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More "Aimless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... There was where the little school-house stood in which she once taught school in 1836. There was where she, riding horseback with a sweetheart who later became governor of the state, once joined with him in a riotous and aimless chase after a black bear which had crossed the road. Her cheeks, upon which there were not many wrinkles, glowed as she told the story of her youth to the man beside her. He looked upon her with the full intelligence of a great relationship for ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... noon Aimless I stand, my promised task undone, And raise my hot eyes to the angry sun That will go down ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... her round of solitude She used to haunt a dead sea-wood Where among boulders lifeless trees Stuck rigid fingers to the breeze— That stream of faint hot air that flits Aimless at noon. 'Tis there she sits Hour after hour, and as a dove Croons when her breast is ripe for love, So sings this exile, quiet, sad chants Of love, yet knows not what she wants; And singing there in undertone, Is one day answered ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... gold, and conquers the gigantic pike that swims in the Styx of Finnish mythology. After this point the story is interrupted by a long sequel of popular bridal songs, and, in the wandering course of the rather aimless epic, the flight and its incidents have been forgotten, or are neglected. These incidents recur, however, in the thread of somewhat different plots. We have seen that they are found in Japan, among the Eskimo, among the Bushmen, the Samoyeds, and the Zulus, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... the dead and the dying to mark their course. Uncertain who were their attackers, and unable to tell their English enemies from their newly-arrived Breton allies, the Spanish knights rode wildly hither and thither in aimless fury. The mad turmoil, the mixture of races, and the fading light, were all in favor of the four who alone knew their own purpose among the vast uncertain multitude. Twice ere they reached open ground they had to break their way through ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... grey in the awful cloud-land, where the red rents went and came Round the snows no summers minish and the far-off sunset flame: But lo, the burg at the ridge-end! have the Gods been building again Since they watched the aimless Giants pile up the wall of the plain, The house for none to dwell in? Or in what days lived the lord Who 'neath those thunder-forges upreared that battle's ward? Or was not the Smith at his work, and the blast of his forges awake, And the world's heart ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... people in this temper Charles II. was the natural and rightful head. He may have been a pantomime King, but he was a King, and with all his geniality he let nobody forget it. He was not, indeed, the aimless flaneur that he has been represented. He was a patient and cunning politician, who disguised his wisdom under so perfect a mask of folly that he not only deceived his allies and opponents, but has deceived almost all the historians that have come after him. But if Charles was, as he emphatically ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... temper, but for conscience; not, as we devoutly believe, that our will is done, but that God's will hath been done. We should be unworthy of that liberty intrusted to our care, if, on such a day as this, we sullied our hearts by feelings of aimless vengeance; and equally unworthy if we did not devoutly thank him who hath said: "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord," that he hath set a mark upon arrogant rebellion, ineffaceable ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... the first. Book-shops full of old plays, and a man who talked of Scott's width of imagination and Clay's statesmanship, were indigestible matter which Berrytown would gladly have spewed out of her mouth. "What have aimless imagination and temporizing policy to do with the Advancement of Mankind? Dead weight, sir, dead weight! which but clogs the wheels of the machine." Any schoolboy in Berrytown could have so reasoned you the matter. While Catharine was growing up, therefore, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... from the Grand Duke and everybody. Not such an aimless day as usual. I got into a new sitting-room and put it straight, and in the evening we went to Prince Orloff's box for a performance of "Carmen." It was very Russian and wealthy. At the back of the box were two anterooms, where we sat and talked between the acts, and where tea, chocolates, etc., ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... preach such doctrines, and they cannot escape their share of responsibility for the whirlwind that is reaped. This applies alike to the deliberate demagogue, to the exploiter of sensationalism, and to the crude and foolish visionary who, for whatever reason, apologizes for crime or excites aimless discontent. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... what the outcome of all their troubles was to be. She couldn't go on in this aimless way, day after day. She must find something to do that would pay her a salary, and it must be something that she could do at home, where she would be needed sorely as soon as the nurse left. Then she would go over ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... of college life, of foreign travel, of social engagements, or of philanthropic enterprise. Still, a residue remains even of girls of this class whose own inclinations, or whose family circumstances, lead to an aimless, purposeless existence, productive of much injury to both body and mind, and only too likely to end in hopeless ennui and nervous troubles. It should be thoroughly understood by parents and guardians that no matter what the girl's circumstances may be, she ought always to have an abundance of ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... (1762-1814) talks in certain of his writings as though he believed himself to be the universe, and his words cause Jean Paul Richter, the inimitable, to break out in his characteristic way: "The very worst of it all is the lazy, aimless, aristocratic, insular life that a god must lead; he has no one to go with. If I am not to sit still for all time and eternity, if I let myself down as well as I can and make myself finite, that I may have something in the way of society, still I have, like petty princes, only my own creatures ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... far in mere aimless fashion; leaning against a wall he strove once more to plan, but ever as he did so, through his thought the girl's fair face, looking out from enshrouding lace, intruded. Again he felt the light of her eyes, all the bitterness of spirit their ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... left him in burning wonder. He panted to know if she, too, knew, or knew and cared not, or cared and knew not. She was so strange and human a creature. To her all things meant something—nothing was aimless, nothing merely happened. Was this rain beating down and back her love for him, or had she never loved? He walked his room, gripping his hands, peering through the misty windows toward the swamp—rain, rain, rain, nothing but rain. The world was ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... me that I saw in the faces and forms of the people the results of this too monotonous existence. The young women are mostly pale, flat-chested, and somewhat thin. The young men look good-natured, but aimless. The older women and men are slow in their movements, placid, very quiet, and apparently satisfied ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... in their transformation from salt to fresh water fish. I had to effect my transition in a few weeks. Catholicism, like a fairy circle, casts such a powerful spell upon one's whole life, that when one is deprived of it everything seems aimless and gloomy. I felt terribly out of my element. The whole universe seemed to me like an arid and chilly desert. With Christianity untrue, everything else appeared to me indifferent, frivolous, and undeserving of interest. The shattering of my career left ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... commended as a recognition of the superior importance of literary matters. Amateur journalism is rapidly progressing nearer and nearer its ideal: a device for the instruction of the young and crude, and an aid for the obscure author of any sort, rather than a playground for the aimless ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... grow misanthropical when I saw in the eyes of so many who were called old, the gushing fountains of eternal youth, and the light of an immortal dawn, or when I saw those who were esteemed unsuccessful and aimless, ruling a fair realm of peace and plenty, either in themselves, or more perfectly in another—a realm and princely possession for which they had well renounced a hopeless search and a belated triumph. I knew one man who had been for years ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... satisfied if you'll only tell me one thing.' She put her hands to her head with a rapid, aimless movement that showed the extremity of her agitation. 'Oh, what has love done with me?' she cried desperately. 'I was so proud of my brother and so utterly devoted to him. But I loved you so much that there wasn't any room in my heart for the past. I forgot all my unhappiness ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... to bed early that night, wearied in all his limbs with much and aimless walking. If, as he trudged highroad or lane in the early summer heat, any thought of Mrs Bosenna arose for a moment and conquered the anodyne of bodily exercise, it was not a thought of grudging her to 'Bias. By the turn of Fortune's wheel 'Bias would win her now. To him, at all ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... something of the world. Perhaps, she, too, could offer some suggestion as to how the life of a poor aimless thing like Claudia Haberton might be animated by ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... and that the effects of that blow, with the desolation of heart and fortune which the heavier ones, struck at the same time, had entailed, might have driven him to the woods, an idle, and perhaps aimless, wanderer. ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... was restless and disposed to dark hours, and there is reason to suspect that there was in him a vein of insanity. His later writings were incomprehensible. When we were living in England, he passed through the midst of us on one of his aimless, mysterious journeys round the world; and when I was in New York, in 1884, I met him, looking pale, sombre, nervous, but little touched by age. He died a few years later. He conceived the highest admiration for ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... is used in talking,—from the aimless motion of the hands, the shoulders, the feet, the entire body, to a certain rigidity of carriage, which tells as powerfully in the wear and tear of the nervous system as superfluous motion. It is a curious discovery when we find often how we are holding our shoulders in ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... affinity[10]—all of which Olimpia listened to with great reverence. He fished up from the very bottom of his desk all the things that he had ever written—poems, fancy sketches, visions, romances, tales, and the heap was increased daily with all kinds of aimless sonnets, stanzas, canzonets. All these he read to Olimpia hour after hour without growing tired; but then he had never had such an exemplary listener. She neither embroidered, nor knitted; she did not look out of the window, or feed a bird, or play with ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... days the soldiers rested, recruiting their forces after their long and perilous marches. The impatience of the Emperor Alexander had already carried the general quarters of the allies to Wischau. It was there that General Savary presented himself, intrusted with aimless negotiations, which gave him opportunity to examine the condition of the Austro-Russian army. Prince Dolgorouki, sent from Bruenn with the reply of the Emperor Alexander, was received at the advanced posts. ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... her body. Her aimless hands struck the spiked surface of a cactus-bush, but she never knew it. When the song finished, she crept to the grating and ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... the old mare went round to begin another of those endless journeys through London streets which horses, if they reason at all, must find so utterly incomprehensible and aimless. ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... it with the sloes, Snared by their home-picked brand of ardent gin Designed to warm a shivering sportsman's toes And light a fire his reckless head within? Or did my silly loader put me off With aimless chatter ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... practice to affect the jocular early-bird squire, and drag Plank out of bed. And Plank, in no position to be anything but flattered by such sans gene, laboriously and gratefully splashed through his bath, wallowed amid the breakfast plates, and mounted a hunter for long and apparently aimless gallops with Mortimer. ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... sardonic anguish, for he felt that his life was aimless if he should have no son ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... Forster says that he began to feel a strain upon his invention, a certain disquietude, and a necessity for jotting down memoranda in note-books, so as to assist his memory and his imagination. He began to long for solitude. He would take long, aimless rambles into the country, returning at no particular time or season. He once wrote ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... have been the Devil who arranged the thing, but the fact of the case is that Losson had for a long time been worrying Simmons in an aimless way. It gave him occupation. The two had their cots side by side, and would sometimes spend a long afternoon swearing at each other; but Simmons was afraid of Losson and dared not challenge him to a fight. He thought over the words ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... I knew she had taken my hands and was coyly holding them in the position desired. She released them presently, and the little board began to slide around in an aimless sort of way. There seemed to be some force tugging it about. I looked at my partner, first with suspicion, and then with a vast relief. If she was doing it, then all that talk about spirits——Oh, I did hope Miss Laura Hinkle ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... narrowness of mind and short- sightedness, which are the proper and inalienable privileges of all genuine patricianism, were true to their character also in Rome, and rent the powerful commonwealth asunder in useless, aimless, and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... thee is shadow, to Him is day, And the end He knoweth; And not on a blinded, aimless ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... is not completely developed, and it is impossible for the infant to coordinate its movements, mothers wasted several half-hours of the day "teaching baby to walk." Holding the little creature by the body, they watched the aimless movements of the tiny feet, and deluded themselves with the belief that the child was already making an effort to walk; and because it does actually by degrees begin to arch its feet and move its legs more boldly, the mother attributed its progress ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... swung about and glared defiantly at his pursuers out of injected eyes. He had never seen a lasso before, possibly not a man; but his instinct told him that the horse and rider behind him were not roving the plain in his own aimless fashion. He stood pawing the ground and shaking his great red nostrils. Suddenly to his surprise the part of the horse new to him lifted itself, and a black coiling something, graceful and swift as a rattlesnake, sprang through the air with a sharp ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... the ridge, Jack could see figures moving to and fro in the aimless manner natural to such indolent people. There were children running and playing among the stumps and dwellings—half naked little knots of humanity, who in a few years would become the repulsive squaws or terrible warriors of the tribe. ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... we say?—eupeptic. And certainly a much more elaborate meal than my lord DEVONPORT allowed me would be required to induce a mood sufficiently tolerant to face without impatience the welter which followed. The three incredible people—mercenary virgin, heavy father and aimless smiling villain—that walked straight out of the Elephant and Castle into the Second Act were not, I suspect, any elaborate (and quite irrelevant) joke of the actor-author's at the expense of the transpontine method, but just queer puppets brought on to disentangle the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various
