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More "Sloth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... own priest, and I shrive myself Of all my wasted yesterdays. Though sin And sloth and foolishness, and all ill weeds Of error, evil, and neglect grow rank And ugly there, I dare forgive myself That error, sin, and sloth and foolishness. God knows that yesterday I played the fool; God knows that yesterday I played the knave; But shall I therefore cloud this new dawn o'er ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... passionate ardour of discoverers, the fiery enthusiasm of confessors. They stood alone, sustained but little by intercourse among themselves, and wholly misunderstood by the people round them. Italy, sunk in sloth, priest-ridden, tyrant-ridden, exhausted with the unparalleled activity of the Renaissance, besotted with the vices of slavery and slow corruption, had no ears for spirit-thrilling prophecy. The Church, terrified by the ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... y yolk on'ly proc'u ra tor scoff mon'grel mi cros'co py nonce be troth' drom'e da ry cost proc'ess zo ol'o gy won't doc'ile al lop'a thy wont prov'ost au tom'a ton shone grov'e1 hy drop'a thy sloth fore'head La oc'o on forge joc'und pho tog'ra phy doth don'key ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... which he very tranquilly began to draw. Happily for Gideon Spilett, the animal in question did not belong to the redoubtable family of the plantigrades. It was only a koala, better known under the name of the sloth, being about the size of a large dog, and having stiff hair of a dirty color, the paws armed with strong claws, which enabled it to climb trees and feed on the leaves. Having identified the animal, which they did not disturb, Gideon Spilett erased "bear" from the ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... country. What miserable economy! what feeble foresight! What principle of political economy is better established than that a monopoly is a curse to both producer and consumer? To the first it pays a premium on fraud, sloth, and negligence; and to the second it supplies the worst possible article, in the worst possible way, at the highest possible price. In agriculture, in manufactures, in the professions, and in the arts, it is the greatest bar to improvement with which any branch of industry can be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... Winds (especially the East) That staunch the young year's floods by dyke and dam, Who enter like a lion, that great beast, And make your egress like a woolly lamb; Who come, as Mars full-armed for battle's shocks, From lethargy of Winter's sloth to wean us, Then melt (about the vernal equinox), As he did in the softer arms ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... stolid clownish type still held the thrones of collegiate power. Yet the eye of an imaginative scholar as he gazed upon the grey walls, reared by piety, munificence, and love of learning in a far-off time, might well discern behind an unattractive screen of academic sloth, the venerable past, not dim and cold, but in its traditions rich, nourishing, and alive. Such an one could see before him present days of honourable emulation and stirring acquisition—fit prelude of a man's part to ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... shall be better prepared to believe when I see that beauty is not regarded in Nature, but is a mere casual attendant upon use. The artist Greenough did, indeed, strenuously maintain this last. But the sloth and the bird-of-paradise are equally useful to themselves; if beauty were but an aspect of use, these should be equally comely in our eyes. No; "the struggle for life" has not grooved the bill of the auk, and painted the tail of the peacock, any ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... the slow stupendous teaching of the world's events. Men will go on planting potatoes, and nothing else but potatoes, till a potato disease comes and forces them to find out the advantage of a varied crop. Selfishness, stupidity, sloth, persist in trying to adapt the world to their desires, till a time comes when the world manifests itself as too decidedly inconvenient to them. Wisdom stands outside of man and urges itself upon him, like the marks of the changing seasons, before it finds a home within him, directs his actions, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... a history of selfishness and sin, and his body bears the marks thereof. His features are "seamed by sickness, dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, pinched by poverty, shadowed by sorrow, branded by remorse." Men's bodies are consumed by sloth, broken down by labor, tortured by disease, dishonored by foul uses, until beholding the "marks" of character in the natural face in a glass multitudes would fain forget what manner of men they are. For the human face is a canvas, and nature's writing ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... ill-past hours return again! No more, as then, should Sloth around me throw Her soul-enslaving, leaden chain! No more the precious time would I employ In giddy revels, or in thoughtless joy, 5 A present joy ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... hands are the hearts of kings, and who put into the heart of your Majesty what is provided, ordained, and commanded by this letter for the weal and betterment of all this land. If this be executed as your Majesty has ordered, the country may be helped; but hitherto there has been so much sloth and carelessness in executing what your Majesty provides and orders for the good of this land, that thus it has come to its present extremity. I trust in our Lord that this state of affairs will not continue, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... on on twelve shillings a week, and learning obedience, self-denial, self- respect, and trust in God, by the things suffered in that hard life here at home, than be a Negro in Tropic islands, fattening himself in sloth under that perpetual sunshine, and thinking nought of God, because, poor fool, he can get all he wants ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... quiet way; so snug! and tell you how matters go upon 'Change, or in the House, or according to the blockhead's first pursuits, whether lucrative or politic, which thus he leaves; and lays himself down a voluntary prey to his own sensuality and sloth, while the ambition and avarice of the nephews and nieces, with their rascally adherents and coadjutors, reap the advantage, ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... booksellers. From various sources we get some highly-coloured and unflattering pictures of the typical booksellers of the period. Tom Nash has limned for us a vivid little portrait in 'Pierce Penilesse' (1592), in which he declares that if he were to paint Sloth, 'I swear that I would draw it like a stationer that I know, with his thumb under his girdle, who, if ever a man come to his stall to ask him for a book, never stirs his head, or looks upon him, but ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... overseers, as being in nothing better men than themselves, they despised and slighted, nor were the least concerned at their commands and menaces. They used honest pastimes and liberal studies, not esteeming sloth and idleness honest and liberal, but rather such exercises as hunting and running, repelling robbers, taking of thieves, and delivering the wronged and oppressed from injury. For doing ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... he declared comfortably, "to-day is Friday. I'll spend Saturday and Sunday in sinful sloth and the renewal of old acquaintance, and on Monday I'll sit in at your desk and give you a long-deferred vacation. ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... the cedars and striving to reach their crowns. Of animal life there was no movement amid the majestic vaulted aisles which stretched from us as we walked, but a constant movement far above our heads told of that multitudinous world of snake and monkey, bird and sloth, which lived in the sunshine, and looked down in wonder at our tiny, dark, stumbling figures in the obscure depths immeasurably below them. At dawn and at sunset the howler monkeys screamed together and the parrakeets broke into shrill chatter, but during the hot hours ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of Charles' greatest power (1547). His ancient rivals Henry and Francis both died in this year, the one sunk in sensual sloth, the other in shame and gloom and savage cruelty. In his hatred of Charles, Francis had even in his latter years allied himself with Solyman the Magnificent, and encouraged the Turks in their assault on Germany. Henry's crown fell to a child, Edward VI; that of Francis, to his son, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... without being slothful subsist on such water as he gets, and air, and all forest products. He should live upon these, in due order, according to the regulations of his initiation.[138] He should honour the guest that comes to him with alms of fruits and roots. He should then, without sloth, always give whatever other food he may have. Restraining speech the while, he should eat after gratifying deities and guests. His mind should be free from envy. He should eat little, and depend always on the deities. Self-restrained, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Palinuris, steering straight the gallant bark, By voice and exhortation keep your heroes to the mark. Cheer the plucky, chide the cowards who to do their work are loth, And forbid them to grow torpid by indulging selfish sloth. Fool! I know my words are idle! yet if any love remain; If my honour be your glory, my discredit be your pain; If a spark of old affection in your hearts be still alive! Rally round old Father Camus, and ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... 840 Each supples a dry brain, fills you its ins-and-outs, Gives your life's hour-glass a shake when the thin sand doubts Whether to run on or stop short, and guarantees Age is not all made of stark sloth and arrant ease. I have seen my little lady once more, Jacynth, the Gipsy, Berold, and the rest of it, For to me spoke the Duke, as I told you before; I always wanted to make a clean breast of it: And now it is made-why, my heart's blood, that went trickle, Trickle, but anon, in ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... sacrifice could not be brought on this very morning of the Temple dedication, because the Temple keys lay under Solomon's pillow, and none dared awaken him. Word was sent to Bath-sheba, who forthwith aroused her son, and rebuked him for his sloth. "Thy father," she said, "was known to all as a God-fearing man, and now people will say, 'Solomon is the son of Bath-sheba, it is his mother's fault if he goes wrong.' Whenever thy father's wives ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... that they were working these mines, they would come hither to take them captive; but even now, when no one can molest them, they do not work the mines, and hence we may infer that their poverty is mainly due to sloth. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... of your member's conduct. Try whether his ambition or his avarice have jostled him out of the straight line of duty; or whether that grand foe of the offices of active life, that master vice in men of business, a degenerate and inglorious sloth—has made him flag and languish in his course. This is the object of our inquiry. If our member's conduct can bear this touch, mark it for sterling. He may have fallen into errors; he must have faults; but our error is greater, and our fault is radically ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... essays, and a drama, The Forced Marriage, are forgotten, with the exception of the four stanzas at the end of the first part of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, describing the diseases incident to sloth, which ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... from that day the monks waged, in their conclaves of sloth and sosherie, against the children of the town, denouncing them to their parents as worms of the great serpent and heirs of perdition, only served to make their young spirits burn fiercer. As their joints hardened and their sinews were knit, their hearts ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... to you!" cried the sailor, as, relieved of the boy's weight, he too swung head downwards for a moment or two, then with a quick effort wrenched himself upwards, got hold of the branch with both hands, and after hanging like a sloth for a few moments, succeeded in dragging himself upon the bough, which all the while was swaying heavily up and down and threatening to shake Rodd from where he hung, but at the same time inciting him so to fresh desperate action, that ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... boys all obeyed the summons of the half-past-six bell next morning with nervous alacrity. For it was something more than a mere call to shake off "dull sloth"—it was a reminder that they were fags, and that their masters lay in bed depending on them to rouse them ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... historians, commenced in 1737, under the inspection and at the expense of the community of Saint Maur, will long show that the revenues of the Benedictines were not always spent in self-indulgence, and that the members of that order did not uniformly slumber in sloth and indolence, when they had discharged the ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... on a somewhat higher level, with a broader spirit of brotherly good-will one for another. Peace is generally good in itself, but it is never the highest good unless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness; and it becomes a very evil thing if it serves merely as a mask for cowardice and sloth, or as an instrument to further the ends of despotism or anarchy. We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life; but we despise no less the coward and the ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... or thwart it. Which has done The wisdom of this venerable head; Who, well provided with the secret key To that gold alphabet, himself made me, Himself, I say, the savage he fore-read Fate somehow should be charged with; nipp'd the growth Of better nature in constraint and sloth, That only bring to bear the seed of wrong And turn'd the stream to fury whose out-burst Had kept his lawful channel uncoerced, And fertilized the land he flow'd along. Then like to some unskilful duellist, Who having over-reached himself pushing ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... setting such an example of sloth," she said, and squeaked at her own temerity and ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... for ever; these to me Were no such gifts as crave no thanksgiving, 900 If with one blow dividing the sheer life I might make end, and one pang wind up all And seal mine eyes from sorrow; for such end The Gods give none they love not; but my heart, That leaps up lightened of all sloth or fear To take the sword's point, yet with one thought's load Flags, and falls back, broken of wing, that halts Maimed in mid flight for thy sake and borne down, Mother, that in the places where I played An arm's length from thy bosom and no more 910 Shalt find ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and aguish chills. To carry on the work of the Church by revivals is as unreasonable as it would be to carry on a school, or a cotton factory, by a revival system—alternations of violent study and work, followed by relapses into indolence and sloth. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... ideal community, Godwin reckons that half an hour's toil from every man daily will suffice to produce the necessities of life. He modified this sanguine estimate in a later essay (The Enquirer) to two hours. He dismisses all objections based on the sloth or selfishness of human nature, by the simple answer that this happy state of things will not be realised until human nature has been reformed. Need individuality suffer? It need fear only the restraint imposed by candid public opinion. That ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... sufficiently indicate the first; the second may be allowed, if by "virtue" we understand justice and truth; the third is testified by the constant claim of men, in their epitaphs, to have been benefactors of their species. "I was not an idler," says one; "I was no listener to the counsels of sloth; my name was not heard in the place of reproof ... all men respected me; I gave water to the thirsty; I set the wanderer on his path; I took away the oppressor, and put a stop to violence." "I myself was just and true," writes another: "without ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... men have not only this frivolous ambition of being thought masterly inciting them on one hand, but also their natural sloth tempting them on the other. They are terrified at the prospect before them, of the toil required to attain exactness. The impetuosity of youth is distrusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, and desires, from mere impatience ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... 420 In bawdry gauze, for which our daughters leave The fig, more modest, first brought up by Eve, Panting for breath, inflamed with lustful fires, Yet wanting strength to perfect her desires, Leaning on Sloth, who, fainting with the heat, Stops at each step, and slumbers on his feet; Autumn, when Nature, who with sorrow feels Her dread foe Winter treading on her heels, Makes up in value what she wants in length, Exerts her powers, and puts forth all her strength, 430 Bids ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... higher ranks, who have no call to exertion in gaining the means of subsistence, and no objects of interest on which to exercise their mental faculties, and who consequently sink into a state of mental sloth and nervous weakness, which not only deprives them of much enjoyment, but subjects them to suffering, both of body and mind, ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... offered by music or eloquence, by book or newspaper, by trade and profession, many choose sloth and self-indulgence. These needy millions, blinded with sin and ignorance, stand forth as a great opportunity for loving hearts. Sympathy is making beautiful the pathway of knowledge, that young hearts may be allured along the shining ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... valedixi; syrenis istius cantibus surdam posthac aurem obversurus.