"Improvident" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 'problem' in many other ways, and the columns of the local papers were filled with letters from all sorts of cranks who suggested various remedies. One individual, whose income was derived from brewery shares, attributed the prevailing distress to the drunken and improvident habits of the lower orders. Another suggested that it was a Divine protest against the growth of Ritualism and what he called 'fleshly religion', and suggested a day of humiliation and prayer. A great number of well-fed persons thought this ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... his arrival; it turned to an inflammation in his bowels, and he died last Friday. You may imagine the distress where there was so much domestic felicity, and where the deprivation is augmented by the very slender circumstances in which he could but leave his family; as his father—such an improvident father—is living! Lord Malpas himself was very amiable, and I had always loved him—but this is the cruel tax one pays for living, to see one's friends taken away before one! It has been a week of mortality. The night I wrote to you last, and had sent away ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... shade. The itinerant venders came flocking in like so many buzzards. There was at once chaffering and chaffing, eating and drinking. All were merry. Looking on the groups before us, one would imagine that the sky was serene. And yet, frowning upon this scene of careless security, this improvident disregard of a swiftly coming emergency, was one of the blackest of clouds. Every moment the thunder was jarring and rolling nearer, and yet this jolly people, who "take no thought," heeded not the warning. Even the buyers and packers seemed infected with a like ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... little squirrel and a number of birds—indeed, a good sportsman in health, with a supply of ammunition, need never, in that part of Africa, be without abundance of animal food; but some of the natives, who have no firearms and are very improvident, often suffer from famine even ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... cynically, as though he were two separate persons, one of whom was cool and calculating, while the other was improvident and scape-grace. How Lady Dawn would despise him, were he to reveal to her the stupid commotion of his mind! His excuse for blundering his way into her privacy had been sufficiently fantastic: that her late husband was ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... 24, 1836; he was twenty-three and she somewhat younger. Kind, gentle, loving, she was quite unable to understand she was linked with a genius. Wagner was burdened with debts, begun in Magdeburg and increased in Koenigsberg. She was almost as improvident as he. They were like two children playing at life, with fateful consequences. It was indeed her misfortune, as one says, that this gentle dove was mismated with an eagle. But Minna learned later, through dire necessity, to be more economical and careful, which is more than can ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... Happiness crowned the night; I too, Laughing and looking, one of all, I watched the quivering lamplight fall On plate and flowers and pouring tea And cup and cloth; and they and we Flung all the dancing moments by With jest and glitter. Lip and eye Flashed on the glory, shone and cried, Improvident, unmemoried; And fitfully and like a flame The light of laughter went and came. Proud in their careless transience moved The changing faces that ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... assured him he could leave him nothing, so the son was accustomed to look forward to this situation. Therefore, when he realized it, he was neither surprised nor revolted by the improvident egotism of which he was the victim. His reverence for his father continued unabated, and he did not read with the less respect or confidence the singular missive which figures at the beginning of this story. The moral theories ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... improvident youths like you, who come to lament their wasted lives. If I could receive him this once as he expects to be received, we cannot doubt that it would mean an income of two thousand francs to me. Prosperity dangles before us—shall I fail to clutch ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... thought for the morrow, and is protected by the Dutch Government from ruin by an enforced demand of rice for storage, according to the numbers of the family. Every village contains the great Store Barn of plaited palm leaves, so that, in case of need, the confiscated rice can be doled out to the improvident native, who thus contributes to the support of his family in times of scarcity. This regulation relieves want without pauperising, the common garner merely serving as a compulsory savings bank. Many salutary laws benefit the Malay, possessing a notable ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... He tried to manage their successions; he thought no pains too great to arrange between a widow and a son who had succeeded his father; he was often harassed and perplexed by tales of hardship; and I find him writing, almost in despair, of their improvident habits and the destitution that awaited their families upon a death. 'The house being completely furnished, they come into possession without necessaries, and they go out NAKED. The insurance seems to have failed, and what next is to be tried?' While they lived he wrote behind their backs to arrange ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The precipitate flight and improvident negligence of Pompey, at the beginning of the civil wars, appeared such notorious blunders to Cicero, as quite palled his friendship towards that great man. In the same manner, says he, as want of cleanliness, decency, or discretion in a mistress are found to alienate our affections. ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... "I'm so improvident that I'm afraid I'd marry you on nothing. I haven't a copper of my own, remember. You will have a penniless bride. Oh, I wish more than ever that Uncle Bernard had left me something, so that I might help ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... entered upon what he really believed would be his last journey, he naturally encountered very different experiences, being neither so ignorant, so helpless, nor so improvident as ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... cold virtuoso, who let it slumber in its case for a generation, till, when his hoard was broken up, it came forth once more and rode the stormy symphonies of royal orchestras, beneath the rushing bow of their lord and leader. Into lonely prisons with improvident artists; into convents from which arose, day and night, the holy hymns with which its tones were blended; and back again to orgies in which it learned to howl and laugh as if a legion of devils were shut up in it; then again to the gentle dilettante who calmed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Love is so improvident that a parting a year away is no more feared than death, and a month's end seems dim and distant. But a week,—a week only,—that even to love is short, and the beginning of the end. The chilling mist that rose from the gulf of separation so near before them overshadowed all the brief remnant ...