... Hours aimless-drifting as the milkweed's down In seeming, still a seed of joy ye bear That steals into the soul when unaware, And springs up Memory ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... after all Mr. Dalton" I answered swinging one kid shoe in an aimless indifferent manner, and looking purposely away at the leg of the rustic table, "cause this Amey Hampden hasn't got any friends, or any one to ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... From an aimless, idle, and useless brain, emergencies often call out powers and virtues before unknown and suspected. How often we see a young man develop astounding ability and energy after the death of a parent, or the loss of a fortune, or after some other calamity has knocked the props and crutches from ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... went farther, and wandered about Germany. I tried to amuse myself, and I failed miserably. With the aimless whims of an idle and useless man come all sorts of suggestions for good resolutions. One day I made up my mind that I would go and bury myself in a German university for a time, and live simply like a poor student. I ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... sighed Mabel. "It is a pity he is so utterly aimless. He might have made a career for himself by this time, if ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... as they are) leading hither and yon—(how made I know not, for nobody seems to come here, nor man nor cattle-kind.) Temperature to-day about 60, the wind through the pine-tops; I sit and listen to its hoarse sighing above (and to the stillness) long and long, varied by aimless rambles in the old roads and paths, and by exercise-pulls at the young saplings, to keep my joints from getting stiff. Blue-birds, robins, meadow-larks begin ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... minutes or more I stood there begging Madame Coutance to escape, and all the while the number of people in the street steadily increased. They had done no mischief as yet, but passed their time in an aimless sort of promenade, shouting, singing, and mocking at any well-dressed passer-by. Once the whole crowd for some reason swept into the adjoining street, and for a brief period the Rue Crillon ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... impossible to tell how the sense of Esclairmonde's trust, and of the resolute self-denial it would require of him, elevated Malcolm's whole tone, and braced his mind. The taking away of his original high purpose had rendered him as aimless and pleasure-loving as any ordinary lad; but the situation in which he now stood—guarding this saintly being for her chosen destiny, at the expense of all possible earthly projects for his own happiness or ambition—was such as to bring out that higher side of his nature that ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the aimless work of this supposed forger. There are many passages in the Collier folio, some of a few lines, others of many, which are entirely stricken out; and of these there is not one that we have noticed which it could possibly have been intended to represent as spurious. What was a forger ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Nearly all the audience got on benches, and, shaking their fists, shouted: "Atheist! aristocrat! low rascal!" whilst the president's bell kept ringing continuously, and the cries of "Order! order!" redoubled. But, aimless, and, moreover, fortified by three cups of coffee which he had swallowed before coming to the meeting, he struggled in the ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... protested. Alvin told the particulars of their trip in the launch from home to Wiscasset and return, omitting of course all reference to Stockham Calvert that would give a hint of his profession and his purpose in making what looked like an aimless ramble through this portion of Maine. The Captain was assured that his boat would not be disturbed where it lay moored under the bank, and he and Chester gave no further ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... how through the silence the sound of a footstep was magnified a thousandfold, ringing down the desolate pathways away and away to the smallest shrill distinctness, and she saw also the alleys and lane-ways hooded in blackness, and the one or two human fragments who drifted aimless and frantic along the lonely streets, striving to walk easily for fear of their own thundering footsteps, cowering in the vastness of the city, dwarfed and shivering beside the gaunt houses; the thousands upon thousands of black houses, each deadly ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... observed that there was no traceable reason why the girl with a scar should appear to Mr. G., or the soldier and suppliant to Mrs. M., or Lieutenant B. to General Barker. The appearances came in a vague, casual, aimless way, just as the living and healthy clergyman appeared to the diplomatist. On St. Augustine's theory the dead persons who appeared may have known no more about the matter than did the living clergyman. It is ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... pausing frequently and in such a low voice that Powell had to strain his hearing to catch the phrases dropped overboard as it were. And indeed they seemed not worth the effort. It was like the aimless talk of a man pursuing a secret train of thought far removed from the idle words we so often utter only to keep in touch with our fellow beings. An hour passed. It seemed as though Mr Smith could not make up his mind to go below. He ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... moment. Even when she is sitting down her body moves in a manner that is almost convulsive. I am beginning to think that the strain from which she suffered is bringing on some nervous disease, and I am really alarmed. She walks about the house in a peculiarly aimless manner, up and down the stairs, in and out of the garden. She has grown suddenly much more silent, and the look has come back to her eyes which they had when first we brought her down here. When I beg her to tell me what is troubling her, she says: 'I'm afraid that something ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... of those who had once sought to marry her. She recalled him as an amiable and aimless boy; and after she had gone East she had received with incredulity and then with amusement the news of his venture into altruistic politics. It was his efficiency she had doubted, not his sincerity. Later tidings, contemptuous ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the general ugliness of that rain-swept dawn. Its maples were gaunt skeletons, its garden a sodden field over which the chickens were wandering in sad and aimless fashion. To my city-bred wife this home-coming must have been a cruel shock, but it was the best I could do, and whatever the girl felt, she concealed with a smile, resolute to make the ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... all through the most interesting month of June the cottonwood-trees are shedding their cotton, and to a person on the watch for slight stirrings among the leaves the falling cotton is a constant distraction. The butterflies, too, wandering about in their aimless way, are all the time deceiving the bird student, and drawing attention from the ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... during this apparently aimless disquisition, had been drawn from his meal to the speaker. He saw an elderly gentleman, clothed in the black frock-coat and black tie of the rural lawyer of the old school. His eyes shot keen and kindly glances from the deep ambush of great white ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... fixed on nothing with respect to the serious business of life. I am, just as usual, a rhyming, mason-making, raking, aimless, idle fellow. However, I shall somewhere have a farm soon. I was going to say, a wife too; but that must never be my blessed lot. I am but a younger son of the house of Parnassus, and like other younger sons of great families, I may intrigue, if I choose to run all ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... abruptly and found myself in a long, dreary street; looking in the semi-fog and drizzle more desolate than those dismal old-world streets of Bath I had passed through already in my aimless wandering; I turned sharply and came almost face to ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... chin; small, snub or sway-back nose; high forehead, flat at the brows and prominent above; soft consistency; great flexibility of the joints of hands and fingers; a head narrow above and behind the ears and square in the back; a timid, apprehensive expression; rather aimless movements and gestures, and a small thumb, set high on the hand. Rare, indeed, is the person who has all of these indications. So rare, in fact, that he is scarcely a normal being if he has them ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... sad and solemn funeral, Alone and weeping and disconsolate, I sat at evening by the cottage door. I felt as if a dark and bitter fate Had fallen on me in my tender years. I seemed an aimless wanderer doomed to grope In vain among the darkling years and die. One only star shone through the shadowy mists. The moon that wandered in the gloomy heavens Was robed in shrouds; the rugged, looming hills Looked desolate;—the silent river ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... Again, when he essayed to bathe his parched and crackling limbs in its flood, he would be confronted with the dazzling lights of the motionless steamboat and the glare of stony eyes—until he fled in aimless terror. How long this lasted he knew not, until one morning he awoke in his new cabin with a strange man sitting by his bed and a ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... an unthinking, careless hand; the same hand that created masterpieces, prompted by the slightest impulse, the least sensation. When I looked at them superficially they seemed disfigured by all sorts of smudges and thick black lines, which cross and recross in a seemingly wild and aimless sort of way; but when looked into carefully, they all have a meaning of their own, and have been put there with a just and deep felt appreciation of light and shade. The greater compositions crowded with figures, the buildings, the landscapes—all ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... quite enough rope to answer for all, the babe was strangled by means of a red silk handkerchief, taken, doubtless, from the neck of its mother. It was a distressing sight. A most cruel outrage had been committed upon unarmed people—our friends and allies—in a spirit of aimless revenge. The perpetrators were citizens living near the middle block-house, whose wives and children had been killed a few days before by the hostiles, but who well knew that these unoffending creatures had had nothing to do ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... decaying city by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the world calls wealth. Ligeia had brought me far more, very far more than ordinarily falls to the lot of mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary and aimless wandering, I purchased, and put in some repair, an abbey, which I shall not name, in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England. The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... where the world went very well, the eye of Skipper Tommy Lovejoy chanced in aimless roving to alight upon the letter from Wolf Cove, still securely fastened to the wall, ever visible warning to that happy household against the wiles o' women. I fancy that (the twins being gone to Trader's Cove to enquire for us) the mild blue eye wickedly ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... which is the main thoroughfare of Tokyo, along the avenue of slender willow trees which do their gallant utmost to break the monotony of the wide ramshackle street, were spread every evening the stock-in-trade of the yomise, the night shops, which cater their most diverse wares for the aimless multitudes sauntering up and down the sidewalks. There are quack medicines and stylograph pens, clean wooden altar cabinets for the kitchen gods, and images of Daikoku and Ebisu; there are cheap underclothing and old ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... mother to rest among the early reddening sumacs under the hot glare of the August sun; and when she came away, she brought her father with her to Boston, where he spent his days as he might, taking long and aimless walks, devouring heaps of newspapers, rusting in idleness, and aging fast, as men do in ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... seem to him as if he was in duty bound to remain at the farm during the remainder of that day at least; but there was in his mind the fact that he must continue his aimless journey that very night, or be willing to give a detailed account ...