—I bid farewell to Sloth, being resolved henceforth not to listen to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... had no oil in their lamps: their way was material; thus they were in doubt and dark- ness. They heeded not their sloth, their fading warmth [5] of action; hence the steady decline of spiritual light, until, the midnight gloom upon them, they must borrow the better-tended lamps of the faithful. By entering the guest-chamber ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... is placed in the same order with its neighbour, the spring-ant or echidra, also a native of Australia. Before leaving these cases, the visitor should pause to notice the Sloths, and particularly the repulsive aspect of the yellow-faced sloth of ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... they raked the eaves in their swift flight, or skimmed sidelong past her with a rush of wind, she would sometimes stir, and sit a little up, and seem to awaken from her doze of satisfaction. But for the rest of her days she lay luxuriously folded on herself and sunk in sloth and pleasure. Her invincible content at first annoyed me, but I came gradually to find repose in the spectacle, until at last it grew to be my habit to sit down beside her four times in the day, both coming and going, and to talk with her sleepily, I scarce knew of what. I had come to like her ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which case it reared itself on its hind legs from the back of a chair to which it clung, and clawed out with its forepaws like a cat. Its manner of clinging with its claws, and the sluggishness of its motions, gave it a great resemblance to a sloth. It uttered no sound, and remained all night on the spot where I had placed it in the morning. The next day, I put it on a tree in the open air, and at night it escaped. These small Tamanduas are nocturnal in their habits, and feed on those species ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... decease, his acting successor made his appearance on board. The character of Captain Horton was well known to us from the complaints made by the officers belonging to his ship, of his apathy and indolence; indeed, he went by the soubriquet of "the Sloth." It certainly was very annoying to his officers to witness so many opportunities of prize-money and distinction thrown away through the indolence of his disposition. Captain Horton was a young man of family who had advanced rapidly in ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... closer to the wires, the bat opens both wings owl-like, in a most threatening manner; but if we make still more hostile motions the creature retreats as hastily as it can, changing its method of progress to an all-fours, sloth-like gait, the long free thumb of each hand grasping wire after wire and doing most of the leverage, the ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... be broken in, will always refuse to submit to any guidance but their own lawless will. They will remain either the Ishmaels or the Sloths of Society. But man is naturally neither an Ishmael nor a Sloth. ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... astonishment, hardly knew how many were their followers, how few yours. Their line was then withdrawn to the brow of a steep hill; it had before been gathered together to storm, but on your appearance was not deployed for battle. Meanwhile you, having slain some of their best men whom not sloth but courage had made the rearmost of the troop, occupied the level ground alone, though such a fight gave you not so many comrades as your table is wont to contain guests. And when you returned to the town at your leisure what came to meet you in the way of ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... revelers by night! Stealthy companions of the downy moth— Diana's motes, that flit in her pale light, Shunners of sunbeams in diurnal sloth;— These be the feasters on night's silver cloth;— The gnat with shrilly trump is their convener, Forth from their flowery chambers, nothing loth, With lulling tunes to charm the air serener, Or dance upon the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part of their time, to be employed in its service. But idleness taxes many of us much more; if we reckon all that is spent in absolute sloth, or doing of nothing; with that which is spent in idle employments or amusements that amounts to nothing. Sloth, by bringing on disease, absolutely shortens life. Sloth, like Rust, consumes faster than Labor wean; while the ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... that can find no other way for correcting the errors of his people but by taking from them the conveniences of life, shows that he knows not what it is to govern a free nation. He himself ought rather to shake off his sloth, or to lay down his pride, for the contempt or hatred that his people have for him takes its rise from the vices in himself. Let him live upon what belongs to him without wronging others, and accommodate his expense to his revenue. Let him punish crimes, and, by ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... Destruction to the rest: this pause between (Unanswerd least thou boast) to let thee know; At first I thought that Libertie and Heav'n To heav'nly Soules had bin all one; but now I see that most through sloth had rather serve, Ministring Spirits, traind up in Feast and Song; Such hast thou arm'd, the Minstrelsie of Heav'n, Servilitie with freedom to contend, As both thir deeds compar'd this day shall prove. 170 To whom in brief thus Abdiel stern ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... on a sleepless war against sloth and feebleness, is one of the noblest of human spectacles. This warfare was rapidly and hourly changing the monotony and dreary aspects of rock and forest. Under the creative hands of art, temples of ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... controversies among their own people. Robberies which are committed beyond the boundaries of each state bear no infamy, and they avow that these are committed for the purpose of disciplining their youth and of preventing sloth. And when any of their chiefs has said in an assembly "that he will be their leader, let those who are willing to follow, give in their names"; they who approve of both the enterprise and the man arise and promise their assistance and are applauded by the ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... a curse. But, when the crisis of his fate drew nigh, there was, as in our country there often is, a reaction. All his merits, his courage, his good nature, his firm adherence to the Protestant religion in the evil times, were remembered. It was impossible to deny that he was sunk in sloth and luxury, that he neglected the most important business for his pleasures, and that he could not say No to a boon companion or to a mistress; but for these faults excuses and soft names were found. His friends used without ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... own, did please. To quit his care, he gather'd, first of all, In spring the roses, apples in the fall: And, when cold winter split the rocks in twain, And ice the running rivers did restrain, He stripp'd the bear's foot of its leafy growth, And, calling western winds, accus'd the spring of sloth He therefore first among the swains was found To reap the product of his labour'd ground, And squeeze the combs with golden liquor crown'd His limes were first in flow'rs, his lofty pines, With friendly shade, secur'd his tender vines. For ev'ry bloom his trees ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... life as a godlike gift, except in the hope that it is drawing nigh. Let him who understands, understand better; let him not say the good is less than perfect, or excuse his supineness and spiritual sloth by saying to himself that a man can go too far in his search after the divine, can sell too much of what he has to buy the field of the treasure. Either there is no Christ of God, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... patrician-born was something infinitely worse. For, however vile the trade of a Fool may be, it is not half so vile for a low-born clod who is too indolent or too sickly to do honest work as for one who has accepted it out of a half-cowardice and persevered in it through very sloth. ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... religious babel! and 10% of all the inhabitants of the globe, about the same number of people who profess to Protestantism, are Animists. This is the lowest stage of primitive religion, and millions of humans are still quagmired in the sloth of a primitive faith which once must have been the faith of ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... they usually sung, embraced such topics as Love to God—the presence of God—obedience to parents—friendship for brothers and sisters and schoolmates—love of school—the sinfulness of sloth, of lying, and of stealing. We quote the following hymn as a specimen of the subjects which are introduced into their songs: often were we greeted with this sweet hymn, while visiting the different schools throughout ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... I pointed. "Don't be afraid," he answered. "It will not attack us. The animal is a sloth, as harmless as any living creature. We may consider him among the other beasts in our domain destined if necessary for our use. He cannot get away, so we will not attempt to interfere with him at present. He will not venture into the ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... as pride and envy are spiritual sins, so are sloth, avarice, and anger. But spiritual sins are concerned with the spirit, just as carnal sins are with the flesh. Therefore not only can there be pride and envy in the angels; but likewise ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... of family prayers is, I fear, dropping into disuse. Our lives are so full of business that a season of God's service in the morning and in the evening is almost thought to be an excuse of sloth. But what a sad effect do we see on our youth! They have quick eyes for cant and hypocrisy. They follow us to church on Sunday less and less willingly, until finally there is rebellion in their hearts and irreligion in their souls. ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... exceeded thirty feet. The six legs looked as strong as steel cables, and were about a foot through, while a huge, bony proboscis nine feet in length preceded the body. This was carried horizontally between two and three feet from the ground. Presently a large ground sloth came to the pool to drink, lapping up the water at the sides that had partly cooled. In an instant the black armored monster rushed down the slope with the speed of a nineteenth-century locomotive, and seemed about as formidable. The sloth turned in the direction of the sound, and for a moment ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... hard government that should tax its people one tenth part of their time to be employed in its service; but idleness taxes many of us much more; sloth, by bringing on diseases, absolutely shortens life. 'Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears; while the used key is always bright,' as Poor Richard says. How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep! forgetting that 'the sleeping fox catches no poultry,' ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... I begin to grow weary of Samaria; I feel a passion for glory; give me leave to seek it amidst the perils of war. My father, the sultan of Harran, has many enemies. Why does he not call me to his assistance? Why does he leave me here so long in obscurity? Must I spend my life in sloth, when all my brothers have the happiness to be fighting by his side?" "My son," answered Pirouze, "I am no less impatient to have your name become famous; I could wish you had already signalized yourself against ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... quite persuaded of your own excellence, for that is in keeping with your little sense. And of course it is natural that my lady should suppose that you surpass us all in courtesy and bravery. We failed to rise through sloth, forsooth, or because we did not care! Upon my word, it is not so, my lord; but we did not see my lady until you had risen first." "Really, Kay," the Queen then says, "I think you would burst if you could not pour out the poison of which you are so full. You are troublesome and ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... that we have no knowledge of the Miocene mammalian fauna of the Australian and Austro-Columbian provinces; but, seeing that not a trace of a Platyrrhine Ape, of a Procyonine Carnivore, of a characteristically South-American Rodent, of a Sloth, an Armadillo, or an Ant-eater has yet been found in Miocene deposits of Arctogaea, I cannot doubt that they already existed in ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and other things in the language of the Chinese for whom he had printed in their language and characters a memorial upon the Christian life, with other brief tracts of prayer and meditation, in preparation for the holy sacraments, of confession and the sacred communion. He was an enemy of sloth, and so worked much in Chinese, in which he wrote a practically new grammar of the Chinese language, a vocabulary, a manual of confession and many sermons, in order that those who had to learn this language might find it ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous
... jug of water out of doors over night in a blizzard, that the jug, as a jug, would be no longer of value in the morning. He was, and is, routine impersonate, exponent of sound business personified; a living sermon against sloth and improvidence, and easy ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... embraces, And on Andromache[186] his helmet laces. Great Agamemnon was, men say, amazed, On Priam's loose-trest daughter when he gazed. Mars in the deed the blacksmith's net did stable; In heaven was never more notorious fable. 40 Myself was dull and faint, to sloth inclined; Pleasure and ease had mollified my mind. A fair maid's care expelled this sluggishness, And to her tents willed me myself address. Since may'st thou see me watch and night-wars move: He that will not ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... after, O bull of Bharata's race, Pandu who had achieved a victory over sloth and lethargy, accompanied by his two wives, Kunti and Madri, retired into the woods. Leaving his excellent palace with its luxurious beds, he became a permanent inhabitant of the woods, devoting the whole ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... hath assumed my likeness, doubtless for some mischievous purpose. 'If the magistrate,' saith the King, 'be slothful towards witches, God is very able to make them instruments to waken and punish his sloth.' No one can accuse me of slothfulness and want of zeal. My best exertions have been used against the accursed creatures. And now for the rest. 'But if, on the contrary, he be diligent in examining and punishing them, God will not permit ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... place. Miss Meigs 'did' for her. And since then she has been living on there. No one wanted the house—the poor Somerses!—and she was used to it. She's an old thing herself, and of course she hasn't the nerves of a sloth. Now she 'does' for Kathleen. Of course later there'll have to be a nurse again. Kathleen mustn't die with only Melora Meigs. I'm not sure, either, that Melora will last. She all crooked ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... they are sent with a message to any place, one must very patiently await some notable failure caused ordinarily by their natural sloth and laziness. [297] Sicut acetum dentibus, et fumus oculis, sic piger his qui miserunt illum ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... gods, Or she would never cease her prayers to Jove, Until he took from her the heavy curse Of immortality. With closer vows, The knight then sealed his worship and forswore All other aims and deeds to serve her cause. Thus passed unnoted seven barren years Of reckless passion and voluptuous sloth, Undignified by any lofty thought In his degraded mind, that sometime was Endowed with noble capability. From revelry to revelry he passed, Craving more pungent pleasure momently, And new intoxications, and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... knight said gravely. "The Moslems ever gain in power, and it may well be that the Knights of St. John will be hardly pressed to hold their own. If the boy joins them it will be my wish that he shall as early as possible repair to Rhodes. I do not wish him to become one of the drones who live in sloth at their commanderies in England, and take no part in the noble struggle of the Order with the Moslem host, who have captured Constantinople and now threaten all Europe. We were childless some years after our marriage, and Eleanor and I vowed that were a son born to us he should join the Order ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... and was both morally and physically courageous. Though as a youth he had been idle, he was never addicted to pleasure; his accession brought him work which was congenial to him, he overcame his natural tendency to sloth and, so long as his health allowed, discharged his kingly duties with diligence. His intellectual powers were small and uncultivated, but he had plenty of shrewdness and common sense; he showed a decided ability for kingcraft, not of the highest kind, and gained many successes over powerful ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... It is curious, that in none of these lists do we find either Honesty or Industry ranked as a virtue, except in the Venetian one, where the latter is implied in Alacritas, and opposed not only by "Accidia" or sloth, but by a whole series of eight sculptures on another capital, illustrative, as I believe, of the temptations to idleness; while various other capitals, as we shall see presently, are devoted to the representation of the active trades. Industry, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... delicate care, the most minutely measured instalments of provocation, he proceeded to "crowd" the infinitely sluggish Jan. So sunk in sloth was Jan that he, who three hours earlier had been pricked to fury by an insolent glance from Bill's eyes, now positively submitted to the actual touch of Bill's nose on his hocks before he would budge. And then with a long snarl he only edged himself ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... People must be righted. Disunion, and sloth, and meanness enslaved them. Combination, calm pride, and ceaseless labour must set them loose. Let them not trust to the blunders of their enemies, or the miracles of their chiefs—trust nothing, men of Ireland, but the deep resolve of ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... impatience to doubt, temerity to assever, glory to know, doubt to contradict, end to gain, sloth to search, seeking things in words, resting in a part of nature—these and the like have been the things which have forbidden the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things, and in place thereof have married it to vain notions ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... or outside every hackney carriage on the neighbouring roads. I have no knowledge, elsewhere, of more repulsive countenances than are to be found among these gentry. If Nature's handwriting be at all legible, greater varieties of sloth, deceit, and intellectual torpor, could hardly be observed among any class of ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... up and gone to bring in May. A deal of youth ere this is come Back, and with white-thorn laden home. Some have despatch'd their cakes and cream, Before that we have left to dream: And some have wept and woo'd, and plighted troth, And chose their priest, ere we can cast off sloth: Many a green-gown has been given, Many a kiss, both odd and even: Many a glance, too, has been sent From out the eye, love's firmament: Many a jest told of the keys betraying This night, and locks ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... money ahead, passed the test very well, according to Mr. Britt's notion. Young Mr. Vaniman had secured a business education piecemeal, and was a bit late in getting it, but Mr. Britt promptly perceived that the young man had not been hung up by stupidity or sloth. So he hired Vaniman, finding him a strapping chap without ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... slang, therefore, technical in origin, the natural efflorescence of highly cultivated agilities of brain, and hand, and eye, is worthy of all commendation. But there is another kind that goes under the name of slang, the offspring rather of mental sloth, and current chiefly among those idle, jocular classes to whom all art is a bugbear and a puzzle. There is a public for every one; the pottle-headed lout who in a moment of exuberance strikes on a new sordid metaphor for any ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... continent, and to some extent in North America also, a marvellous group of extinct Edentates, representing the living Sloths and Armadillos, but of gigantic size. The most celebrated of these is the huge Megatherium Cuvieri (fig. 260) of the South American Pampas. The Megathere was a colossal Sloth-like animal which attained a length of from twelve to eighteen feet, with bones more massive than those of the Elephant. Thus the thigh-bone is nearly thrice the thickness of the same bone in the largest of existing Elephants, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... was happy; every day he gave Thanks for the fair existence that was his; For a sick fancy made him not her slave, To mock him with her phantom miseries. No chronic tortures racked his aged limb, For luxury and sloth had nourished none ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... a polite style much: But there was little strength in it: He had the beginnings of learning laid well in him: But he has allowed himself in a course of some years in much sloth and too many liberties.—Swift. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... weapons, and bravely fighting, should valiantly protect their country, their property, wives and children, and, what is dearer than these, their liberty and lives; that they should not suffer their hands to be tied behind their backs by a nation which, unless they were enervated by idleness and sloth, was not more powerful than themselves, but that they should arm those hands with buckler, sword, and spear, ready for the field of battle; and, because they thought this also of advantage to the people they were about to leave, they, with the help of the miserable natives, ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas
... great extent, the result of our money-getting propensities. Our material wants are more urgent, more irresistible; they press more constantly upon us than any other; and those whom they fail to rouse to exertion are, as a rule, hopelessly given over to indolence and sloth. In the stimulus of these lower needs, then, is found the impulse which drives men to labor; and without labor ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... the breast inflame; Now avarice thirsts, insensible of shame; Now sloth unnerves them in voluptuous ease, And the sweet pleasures of the body please. With eager haste they rush the gulf within, And their whole souls are centred in their sin. But oh, great Jove! by whom all good is given— Dweller with lightnings and the clouds of heaven— ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... E., To-day will be brought up to me For impudence and sloth; Reveille only made him sneer; Aroused, he lipped a Bombardier (And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... spinal column, is perhaps the strongest argument against the theory of direct creation and the radical toto coelo distinction between man and beast that has yet been advanced. We cannot at the moment lay our hands upon any thorough and trustworthy account of the valves in the veins of the sloth: as that animal spends its life hanging, back downward, the structure of the veins would be interesting in this connection.—ED. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... were not only immersed in luxury and sloth, but were abandoned to the most scandalous excesses; most of them lived by robbery, and several had committed assassinations on the travellers who had occasion to traverse the woods. The neighbourhood shrunk with terror from the ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... the White Man's burden— The savage wars of peace— Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch Sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hope ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... variety, as also of those creatures which seem neither bird nor beast. There are large black howling monkeys, and little black-faced ones with prehensile tails, by means of which they swing in mid-air or jump from tree to tree in sheer lightness of heart. There is also the sloth, which, as its name implies, is painfully deliberate in its motions. Were I a Scotchman I should say that "I dinna think that in a' nature there is a mair curiouser cratur." Sidney Smith's summary of this strange ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... as weeds and nettles. Thus the great bulk of the universe is to him useless or hurtful, because he will not, or cannot, learn its secrets. These unknown things are standing reproaches to his ignorance and sloth." ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... during the day, a hundred friends among those unfortunate scions of noble houses who will not wear the Russian uniform, who cannot by the laws of their caste engage in any form of commerce, and must not accept a government office—who are therefore idle, without the natural Southern sloth that enables Italians and Spaniards to do nothing gracefully all day long. Wanda was wiser than Martin. Girls generally are infinitely wiser than young men. But the wisdom ceases to grow later in life, and old men are wiser than ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... luxury, The lazy monarch must be doomed to die; So let the royal insect rule alone, And reign without a rival in his throne. The kings are different; one of better note, All speck'd with gold, and many a shining spot, Looks gay, and glistens in a gilded coat; 110 But love of ease, and sloth, in one prevails, That scarce his hanging paunch behind him trails: The people's looks are different as their kings', Some sparkle bright, and glitter in their wings; Others look loathsome and diseased with sloth, Like a faint traveller, whose dusty mouth Grows dry with heat, and spits a mawkish ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... my soul, and with the sun Thy daily stage of duty run; Shake off dull sloth, and joyful rise To ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... spot That even guarding gods forgot, When clothing him in armor; And I have proved this charge o' mine For fear, and sloth, and vice, and wine, But clear ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... perhaps this second argument is stronger. Gillman's Coleridge, Vol. I., deals rashly, unjustly, and almost maliciously, with some of our own particular friends; and yet, until late in this summer, Anno Domini 1844, we—that is, neither ourselves nor our friends—ever heard of its existence. Now a sloth, even without the benefit of Mr Waterton's evidence to his character, will travel faster than that. But malice, which travels fastest of all things, must be dead and cold at starting, when it can thus have lingered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... of neither wine nor silk was destined to succeed in the colony; tobacco and cotton were to be its staples, but the latter had not at this epoch been attempted. Order and propriety among the colonists were assured by penalties on gaming, drunkenness, and sloth; and the better to guard against the proverbial wiles of Satan, a university was sketched out, and direction was given that such children of the heathen as showed indications of latent talent should be caught, tamed and instructed, and employed as missionaries ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... defined what early rising is; seven, to those who have nothing to do,—as soon as ever business calls, to those who have. Was ever bed of sloth more eloquently reprobated than in the following ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... presence of rudiments of horns in the female of Cervulus moschatus; on the horns of goats and sheep; on crests of male antelopes; on the beard of the ibex; on the Berbura goat; on sexual differences in the coloration of Rodents; ornaments of male sloth; on the colours of the Elands; on the Sing-sing antelope; on the colours of goats; on Lemur Macaco; on ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... could not give the work the due perfection, and left it in its beginning, as he had to go to the other villages. He charged some Christians to continue in preparing and cultivating those souls so that they might be ready on his return to receive baptism. But human weakness, united to the sloth, which almost as if native to him, accompanies the Indian, was the reason that when the religious returned after an interval of four or six months, instead of finding the work advanced, he found that which he himself had done in it lost. And idolatry always triumphed, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... mollusk of a woman. In the case of the widow Broadnax this natural feeling was not at all affected by the fact that she was too indolent to make the exertion to claim and fill her rightful place as mistress of the house. It did not matter in the least that she lay and slept like a sloth while poor little Miss Penelope was up and working like a beaver. No woman's claims ever have anything to do with her deserts; perhaps no man's ever have either; perhaps all who claim most deserve ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... dead branches together; and in this confused tangle the animal scrambled and tore with a great show of energy, but really made very little progress; and all at once it flashed into my mind that it was a sloth—a common animal, but rarely seen on the ground—with no tree near to take refuge in. The shock of joy this discovery produced was great enough to unnerve me, and for some moments I stood trembling, hardly able ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... say that he does not merit the glowing eulogy on himself which he inserts in his General History? "What shall I say but this, we left him, that in all his proceedings made justice his first guide, and experience his second, ever hating baseness, sloth, pride, and indignity, more than any dangers; that upon no danger would send them where he would not lead them himself; that would never see us want what he either had or could by any means get us; that would rather want than borrow; or starve than not pay; that loved ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... on the stage for Henry the Sixth; he in it asleep. To him the lieutenant, and a pursuivant (R. Cowley, Jo. Duke), and one warder (R. Pallant). To them Pride, Gluttony, Wrath, and Covetousness at one door; at another door Envy, Sloth, and Lechery. The three put back the four, and ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... Quintilian says, "We palliate our sloth by the specious pretext of difficulty." Nothing, in fact, is too difficult to accomplish, which we set about, with a proper consideration of those difficulties, and pursue with perseverance. The Indian language cannot be acquired so ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... are always bitter," and it is this alone that makes it possible to strengthen the will while instructing the mind. The well-schooled will comes, like Herder, to scorn the luxury of knowing without the labor of learning. We must anticipate the future penalties of sloth as well as of badness. The will especially is a trust we are to administer for the child, not as he may now wish, but as he will wish when more mature. We must now compel what he will later wish to compel himself to do. To find his habits already formed to the same law ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... rest he pushes off in a mass as weeds and nettles. Thus the great bulk of the universe is to him useless or hurtful, because he will not, or cannot, learn its secrets. These unknown things are standing reproaches to his ignorance and sloth." ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... told—no more; But, as insuperably soared that cliff, Unfathomably thus its sheer descent Walled the abyss. Again he heard that Voice: "Henceforth no place remains for active toils, Penance for acts perverse. Inactive sloth Through passive suffering meets its due. On earth That sloth a nothing seemed; a nothing now That chasm whose hollow bars thee from the Blest, Poor slender film of insubstantial air. Self-help is here denied thee; for that cause A twofold term thou need'st of pain ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... Hebrews and unclassified sects. Truly, a religious babel! and 10% of all the inhabitants of the globe, about the same number of people who profess to Protestantism, are Animists. This is the lowest stage of primitive religion, and millions of humans are still quagmired in the sloth of a primitive faith which once must have been the faith of ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... transports of his wrath, flung the power of attorney at the head of the innocent maidservant, and was only forcibly withheld from horse-whipping the rascally messenger by whose sloth and drunkenness the ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... protection of the Immortals, who have so many times preserved this republic in its greatest dangers. The aid of the Gods is not gained by prayers or womanish supplication. To those who watch, who act, who take counsel, wisely, all things turn out successful. Yield yourselves up to idleness and sloth, and in vain you shall implore the Gods—they are ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... once on a time a Great King, who had two vast realms, the Land of Light and Truth, and the Land of Night and Sloth. Those who dwelt in the first were full of life and joy. The King held his court at the Place of Rest ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson Told in Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin
... are involved, they may be constrained at once to render thanks to God Who hath deigned to call His faithful people out of such perilous darkness into His marvellous Light, and to pray for the illumination of the hearts of the Heathen. Hereby, also, the sloth of undevout Christians may be put to shame, when they see how much more ready the nations of the unbelievers are to worship their Idols, than are many of those who have been marked with Christ's Token to adore the True God. Moreover, the hearts of some members of the religious orders may ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... priest, and I shrive myself Of all my wasted yesterdays. Though sin And sloth and foolishness, and all ill weeds Of error, evil, and neglect grow rank And ugly there, I dare forgive myself That error, sin, and sloth and foolishness. God knows that yesterday I played the fool; God knows that yesterday I played the knave; But shall I therefore cloud this new ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... glory's arduous toils the breast inflame; Now avarice thirsts, insensible of shame; Now sloth unnerves them in voluptuous ease, And the sweet pleasures of the body please. With eager haste they rush the gulf within, And their whole souls are centred in their sin. But oh, great Jove! by whom all good is given— Dweller ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... off all this dull sloth, away with sluggishness, yes, and get back that old gift of guile of yours! Save your master: mind you don't do the same as other servants that use their wily wits to ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... arts and industry. He will often argue, that if this part of our trade were well cultivated, we should gain from one nation; and if another, from another. I have heard him prove, that diligence makes more lasting acquisitions than valour, and that sloth has ruined more nations than the sword. He abounds in several frugal maxims, amongst which the greatest favourite is, 'A penny saved is a penny got.' A general trader of good sense is pleasanter company than a general scholar; and Sir ANDREW having a natural unaffected eloquence, ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... innovation: that some few other persons of quality and gentry had done the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill common-wealth's men, preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... then, that I was pleased with my duty as a guardian of the flock, for it seemed to me that in that way I ate the bread of industry, and that sloth, the root and mother of all vices, came not nigh me; for if I rested by day, I never slept at night, the wolves continually assailing us and calling us to arms. The instant the shepherds said to ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... to seek it amidst the perils of war. My father, the sultan of Harran, has many enemies. Why does he not call me to his assistance? Why does he leave me here so long in obscurity? Must I spend my life in sloth, when all my brothers have the happiness to be fighting by his side?" "My son," answered Pirouz, "I am no less impatient to have your name become famous; I could wish you had already signalized yourself against your ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... lay scattered in inaccessible straths and spots among the mountains, where they lived in family with their pigs and kyloes (cattle), in turf cabins of the most miserable description; they spoke only Gaelic, and spent the whole of their time in indolence and sloth. Thus they had gone on from father to son, with little change, except what the introduction of illicit distillation had wrought, and making little or no export from the country beyond the few lean kyloes, which paid the rent and produced wherewithal to pay for the ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... the lyre is loth, Or powerless now, to give what all men seek! Either it deadens with ignoble sloth Or deafens ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... of opinions be fully written, it would be seen how large a part in human proceedings the love of conformity, or rather the fear of non-conformity, has occasioned. It has triumphed over all other fears; over love, hate, pity, sloth, anger, truth, pride, comfort, self-interest, vanity, and maternal love. It has torn down the sense of beauty in the human soul, and set up in its place little ugly idols which it compels us to worship with more than Japanese devotion. It has contradicted Nature in the most obvious ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal—these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... were certain huge beasts, now extinct, which formerly inhabited the same Continent—such as the Megatherium and Mylodon, which rivalled or exceeded our largest rhinoceroses in bulk. They fed on the same food which nourishes the sloth, but obviously the branches of no tree could sustain such monsters. They obtained their leafy pasture, therefore, by a different method. Rearing themselves on their massive hind legs and powerful tail, as on a tripod, they embraced the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... sometimes, after years of practice, finds it difficult to begin the composition of some simple reception or commemorative address; but the reading of a meagre outline, not one word or idea of which may be directly used, serves to break the spell of intellectual sloth or inertia, and starts him upon his work ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... not touch at it, but Anselmo informed me that the inhabitants were engaged in a little civil war of their own, murdering each other to their hearts' content. Had we had time, I dare say we might have supplied ourselves with monkey and sloth-flesh, opossums, snakes, crabs, and a variety of birds, but I doubt whether the crew would have appreciated the exertions of the sportsman. At last