— Lost - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... Ferdinand's scrapes they would not have known each other. Nor was Lord Catchimwhocan passed over. Ferdinand Armine was not the man to neglect a friend or to forget a good service; and he has conferred on that good-natured, though somewhat improvident, young nobleman, more substantial kindness than the hospitality which is always cheerfully extended to him. When Ferdinand repaid Mr. Bond Sharpe his fifteen hundred pounds, he took care that the interest should appear in the shape of a golden vase, which is now not the least gorgeous ornament ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... speculation, an official order for every issue, specifying the article, was necessary. Such methods of distribution gave, notwithstanding, ample room for partiality and corruption. On the arrival of Bligh, he found the improvident settlers, discontented and poor, completely in the hands of the martial dealers. Perhaps, from a love of justice, he attempted to rescue them from the grasp of these intermediate agents, who bought their produce at a narrow price, and gave them in exchange goods bearing an enormous ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... child of Robert Foulkes, a hardworking but somewhat improvident teamster on the Express Route between Big Bend and Reno. His daily avocation, when she was not actually with him in the wagon, led to an occasional dispersion of herself and her progeny along the road and at wayside stations between those places. But the family ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... be called a bread-fruit, since, during the long winter months, it furnishes bread to many tribes of Indians; indeed, not bread alone, but subsistence—as it is the only food these improvident ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... subtle fairy poem than the Nymphidia. The fourth and tenth Nymphals are also touched with the sadder, almost satiric vein; the former inveighing against the English imitation of foreigners and love of extravagance in dress; while the tenth complains of the improvident and wasteful felling of trees in the English forests. This last Nymphal, though designedly an epilogue, is probably rather a warning than a despairing lament, even though we conceive the old satyr to be Drayton himself. As a whole the Nymphals show Drayton at his happiest and lightest in style ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... evil, taking as was the superficial evidence to the contrary. No cruelty could make the slave work like a free man, while his power to consume was enormous. Infants, aged, and weak had to be supported by the owner. Even the best slaves were improvident. Everywhere slave labor tended to banish free. Upon slave soil scarcely an immigrant could be led to set foot. Poor whites grew steadily poorer, their lot often more wretched than that of slaves. Invention, care, forethought ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... away—there are from a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand of the youth of Scotland added to the adult community in an untaught, uninformed condition. Nor need we say in how frightful a ratio their numbers must increase. The ignorant children of the present will become the improvident and careless parents of the future; and how improvident and careless the corresponding class which already exists among us always approves itself to be, let our prisons and workhouses tell. Our country, with all its churches, must ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Medley, that the poet has drawn out some sketch of himself, and from the authority of Mr. Bowman, who played Sir Fopling, or some other part in this comedy, it is said, that the very Shoemaker in Act I. was also meant for a real person, who, by his improvident courses before, having been unable to make any profit by his trade, grew afterwards, upon the public exhibition of him, so industrious and notable, that he drew a crowd of the best customers to him, and became a very thriving tradesman. Whether ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... storm, by which the former is so closely followed, is of a new descent of these Western nations, more formidable than any which we or our fathers have yet seen. This consists not of the ignorant or of the fanatical—not of the base, the needy, and the improvident. Now,—all that wide Europe possesses of what is wise and worthy, brave and noble, are united by the most religious vows, in the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... discharging of pistols, and you are filled with a vague thought that the whole city has been formed into a line of skirmishers. You are startled by a noise on the front pavement, which sounds like an energetic drummer beating the long roll on a barrel-head; and you have an indistinct idea that some improvident urchin (up since the dawn) has ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... writes a northern physician on one of the plantations on Port Royal Island; "deception and petty thieving prevail. They are careless, indolent, and improvident. They have a miserable habit of scolding and using authoritative language to one another. All these vices are clearly the result of slave education, and will gradually disappear under improved conditions.... If one is honest with them, ...
— Mary S. Peake - The Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe • Lewis C. Lockwood
... her letters and those of her husband, written after his fatal seizure to Mrs. Calvert, describing everything connected with their young and, as it proved, improvident lives. Neither of them, the sad wife protests, had ever been trained to the wise handling of money or of anything useful. It had not been their fault so much as their misfortunes that they were dying in what was to them real poverty; and the ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... they are lazy, they are improvident. They are not content in the station in which it has pleased God to place them. I know all about these people. They are turbulent, they are rebellious; they want to get their good, kind landlords out ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... London upon thirty shillings. It naturally results that the mechanics of Berlin, unlike those of the smaller towns of Germany, "are married and given in marriage," although the practice is regarded even there as indiscreet and improvident. It is doubtless a creditable feeling which demands of the workman that he shall have past out of his state of servitude, and have gained the position of an employer of labor, before he dare assume still ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... Congress, by an appropriation for that purpose, renders their continued enforcement possible. The experience of other nations teaches us that a country can not be stripped of its forests with impunity, and we shall expose ourselves to the gravest consequences unless the wasteful and improvident manner in which the forests in the United States are destroyed be effectually checked. I earnestly recommend that the measures suggested by the Secretary of the Interior for the suppression of depredations on the public timber lands of the United States, ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... first two years in navigating canoes, and hunting elephants, had often managed to save a little, to take back to their own country, but had to part with it all for food to support the rest in times of hunger, and, latterly, had fallen into the improvident habits of slaves, and spent their surplus earnings ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... spite of this hankering after the woods and the freedom of the chase, they are a people easily instructed, quick to learn, (when they like to do so), and very submissive and grateful. But they are very, very improvident. So long as they have enough for to-day, let to- morrow look out for itself. Even upon great festivals such as Christmas, when my husband would give them a double allowance of rations, they would come before our house, fire off their guns as a token of joy and thanks, ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... But Omai remained undetermined to the last, and would not, I believe, have adopted my plan of settlement in Huaheine, if I had not so explicitly refused to employ force in restoring him to his father's possessions. Whether the remains of his European wealth, which after all his improvident waste, was still considerable, will be more prudently administered by him, or whether the steps I took, as already explained, to insure him protection in Huaheine, shall have proved effectual, must be left ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... it a wonder that they stoop to plead and whine for coppers around every carriage that traverses their country? That they fare miserably, their scanty rags and pinched faces sufficiently attest; that they are indolent and improvident I can very well believe: for when were uneducated, unskilled, hopeless vassals anything else? Italy, beautiful, bounteous land! is everywhere haggard with want and wretchedness, but these seem nowhere so general and chronic as in the Papal territories. Every political division of ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... fillip for the appetite—cunnilinctus. But this, though for a while quite adequate, soon ceased to gratify. At this juncture, Christmas of my first college year, I was appointed editor of a small magazine, an early stricture of whose new conduct was paucity of love stories. Such improvident neglect was in keeping with my altering view of women, a view accorded to me by self-dissipation of the glamour