... the week. Also, when he worked by the day he received his pay in kind. This system prevailed until money became sufficiently plentiful to enable the payment of wages for piecework and by the day. The payment in kind, of course, was a very clumsy and wasteful method of carrying on industry. Many methods of payment in kind prevailed for centuries, even down to recent times in America. Before the great {434} flour-mills were developed, the farmer took his wheat to the mill, out of which the miller took a certain ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... known fact that wrought iron was extensively used in almost all quarters of the globe, before pig or cast iron was ever produced. Without entering into the details of the processes by which this wrought iron was made, it suffices for my present purpose to say that they were crude, wasteful, and expensive, so that they can be employed to-day only in a very few localities favored with good and cheap ore, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various

... flying fast from Heaven's fated face, And from the world that her discovered wide, Fled to the wasteful wilderness space, From living eyes her open shame to hide, And lurked in rocks and caves long unespied. But that fair crew of knights, and Una fair, Did in that castle afterwards abide, To rest themselves, and weary powers repair, ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson

... such a howling about? Look at me, with two shot-holes through my figure-head, while you have only got one in your stern: I wish I could change with you, by heavens, for I could use my whistle then—now if I attempt to pipe, there will be such a wasteful expenditure of his Majesty's stores of wind, that I never shall get out a note. A wicked shot ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat

... Phil! I should hate to have you die, for force of habit is so strong with me that I shall forever continue to lunch with none but you, ordering two portions of everything, which I am sure I could not eat, and how wasteful that would be!" And now he had passed over the threshold into the valley, and I ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... ridging land seeded to grain was necessary before the invention of the modern drill. Dickson, in his Husbandry of the Ancients, XXIV, argues that, while wasteful of land, it had the advantage of preventing the grain from lodging. Walter of Henley, who followed the Roman methods by tradition without knowing it, advises with them that to be successful in this kind of ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato

... fire-brick or a "water-jacket," forming part of the boiler. A water-jacket signifies a double coating of metal plates with a space between, which is filled with water (see Fig. 6). The fire is now enclosed much as it is in a kitchen range. But our boiler must not be so wasteful of the heat as is that useful household fixture. On their way to the funnel the flames and hot gases should act on a very large metal or other surface in contact with the water of the boiler, in order to give up a due ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams

... is a large one the flesh of all the animals cannot be preserved, and frequently only the tongues are used. Of late years, however, owing to the growing scarcity of reindeer, it is said the Indians have learned to be a little less wasteful than for- merly, and to restrict their kill more nearly to their needs, though during the winter I was there hundreds were slaughtered for tongues and sinew alone. Large quantities of the venison are dried and stored up ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace

... but prices have risen to an unreasonable height. During the war, a most wasteful regime prevailed; everybody made big profits or received huge wages, and accustomed himself to a most sumptuous life. Now, vengeance is upon them, for nature does not allow herself to be ravished, nor does she present gifts ...
— Bremen Cotton Exchange - 1872/1922 • Andreas Wilhelm Cramer

... to the superior energy, skill, and willingness of the American laborer. The English laborer is faithful to the policy of "ca' canny." He refuses point-blank to get the work out of a machine that the New World scab gets out of a machine. Mr. Maxim, observing a wasteful hand-labor process in his English factory, invented a machine which he proved capable of displacing several men. But workman after workman was put at the machine, and without exception they turned out neither more nor less than a workman turned out by hand. They obeyed the mandate of the ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... now. They had not fed, and could find nothing to feed upon but two hawthorn-berries, dropped by the wasteful fieldfares; but they drank, and cleaned, and proceeded up-stream, with that caution one only learns in a world full of enemies and ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... lot of wood to make a little paper?" asked the boy. "There's been such a howl about paper-pulp that I thought it must be fearfully wasteful." ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... rates of interest, many millions of dollars. It is believed that into these banks the Ring have taken the city's obligations and converted them into money, which has been sent flowing into the various channels of wasteful administration, out of which they have drawn into their pockets millions on millions. The craft of this contrivance was profound. It wholly avoided the difficulty of raising money on the unlawful and excessive issues of city and county bonds, and took out of public sight transactions ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... selected an extreme case instead of a fair type of what I have ventured to call the African system. I am quite reassured. My friend, who is an accomplished and experienced Irishman, tainted only by a very few years' residence in England, assures me that I have considerably understated the wild, wasteful profusion, slothfulness, and dirt of the old-fashioned chieftain's kitchen. He assures me that families are now abroad in the world without an acre of land or a halfpenny beyond their earnings, who, ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker

... of the village rich enough to provide an animal for Jacob's knife. The wife of this idle and improvident butcher was such a wife as such men usually contrive to pick up,—industrious, saving, and capable; the mainstay of his house. Often she remonstrated with her wasteful and beer-loving husband; the domestic sky was often overcast, and the children were glad to fly from the noise and dust ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... example. Young women are sometimes apt to acquire a habit of being wasteful in regard to small things, such as pins, needles, &c. Yet, to teach them, in these days of refinement, always to pick up pins when they see them lying before them on the floor or elsewhere, and put them into a pin-cushion, or in some suitable place, ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott

... as he looked at the sapphire sparkling in his broad, brown palm; "I never saw such a with-lavishness-wasteful-and-with-courteous-speech-laconic gentleman! I wish I had not let him have the gun; he will take his own life, belikes; ach, Gott! He will take his ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... and external evidence, according to our calendar of the Muses, he is the first-born of the Poets that yet survive the wasteful ravages of hoary Time. He sings not, indeed, of Chaos and Eternal Night. But as one inspired by a heaven-born Muse, he echoes the chorus of the Angelic Song, when on the utterance of the first fiat the Morning Stars sang together and all the sons ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... He condemns the Roman husbandry as fettered by superstitions, and gives a piquant sneer at the absurd rhetoric and verbosity of Varro.[G] Nor is he any more tolerant of Scotch superstitions. He declares against wasteful and careless farming in a way that reminds us of our good friend Judge ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... particular relevancy if all the buildings asked for were necessary for the transaction of public business, as long as we have the money to pay for them; but inasmuch as a large number of the buildings proposed are unnecessary and their erection would be wasteful and extravagant, besides furnishing precedents for further and more extended reckless expenditures of a like character, it seems to me that applications for new and expensive public ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland

... you've no patience with such stuff As by Renan is writ, and when you read (Why do you read?) have hardly strength enough To hold your hand from flinging the vile screed Into the fire. That were a wasteful deed Which you'd repent in sackcloth extra rough; For books cost money, and I'm told you care To lay up treasures Here as ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce

... wasteful fury; Blue Jeans with a cold hatred of his cruelty—a cold and bitter hatred of his opulence. The superintendent struck him once with a wild, wide swing. Once—only once. For he hugged to the superintendent after that and those wild swings went past. ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans

... the trader, to the progress in military apparatus during the last few decades. The house-appliances of to-day for example, are little better than they were fifty years ago. A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory places of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the rifle or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to those ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... though there was need for the legal protection that has of late years been given. It is probable that more caribou and young moose are killed every year by wolves than by hunters. Only in the neighbourhood of a considerable settlement is there danger of reckless and wasteful slaughter, and some attention is paid by game wardens to the markets of such places. The mountain-sheep stands in greater danger of extermination than either caribou or moose. Its meat, the most delicious mutton in the world, as it has been pronounced by ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... South. If the hundred thousand loyal women left in their homes had been armed with ballots, copperhead treason would not have wrested the influence of that State to the aid and comfort of the rebellion. If the women of Iowa had been legally empowered to meet treason at home, the wasteful expense of canvassing distant battle-fields for the soldiers' votes might have been saved. And it would have been easier for these women to vote than to pay their proportion of the tax incurred. Yankee thrift and shrewdness would have been vindicated ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... strowed wasteful fire, Envenoming the hearts of most and least, Folly, disdain, madness, strife, rancor, ire, Thirst to shed blood, in every breast increased, This ill spread far, and till it set on fire With rage the Italian lodgings, never ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... press that decided it: the greatest engine in the world, to which submarines and howitzers and airplanes are but wasteful toys. For when the printing presses are united the planet may buck and yaw, but she comes into line at last. A million inky cylinders, roaring in chorus, were telling him the truth. When his assistants found him, on his desk lay a half-ripped magazine ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... the big game of British Columbia is at least twice too liberal,—five deer, two elk, two moose (one in Kootenay County), three caribou and three goats. There is no necessity for such wasteful liberality. Few sportsmen go to British Columbia for the sake of a large lot of animals. I know many men who have been there to hunt, and the great majority cared more for the scenery and the wild romance of camping out in ground mountains than for ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... bringing the flesh of the giraffe, but they returned crestfallen in the evening, as again the lions and hyaenas had been before them, and nothing was left. I therefore resolved not to shoot again until I should be settled in my new camp on the other side of the river, as it was a wasteful expenditure of these beautiful animals unless the flesh could ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker

... by another little chance, had been still left there: "Can the Herr Lieutenant-Colonel tell me where General Nostitz is?" Benkendorf can tell;—will himself take the message: but Benkendorf looks into the important Pencil Document; thinks it premature, wasteful, and that the contrary is feasible! persuades Nostitz so to think; persuades this regiment and that (Saxon, Austrian, horse and foot); though the cannon in retreat go trundling past them: "Merely shifting their battery, don't you see:—Steady!" And, in fine, organizes, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... previously reduced the business to a perfect system, which he had only to follow. It is true he introduced great economy into every department; but the North-West Company had done so before him, and the wasteful extravagance which preceded his appointment was entirely the result of the rivalry between the two companies, and under any governor whatever would have ceased when ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean

... that, under the antient Government of Ireland, the Education of the landed Gentry, when Luxury, with its wasteful Catalogue of Vices, had not rendered Property so mutable and wavering as in modern Ages, was provided for; whether by the immediate Care of Parents, or essential Attention of Guardians, by the Laws of the Land; in order that Gentlemen ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke

... country every year furnishing nutriment to tails that are of no earthly use to the horses after they're nourished. You can depend on that. I've examined the government statistics, and they're enough to make a man cry to see how wasteful the American ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)

... slants off to the right or left, he escapes at a tangent. If I try to interfere and to bring him back to the path of my choosing, he persists in his refusal, shrivels up, does not budge, and soon the whole procession is in confusion. We will not insist: the method is a poor one, very wasteful of effort for at ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... as the glide of his sandals died away in the echoing cloisters, I leaned forth to spread my expanding heart in the upward and boundless light of the moon—for I seemed to wish never again to lose in the wasteful forgetfulness of sleep, the consciousness that ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... cannot subsist except upon the supposition that one man is as much a born ruler as another, which means a levelling down of the best talent of the community, for that is the only way in which capacities can be equalised—a very wasteful and ruinous expedient, and one that the born leaders of the people will not long endure. Then there is the proverbial fickleness of democracy, one day all aglow, and cooled down the next, never ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... the redwood and pine forests there are some thirty mill plants, and they own about half of the timber district. The methods of lumbering are exceedingly wasteful. Scarcely half of the standing timber of a tract is taken by the loggers and what is left is often burned or totally neglected. Replanting is unthought of and the young trees are ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini

... is a laborious task, yet after one or two years they require extensive repairs, and when the repairs are such as to amount to a practical rebuilding, the "conuco" is commonly abandoned, and a new one located elsewhere. This method is wasteful of fence-material and land. The planting is done in the most primitive way, commonly by making a hole in the ground with a machete or by using a forked stick as a plow. There are few hoes, and among the natives ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... misfortune came and necessity arose, many of us were unwilling and more of us unable to engage in the work of production. In some localities legislation was invoked to urge us toward the fields and gardens. We have shown ourselves a wasteful people, and in the wake of our wastefulness have followed a dismal train of disasters, cold, hunger, and many another form of distress. Deplore and repent of our prodigality as we may, the effects abide to remind ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... flashed in the precious ruby of the ring he wore on his white hand. He seemed a true incarnation of his magnificent city, a century before the rest of all Italy in luxury, in extravagance, in the art of wasteful trifling with great things which is a rich man's way of loving art itself; and there were many others of the company who were of the same stamp as he, but whose faces had no interest for Zorzi compared with Contarini's. Beside him they were but ordinary men in the ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford

... Everywhere Victurnien made a brilliant figure, everywhere he flung the pearls of his wit broadcast. He gave his opinion on men, affairs, and events in profound sayings; he would have put you in mind of a fruit-tree putting forth all its strength in blossom. He was leading an enervating life wasteful of money, and even yet more wasteful, it may be of a man's soul; in that life the fairest talents are buried out of sight, the most incorruptible honesty perishes, the best-tempered springs of ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac

... The Assembly Rooms were crammed. (The Meteor says, with its usual accuracy and good taste, "The attendance was small, the proceedings were dull. A wonderful amount of stale Jingoism was afterwards swept up by the caretakers from the floor. Our Conservative friends are so wasteful.") I was adopted as Candidate almost unanimously, only ten hands being held up against me. One or two questions were asked—one about local option, which rather stumped me—but I managed to express great sympathy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various