Anselmo informed me, much to my satisfaction, that we were ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... a sign of sloth on the part of the gardener. In a grapery devoted exclusively to grape-growing, it should never be seen, but, since gardeners must often grow other plants in the grapery, mealy-bug sooner or later appears and is often hard to dislodge. It is best repelled by removing the loose bark on the trunks ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... no! I would not, were I fifty times a prince, be a pensioner on the dead! I honor birth and ancestry when they are regarded as the incentives to exertion, not the titledeeds to sloth! I honor the laurels that overshadow the graves of our fathers; it is our fathers I emulate, when I desire that beneath the evergreen I myself have planted, my own ashes may repose! Dearest! couldst thou ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... quarter upon the natives. Rapine and insolence inflamed the hatred which prevailed between the conquerors and the conquered: want of security among the Irish, introducing despair, nourished still more the sloth natural ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... influence which has been claimed for climate. Politics and society, in our opinion, had more to do with altering the religions of India than had a higher temperature and miasma. As a result of ease and sloth—for the Brahmans are now the divine pampered servants of established kings, not the energetic peers of a changing population of warriors—the priests had lost the inspiration that came from action; they now made no new hymns; they only formulated new rules of ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... dwelling at Sully, in the castle of La Tremouille, a man who had a foot in either camp, so that neither English nor Burgundians had ever raided on his rich lands, when these lay in their power. So, what with the self-seeking, and sloth, and jealousy of La Tremouille; what with the worldly policy of the Archbishop of Reims, crying Peace, where there was no peace, the Maid and the captains were not listened to, or, if they were heard, their plans were wrought out with a faint heart, so that, at last, if it is lawful to say ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... in the body is liable to result in criminality. A chemical system of morals might be developed on this basis. Among the ferruginous sins would be placed murder, violence and licentiousness. Among the non-ferruginous, cowardice, sloth and lying. The former would be mostly sins of commission, the latter, sins of omission. The virtues could, of course, be similarly classified; the ferruginous virtues would include courage, self-reliance and hopefulness; ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... life. For this reward of all his constancy he had endured what had been wellnigh unendurable—loneliness, homesickness, isolation, discomfort. For this he had kept his body clean and his soul clean where all about him was sloth and slackness. He thought backward upon that which he had undergone; he thought forward upon the dreary purposeless prospect that stretched unendingly before him. Never now could he bring himself to go back ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... O! If you but knew how you the purpose cherish Whiles thus you mocke it: how in stripping it You more inuest it: ebbing men, indeed (Most often) do so neere the bottome run By their owne feare, or sloth ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... to believe, impatience to doubt, temerity to assever, glory to know, doubt to contradict, end to gain, sloth to search, seeking things in words, resting in a part of nature—these and the like have been the things which have forbidden the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things, and in place thereof have married it to vain notions and blind experiments.... ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... trance of meditation; But coming to myself, "O Lord," said I, "Shall it be so I must I unmarried die?" And, being angry, father, farther, said— "Now, by Saint Anne, I will not die a maid!" Good faith, before I came to this ripe growth, I did accuse the labouring time of sloth; Methought the year did run but slow about, For I thought each year ten I was without. Being fourteen and toward the tother year, Good Lord, thought I, fifteen will ne'er be here! For I have heard my mother say that then Pretty maids were fit for handsome men: Fifteen past, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... the Druids— Friendship may match with that monarch of fluids; 840 Each supples a dry brain, fills you its ins-and-outs, Gives your life's hourglass a shake when the thin sand doubts Whether to run on or stop short, and guarantees Age is not all made of stark sloth and arrant ease. I have seen my little lady once more, 845 Jacynth, the gypsy, Berold, and the rest of it, For to me spoke the Duke, as I told you before; I always wanted to make a clean breast of it: And now it is made—why, my heart's blood, that went trickle, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... power from on high.' There is no such force for the spreading of Christ's Kingdom, and the witness-bearing work of His Church, as the possession of this Divine Spirit. Plunged into that fiery baptism, the selfishness and the sloth, which stand in the way of so many of us, are all consumed and annihilated, and we are set free for service because the bonds that bound us are burnt up in the merciful ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... thirty million years the bird arrived, and the kangaroo, and by and by the mastodon, and the giant sloth, and the Irish elk, and the old Silurian ass, and some people thought that man was about due. But that was a mistake, for the next thing they knew there came a great ice-sheet, and those creatures all escaped ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... interspersed with others illustrating the habits of society; one for example, told how a certain rich man was cured of the gout, showing how, while most of the diseases of the poor originate in the want of food and necessaries, the rich are generally the victims of their own sloth and intemperance. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... was lost of throwing dust in the eyes of the new-comers, whom, even in the most trifling details, it was the official policy to lead astray. Now, however, there is no cause for concealment; the Roi Faineant has shaken off his sloth, and his Maire du Palais, together, and an intelligible Government, which need not fear scrutiny from abroad, is the result: the records of the country being but so many proofs of the Mikado's title to power, there is ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... group, and the sailors ceased to cheer, as, with the elastic rod-like tree bending more and more over, and swaying up and down, Ned climbed on, till the last part of his progress was after the fashion of a sloth, hanging back downward, and at every movement coming nearer, till the great crown of leaves and nuts, which had stood forty feet in the air, ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... the fields with his flock, a wolf, rushing from the neighboring wood, caught up a ewe-lamb, and carried it away. Returning home at evening from the fold, his aunt chided the boy for negligence or for sloth; yet he, though blushing at the reproof, patiently bore all her anger, and poured forth his prayers for the restoration of the ewe-lamb. In the next morning, when he brought the flock to the pasture, the wolf ran up, carrying the lamb in his mouth, laid it at Patrick's ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... which held it in place, and prodded his friend severely in the ribs. "Double-up Lucy; the sun is in the sky!" he proclaimed with unwonted energy. "Listen. I cut this out of yesterday's Evening Register. With my own fair hands I did it, to rouse you from your shameless sloth. With your kind attention, ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... will gratify any appetite which interrupts their contemplation": these are "by far the worst of all." "There is another error," he proceeds, "of those who like to call themselves 'theopaths.' They take every impulse to be Divine, and repudiate all responsibility. Most of them live in inert sloth." As a corrective to these errors, he very rightly says, "Christ must be the rule and pattern of all our lives"; but he does not see that there is a deep inconsistency between the imitation of Christ as the living way to the Father, and the "negative ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... rousing the pheasants and partridges from their coverts. Idris leant on my arm; her sadness yielded to the present sense of pleasure. We met other families on the Long Walk, enjoying like ourselves the return of the genial season. At once, I seemed to awake; I cast off the clinging sloth of the past months; earth assumed a new appearance, and my view of the future was suddenly made clear. I exclaimed, "I have now ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... persons like priests and royal officials. The church, too, strove to set an example of centralized administration; but its organization was still monastic rather than parochial and episcopal, and even Dunstan failed to cleanse it of sloth and simony. With no regular system of taxation, little government machinery, and no police, standing army, or royal judges, it was impossible to enforce royal protection adequately, or to check the centrifugal tendency of England to break up into its component parts. ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... time, and thus begun, "All Europe now and Asia be in war, And all that Christ adore and fame have won, In battle strong, in Syria fighting are; But thee alone, Bertoldo's noble son, This little corner keeps, exiled far From all the world, buried in sloth and shame, A carpet champion for a ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... their gay capital. And when their general found it necessary to demand their aid on the ramparts, he could only secure their attendance by ordering the taverns and cookshops to be removed to the place of duty. Not yet so far sunk in sloth and debauch, the Byzantines were nevertheless hosts eminently dangerous to the austerer manners of their Greek visitors. The people, the women, the delicious wine, the balm of the subduing climate served to tempt the senses and relax the mind. Like all the Dorians, when freed ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... first, a sterile and improper soil; for, though I was of a strong and healthful constitution, and of a disposition tolerably sweet and tractable, yet I was, withal, so heavy, idle, and indisposed, that they could not rouse me from my sloth, not even to get me out to play. What I saw, I saw clearly enough, and under this heavy complexion nourished a bold imagination and opinions above my age. I had a slow wit that would go no faster than it was led; a tardy understanding, a languishing invention, and above all, incredible defect ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... broad Pacific, basking bright, And girdling lands of lustrous growth, Vast continents and isles of light, Dumb tracts of undiscovered sloth; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the same uncouth-looking effort of humanity that he had been at Yale. No wonder the Northern boys jeered him, with his sloth-ways, his mouthed English, torpid eyes, and brain shut up in that worst of mud-moulds,—belief in caste. Even now, going up and down the tan-bark, his step was dead, sodden, like that of a man in whose life God had not yet wakened the full live soul. It was wakening, though, Dorr thought. Some ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... live with thee inclosed, I will loathe my pen and paper Art shall never be supposed, Sloth shall ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... sickly, and dispirited at the prospect before us. That appearance of glory which we once had in view—that hope—that laudable ambition of serving our country, and meriting its applause, are now no more: all is dwindled into ease, sloth, and fatal inactivity. In a word, all is lost, if the ways of men in power, like certain ways of Providence, are not inscrutable. But we who view the actions of great men at a distance can only form conjectures agreeably ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... the Greeks, and the persons who style themselves the patriarchs of the Eastern churches." For such an embassy, a time and character less propitious could not easily have been found. Benedict the Twelfth [3] was a dull peasant, perplexed with scruples, and immersed in sloth and wine: his pride might enrich with a third crown the papal tiara, but he was alike unfit for the regal and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... seven hundred on foot that were prompt for harm. They were gone in to the land to obtain fodder, both fodder and meat, to carry to their host. The clamour they heard of the Rome-folk, their deeds they relinquished, and thitherward gan ride the strong mooded men and swift, of sloth devoid, until they came soon near to the fight. Guitard and his knights there right forthright grasped their shields, knights most bold; and all the archers pressed them beside; and the men on foot gan advance; and all together they on smote, with their smart blows. At the first onset ...
— Brut • Layamon
... /mi:'kroh-sloth' win'dohz/ n. Hackerism for 'Microsoft Windows', a windowing system for the IBM-PC which is so limited by bug-for-bug compatibility with {mess-dos} that it is agonizingly slow on anything less than a fast 386. ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... inevitable disorganization of a household reaching its climax, it was rebellion against nature's law and indulgence in vice leading to the gradual decline of a man of intelligence, it was a hard worker sinking into the sloth of so-called pleasure; and then, death having snatched away the only son, the home broke to pieces—the wife—fated to childlessness, and the husband driven away by her, rolling ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... we have no knowledge of the Miocene mammalian fauna of the Australian and Austro-Columbian provinces; but, seeing that not a trace of a Platyrrhine Ape, of a Procyonine Carnivore, of a characteristically South-American Rodent, of a Sloth, an Armadillo, or an Ant-eater has yet been found in Miocene deposits of Arctogaea, I cannot doubt that they already existed in the ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... within bounds; to live and let live; to regard, without jealousy or envy, possessions which are the heritage of others less efficient than herself; and to leave it to time, slowly but surely, to do its work in rewarding merit and punishing inefficiency and sloth. ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... strongest argument against the theory of direct creation and the radical toto coelo distinction between man and beast that has yet been advanced. We cannot at the moment lay our hands upon any thorough and trustworthy account of the valves in the veins of the sloth: as that animal spends its life hanging, back downward, the structure of the veins would be interesting in this connection.—ED. J. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... replied Philander,—'thus with my mistress, that you would revenge them? Is it in the arms of Sylvia, that you would repay me the favours I did your sister Calista?' 'You have by that word,' said Octavio, 'handsomely reproached my sloth.' And leaping briskly from the bed, he took out his sword, and cried: 'Come then——let us go where we may repair both our losses, since ladies' chambers are not fit places to adjust debts of this ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... that life for art is short? Or is it nature's cruel sport? Or would she thus a moral teach; That man should see, but never reach, The height of excellence, and show The vanity of works below? Or consequence of Pride, or Sloth; Or rather the effect of both? Whoe'er on life his eye has cast, I fear, ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... averaged ten feet in twenty seconds, as they raced up the post. I have now called in an artist and an astronomer to verify my results, these two being the only living beings within hailing distance as I write, except a baby red howling monkey curled up in my lap, and a toucan, sloth, and green boa, beyond my laboratory table. Our results are identical, and I can safely announce that the amateur record for speed of army ants is equivalent to a mile in two hours and fifty-six seconds; and this when handicapped ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... he had a bit of money ahead, passed the test very well, according to Mr. Britt's notion. Young Mr. Vaniman had secured a business education piecemeal, and was a bit late in getting it, but Mr. Britt promptly perceived that the young man had not been hung up by stupidity or sloth. So he hired Vaniman, finding him a strapping ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... gives a long list of the holy bishops who were his contemporaries, and of the churches and monasteries which were scattered thickly over the land. The whole tone of his writing—earnest, biblical, spiritual, shows how the Church, in spite of weakness and sloth and failure in some of her chief men, yet held up a standard of right and justice, purity and devotion, which penetrated all over the country, into castles and humble homesteads, and profoundly affected the whole national life. And ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... of the word in the sense of stubbornness or self-will Roger Ascham gives a good instance in his 'Scholemaster,' (1570), where he recommends that such a vice in children as 'will,' which he places in the category of lying, sloth, and disobedience, should be 'with sharp chastisement daily cut away.' {418a} 'A woman will have her will' was, among Elizabethan wags, an exceptionally popular proverbial phrase, the point of which revolved about the equivocal ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... Polly corrected herself, even begged pardon for her stupidity, till Mahony could bear it no longer. Throwing politeness to the winds, he twitted Sara with her finical affectations, her old-maidish ways, the morning sloth that expected Polly, in her delicate state of health, to carry a breakfast-tray to the bedside: cast up at her, in short, all that had made him champ and fret in silence. Sara might, after a fitting period of the huff, have overlooked the ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... was rather worse. There was lack of arms and powder. The drafts were made with difficulty, and the new levies came in slowly. Supplies failed altogether, and on every hand there was nothing but delay, and ever fresh delay, and in the midst of it all Washington, wrestling with sloth and incoherence and inefficiency, trampled down one failure and disappointment only to encounter another, equally important, equally petty, and ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... succeed each other in turns. "Do you want to make your son sick of soldiering? Shew him the Trainbands of London on a field-day." Let him who would wish to give his son a distaste to Popery, point out to him the sloth, the ignorance, and the bigotry ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay • Watkin Tench
... but knew how you the purpose cherish Whiles thus you mock it! how, in stripping it, You more invest it! Ebbing men indeed, Most often, do so near the bottom run By their own fear or sloth. ...