through which they had been wont to appear. I had wandered somehow behind the scenes, and beheld, no footlights of sex intervening, the once so radiant fairies resolved into a raddled ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... annals and the aspects of no State in the Union are better known—even to the local peculiarities of life and language—to the general reader, than those of Virginia, from negro melody to picturesque landscape, from old manorial estates to field sports, and from improvident households to heroic beauties; and among the freshest touches to the historical and social picture are those bestowed by Irving in some of the most charming episodes of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... flower and fruit, owing to its site; its growth is tall and slender, and its crown at least that of the smaller, very small and ill developed. Large trees are rare; in fact, they have been all cut down by the Singfos, who are like all other natives excessively improvident. The largest we saw, and which Wallich felled, was, including the crown, 43 feet in length. Small plants are very common, although Bruce had already removed 30,000. Mac. thinks they grow chiefly on the margins of the ravinules ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... solicitude rests. It has been often charged against free governments that they have neither the foresight nor the virtue to provide at the proper season for great emergencies; that their course is improvident and expensive; that war will always find them unprepared, and, whatever may be its calamities, that its terrible warnings will be disregarded and forgotten as soon as peace returns. I have full confidence that this charge so far as relates to the United States will be shewn ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... merely want application and fortitude to become his successor, but skill and knowledge; his deliberation, therefore, was hasty, and his resolution improvident; he determined to continue at the Temple himself, while the shop, which he could by no means afford to relinquish, should be kept up by another name, and the business of it be transacted by an agent; hoping thus to secure and enjoy its emoluments, without either ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... passionate expressions of a despair "wishing only for death," bore fitful and variable witness to her first sense of a heavier yoke than yet had galled her spirit and her pride. At other times her affectionate gayety would give evidence as trustworthy of a fearless and improvident satisfaction. They rode out in state together, and if he kept cap in hand as a subject she would snatch it from him and clap it on his head again; while in graver things she took all due or possible care to gratify his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... frequent saints' days, during which no work is done, and its numerous holy fraternities living on alms, and its sanctification of mendicancy in the name of religion, has tended to pauperise the nation, and give it those unthrifty improvident habits which have destroyed independence and self-respect. Although, therefore, the Government has publicly forbidden begging throughout the country, it has in some measure tacitly connived at it, as a compromise between an inefficient poor-law and the widespread misery arising from the improvidence ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... delivered the young artist a level look of understanding from her topaz eyes. "I fear thou art indeed improvident," she continued, "if thou leavest thy future ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... disintegrated individuals lacking any spontaneous, central, rallying point, and who, failing natural leaders, simply push and jostle each other or stand still, each according to personal, blind, and haphazard impressions—a hasty, improvident, inconsistent, superficial opinion, caught on the wing, based on vague rumors, on four or five minutes of attention given each week, and chiefly to big words imperfectly understood, two or three sonorous, commonplace phrases, of which the listeners fail to catch the sense, but the sound which, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... pleasure-loving and improvident, and soon finds himself and his family in the direst need. Unable finally to bear the reproaches of his wife, he goes out in the field to hang himself, when a little fairy dressed like a friar appears, and blames him for his Judas-like ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... to the sensitive boy—far more painful, it would seem, than to the "Prodigal Father," as Dickens later called him. This father, whom Dickens long afterward described, in David Copperfield, as Mr. Micawber, was, as his son was always most willing to testify, a kind, generous man; but he was improvident to the last degree; and when in difficulties which would have made melancholy any other man, he was able, by the mere force of his rhetoric, to lift himself above circumstances or to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... work of time. The majority of the people are unstable, thriftless improvident and ignorant. Slavery left its blight of impotency and profligacy upon them. They come and go as did their fathers a hundred years ago. Their tools and utensils are the same their great-grandparents used, and they are content with them. We never worked harder ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 01, January, 1884 • Various
... of the reputation which they cause him to bear. He is more gracefully built than are most other natives on the East Coast, he dresses within an inch of his life, and often carries the best part of his property on his back and about his person,—for, like all gamblers, he is hopelessly improvident. He is a sportsman as soon as he can walk upon his feet without the aid of the supporting adan;[6] he is in love as a permanent arrangement, and will go to any length, and run any risk, in order to satisfy his desires; ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... anticipation of the act for that purpose, in the British parliament. General Lee marched upon Florida with the Virginia and North Carolina troops. He was subsequently joined by those of South Carolina; but, owing to his own ill-advised and improvident movements, the expedition was a total failure.* This result necessarily gave encouragement to the Tories; and, though in too small numbers to effect any important objects without the cooperation of a British force, they were yet sufficiently active to invite the presence of one. They ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... than it should have come if the belligerents had not been far too afraid of one another to face the situation sensibly. Germany, having failed to provide for the war she began, failed again to surrender before she was dangerously exhausted. Her opponents, equally improvident, went as much too close to bankruptcy as Germany to starvation. It was a bluff at which both were bluffed. And, with the usual irony of war, it remains doubtful whether Germany and Russia, the defeated, will not be the gainers; for the victors are already busy fastening ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... smaller number, and to make each individual egg much larger and richer in proportion than their rivals. This plan, of course, enables the young to begin life far better provided with muscles and fins than the tiny little fry which come out of the eggs of the improvident species. For example, the cod-fish lays nine million odd eggs; but anybody who has ever eaten fried cod's-roe must needs have noticed that each individual ovum was so very small as to be almost indistinguishable ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... lessons from women: they call it teaching her what is her proper place. Those good and discreet ladies have a notion that their conduct is full of propriety and discretion and sound sense; but how they make their sisters suffer—ah, how they make the poor things suffer! I believe that, if any improvident man could see, in a keenly vivid dream, a vision of his wife's future after his death, he would stint himself of anything rather than run the risk of having to reflect on his death-bed that he had failed to do ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... angry over the least trifle; he was quick to see and speak of the faults in others; he was demanding more of those he associated with in the way of consideration and justice than he was willing to give, and he was untidy in his person and improvident in ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Foolish, improvident young man, who art wasting the noble strength of youth, and manly spirits which God has given thee on sin and folly, throwing away thine honest earnings in cards and drunkenness, instead of laying them by against a time of need—has not thy sin found thee out? Then be sure it will ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the others; nor in the higher, to find a young man, whose estates have, during a long minority, under the careful management of Government officers, been freed from very heavy debts, with which an improvident father had left them encumbered, the moment he attains his majority and enters upon the management, borrowing three times their annual rent, at an exorbitant interest, to marry a couple of sisters, at ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... to this subject by the McFarland-Richardson trial, in which the former shot the latter, being jealous of his attentions to his wife. McFarland was a brutal, improvident husband, who had completely alienated his wife's affections, while Mr. Richardson, who had long been a cherished acquaintance of the family, befriended the wife in the darkest days of her misery. She was a very refined, attractive woman, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Jews; 'Tisn't the middleman more than the factor, 'Tisn't, no 'tisn't, the sub-contractor; 'Tisn't machinery. No! In fact, What Sweating is, in a manner exact, After much thinking we cannot define. Who is to blame for it? Well, we incline To think that the Sweated (improvident elves!) Are, at the bottom, to blame themselves! They're poor of spirit, and weak of will, They marry early, have little skill; They herd together, all sexes and ages, And take too tamely starvation wages; And if they will do so, much to their shame, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various