... greatest curses of modern civilization. Extravagance, ostentatious display, a desire to outshine others, is a vice of our age, and especially of our country. Some one has said that "investigation would place at the head of the list of the cause of poverty, wastefulness inherited from wasteful parents." ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... life distasteful? My life did, and does, smack sweet. Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? Mine I saved and hold complete. Do your joys with age diminish? When mine fail me, I'll complain. Must in death your daylight finish? My sun ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... poor cook. You are wasteful, dirty, ill-tempered and impertinent. You have been a grievous trial and a money loss to me. I am willing to write this down, together with the statement that you are sober, strong and quick to learn, and that you ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... playbills, is supposed to elapse. And here is the subject of this memoir sitting on a balcony above the sea. The time, evening. He is thinking of the whole bewildering record of which the foregoing is a brief outline: he sees how far he has gone wrong and how idle and wasteful and wicked he has often been: how miserably unfitted he is for what he is called upon to be. Let him now declare it and hereafter ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... lighting, frying fish, and other purposes. It may be fairly estimated that 2000 more jars-full are consumed by the inhabitants of the villages on the river. Now, it takes at least twelve basketsful of eggs, or about 6000 by the wasteful process followed, to make one jar of oil. The total number of eggs annually destroyed amounts, therefore, to 48,000,000. As each turtle lays about 120, it follows that the yearly offspring Of 400,000 turtles is thus annihilated. A vast number, nevertheless, remain ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... as responsible in this supremely important sphere, as we do in every other. Doubtless, this will often mean some interference with his "sins of waste and carelessness"; and so much the better for everybody. Those who prefer to be wasteful and careless had best remain in the ranks of bachelorhood. We have no desire for any representation of their moral characteristics in future generations, but if they do marry they must be controlled. Meanwhile our champions of paternal irresponsibility ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... Hubbard only regarded him blankly, as if there had been no interruption, and then she proceeded. "And you will note what she was eating. Curds and whey—perfectly simple yet nutritious fare. There were other instances showing that the wasteful dinner table must go. It was a wonderful address. A treat. A feast of good things. A ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge

... knowledge in potentia. To invert the order is to destroy Philosophy not to serve it, is, indeed, a mere counsel of desperation. An intuitive Philosophy so- called finds itself sooner or later, generally sooner, in a blind alley. Practically, it gives rise to all kinds of crude and wasteful effort. It is not an accident that Georges Sorel in his Reflexions sur la Violence takes his "philosophy" from Bergson or, at least, leans on him. There are intuitions and intuitions, as every wise man knows, as William James once ruefully admitted after his adventures with nitrous oxide, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... rather than an absolute, truth. It has to be so. Otherwise, book study, which employs sight exclusively, would be the only efficient method of teaching, and oral instruction, which depends primarily on sound impact, would be a wasteful process. ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... Mrs. Lee, very gently, "I told the children they might blow bubbles a little while this afternoon. Jane mixed the soap for them, that they need not be wasteful." ...
— Hatty and Marcus - or, First Steps in the Better Path • Aunt Friendly

... his face again." I had to hold my breath and run out into the forest. Ban, I didn't know that it was in me to cry so—not since that night on the train when I left you.... This all seems so wicked and wrong and—yes—wasteful. Think of what these two splendid people could be to each other! She craves him so, Ban; just the sound of his voice, a word from him; but she won't break her own word. Sometimes I think I shall do it. Write me all you can ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... to prevent the natives from watering their cattle, and to force them to leave them behind; and he noted that officials nearly always carried negro whips with them. These practices, indeed, were condemned by the German Government itself, but only after many years, and mainly because they were wasteful. Government representatives have told the Reichstag, as Herr Schleitwein did in 1904, that they must pursue a 'healthy egoism,' and forswear 'humanitarianism and irrational sentimentality.' 'The Hereros must be forced ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir

... other groups of human wastage to the unemployed, thence to the unemployable, and so to the gutter and the grave. The poor we have always with us; but the wastrel—like the pauper—"is a work of art, the creation of wasteful ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... was used every two and a half days in this camp of hungry hard-working men. It took a good man to plan and organize; and a good man Corrigan was. His meals were never late, never scant, and never wasteful. He had the record for all the camps on the river of thirty-five cents a day per man—and the men satisfied. Consequently, in his own domain he was autocrat. The dining room was sacred, the kitchen was sacred, meal hours were sacred. Each man was fed at half-past five, at twelve, and at six. ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White

... the fields, along the fences, lay October's wasteful ripeness, but the season was about to turn, for the bleak corner of November was in sight. A sharp wind blew out of a cloud that hung low over the river, and far away against the darkening sky was a gray triangle traced, the flight of wild geese from the north. With the stiffening ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read

... to eat less bread. In fact we must, you know; and toast is particularly wasteful, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various



Words linked to "Wasteful" :   spendthrift, profligate, destructive, uneconomic, extravagant, pound-foolish, improvident, uneconomical, inefficient



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