"Purposeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prevent it. On a flat piece of green in front of the rocky kopjes, where the enemy evidently was, I could see men, not running, but walking about in different directions. They were not crowded, but they seemed to be moving about like black ants, only in a purposeless kind of way. "They are Boers, and we've got them between our men and our battery," said a Gordon officer. But I knew his hope was a vain one. Very slowly they were coming towards us—turning and firing and advancing ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... differ for us, according as we consider that the facts of experience up to date are purposeless configurations of blind atoms moving according to eternal laws, or that on the other hand they are due to the providence of God? As far as the past facts go, indeed there is no difference. Those facts are in, are bagged, are captured; ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... hope to become a really great or celebrated novel-reader who does not begin his apprenticeship under the age of fourteen, and, as I said before, stick to it as long as he lives. He must learn to scorn those frivolous, vacillating and purposeless ones who, after beginning properly, turn aside and whiling away their time on mere history, or science, or philosophy. In a sense these departments of literature are useful enough. They enable you often to perceive the most cunning and profoundly interesting touches in fiction. Then I have no doubt ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... early yet for breakfast, and he sauntered about idle and purposeless. Suddenly he came upon the young man upon whose advice he had purchased his ticket. He, too, had a Herald in his hand, but was ...
— Sam's Chance - And How He Improved It • Horatio Alger
... dominates these and turns them to new ends. I suppose the nature of the activity of the bombarding molecules of gases and liquids is the same in our bodies as out; that turmoil of the particles goes on forever; it is, in itself, blind, fateful, purposeless; but life furnishes, or is, an organizing principle that brings order and purpose out of this chaos. It does not annul any of the mechanical or chemical principles, but under its tutelage or inspiration ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... contractions due to nervousness are entirely purposeless; they even defy the most earnest efforts at inhibition. A marked feature of this type of involuntary action is the contraction of antagonist groups of muscles, productive of muscular ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... even the calling himself so did not seem to make matters any better. He reviewed in his mind the events of the day before. He remembered his very pleasant walk and talk with Miss Earle. He knew the talk had been rather purposeless, being merely that sort of preliminary conversation which two people who do not yet know each other indulge in, as a forerunner to future friendship. Then, he thought of his awkward leave-taking ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... motives. We know the character of our David Hume perfectly well, and though it was not faultless, its fault certainly lay rather in an excessive desire to make the world comfortable for everybody, than in anything like purposeless malignity, of which he never had a trace. Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume's agency was exceedingly to his advantage. Hume was not without vanity, and his letters show that he was not displeased at the addition to his consequence which ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... will allow me to say so," Josephine replied, "you have come upon a very purposeless errand. I do not discuss my husband with any one, for reasons which I think ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... three human forms shot through the narrow door and out into the fog, hair on end, eyes bulging but sightless, legs traveling like the wind and as purposeless. It mattered not that the way was hidden; it mattered less that weeds, brush, and stumps lurked in ambush for unwary feet. They fled into the foggy dangers without a thought of what lay before them—only ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... lopsided weatherbeaten pole was planted in the ashes there, and had been there many a year. Hard by this pole, his lantern stood: lighting a few feet of the lower part of it and a little of the ashy surface around, and then casting off a purposeless little clear trail of light ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... marshy ground would allow her to see distinctly. There was the fragment of a hedge—all that remained of a 'wet old garden'—standing in the middle of the mead, without a definite beginning or ending, purposeless and valueless. It was overgrown, and choked with mandrakes, and she could almost fancy she heard their shrieks.... Should she withdraw her hand? No, she could not withdraw it now; it was too late, the act would not imply refusal. She felt as one in a boat without oars, drifting ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... water-barrel, and was silent. As he watched Lolita, serenely working, his silver crescent ear-rings swung a little with the slight tilting of his head, and his fingers, forgotten and unguided by his thoughts, ruffled the strings of the guitar, drawing from it gay, purposeless tendrils of sound. Occasionally, when Lolita knew the song, she would hum it on the roof, inattentively, busy ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... and started back along William's tracks to find the water cans. He followed a winding, purposeless trail that never showed the track of burros, and after an hour or so he came upon the pack and the cans. Evidently the water supply had suffered in the wind, for only four cans were with the blankets and ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... the window, I saw a shabby dragoon paying auspicious attention to my horses, contraband, and saddle-bags. I was greatly relieved, on going out, to find that the warrior was too stupidly drunk, to be actuated by anything beyond an idle, purposeless curiosity. So, after receiving directions as to where I was likely to rejoin my companions, I set my face northeast again, and rode out into the deepening darkness with feelings not much less sullen than the black rock of ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... 'I look to deriving from this adventure some benefit more substantial than a sound sleep or minstrels' flattery; and, to speak truth, I am somewhat weary of this saint-king and this purposeless Crusade, and would fain go to aid the Emperor of Constantinople against the Greeks and the Turks; and Baldwin de Courtenay could not but accord a favourable reception to warriors who had saved his kinswoman from the Saracens. What thinkest thou of ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... by stringing Ooma, in imagination. I allow you full credit for your sensational development—always excepting this, that I sent you to Middle Street. Why did he kill Sir Alan? How does his Japanese nationality elucidate an utterly useless and purposeless murder?" ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... be judged, at first, by what he says and does. But with him such extravagance as I have referred to was little more than the habitual indulgence (on such themes) of passionate feelings and language, indecent indeed but utterly purposeless; the mere explosion of wrath provoked by tyranny or cruelty; the irregularities of an overheated steam-engine too weak for its own vapour. It is very certain that no one could detest oppression more truly than Landor did in all seasons and times; and if no one expressed that scorn, that abhorrence ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... was a most surprising and notable democratic step. China declared itself a Republic. Considerable fighting preceded this change, warfare of a character rather vague and purposeless; for China is so huge that a harmony of understanding among her hundreds of millions is not easily attained. Yet, on the whole, with surprisingly little conflict and confusion the change was made. The oldest nation in the world joined hands with the youngest in adopting this modern form ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... to do? Go home to his lodgings—eat, drink, sleep? Was it possible for him to eat or to sleep while that precious life trembled in the balance? He walked slowly along the endless roads and terraces in a purposeless way. Careless people pushed against him, or he pushed against them; children brushed past him as they ran. What a noisy, busy, clattering world it seemed! And she lay dying! O, the droning, dreary organs, and the hackneyed, common tunes, how excruciating ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... lines of discontent. It was a kind of reaction which frequently followed moments of intense activity and, realizing its significance, she yielded to it sulkily, her gaze on the face of the clock which was ticking off purposeless minutes with maddening precision. She glanced over her shoulder in relief as her maid ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... shines; for, during the hottest days of summer and the coldest days of winter (that is, if there is sunlight and no ice on the water), it may be seen on the surface of ponds and streams, gyrating hither and thither in a seemingly mad and purposeless manner. ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... passed on, thoughtfully, towards Royal-street. In the excitement of the recent adventure, he had almost forgotten what had called him forth at that time of night, and now walked on, like one who wanders forth purposeless, into darkness and solitude. But suddenly, in passing a brilliantly lighted cafe, the thought of Arthur crossed his mind; and, for the first time, the idea flashed upon him, that he might have been one of those concerned in ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... through amateurishness—then the construction is bad. This calamity does not often occur in fine novels, but in really good work another calamity does occur with far too much frequency—namely, the tantalising of the reader at a critical point by a purposeless, wanton, or negligent shifting of the interest from the major to the minor theme. A sad example of this infantile trick is to be found in the thirty-first chapter of Rhoda Fleming, wherein, well knowing that the reader is tingling for the interview ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... differentiation; and in each illustration alike we find the result of the operation of known physical causes to be that of selection. If it should be argued in reply that the selection in the one case is obviously purposeless, while in the other it is as obviously purposive, I answer that this is pure assumption. It is perhaps not too much to say that every geological formation on the face of the globe is either wholly or in part due to the selective ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... own charm. La Catanaise is again alone on the scene, threatening. "The bow is drawn, the hen setting." This last comparison, the reader will remark, would be simply impossible as the termination of an act in a serious English play. This last scene, too, is wofully weak and purposeless. ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... be. And into the pretty print of the scene on his mind, like a humped marine beast rising through a summer sea, there obtruded the recollection of the little solicitor, the graceless embarrassment that he had shown at the beginning of the interview by purposeless rubbings of his hands and twisting of the ankles, the revelation of ugly sexual quality which he had given by his shame at the story of the bed that was made an altar. He looked at her sharply and said to ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... fresh vexatious contention, and continual alarm on Madame Sand's part lest the boy should be taken by force from her side. These skirmishes included the actual abduction of Solange from Nohant by M. Dudevant during her mother's absence at Fontainebleau; a foolish and purposeless trick, by which nothing was to be gained, except annoyance and trouble to Madame Sand, whose right to the control of her daughter had never been contested. A final settlement entered into between the parties, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... p.102. Adifferent division of words adopted by Chinese grammarians is that into dead and live words, ss-ts and sing-ts, the former comprising nouns, the latter verbs. The same classes are sometimes called tsing-ts and ho-ts, unmoved and moved words. This shows how purposeless it would be to try to find out whether language began with noun or verb. In the earliest phase of speech the same word was both noun and verb, according to the use that was made of it, and it is so still to a great extent in Chinese. See Endlicher, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... a little gesture of impatience. He had left London at a moment when he could ill be spared, and had not travelled to this out-of-the-way corner of the kingdom to exchange purposeless platitudes with a man whose present attitude towards life at any rate he heartily despised. He seated himself upon a half-broken rail, and ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... readiness for instant action. Protection by Outposts in the normal formation is generally impossible and can only be provided by patrols, who keep touch with the enemy without causing unnecessary alarms or looking for purposeless encounters, and by sentries over the Forward Troops, which take the place of the Piquets. The troops must be ready at any moment to repel attacks with bullets and bayonets. Unless otherwise ordered, the patrols should refrain ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... those who strive to make free and independent sovereigns of all men and all women. Everywhere here are reminders of the ravages of war, the madness of ignorance and unreason. I want to get away from them and their saddening associations. You will think I am blue. So I am, from having lived a purposeless life these three months. I don't know but the women of America, myself in particular, will be the greater and grander for it, but I can not yet see ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... was not thinking about Charlotta this morning, and she felt so strong a distaste for her lonely, purposeless life that she was in no haste to go forth to meet another ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and one behind—besides the great cutlass at his waist, and a pistol in each pocket of his square-tailed coat. To complete his strange appearance, Captain Flint sat perched upon his shoulder and gabbling odds and ends of purposeless sea-talk. I had a line about my waist, and followed obediently after the sea-cook, who held the loose end of the rope, now in his free hand, now between his powerful teeth. For all the world, I was led like a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fortnight of Kant's life, he busied himself unceasingly in a way that seemed not merely purposeless but self-contradictory. Twenty times in a minute he would unloose and tie his neck handkerchief—so also with a sort of belt which he wore about his dressing-gown, the moment it was clasped, he unclasped ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... world gone all awry! What had in the morning of that day been a prospect of joy was vanished in a drear mist of broken hopes. Here was John Cather departed in sore agony, for which was no cure that ever I heard of or could conceive. Here was John Cather gone with the wreck of a soul. A cynical, purposeless, brooding life he must live to his last day: there was no healing in all the world for his despair. Here with us—to whom, in the years of our intercourse, he gave nothing but gladness—his ruin had been wrought. 