... support the injuries done to the natives for their selfish ends by new injuries done in favor of those before whom they are to account. It is not reasonably to be expected that a public rapacious and improvident should be served by any of its ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... attempted to trace Edgar Poe's descent from the old Norman family of Le Poer, which emigrated to Ireland during the reign of Henry II. of England. Lady Blessington, through her father, Edmund Power, claimed the same illustrious descent. The Le Poers were distinguished for being improvident, daring and reckless. The family originally belonged to Italy, whence they passed to the north of France, and went to England with William the Conqueror. In a letter dated January 3, 1877, Mrs. Whitman says: "For all that I said on the subject I alone am responsible. A distant ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... really charming, and displayed without affectation. He connected them with the image of his lost wife. There is no more natural, truly affecting passage than his display of fretfulness when he got some inkling that his second daughter was about to make a rather improvident marriage with young Snodgrass. The first had followed her inclinations in wedding Trundle—a not very good match—but he did not lose her as the pair lived beside him. He thought Emily, however, a pretty girl who ought to do better, and he had his eye on "a young gentleman in the neighbourhood"—and ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... broth, wine, brandy, milk to any extent, rice, &c.—Palmer manufactures all. The Pitcairners, most improvident people, are short of all necessary stores. I give what I can, but I must be stingy, as I tell them, for I never anticipated an attack of typhus here. They will, I trust, learn a lesson from it, and not provoke a recurrence of it by going on in their ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... advancing small sums of money to a number of men, who, of course, immediately got drunk. My ignorance of popular manners and customs had made me unable to realize the lamentable fact that if you pay five shillings to a man in the improvident class he will at once invest it in five shillings' worth of intoxication. I was still in Padiham at two in the afternoon, finishing accounts, and I had to be in Burnley with my men in time to get them off by the evening trains. When we started many of them were so drunk ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... were good. He had the artistic temperament and some of its incidental weaknesses. He acknowledged himself "constitutionally improvident," and a debt-burdened life is not easy. His later years were pathetic. Those who knew and appreciated him remember him fondly. California failing ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... where every household is burning wood and charcoal daily, a country where not only the houses but most of the things in common use are made of wood; and there seems to be no end to the trees that remain. It is little wonder that in many parts there has been and is improvident use of wood. Happily every year the regulation of timber areas and wise planting make progress. But for many square miles of hillside I saw there is no ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... for acquiring a piece of freehold land of about seven acres, close to the poet's cottage, known to the people of Helpston as 'Bachelors' Hall' and already noticed as belonging to two brothers of the name of Billing. The brothers were somewhat improvident, leading gay bachelors' lives; and, getting into debt gradually, they were compelled at last to mortgage their small property to a Jew for the sum of two hundred pounds. For some years, the interest ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... was soft even to weakness: he was so generous that he quite forgot to be just: he forgave injuries so readily that he might be said to invite them; and was so liberal to beggars that he had nothing left for his tailor and his butcher. He was vain, sensual, frivolous, profuse, improvident. One vice of a darker shade was imputed to him, envy. But there is not the least reason to believe that this bad passion, though it sometimes made him wince and utter fretful exclamations, ever impelled him to injure by wicked arts the reputation of any of his rivals. The truth probably is, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... affections among the young weavers of the place, but a journeyman tailor named Henry Somers was the successful wooer. A year or two after the wedding, Mr. and Mrs. Somers emigrated and came to the city of New York, settling over on the east side, about Oliver street. Somers was lazy, improvident and a tippler, and after a short sojourn in America Mrs. Somers found herself a young and blooming widow, with one child, a girl, to provide for. She had all along industriously supplemented her husband's earnings by her needle. She was now wholly dependent upon it for the subsistence ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... only to return next year, when the traitor Edric joined him and Wessex submitted. Together Canute and Edric harried Mercia, and were preparing to reduce London, when AEthelred died there on the 23rd of April 1016. Weak, self-indulgent, improvident, he had pursued a policy of opportunism to a ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... better than to take it from you," Aunt Maria said. "She is nothing but a little thief, and you are a very improvident child. To-morrow I'll take you to ...
— Five Happy Weeks • Margaret E. Sangster
... great multitude be supplied? I see a selfish man in that crowd pulling a luncheon out of his own pocket, and saying: "Let the people starve. They had no business to come out here in the desert without any provisions. They are improvident, and the improvident ought to suffer." There is another man, not quite so heartless, who says: "Go up into the village and buy bread." What a foolish proposition! There is not enough food in all the village for this crowd; besides that, who has the money to ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... idea of the natural inferiority of the Negro as a silly excuse. He conceded that most of the blacks were improvident and poor, but believed that their condition was not due to deficient understanding but to their lack of education. He was very much impressed with their achievements in music.[1] So disgusting was this notion ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... oppose themselves to the gain that might give them a master. The duller of those who were the life-seekers of old would have told you how some chance, trivial, unlooked-for, foiled their grand hope at the very point of fruition,—some doltish mistake, some improvident oversight, a defect in the sulphur, a wild overflow in the quicksilver, or a flaw in the bellows, or a pupil who failed to replenish the fuel, by falling asleep by the furnace. The invisible foes seldom vouchsafe to make ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that stage in their development in which they begin to till the soil, they soon become careful of the little property they have, in marked distinction to the savage and nomadic tribes, who are always lavish and improvident. I have seen as many as ten store-houses of the kind described, and once even fourteen near one dwelling, but generally one or two only are ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... with few exceptions shiftless and improvident plantation laborers and renters. Of the almost 13,000 Negroes in the county not more than fifty or sixty owned land. They lived almost exclusively in one-room cabins. Sometimes in addition to the immediate family there were relatives and friends ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... to borrow it. Those who have either, will seldom be in want either of the money, or of the wine which they have occasion for. This complaint, however, of the scarcity of money, is not always confined to improvident spendthrifts. It is sometimes general through a whole mercantile town and the country in its neighbourhood. Over-trading is the common cause of it. Sober men, whose projects have been disproportioned to their capitals, are as likely to have neither wherewithal to buy money, nor credit ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... even among this improvident and impracticable race; an old man; a man grown grey; can look a New Year in the face with his affairs in this condition; how he can lie down on his bed at night, and get up again in the morning, and—There!" he said, turning ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... relieved his long-pent-up feelings. He spoke of their poverty and the prosperity of others. He spoke of the Beauchenes, the Moranges, the Seguins, the Lepailleurs, of all he had seen of them, of