— The Tempest • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... amenable to the common law of the land in all except that which referred to his spiritual functions; to put a limit on the amassment of wealth by religious corporations; to check the multiplication of convents and the multiplication of feast days, both of which encouraged the people in sloth and idleness; to withdraw education from the sole control of ecclesiastics; and finally, to authorise civil marriage, but without making it compulsory. The programme was large, and it took years to carry it out. The Vatican contended that it was contrary to the Concordat which ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... mother-bird outsoars her nest, The child outgrows the breast; But suns as stars shall fall from heaven and cease, Ere we twain be as these; Yea, utmost skies forget their utmost sun, Ere we twain be not one. My lesser jewels sewn on skirt and hem, I have no heed of them Obscured and flawed by sloth or craft or power; But thou, that wast my flower, The blossom bound between my brows and worn In sight of even and morn From the last ember of the flameless west To the dawn's baring breast— I were not Freedom if thou wert not free, Nor thou wert Italy. O mystic rose ingrained with ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... supremely knowest all. Yea, ignorance and foolishness itself is cloaked under the name of simplicity and uninjuriousness; because nothing is found more single than Thee: and what less injurious, since they are his own works which injure the sinner? Yea, sloth would fain be at rest; but what stable rest besides the Lord? Luxury affects to be called plenty and abundance; but Thou art the fulness and never-failing plenteousness of incorruptible pleasures. Prodigality presents ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... memory and understanding forced into almost unnatural ripeness, I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys that were at all near my own age, and before I was eight years old I was a "character". Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my understanding, were even then prominent ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... studies and illustrious works. Alfonso accordingly affected to despise the poems which Tasso presented, and showed his will that: 'I should aspire to no eminence of intellect, to no glory of literature, but should lead a soft delicate and idle life immersed in sloth and pleasure, escaping like a runaway from the honor of Parnassus, the Lyceum and the Academy, into the lodgings of Epicurus, and should harbor in those lodgings in a quarter where neither Virgil nor Catullus nor Horace nor Lucretius himself had ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... as strong as steel cables, and were about a foot through, while a huge, bony proboscis nine feet in length preceded the body. This was carried horizontally between two and three feet from the ground. Presently a large ground sloth came to the pool to drink, lapping up the water at the sides that had partly cooled. In an instant the black armored monster rushed down the slope with the speed of a nineteenth-century locomotive, and seemed about as ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... oppression that has not until now been confessed by those who suffer from it or who are participants, as mere witnesses, in its tyranny. It is the obsession of man by the flower. In the shape of the flower his own paltriness revisits him—his triviality, his sloth, his cheapness, his wholesale habitualness, his slatternly ostentation. These return to him and wreak upon him their dull revenges. What the tyranny really had grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in country lodgings, where the most ordinary things of design and decoration ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... slow in matters of love, it was his only sloth. In action he was swift and thorough, and his perception in all matters pertaining to the ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... estate be so meane and inconsiderate that it will not reach to a free education, then that orphan [shall] be bound to some manuall trade ... except some friends or relatives be willing to keep them." 1660-61. "To avoid sloth and idleness ... as also for the relief of parents whose poverty extends not to giving [their children] breeding, the justices of the peace should ... bind out children to tradesmen or husbandmen to be brought up in some ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Nevertheless, I harnessed him to the sledge, and, followed by the dogs, went forward to the coast, where I found my boat and raft safe at anchor. I took up a moderate load and came home to breakfast; but found all still as I left them. I called my family, and they sprung up ashamed of their sloth; my wife declared it must have been the good mattress that had ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... then the wood-woman kissed her and turned her heels to her, and was gone; but Birdalone strung her bow, and got to her woodcraft, and presently had a brace of hares, wherewith she went back home to the dame; who indeed girded at her for her sloth, and her little catch in so long a while; but there ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... towards Berwick, where he was to make a league with the Protestant nobles of Scotland, Knox summoned Chatelherault, and the gentlemen of his party, then in Glasgow. They wished Norfolk to come to them by Carlisle, a thing inconvenient to Lord James. Knox chid them sharply for sloth, and want of wisdom and discretion, praising highly the conduct of Lord James. They had "unreasonable minds." "Wise men do wonder what my Lord Duke's friends do mean, that are so slack and backward in this Cause." The Duke did not, however, write to France ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... beauteous victim slow Ascend the pile where her dead husband lies: She kisses his cold cheeks, inclines her breast On his, and lights herself the fatal pile That shall consume them both! On Egypt's shore, Where Science rose, now Sloth and Ignorance Sleep like the huge Behemoth in the sun! 300 The turbaned Moor still stains with strangers' blood The inmost sands of Afric. But all these The light shall visit, and that vaster tract From Fuego to the furthest Labrador, Where ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... hands lie buried fathom-deep in his pockets, as if part of his brain lay there to be rummaged; and he sucks at his old pipe as if his head, like other venerable hulks, must be smoked out at intervals. His walk is that of a sloth, one foot dragging heavily behind the other. I meet him as I go to the post-office, and on returning, twenty minutes later, I pass him again, a little farther advanced. All the children accost him, and I ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... help reminding you," he added, with a jocular though truly infernal grin, "that you were all but starved, above there, during the last dear years. As for you, my son Belphegor, lousy prince of Sloth, nobody has afforded us more pleasure than yourself, so very great is your authority amongst gentle and simple, even down to the beggar. Nevertheless, if it were not for the skill of my daughter Hypocrisy, in coloring and disguising, who would ever swallow one of your hooks? And ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... these twin and fair flowers which Eve saved for Earth out of Paradise, each with the virtue to heal or to strengthen, stored under the leaves that give sweets to the air; here, soothing the heart when the world brings the trouble; here, recruiting the soul which our sloth or our senses enervate, leave we Woman, at least in the place Heaven assigns to her amidst the multiform ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... certain he was on the very point of choking to death, and sat up in bed praying he wouldn't, and offering our month's salary to charity if he would; and through all our fatiguing anguish he snorted undisturbedly on. In House 35 he was known as "the Sloth." It was a gentle and ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... proclaim to it is peace and happiness? But peace and happiness can exist only by knowledge and virtue; slavery has no enduring connection with tranquillity or security—she cannot frame a league with any thing which is desirable—she has no charter even for her own ignoble ease and darling sloth. Yet to this abject condition, mankind, betrayed by an ill-judging tenderness, would surely be led; and in the face of an inevitable contradiction! For neither in this state of things would the shedding of blood be prevented, nor would warfare cease. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... finds himself, and he varies with them. He changes suddenly, when their change is sudden, and is as unlike what he was just before, as one fortune or external condition is unlike another. He moves when he is urged by appetite; else, he remains in sloth and inactivity. He lives, and he dies, and he has done nothing, but leaves the world as he found it. And what the individual is, such is his whole generation; and as that generation, such is the generation before and after. No generation can say what it has been doing; it has not made ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the unwelcome newcomer, Nan Graham, had devolved the cleaning up of the camp grounds and their work had been most thoroughly done, but indeed no one could be accused, of anything approaching sloth this morning when so much of their future reputation was at stake. Only Edith Norton had been unable to help because of her work in town, but she hoped to be able to return to camp by noon so as not ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... morbid fancies and inflamed conscience, he is the most valiant of men, whom they can hardly keep from getting himself killed, and for that matter all the rest of them. Here, again, is an inimitable flash of insight, where Simple, Sloth, and Presumption have prevailed with "one Short-Wind, one Sleepy-Head, and with a young woman, her name was Dull, to turn out of the way and become ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... longer intimidated him. Despite his grave defects as a keeper of resolves, despite his paltry trick of picking up a newspaper or periodical and reading it all through, out of sheer vacillation and mental sloth, before starting serious perusals, despite the human disinclination which he had to bracing himself, and keeping up the tension, in a manner necessary for the reading of long and difficult works, and despite sundry ignominious backslidings into original sluggishness—still ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... contracted ideas, and weak, both in body and in mind, as the unhappy Californians. Their characteristics are stupidity and insensibility, want of knowledge and reflection, inconstancy, impetuosity, and blindness of appetite, excessive sloth, abhorrence of all fatigue of every kind, however trifling or brutal,—in fine, a most wretched want of everything which constitutes the real man and makes him rational, inventive, tractable, and useful to himself and others." All of which goes to show ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... world!' cried Shubin, 'every word of yours is worth its weight in gold, and it's not to me but to you a statue ought to be raised, and I would undertake it. There, as you are lying now, in that pose; one doesn't know which is uppermost in it, sloth or strength! That's how I would cast you in bronze. You aimed a just reproach at my egoism and vanity! Yes! yes! it's useless talking of one's-self; it's useless bragging. We have no one yet, no men, look where you will. Everywhere—either small fry, nibblers, Hamlets ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... would not only have involved the nation in much useless expense, but would have imperilled the whole structure. Delay and caution are seldom popular, but they are often wise. Those who are stung by the accusation of sloth are likely to do something foolish in a hurry. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of our aeronautical development than its comparative freedom from costly mistakes. This freedom was attained by ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... mentioned without a curse. But, when the crisis of his fate drew nigh, there was, as in our country there often is, a reaction. All his merits, his courage, his good nature, his firm adherence to the Protestant religion in the evil times, were remembered. It was impossible to deny that he was sunk in sloth and luxury, that he neglected the most important business for his pleasures, and that he could not say No to a boon companion or to a mistress; but for these faults excuses and soft names were found. His friends used without ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... greater or less degree; that in some cases the Indians most neglected have done better for themselves than those who have received the care and bounty of the government; that many tribes and bands which had apparently emerged from their barbarous condition have miserably fallen back into sloth and vicious habits; that the meat-eaters, who constitute the bulk of the tribes with which the latest advances of our settlements and railways have brought us in contact, are exceptionally wild and fierce; that ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... cetacea, or whale-like mammals, sixty-five; ruminantia, or cud-chewers, one hundred and seventy-seven; pachydermata, or thick-skinned mammals, such as the horse, hog, and elephant, forty-one; edentata, like the sloth and ant-eater, thirty-five; rodentia, or gnawers, such as the rat, squirrel, and beaver, six hundred and seventeen; carnivora, or flesh-eaters, four hundred and forty-six; cheiroptera, or bats, three hundred and twenty-eight; quadrumana, or monkeys, two hundred and twenty-one; and marsupialia, ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... belief have arisen from the natives having seen large skeletons embedded in cliffs? I remember finding on the banks of the Parana a skeleton of a Mastodon, and the Gauchos concluded that it was a borrowing animal like the Bizcacha. (684/1. On the supposed existence in Patagonia of a gigantic land-sloth, see "Natural Science," XIII., 1898, page 288, where Ameghino's discovery of the skin of Neomylodon listai was practically first made known, since his privately published pamphlet was not generally seen. The animal was afterwards identified with a Glossotherium, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... as the years won over three folk of the heavenly halls Grew aweary of sleepless sloth, and the day that nought befalls; And they fain would look on the earth, and their latest handiwork, And turn the fine gold over, lest a flaw therein should lurk. And the three were the heart-wise Odin, the Father of the Slain, And Loki, the World's Begrudger, who maketh all labour vain, And Haenir, ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... anyone thinks that those who have not good natural ability cannot to some extent make up for the deficiencies of nature by right training and practice, let such a one know that he is very wide of the mark, if not out of it altogether. For good natural parts are impaired by sloth; while inferior ability is mended by training: and while simple things escape the eyes of the careless, difficult things are reached by painstaking. The wonderful efficacy and power of long and continuous labour you may see indeed every day in the world around you.[6] Thus water continually ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... devote themselves to a life of ease and enjoyment without falling under a real inferiority, provided they do not allow the mind to be degraded or sunk in sloth, ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... it not be a proud day for knight or squire if he could overthrow seven adversaries in the lists? Yet here are we in the lists of life, and there come the seven black champions against us Sir Pride, Sir Covetousness, Sir Lust, Sir Anger, Sir Gluttony, Sir Envy, and Sir Sloth. Let a man lay those seven low, and he shall have the prize of the day, from the hands of the fairest queen of beauty, even from the Virgin-Mother herself. It is for this that these men mortify their flesh, and to set us an example, who would pamper ourselves overmuch. I say again that ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... soul, and with the sun Thy daily stage of duty run; Shake off dull sloth, and joyful rise To ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... entertaining volume the complete art of youthful boredom and ornamental and expensive sloth is exploited. Where to get clothes; how much to owe for them; how soon to discard them and get others; what adjectives to use; and where, the best nut food may be obtained—all is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... servants, his bailiffs and overseers, as being in nothing better men than themselves, they despised and slighted, nor were the least concerned at their commands and menaces. They used honest pastimes and liberal studies, not esteeming sloth and idleness honest and liberal, but rather such exercises as hunting and running, repelling robbers, taking of thieves, and delivering the wronged and oppressed from injury. For doing such things, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... even had he time, he was opposed in principle to all philanthropic activity. "Philanthropy gives a beautiful witness touching those who engage in it, but it cannot prevent the misfortunes which torture the race; nay, it strengthens them needlessly, and offers premiums to sloth and incompetence. Only exertion of all forces in untiring and iron labor can save mankind from the cancer of poverty which tortures it. Were there no help behind any man's shoulders, no hands would drop down unoccupied; each man would exercise his own strength, ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... stand upright; and that he no longer ventured to join the weekly club, of which he had been once the life and soul. In short, Dick Tinto's friends feared that he had acted like the animal called the sloth, which, heaving eaten up the last green leaf upon the tree where it has established itself, ends by tumbling down from the top, and dying of inanition. I ventured to hint this to Dick, recommended his transferring the exercise of his inestimable talent to some other sphere, and forsaking ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... at evening both, You merry were and glad, So little care of sleep and sloth Those pretty ladies had. When Tom came home from labour. Or Cis to milking rose, Then merrily, merrily went their tabor, And merrily ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... acres, But the landscape, I; Half the charms to me it yieldeth Money cannot buy; Cleon harbors sloth and dullness, Freshening vigor, I; He in velvet, I in fustian— ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... "Slaves of sloth and the senses, Clippers of Freedom's wings, Come back to the Pilgrim's Army And fight for the King of Kings; Come back to the Pilgrim's conscience; Be born in the nation's birth; And strive again as simple men For the freedom of the earth. Freedom a free-born nation still shall ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... yields her last retreat; Should Reason guide thee with her brightest ray, And pour on misty Doubt resistless day; Should no false kindness lure to loose delight, Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright; Should tempting Novelty thy cell refrain, And Sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain; 150 Should Beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, Nor claim the triumph of a letter'd heart; Should no disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor Melancholy's phantoms haunt thy ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... now," said the king, "and think clearly. Have you not learned courage and hardiness? Have not your labours brought you strength; your perils, wisdom; your wounds, patience? Has not your task broken chains for you, and lifted you out of sloth and above fear? Do you say that the stone that has done this for you is false, a ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... enterprises in which I was engaged, I should be actually depriving the families of many workmen and artisans of the fruits of their honest labour for the purpose of enabling a smaller number of families to live in sloth and indolence. But, now, suppose the case I have imagined to become a general one, and that it was a common occurrence for rich men to dispense their superfluous wealth amongst their poorer neighbours, without demanding ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... and a cordial welcome. They found a wilderness. The castle of New Edinburgh was in ruins. The huts had been burned. The site marked out for the proud capital which was to have been the Tyre, the Venice, the Amsterdam of the eighteenth century was overgrown with jungle, and inhabited only by the sloth and the baboon. The hearts of the adventurers sank within them. For their fleet had been fitted out, not to plant a colony, but to recruit a colony already planted and supposed to be prospering. They were therefore worse provided with every necessary of life than their ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the rich and charitable, while they turn away disgusted with filth and laziness: not out of pride, but because they see that it is next to impossible to mend the condition of those who degrade themselves by dirt and sloth; and few people care to help those ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... its orders, to the present fauna of Europe, Asia and Africa; and that on an average it was built up more stupendously than that of to-day, we can see from the cave-bear and the mammoth. South America is the home of a peculiar order of mammalia—of the edentata, to which belong the sloth, the armadillo, and the like. All its predecessors are to be found also in the Pliocene strata of South America, and only there; and mostly in gigantic, but otherwise completely related, forms. New Zealand has no indigenous mammalia, but in their place great cursorial ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... hour passed and they came not, the desperado began heartily to curse their sloth—for to no other cause was he enabled to attribute the delay, as he knew the house, the destined scene of the outrage, to be deserted by all for the night, except by the three ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... sweet Lord," I said, "do turn thine eye On him who shows himself more negligent Then even Sloth herself ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... sickness, so, Lord, make these thorns feathers again, feathers of thy dove, in the peace of conscience, and in a holy recourse to thine ark, to the instruments of true comfort, in thy institutions and in the ordinances of thy church. Forget my bed, O Lord, as it hath been a bed of sloth, and worse than sloth; take me not, O Lord, at this advantage, to terrify my soul with saying, Now I have met thee there where thou hast so often departed from me; but having burnt up that bed by these ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... until the following day. This was very provoking, but such was the tiresome mode of travelling through this country. No consideration can induce the natives to shake off their habitual indolence, not if a voice from heaven were to be heard, would they do it. Pleasure and sloth are with them synonymous terms, and they are scarcely alive to any other gratification. In the mean time, the chief, who appeared to be a very good sort of man, although he had little authority over his people, sent them a fatted goat; and being in good health, and ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... "Secondly, because sloth is a kind of disease in a well-ordered Common-wealth wee further charge and command by the vertue of our absolute authority, that no man bee found winking, or pincking, or nodding, much lesse snorting, upon paine of forfaiting twelve pence, as ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... example set by the venerated leaders of thought exercised great influence throughout society, and all the more because it justified the carelessness and sloth to which ordinary humanity is prone. In the principal towns of Europe, as well as in the country at large, down to a recent period, the most ordinary sanitary precautions were neglected, and pestilences continued to be attributed to the wrath of God or the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Man's burden— The savage wars of peace— Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch Sloth and heathen Folly Bring all ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... vowed communities do not claim to be free from difficulties. No state of life and no organization claims to be so perfect as totally to prevent abuse of power on the part of superiors or caprice and sloth on ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... Shaking off the deadly sloth, they ran on again at full speed, peering through the stems in every direction. The effort made their brains throb fiercely. And still there was nothing before them and about them but the endless succession ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... "are creatures in every way adapted to the mode of life which they are doomed to lead. Place them in any other, and they will be miserable. You see there the ai, or three-toed sloth (the Bradypus torquatus). Though its arms, or fore-legs more properly, are nearly twice as long as the hinder ones, it finds them exactly suited for climbing the trees on which it lives. Place it on the ground, and it cannot get along. It passes its life, not above, but under the branches. When ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... from those that wear hoofs as it could be, but the philosopher, considering the point at which it has arrived, rather than the route by which it got there, will class it with them, for its idea of life is just theirs turned topsy-turvy. The nails of the sloth, instead of being hammered into hoofs on the hard ground, have grown long and curved, like those of a caged bird, and become hooks by which it can hang, without effort, in the midst of the leaves on which it feeds. A minimum of intellect is required ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... God or Demigod For Britain's ancient Genius mov'd (If our afflicted land Have expiated at length the guilty sloth Of her degen'rate sons) Shall terminate our impious feuds, And discipline, with hallow'd voice, recall? 