'Twas not by wish of us; but there was small comfort in the reflection, ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... remembered that to many minds the mysterious accompaniments of some of the deaths daily occurring conveyed a still darker significance than that implied in mere self-destruction, and seemed to point to a succession of purposeless and hideous murders. The demagogues, I must say, spoke with some wildness and incoherence. Many laid the blame at the door of the police, and urged that things would be different were they but placed under municipal, instead of ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... shrank from the means that were bidding fair to accomplish her own end. She shuddered at her husband's vulgar ejaculations of assent and approval; at her son's thoughtless laughter; at this woman's sparkling and audacious talk, which seemed so purposeless, and yet was so full of design and craft. She had feared her and shrank from her at Gethin, and she feared her now. And yet how necessary was her assistance! Of her own self she was well aware that she could do nothing to avert that coming peril from her husband and her son, the shadow of which ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... accidental; not meant; undesigned, purposed; unpremeditated &c. 612; unforeseen, uncontemplated, never thought of. random, indiscriminate, promiscuous; undirected; aimless, driftless[obs3], designless[obs3], purposeless, causeless; without purpose. possible &c. 470. unforeseeable, unpredictable, chancy, risky, speculative, dicey. Adv. randomly, by chance, fortuitously; unpredictably, unforeseeably; casually &c. 156; unintentionally &c. adj.; unwittingly. en passant[Fr], by the way, incidentally; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... confine himself to purposeless copying, without thought, each blade of grass, as commended by the inconsequent, but, in the long curve of the narrow leaf, corrected by the straight tall stem, he learns how grace is wedded to dignity, how strength ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... this little Bay, Full of tumultuous life and great repose, Where, twice a day, The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes, Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town, I sit me down. For want of me the world's course will not fail: When all its work is done, the lie shall rot; The truth is great, and shall prevail, When ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... square-hewn face with its tracery of lines about the eyes, its fine, strong jaw, and its indefinable expression of power, she began to understand more fully why those with whom she had talked had spoken of Murray O'Neil with an almost worshipful respect. She felt very insignificant and purposeless as she huddled there beside him, and her complacence at his attentions deepened into a vivid sense of satisfaction. Thus far he had spoken entirely of men; she wondered if he ever thought of women, and thrilled a bit at the intimacy that had sprung ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... this time that creation is an empty jest; we are all beginning to understand its bathos! And if we must grant that there is some mischievous supreme Farceur who, safely shrouded in invisibility, continues to perpetrate so poor and purposeless a joke for his own amusement and our torture, we need not, for that matter, admire his wit or flatter his ingenuity! For life is nothing but vexation and suffering; are we dogs that we should lick the hand ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... content to keep at heel, and to be permitted to admire. I have seen him sit for half an hour on a doorstep, a canine monument of patience, waiting for her to come out, and I have seen her travel about the Place in apparently purposeless zigzags and circles for the mere pride and vanity of knowing how closely he would follow ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... be considered as a continuous series of achievements of the human mind than as the conquest of any single individual. It has sometimes taken centuries of experience to ascertain the value of a single fact in its various bearings. Like man himself, experience is feeble and apparently purposeless in its infancy, but acquires maturity and strength with age. Experience, however, is not limited to a lifetime, but is the stored-up wealth and power of our race. Even amidst the death of successive generations it is constantly advancing and accumulating, exhibiting at the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... his fanatic hordes, who carried "fire, the sword, and desolation" far and wide over that unhappy land. It is not to the British administrators in Egypt that the blame of all this failure, and of the purposeless bloodshed of the two expeditions from Suakin, is to be laid, nor can it be said that after the fall of Khartoum any other course could have been adopted than to retire for a time; but it is to the British administrators ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... uncongenial, badly-planned, disconnected, or purposeless effort fatigues, worries, and weakens both body and mind: is it difficult to believe the converse—that thorough, methodical, and helpful ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... is true. Man thus divested would be God—would be unindividualized. But he can never be thus divested—at least never will be—else we must imagine an action of God returning upon itself—a purposeless and futile action. Man is a creature. Creatures are thoughts of God. It is the nature of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Homer only to inspire horror by contrast with softer manners; they are almost what the wicked man is in the naive imagination of a child brought up by a mother in the ideas of a gentle and pious morality. The primitive man of Teutonism is revolting by his purposeless brutality, by a love of evil that only gives him skill and strength in the service of hatred and injury. The Cymric hero on the other hand, even in his wildest flights, seems possessed by habits of kindness and a warm sympathy with the weakv. Sympathy indeed is one of the deepest ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... of human speech is mere purposeless impulse or habit, you will not wonder when I tell you that this identical objection had been made, and had received the same