all they had said, of all their scarcely disguised contempt for an improvident starveling like himself. He, Mathieu, and she, Marianne, would never have factory, nor mansion, nor mill, nor an income of twelve thousand francs a year; and their increasing penury, as the others said, had been their ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... colony will be placed entirely in the hands of the contractor by the railway contract, which appears highly improvident. As there seems to be no penalty provided for failure to operate the railways, the contract is essentially the sale of a million and a quarter acres for ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... of virtue or manliness. He loves idleness, he has little conception of right and wrong, and he is improvident to the last degree of childishness. He is a creature,—as some of our own people will do well to keep carefully in mind,—he is a creature just forcibly released from slavery. The havoc of war has filled his heart with confused longings, and his ears with confused sounds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... who have died in great poverty. His works, recommended by Lord Dorset, were read largely, and even by the King himself; but there was then no great demand for books, and authors had to look to patrons, and eat the uncertain bread of dependence. We may suppose, however, that he was an improvident man, for during his life he held several offices, and was at one time ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... least taught you civility. What do you complain of? I am a magistrate; and I execute a warrant, addressed to me by the first authority in that state. I am a creditor also of yours; and law arms me with powers to recover my own property from the hands of an improvident debtor." ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... advanced suffragette, joined these scientists in the new Eden. Owen had issued a universal invitation to the "industrious and well disposed," but his project offered also the lure of a free meal ticket for the improvident and the glitter of novelty ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... But it's sorry I am to come troubling you about such things, when I know you are thinking of other matters. And, as I said before, the money does not signify to me; the times, thank God, are good, and I've never been very improvident." ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... it was, in the best mode they were able. It proved a severe shock. Mrs. Verner had loved John, her eldest born, above every earthly thing. He was wild, random, improvident, had given her incessant trouble as a child and as a man; and so, mother fashion, she loved ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... time was permitted to France between two convulsive efforts, and the Revolution as yet knew not whether it should maintain the constitution it had gained, or employ it as a weapon to obtain a republic, Europe began to arouse itself; egotistical and improvident, she merely beheld in the first movement in France a comedy played at Paris on the stage of the States General and the constituent Assembly—between popular genius, represented by Mirabeau, and the vanquished ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... no right, be put to live along with me; nay, I can live, though burdened with impositions beyond what at present I labor under: but to have my liberty, which is the soul of my life, ravished from me to have my person pent up in a jail, without relief by law, and to be so adjudged,—O, improvident ancestors! O, unwise forefathers! to be so curious in providing for the quiet possession of our lands, and the liberties of parliament; and at the same time to neglect our personal liberty, and let us lie in prison, and that during pleasure, without redress ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... Priscilla. "I lost sight of her after she left Dinwiddie, but somebody was telling me the other day that Henry's investments all turned out badly and they came down to real poverty. Sarah Jane was a pretty girl and I was always very fond of her, but she was one of the improvident sort that couldn't make two ends meet without ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... not to think. When one enters the portals of learning, one leaves the dearest pleasures—solitude, books and imagination—outside with the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some comfort in the thought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment, but I am improvident enough to prefer present joy to hoarding riches ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... bargains, and the provisions thus obtained were divided every evening among the people. This arrangement had a happy effect in promoting a peaceful intercourse. The stores thus furnished, however, coming from a limited neighborhood of improvident beings, were not sufficient for the necessities of the Spaniards, and were so irregular as often to leave them in pinching want. They feared, too, that the neighborhood might soon be exhausted, in which case they should be reduced to famine. In this emergency, Diego ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... their goods and chattels, except the axe, the rifle, and the horse—these being invariably the best and handsomest which their means enable them to procure. But he is mistaken in supposing them indolent or improvident; and is little aware how much ingenuity and toil have been exerted in procuring the few comforts which they possess, in a country without arts, mechanics, money, ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... Ohnet's books. The main plot is not very novel—his plots seldom are—and, in parts as well as plots, any one who cared for rag-picking and hole-picking might find a good deal of indebtedness. It is the old jealousy of a clever and unscrupulous self-made man towards an improvident seigneur and his somewhat robustious son. The seigniorial improvidence, however, is not of the usual kind, for M. le Marquis de Clairefont wastes his substance, and gets into his enemy's debt and power, by ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... husband to this town, at an early period of its settlement from the vicinity of Boston, where the latter had become so much straitened in his pecuniary circumstances, in consequence of being surety for an improvident and luckless brother, that he was induced, with the hope of bettering his fortunes, to gather up the poor remnant of his property, and, with it, remove to the New Hampshire Grant's, at that time the Eldorado most in vogue among those ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... they are! How wise and humbly happy!—Ramuntcho quitted him with some haste, with a heart more bruised for having spoken to him, but wishing very sincerely that he should be happy in his improvident, ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... While the improvident did, indeed, wonder what they had done with their summer wages, the thrifty contemplated their piles of wood and their winter vegetables with a ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... Negro some of the arts of civilized life; but it must be added, that, denying him the inalienable rights of manhood, denying him the right to the product of his labor, it left him no noble incentive to labor at these arts, and thus tended to render him improvident, careless, shiftless, in short, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... hill ranges, which gave us a lot to do as in our weak condition we proceeded to climb them. We had eaten more food than we should have done, and the result was that we now had none left, except a tin of guyabada (sweet cheese). I had become almost as improvident as the Brazilians when it came to food, as I could not resist the temptation, and instead of the usual three meals a day we were ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Philip?" said Mr. Strawn. "I know that things are not as they should be, but how can there be a more even distribution of wealth without lessening the efficiency of the strong, able and energetic men and without making mendicants of the indolent and improvident? If we had pure socialism, we could never get the highest endeavor out of anyone, for it would seem not worth while to do more than the average. The race would then go backward instead of lifting itself higher by the insistent ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... now backwards, now swerving to the one side or the other, now availing himself of the fragments of the ruins, but watching all the while, with the utmost composure, the moment when the strength of his enraged enemy might become somewhat exhausted, or when by some improvident or furious blow he might again lay himself open to a close attack. The latter of these advantages had nearly occurred, for in the middle of his headlong charge, the Switzer stumbled over a large stone concealed among the long grass, and ere he could recover himself, received ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 373, Supplementary Number • Various
