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Laborious   /ləbˈɔriəs/   Listen
Laborious

adjective
1.
Characterized by effort to the point of exhaustion; especially physical effort.  Synonyms: arduous, backbreaking, grueling, gruelling, hard, heavy, operose, punishing, toilsome.  "A grueling campaign" , "Hard labor" , "Heavy work" , "Heavy going" , "Spent many laborious hours on the project" , "Set a punishing pace"



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"Laborious" Quotes from Famous Books



... the contrary, full of energy, and active in everything, patient and laborious, if required, and never taking anything in hand without ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat

... edge. An enormous heap of dry wood and leaves is then piled over the hole, set on fire, and allowed to burn itself out. As soon as the last sticks have fallen into the hole, the men begin to rake out the glowing embers with long poles. This is a laborious and difficult task, the heat being so great, that each man can only work for a few consecutive seconds, and then gives way to a cooler comrade. However, there are plenty of laborers, and the hole ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various

... boat toward the approaching one. There was no doubt about it. It was Andy Foger's craft, but it was not speeding forward under the power of the motor. Slowly and laborious the occupants were pulling it along, and as it was not meant to be rowed, progress ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-boat - or, The Rivals of Lake Carlopa • Victor Appleton

... frequent occurrence in this teepee. Men at the doors of other lodges, engaged in cleaning their guns, or in other light occupations suitable to the manly dignity, shrugged with strong scorn for the man who could not keep his women in order. With the shrugs went warning glances toward their own laborious spouses. ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner

... fond delusion, bred up as he had been upon the wildest sea-coast, exposed to the full sweep of the Atlantic storm! She set him off upon his own scenery, to the destruction of his laborious English, as he dwelt on the glories of his beloved rocks rent by fierce sea winds and waves into fantastic, grotesque, or lovely shapes, with fiords of exquisite blue sea between, the variety of which had been to him as the gentle foliage of tamer countries. Not a tree ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... been the source of very numerous courses of lectures by ministers of all denominations; and has been turned into a handsome volume of hymns, adapted for public worship, by the late Mr. Purday, a friend of John Wesley's, and a laborious preacher for ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... irrigation—send water up from lowland springs and streams by hydraulic rams for the same purpose, and for stock on the hills; or bring it down from hillsides if you are so situated; and buy guano for those distant fields, instead of wasting time in the laborious operation of hauling manure. Those who use guano, are enabled by the saving of time, to say nothing of their increased profits, to make improvements which are utterly impossible to accomplish ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson

... days I remained at Corinth the town was a perfect aceldama, though all was done that could be to save life and alleviate suffering. Many of the best surgeons in the South arrived in time to render valuable assistance to the army surgeons in their laborious duties. Among these may be named Surrell of Virginia, Hargis and Baldwin of Mississippi, Richardson of New Orleans, La Fressne of Alabama, with many others of high reputation. During the week following the battle the wounded ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson

... first settlement of east Tennessee and the close of the Revolutionary struggle, Colonel Bledsoe, with his brother and kinsmen, was almost incessantly engaged in the strife with their Indian foes, as well as in the laborious enterprise of subduing the forest, and converting the tangled wilds into the husbandman's fields of plenty. In these varied scenes of trouble and trial, of toil and danger, the men were aided and encouraged by the women. Mary Bledsoe, ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various

... our domestic animals will probably forever remain vague. But I may here state that, looking to the domestic dogs of the whole world, I have, after a laborious collection of all known facts, come to the conclusion that several wild species of Canidae have been tamed, and that their blood, in some cases mingled together, flows in the veins of our domestic breeds. In regard to sheep and goats I can form no decided opinion. From facts communicated ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... forever this palace, whither the cruellest of fatalities summoned my youth and inexperience. Had I not met you, my heart would have loved seclusion, a laborious life, and my kinsfolk. An imperious inclination, which I could not conquer, gave me to you, and, simple, docile as I was by nature, I believed that my passion would always prove to me delicious, and that your love would ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan

... laborious little studies of still life or nature, the public would have none. Even the two life-sized pictures, which had more than a little merit in them, remained unpurchased. Both were for sale now; for Joseph needed no portrait of what was his; and Prince G—— naturally never commanded ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... make many rules in religion, and turn it into a laborious art, full of intricate questions, precepts, and contentions. As there hath been a great deal of vanity in the conception of speculative divinity, by a multitude of vain and unedifying questions which have no profit in them, or are beneficial ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... and scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to announce; and Beatrice, in all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of the jargon and slang of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or infidel. After that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... mangled by the witches, who took from them the most choice ingredients composing their charms. Above all, it must not be forgotten that these frightful sorceresses possessed the power of transforming themselves and others into animals, which are used in their degree of quadrupeds, or in whatever other laborious occupation belongs to the transformed state. The poets of the heathens, with authors of fiction, such as Lucian and Apuleius, ascribe all these powers to the witches of the pagan world, combining them with the art of poisoning, and of making magical ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... personal experience of his hostility. Immured for his safety in a voluntary but gloomy prison, occupied intensely in the plan of a mighty revolution against the most powerful hierarchy that has ever existed, engaged continuously in the laborious task of translating the Sacred Scriptures, only partially freed from the prejudices of education, it is little surprising that the antagonist of the Church should have experienced infernal hallucinations. This weakness of the champion of Protestantism ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams

... keynote was to be economy. But just how economies were actually to be effected was not so clear. For months Gallatin had been toiling over masses of statistics, trying to reconcile a policy of reduced taxation, to satisfy the demands of the party, with the discharge of the public debt. By laborious calculation he found that if $7,300,000 were set aside each year, the debt—principal and interest—could be discharged within sixteen years. But if the unpopular excise were abandoned, where was the needed revenue to be found? New taxes were ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson

... fought on the 7th of March, was desperately contested, but Del Canto was superior in numbers, and Robles was himself killed and his army dispersed. After this the other Balmacedist troops in the north gave up the struggle. Some were driven into Peru, others into Bolivia, and one column made a laborious retreat from Calama to Santiago, in the course of which it twice crossed the main chain ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... a troublesome one from the first. The brand kept the great beasts at a distance, time and again the red coals almost died out, and Grom had anxious and laborious moments nursing them again into activity; and the care of the mysterious things made progress slow. Grom learned much, and rapidly, in these anxious efforts. He discovered once, just at a critical moment, the remarkable ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... which might be multiplied by millions, are cases in which a long, laborious, conscious, detailed process of acquirement has been condensed into an instinctive and unconscious inborn one. Factors which formerly had to be considered one by one in succession are integrated into what seems a single simple factor. Chains of hardly soluble problems have coalesced ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... female sex, which arises from this cause, has rendered prevalent the custom of stealing wives; and as women are of great value, not only on account of the personal attachment which they might be supposed to excite, but from the fact of all laborious tasks being performed, and a great portion of the food of the family being also collected by them, every precaution is taken to prevent them from forming any acquaintances which would be likely to terminate ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey

... the temporalities arising from the church, stipend, glebe, parsonage, but not of the spiritual functions. We had no right to the emoluments of our stations, when the law courts had decided against us, but we had a right to the laborious duties of the stations.' No gravity could refuse to smile at this complaint—verbally so much in the spirit of primitive Christianity, yet in its tendency so insidious. For could it be possible that a ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey

... brains of a poor harmless creature, found by chance in his field; which obligation was amply recompensed by the gain he had made in showing me through half the kingdom, and the price he had now sold me for. That the life I had since led was laborious enough to kill an animal of ten times my strength. That my health was much impaired by the continual drudgery of entertaining the rabble every hour of the day, and that, if my master had not thought my life in danger, her majesty would not have got so cheap a bargain. But as I was out ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift

... the medical student as he actually exists—his reckless gaiety, his wild frolics, his open disposition. That he is careless and dissipated we admit, but these attributes end with his pupilage; did they not do so spontaneously, the up-hill struggles and hardly-earned income of his laborious future career would, to use his own terms, "soon knock it all out of him;" although, in the after-waste of years, he looks back upon his student's revelries with an occasional return of old feelings, not unmixed, however, with a passing reflection upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... Their agriculture is laborious, and perhaps rather feeble than unskilful. Their chief manure is seaweed, which, when they lay it to rot upon the field, gives them a better crop than those of the Highlands. They heap sea shells upon the dunghill, which in time moulder into a fertilising substance. When they ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson

... "These ideas," she writes in a later preface to her socialist novel, Le Peche de M. Antoine, "at which, as yet but a small number of conservative spirits had taken alarm, had, as yet, only really begun to sprout in a small number of attentive, laborious minds. The government, so long as no actual form of political application was assumed, was not to be disquieted by theories, and let every man make his own, put forth his dream, and innocently construct his city of the future, by his own fire-side, in ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... commenced as portraits, but recalled no faces I knew; then a number of fragmentary notes, written in pencil. I found no name, from first to last; only, under the sketches, a monogram so complicated and laborious that the initials could hardly be discovered unless one ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... badly served in this essential. Of all the admirable qualities which they have shown none is more wonderful than the spirit which has carried them through the laborious and distasteful groundwork of their calling without one note of music, except that which the same indomitable spirit provided out of their own heads. We have all seen them marching through the country, through the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... "Most of the laborious work in this island is performed by mules; horses being to appearance scarce, and chiefly reserved for the use of the officers. They are of a small size, but well shaped and spirited. Oxen are also employed to drag their casks along upon a large clumsy piece of wood; and they are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... the court was definitely formed. After laborious studies on the part of a special commission, and long discussions in which Napoleon took as interested a part as he did in the preparation of the civil code, all the wheels of etiquette had been ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand

... know not, whether these civil tyrants be so bad as the spiritual tyrants who have just set up for themselves what they call a "Free Kirk." These reverend gentlemen have received the fruits of the blood of the slaves, employed on the laborious fields of the Southern States of America, to build up their new Free Church, pretending they have a Divine right to receive the value of the forced-labour of slaves, and quoting Scripture like the Devil himself. When called upon to refund they refuse, and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... Constitution sprang, like Minerva, armed cap-a-pie, from the brain of the American people, whereas it was as much the result of a slow, laborious, and painful evolution as was the British Constitution. Probably Gladstone so understood the development of the American Constitution and recognized that its framing was only the culmination of an evolution ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... in my offering to the members some remarks upon the peculiar difficulties which beset the medical practitioner in the discharge of his laborious and important duties. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... moving his lips as he did so, in order to get the matter clearly before his mind. He regarded it as a laborious task, and would sooner have chopped a cord of wood than read for half an hour. Notwithstanding the irksomeness of reading, there were two books which led him conscientiously through their pages to the end—those of Gordon Cumming and Jules Gerard on ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... practices that characterized methods of instruction in secular subjects. The term "lecture," as commonly understood in the Middle Ages, implied or included a catechetical system of teaching, in which the master asked and the scholar answered a series of questions. This laborious but effective mode of ascertaining and accelerating progress in knowledge was left irksome by both parties, and "ordinary" lectures—or, as we should term them, lessons—were threatened with supersession by a seductive invention known as "cursory" lectures. ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... schoolroom, and by the sound of his good Leah or Rachel or Deborah (I don't remember her name) keeping order among his little ones. She kept very good order, too, so that most of the time you could hear the scratching of the laborious pens accompanied by the croaking of the frogs in ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... the 25th February, with hands clearer of thrums. The march goes in proper columns, dislocations; Prince Dietrich, on the right, with a separate Corps, bent else-whither than to Chrudim, keeps off the Pandours. A march laborious, mountainous, on roads of such quality; but, except baggage-difficulties and the like, nothing material going wrong. "On the 13th [April], we marched to Zwittau, over the Mountain of Schonhengst. The passage over this Mountain is very steep; but not so impracticable as it had been ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... secreta petit loca, balnea vitat; Nanciscetur enim pretium nomenque poetae, Si tribus Anticyris caput insanabile numquam Tonsori Licino commiserit. O ego laevus, Qui purgor bilem sub verni temporis horam! Non alius faceret meliora poemata: verum Had they not, scorning the laborious file, Grudg'd time, to mellow and refine their stile. But you, bright hopes of the Pompilian Blood, Never the verse approve and hold as good, 'Till many a day, and many a blot has wrought The polish'd work, and chasten'd ev'ry thought, By ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace

... the sleek flutterer in the sunshine of fortune. And for the idle, the gay, the fair, the well-dressed and wealthy, the sturdy workman of his own rough way felt something of the uncharitable disdain which the laborious have-nots too usually entertain for the prosperous haves. But the moment the unwelcome intelligence of Madame Dalibard was conveyed to him, the smooth-faced boy swelled into dignity ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... years; had once 100,000l. a year for the support of his dignity, and had at that time 50,000l. This man, sitting in his garden, reposing himself after the toils of his situation, (for he was one of the most laborious men in the world,) was suddenly arrested, and, without a moment's respite, dragged down to Calcutta, and there by Mr. Hastings (exceeding the orders of the Company) confined near two years under a guard of soldiers. Mr. Hastings ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... me—since I had left home. My better nature returned strong upon me. Everything was in accordance with my state of feeling, and I experienced a glow of pleasure at finding that what of poetry and romance I ever had in me, had not been entirely deadened by the laborious and frittering life I had led. Nearly an hour did I sit, almost lost in the luxury of this entire new scene of the play in which I had been so long acting, when I was aroused by the distant shouts of my companions, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... singular that a literature, so unrivalled as ours in its compass and variety, should not have produced any, even the shallowest, manual of itself. And thus it happens, for example, that writers so laborious and serviceable as Birch are in any popular sense scarcely known. I showed to Lord Massey, among others of his works, that which relates to Lord Worcester's (that is, Lord Glamorgan's) negotiations with the Papal nuncio ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... weakness of his constitution a pretext for his ease, but rather used war as the best physic against his indispositions; whilst by indefatigable journeys, coarse diet, frequent lodging in the field, and continual laborious exercise, he struggled with his diseases, and fortified his body against all attacks. He slept generally in his chariots or litters, employing even his rest in pursuit of action. In the day he was thus carried to the forts, garrisons, and camps, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... caused by the news that the West Australians were in action at Slingersfontein, distant about twelve miles from Rensburg. To saddle up and get out as fast as horseflesh would carry a man was but the work of a very short period of time, for the gallop across the open veldt was not a very laborious undertaking. I soon found that the stalwart sons of the great gold colony were in it, ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales

... much the most laborious and critical part of the service that Captain Truck had undertaken, if we except the collision with the Arabs—that of towing all the heavy spars of a large ship, in one raft, in the open sea, near a coast, and with the wind blowing ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... the young author believe that the best work in modern magazine literature "is dashed off at white heat." What is dashed off reads dashed off, and one does not come across it in the well-edited magazine, because it is never accepted. Good writing is laborious writing, the result of revision upon revision. The work of masters such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling represents never less than eight or ten revisions, and often a far greater number. It was Stevenson who once said to Edward Bok, after a laborious correction of certain ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok

... stormiest of seas, and inwardly groan at the signs of other and worse tempests ready ever to burst forth in the Atlantic of that young sinner's future course; and when after many weeks of anxious thought, fatiguing travel, and laborious inquiry you find a home for the child, fold your hands, give thanks and say, "What an adventure! What a toil! But now at length it is finished!" And yet perhaps it is not ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe

... the plant extended a considerable distance farther toward the middle of the river. Once within this little forest of the wild rice, he was enabled to drag the canoe farther and farther from the north shore, though his progress was both slow and laborious, on account ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... stretch off the land to the southward into a waste of waters that seems interminable. There are islands to the southward of Cape Horn, and a good many of them too, though none very near. It is now known, also, by means of the toils and courage of various seamen, including those of the persevering and laborious Wilkes, the most industrious and the least rewarded of all the navigators who have ever worked for the human race in this dangerous and exhausting occupation, that a continent is there also; but, at the period of which we are writing, the existence ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... carried as rapidly as possible, and the boiling-house requires a number of hands. However, they become fat and sleek during that period, as they may suck as much of the cane as they like, and do not look upon the task as especially laborious. As a number of artisans are required on the estate, such as carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, and coopers, the more intelligent lads are selected and sent as apprentices to learn those trades; though they get ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston

... the only effect was to set her arguing with me, in favor of the crime, representing it as a virtue acceptable to God, and honorable to me. The priests, she said, were not situated like other men, being forbidden to marry; while they lived secluded, laborious, and self-denying lives for our salvation. They might, indeed, be considered our saviours, as without their services we could not obtain the pardon of sin, and must go to hell. Now, it was our ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk

... climbing forest, and breaks down shoreward in steep taluses and cliffs. From the edge of one of the highest, perhaps seven hundred or a thousand feet above the beach, a Virgin looks insignificantly down, like a poor lost doll, forgotten there by a giant child. This laborious symbol of the Catholics is always strange to Protestants; we conceive with wonder that men should think it worth while to toil so many days, and clamber so much about the face of precipices, for an end that makes us smile; and yet I believe it was the wise Bishop Dordillon who chose the ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... catching of land animals, of which the one sort is called hunting by night, in which the hunters sleep in turn and are lazy; this is not to be commended any more than that which has intervals of rest, in which the wild strength of beasts is subdued by nets and snares, and not by the victory of a laborious spirit. Thus, only the best kind of hunting is allowed at all—that of quadrupeds, which is carried on with horses and dogs and men's own persons, and they get the victory over the animals by running them down ...
— Laws • Plato