30 Recall the Muses too Driv'n from their antient seats In Albion, and well-nigh from Albion's shore, And with keen Phoebean shafts Piercing ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... away in hideous sloth the inestimable gift of time; his valuable life, every second of which he would have to account for hereafter, passing away from him, unused. He might have been up stuffing himself with eggs and bacon, irritating the dog, or flirting with the slavey, instead ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... the past is best for the future. How is this? Because you performed no part of your duty, great or small, and therefore you fared ill: had you done all that became you, and your situation were the same, there would be no hope of amendment. Philip has indeed prevailed over your sloth and negligence, but not over the country: you have not been worsted; you have ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... enabling them to endure the hardships of the siege. Vespasian had, as we have already stated,[213] three legions well tried in war. Four others were under Mucianus' command.[213] Although these had never seen war, yet their envy of the neighbouring army's fame had banished sloth. Indeed, as the former were hardened by work and danger, so the latter owed their ardour to their unbroken inaction, and their shame at having no share in the war.[214] Both generals had, besides auxiliary infantry and cavalry, foreign fleets[215] ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... Coleridge, Vol. I., deals rashly, unjustly, and almost maliciously, with some of our own particular friends; and yet, until late in this summer, Anno Domini 1844, we—that is, neither ourselves nor our friends—ever heard of its existence. Now a sloth, even without the benefit of Mr Waterton's evidence to his character, will travel faster than that. But malice, which travels fastest of all things, must be dead and cold at starting, when it can thus have lingered in the rear for six years; and therefore, though the world was so far right, that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... tremendous thumps, but by the constant patterings of minutest touches. The athlete does not build his strength by enormous exertions, but by consistent and gentle training. Huge strains at spasmodic intervals, separated by periods in which he lies fallow in sloth, add nothing to his capacity for endurance; it is by the tally of each minute of his preparation that you may read how he will acquit himself against the test. Thus also with the shaping of character, and thus was Mr. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... Further our Lord calls the servant wicked and slothful who through pusillanimity refused to make use of the money. Moreover the Philosopher says (Ethic. iv, 3) that the fainthearted seem to be slothful. Now sloth is opposed to solicitude, which is an act of prudence, as stated above (Q. 47, A. 9). Therefore pusillanimity is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... waking I lay long in bed yielding to sloth. O God, help and strengthen me that I may walk in Thy ways! Read the Scriptures, but without proper feeling. Brother Urusov came and we talked about worldly vanities. He told me of the Emperor's new projects. I began ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... so mean, Having thy limbs, a thousand fairer courses Offer themselves to thy election. Either the wars might still supply thy wants, Or service of some virtuous gentleman, Or honest labour; nay, what can I name, But would become thee better than to beg: But men of thy condition feed on sloth, As cloth the beetle on the dung she breeds in; Nor caring how the metal of your minds Is eaten with the rust of idleness. Now, afore me, whate'er he be, that should Relieve a person of thy quality, While thou insist'st in this loose desperate course, I ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... more than hopes, Mistress Deborah; for he that lives upon hope will die fasting. To apply one's self right heartily is to do more than hope. Sloth makes all things difficult; but industry all things easy. You are not eating, Mistress Deborah. (She rises.) Have my blunt ways offended you? Have I again displeased you? ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... situation, where a scanty subsistence could only be earned by a life of extreme temperance and toil, and where it was often to be sought, sword in hand, from an enemy far superior in numbers. Whatever may have been the vices of the Spaniards, they cannot have been those of effeminate sloth. Thus a sober, hardy, and independent race was gradually formed, prepared to assert their ancient inheritance, and to lay the foundations of far more liberal and equitable forms of government, than were known to ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... in the diligence and the old hag, it belongs to!Diligence, quoth I? Thou shouldst have called it the SlothFly, quoth she? why, it moves like a fly through a glue-pot, as the Irishman says. But, however, time and tide tarry for no man, and so, my young friend, we'll have a snack here at the Hawes, which is a very decent sort of a place, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... your present position, He may be calling you to something more. If he has given you the power and opportunity of raising yourself, he meant you to use them. It is a false humility and a false view of religion that encourages sloth under the pretence of being contented with one's humble lot. There is God's work—real every day work to be done in worldly as well as in what seems to be more directly spiritual work. One's whole interest is not to be centred on earthly things, neither are we to be so heavenly minded as to neglect ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous
... lightkeeper was frail. During the unbroken solitude of the winter months, when inspection is scarce possible, it must seem a vain toil to polish the brass hand-rail of the stair, or to keep an unrewarded vigil in the light-room; and the keepers are habitually tempted to the beginnings of sloth, and must unremittingly resist. He who temporises with his conscience is already lost. I must tell here an anecdote that illustrates the difficulties of inspection. In the days of my uncle David and my father there was a station which ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Physical Inertness.— N. inertness, dullness &c. adj.; inertia, vis inertiae[Latin], inertion[obs3], inactivity, torpor, languor; quiescence &c. 265; latency, inaction; passivity. mental inertness; sloth &c. (inactivity) 683; inexcitability &c. 826[obs3]; irresolution &c. 605; obstinacy &c. 606; permanence &c. 141. rare gas, paraffin, noble metal, unreactivity. V. be -inert &c. adj.; hang fire, smolder. Adj. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... heart. And books in quantity no longer intimidated him. Despite his grave defects as a keeper of resolves, despite his paltry trick of picking up a newspaper or periodical and reading it all through, out of sheer vacillation and mental sloth, before starting serious perusals, despite the human disinclination which he had to bracing himself, and keeping up the tension, in a manner necessary for the reading of long and difficult works, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the institution of slavery, Fee maintained that sealing up the mind of the slave, lest he should see his wrongs, was tantamount to cutting off the hand or foot in order to prevent his escape from forced and unwilling servitude.[2] "If by our practice, our silence, or our sloth," said he, "we perpetuate a system which paralyzes our hands when we attempt to convey to them the bread of life, and which inevitably consigns the great mass of them to unending perdition, can we be guiltless in the sight of Him who hath made us stewards of His grace? This is ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... seemed to promise them the greatest advantage, gave the final stroke to their ruin and destruction. "Their courage," says Justin,(217) "did not survive that illustrious Theban. Freed from a rival, who kept their emulation alive, they sunk into a lethargic sloth and effeminacy. The funds for armaments by land and sea were soon lavished upon games and feasts. The seaman's and soldier's pay was distributed to the idle citizen. An indolent and luxurious mode of life enervated every breast. The representations ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... though a Phrygian, rose, And ev'n derived from Scythian snows; If Anacharsis could devise By wit to gain th' immortal prize; Shall I, who to learn'd Greece belong, Neglect her honour and her song, And by dull sloth myself disgrace? Since we can reckon up in Thrace, The authors that have sweetest sung, Where Linus from Apollo sprung; And he whose mother was a muse, Whose voice could tenderness infuse To solid rocks, ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... it, but is a feeder upon roots and berries. Nearly all bears are inclined to vegetable food and insects, accepting flesh when they find the freshly killed body of an animal, but not seeking live creatures to kill and eat. The sloth bear of India is an exception to this rule, as it refuses flesh, and lives simply upon fruits, berries, leaves of certain trees, roots, and insects of all kinds, the favourite bonne bouche being the nest of white ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... provoking sloth, after the smartly executed movements already described, Number Seven dug his oar deeply into the water, making up somewhat for his tardiness by the fierceness of the movement. The nose of the boat turned outwards almost with a jerk, and the craft slid in close to and parallel ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... look-out on your own side, and jamming all other varments slick through a stone wall, as the waggon-wheel used up the lame frog? (Hear, hear.) I say—and mind you I'll stick to it like a starved sloth to the back of a fat babby—I say, gentlemen, this country, the United States (particularly Kentucky, from which I come, and which will whip all the rest with out-straws and rotten bull-rushes agin ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... nation urging on a sleepless war against sloth and feebleness, is one of the noblest of human spectacles. This warfare was rapidly and hourly changing the monotony and dreary aspects of rock and forest. Under the creative hands of art, temples of magnificence rose where the pines had fallen. Long and ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... and can they not watch one half hour to hear them defended? Is this to deal like a judge (I mean like a good judge), to listen on one side of the cause and sleep on the other? I shall add but one word more. That this indecent sloth is very much owing to that luxury and excess men usually practise upon this day, by which half the service thereof is turned to sin; men dividing their time between God and their bellies, when, after a gluttonous meal, their senses dozed and ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... prayers to Jove, Until he took from her the heavy curse Of immortality. With closer vows, The knight then sealed his worship and forswore All other aims and deeds to serve her cause. Thus passed unnoted seven barren years Of reckless passion and voluptuous sloth, Undignified by any lofty thought In his degraded mind, that sometime was Endowed with noble capability. From revelry to revelry he passed, Craving more pungent pleasure momently, And new intoxications, and each ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... they who are old have no hope of renewing themselves, nor expect any thing but their departure; so you being weakened through your worldly affairs gave yourself up to sloth, and cast not away your solicitude from yourself upon the Lord: and your sense was confused, and you grew ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... vowed that he would conquer sloth and lasciviousness, and outrageously triumph in the gaudy, foolish world, and insult his rival with riches and even honour. Then he heard Lizzie reproach Frank for refusing her first request, and the foolish fellow's expostulations suscitated feelings ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... in the direction I pointed. "Don't be afraid," he answered. "It will not attack us. The animal is a sloth, as harmless as any living creature. We may consider him among the other beasts in our domain destined if necessary for our use. He cannot get away, so we will not attempt to interfere with him at present. He will not venture into the water; and even had we ground below us, ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... making cheese from their milk. He perhaps plants a small patch of maize once a year, and grows a few plantains, content to live on the plainest fare, and in the rudest style, so that he may indulge in indolence and sloth. So he vegetates and drops into his grave, and in a year or two no mark or sign tells where he was laid. The graves of the old Indians are still to be found, but no mounds mark the spots where the inhabitants of the valley since the conquest have been laid to rest. They have passed ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... [296] they are sent with a message to any place, one must very patiently await some notable failure caused ordinarily by their natural sloth and laziness. [297] Sicut acetum dentibus, et fumus oculis, sic piger his qui miserunt ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... for, though I was of a strong and healthful constitution, and of a disposition tolerably sweet and tractable, yet I was, withal, so heavy, idle, and indisposed, that they could not rouse me from my sloth, not even to get me out to play. What I saw, I saw clearly enough, and under this heavy complexion nourished a bold imagination and opinions above my age. I had a slow wit that would go no faster than it was led; a tardy understanding, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... accustomed to look on Uncle James as a mere sluggard. I pictured ants raising their antennae scornfully at the sight of him. I was to learn that not sloth but a deep purpose dictated his movements, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... most lamentable in the past is best for the future. How is this? Because you performed no part of your duty, great or small, and therefore you fared ill: had you done all that became you, and your situation were the same, there would be no hope of amendment. Philip has indeed prevailed over your sloth and negligence, but not over the country; you have not been worsted; you have ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... All ideas of peace on a basis of compromise had disappeared on either side. The end, it was seen clearly, must be either absolute slavery for all but the privileged, or a system of life founded on equality and Communism. The sloth, the hopelessness, and if I may say so, the cowardice of the last century, had given place to the eager, restless heroism of a declared revolutionary period. I will not say that the people of that time foresaw the life we are leading now, but there was a general ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... the end of the last chapter and the beginning of this. Meanwhile, I had moved to sociable chambers within sound of the city clocks, and had lived the life of a lonely man about town, sinking more and more into the comfortable sloth of bachelorhood. I had long come to look back upon my pilgrimage as a sort of Indian-summer youth, being, as the reader can reckon for himself, just on thirty-seven. As one will, with one's most serious experiences, hastening to laugh lest ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... country, their property, wives and children, and, what is dearer than these, their liberty and lives; that they should not suffer their hands to be tied behind their backs by a nation which, unless they were enervated by idleness and sloth, was not more powerful than themselves, but that they should arm those hands with buckler, sword, and spear, ready for the field of battle; and, because they thought this also of advantage to the people they were about to leave, they, with the help of the miserable natives, built a wall ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas
... fouler than the noisome dust, That reeks your rotting bones encasing, Shall be your fame, ye sons of lust, And sloth, and every vice debasing! Insulters of the glorious dead, While honour in our land is dwelling, Above your tombs shall Britons tread, And cry, while scorn each breast is swelling— "HERE LIE THE DASTARD, CAITIFF SLAVES, WHO DRAGGED ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... the haunts whereof I told thee? Well I know thou didst not, since they saw no tiger! Behold our faces blackened through thy sloth ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... sluggishness that they could interest themselves only in trivialities. Their thoughts were occupied by their neighbours and the humdrum details of the life about them. Flattering themselves on their ideals and their high principles, they vegetated in stupid sloth and in a less than animal vacuity. Every topic of conversation above the most commonplace they found dull or incomprehensible. James learned that he had to talk to them almost as if they were children, and the tedium of those endless days ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... tumbrels! Then, the name of coach was heathen Greek. Who ever saw, but upon extraordinary occasions, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Francis Drake ride in a coach? They made small use of coaches; there were but few in those times; and they were deadly foes to sloth and effeminacy. It is in the memory of many when, in the whole kingdom, there was not one! It is a doubtful question whether the devil brought tobacco into England in a coach, for both appeared at the same time." According to Stow, coaches were introduced here 1564, by Guilliam Boonen, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... for battle; sloth's determined foe; Of scholars chief, who to the Veda cling; Rich in the riches that ascetics know; Glad, gainst the foeman's elephant to show His valor;—such was Shudraka, ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... once my sloth: in such an age So many volumes deep, I not a page? But I recant, and vow 'twas thrifty care That kept my pen from spending on slight ware, And breath'd it for a prize, whose pow'rful shine Doth both reward the striver, and refine. Such are thy poems, friend: for since th' hast writ, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... scan an author. This means to take a rapid observation of his thoughts. Much of one's common reading matter should be scanned. All local news, much magazine literature, and many books should be used in this way. It is mental sloth and waste of time to pore over a newspaper or a book of light fiction, as one would a philosophy of history or a work of science. As Bacon aptly puts it, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... a supernatural manner, is such that it must be obeyed by all means, without any doubt,—that man takes away and overturns from the foundation the true nature and dignity of man, at the same time cherishes the most pernicious laziness and sloth, or stirs up the depraved errors of fanaticism.... As to that which is said to be above reason, the truth of which can by no means be understood, there is no possible way open to the human mind to ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... not; and on one side he had a most beautiful young woman representing Minerva, who with one hand was pointing out to him a figure of Fame on high, and with the other was urging him to follow her; but Sloth and Idleness, who were behind the young man, were striving to detain him. Below these was a figure with an uncouth face, rather that of a slave and a plebeian than of one of noble blood, who had two great snails clinging to his elbows and was seated on a crab, ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... on her sloth and indifference, Rose caught, from the empty couch which had been destined for her own use, the upper covering, and dragging it with her into the inner ante-room, disposed it so as, with the assistance of the rushes which strewed that ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... readily uttered, without premeditation, to declare the world's vanity, full of ridiculous contrariety, he made answer, that necessity compelled men to many such actions, and divers wills ensuing from divine permission, that we might not be idle, being nothing is so odious to them as sloth and negligence. Besides, men cannot foresee future events, in this uncertainty of human affairs; they would not so marry, if they could foretell the causes of their dislike and separation; or parents, if they knew the hour of their children's death, so tenderly provide for them; or an ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... voice is sounding, "Christ is nigh," it seems to say. "Cast away the dreams of darkness, O ye children of the day." Startled at the solemn warning, Let the earth-bound soul arise; Christ, her Sun, all sloth dispelling, Shines upon ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... know what is likely to happen to an estate in the owner's prolonged or permanent absence—it deteriorates; his active interest and personal supervision are wanting, and the results are visible everywhere. Sloth and mismanagement, which his presence would check, go uncorrected, the daily duties are indifferently performed or remain undone, and soon the property as a whole bears unmistakeable traces of neglect. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the country and another. Hence trade and commerce arose, by reason of the facilities afforded for the interchange of traffic. The people, being fairly educated by the parish schools, were able to take advantage of these improvements. Sloth and idleness gradually disappeared, before the energy, activity, and industry which were called into life ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... sides—round, smooth arms with a pretty dimple at the elbow. Her wrists were delicate; her hands, which did not betray the servant, were embellished with a lady's fingernails. And lazily, with graceful sloth, she allowed her indolent figure to curve and sway;—a figure that a garter might span, and that was made even more slender to the eye by the projection of the hips and the curve of the hoops that gave the balloon-like roundness to her skirt;—an impossible waist, absurdly small but adorable, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... flocked around him, and, showing him all marks of profound respect, received every word he uttered as the most sacred oracle [q]. Even the military virtues, so inherent in all the Saxon tribes, began to be neglected; and the nobility, preferring the security and sloth of the cloister to the tumults and glory of war, valued themselves chiefly on endowing monasteries, of which they assumed the government [r]. The several kings, too, being extremely impoverished by ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... twelve shillings a week, and learning obedience, self-denial, self- respect, and trust in God, by the things suffered in that hard life here at home, than be a Negro in Tropic islands, fattening himself in sloth under that perpetual sunshine, and thinking nought of God, because, poor fool, he can get all he ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... in this gruesome place was Elvidner (misery), the hall of the goddess Hel, whose dish was Hunger. Her knife was Greed. "Idleness was the name of her man, Sloth of her maid, Ruin of her threshold, Sorrow of her bed, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... activities of the last half-century; or was it the sleep that presaged death? Her enemies told her so in plain and unvarnished language. Her friends, too, said that she was folding her robes to die with what dignity she could. Lethargy, sloth, sleep—a dead, dull, dreary sleep—fell like a leaden pall upon her spiritual life, darkening the light that shone but vaguely through the storied panes of her mediaeval windows, while a paralysing numbness crippled her limbs and quenched ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... he pushes off in a mass as weeds and nettles. Thus the great bulk of the universe is to him useless or hurtful, because he will not, or cannot, learn its secrets. These unknown things are standing reproaches to his ignorance and sloth." ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... of than high sovereignty. They thought how they might plant a heaven on earth, Whereof they would be principal low-gods;[110] That heaven they called Contemplation: As much to say as a most pleasant sloth, Which better I cannot compare than this, That if a fellow, licensed to beg, Should all his lifetime go from fair to fair And buy gape-seed, having no business else. That contemplation, like an aged weed, Engender'd thousand sects, and all ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... etc.,—of different species to those now living,—but still their close allies. If you turn to South America, where, at the present day, we have great sloths and armadilloes and creatures of that kind, what do you find in the newest tertiaries? You find the great sloth-like creature, the 'Megatherium', and the great armadillo, the 'Glyptodon', and so on. And if you go to Australia you find the same law holds good, namely, that that condition of organic nature which has preceded ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... wouldst constrain us also to descend into like peril. But as long as we were tried in the warfare of this world, we failed in no point of duty. Thou thyself will bear me witness that we were never charged with sloth or heedlessness. ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... and the Irish; and I ask myself, How is it that every one is so sanguine about the one, and so hopeless about the other? Why do we hear of the capacity and the intelligence of the former, and only of the latter what pertains to their ignorance and their sloth? Oh! unjust generation of men! have not my poor countrymen all the qualities you extol in these same Peninsulars, plus a few others ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... Howes, and has always hated them. So he schemes this silly side movement of Burgoyne's from Canada, and plans that the army at New York shall be but an assistant to that enterprise, with no share in its glory. Sir William, however, sloth though he be, saw through it, and, declining to be made a cat's-paw, he gets aboard ship, to seek laurels for himself, leaving Burgoyne to march and fight through his wilderness alone. Mark me, the British may capture Philadelphia, but if ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... upon the head she tapped into sloth her rising resentment. "Nobody dead," she said, with a smack of the mouth, "but Liza Pruitt ain't expected to ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... garret-room, in which there was scarce space for it to stand upright; and that he no longer ventured to join the weekly club, of which he had been once the life and soul. In short, Dick Tinto's friends feared that he had acted like the animal called the sloth, which, heaving eaten up the last green leaf upon the tree where it has established itself, ends by tumbling down from the top, and dying of inanition. I ventured to hint this to Dick, recommended his transferring the exercise of his inestimable talent to some other sphere, and forsaking the common ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... adviser in matters of business or pleasure, and governed alike the army, the courts of justice, and the women. Thus was spent a reign of seventeen years, during which the king had never but once, when he met Antiochus in battle, roused himself from his life of sloth. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Ancestors exerted in the Case of Chilperick their 18th King, whom they forced to abdicate the Kingdom, [Footnote: Regno se abdicare coegerunt.] and made him a Monk, judging him unworthy to sit at the Helm of so great an Empire, [Footnote: Propter inertiam.] by reason of his Sloth. Whereof Aimoinus, lib. 4. cap. 61. Sigibertus and Trithemius, anno 750. and Godfrey, Chronic. part. 17. ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... the philosopher, considering the point at which it has arrived, rather than the route by which it got there, will class it with them, for its idea of life is just theirs turned topsy-turvy. The nails of the sloth, instead of being hammered into hoofs on the hard ground, have grown long and curved, like those of a caged bird, and become hooks by which it can hang, without effort, in the midst of the leaves on which it feeds. A minimum of intellect is required ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... or any Utensil to cook her Victuals, might as well be found among the Tartars as with her. She took every thing from her Sister at what Price she pleased, unsight unseen, and bought the Pig in the Poke. Necessity roused her from Stupidity and Sloth, she encouraged her Tenants to apply to Trades, assured them of a ready Market, and rewarded those that did their Work the best; and, at present, has every thing within herself. And tho' it must be owned a very unreasonable, and not to be ...
— The True Life of Betty Ireland • Anonymous
... their operation than diseases; and, as bodies slowly increase, but quickly perish, so it is more easy to suppress industry and genius, than to recall them. For indolence itself acquires a charm; and sloth, however odious at first, becomes at length engaging. During the space of fifteen years, [7] a large portion of human life, how great a number have fallen by casual events, and, as was the fate of all the ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... majesty, his heart swelling with joy at the near prospect of Isabella becoming his own for ever. Time sped, but not with the nimbleness he desired; for those who live on the hopes of pleasure to come, always imagine that time does not fly, but hobbles on the feet of sloth itself. At last the day came on which Richard expected, not to end his desires, but to find in Isabella new graces which should make him love her more, if more was possible. But in that brief space of time, in which he thought the ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... great and worthy man is the father of all about him; he knows that most of the diseases of the poor, originate in their want of food and necessaries, and therefore benevolently assists them with better diet and clothing. The rich, on the contrary, are generally the victims of their own sloth and intemperance, and, therefore, he finds it necessary to use a contrary method of cure—exercise, abstinence, and mortification. You, sir, have indeed been treated like a child, but it has been for your own advantage. Neither your bed, nor meat, nor drink, has ever ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... not only this frivolous ambition of being thought masterly inciting them on one hand, but also their natural sloth tempting them on the other. They are terrified at the prospect before them, of the toil required to attain exactness. The impetuosity of youth is distrusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, and desires, from mere impatience of labour, to take the ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... themselves to the work of justice. The great idle drones, asleep in unconscious groups on the melliferous walls, are rudely torn from their slumbers by an army of wrathful virgins. They wake, in pious wonder; they cannot believe their eyes; and their astonishment struggles through their sloth as a moonbeam through marshy water. They stare amazedly round them, convinced that they must be victims of some mistake; and the mother-idea of their life being first to assert itself in their dull brain, they take a step towards the vats ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... babel! and 10% of all the inhabitants of the globe, about the same number of people who profess to Protestantism, are Animists. This is the lowest stage of primitive religion, and millions of humans are still quagmired in the sloth of a primitive faith which once must have been the ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... jolly games, Forsake; their comrades gay, And quit proud homes and youthful dames, For famine, toil, and fray? Yet on the nimble air benign Speed nimbler messages, That waft the breath of grace divine To hearts in sloth and ease. So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... see one whom the Lord hath blessed with all the creature-comforts of life, thus early aroused from sluggish sloth, and abroad, doubtless, on ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... man in the sloth and darkness of a prison, is a loss to the nation, and no gain to the creditor. For of the multitudes who are pining in those cells of misery, a very small part is suspected of any fraudulent act by which they retain what belongs ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... which all things live and move, and have their being, and that foulness is painful as the accompaniment of disorder and decay, and always indicative of the withdrawal of Divine support. And the practical analogies of life, the invariable connection of outward foulness with mental sloth and degradation, as well as with bodily lethargy and disease, together with the contrary indications of freshness and purity belonging to every healthy and active organic frame, (singularly seen ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... this "golden age" of the national history, whose outward show of glory will seem to his penetrating eye only the hectic brilliancy of decay. He will turn to an earlier period, when the nation, emerging from the sloth and license of a barbarous age, seemed to renew its ancient energies, and to prepare like a giant to run its course; and glancing over the long interval since elapsed, during the first half of which the nation wasted itself on schemes of mad ambition, ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... that is Charity the champion, chief help against sin, For he strengtheth man to stand, and stirreth man's soul, And though thy body bow, as boate doth in water, Aye is thy soule safe, but if thou wilt thyself Do a deadly sin, and drenche[14] so thy soul, God will suffer well thy sloth, if thyself liketh, For he gave thee two years' gifts, to teme well thyself, And that is wit and free-will, to every wight a portion, To flying fowles, to fishes, and to beasts, And man hath most thereof, and most is to blame But if he work well therewith, as ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... feet. The six legs looked as strong as steel cables, and were about a foot through, while a huge, bony proboscis nine feet in length preceded the body. This was carried horizontally between two and three feet from the ground. Presently a large ground sloth came to the pool to drink, lapping up the water at the sides that had partly cooled. In an instant the black armored monster rushed down the slope with the speed of a nineteenth-century locomotive, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... celebrate victories and lead processions of triumph, not only over men, but also over the gods as captives; then, that he had diverted to idleness, and vain talk about curious arts and artificers, the common people, which, bred up in wars and agriculture, had never tasted of luxury and sloth, and, as Euripides said ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... consisted partly in small presents, partly in constant attention. The liberality of the singular old gentleman gave him a perfect right to scold when he saw things wrong; the domestics, who had fallen into total sloth and indifference, began to exert themselves under Mr. Touchwood's new system of rewards and surveillance; and the minister, half unconscious of the cause, reaped the advantage of the exertions of his busy friend. Sometimes ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... knew that a great nation had cast aside the bonds of sloth and luxury, and was girding itself to join in the fight for the free democracy ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... and records. No opportunity was lost of throwing dust in the eyes of the new-comers, whom, even in the most trifling details, it was the official policy to lead astray. Now, however, there is no cause for concealment; the Roi Faineant has shaken off his sloth, and his Maire du Palais, together, and an intelligible Government, which need not fear scrutiny from abroad, is the result: the records of the country being but so many proofs of the Mikado's title to power, there is no reason for keeping up any show of mystery. The path of inquiry is open ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... power of divine moments that they abolish our contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by day; but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a sort of omnipresence and omnipotence which ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... this saying touched the sloth and sluggishness of his, and did not allow the fraud and subtlety of others; neither was glad that it was indeed as he had said, but complained rather that it should be so: as many men speak many things, not that they ought to be so, but that they are wont to be so. Nay, this ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... Kearney's decease, his acting successor made his appearance on board. The character of Captain Horton was well known to us from the complaints made by the officers belonging to his ship, of his apathy and indolence; indeed, he went by the soubriquet of "the Sloth." It certainly was very annoying to his officers to witness so many opportunities of prize-money and distinction thrown away through the indolence of his disposition. Captain Horton was a young man of family who had advanced rapidly in the service ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... tigers sup at Exeter 'Change. Except Veli Pacha's lion in the Morea,—who followed the Arab keeper like a dog,—the fondness of the hyaena for her keeper amused me most. Such a conversazione!—There was a "hippopotamus," like Lord Liverpool in the face; and the "Ursine Sloth" had the very voice and manner of my valet—but the tiger talked too much. The elephant took and gave me my money again—took off my hat—opened a door—trunked a whip—and behaved so well, that I wish he was my butler. The handsomest animal on earth is one of the panthers; ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... SLOTH. I am Sloth. I was begotten on a sunny bank, where I have lain ever since; and you have done me great injury to bring me from thence: let me be carried thither again by Gluttony and Lechery. I'll not speak another ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... in ridicule whether I suppose that the megatherium and other allied huge monsters, which formerly lived in South America, have left behind them the sloth, armadillo, and anteater, as their degenerate descendants. This cannot for an instant be admitted. These huge animals have become wholly extinct, and have left no progeny. But in the caves of Brazil there are many extinct species which are closely allied in size and in all other characters ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... position, we have only to look at the numerous victims to be found among females of the middle and higher ranks, who have no calls to exertion in gaining the means of subsistence, and no objects of interest on which to exercise their mental faculties, and who, consequently, sink into a state of mental sloth and nervousness, which not only deprives them of much enjoyment, but subjects them to suffering, both of body and mind ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... without ties and responsibilities would fain do the same. It is a sacrifice, no doubt, to give up civilization and to begin life anew, but it is what our colonists are always doing. At any rate it is freedom—freedom from the corruption, the intrigue, the sloth, and the littleness of a decaying power like that of Carthage. You will be happy at least in having your wife with you, while the gods only know when I shall see the face of ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... way; so snug! and tell you how matters go upon 'Change, or in the House, or according to the blockhead's first pursuits, whether lucrative or politic, which thus he leaves; and lays himself down a voluntary prey to his own sensuality and sloth, while the ambition and avarice of the nephews and nieces, with their rascally adherents and coadjutors, reap the advantage, ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... among the forces that oppose their schemes there are some that they know not; but against such as they do know they fight on as bravely as though no others existed; and these men will be often victorious. We shall have added most strangely to our safety and happiness and peace the day that our sloth and our ignorance shall have ceased to term fatal. What should truly be looked on as human and natural by our ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... have no knowledge of the Miocene mammalian fauna of the Australian and Austro-Columbian provinces; but, seeing that not a trace of a Platyrrhine Ape, of a Procyonine Carnivore, of a characteristically South-American Rodent, of a Sloth, an Armadillo, or an Ant-eater has yet been found in Miocene deposits of Arctogaea, I cannot doubt that they already existed in ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and prose essays, and a drama, The Forced Marriage, are forgotten, with the exception of the four stanzas at the end of the first part of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, describing the diseases incident to sloth, which he contributed. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... would not be a shaven priest, For all his sloth-won tythe: But while to me this breath is leased, And these old limbs are lithe,— Ere Death hath marked me for his feast, And felled me with his scythe,— I'll troll my song, The leaves among, All in the ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... Joseph could not bring himself to believe that Nicodemus' interests in heroic warfare were more than intellectual caprice: and he regarded as entirely superficial Nicodemus' attacks on the present-day Jews, whose sloth and indolence he reproved, saying that they had left the heroic spirit brought out of Arabia with their language, on the banks of the Euphrates. One hero, he admitted, they had produced in modern times (Judas Maccabeus), and Joseph heard for the first time that this ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... the coast of Patagonia, whither we had gone to shoot the great Sloth, known to be the largest of animals, though we found his size to have been under-estimated. David, his father and I had flung our limbs upon the beach and were having a last pipe before turning in, while Mary, attired in barbaric splendour, sang and danced before us. ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... extreame adversitie, (Mans chiefest credit growes by dooing well). Be not high-minded in prosperitie; Falshood abhorre, no lying fable tell. Give not thyselfe to sloth, (the sinke of shame, The moath of time, ...