... not before cleared up by a daughter of Adam, and which, submitted to a woman's culture, has yielded a harvest of unknown flowers. Let us permit Madame Sand to produce these perilous marvels till the approach of winter; she will sing no more when the North wind has come. Meanwhile, less improvident than the grasshopper, let her make provision of glory for the time when there will be a famine of pleasure. The mother of Musarion was wont to repeat to her child: "Thou wilt not always be sixteen; will Choereas always remember ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... I read an article written by a cynical woman who has lived in the Islands only a few months. I read part of it to father, the part which says that "the Filipinos are a worthless, shiftless, lazy people; improvident, untrustworthy and immoral!" After I had read that he thought a moment and ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... vigorous bearing. They are perhaps the most courageous and intelligent of the peoples; pugnacious, but less quarrelsome than the Sea Dayak; more energetic and excitable than the Kayan; hospitable and somewhat improvident, sociable and of pleasant manners; less reserved and of more buoyant temperament than the Kayan; very loyal and obedient to their chiefs; more truthful and more to be depended upon under all circumstances than any of the other ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... does with fawn nor any game unaware; who prayed permission of the Wuld before they went to hunt, and left offal for their little brothers of the Wilderness. Indians know. But Greenhow, being a business man, opined that Indians were improvident, and not being even good at his business, fouled the waters where he camped, left man traces in his trails and neglected to put out ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... coach, and fine house in Bloomsbury: they began to forgive him when the bailiffs were after him, and abused Mr. Addison for selling Dick's country-house. And yet Dick in the spunging-house, or Dick in the Park, with his four mares and plated harness, was exactly the same gentle, kindly, improvident, jovial Dick Steele: and yet Mr. Addison was perfectly right in getting the money which was his, and not giving up the amount of his just claim, to be spent by Dick upon champagne and fiddlers, laced clothes, fine furniture, and parasites, Jew and Christian, male ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Butler! Butler! You are my evil genius, wherefore must you Announce it in their presence? It was all In a fair way. They were half won! those madmen With their improvident over-readiness— A cruel game is Fortune playing with me. The zeal of friends it is that razes me, And ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... earth; these circumstances render it impossible that France and the United States can continue long friends, when they meet in so irritable a position. They, as well as we, must be blind, if they do not see this, and we must be very improvident if we do not begin to make arrangements on that hypothesis. The day that France takes possession of New Orleans, fixes the sentence which is to restrain her for ever within her low-water mark. It seals the union of two nations, who, in conjunction, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... calculation in the scheme; and though I have read of boys, especially in English books, who made a profit out of their fellows, I never knew any boy who had enough forecast to do it. They were too wildly improvident for anything of the kind, and if they had any virtue at all it was scorn of the ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... could be made inviting and neat if the occupants were thrifty. No one was allowed to sell liquor on the property owned by the Gordons, but outside of this limit was a fringe of low saloons which did a thriving business off the improvident miners. ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... disliked the man. He had never met him before, and knew nothing at all about him. It was one of those inexplicable things which can not be answered. Otherwise Hillard enjoyed himself vastly. He found these people full of hope, light-hearted, generous, intelligent, and generally improvident. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... in every company—in every squad room—who always spend their pay within a few days after receiving it from the paymaster. As soon as his money is gone, and he needs or wants more, the improvident soldier turns to some comrade who saves and lends his money. The loan is five dollars, but by all the traditions the borrower must return six on ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... to be improvident!" said Herbert "We have had to spend all our income, but we are not in debt—that is, we have no debts that we are unable ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... The farmer ideal is realizable on a farm; but it was not so for the men whose sole occupation was transporting that which the agriculturist did not need to markets now closed by law. Wherever employment depended upon commerce, distress was immediate. The seamen, improvident by habit, first felt the blow. "I cannot conceive," said Representative [afterwards Justice] Story, "why gentlemen should wish to paralyze the strength of the nation by keeping back our naval force, and particularly now, when many of our native seamen (and I am sorry ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... as the captain says, all romance has long since vanished, and I think the most of us are beginning to look the fact of our awful situation full in the face.' 'We are making but little headway on our course.' Bad news from the rearmost boat: the men are improvident; 'they have eaten up all of the canned meats brought from the ship, and are now growing discontented.' Not so with the chief mate's people—they are evidently under ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... wasting his property in Italy and Spain, he returned to London to earn his bread by the pen. As a pamphleteer, as a poet, and especially as a dramatist, Greene achieved a considerable reputation. But his improvident habits and a life of constant debauchery brought his career to a close, amidst poverty and remorse, at the early age of thirty-two. He died in a drunken brawl, leaving in his works the evidence of talents and qualities which the degradation of his life ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... an individual, ma'am,' said Bitzer, dropping his voice and drawing nearer, 'he is as improvident as any of the people in this town. And you know what their improvidence is, ma'am. No one could wish to know it better than a lady of ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... honey of flesh, that dainty of the deep,' who anchors himself to a little pebble to prevent being dashed about by the waves; of birds, who change their dwellings when winter draws nigh; of beasts, who adapt their lair to the time of year. And shall man alone be improvident? Shall he not imitate that higher Providence by ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... Genoese, who had spent much time in Buenos Ayres and was presently thinking of New York; and we had some friendly discourse together concerning the English. His ideas of them were often so parallel with my own that I hardly know how to say he thought them an improvident people. I owned that they spent much more on state, or station, than the Americans; but we neither had any censure for them otherwise. He was of that philosophic mind which one is rather apt to encounter in the Latin races, and I could well wish for his further acquaintance. ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... to be. He was not without success in the circus which he subsequently joined, but he was improvident. His income increased in arithmetical progression, and his expenditure in geometrical. This, as Dr. Micawber and Professor Malthus have shown us, must end in disaster. Looking at it from the noblest point of view—the autobiographical—I saw that a marriage with Hugo would inevitably ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... session, that he had given much offence by the general levity of his conduct, and especially to the Tories by the occasional flippancy or severity of his attacks upon them, that as it was clear that any Conservative Government must depend upon the great body of the Tory party for support, it was improvident in him to make himself obnoxious to them, and that he would do well to exert his influence over Stanley for the purpose of restraining those sallies in which he was too apt to indulge, and showing him the expediency of conciliating that not very wise but still powerful ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... improvidence is a virtue of such lustre, that itself or its likeness is essential to the very existence of respectability; and, by carrying out this proposition, that in order to make the least amount of extravagance produce the utmost admiration and envy, it is desirable to be improvident as publicly as possible; the means for such expenditure being gleaned from retrenchments in the home department. Thus, by a system of domestic alchemy, the education of the children is resolved into a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... and some outside aid might be looked for; but such supplies are in their nature precarious and soon exhausted. It is a noticeable feature of strikes that the moment the workman's pay stops his living expenses increase. Even the more economical becomes improvident. If he has money, the tobacco shop and the tavern are likely to get more of it than the butcher's cart. The prolonged strain is too great to ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... he cannot catch. He is not careful to catch all that he could. His purpose is to draw the largest possible revenue per day from his claim. He does not intend to spend many years in mining, or if he does, he has become thriftless and improvident. In either case, he wishes to derive the utmost immediate profit from his mine. If his claim contain a dollar to the ton, and he can save five dollars by slowly washing only six tons in a day, while he might make ten ...