— Aunt Hannah and Seth • James Otis
... the mountains are nameless, And the rivers all run God knows where; There are lives that are erring and aimless, And deaths that just hang by a hair; There are hardships that nobody reckons; There are valleys unpeopled and still; There's a land — oh, it beckons and beckons, And I want to go back — and ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... an aimless man. He was a brilliant sailor, not because he set himself to the task, but merely because seamanship was born in him, together with a dogged steadiness of nerve and a complete fearlessness. It was so easy to be a good sailor that he had not even the satisfaction of having to make an effort. His ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... house when she lay sleeping in the forenoon. Their sense of chivalry would not have permitted it. When she arose she called them to her and patted their heads and said: 'What dear parents I have!' It might be thought that the fair Frances led an aimless and idle life. Not so. The young lady was very busy and never forgot her aim. She was preparing herself to be a marryer of men and the leading marryer in the proud city of her birth. Every member of the household became her assistant in this ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... the depths, in bitterness she cried, 'Hell is on earth, and heaven is but a dream; And human life a troubled aimless stream; And God is nowhere. Would God so deride A loving creature's faith?' A voice replied, 'The stream flows onward to the Source Supreme, Where things that ARE replace the things that SEEM, And where the deeds of all past lives abide. Once at thy door Love languished and ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the future, that nation cries out to us to make a wise decision now, to take no step which might lead to the downfall or even to the extermination of their race, and thus make all their sacrifices of no avail. Our struggle, up to the present, has not been an aimless one. We have not been fighting in mere desperation. We began this strife, and we have continued it, because we wanted to maintain our independence and were prepared to sacrifice everything for it. But we must not sacrifice the African nation itself upon the ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... the wood, and entered one of the many aimless paths that wandered through it. The uneven ground sloped downwards to the south, and through the manifold branches of the undergrowth of budding hazels the sea lay deeply blue, far away. The primroses were everywhere among ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... commonplace, she was not even the rather drooping form that had caught his facile sense of beauty when he had proposed to her in the Recreation Ground. There was something too that did not please him in the angle of her hat, it was indeed an ill-conceived hat with large aimless rosettes of pink and grey. Then his mind passed to Mrs. Larkins and the bonnet that was to gain such a hold upon him; it seemed to be flag-signalling as she advanced, and to the two eager, unrefined ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... that Mr. Speaker does— With nobody to help him except the trembling Sergeant, While still begin and never end the shout and scream and buzz? Oh, never any where, save in desert groves Brazilian, Was ever heard such endless and aimless gabble yet. For there the tribes of monkeys to the number of a million, Screech and chatter without ceasing, from the sunrise to the set. Rap! rap! rap! To quell the rising clamor; Order! order! order! ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... Manor, and finding his old quarters at Sir Roderick's swept and garnished, incontinently took up his abode there, and proceeded to look round for some suitable occupation. When this momentous but invisible event accomplished itself, Sir Roderick was outwardly engaged in the innocent and aimless pursuit of knocking the billiard balls about and listening absently to a discourse from Morewood on the essential truths which he (Morewood) had grasped and presented alone of modern artists. The theme was not exhilarating, and Sir Roderick's tenant soon ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... And like it all the rest of the natural world, faithful to the law of its Maker, was stamped with the same signet of perfection. Only man, in all the universe, seemed to be at cross purposes with the end of his being. Only man, of all animate or inanimate things, lived an aimless, fruitless, broken life,—or fruitful only in evil. How was this? and whence? and when would be the end? and would this confused mass of warring elements ever be at peace? would this disordered machinery ever work smoothly, ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... gigantic concussions. A mass of glass and ironwork fell from the remote roofs into the middle gallery, not a hundred yards away from him, and in the distance were shouts and running. He, too, was startled to an aimless activity, and ran first one way and then ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... gone around to the northeast and freshened steadily, driving the waves in from the sea in steep gray hills, quite different from anything Jeremy had before experienced. The sloop, under three reefs and a storm jib, began to make rough weather of it, staggering up and down the long slopes in an aimless, dizzy fashion that made Jeremy and Bob very unhappy. The poor young New Englander had to perform his regular tasks no matter how he felt within, but once the work was done he stumbled forward miserably and lay ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... Harding took its way to the performance. I had taken the precaution to set my watch fifteen minutes fast. Tom was nervously preparing himself for the ordeal. He fidgeted himself into his best suit an hour before the time, carried his hat about the room in the most aimless and demented way and consulted his watch a hundred times. I was to accompany him to church, and I spent the time fussing about the room, doing the most extraordinary things in the most exasperating manner—in short, keeping up Tom's feverish excitement by every wicked device ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... parties, and contributed to augment the discord prevailing, and to weaken the party of the Princes by dividing it. The Duchess de Longueville, when no longer guided by La Rochefoucauld, did not fail to lose herself in aimless projects, and to compromise herself in intrigues without result. On Nemours being wounded, his wife repaired to the army to tend him, and the Duchess de Chatillon, under pretext of visiting one of her chateaux, accompanied her as far as Montargis; thence ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... not new to him. He cast one gently reproachful glance on her, then lowered his eyes to the carpet, and kept them there. "Do you think," said he, in a low, dejected voice, "it can be any pleasure to a man to relate the follies of an idle, aimless life? and to you, who have given me higher aspirations, and made me awfully sorry, I cannot live my whole life over again. I can't bear to think of the years I have wasted," said he; "and how can I talk to you, whom I reverence, of the past follies I despise? ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... Otherwise she would split up into many impotent states and be at the mercy of the solidary races adjoining her. But who could not want the Hohenzollerns? They had made of Germany—really a small, poor country—a mighty power. Look at huge America, by contrast! She was weak, disorganized, aimless. She was the proverbial giant with few bones. The western half of the United States was still practically undeveloped, and yet it ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... ran up the steps of the porch and found momentary safety in the darkness of its heavy vines. But this he knew could not last. Running figures were converging toward him at a focal point. He could hear oaths and cries. Some one was throwing aimless shots from a revolver at ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... wall of the empty pig-stye, cut out into a stubble field. He was not afraid of his mother missing him till bedtime, as it was the wont of the youths—especially of those who had comfortless homes—to wander about in parties in the evening, bat-fowling sometimes, but often in an aimless sort of way, doing little bits of mischief, and seeking diversion, which they seldom found, unless there was any solitary figure to be shouted at and startled. His father was not likely to come in till after he was turned out of the public-house; so John strode, ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... their labors are judged today, the greater service which these men rendered appears in its true light. They stifled provincialism; they battered down Chinese Walls of prejudice and separatism; they reduced the aimless rivalry of bickering provinces to a businesslike common denominator; and, perhaps more than any class of men, they made possible the wide-spreading and yet united Republic that is honored and ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... wrong." He broke off his speech, for at the half-open door stood Paul. He was very pale, and his eyes had the expression of some hunted creature. His attire was in disorder and betokened a night spent in aimless ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... her now; it followed her from room to room of her house; it drove her out of doors. It seemed to her that she went before it with quick uncertain feet and a fluttering heart, aimless and tormented as a leaf driven by a vague light wind. Sometimes it sent her up the field towards the wood; sometimes it would compel her to go a little way towards the Farm; and then it was as if it took her ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... kind; though it must be confessed that the keenest and best enthusiasm seems to me there to be drifting away from the literary side of education. But while an old and outworn humanist tradition is allowed to prevail, while the studies of the average passman are allowed to be diffuse, desultory, and aimless, and of a kind from which it is useless to expect either animation or precision, so long will a blight rest upon the education of the country. While boys of average abilities continue to be sent to the Universities, and while the Universities maintain the classical fence, so long ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Britain cocks crew lustily all night on December 24th to scare away witches and evil spirits, and in Bavaria some of the countrymen made frequent and apparently aimless trips in their sledges to cause the hemp to grow ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... the glass and studied the pirate, who was loafing along in an aimless fashion, stopping every few steps to scan the ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... was over, and the bridge players were established on the veranda, he drifted off to the smoking-room in an aimless, inconsequent fashion, and his hostess and accomplice saw him ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... a dull glow still lingered in the western sky, though the shadows of dusk were fallen on the fort and its surroundings, Major Hester passed the sentry at one of the gates and walked slowly, as though for an aimless stroll, as far as the little French-Canadian church. On reaching it he detected a dim figure in its shadow and asked in a low tone, ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... Meffia, walking about the court, in her irritatingly aimless fashion, passed between Brinnaria and the edge of the tank. There was no earthly reason for her so doing, as Brinnaria was barely a yard from the margin of the pool, and on the other side of Brinnaria was the ample expanse of the ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... as little better than insane had he not been prepared by Miss Egerton's description; and he now acquiesced in the young lady's desire to detain him another hour, half amused and half wearied with her aimless and wild fancies. But here he was mistaken. Her fancies were not aimless; his heart was the game she had in view, and she determined a desperate attack should make it her own, in return for the deep wounds she had received from every tone of his voice, whilst ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... restored to health by gentleness and skill, were driven into hopeless madness by noxious medicines and brutality. Some few were saved as mere lunatics—they were surrendered to general carelessness, and became simply a prey to ridicule and aimless brutality; but vast numbers were punished as tabernacles ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... almost any one of Tennyson's more serious poems, and it will be found pervaded by the thought of life as to be fulfilled and perfected only through moral endurance and struggle. "Ulysses" is no restless aimless wanderer; he is driven forth from inaction and security by that necessity which impels the higher life, once begun within, to press on toward its perfecting this all-possible sorrow, peril, and fear. "The Lotos-eaters" are no mere legendary myth: they shadow forth what the lower instincts of our ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... listening again to old Rose. She was now complaining that some white young'uns had called her "raving Rose." She hoped "God'lmighty would send down two she bears and eat 'em up." Peter was amazed by the old crone's ability to maintain an unending flow of concentrated and aimless virulence. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... dubious grimace, he went aft. Iff, however, wasn't in the smoking-room. Neither was he anywhere else that Staff could discover in his somewhat aimless wanderings. And he found his stateroom unoccupied when at length he decided to ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... peopled by really thinking beings, it could not be that noise of every kind would be allowed such generous limits, as is the case with the most horrible and at the same time aimless form of it.[1] If Nature had meant man to think, she would not have given him ears; or, at any rate, she would have furnished them with airtight flaps, such as are the enviable possession of the bat. But, in truth, ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... his son with but one idea. This child shall have the full advantages of regular college-training; and so for years he battles with a boy abhorring study, and fitted only for a life of out-door energy and bold adventure,—on whom Latin forms and Greek quantities fall and melt aimless and useless, as snow-flakes on the hide of a buffalo. Then the secret agonies,—the long years of sorrowful watchings of those gentler nurses of humanity who receive the infant into their bosom out of the void unknown, and strive to ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... tides of life, that seem In wayward, aimless course to tend, Are eddies of the mighty stream That rolls to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... duration; and what Mr Wilson proves in his cricket-ground, what London shewed in the time of the World's Fair, generations and countries would always exhibit in larger characters, more widely read—that the mind and body of man require amusement—simple pleasure—purposeless, aimless, unintellectual, physical pleasure—as much as his digestive organs require food and his hands work; not as the sole employment, but mixed in with, and forming the basis and the body of higher things—the strong practical woof through which the warp of golden ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... one of the aimless remarks that such folks indulge in. The hope of freedom filled him with such joy that he could not be troubled to consider the words of a man who was no more than a better sort of peasant. He set to work at once, and had filed the bars through in the course of the day. Fearing a visit ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... "internationalism" take the place of these powerful personal loyalties to racial ideals?... "Mere boys led to the slaughter" is the sentimentality one hears of the marching conscripts of European armies. Better even so than the curse of no supreme allegiance, or devotion, or readiness to sacrifice—than the aimless selfishness in which our American ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... no aimless travesty of the average Wall Street man, but a faithful etching of him, apart from those more sorry lineaments which might be disclosed in a portrait painted, as it were, with the oil of his own slippery speculations. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... been especially rich in such novels. There was, for example, Fitzgerald's ragged, but brilliant, "This Side of Paradise," which conducted aimless and expansive youth from childhood through college. There was the much more impressive "Main Street," biographic in form, but with teeth set on edge in revolt. There was the vivid and ill-controlled sex novel "Erik Dorn," and Evelyn Scott's "The Narrow House," in which the miseries of a young girl ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... walked up to the Carlings' house one Sunday afternoon, and saw that it was closed, as he had expected. By an impulse which was not part of his original intention—which was, indeed, pretty nearly aimless—he was moved to ring the doorbell; but the maid, a stranger to him, who opened the door could tell him nothing of the family's whereabouts, and Mr. Betts (the house man in charge) was "hout." So John retraced his steps with a feeling of disappointment wholly disproportionate ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... did. But look at that creature's wavering, unsteady flight; his aimless wanderings, anywhere or nowhere; and compare it with the 'mounting up with wings as eagles', which a Christian soul may know, even in this life,—compare it with the swift 'return to God who gave it'—with the being 'caught ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... seemed to slide off his shoulders and neck as Fancy swung smartly around the bend into the narrow wagon-road that stretched its aimless way through the scrubby bottom-lands and over the ridge to the open sweep of the plains beyond. Presently he urged the mare to a rhythmic lope, and all the while his ears were alert for the thud of galloping horses behind. It was not until he reached the table-land ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... thoughts men have had through three centuries on a matter that has been so near their hearts, the new body—a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over those too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in the doorway, a feather in ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... consideration. Nothing is more startling than the contrast between the heavy, formal, lifeless slang of the man-about-town and the light, living, and flexible slang of the coster. The talk of the upper strata of the educated classes is about the most shapeless, aimless, and hopeless literary product that the world has ever seen. Clearly in this, again, the upper classes have degenerated. We have ample evidence that the old leaders of feudal war could speak on occasion with a certain natural symbolism and eloquence that they had not gained from books. When Cyrano ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... the room in an apparently aimless manner. On the side wall hung a cheap etching of a woodland scene. Kennedy seemed engrossed in it while the rest of us fidgeted at ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... physical or to a mental agent, and is either aimless or directed. If directed, it shows tendency. The tendency may or may not be resisted. If not, we call the activity immanent, as when a body moves in empty space by its momentum, or our thoughts wander at their own sweet will. If resistance is met, its agent complicates the ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... pistol, but before he could pull the trigger a shot from a trooper in the rear, and who from his position could well observe the intention of Morley, struck Stephen in the breast; still he fired, but aimless and without effect. The troopers pushed on; Morley fainting fell back with his friends who were frightened, except Devilsdust, who had struck hard and well, and who in turn had been slightly sabred. The yeomanry entered the muniment room almost at ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... did no more aimless sauntering after they had slipped round a corner and eluded Kate Gardiner's curious eyes. Had their business not been of life-and-death importance, they would have felt like children escaped from school; since the least imprudence might lose them the stake for which they played, and Kate's presence ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... these apparently aimless strolls with a stenographer he visited not only the classrooms and shops but every corner of the great institution. He would return to his office with a notebook full of memoranda of matters to be followed up or changed, and of people to be commended ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... the floor of his prison, tugging at his chains with an absent, aimless, all but perpetual motion; for he had long since convinced himself that his fetters could not be broken or loosed. The ruby light that had shown him the food and wine placed for him had faded away to the faintest red glow which scarcely sufficed to reach the tabouret. ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... object, I could have sympathised at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully. They were wretched in themselves; the old animal hate moved them ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... said: "I will make for them myself some little foolish songs so that they may be merry in the lanes and happy by the fireside." And for some days he made for them aimless songs such as maidens sing on the hills in the ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... against common enemies, the interest of these men was fundamentally too different from that of the Reformers to enable them to stand long on the same platform. There was Clement Marot, [Sidenote: Marot] a charming but rather aimless poet, a protege of Margaret and the ornament of a frivolous court. Though his poetic translation of the Psalms became a Protestant book, his poetry is often sensual as well as sensuous. Though for a time absenting ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... has been especially rich in such novels. There was, for example, Fitzgerald's ragged, but brilliant, "This Side of Paradise," which conducted aimless and expansive youth from childhood through college. There was the much more impressive "Main Street," biographic in form, but with teeth set on edge in revolt. There was the vivid and ill-controlled sex novel "Erik Dorn," and Evelyn Scott's ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... babe seemed to take her very heart away when it went into the Darkness can pity the other bereaved ones; so that her soul is exalted through its grief. The poet is thought by some to have uttered a mere aimless whim in words when ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... he seemed to forget the terrors in store, and strolled along, stopping now and again to admire some particular oak or view; chatting all the while in a discursive manner, which, though somewhat aimless, was by no means without its charm. He made a capital companion for a silent man like Harold Quaritch who liked ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... of every teacher of young children. The Nursery School, especially if it consists chiefly of children under five, presents at first very hard problems to the teacher; however strong her belief in play may be, it receives severe tests. So much of the play at first seems to be aimless running and shouting, or throwing about of toys and breaking them if possible, so much quarrelling and fighting and weeping seem involved with any attempts at social life on the part of the children; there seems very little desire to co-operate, and very little ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... a still earlier hour the Latimer girls had been flying in and out of their respective rooms in a perfectly aimless, joyous, childishly happy fashion, like a flock of white pigeons. And the sum of their conversation was simply this: "Oh, what a day! what a glorious day!" Yet it sufficed for a Babel of bird-like voices. At last one more ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... He was sure that he ought to know who they were, but for the life of him he could not think. He met so many people in his rather aimless life it was impossible to remember ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... the shawl and ran down the twisted path fringed with long, reaching fingers of the hare berry bushes. At the stable she stopped for an aimless dialogue with Jase and then rode away, past the orchard whose leafless branches gave glimpses of the low, sod-roofed cabin, with Marthy standing rather disconsolately on the rough ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... been rather an aimless man. He was a brilliant sailor, not because he set himself to the task, but merely because seamanship was born in him, together with a dogged steadiness of nerve and a complete fearlessness. It was so easy to be a good sailor that he had ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... would come down from the north in all its fury without ten minutes' warning, and in a few seconds the air, full of blinding snow, precluded the possibility of finding their shelter, an attempt at which would only result in an aimless circular march on the prairie. On such occasions, to keep from perishing by the intense cold, they would kill a buffalo, and, taking out its viscera, creep inside the huge cavity, enough animal heat being retained until the storm had sufficiently abated for them to proceed ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... stone. Standing by it was a man with a large chisel in one hand and a heavy mallet in the other. As I looked he walked up to the stone and began to knock great pieces off it with chisel and mallet. I paused to watch him, my curiosity aroused to know what he was doing in his apparently aimless work. ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... his steady face and ceased their aimless running about. Many joined in. The chorus swelled louder and louder. It was extraordinary what reassurance there was in the sound. The children sat down again, and presently like children, many of them were laughing ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... in ample store; Her children all are heirs that trace Their lineage through the royal race, And all her wealth is theirs—and more; But one with cunning hand controls The portions that his brothers fed, While thousands—just and worthy souls— In aimless anguish ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... life that seem In wayward, aimless course to tend, Are eddies of the mighty stream That rolls to its ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... a trembling hand; Sad, trembling lips that utter broken thought: One of a wide and wandering, aimless band; One in the world who ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... with a smile, for he appeared to take it for granted, as others had done, that they had no brilliant social functions in Montreal. "I think I do; but when you have so much of it, the thing seems a little aimless, doesn't it?" ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... plod away, Step by step in mouldering moss; Thick branches bar the day Over languid streams that cross Softly, slowly, with a sound Like a smothered weeping, In their aimless creeping Through ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke
... his philosophy was sceptical to the last degree, but from the excess of it provoked a reaction in Germany, headed by Kant, which has yielded positive results; he found in life no connecting principle, no purpose, and had come to regard it as a restless aimless, heaving up and down, swaying to and fro on a waste ocean of blind sensations, without rational plot or counterplot, God or devil, and had arrived at an absolutely non-possumus stage, which, however, as hinted, was followed by a speedy and steady rebound, in speculation ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... early-bird squire, and drag Plank out of bed. And Plank, in no position to be anything but flattered by such sans gene, laboriously and gratefully splashed through his bath, wallowed amid the breakfast plates, and mounted a hunter for long and apparently aimless gallops with Mortimer. ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... the Indians also had been able to see. Those who survived uttered their yell and plunged into the corners, stabbing with their knives. There was a wild, blind, eager scuffling, mixed with another shot or two, oaths, whooping, screams, tramplings, and aimless blows ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... representing pictorial resources I supposed him originally to possess, with such material, and the need he must feel of using it, such a man would suddenly dilate into a form of Pride, Power, and Glory,—a centre, round which asking, aimless hearts might rally,—a man fitted to act as interpreter to the ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... commotion prevailed. Serving-men and maids ran hither and thither in an excited and aimless fashion; they started back in surprise and dismay when they perceived Wilhelmine's tall figure beside the Duke, but neither his Highness nor the lady stopped to question the servants on the cause of the disturbance. When they reached ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... war blew strongest, and the best men met the best? Lo, this is the tale of to-day: but what shall to-morrow tell? That Thiodolf the Mighty in the fight's beginning fell; That there came a stroke ill-stricken, there came an aimless thrust, And the life of the people's helper lay quenched ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... under a state of chronic anarchy than was possible under the Constitution. Four years of concentrated warfare, animated by an intense and lofty moral purpose, could not hurt the character or mar the fortunes of the people, like a century of aimless and miscellaneous squabbling over a host of petty local interests. The War of Secession was a terrible ordeal to pass through; but when one tries to picture what might have happened in this fair land without the work of the Federal Convention, ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... a sense more strangely beautiful, did I ever witness. Her tremulous, rapid, affectionate, eager Scotch voice,— the swift, aimless, bewildered mind, the baffled utterance, the bright and perilous eye; some wild words, some household cares, something for James, the names of the dead, Rab called rapidly and in a "fremyt" voice, and he starting up, surprised, and slinking off as if he were to blame somehow, or had been ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... Dundas as little better than insane had he not been prepared by Miss Egerton's description; and he now acquiesced in the young lady's desire to detain him another hour, half amused and half wearied with her aimless and wild fancies. But here he was mistaken. Her fancies were not aimless; his heart was the game she had in view, and she determined a desperate attack should make it her own, in return for the deep wounds she had received from every tone ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... rank, without power, almost without the hope of power. I—but you know not my new dignity—I, in the Cabinet of England's ministry, vast fortunes opening to my gaze, the proudest station not too high for my reasonable ambition! You, wedding yourself to some grand chimera of an object, aimless when it eludes your grasp. I, swinging, squirrel-like, from scheme to scheme; no matter if one breaks, another is at hand! Some men would have cut their throats in despair, an hour ago, in losing the object ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... in hand for evermore they stray, And if they part, or quarrel for a day, You'll find Ambition, aimless, reckless, wild, And Genius moping, ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... sat by the pleasant west window of the kitchen, engaged in reading those aimless shreds of local information which usually make up the outside pages of the weekly newspaper. She could not possibly feel the slightest interest in the fact that Mr. and Mrs. James M. Snider of West Schofield were entertaining ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... Spectator,) opposed on most points to the present Government, "the late Ministers commenced a career, perilous in the extreme to all the best interests of the nation—demoralizing public opinion, wasting public resources, and entangling the country in quarrels alike endless and aimless; and all this with a labouring after melodramatic stage effect, and a regardlessness of consequences perfectly unprecedented." We were, in the words of truth and soberness, fast losing our moral ascendency in Europe—by a series of querulous, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... in the mysterious ebb of the night Pass the men whose eyes are shut like anemones in a dark pool; Why don't they open with vision and speak to me, what have they in sight? Why do I wander aimless ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... invited the benign organization of law and religion, and held out to pure spirits an opportunity richer than all its crops and mines, was poisoned in its cradle. What wonder that its vigor became the aimless gestures of madness, that a bloated habit simulated health, and that decrepitude suddenly fell upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... particulars of their trip in the launch from home to Wiscasset and return, omitting of course all reference to Stockham Calvert that would give a hint of his profession and his purpose in making what looked like an aimless ramble through this portion of Maine. The Captain was assured that his boat would not be disturbed where it lay moored under the bank, and he and Chester gave no ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... sultry hour, Resting my eye upon a drooping plant, 10 With brow low-bent, within my garden-bower, I sate upon the couch of camomile; And—whether 'twas a transient sleep, perchance, Flitted across the idle brain, the while I watch'd the sickly calm with aimless scope, 15 In my own heart; or that, indeed a trance, Turn'd my eye inward—thee, O genial Hope, Love's elder sister! thee did I behold, Drest as a bridesmaid, but all pale and cold, With roseless cheek, all pale and cold and dim, 20 Lie lifeless at my feet! And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... metaphysics, but in vain. He was restless and disposed to dark hours, and there is reason to suspect that there was in him a vein of insanity. His later writings were incomprehensible. When we were living in England, he passed through the midst of us on one of his aimless, mysterious journeys round the world; and when I was in New York, in 1884, I met him, looking pale, sombre, nervous, but little touched by age. He died a few years later. He conceived the highest admiration for my father's genius, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... yet won the right to destroy deliberately even its most inferior vital products in the womb. A civilization guilty of so reckless a waste of life cannot safely be entrusted with this judicial function. The blind and aimless anxiety to cherish the most hopeless and degraded forms of life, even of unborn life, may well be a weakness, and since it often leads to incalculable suffering, even a crime. But as yet there is an impenetrable ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... preoccupied; his talk, when he spoke with her, was of a more general kind than formerly; she was conscious that her presence did not affect him as it had done. She sank again into despondency; books were insipid, and society irritated her. She began the habit of taking long walks, an aimless wandering about the streets and parks within her reach. One evening, wending wearily homewards, she was attracted by the lights in a church in Marylebone Road, and, partly for a few minutes' rest, partly out of a sudden attraction to a religious service, she entered. It was the church of ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... and Sir Tancred, ignorant of their plight, had spent a delightful afternoon exploring with a never-tiring interest one another's souls. For a long time she chided him gently for his aimless manner of living; and he defended himself with a half-mocking sadness. At about sunset they rose reluctantly, sighed with one accord that the pleasant hours were over, looked at one another with sudden questioning eyes at the sound ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... industrial system which has propagated them. Consequently, these superficial effusions and tirades—based upon a lack of understanding of the propelling forces of society—have little value other than as reflections of a certain aimless and disordered spirit of the times. With all their volumes of print, they leave us in possession of a scattered array of assertions, bearing some resemblance to facts, which, however, fail to be facts inasmuch as ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... knowing what that fondness meant. He had returned to find her married, and severed from him forever, at least in this life. When he found that he had lost her he began to understand how dear she was. All life stood before him aimless, pointless, and meaningless without her. He came back, but the old intercourse could not be renewed; she could not be his, and he could only live, and love, and endure. Perhaps it would have been wiser if he had at once left Holby and sought out some other abode. But the ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... were finally released and found ourselves in the noise and tumult of that tremendous life, where the selfish seeking of the few is by a secret and uncomprehended power forced together into a mysterious and curious order, - as out of the seemingly aimless and orderless agitation of ants or bees one sees a well-planned structure arise, - amid the rattling of the trucks, the shuffling of thousands of feet upon the worn and ill-kept pavement, the ceaseless thunder of the elevated trains running ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... service, for the spirit of pandemonium was present in the west side. Towards evening, however, the rioters ceased their aimless and capricious violence, and adopted in their madness the dangerous method of Parisian mobs. They began throwing up a series of barricades in Eighth Avenue. Vehicles of all kinds within reach, telegraph poles, boxes,—anything that would obstruct,—were ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... day. The ice on the trees of Central Park was a diamond iridescence. Nursemaids were leading children, bits of muffled wealth, along the alleys. Horses pounded on the bridle paths. Automobiles and taxis, that must have looked to the airman above like aimless black planes drifting in a crystal sea, were carrying people to a thousand destinies. Towering on all sides was the irregular concrete mass of New York. As dusk fell, lights in those high buildings began to appear, first intermittently, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... at dinner, but he had not expected her, and was glad to know that she was in hiding. But when, after an hour or two's aimless ramble under the shadow of the Terre de Falaise, he returned to the hotel and entered the salle a manger, he found there a certain unwonted sense of warmth and brightness. Not only was the stove blooming cherry-red ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... barn the snow stopped falling, except for a few aimless flakes, which drifted from all sides in the air. It was very dark still; the sky was like ink; but there was a feel of freshness (I cannot describe it) which told me that the wind had changed. Presently I ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... of the passion that shook my youth, Of its aimless loves and its idle pains, And am thankful now for the certain truth ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... rather on the side of the Imperialists, as the futile expedition to Peking had left the rebels in a somewhat aimless state, not quite knowing what to do next. It is true that they were busy spreading the T'ai-p'ing conception of Christianity, in establishing schools, and preparing an educational literature to meet the exigencies of the time. They ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... adventurers led up hill and down dale and wound here and there in a fashion that seemed aimless. But always it drew nearer to a range of low mountains and Files said more than once that he was certain the entrance to Ruggedo's cavern would be found among these ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... these days, when the tendency of society is to educate girls for heartless, aimless, factitious life, a book like this is to be welcomed and gratefully received. Wherever it is read, it will be retained as a thoughtful, ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... seriously. The naturalists will tell us more about them, and interest us more, than the poets. Mr. Bryant makes fun of the bobolink, and turns into an aimless whistle the solemn oration on domestic matters uttered by that small but energetic American to his mate. The waterfowl he treats more gravely and respectfully, but he still makes it only a part of the landscape ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... which left the Clyde in coal; both rounded the Horn, and both, at several hundred miles of distance, though close on the same point of time, took fire at sea on the Pacific. One was destroyed; the derelict iron frame of the second, after long, aimless cruising, was at length recovered, refitted, and hails to-day from San Francisco. A boat's crew from one of these disasters reached, after great hardships, the isle of Hiva-oa. Some of these men vowed they would never ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... experience in mankind could have taught me little enough), how an ardent, serious, inquiring mind, struggling into passion under the load of knowledge, had, with that stimulus sadly and abruptly withdrawn, sunk into the quiet of passive, aimless study. I comprehended how, in the indolence of a happy but unimpassioned marriage, with a companion so gentle, so provident and watchful, yet so little formed to rouse and task and fire an intellect naturally calm and meditative, years upon years had crept away in the learned idleness ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... harked back to Cahors, for an aimless two weeks among the upper waters of the Lot and the Tarn. I led him over the roof of France, as they call it. I sweated him down valleys to Ambialet, to Roc-Amadour, I threaded him through limestone caverns wherein I could have cut his throat and left him, never to be missed. We struck ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Garman, has always been, that the aimless life a lady in your position is obliged to lead here at home, must sooner or later become ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... she lay sleeping in the forenoon. Their sense of chivalry would not have permitted it. When she arose she called them to her and patted their heads and said: 'What dear parents I have!' It might be thought that the fair Frances led an aimless and idle life. Not so. The young lady was very busy and never forgot her aim. She was preparing herself to be a marryer of men and the leading marryer in the proud city of her birth. Every member of the household became her assistant in this noble ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... and possibly being influenced by what he had heard of the yearly vigils Mr. Moore was in the habit of keeping there, had taken a notion to stroll among the graves, in search of the rest and peace of mind he had failed to find in his aimless walks about the city. At least, that was the way he chose to account for the meeting he mentioned. Falling into reverie again, he seemed to be trying to recall the name which at this moment was of such importance to him. But it was without avail, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... pair. The women themselves became tired of the moping and inefficient youth, who still remained poor and unsettled, with a father desperately healthy and inexorable. They grew tired and went away,—the wife, like Lady Byron, refusing to go back to such an aimless, rhapsodizing husband. And in truth, the hardship of living with such a man as Shelley, for a woman like Harriet, must have been very great. It is easy to understand how a limited nature like hers should be worn out by ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... the end of May; the meadow was like a rug of rich emerald velvet, and the willows were freshly decked in their pale leafage. The whole scene was mantled with the exquisite radiance of the northern summer sun. Children and dogs loafed and rolled in aimless ecstasy, and the whole people sat at the teepee ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... November twilight, as Morrow was returning to his own door after shadowing Brunell on an aimless and chilly walk, he saw the kitten lying curled up just outside its own gate, and an inspiration sprang to his ingenious mind. He seated himself upon the steps of Mrs. Quinlan's front porch and waited until the darkness had deepened sufficiently to cloak his nefarious scheme. ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... was the wrecking of Irish John. He seemed homeless and aimless. The constant smiles on that remarkable face gave way to soberness profound. Old habits crept back upon him. He had a friend, one of our number, who took a kindly interest in him, but could not follow all his waywardness. He departed for New York, ostensibly ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... miseries and cruelties which make the world a place of torture for so many, so long as men are encouraged in the name of religion to look for a remedy, not in fighting against surrounding evils, but in cultivating aimless contemplations of an imaginary ideal. Much of our popular religion seems to be expressly directed to deaden our sympathies with our fellow men by encouraging an indolent optimism; our thoughts of the other ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... he began, 'I had no object in life. I was educated at Oxford. I narrowly escaped the legal profession. I had a near shave of the Church. I wasted years in aimless travel, waiting for destiny to turn up. I was conscious of no gift except a power for organizing. That gift I felt I had, and gradually I perceived that I would like to be the head of some large and complicated undertaking. ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... still remained, but that she suggested another kind of scene altogether. He felt that to say it was a bore to go out was no longer that easy fiction which it usually is. It was a bore to go out into those aimless assemblies where not to go was a social mistake, yet to go was weariness of the flesh and spirit. In the midst of them his thoughts would turn to the little group in Half Moon Street which had made the commonplace drawing-room of the lodging-house into a home. Chatty over her ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... easily support so humble a role for a considerable period. I tramped to a neighbouring market-town, and, late as the hour was, the production of a few shillings procured me supper and a night's lodging in a cheap coffee-house. The next day I started forth on an aimless course of wandering from one small town to another. I was already somewhat disgusted with the upshot of my sudden freak; in a few hours' time I was considerably more so. In the contents-bill of a local news sheet I read the announcement of my own murder at the hands of some person ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... process of creation the sport of an infant God; is the Logos, sacrificing himself in order to give life to the Universe, a prodigal, working without rhyme or reason, sending forth His intelligence and might in aimless sport and leaving evolution at the mercy of His caprice; did not Brahma, by means of meditation, which, as the Oriental scriptures tell us, preceded creation, practise the gentlest, the most rapid, and the easiest method of guiding beings to the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... of her room in the early part of the afternoon, Cecil meets unexpectedly with Mr. Potts, who is meandering in a depressed and aimless fashion ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... The spirit breaks; The fountain soon must dry. If not, good God! The temple shakes; It totters! What am I? A wreck of hope!—An aimless thing! A helmless ship at sea To whose last spar love still must ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... its way through the maze by chance. Two hours afterwards it reached the nest in fifteen minutes; and after another interval of two hours it only required five minutes. After the third trial, the routes became more direct, there was less aimless wandering. The time of the twentieth trial was forty-five seconds; that of the thirtieth, forty seconds. In the thirtieth case, the path followed was quite direct, and so it was on the fiftieth trip, which only required thirty-five seconds. Of course, the whole ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... write a book." A wise man in the past hath shrewdly said, Knowing full well that when one's thoughts are paged They like foul spirits menace peace of mind. Alas! 