... factories everywhere, edifices like that of Mandaloyan! I hear the steam hiss, the trains roar, the engines rattle! I see the smoke rise—their heavy breathing; I smell the oil—the sweat of monsters busy at incessant toil. This port, so slow and laborious of creation, this river where commerce is in its death agony, we shall see covered with masts, giving us an idea of the forests of Europe in winter. This pure air, and these stones, now so clean, will be crowded with coal, with boxes and barrels, the products of human ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... whose "Life and Letters" have been edited by Lady Ilchester and her son, Lord Stavordale. In the Addison or dining room there are several other portraits and more china, including the famous Chelsea service presented by the proprietors of the Chelsea Company to Dr. Johnson in recognition of his laborious and unsuccessful efforts to learn their trade. From here we can pass to the library, a long gallery running the whole width of the house, as a library should do. Besides ordinary books, the library contains priceless treasures, such as a collection ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... inquiringly, and he smiled, saying, "Ah, you are not used to the Martian way of doing things! This seems to you very quick work, no doubt; but the erection of the building was not such a heavy and laborious task as it would have been upon the earth. Owing to the lesser gravitation here, and to the larger physical development of our people on Mars, one man can accomplish in the same time what it would require many men to achieve upon the earth. ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... scientific career, its original aim, the methods adopted for its development, and its final success or failure, with the circumstances to which either event was attributable. The book, in truth, was both the history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet practical and laborious life. He handled physical details as if there were nothing beyond them; yet spiritualized them all, and redeemed himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the infinite. In his grasp the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul. Georgiana, as she read, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... through one or more of a hundred different circumstances over which he has no control, or through some error of judgement, that after many years of laborious mental work an employer is overtaken by misfortune, and finds himself no better and even worse off than when he started; but these are exceptional cases, and even if he becomes absolutely bankrupt he is no worse off than the majority of ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... from home, she having lived at Bastres with a friend of her mother, where she had been provided with a home for the small sum of five francs a month and her service in tending the sheep: she was not strong enough for more laborious work. Here Bernadette lived a calm and uneventful life, her duties causing her to be much in solitude, which she whiled away in petting her lambs. Very often the time had been set when she was to return home, but it was as often postponed. Her friends at Bastres could ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... vital juices from members of the state, where the public inanition is far more sorely felt than in the local exchequer of England. Not content with winking at these abuses, whilst he attempts to squeeze the laborious, ill-paid drudges of English revenue, he lavishes, in one act of corrupt prodigality, upon those who never served the public in any honest occupation at all, an annual income equal to two thirds of the whole collection of the revenues ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... a man to have been allowed to reach his present age entirely ignorant of the psychology of women, though comparative poverty and laborious studies had limited his education in this direction, and left him unspoiled. He knew enough to realize the secret of Miss Wycliffe's charm, and to reflect consciously upon it in connection with himself. Mere beauty, ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... daily occupations, if such they can be called, their joining in occasional games, such as chess and knuckle-bones, and you have a complete picture of the existence—we will not say life—of a Kalmuk paterfamilias. At their laborious days, however, the women never repine; they are accustomed to the burden, and bear it cheerfully; but they age very early, and after a few years of wedlock, not only lose their good looks, but acquire a coarseness of feature and a robustness of figure which make it exceedingly difficult ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... instance, referring to the Mound-Builders, state that "many of these (i.e., sculptures) exhibit a close observance of nature such as we could only expect to find among a people considerably advanced in the minor arts, and to which the elaborate and laborious, but usually clumsy and ungraceful, not to say unmeaning, productions of the savage can claim but a ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw

... the animal's skull to the feet and the entrails. As soon as the skins of beaver and musquash are removed, the bodies, so many skinned cats, are impaled on sticks of jack-pine and set sizzling before the fire. In the woods as in the camp, the laborious work falls to the woman. Lordly man kills the animal and that is all. With her babies on her back or toddling by her side, the wife trails the game home on hand-sled, and afterwards in camp she must dress the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... contrary, though philosophic minds have been engaged in its consideration, and learned pens have not disdained to occupy themselves with its details, it still remains a singular proof of the errors into which the most acute and laborious writers are apt to fall, when they take upon themselves the task of writing on matters which cannot be studied in the closet, and on which no information can be received by mixing in the society of the wise, the lettered, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow

... 629: "The parallel implied here is of the havoc occasioned by Hector, and the laborious tasks imposed by Eurystheus. Such appears to be the ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer

... Mrs. Johnson descended into our kitchen she conjured from the malicious disorder in which it had been left by the flitting Irish kobold a dinner that revealed the inspirations of genius, and was quite different from a dinner of mere routine and laborious talent. Something original and authentic mingled with the accustomed flavors; and, though vague reminiscences of canal-boat travel and woodland camps arose from the relish of certain of the dishes, there was yet the assurance ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)

... featured. Intellect and uncertainty of temper were equally marked upon his visage; his brows were knitted in a permanent expression of severity. He had thin, smooth hair, grizzled whiskers, a shaven chin. In the multitudinous wrinkles of his face lay a history of laborious and stormy life; one readily divined in him a struggling and embittered man. Though he looked older than his years, he had by no means the appearance of being beyond the ripeness of ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... mining community has been startled by the discovery of the notorious gang of bush-rangers, Starlight and the Marstons, domiciled in the very heart of the diggings, attired as ordinary miners, and—for their own purposes possibly—leading the laborious lives proper to the avocation. They have been fairly successful, and as miners, it is said, have shown themselves to be manly and fair-dealing men. We are not among those who care to judge their fellow-men harshly. It may be that they had resolved ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood

... a very determined man, however, and he shouldered his rifle, intent on accomplishing by a laborious prosecution of the chase the means of winning his loved one from her parents, notwithstanding that the elements and the times were against him. He worked industriously, and after many days was rewarded by a goodly supply of beavers, otters, and mink which he had trapped, ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman

... been extended from Rheims over many laborious wooden bridges, stopped short of Charleville by four miles, as the bridges over the Meuse had not yet been made strong enough to support a railroad. To the passenger train, which left Paris twice a week, one goods truck full ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold

... forgive me if I say that, though I honour him much for his many strong and good qualities, I think he is far too given to laborious processes in work and social life.... My warm regard for you rests to some extent on my very high appreciation of your strength and consistency of character: you have always appeared to me to be a supremely honest man, almost comically so, at least when I ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... the data on the fly, slowing down now and then to read something, until a yell from Santos or Koa warned that the sun line was creeping close. When he had all data noted on the board, he started his mathematics. He was right in the middle of a laborious equation when he stumbled over a thorium crystal. He went headlong, shooting like a rocket three feet above the ground. His board flew away at a tangent. His stylus sped out of his glove like a miniature projectile, and the slide ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage

... love would allow,—though, indeed, his words were tender enough. He strove to make her understand that she could have no escape from the dirt and vileness and depth of misery into which she had fallen, without the penalty of a hard, laborious life, in which she must submit to be regarded as one whose place in the world was very low. He asked her whether she did not hate the disgrace and the ignominy and the vile wickedness of her late condition. "Yes, indeed, sir," she answered, with ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope

... have I gained by my laborious researches but an humbling conviction of my weakness and ignorance! Of how little has man, at his best estate, to boast! What folly in him to glory in his contracted powers, or to value himself upon ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous

... good fellow? Whither away after this burdened manner?' What a contrast those two men were to one another in the midst of that plain that day! Our pilgrim was full of the most laborious going; sighs and groans rose out of his heart at every step; and then his burden on his back, and his filthy, slimy rags all made him a picture such that it was to any man's credit and praise that he should stop to speak to him. And then, when ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte

... Rev. Dr. Macknight, who translated anew the Apostolic Epistles, is said to have copied over with his own hand that laborious and valuable work five times, previously to his committing ...
— The Author's Printing and Publishing Assistant • Frederick Saunders

... correct view of Frank's character. He was quiet, inoffensive, laborious, and punctual; though not very social or communicative, yet he was both well-tempered and warm-hearted, points which could not, without considerable opportunities of knowing him, be readily perceived. Having undertaken the accomplishment of an object, he permitted no circumstance to dishearten or ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton

... departed through this gate of the Meidhan, three hours before sun-rise, and took the road by which the Hadj annually commences its laborious journey; this gate is called Bab Ullah, the Gate of God, but might, with more propriety be named Bab-el-Maut, the Gate of Death; for ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... sheeted bed with the two elder survivors of Frapp fecundity, and spent my week days in helping in the laborious disorder of the shop and bakehouse, in incidental deliveries of bread and so forth, and in parrying the probings of my uncle into my relations with the Blood, and his confidential explanations that ten shillings a week—which was what my mother paid him—was not enough to cover my accommodation. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... and nights of toil; but they find it a vain ambition. Before a man can become Senior Wrangler he must have burnt, not only the midnight oil, but some of the very fibre of his soul. Conspicuous positions in the literary and scientific world are less the reward of genius than of laborious, soul-consuming toil. The great chemist will work sixteen hours out of twenty-four. The illustrious author acquires, by profound research, the materials which he weaves into his brilliant page. Such men shine ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... its golden hives, and carved granaries, and irregular domain of latticed and espaliered cottages, gladdening to look upon in their delicate homeliness—delicate, yet in some sort, rude; not like our English homes—trim, laborious, formal, irreproachable in comfort—but with a peculiar carelessness and largeness in all their detail, harmonizing with the outlawed loveliness of their country. For there is an untamed strength even in all that soft and habitable land. It is indeed gilded with corn, and fragrant with deep ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin

... senses.—Both these feelings, the Greeks, whose language is more copious than ours, express by the common name of [Greek: Ponos]: therefore they call industrious men painstaking, or, rather, fond of labor; we, more conveniently, call them laborious; for laboring is one thing, and enduring pain another. You see, O Greece! your barrenness of words, sometimes, though you think you are always so rich in them. I say, then, that there is a difference between laboring and being in pain. When Caius Marius had an operation performed for a swelling ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... if it were necessary to do something, she sat down in a chair, and looked quietly and fixedly in front of her. She felt very old this morning, and useless too, as if her life had been a failure, as if it had been hard and laborious to no purpose. She did not want to go on living, and yet she knew that she would. She was so strong that she would live to be a very old woman. She would probably live to be eighty, and as she was now fifty, ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf

... thus cast away from him the laborious study of the Doctrine of Nirvana, Doshaku, the Great Teacher, himself trusted only in the power of the Divine Promise, and he persuaded men ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin

... possible blunder. "Where there is nothing more to see or to grasp, there is also nothing more for men to do"—that is certainly an imperative different from the Platonic one, but it may notwithstanding be the right imperative for a hardy, laborious race of machinists and bridge-builders of the future, who have nothing but ROUGH work ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... to where a silver lattice fenced a garden that was full of the quiet of evening. Golden bees hummed through the air, and there was the sound of quiet waters. How wild and laborious was the world he had come from, Heracles thought! He felt that it would be hard for him to return ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... find among them several volumes which she remembered to have belonged to her father. Godolphin had bought them after Volktman's death, and put them by as relics of his singular friend, and as samples of the laborious and selfwilled ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... thankles Muse, Were it not better don as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair? Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise 70 (That last infirmity of Noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes: But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze. Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears, And slits the thin spun life. But not the praise, Phoebus repli'd, and touch'd my trembling ears; Fame is no plant that grows on mortal ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... of concreted composition. For me, I must write impromptu, or not at all; none of your conventional impromptus, toils of half-a-day, as little instantaneous as sundry patent lights; no working-up of laborious epigrams, sedulously sharpened antitheses, or scintillative trifles, diligently filed and polished; but the positive impromptu of longing to be an adept at shorthand-writing, by way of catching as they fly ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... Kellieston, and subsequently at the academy of Dumfries. The circumstances of his parents required that he should choose a manual profession; and he was apprenticed by his own desire to a neighbouring mill-wright. It was during his intervals of leisure, while acquiring a knowledge of this laborious occupation, that he first essayed the composition of verses; he submitted his poems to his father, who mingled judicious criticism with words of encouragement. "The Har'st Home," one of his earliest pieces of merit, was privileged with insertion in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... I was in part the almoner of the congregation, the public meetings, the committees to be attended, the constantly widening circle of social relations and engagements, the pressure, in fine, of all sorts of claims upon time and thought, all this made a very laborious life for me. Yet it was pleasant, and very interesting. I thought when I [85]first went to the great city, when I first found myself among those busy throngs, none of whom knew me, beside those ranges of houses, none of which had any association for me, that I should ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... to the scholar it yields a classic result. A very agricola laboriosus was I to travellers bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; I the home-staying, laborious native of the soil. But soon my homestead was out of their sight and thought. It was the only open and cultivated field for a great distance on either side of the road, so they made the most of it; and sometimes the man in the field heard more ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... the difficulty of breathing experienced after scalds or burns on the cuticle, the cough that follows the absorption of cold or damp by the skin, the oppressed and laborious breathing experienced by children in all eruptive diseases, while the rash is coming to the surface, and the hot, dry skin that always attends congestion of the lungs, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... that region. He left me at St. John's in the month of March, as travelling over the snow in the island is considered less difficult in that month than walking overland is at any other season of the year. When we parted I knew that he was going on a laborious and painful journey, but I had formed no idea of the dangers to which he would be exposed, or my heart would indeed have sunk within me. He took with him a guide to pilot him through the country; a man who was reckoned very skilful and experienced, and who had lived ...
— Georgie's Present • Miss Brightwell