— Hittel on Gold Mines and Mining • John S. Hittell
... little left, and the cattle and horses were few, and only a small flock of sheep kept just to provide the house with mutton. His poor relations living scattered about the district knew that he was not only an improvident but an exceedingly weak and soft-hearted man, in spite of his grand manner, and many of the poorest among them had been allowed to build their ranches on his land and to keep a few animals for their ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... family of children takes care of the hull on 'em. And if one is miserly and one a spendthrift and one a dissipator and one over-ambitious they watch over 'em and curb these different traits of theirn and adjust 'em to the good of all and the honor of their pa and ma. They spur on the indolent and improvident, hold back the greedy and ambitious, watch and see that the careless and good-natured don't git trod on, nor the strong make slaves of the weaker. The feeble are protected, temptations are kept out of the way of the feeble wills; ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... said, anything but that; making bad worse, the improvident more improvident, the liar more ready to lie, the idler more ready to idle. But the Charity which is Humanity, which is the spirit of pure pity, the Spirit of Christ and ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... allotments of the villagers had already received their spring tillage; but the garden and the allotment of the Durbeyfields were behindhand. She found, to her dismay, that this was owing to their having eaten all the seed potatoes,—that last lapse of the improvident. At the earliest moment she obtained what others she could procure, and in a few days her father was well enough to see to the garden, under Tess's persuasive efforts: while she herself undertook the allotment-plot ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... hand in hand, she in a decent black dress, and both wearing very tight white kid gloves that refused to hide entirely the whole of the rough red hands, and they looked so ridiculously young, and the whole thing was so wildly improvident, that no words of exhortation would come to my lips as I gazed at them in silence, between laughter and tears. I ought to have told them they were sinners; I ought to have told them they were reckless; I ought to have told them by ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... a great variety of remarks upon this transaction, from the economist who turns it into an illustration of the evil results of hospitals for foundlings in encouraging improvident unions, down to the theologian who sees in it new proof of the inborn depravity of the human heart and the fall of man. Others have vindicated it in various ways, one of them courageously taking up the ground that Rousseau had good reason to believe that the children ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... unreal, was (whatever this may mean) universally intelligible. "His types established themselves in the public mind like personal experiences. Their falsity was unnoticed in the blaze of their illumination. Every humbug seemed a Pecksniff, every jovial improvident a Micawber, every stinted serving-wench a Marchioness." The critic, indeed, saw through it all, but he gave his warnings in vain. "In vain critical reflection showed these figures to be merely masks; not characters, but personified characteristics; caricatures and distortions of human nature. The ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... affectionate, improvident, bewitching, in short—was Laura at this period. Could she have remained there, this history would not need to be written. But Laura had grown to be almost a woman in these few years, to the end of which we have now come—years ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... anxious to assist his fellow-subjects of King George as he was to promote the British policy of building up the Canadian territories as a counterpoise to the United States. While there was undoubtedly some distress among immigrants of the improvident class, those who came here with the determination to work generally found work before long at much better compensation than they could have earned in England, while those who proceeded to the new regions of the West had no difficulty in ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... three midshipmen on the crest of the sand-ridge; had even noted the peculiar garb that bedecked their bodies,—all this beyond doubt. Notwithstanding the haste with which they had entered on the pursuit, they had not continued it either in a reckless or improvident manner. Skilled in the ways of the wilderness,—cautious as cats,—they had continued the chase; those in the lead from time to time assuring themselves that the game was still before them. This they had ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... civilized life, usually preferring their original habits and pursuits to the restraints of society. They readily admit the superiority of foreigners, but cling tenaciously to their forest homes and rude lives of unfettered freedom. In character they are cruel and vindictive, improvident and thievish; and they seem almost devoid of gallantry in the treatment of their women, wooing their wives with blows, and often inflicting death upon women and children for the slightest offences. Yet they have some ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... far better, than he could ever hope to lie. For she possessed that most priceless of all gifts: she believed her own lies. She looked people straight in the face and spoke from her heart; a falsehood, before it left her lips, had grown into a flaming truth. She was a florid, improvident liar. There was no classical parsimony about her misstatements. They were copious baroque, and encrusted with pleasing and unexpected tricks of ornamentation. That tropical redundancy for which her person was renowned reflected itself likewise in her ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... to be strictly required again, allowing only the tenth part to be retained; though it turned to very small account, most of those persons expending their daily income as fast as they received it, being rude, improvident livers; upon which he had further inquiry made as to those who had bought or received from them, and called upon these people to refund. The trouble was infinite, the exactions being prosecuted far, touching a great number of persons, bringing disrepute on Galba, and general hatred ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... (countries differing in race, government, climate and situation), that peasant proprietors are superhumanly industrious; intelligent cultivators, and generally intelligent men; prudent, temperate, and independent, and that they exercise self-control in avoiding improvident marriages. This group of empirical generalisations as to the character of peasant proprietors he then deduces from the nature of the case: their industry, he says, is a natural consequence of the fact that, however much they produce, it is all their own; they cultivate intelligently, because ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... born 1787, legitimate son of Adelaide Fouque, was a thrifty, selfish lad who saw that his mother by her improvident conduct was squandering the estate to which he considered himself sole heir. His aim was to induce his mother and her two illegitimate children to remove from the house and land, and in this he was ultimately successful. Having sold the property for fifty thousand ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... habits of fashionable life upon the class of tradesmen whose custom lies in that direction, is not less injurious. People of fashion are for the most part improvident: but even when they are not so in the long run, it seems to be their pride to be wantonly and perversely disorderly in the conduct of their pecuniary transactions. The result of this to themselves is not here the point in question, although there are few things which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... was brave and alert, but cruel and revengeful, preferring treachery and cunning to open battle. At home, he was lazy, improvident, and an inveterate gambler. He delighted in finery and trinkets, and decked his unclean person with paint and feathers. His grave and haughty demeanor repelled the stranger; but he was grateful for favors, and his wigwam ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... for this beautiful girl filled his whole life. He was poor and could not marry, but he had many arguments with himself about the propriety of doing so even without an income. "I think," he finally writes, "that these early and improvident marriages are too apt to break down the spirit and energy of a young man, and make him a hard-working, half-starving, repining animal all his days." And again: "Young men in our country think it a great extravagance to set up a horse and carriage without adequate means, but ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... (print) presi. Impression (printing) presajxo. Impression impreso. Impressionable impresebla. Impressive impresa. Imprison malliberigi. Improbable neversxajna. Improper nedeca. Impropriety nedececo. Impromptu senprepara. Improve plibonigi. Improvement plibonigo. Improvident malspxarema. Improvise improvizi. Imprudent nesingardema. Impudent senhonta. Impulse pusxo. Impure malpura. Impurity malpureco. Impute alkalkuli. In en. In front antauxe. In place of, to put anstatauxi. In that manner tiamaniere. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... visiting her dress-maker at the Benedick would be in active circulation among Mr. Rosedale's acquaintances. The worst of it was that she had always snubbed and ignored him. On his first appearance—when her improvident cousin, Jack Stepney, had obtained for him (in return for favours too easily guessed) a card to one of the vast impersonal Van Osburgh "crushes"—Rosedale, with that mixture of artistic sensibility and business astuteness which characterizes his race, had instantly ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... Spencer, "the fate of each creature is determined by its individual qualities; whereas in civilised societies a man may obtain the highest position and the most beautiful wife because he is rich and well-born, although he may be ugly, idle or improvident; and then it is he who will perpetuate the species. The wealthy man, ill constituted, incapable, sickly, enjoys his riches and establishes his stock under the protection of the laws." Haycraft in England and Jentsch in Germany have strongly emphasised these "anomalies," which nevertheless are the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... any difference) of the two. No, sir, no. If my family and friends have united their wits and money for this purpose, be the crime of perverted justice on their heads! They injure whom they intended to serve. Improvident men!—if the young may speak thus of the elderly; could they imagine to themselves that your worship was to ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... aware of the precipice, to the verge of which his improvident passion had drawn him, watched them out of the corner of his eye, uncertain how far their comprehension of the scene had gone. He trembled to think how nearly he had betrayed his secret; and took the more ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... in his steps Blythe now moved rapidly through the town by way of its landward environs. He passed through the squalid quarters of the improvident negroes and on beyond the picturesque shacks of the poorer mestizos. From many points along his course he could see, through the umbrageous glades, the house of Frank Goodwin on its wooded hill. And as he crossed the little bridge over the lagoon ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... degree of explicitness would confute the charges that were made against him; whether, by trampling on his sacred promise, he should not multiply his perils instead of lessening their number. A difficult part had been assigned to him; by much too difficult for one young, improvident, and inexperienced ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... designed to provide for him in the army, by purchasing him an ensign's commission, that is to say, provided he could raise the money, or procure it by interest, either of which clauses was rather to be wished than hoped for by him. On no better a plan, however, had his improvident father suffered this youth, a youth of great promise, to run up to the age of manhood, or near it at least, in next to idleness; and had, besides, taken no sort of pains to give him even the common premonitions ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... sea-coast of British America, until no tract there was left uninhabited but—frozen wastes and arid plains. What of the fruitful regions which lay in the vast interior? It was thither that the government should turn the thoughts of the homeless and the improvident. Leading to this temperate and fertile area was {16} an excellent northern highway—the waters of Hudson Bay and ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... living. He consumes a large amount of oleaginous food, and breathes a damp heavy atmosphere, and is, consequently, of a dull phlegmatic temperament. Notwithstanding his uncertain supplies of food, he is recklessly improvident, and indifferent to all the lessons of experience. Intellectual pursuits are all precluded. There is no motive, no opportunity, and indeed no disposition for mental culture. But in a temperate climate man is stimulated to high mental activity. The alternations of heat and cold, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... that the Prince gave him a commission, under an express promise that when he could not shew it, he was no longer to enjoy his royal favour. This commission was afterwards lost by the improvident possessor, and going to call on the donor one morning, who espying him on his way, he threw up the sash and called out, "Well, George, commission or no commission?" "No commission, by G——, your ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... much from nothing, or reasonably calculate upon improving very poor land without manure of some description, unless plaster will act with effect; nor is this generally the case without the land possesses naturally, some particular source of fertility, not wholly exhausted by bad or improvident tillage. ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... money by it. So, if he asks you to see it, do me the pleasure to say, lest he should take on (pigliarsi) with me about it: 'Thanks, but we saw the Tarantella at Pompeii!'" It was the last place in Italy where we were likely to have seen the Tarantella; but these simple people are improvident in lying, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... into America, the women becoming domestic servants and the men the unskilled laborers that were needed in the construction camps. They built roads, dug canals, and laid the first railways. Complaint was made that they lowered the standards of wages and of living, that their intemperate, improvident ways tended to complicate the problem of poverty, and that their Catholic religion made them dangerous, but they continued to come until the movement reached its climax, in 1851, when 272,000 passed through the ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... bended knees entreated him not to let the Romans, with an improvident disregard of all safety (they whose fortune their everlasting good faith had raised to the skies), now be misled by a base error to trample all former agreements under foot, and attempt an act unworthy ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... resignation—would the world which was created to receive the beings which we now are have been this unpleasant little park for small game, this salad patch, this wooded, rocky and spherical kitchen garden where your improvident Providence had destined us to live naked, in caves or under trees, nourished on the flesh of slaughtered animals, our brethren, or on raw vegetables nourished by ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... a continuous scene of gambling, brawling, and fighting, so long as the improvident trapper's money lasted. Seated around the large camp-fires, cross-legged in Indian fashion, with a blanket or buffalo-robe spread before them, groups were playing cards—euchre, seven-up, and poker, the regular mountain games. The usual stakes were beaver-skins, which were current ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... say—fourteen hundred pounds. And how came he not to have settled that matter before this person's death? Now indeed it would be too late to sell it, but a man of Colonel Brandon's sense!—I wonder he should be so improvident in a point of such common, such natural, concern!—Well, I am convinced that there is a vast deal of inconsistency in almost every human character. I suppose, however—on recollection—that the case may probably be this. Edward is only to hold the ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... inherited wealth, for that often proves a young man's ruin, but does he come of an honest, industrious family? Have you just reason to suppose that he will make a fair success of life? Is his father shiftless, lazy, improvident? If so, it will be harder for him to be provident, business-like. Has he true ideas of the dignity of life and his own responsibility? Is he looking for an "easy job," or does he purpose to give a fair equivalent for all that he receives? Would he rather toil at ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... gods of the improvident, I was lured into the backwoods of the Ozarks by such a name as "Mountain Home," which caught my fancy on the map; and with no definite "stories" in mind I would go sauntering from Nowhere-in-Particular in Northern Arkansas to Someplace Else in Southern Missouri, snapping pictures by the ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... in the Marshalsea common yard; even I knows that. But they've the wink there. 'Too full,' says they. Too full be d———d. I've know'd the time—after the Vansdell smash it were—when they found room for three hundred more improvident debtors over and above what they're charted for. Too full! Their common yard! They don't want you to speak to a soul, an' you won't till this day week, when the Hadmir'lty Session is in full swing." ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... stood the foremost in the list: not from the greatness of the sum; but from the danger of his adding to it the expenses of law. Sir Terence undertook to pay the whole with five thousand pounds. Lord Clonbrony thought it impossible: the solicitor thought it improvident, because he knew that upon a trial a much greater abatement would be allowed; but Lord Colambre was determined, from the present embarrassments of his own situation, to leave nothing undone ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... directly in front of her and did not reply. The wind of a keen clear winter morning had put colour into her cheeks. Overhead, the creamy- yellow smoke-clouds were thinning away one by one against a pale-blue sky, and the improvident sparrows broke off from water-spout committees and cab-rank cabals to clamour of ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... besides being somewhat dazzled with ale and brandy, were speedily engaged in contemplating a half-crown which Joshua held between his finger and his thumb, saying, at the same time, 'Friend, thou art indigent and improvident. This will, well employed, procure thee sustentation of nature for more than a single day; and I will bestow it on thee if thou wilt sit here and keep me company; for neither thou nor I, friend, are fit company ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... the settlers were in sore straits for food, for they were improvident, and managed badly, Pocahontas, always generous and friendly, learning of their needs, came with her brother Nantaquaus and her Indians bringing corn, and kept them from starving, while their own was growing. Captain John in return gave her beads and trinkets to deck herself, ...
— The Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith • E. Boyd Smith |