'tis so, when tongue shall like a bird Take wing, soaring aloft, and as the wind Fly aimless over mountain, hill and dale, Until tired nature doth demand repose, Why did I Roosevelt as a pattern take And boast his doctrines as the wisdom's fount From which I drank as a disciple might Who worships blindly at his idol's shrine? And now these varlets ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... learnt by grim experience. When first he moved it, it drove him headlong into inky darkness. His gills crumpled in the rough embrace of the mud, and his eyes and sucker were choked with slime. It was only a desperate, convulsive, aimless wriggle that freed him. The next time he cleared his immediate surroundings, and shot a full six inches upwards, only to sink slowly to the ooze again, motionless, and exhausted. He ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... half an hour in aimless strolling about the streets. From earliest boyhood his mind had always worked most clearly when he walked alone. Every mental process which had left a mark upon his memory and his career—the daydreams of future academic greatness and fame which had fashioned themselves ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... conquers the gigantic pike that swims in the Styx of Finnish mythology. After this point the story is interrupted by a long sequel of popular bridal songs, and, in the wandering course of the rather aimless epic, the flight and its incidents have been forgotten, or are neglected. These incidents recur, however, in the thread of somewhat different plots. We have seen that they are found in Japan, among the Eskimo, among the Bushmen, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... taking the dimensions of the rim of my straw hat which lies on the dry leaves beside me. It humps around it in an aimless sort of way, stopping now and then and rearing up on its hind legs and feeling the vacant space around it as a blind man might hunt for a lost trail. I know what it wants: it is on its travels looking for a place in which to go through that wonderful transformation of creeping ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to establish aimless truths: it is rather to fulfil a function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take on body—are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed.... ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... effect of a corrupt society upon women. As in the case of men, women were moved to forsake their social duties because they were weary of the sensual and aimless life of Rome. Those were the days of elaborate toilettes, painted faces and blackened eyelids, of intrigues and foolish babbling. Venial faults—it may be thought—innocent displays of tender frailty; but woman's nature demands loftier employments. A great soul craves occupations ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... of the street I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates. The brown waves of fog toss up to me Twisted faces from the bottom of the street, And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts An aimless smile that hovers in the air And vanishes along ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... so, be so loved, yet so mistaken What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the Souvenir Company building after working late at taking inventory and roamed down toward Fourteenth Street, Mr. Wrenn felt forlornly aimless. The worst of it all was that he could not go to the Nickelorion for moving pictures; not after having been cut by the ticket-taker. Then, there before him was the glaring sign of the Nickelorion tempting him; a bill with "Great Train Robbery Film Tonight" ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... this turbulent career, for which surely she was not inextricably destined, and let her be the bright but flawless ornament of a happy home and a choice circle—if not the lady of fashion, in case the student realized one of his fantastic dreams of aimless ambition. The quiet learner felt an immense flame usurp the place of his blood; he seemed gifted with the powers of the athletic Duke of Munich, Christopher the Leaper, whose statue adorned the proscenium, and like him, clearing the orchestra with a bound of twelve ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... genuine and original contribution to modern thought. But it is the later essays in the little volume that touched most readers, and will for long continue to touch them. They are as far as possible from being vague, or misty, or aimless. Yet they have, what is so curiously rare in English literature, the charm of reverie. As the author said, they 'contain rather suggested thoughts that may fructify in other minds than distinct propositions which it is sought argumentatively to prove.' They have the ever seductive note ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... restless, capricious, and far-wandering of all the wilderness kindreds, were drifting south on one of their apparently aimless migrations. They were travelling on the ridge, because, as Pete instantly inferred, the snow there had been partly blown away, partly packed, by the unbroken winds. They were far out of gunshot. But he was going to trail them ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... philosophers, transport yourselves with me on to the confines of the universe, beyond the point where I feel, and you see, organised beings; gaze over that new ocean, and seek across its lawless, aimless heavings some vestiges of that intelligent Being whose wisdom strikes you ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... legends of ancient Britain cocks crew lustily all night on December 24th to scare away witches and evil spirits, and in Bavaria some of the countrymen made frequent and apparently aimless trips in their sledges to cause the hemp ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... pretty high rock on the north-west of Earraid, which (because it had a flat top and overlooked the Sound) I was much in the habit of frequenting; not that I ever stayed in one place, save when asleep, my misery giving me no rest. Indeed, I wore myself down with continual and aimless goings and comings in ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... aimless. The night was full of sounds, but whether earthly; from wildfowl and bittern and curlew, from fox, and badger, and otter; or from the evil spirits of the marsh, I knew not nor cared. For now the ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... on one side to spur him, and Miss 'Rill's unbounded faith in him on the other hand, how could Hopewell Drugg fall back into the old aimless existence which had cursed him when first Janice had taken an interest in his little Lottie, his ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... he loitered long at Budweis, failed to join Hiller so as to throw their united force across the French advance to Vienna, and when at last he brought up on the slopes of the Bisamberg he seemed for an instant aimless. Thus can the hope of peace paralyze a great general's activity. But when, having offered to open negotiations with his adversary, he received no answer, when he learned that the Austrian ministry also was determined to fight the struggle out, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the water of Old Wives' Cove since my infancy. Whatever the pretence he made, the labor was planned and undertaken in anxious haste: there was, indeed, too much pretence—too suave an explanation, a hand too aimless and unsteady, an eye too blank, too large a flow of liquor—for a man who ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... many things but to conquer himself and be his own best friend; that is, according to the conception of the ordinary, respectable, get-on folk of the world. He has followed more or less the wild, shifting impulses of his nature—restless and reckless, if aimless and harmless; fickle and passionate, if rebelliously natural; exhausting his youth and manhood in fruitless action, and devoting the moments of reflection to the playful current of the muse's fancy, forsooth, to the delectation of the more prosaic humanity in this his locality. ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... they feel that what they do is part of a living whole. That in itself is sunshine. See how the face lights up, how the step is quickened, how the whole man or child is a different being from the weary, aimless, lifeless, complaining being who had no work! It is all the difference between ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... Holmes drove the car in what Bessie soon saw to be an aimless fashion. The morning was nearly done, and Bessie, used to guessing at the time from the sun, knew that it was very near noon. Holmes seemed to be doubling on his tracks, and to be driving in what resembled a circle, as if he were chasing his own tail, and at last ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the Farm - Or, Bessie King's New Chum • Jane L. Stewart
... engaged in the harmless occupation of trying to ride a bicycle. They were of the type which he held in especial aversion, the Rural Hooligan type, and one at least of the two had evidently been present at a recent circulation of the festive bowl. He was wheeling the bicycle about the road in an aimless manner, and looked as if he wondered what was the matter with it that it would not stay in the same place for two consecutive seconds. The other youth was apparently of the 'Charles-his-friend' variety, content to look on and applaud, and generally to play chorus to his ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... through three centuries on a matter that has been so near their hearts, the new body—a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over those too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in the doorway, a ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... tides of excited men. It was difficult to make one's way. Toward midnight our aimless tramp brought us to the neighborhood of the beautiful church of St. Ouen, and there all was bustle and work. The square was a wilderness of torches and people; and through a guarded passage dividing the pack, laborers were carrying planks and timbers ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... with eight thousand men an army of nearly a hundred thousand, raised him in men's minds to the level of the most famous conquerors. Unfortunately for himself, it redoubled his self-will and vanity, the adulation given him leading him into a course of wild and aimless invasion that brought upon him eventually misfortune and defeat and nearly ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... apparently aimless strolls with a stenographer he visited not only the classrooms and shops but every corner of the great institution. He would return to his office with a notebook full of memoranda of matters to be followed up or changed, ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... invisible world, would return to them, and, clothed in flesh, he would go back to his tribe. At other times a vague and indescribable longing seizes a young person, a morbid appetite possesses them, or they fall a prey to an inappeasable and aimless restlessness, or a causeless melancholy. These signs the old priests recognize as the expression of a personal spirit of the higher order. They take charge of the youth, and educate him to the mysteries of their craft. For ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... more fairly of the blessings that the communist offers. Instead of the present world, where some at least are well-to-do and happy, the communist holds before us a world where all alike are poor. For the activity, the push, the vigor of our modern life, his substitute is a life aimless and unbroken. And so we have to say to communists what George Eliot might have said: Be not blinded by the passions of the moment, but when you prate about your own wrongs and the sufferings of your offspring, take heed lest in the long run you make a worse time of it for your own generation, ...