— The Affectionate Shepherd • Richard Barnfield
... outgrows the breast; But suns as stars shall fall from heaven and cease, Ere we twain be as these; Yea, utmost skies forget their utmost sun, Ere we twain be not one. My lesser jewels sewn on skirt and hem, I have no heed of them Obscured and flawed by sloth or craft or power; But thou, that wast my flower, The blossom bound between my brows and worn In sight of even and morn From the last ember of the flameless west To the dawn's baring breast— I were not Freedom if thou wert not free, Nor thou wert Italy. O mystic rose ingrained with ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... found in Ceylon is the little loris[1], which, from its sluggish movements, nocturnal habits, and consequent inaction during the day, has acquired the name of the "Ceylon Sloth." ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... another. Peace is generally good in itself, but it is never the highest good unless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness; and it becomes a very evil thing if it serves merely as a mask for cowardice and sloth, or as an instrument to further the ends of despotism or anarchy. We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life; but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... his mother: "Madam, I begin to grow weary of Samaria; I feel a passion for glory; give me leave to seek it amidst the perils of war. My father the sultan of Harran has many enemies. Why does he not call me to his assistance? Must I spend my life in sloth, when all my brothers have the happiness to be fighting by his side?" "My son," answered Pirouze, "I am no less impatient to have your name become famous; I could wish you had already signalised yourself against your father's enemies; but we must wait till he requires it." ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... as that "which punishes knaves and makes idle persons work." For that is indeed the ultimate and perennial soldiership; that is the essential warrior's office to the end of time. "There is no discharge in that war." To the compelling of sloth, and the scourging of sin, the strong hand will have to address itself as long as this wretched little dusty and volcanic world breeds nettles, and spits fire. The soldier's office at present is indeed supposed to be the defense of his country against other countries; but that is an office which—Utopian ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... perhaps inmates of our dwelling; they are our relations: they are sick or dying; or they have cast themselves upon our aid. But we let the moment pass. The work given us is not done. We have neglected it from sloth, procrastination, thoughtlessness, or selfishness. And we may become awake to our culpable negligence, and rouse ourselves to duty. But, alas! those whom we could have aided are past help. They are dead, or are removed from our influence, or in some way "past remedy." And ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... minister's salary, and for other expenses of the church, wholly by voluntary and eagerly given contributions,—the "Lord having directed him to make it clear by Scripture." He believed that tithes and church-taxes were productive of "pride, contention and sloth," and indicated a declining spiritual condition of the church. But it was a strange voluntary gift he wished, that was forced by dread of ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... inventions in the space of six years are a striking testimony to the fertility of Bain's imagination at this period. But after this extraordinary outburst he seems to have relapsed into sloth and the dissipation of his powers. We have been told, and indeed it is plain that he received a considerable sum for one or other of his inventions, probably the chemical telegraph. But while he could rise from the ranks, and brave adversity by dint of ingenuity ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... ground all about was covered with creepers, binding the ferns, bushes, and old dead branches together; and in this confused tangle the animal scrambled and tore with a great show of energy, but really made very little progress; and all at once it flashed into my mind that it was a sloth—a common animal, but rarely seen on the ground—with no tree near to take refuge in. The shock of joy this discovery produced was great enough to unnerve me, and for some moments I stood trembling, hardly able to breathe; then recovering I hastened after it, ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... us imagine a scene at the king's residence. The alii, rousing from his sloth and rubbing his eyes, rheumy with debauch and awa, overhears remark on the doings of a new company of hula dancers who have come into the neighborhood. ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... succeed to it, as subsists between a cloudy winter, and a radiant spring.—Besides, our lands would not be then cut down for the support of a numerous train of useless inhabitants—useless, I mean, to themselves, and effectually to us, by encouraging sloth and voluptuousness among our young farmers and planters, who might otherwise know how to take care of their money, as well as how to dissipate it.—In all other respects, I conceive them to be as valuable ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... usually sung, embraced such topics as Love to God—the presence of God—obedience to parents—friendship for brothers and sisters and schoolmates—love of school—the sinfulness of sloth, of lying, and of stealing. We quote the following hymn as a specimen of the subjects which are introduced into their songs: often were we greeted with this sweet hymn, while visiting the different ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... glass partitions someone spoke suddenly and she was startled. She laughed foolishly. For a long time after she went to work in the office of Walter Sayers she thought the desire in herself to be physically more graceful and beautiful and to rise also out of the mental stupidity and sloth of her young womanhood was due to the fact that the factory windows faced the river and the western sky, and that in the morning she saw the gulls feeding and in the afternoon the sun going down through the smoke clouds in a riot ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... in the pearl arch of sky, deepening at the horizon meeting of sea and air in a rainbow tint of cloud. The lazy swells of the ocean held the same soft color, darkened with crimson veins where spirals of weed drifted. A rose world bathed in soft sunlight, knowing only gentle winds, peace, and—sloth. ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... negro men, sitting on barrels at the head of the room, were drawing discordant notes from a pair of cracked, patched, and greasy fiddles. And there were men, whose red and bloated faces gave faithful witness of their habitual intemperance; and men, whose threadbare and ragged garments betokened sloth and poverty; and men, whose vulgar and ostentatious display of showy clothing, and gaudy chains, and rings and breast-pins, which they did not know how to wear, indicated dishonest pursuits; and men, whose blue jackets and bluff, brown faces showed them to be sailors; and ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... my stand on the broad moral ground that every human being, from the highest to the lowest, has two sides to his life—his work and his leisure. To be without work in life is selfishness and sloth. But if a man or woman is so entangled in routine duties as never to command leisure, we have a right to say to such persons that they are leading an immoral life. Such an individual has no claim to the title of a working man, he is a slave. It may be cruel circumstances that ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... his miscarriage if he fail, Deems his reward too great if he prevail, And labours to surpass him day and night, Less for improvement, than to tickle spite. The spur is powerful, and I grant its force; It pricks the genius forward in its course, Allows short time for play, and none for sloth, And felt alike by each, advances both, But judge where so much evil intervenes, The end, though plausible, not worth the means. Weigh, for a moment, classical desert Against a heart depraved, and temper hurt, Hurt, too, perhaps for life, for early wrong Done ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... thus to learn to depend upon God to work through our feeble resources, and yet, while so depending, to be absolutely faithful and diligent, and not allow our trust to deteriorate into supineness and indolence. We find no sloth or negligence in Gideon, or his three hundred; though they were weak and few, they were wholly true, and everything in them ready for God to use to the very last. "Faint yet pursuing" was their watchword as they followed and finished their glorious ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... of the Winds (especially the East) That staunch the young year's floods by dyke and dam, Who enter like a lion, that great beast, And make your egress like a woolly lamb; Who come, as Mars full-armed for battle's shocks, From lethargy of Winter's sloth to wean us, Then melt (about the vernal equinox), As he did in the softer arms ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... marching with seven-league stride in the van of progress, banner-bearer of the highest and newest civilization, carving his beneficent way with the tomahawk of commercial enterprise, sounding the warwhoop of Christian culture, tearing off the reeking scalp of sloth and superstition to plant there the steam-plow and the school-house—ever in his front stretch arid lawlessness, ignorance, crime, despair; ever in his wake bloom the jail, the gallows, and the pulpit; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ambitious to win 160 From me som Plume, that thy success may show Destruction to the rest: this pause between (Unanswerd least thou boast) to let thee know; At first I thought that Libertie and Heav'n To heav'nly Soules had bin all one; but now I see that most through sloth had rather serve, Ministring Spirits, traind up in Feast and Song; Such hast thou arm'd, the Minstrelsie of Heav'n, Servilitie with freedom to contend, As both thir deeds compar'd this day shall prove. 170 To whom in brief thus Abdiel stern repli'd. Apostat, still thou errst, nor ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... their various cousins: the Black Bear, the Syrian bear, the Grizzly bear of America the Thibetan sun bear, the Polar bear of the Arctic regions, the Aswail hear of India, the Bruany bear (also of India), the Sloth bear, the White bear, and the Brown ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... and our own fathers imitated them, not being satisfied with their temporary fortune nor content with what they had inherited, and they regarded sloth as their sure destruction but exertion as their certain safety. They feared that if their treasures remained unaugmented they would be consumed and worn away by age, and were ashamed after receiving so rich a heritage ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... iron. When Maurice entered, he was stretched on the sofa, with closed eyes; on his chest slept Wotan, the one-eyed cat, now growing sleek and fat. While Maurice was trying to rally him, Krafft sprang up. With a precipitance that was the extreme opposite of his previous sloth, he lowered both window-blinds, and, lighting two candles, set them on the piano, where they dispersed the immediate darkness, but ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Darwin had his first experience of the wealth of animal and plant life in the tropics, and, like all naturalists, he was very enthusiastic over it. Among the animals that particularly attracted his attention was the sloth, a peculiar creature climbing slowly about the trees, small of size and sluggish of habit. Another animal that interested him greatly was the little armadillo with its interesting habit of curling ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... cannot to some extent make up for the deficiencies of nature by right training and practice, let such a one know that he is very wide of the mark, if not out of it altogether. For good natural parts are impaired by sloth; while inferior ability is mended by training: and while simple things escape the eyes of the careless, difficult things are reached by painstaking. The wonderful efficacy and power of long and continuous labour you may see indeed every day in the world around you.[6] Thus water continually ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... making them paupers; these who have always fended abundantly for themselves, and can entirely do so yet. With free rations there would be no more hunting, no more trapping, no more fishing; and a hardy, self-supporting race would sink at once to sloth and beggary and forget all that made men of them. If it were designed to destroy the Indian at a blow, here is an easy way to do it. Yet there are some, obsessed with the craze about what is called education, regarding it as an end in itself and not as a means to any end, who recommend this pauperising ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... and at evening both You merry were and glad, So little care of sleep or sloth These pretty ladies had. When Tom came home from labour, Or Ciss to milking rose, Then merrily, merrily went their tabour, ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... tone of the stomach. The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or when cramped by custom and authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of thought or action. Can we wonder at the languor and lassitude which is thus produced by a life of learned sloth and ignorance; by poring over lines and syllables that excite little more idea or interest than if they were the characters of an unknown tongue, till the eye closes on vacancy, and the book drops from the feeble hand! I would rather be a wood-cutter, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... beauty made him proud: In diet was perhaps too nice, But gluttony was ne'er his vice: In every turn of life content, And meekly took what fortune sent; Inquire through all the parish round, A better neighbour ne'er was found; His vigilance might some displease; 'Tis true, he hated sloth like pease. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... v. 2-vi. 10), however, shows again failure; not as before through worldliness, but rather through spiritual pride and sloth. Restoration now was much more difficult; but again when she went forth diligently to seek her LORD, and so confessed Him as to lead others to long to find Him with her, He revealed Himself and the communion was restored, to ...
— Union And Communion - or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon • J. Hudson Taylor
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