kind of answer, many hundred times in the course of the fifteen years that Mr. Irwine's sister Anne had been an invalid. Splendid old ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... stream. And let your hives (sewn concave, seam to seam, Of cork; or of the supple osier twined) Have narrow entrances; for frosts will bind Honey as hard as dog-days run it thin: —In bees' abhorrence each extreme's akin. Not purposeless they vie with wax to paste Their narrow cells, and choke the crannies fast With pollen, or that gum specific which Out-binds or birdlime or ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... cascades. Indian villages were everywhere upon the banks; but their people were of a very low order,—very jackals of humanity; dirty, flea-bitten packs, whose physical and moral constitutions plainly showed the debilitating effects of unnumbered generations of fish-eating, purposeless life. Physical and moral decency usually go hand in hand, even in a state of nature. The Columbia tribes had no conception of either; they were in the same condition then as now, mean-spirited, and strangers to all those little delicacies of behavior that ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... meal times were (according to the number wanted) put round the table. It is a theory among those who believe that a spirit nourishes all things from within, that there was some competition amongst these chairs as to which should be used at table, so dull, forlorn and purposeless was their life against the wall. Seven pictures hung on that wall; not because it was a mystic number, but because it filled up all the required space; two on each side of the looking-glass and three large ones on the opposite wall. They were all of them engravings, ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... streets, furtive watches, deceitful ruses, scared embarkings for distant ports, new schemes for wealthy alliance, horrible tableaus, attempts at other murders, suspense of imprisonment, strange releases, and harassing uncertainty, compelling renewed flight, resulting in purposeless return of arch-criminals to scene ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... calmly. Then, in her sweet, clear voice, she said: "Did it ever occur to you, dearest, that a more ridiculous, unconvincing, purposeless, insane, God-forsaken idiot than you never existed? That you eclipse the wildest dreams of insanity? That you are ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... that it was not. The struggle represented no great principles, begot no far-reaching consequences. It was not inspired by the "holy glee" with which in Wordsworth's sonnet Liberty fights against a tyrant, but by the faltering boldness, the drifting, purposeless unresolve of statesmen who did not desire it, and by the irrational violence of a Press which did not understand it. It was not a necessary war; its avowed object would have been attained within a few weeks or months by bloodless European concert. It was not a glorious ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... old Turnspit into the remotest corner under the backstairs of the Dark Ages. I have alluded to his alleged descendants, as pointed out to my observation in boyhood; but they were an effete and degenerate race, purposeless, and wallowing much with the pigs, whom their grandsires would have recognized only ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... was going to be hard. Strong men must have something to lay their hands to. He knew that he could not remain idle very long; he must be doing something. But out of the shops he felt that he would be like a ship without steering apparatus—lost, aimless, purposeless. ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... thought, and the more he talked the more I thought it. There he was, purposeless in life and purposeless out of it. He talked of his father and mother and his schoolmaster, and all who had ever been anything to him in the world, meanly. He had been too sensitive, too nervous; none of them had ever valued him properly or understood him, he said. He had never ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... Elizabethan era, "how poor a thing is man!" Without a certain degree of practical efficient force—compounded of will, which is the root, and wisdom, which is the stem of character—life will be indefinite and purposeless—like a body of stagnant water, instead of a running stream doing useful work and keeping the machinery of a district ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... She knew that Chauvelin had spoken the truth; the man was too earnest, too blindly devoted to the misguided cause he had at heart, too proud of his countrymen, of those makers of revolutions, to stoop to low, purposeless falsehoods. ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... the city—either sallying out from unguarded posterns, at night; or letting themselves down from the lower part of the walls, by ropes. Titus allowed them to pass through; but John of Gischala and Simon, with purposeless cruelty, placed guards on all the walls and gates, to prevent the starving people leaving the city—although their true policy would have been to facilitate, in every way, the escape of all save the fighting men; and thus to husband what provisions still remained ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... longer observing. His distress was pitiful. It was there in his kindly eyes, in the purposeless fashion in which he fingered his pipe. He was torn between two desires. One was to continue talking at all costs. The other was precipitate, ignominious flight from the sight of the other's voiceless despair. He knew Steve, and well enough he realized what the strong wall the man had set up in ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... largely purposeless provender, he will pay thousands of simians to be reporters of such events day and night; and they will report them on such a voluminous scale as to smother or obscure more significant news altogether. Great printed sheets will be ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... girl, with a little laugh. "At least, I shall not be sorry to return to Silverdale. It has a charm of its own, for while one is occasionally glad to get away from it, one is even more pleased to come home again. It is a somewhat purposeless life our friends are leading yonder in the cities. I, of course, ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... some one man may escape, and I shall be he." So I went on into the wood, still hoping to find, in some one of its mysterious recesses, my lost lady of the marble. The sunny afternoon died into the loveliest twilight. Great bats began to flit about with their own noiseless flight, seemingly purposeless, because its objects are unseen. The monotonous music of the owl issued from all unexpected quarters in the half-darkness around me. The glow-worm was alight here and there, burning out into the great universe. The night-hawk heightened all ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... the vocation of taking care of me, which you repudiated with scorn—in fact refused to entertain it seriously at all. Of course there may have been other grounds, but the one you laid stress on was that I was lazy and purposeless, and that if you ever did take up such a vocation it would be to take care of some one you could respect. I don't say for an instant that I approach to that altitude, but at least I may say I am no longer an