— The Altruist in Politics • Benjamin Cardozo
... well-loved favourite of the relatively few, a much wider constituency. To these late comers, rather than to the older (and of course superior) Conradists, who know it already, let me recommend this rambling, which is by no means to say aimless, account of the wanderings of the MS. of Almayer's Folly, some queer entertaining scraps of the author's family history, a description of the encounters with the original Almayer, and those vignettes of Marseilles which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... years remarked that, with all the giddy whirl of previous winters in the outer circle, none had approached in mad rapidity that of 1860-61. The rush of aimless visiting, matinees and dinners, balls and suppers, followed each other without cessation; dress and diamonds, equipage and cards, all cost more than ever before. This might be the last of it, said an uneasy sense of the coming storm; and in the precedent sultriness, the thousands who had come ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... Lexicon der Mythologie that the Assyrian Ishtar, the Phoenician Ashtoreth (Astarte), the Syrian Atargatis (Derketo), the Babylonian Belit (Mylitta) and the Arabian Ilat (Al-ilat) were all moon-goddesses has given rise to much rather aimless discussion, for there can be no question of their essential homology with Hathor and Aphrodite. Moreover, from the beginning, all goddesses—and especially this most primitive stratum of fertility deities—were ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... word from the two Searchers. Two more went by. The sheriff rose from his chair, stamped about the room, and looked out at the night, a driving, aimless thing in ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... William Henry Smith see the door of the Church closed upon him with no vain regrets, but in a spirit of submission to his father's wishes. Writing of these days many years later, when as a Minister of the Crown he was in attendance upon her Majesty at Balmoral, he says: "I thought my life was aimless, purposeless, and I wanted something else to do; but events compelled me to what promised to be a dull life and a useless one: the result is that few men have had more interesting ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... convenient station buffets have been closed up since the war and civilians are tacitly understood to look after themselves and not to bother the Government by racing needlessly over the country. But I do not think there were many making aimless journeys. ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... drift, Forceful, formless, fierce, and swift; Hair-like vapours madly riven; Waters smitten into dust; Lightning through the turmoil driven, Aimless, useless, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... craved for the society of someone he knew, and the idea of going back to spend the rest of the day in those suburban lodgings seemed intolerable. So he decided to wait, and walked down the narrow side street into the Strand, and thence westwards, in more or less aimless fashion. He had never known town sufficiently well to note the changes which the last ten years had brought; possibly, they would not have interested him greatly in any case, for he was a Londoner ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... fortune followed some profession and resigned themselves to the sword or to the church. The poorest gave themselves up with cold enthusiasm to great thoughts, plunged into the frightful sea of aimless effort. As human weakness seeks association and as men are gregarious by nature, politics became mingled with it. There were struggles with the 'garde du corps' on the steps of the legislative assembly; at the theatre Talma wore a wig which made him resemble Caesar; every one ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... had said nothing whatever about broken legs—got suddenly to her feet and walked to the little dressing table across the room. She was picking up one object after another now, and putting each down, in an aimless fashion quite unlike her usual decisiveness. Her face was not aimless-looking at all, however; it was white ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... doctors and merchants, actors and newspaper-men who met by chance and the one common instinct of book-loving at McClurg's, albeit "the greatest aggregation of liars" one of them had ever "met up with," were a simple, ingenuous, and aimless lot compared to the group which Field assembled in his corner in the "Sharps and Flats" column. Only quotations from some of his reports of their imaginary meetings can do justice to these children of his brain. These I should preface with ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... entered one of the many aimless paths that wandered through it. The uneven ground sloped downwards to the south, and through the manifold branches of the undergrowth of budding hazels the sea lay deeply blue, far away. The primroses were everywhere among the trees. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... for, from the weakness in his body and the fuzzy turmoil in his brain, he knew that his end was near. Like a wild animal he had crept into hiding to die. Half-conscious, aimless and wandering, he lived back in his life to his early manhood on Niihau. As life faded and the drip of the rain grew dim in his ears it seemed to him that he was once more in the thick of the horse-breaking, ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... proves in his cricket-ground, what London shewed in the time of the World's Fair, generations and countries would always exhibit in larger characters, more widely read—that the mind and body of man require amusement—simple pleasure—purposeless, aimless, unintellectual, physical pleasure—as much as his digestive organs require food and his hands work; not as the sole employment, but mixed in with, and forming the basis and the body of higher things—the strong practical woof through which the warp of golden stuff is woven into a glorious ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... rigidly—but no more so than was necessary for a public just beginning to follow easily the main outlines of the form. Haydn leads up to his objective points in a clear-cut, logical way and there is little of "running off into the sand" or of those otherwise aimless passages so prevalent in Emmanuel Bach. In his best works, notably in many of the Quartets, there is also more individuality secured for the second theme;[114] although for highly personified and moving second themes we have to await the greater genius of Mozart and Beethoven. Whenever ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... imagined it. He turned, and saw the two workmen standing side by side under the projecting masses of the tall pink cliffs. He hesitated whether he should make one last attempt to save the man Hill. His physical excitement seemed to desert him suddenly, and leave him aimless and helpless. He turned shoreward, stumbling and wading towards ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... flicked, and the old mare went round to begin another of those endless journeys through London streets which horses, if they reason at all, must find so utterly incomprehensible and aimless. ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... pace. The Professor and John kept a vigilant watch on their enemies, and it was not long before the disappearance of the wagon was noted, and then the utmost excitement prevailed. It was evident that there was no concerted movement among them. There was an aimless running to and fro, but the two stood there, guns in hand, and that no doubt disconcerted the natives, who evidently believed that the wagon had been removed to a ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... my brother hobbled over to the window. For several minutes he remained there, looking out upon the street with the aimless air of a man who scarcely knows what to ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... for which society would pay as for value received, they had doubtless often conferred, and concluded that was the happiest and best life for their sons, instead of allowing them to fritter away the precious years of youth in aimless frivolity, to be followed in later years by a ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... sufficiently profound to have one thought beyond their friends, whom they exploit; then of evenings, when they lay their heads on their pillows, they weigh men as a miser weighs his gold pieces. The one are vexed at an aimless impertinence, and allow themselves to be ridiculed by the diplomatic, who make them dance for them by pulling what is the main string of these puppets—their vanity. Thus, a day comes when those who had nothing have something, and those who had something have nothing. The latter look at their comrades ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... that I am! Why do I thus deceive myself? What is to come of all this wild, aimless, endless passion? I cannot pray except to her. My imagination sees nothing but her: all surrounding objects are of no account, except as they relate to her. In this dreamy state I enjoy many happy hours, till at length I feel compelled to tear myself away from her. Ah, Wilhelm, ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... men who preach such doctrines, and they cannot escape their share of responsibility for the whirlwind that is reaped. This applies alike to the deliberate demagogue, to the exploiter of sensationalism, and to the crude and foolish visionary who, for whatever reason, apologizes for crime or excites aimless discontent. ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... That aimless, happy-go-lucky journey was typical of Goldsmith's whole life of forty-odd years. Those who knew him loved but despaired of him. When he passed away (1774) Johnson summed up the feeling of the English literary ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... climate maddened these unbridled Europeans. Avarice is a calculating passion; but here were aimless and exhausting horrors, like those which swarm in the drunkard's corrupted brain. What were vices at home became transformed into manias here. The representatives of other nations were not slow to imitate the example of the possessors ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... wandering about to-day in an apparently aimless fashion, but in reality "musing upon many things." Our horror of shiftlessness, and our realization of the responsibilities of life, and of the important work Providence has kept saving up for us, or perhaps "growing up" for us, ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... last night in the city over here in the main park of C Sector, walking in the restless crowds, trying to settle his thoughts. He moved through slow aimless eddies of brightly appareled citizens, avoiding other pedestrians, skaters and the heavy, four-wheeled autoscooters. Everything was dully, uncompromisingly the same as in his own sector, even to the size and spacing of the ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage
... Waters; "all such study is vain. Form a plan, have an object; then work for it, learn all you can about it, and you will be sure to succeed. What I mean by studying on speculation, is that aimless learning of things because they may be useful at some time; which is like the conduct of the woman who bought at auction a brass door-plate with the name Thompson on it, thinking it might some day ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... her arm and the nestlings from her veil which she gathered over her shoulders and bosom. The birds she tied in a loose end of the veil and hid in the front of her garment. Meantime the baby was crying lustily and making feeble and aimless motions of protest or desire with its tiny brown fingers. Mary was trying to quiet it by walking when the Bedouin woman returned ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... the hand will sometimes blister and the body ache, but perseverance will cure the one and Russia Salve the other; and the invigorated life in every limb will give a perpetual charm to those seemingly aimless leaps and somersets. The feats once learned, a private gymnasium can easily be constructed, of the simplest apparatus, and so daily used; though nothing can wholly supply the stimulus afforded by a class in a public institution, with a competent teacher. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... education, and, willy-nilly, I was being prepared for the University. In addition to my studies, my occupations included certain vague dreamings and ponderings, a number of gymnastic exercises to make myself the finest athlete in the world, a good deal of aimless, thoughtless wandering through the rooms of the house (but more especially along the maidservants' corridor), and much looking at myself in the mirror. From the latter, however, I always turned away with ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... a bomb that had burst and killed several people in the little square outside. Such excitements seem to be things of the past now in Udine. Udine keeps itself dark nowadays, and the Austrian sea-planes, which come raiding the Italian coast country at night very much in the same aimless, casually malignant way in which the Zeppelins raid England, apparently because there is nothing else for them to do, find it easier to ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... total imbecility which, as medical people well know, frequently follows some terrible shock to the spirits. Constance is frantic; Lear is mad; Ophelia is insane. Her sweet mind lies in fragments before us—a pitiful spectacle! Her wild, rambling fancies; her aimless, broken speeches; her quick transitions from gayety to sadness—each equally purposeless and causeless; her snatches of old ballads, such as perhaps her nurse sung her to sleep with in her infancy—are all so true to the life, that we forget to wonder, and can only weep. ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... calling upon Mrs. Perce. Sally was beaten. She was full of expostulations and arguments, but all were addressed to Toby, and she could not have borne any other society. So she wandered about the streets for an hour, miserably aware that once or twice she was followed by an aimless strolling youth who did not know how to occupy a lonely evening and who yet was too much of a coward to address her. In her mind she went over every detail of her friendship with Toby. It had become suddenly unreal, like a thing that had happened years before. And yet the throb of pain ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... harmony with you—with the earth under me. I became horribly despondent—like an outcast who suddenly realizes the whole world is alien. And all the wandering about the world, and all the romance and excitement I'd enjoyed in it, appeared an aimless, futile business, chasing around in a circle in an effort to avoid touching reality. Forgive me, Curt. I meant myself, not you, of course. Oh, it was horrible, I tell you, to feel that way. I tried to laugh at myself, ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill
... second insignificant rifle-crack at his right, and heard other shots from Blount's window at the left. His own work he did methodically, feeling that his duty was plain to him. He was a rifleman. His firing was not aimless, but exact, careful, ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
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