... British mechanic, who, when he arrived at Fairmead, with his fare advanced at our expense, demanded the highest wages paid in Canada, and then expressed grave doubts as to whether he could conscientiously undertake the more laborious parts of the framing, because he was a cabinet joiner, and this, so he said, was carpenter's work. We had met others of the kind before, who had made their employers' lives a burden in the old country, but they were the exception, ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... increased, and the majority, of every people are obliged by necessity, or at least strongly incited by ambition and avarice; to employ every talent they possess. After a history of some thousand years employed in manufacture and commerce, the inhabitants of China are still the most laborious and industrious of any ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.

... cunning, and how devout they were in prayers, how fervent they were in heavenly desires, and how they absented them from spectacles of vain seeings and hearings, and how stable they were to let [hinder] and to destroy all vices, and how laborious and joyful they were to sow and plant virtues. These heavenly conditions and such others, have the pilgrims, or endeavour them for to have, whose pilgrimage ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various

... to laugh. "I'm not sure I do, either. But let's try." He sat down at the table and held the receiver to his ear. With the other hand he began the laborious job of locating a sensitive spot ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... May he had not experienced such a sense of well-being. With rolling gait, hat a little to the back of his head, in the position in which he had seen it worn by overworked politicians harassed by pressure of business, allowing all the laborious fever of their brain to evaporate in the coolness of the air, as a factory discharges its steam into the gutter at the end of a day's work, he moved forward among other figures like his own, evidently coming too from that colonnaded temple which faces ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... long and had left nothing behind. Six years had passed, and she did not even remember how she had regained her liberty, so prompt and easy had been her conquest of that husband, cold, sickly, selfish, and polite; of that man dried up and yellowed by business and politics, laborious, ambitious, and commonplace. He liked women only through vanity, and he never had loved his wife. The separation had been frank and complete. And since then, strangers to each other, they felt a tacit, mutual gratitude for their freedom. She would ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... hardened her, as it often does. She had been redeemed by the kindness of those whom she had injured. Mrs. Clifton found her a position, in which her energy and administrative ability found fitting exercise, and she leads a laborious and useful life in a community where her history is not known. As for John Somerville, with the last remnants of a once handsome fortune, he purchased a ticket to Australia, and set out on a voyage for that distant country. But he never ...
— Jack's Ward • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... upon a strict examination that all I am now possessed of does not amount to two-thirds of the fortune my wife brought me on the day of our marriage, together with the yearly additions and advantages since arising from her laborious employment on the stage during twelve years past, I thought myself bound by honesty, honour, and gratitude due to her constant affection, not to give away any part of the remainder of her fortune at my death"; and with that ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... Louis XIV., acting under the advice of the Queen-Regent, to administer all the affairs of the diocese until such time as a new Bishop should be nominated to the vacant See by His Majesty and our Holy Father the Pope. Into this laborious task of sowing, ploughing, cultivating a vast weed-grown, and unpromising field, Camus threw himself with all his old ardour and energy. He did so much in a very short time that his name will long be remembered among the descendants of those from whom the troubles of the times ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus

... An Historical Political, and Statistical Account of Ceylon and its Dependencies, by C. PRIDHAM, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1849. The author was never, I believe, in Ceylon, but his book is a laborious condensation of the principal English works relating to it. Its value would have been greatly increased had Mr. Pridham accompanied his excerpts by references to the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... the corpse has terminated, the widow collects the larger bones, which she rolls up in an envelope of birch bark, and which she is obliged for some years afterwards to carry on her back. She is now considered and treated as a slave, all the laborious duties of cooking, collecting fuel, etc., devolve on her. She must obey the orders of all the women, and even of the children belonging to the village, and the slightest mistake or disobedience subjects her to the infliction of a heavy punishment. The ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow

... of exercise, the first we would recommend is general housework, provided windows are kept open, avoiding the more laborious parts, and always being careful not to get over-fatigued. Light gardening, walks, if not too long, and light gymnastic exercises are all beneficial. The exercises described in the appendix, practised for ten minutes at a time, ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... date takes my fancy. I can see the Anderson of those days, large-boned, sinewy, stooping, with a red, fiery beard, like his present representative, stolid, laborious, contented, building his house here facing the coasts of France, nearly as ignorant of, and quite as indifferent to, the wild work going on over there in Paris town as little Annie herself can be. King, Dictator, Emperor, King, Emperor, Commune, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various

... additions, or, in the more rapidly growing divisions, a still greater space. This will permit accessions to be shelved with their related books, without the trouble of frequently moving and re-arranging large divisions of the library. This latter is a very laborious process, and should be resorted to only under compulsion. The preventive remedy, of making sure of space in advance, by leaving a sufficiency of unoccupied shelves in every division of the library, is the ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... fortunes of a quarter of a million in a few days, and then we have heard them, though notoriously amongst the lowest and basest of human creatures, called 'honourable gentlemen'! In such a state of things, who is to expect patient industry, laborious study, frugality and care; who, in such a state of things, is to expect these to be employed in pursuit of that competence which it is the laudable wish of all men to secure? Not long ago a man, who had served his time to a tradesman ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett

... the monkish student! whose vow of obedience to patristical guidance was thus sorely perplexed; he read and re-read, analyzed passage after passage, interpreted word after word; and yet, poor man, his laborious study was fruitless and unprofitable! What bible student can refrain from sympathizing with him amidst these torturing doubts and this crowd of contradiction, but after all we cannot regret this, for ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... world For England, when amid the embattled fury Of world-wide empires, England stood alone. Still she held back from war, still disavowed The deeds of Drake to Spain; and yet once more Philip, resolved at last never to swerve By one digressive stroke, one ell or inch From his own patient, sure, laborious path, Accepted her suave plea, and with all speed Pressed on his huge emprise until it seemed His coasts groaned with grim bulks of cannonry, Thick loaded hulks of thunder and towers of doom; And, all round Antwerp, Parma still prepared To hurl such armies o'er the rolling ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... husbands are of high rank, live under constant confinement; those of the second class are little better than upper servants, deprived of all liberty; whilst the poort share with their husbands the most laborious occupations. ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux

... but it is not so precious now; and a great work, so far from being treated as a priceless possession and a companion, is regarded only as an item in the menu furnished for a sort of literary debauch. A laborious historian spends ten years in studying an important period; he contrives to set forth his facts in a brilliant and exhilarating style, whereupon the word is passed that the history must be read. People meet, and the usual inquiries ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman

... as an equivalent for its happiness, i.e., for the happiness of love. She has been drawing from the cast of a hand—enraptured with its delicate beauty—thinking how the rapture must have risen into love in the artist who saw it living; when the coarse (laborious) hand of a little peasant girl reminds her that life, whether beautiful or not, is the artist's noblest study; and that, as the uses of a hand are independent of its beauty and will survive it, life with its obligations will survive love. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... in the Proposal was not Swift's eulogy or Harley and the Tory ministry, but his scornful reference to antiquarians as "laborious men of low genius," his failure to recognize that his manifest ignorance of the origins of the language was any bar to his pronouncing on it or legislating for it, and his repetition of some of the traditional ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob

... we commonly understand the violent passions only, which engender a marked disturbance in the soul and the production of which requires a certain propinquity of the object. A man is said to be industrious "from reason," when a calm desire for money makes him laborious. It is a mistake to consider all violent passions powerful, and all calm ones weak. The prevalence of calm affections constitutes the essence of strength ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... adopted mother and sister, and Agricola's good wife, have divided between them the household cares; and God has blessed this little colony of people, who, alas! have been sorely tried by misfortune, and who now only ask of toil and solitude, a quite, laborious, innocent life, and oblivion of great sorrows. Sometimes, in our winter evenings, you have been able to appreciate the delicate and charming mind of the gentle 'Mother Bunch,' the rare poetical imagination of Agricola, the tenderness of his mother, the good sense of his father, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... the history of music we read of what men have been willing to do for the love of their art. It is not that they have been willing to do when told; but that they have cheerfully done painful, laborious tasks of their own accord. The name of every master will recall great labor willingly given for music and equally great suffering willingly endured, nay, even sought out, that the music might be purer to them. Poor Palestrina went along many ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper

... bright and glad, looking as if it would make up for its father's wildness by a gentler treatment of the world. The wind was still high, but the hate seemed to have gone out of it, and given place to a laborious jollity. It swept huge clouds over the sky, granting never a pause, never a respite of motion; but the sky was blue and the clouds were white, and the dungeon-vault of the world was broken ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... my evening to the perusal of Mrs. Rebecca Haygarth's letters. The pale ink, the quaint cramped hand, the old-fashioned abbreviations, and very doubtful orthography rendered the task laborious; but I stuck to my work bravely, and the old clock in the market-place struck two as I began the last letter. As I get deeper into this business I find my interest in it growing day by day—an interest sui generis, apart from all prospect of gain—apart even from the consideration that ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... devoted to intense study. Then, for twelve years, he was employed in teaching and in many laborious and self-denying duties. As was natural, with a young man of his ardent nature and glowing spirit of enterprise, he was very desirous of conveying the glad tidings of the Gospel to those distant nations who had never even heard of ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott

... garden, rough and unfruitful, out of which God plucks the weeds, and plants flowers, which we have to water by prayer. There are four ways of doing this—First, by drawing the water from a well; this is the earliest and most laborious process. Secondly, by a water-wheel which has its rim hung round with little buckets. Third, by causing a stream to flow through it. Fourth, by rain from heaven. The first is ordinary prayer, which is often attended by great sweetness and comfort. But sometimes the well is dry. What then? The ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... hopes, with large purposes, and with calm and earnest persistence. I trust that we shall bear in remembrance that the work we have undertaken is our special function; that it is a work which calls for cool thought, for laborious and tireless painstaking, and for clear discrimination; that it promises nowhere wide popularity, or, exuberant eclat; that very much of its ardent work is to be carried on in the shade; that none ...
— Civilization the Primal Need of the Race - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Paper No. 3 • Alexander Crummell

... This result was arrived at after only ten minutes of calculation, and is believed to be more nearly accurate than that obtained by M. Le Verrier, the great French astronomer, from observations continued through a century and after several years of laborious calculation by a corps of computers. This wonderful difference in the expenditure of time and labor is due to the vigilance of Professor Hall and to the admirable qualities of his instrument, the great twenty-six inch refracting telescope made by Alvan ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various

... was chosen as successor of Pere La Chaise, and a terrible successor he made. Harsh, exact, laborious, enemy of all dissipation, of all amusement, of all society, incapable of associating even with his colleagues, he demanded no leniency for himself and accorded none to others. His brain and his health were of iron; his conduct was so also; ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... questionless the universal favor entertained for it is well merited. In worth as a Book we have rated it beyond any other product of the eighteenth century; all Johnson's own Writings, laborious and in their kind genuine above most, stand on a quite inferior level to it; already, indeed, they are becoming obsolete for this generation; and for some future generations, may be valuable chiefly as Prolegomena and Expository Scholia to this Johnsoniad of Boswell. Which of us but remembers, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various

... the guide insisted upon leaving what looked like the better track, and led him round a sort of shoulder of piled up snow and rock, where walking was very laborious. Tom began to feel the need of food, and would have stopped and opened his wallet; but the man shook his head and gesticulated, and seemed to urge him onwards at some speed. Tom supposed he must obey, as the man pointed warningly to the rocks above, as though to hint that danger might be expected ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green

... moving to St. Louis his profession was the sole mistress of Roswell Field's "laborious days" and bachelor nights. Almost coincident with his becoming interested in the case of the slave, Dred Scott, he met, and more to the purpose of this narrative, became interested in Miss Frances Reed, then of St. Louis, but whose parents hailed from Windham County, Vermont. ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... fall even lower. Mr. Schloss gives the wages of five men working in a small workshop, whose average is less than 11s. a week. These wages do not of course represent skilled work at all. Machinery has taken over all the skilled work, and left a dull laborious monotony of operations which a very few weeks' practice enable a completely unskilled worker to undertake. Probably the bulk of the cheapest work is executed by foreigners, although from figures taken in 1887, of four typical London parishes, it appeared that only 16 per cent, ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... obtain a continuous effect when working clearly upon lines already provided for him, or simulate one by fitting together fragments struck out at intervals. The defect was aggravated or caused by the physical infirmities which put sustained intellectual labour out of the question. The laborious and patient meditation which brings a converging series of arguments to bear upon a single point, was to him as impossible as the power of devising an elaborate strategical combination to a dashing Prince ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... the sun shines fiercely, so that some of them die thereof, and others die of the frozen mixed drinks; for they have ice even in the summer, and this ice they put to their liquor. Through the whole of this island, from the west even to the east, there flows a river called Thames: a great river and a laborious, but not to be likened to ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... began to rise they would all notice him, and so it has proved. I have no doubt I shall gain through them more than the thousand dollars a-year which Sprague will draw, while I shall be saved every thing that is really disagreeable or laborious in my practice; and you give two thousand dollars a-year, and are to have your daughter married to a gentleman who leaves all the business on your hands—which of us, do you think, has attended most ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh

... poor to give us 70 Something to live for here that shall outlive us? Some more substantial boon Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle moon? The little that we see From doubt is never free; The little that we do Is but half-nobly true; With our laborious hiving What men call treasure, and the gods call dross, Life seems a fest of Fate's contriving, 80 Only secure in every one's conniving, A long account of nothings paid with loss, Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires, After our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... This laborious task completed, Raspe lost no time in applying himself with renewed energy to mineralogical work. It was announced in the Scots Magazine for October 1791 that he had discovered in the extreme north of Scotland, where ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe

... "worship in Spirit and in truth." It is easier to get "the sense of the meeting" in choosing a pastor than to learn "the mind of the Spirit" by patient tarrying and humble surrender to God; but the more laborious way will certainly prove the more profitable way. The failure to take this way is, we are persuaded, the cause of more decay and spiritual death in the churches than we have yet imagined. From the watch-tower where we write we can look out on half a score of churches on which "Ichabod" has ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon

... fault lies rather with yourself than with the book. Your knowledge of natural history is so superficial that you are constantly baffled by terms of which you do not understand the meaning, and in which you consequently lose all interest. I admit, however, that the book is hard and laborious reading; and, moreover, that the writer appears to have predetermined from the commencement to reject all ornament, and simply to argue from beginning to end, from point to point, till he conceived that he had made ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler

... Catechisms. In its preface R. Drescher says: "The writings of 1529 to 1530, in their totality were a difficult mountain, and it gives us particular joy finally to have surmounted it. And the most difficult and laborious part of the way, at least in view of the comprehensive treatment it was to receive, was the publication of the Large and the Small Catechism, including the three series of Catechism Sermons. ... The harvest which was garnered fills a ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... the destruction of the Parthenon by the Turks as a great calamity; yet it would be possible, thanks to the laborious studies which have chiefly emanated from Germany, for modern architects to completely restore the Parthenon in its former grandeur; but it is far beyond the power of all the naturalists of the world to restore one ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various

... this important inquiry into the first and final cause of the origin of myth, it is evidently not enough to make a laborious and varied collection of myths, and of the primitive superstitions of all peoples, so as to exhaust the immense field of modern ethnography. Nor is it enough to consider the various normal and abnormal conditions of psychical ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... extremely dull. The former took refuge in the mystic sensualities of the worship of Isis, the latter in the Stoical rules of life. The Romans classified their gods carefully in their order of precedence, analysed their genealogies in the laborious spirit of modern heraldry, fenced them round with a ritual as intricate as their law, but never quite cared enough about them to believe in them. So it was of no account with them when the philosophers announced that Minerva was merely memory. She had never been much else. ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... ancient customs in order to obtain it? Well, since I have been studying the Bee who endows her family with the property of others, I have not yet seen anything in her that points to slothfulness. On the contrary, the parasite leads a laborious life, harder than that of the worker. Watch her on a slope blistered by the sun. How busy she is, how anxious! How briskly she covers every inch of the radiant expanse, how indefatigable she is in her endless quests; in her visits, which are generally ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... Fortuna was sailing bravely across the Sea of Okhotsk some six hundred and fifty miles to the coast of Kamtchatka. This she did in sixteen days. The country of Kamtchatka had now to be crossed, and with boats and sledges this took the whole winter. It was a laborious undertaking following the course of the Kamtchatka River; the expedition had to camp in the snow, and few natives were forthcoming for ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... in a Bill to extend the time for payment of rates and for voters under the new Bill, and because it was opposed he abandoned it suddenly; his friends are disgusted. Robarts told me that the Bank Committee had executed their laborious duties in a spirit of great cordiality, and with a general disposition to lay aside all political differences and concur in accomplishing the best results; a good thing, for it is in such transactions as these, which afford ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville

... M'Queen of Braxfield) was one of the judges of the old school, well known in his day, and might be said to possess all the qualities united, by which the class were remarkable. He spoke the broadest Scotch. He was a sound and laborious lawyer. He was fond of a glass of good claret, and had a great fund of good Scotch humour. He rose to the dignity of Justice-Clerk, and, in consequence, presided at many important political criminal trials about the year 1793-4, such as those of Muir, Palmer, Skirving, Margarot, Gerrold, etc. ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay

... swell a letter with news or observations, of both which he can viva voce satisfy you. He will communicate to you his business in Holland, and I am sure you will assist him to the utmost of your power. He can tell you what an anxious and laborious life I lead here; and, what adds to my misfortune, how impossible it is, in the present critical situation of affairs, for me to quit this post for a single day; much more it is as yet impossible for me to ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various

... the spirit of the multitude must really have been admirable, for the humble and laborious work of plasterers and barrow-men was accepted by all, noble or base-born, as an act of mortification and penance, and at the same time as an honour; and no man was so audacious as to lay hand on the materials belonging to the Virgin ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... by the thought of what she must have borne for it was difficult to imagine Sylvia engaged in laborious domestic toil. It had never occurred to him that her delicate appearance ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss



Words linked to "Laborious" :   labor, effortful



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