idler, that I have worked ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... journey, miserable as was its object, was accomplished, and Stillton, in all its tomb-like silence and drowsy do-nothingness, with its few glaring white houses and its one dusty road, offering no apology or explanation whatever for its purposeless existence, at last was reached, and Farmer Galusha Krinklebottom, in accordance with Dr. Nevercure's arrangements, met the jaded travellers at the station in his rickety shay, prepared to take ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... and these constitutions may produce chemic wonders—in others a natural fluid, call it electricity, and these may produce electric wonders. But the wonders differ from Normal Science in this—they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous. They lead on to no grand results; and therefore the world does not heed, and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I saw or heard, a man, human as myself, was the remote originator; and I believe unconsciously to himself as ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... relative to the appearance of the "wraiths" of living men, or accounts of visions, strange apparitions, or extraordinary experiences; some few of these have a purpose, while the majority are strangely aimless and purposeless—something is seen or heard, that is all, and no results, good or ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... rather surprised that men to whom my past work is well known should suspect me of making a wanton and purposeless attack upon religion. My attack is not wanton, but deliberate; not purposeless, but very purposeful and serious. I am not acting irreligiously, but religiously. I do not oppose Christianity because it is good, but because ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... without the preparation which could fit them to struggle with these tempestuous elements. In times like these the faith is the man; and they to whom it is given in larger measure owe a special duty to those who for want of it are faint at heart, uncertain in speech, feeble in effort, and purposeless in aim. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... but professed to know nothing of the matter, nor could any inquiry clear it up. Another item had been added to that constant and apparently purposeless series of small mysteries which had succeeded each other so rapidly. Setting aside the whole grim story of Sir Charles's death, we had a line of inexplicable incidents all within the limits of two days, which included the receipt of the printed letter, the black-bearded ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... to the good people of Rheims, some of whom had evidently written to her to ask what was the meaning of the delay, and whether she had given up the cause of the country. There is a terse determination in its brief, indignant sentences which is a relief to the reader weary of the wavering and purposeless campaign: ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... to his life just when he was about to attain the summit of that life's ambition. It was a Schopenhauerian doctrine that all men had suicidal tendencies in them, in the sense that every man wished at times for the cessation of the purposeless energy called life, and it was only the violence of the actual act which prevented its more frequent commission. But Barrant reflected that in his experience suicides were generally people who had been broken by life or were bored with it. Men of action or intellect rarely ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... which is elevated, and, although alive in the body, she vegetates there as if dead, being present as an animating principle and absent in operative activity; not because she does not act while the body is alive, but that the actions of this mass are intermittent, weak, and, as it were, purposeless. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... in a genuine writing than in a forgery.—While external and internal evidence thus combine to assert the genuineness of these writings, no satisfactory account has been or apparently can be given of them as a forgery of a later date than Ignatius. They would be quite purposeless as such; for they entirely omit all topics which would ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... instant, as I stood there, it was suddenly driven home to me how poor and purposeless a life I should lead while this crippled friend of ours and the companion of my boyhood were away in the forefront of the storm. Quick as a flash my resolution ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn from the ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his purposeless person to the window. Glennard measured his course with a contemptuous eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out of the window just as it was growing too dark to see anything! There was a man rich enough to do what ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... principal had chosen the boy's right hand upon which to rain the blows. Edward was told to sit down at the principal's own desk and copy the lesson. He sat, but he did not write. He would not for one thing, and he could not if he would. After half an hour of purposeless sitting, the principal ordered Edward again to stand up and hold out his hand; and once more the rattan fell in repeated blows. Of course it did no good, and as it was then five o'clock, and the ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... tried to bestir himself at something definite in the way of action, Henrietta would have been really disturbed instead of simply pretending to be. She had a good mind, a keen wit that had become bitter with unlicensed indulgence; but she was as indolent and purposeless as her husband. All her energy went in talk about doing something, and every day she had a new scheme, with yesterday's ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... and my George—favoured guests—have sat with us through our meal; but how fleeting our converse with those others—with Mr. William Wyvern, with Margaret, with Mrs. Major and with Mr. Marrapit! I grant you cause to grumble at their introduction, so purposeless has been their part. I grant you they have been as the guests at whose arrival, disturbing the intimate chatter, impatient glances are exchanged; at whose departure there ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... when he had quit looking for Reuther and wandered away up the ravine. I have thought since that perhaps the glimpse he had got of his little one peering from the scene of his crime may have stirred even his guilty conscience and sent him off on this purposeless ramble; but, however this was, I did not see him or anybody else as I took my way leisurely down towards the bridge, whittling at the stick and thinking of what I should say to Mr. Etheridge when I met him. And now for Fate's final and most fatal touch! ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... in whom put trust? In truth thou didst bid me entrust my soul to thee, sans love returned, lulling me to love, as though all [love-returns] were safely mine. Yet now thou dost withdraw thyself, and all thy purposeless words and deeds thou sufferest to be wafted away into winds and nebulous clouds. If thou hast forgotten, yet the gods remember, and in time to come will make ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... good will on the viands prepared (Pork chops were the principal portion), Then retiring to bed, with their dreams they were scared, And spent half the night in contortion; Then rose in their sleep and came down to this room, And, instead of a purposeless pawing, They painted these pictures, then fled in the gloom, And Furniss has touched up ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Review,' April, 1860. "By Professor Bowen," is written on my father's copy. The passage referred to occurs at page 488, where the author says that we ought to find "an infinite number of other varieties—gross, rude, and purposeless—the unmeaning creations of an unconscious cause.") from the United States, clever, and dead against me. But one argument is funny. The reviewer says, that if the doctrine were true, geological strata would be full of ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... first. It is assumed that recreation means amusement, idle and purposeless, if not skittles with beer and tobacco, then the music-hall with beer and tobacco, the comic man bawling a topical song and executing the famous clog-dance. If one points out that it is not amusement that is meant, but ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... the development of every organism begins with it, the primitive condition is in no way recapitulated from the time when perhaps only single-celled amoebas existed on our planet. For according to our theory the egg-cell, for instance, of a now extant mammal is no simple and indifferent, purposeless structure, as it is often represented, (as according to Haeckel's "biogenetic principle" it would necessarily be); we see in it, in fact, the extraordinarily complex end-product of a very long historic process of development, through which the organic substance has passed since ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... alternations between despair and hope! What rebound from the gates of Death to the threshold of Eden! How untrue, after all, was the nebulous philosophy of Omar, the Tentmaker. Surely in the happenings of the bygone day there was more than the purposeless ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... as she was could easily look higher; but still he might swell the list of those followers she seemed to like to behold at her feet offering up every homage to her beauty, even to their actual despair. And he thought of his own condition—very hopeless and purposeless ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... and went as straight through the fog as the ground-plan of the streets permitted to the house where her mother and a nurse were doing what might be done to prolong the tenancy of the top-floor. But both knew the occupant had received notice to quit. Only, it did seem so purposeless, this writ of ejectment and violent expulsion, when he was quite ready to go, and ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... to be a pretty regular thing, that Mr. Copley spent the evening abroad, excused himself from going anywhere with his family, and when they did see him wore an uncertain, purposeless, vagrant sort of look and air. By degrees this began to strike ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... no question of Io's going that day, even had accommodations been available. A clogging lassitude had descended upon her, the reaction of cumulative nervous stress, anesthetizing her will, her desires, her very limbs. She was purposeless, ambitionless, except to lie and rest and seek for some resolution of peace out of the tangled web wherein her ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a rose Of roses unchidden and purposeless; a rose For rosiness only, without an ulterior motive; For me it is more than enough if ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... not been beyond humor, he would have smiled at the idea that in the face of all eternity it mattered what nation on one little planet eventually possessed a fragment called California. To him that fair land was empty and purposeless save for one figure, and even of her he thought with the terrible calm of dissolution. During these last months of illness and isolation he had been less lonely than at any time of his life save during those few weeks in California, for ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... continued to exist, it probably served some necessary purpose in human economy, though he could himself no more understand the good of it than he could comprehend the use of human existence in any shape. Since men and women were here, idiotic and purposeless as they might be, they had what they chose to call a right to amuse themselves in their own way, and if this way made some happy without hurting others, Strong was ready enough to help. He was as willing to help Hazard as to help Esther, provided the happiness of either seemed to be within reach; ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... vehicles may chance to wander. Some birds, too, deliberately bury seeds in the earth, or in holes excavated by them in the bark of trees, not indeed with a foresight aiming directly at the propagation of the plant, but from apparently purposeless secretiveness, or as a mode of ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... alone; always preoccupied by something else than the actual business on hand; appearing suddenly from ditches, behind trunks, and between fence-rails; cropping up in unexpected places along the road after vague and purposeless detours—seemingly going anywhere and everywhere but to school! So unlooked-for, in fact, was their final arrival that the master, who had a few moments before failed to descry a single torn straw hat or ruined sun-bonnet above his visible horizon, was always startled to find ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... than the pain upon the corner-sofa, whose leave-taking he had mercilessly marred. Frederic dumb and furious; Mabel equally dumb and amazed to alarm, knowing as she did that her brother's actions were never purposeless, sat still, their hands clasped stealthily amid the folds of Mabel's dress; their eyes saying the dear and passionate things forbidden to their tongues. Neither would feign indifference, or attempt a lame dialogue upon other topics than those that filled their minds. ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... was not Julian, intending to do something but unable to define that thing. There was a vague admission that this last pause before his entry into Jerusalem where he must accomplish so much was an opportunity for some sort of preparation, but he lacked direction and resource. He was irritable and purposeless. ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... love no human thing, you love not even yourself, you love only the eternal spirit of beauty in all things, you love only me. Me you may sacrifice, your own heart you may deny, in the weakness of human pity for human love; but, should this be, your life will be in secret broken, purposeless, and haunted, and to me at last you will come, at the end—at the end and too late. This is your own heart's voice; you know if it ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... driven out. A recognition of others' claims takes its place. Hypnotism, suggestion, and group enthusiasm are used to their utmost possibilities. The success of the Boston moral clinic is due to establishing in the mind of the neurasthenic, the alcoholic, the world-weary, and the purposeless a truer conception of the pleasures that result from vitality and ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... that it was good, and suggested all that might have happened had the eyes only been faithful to their duty. When thinking ceased through sheer weariness, there poured into Dick's soul tide on tide of overwhelming, purposeless fear—dread of starvation always, terror lest the unseen ceiling should crush down upon him, fear of fire in the chambers and a louse's death in red flame, and agonies of fiercer horror that had nothing to do with any fear of death. Then Dick bowed his head, and clutching the arms of ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet. No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of mankind before it settled down into perfect harmony with the conditions under which it lived—the flourish of that triumph which began the last great peace. This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... new range of emotion. She, the least moody of young women, had strange fluctuations of temper, finding herself buoyantly happy one hour, the next pensive, filled with timidity and self-distrust—not to mention the little fits of gusty anger, and purposeless jealousy which took her, hurting her pride shrewdly. She grew anxiously solicitous as to her personal appearance. This dress would not please her nor that. The image of her charming oval face and well-set head ceased to satisfy her. Surely a woman's hair should be either positively blond or black, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... and hence the knowledge of Brahman also depends altogether on the thing, i.e. Brahman itself.—But, it might be said, as Brahman is an existing substance, it will be the object of the other means of right knowledge also, and from this it follows that a discussion of the Vedanta-texts is purposeless.—This we deny; for as Brahman is not an object of the senses, it has no connection with those other means of knowledge. For the senses have, according to their nature, only external things for their objects, not Brahman. If Brahman were an object ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... applying it in every needed direction, lies the hope of the future of mankind. To those who agree in this conclusion the history of the religion of the world, full of errors and of grievous failures as it has been seen to be, cannot appear to have been a vain and purposeless excursion in a land of shadows. Not without a divine call, and not without divine guidance did man set out so early, and persevere so constantly in spite of all his disappointments, in the search ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... No wonder this purposeless lullaby is satirised in the orthodox libretto of Punch's Opera or the Dominion of Fancy, for Punch, having sung it, throws the child ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... Africa. I know that I may die in an instant; and though, if dying at sea, I might sink to the depth, where something of Dorothy remains, I would as soon be reduced to ashes and scattered on the shores of this lake that I have known so long. That would be symbolical of my purposeless and wasted life. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... in purposeless fashion, towards the spot where Chilvers held his court. Their personal acquaintance with Bruno and his family was slight, and though Mrs. Warricombe would gladly have pushed forward to claim recognition, natural diffidence restrained ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... There was always a haughty aloofness in his eyes that killed any word of greeting upon the lips of these same beholders with whom, a few hours later, he was to sit and wrangle in bitterest intimacy; a certain brisk importance of step which was a palpable rebuke to their purposeless unemployment. ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... this mischief it is hard to say. I am sure that the English soldiers, thoughtless though they may be, would not stoop to this sort of purposeless outrage. I do not like to accuse the colonial troops as a whole either, although I suspect that some of them, some whose own homes had been destroyed by the enemy, might conceivably have taken vengeance in kind. It is thought by many whose opinion is valuable that the Kaffirs were ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... steady, practised stroke, denoting the accomplished oarsman, with which he had urged the little boat through the water, had given way to an idle and purposeless drift. He longed to cast himself down before the little feet, in their smart high-heeled buckled shoes and clocked stockings, which peeped out at him from under her embroidered camlet petticoat in such a maliciously coquettish manner; he longed to kneel down there ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... second stage there is complete loss of consciousness; and though the reflexes persist, the movements in response to the stimuli are purposeless. The muscles ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... something like a mitre in black lacquer, and it does suggest heat! They all have very brainy-looking heads from the youth upwards, and wear glasses over eyes that have no quickness—as if they could count but couldn't see—and they constantly move their long, weakly hands in somewhat purposeless angular fashion; the women with similar movements frequently pat their front hair which is plastered down off their foreheads, and shade their eyes with their hands at a right ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... successive changes through which each embryo is forced to pass, the late Mr. G. H. Lewes says that "none of these phases have any adaptation to the future state of the animal, but are in positive contradiction to it or are simply purposeless; whereas all show stamped on them the unmistakable characters of ancestral adaptation, and the progressions of organic evolution. What does the fact imply? There is not a single known example of a complex organism which is not developed out of simpler forms. Before it can attain the complex structure ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... the lower animals.— I have already given in the case of Man several instances of movements associated with various states of the mind or body, which are now purposeless, but which were originally of use, and are still of use under certain circumstances. As this subject is very important for us, I will here give a considerable number of analogous facts, with reference to animals; although ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... and inspire them with direful intent. Nor do they inflict any wounds upon their limbs; it is the mind that feels the direful stroke. She had brought, too, with her a monstrous composition of liquid poison, the foam of the mouth of Cerberus, and the venom of Echidna;[64] and purposeless aberrations, and the forgetfulness of a darkened understanding, and crime, and tears, and rage, and the love of murder. All these were blended together; and, mingled with fresh blood she had boiled them in a hollow vessel of brass, stirred about with ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... cried the other, 'so simple a thing; 'Tis nothing on earth but a butterfly's wing. They flit through the garden all hours of the day, They turn to each bud in a purposeless way, And many a time have they halted to see What fun could be made of my neighbours and me. But who cares for them? On their way let them go. When the summer has passed they have nothing to show, ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... nothingness. And his brain turned to nought at the idea. It was a state of nothingness. On the other hand, he might give in, and fawn to her. Or, finally, he might kill her. Or he might become just indifferent, purposeless, dissipated, momentaneous. But his nature was too serious, not gay enough or subtle ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... produced by Russia since Lermontov. He has left six volumes of poetry, of a peculiarly realistic type, chiefly dwelling upon the misfortunes of the Russian peasantry, and putting before us most forcibly the dull grey tints of their monotonous and purposeless lives. ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... their little cottage at Nuncombe Putney. The outward appearance which Dorothy bore on her return home was proof of this. Her clothes, the set of her hair, her very gestures and motions had framed themselves on town ideas. The faded, wildered, washed-out look, the uncertain, purposeless bearing which had come from her secluded life and subjection to her sister had vanished from her. She had lived among people, and had learned something of their gait and carriage. Money we know will do almost everything, and no doubt ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... they form an incongruity at a time when sovereignty and property are separated, when the Government is centralized, when the regime is a pacific one. The bondage which, in the tenth century, was necessary to re-established security and agriculture, is, in the eighteenth century, purposeless thralldom which impoverishes the soil and fetters the peasant. But, because these ancient claims are liable to abuse and injurious at the present day, it does not follow that they never were useful and legitimate, nor that it is allowable to abolish them without indemnity ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... themselves—in numbers somewhat like the little butterflies that roused out of the clover as the intruding feet came by,—about as airy, about as flitting, not quite so purposeless. And thus in a way more summery than summary, Mr. Linden and Faith arrived at the shore. He found a shady seat for her, and with no "by your leave," except in manner, transferred her bonnet to an airy ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... fatality? Leave it to chance, and take no active step Myself to seek what I so hope to find? Accepting it as heaven's fixed ordinance, That man should change his single lot at will, But woman be the sport of circumstance, A purposeless and passive accident, Inert as oysters waiting for a tide, But not like oysters, sure of what they wait for? "Ah! woman's strength is in passivity," Fastidio says, shaking his wise, wise head, And withering me with a disdainful stare. Nay! woman's strength is in developing, In virtuous ways, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... no man has ever made an assumption more perfectly useless and purposeless than the assumption of the Unknowable. We have seen that the distinction between appearance and reality is a serviceable one, and it has been pointed out that it would be of no service whatever if it ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... face belonged to his boyhood—to the time when his shoes were patched and his feet chilblained, but all the world was waiting for him to be a man to do him honor. If he could sit for an hour with the old man on the beach, would it bring the boyish feeling back again? He was conscious of a purposeless temptation—unreasonable as that which he had felt at the edge of a precipice to throw himself over. Nonsense! The committee would be waiting; there were appointments for every hour of his stay in Philadelphia; there was the leading article on the situation which nobody but he could ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... men of the Court. The people in arms had attacked the Tuileries. Wildest rumours flew in all directions, and some of them found their way through the servants to the Hotel Plougastel, of that terrible fight for the palace which was to end in the purposeless massacre of all those whom the invertebrate monarch abandoned there, whilst placing himself and his family under the protection of the Assembly. Purposeless to the end, ever adopting the course pointed out to him by evil counsellors, ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... off, when he wasn't busy. He wasn't busy most of the time; it was too cold for sodas. But he just didn't want to talk. Now, these kids love to talk. A lot of what they say doesn't make sense—either bullying, or bragging, or purposeless swearing—but talk is their normal state; when they quiet down it means trouble. For instance, if you ever find yourself walking down Thirty-Fifth Street and a couple of kids pass you, talking, you don't have to bother looking around; but if they stop talking, turn quickly. You're about to be ...
— The Day of the Boomer Dukes • Frederik Pohl
... "this may have been quite a purposeless affair. The deed may have been committed by a man who was practically a lunatic, without ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... often on the many-tinted wings of the angel, and wandering in the world of fancy. There are meditations which are the ruin of us women! I owe much peace of mind to my flowers, though sometimes they fail to occupy me. On some days I find my soul invaded by a purposeless expectancy; I cannot banish some idea which takes possession of me, which seems to make my fingers clumsy. I feel that some great event is impending, that my life is about to change; I listen vaguely, I stare into the darkness, I have no liking for my work, and after a thousand fatigues I find ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... there, an hour earlier, was by no means lost in purposeless marvelling. He boasted a certain aptitude for mechanics, perhaps legitimately inherited from that obscure origin of his, largely fostered by the requirements of his craft; into the bargain, he had ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... not say that, Father, dear Father. Listen to you! Every word you have said has sunk into the deepest deep of my heart. Pardon my foolish, purposeless snatch of talk to myself: it is but my way, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... floating on the current of impulse which your traveler poet teaches is devilish laziness, and devilish laziness always tends to something worse. You may live such a life, and quote such poetry, but you don't believe that a man should flow on like a purposeless river. The lines you quoted bear the mark of a restless desire to apologize to conscience for a fearful waste of power and possibility. No," he said, rising, "I don't want that check. This one will do; but you won't forget that God and Huckleberry ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... comforting to me. No division of sheep and goats was ever more blatantly simple. Some are born dull-witted, conservative, insensitive, unimaginative—they cling passive to the old planet, content to be whirled round in the purposeless dance of the heavenly bodies. Others are chronic sufferers from divine discontent—they open their eyes with critical intent, they are always conscious of the oblique, the unrighteous, the worthless in their surroundings. They have a sense of power, a will to change things. To them the world ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby |
