"Purposeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... good will on the viands prepared (Pork chops were the principal portion), Then retiring to bed, with their dreams they were scared, And spent half the night in contortion; Then rose in their sleep and came down to this room, And, instead of a purposeless pawing, They painted these pictures, then fled in the gloom, And Furniss has ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... after had been unexpectedly sent in pursuit of the Siebenburgs. Hence he had found no time to speak to the father. If he persisted in his intention of entering a monastery, the petition would be purposeless. If it proved that he was merely trifling with Eva, there would be time enough to call upon the Emperor to punish him. Besides, he knew from Maier of Silenen that the knight had firmly resolved to renounce ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the second stage there is complete loss of consciousness; and though the reflexes persist, the movements in response to the stimuli are purposeless. The muscles generally ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... farthing. Adj. fortuitous &c. 156; unintentional, unintended; accidental; not meant; undesigned, purposed; unpremeditated &c. 612; unforeseen, uncontemplated, never thought of. random, indiscriminate, promiscuous; undirected; aimless, driftless[obs3], designless[obs3], purposeless, causeless; without purpose. possible &c. 470. unforeseeable, unpredictable, chancy, risky, speculative, dicey. Adv. randomly, by chance, fortuitously; unpredictably, unforeseeably; casually &c. 156; unintentionally &c. adj.; unwittingly. en passant[Fr], by the way, incidentally; as it may ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... specific differentiation; and in each illustration alike we find the result of the operation of known physical causes to be that of selection. If it should be argued in reply that the selection in the one case is obviously purposeless, while in the other it is as obviously purposive, I answer that this is pure assumption. It is perhaps not too much to say that every geological formation on the face of the globe is either wholly or in part due to the selective influence of specific gravity, and who ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... afterward with a little start of surprise that Mescal's purposeless, yet all-satisfying, watchful gaze had come to be part of his own experience. It was inscrutable to him, but he got from it a fancy, which he tried in vain to dispel, that something would happen to them out there on ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... goeth up for ever and ever," "The place of hell," "The bottomless pit," "The vengeance of eternal fire," "A lake of fire burning with brimstone." No sight can be so fearful as this glimpse into the interior of the earth, where fires are for ever wallowing with purposeless ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... the station, it was, as the conductor had said, very dark; and it was raining hard. For the first time, a sense of her unprotected loneliness fell upon Mercy's heart. Her mother, but half-awake, clung nervously to her, asking purposeless and incoherent questions. The conductor, still surly from his fancied rebuff at Mercy's hands, walked away, and took no notice of them. The station-master was nowhere to be seen. The two women stood huddling together under one ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... to say about life is, 'The times pass over us,' like the blind rush of a stream, or the movement of the sea around our coasts, eating away here and depositing its spoils there, sometimes taking and sometimes giving, but all the work of mere eyeless and purposeless chance or ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... itself.—But, it might be said, as Brahman is an existing substance, it will be the object of the other means of right knowledge also, and from this it follows that a discussion of the Vedanta-texts is purposeless.—This we deny; for as Brahman is not an object of the senses, it has no connection with those other means of knowledge. For the senses have, according to their nature, only external things for their objects, not Brahman. If Brahman were an object of the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... All this searching and examining seemed to be the mere flogging of a dead horse. The will was obviously a perfectly valid and regular will and there was an end of the matter. At least, so it seemed to me. But clearly that was not Thorndyke's view. His investigations were certainly not purposeless; and, as I walked by his side trying to conceive some purpose in his actions, I only became more and more mystified as I recalled them one by one, and perhaps most of all by the cryptic questions that I had just heard him address to the equally ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... me too some undefined instinct of distrust and disapproval. All that I felt now was the sad tie of brotherhood which united us, poor human atoms, strong only in our capacity to suffer, tossed and driven, whitherward we knew not, in the purposeless play of soulless and ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... and smoothly to the deuce. Some are wanderers by profession, 'turning up' and gone as soon, Travelling second-class, or steerage (when it's cheap they go saloon); Free from 'ists' and 'isms', troubled little by belief or doubt — Lazy, purposeless, and useless — knocking round and hanging out. They will take what they can get, and they will give what they can give, God alone knows how they manage — God alone knows how they live! They are nearly ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... beyond-the-atmosphere—in the powers involved in sub-atoms—in the powers, latent till now, involved in soul...for now each of millions was free to think, free to manifest his own particular luck and knack in discovery, having a country, foothold, not hovering like Noah's dove, urging still the purposeless wing not to pitch into nowhere: for the promise says: "Ye shall not sow and another reap, ye shall not plant and another garner", but in a land of gentlemen ye shall live, as it were to swellings of music, while a noble height grows upon your smooth foreheads, and the sum-total of the ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... the ultimate verdict upon Goldsmith's greatest poem, one thing is as significant as it is certain. These poetic yearnings were long in his heart ere he gave them utterance. A wayward, careless lad, heedless of all responsibility, he seems purposeless and perplexing to the last degree, yet the profoundest meditations of his life moved his soul. The very spell of poetry was upon him. This Divine revealing may have accounted for that outward want of earnestness of the character, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... little effect upon naturalists, because it made no attempt to grapple with the problem in detail, or to show in any single case how the allied species of a genus could have arisen, and have preserved their numerous slight and apparently purposeless differences from each other. No clue whatever was afforded to a law which should produce from any one species one or more slightly differing but yet permanently distinct species, nor was any reason given why such slight yet constant differences ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... prevent it. On a flat piece of green in front of the rocky kopjes, where the enemy evidently was, I could see men, not running, but walking about in different directions. They were not crowded, but they seemed to be moving about like black ants, only in a purposeless kind of way. "They are Boers, and we've got them between our men and our battery," said a Gordon officer. But I knew his hope was a vain one. Very slowly they were coming towards us—turning and firing and advancing a little, one by one—but still coming towards us, till at last they began ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... struggling with death. Groot Willem, who had been for a time highly elated with the prospect of recovering the lost giraffes, was again in great despondence. Much time had been squandered in this purposeless pursuit. ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... tale? Yet, in those hills that hung o'er Arcady, Some roving inebriate Daimon Begat him fair children On nymphs of the vineyard, On nymphs of the rock:— And in the heart of the forest Lay bound in white arms, In action creative a father Without a thought for his child:— A purposeless god, The forbear of men To corrupt, ape, inherit and spoil That fine ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... to so illumined an end that he recognized the judgment-place as holy, and died in full accord with the will of God, Catherine achieved a great marvel which only Christianity can compass: she lifted one of those seemingly purposeless and cruel accidents of destiny which stagger faith, into unity with the organic ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... or bodies. Into this wide waste of muddy ripples every sound in the school-room swam, and also sights and colors, till between her eye-lash and that filmy distant margin nothing existed but a freshet, alive yet with nothing, eddying around with purposeless power, and still moving onward with an under force. The open book in her hand appeared like a great white wharf, or pier, covered with lime and coal in spots and places, and pushed forward into this hissing, rippling, exclaiming deluge, which washed its base ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... hope to attain by keeping up this incessant din? If a love-song, surely the most optimistic cicada must realise that his amorous strains can never reach the ears of his lady-love, since hundreds of his brethren are all keeping up the same perpetual purposeless chirping, which must obviously drown any individual effort. Have the cicadas a double dose of gaiete francaise in their composition, and is this their manner of expressing it? Are they, like some young men we know, always yearning to turn night into ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... unfortunately for his country, it was balanced by the pay and emoluments of a Brigadiership. Reluctant to allow Burnside quietly, a Caesar's opportunity to "cover his baldness with laurels," his whimsical movements, now galloping furiously and purposeless from front to rear, and from rear to front of his command, cursing the officers,—and that for fancied neglect of duty,—poorly concealed ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... it was not to please himself he was going out to look for the silver just then, and the deduction was that the expedition had no attractions for him because he wished to stay at the ranch. Allowing that, the revelation of his motive had not been purposeless. It was only his responsibility drove him away from her, and there was a vague but effective compliment in the implication that she would recognize it. Still, this train of reasoning had led Alice Deringham far enough, and ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... Wynne's appearance three men whose watchful eyes had been fastened on the doorway of the H. Latham Company for something more than an hour stirred. One of them—Frank Claflin—was directly across the street, strolling along idly, the most purposeless of all in the hurrying, well-dressed throng; another—Steve Birnes, chief of the Birnes Detective Agency—appeared from the hallway of a building adjoining the H. Latham Company, and moved along behind Mr. Wynne, some thirty feet in the ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... habit to make purposeless visits," continued he, "especially among frivolous, idle people like you. I've been coming here to make a study ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... know that this doctrine of mere selfish floating on the current of impulse which your traveler poet teaches is devilish laziness, and devilish laziness always tends to something worse. You may live such a life, and quote such poetry, but you don't believe that a man should flow on like a purposeless river. The lines you quoted bear the mark of a restless desire to apologize to conscience for a fearful waste of power and possibility. No," he said, rising, "I don't want that check. This one will do; but you won't forget that God and Huckleberry Street want you, and they will ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... you would expect Arthur Cumberland to admire or even to have patience with, and the very last sort who could be expected to endure his rough ways, or find anything congenial to herself in his dissipated and purposeless life. But the freaks of youthful passion are endless, and it was evident that they loved each ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... know it was weakness! I used to pride myself on my strength of mind, but I'm weak. I'm weaker than a woman. I'm a poor reed—vacillating, uncertain, purposeless. I don't know my own mind. I haven't the courage to act according to my convictions. I'm afraid to give pain. They all think I'm brave, but I'm simply a ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... And still its generations pass on, rhythmically swinging; slaves of Nature, not, as in the West, rebels against her; cyclical as her seasons and her stars; infinite as her storms of dust; identical as the leaves of her trees; purposeless as her cyclones ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... habit of Munich trains to start off in this purposeless way. Apparently, their sole object is to get away from the town. They don't care where they go to; they don't care what becomes of them, so long as they ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... to purposeless copying, without thought, each blade of grass, as commended by the inconsequent, but, in the long curve of the narrow leaf, corrected by the straight tall stem, he learns how grace is wedded to dignity, how strength enhances sweetness, that elegance ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... farthing. Adj. fortuitous &c 156; unintentional, unintended; accidental; not meant; undesigned, purposed; unpremeditated &c 612; unforeseen, uncontemplated, never thought of. random, indiscriminate, promiscuous; undirected; aimless, driftless^, designless^, purposeless, causeless; without purpose. possible &c 470. unforeseeable, unpredictable, chancy, risky, speculative, dicey. Adv. randomly, by chance, fortuitously; unpredictably, unforeseeably; casually &c 156; unintentionally &c adj.; unwittingly. en passant [Fr.], by the way, incidentally; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... concrete terms, his manner of linking adjective with substantive, were all necessary to him for the describing of his strange world; but these habits became a mere vicious trick of absurd periphrasis and purposeless vagueness when they were carried by his imitators into the description of common and familiar objects. A reader making his first acquaintance with Thomson's Seasons might suppose that the poem was written for a wager, to prove ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... purposeless now and bereft, he spied a recruiting party at the door of a public-house; and on coming nearer, found, by one of those strange coincidences which do occur in life, and which have possibly their root in a hidden and wondrous law, that it was a party, perhaps a remnant, of the ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... book-stalls, the visits to print-shops and picture-galleries, soon ceased to afford Lamb much real pleasure or enjoyment. Yea, London itself, with all its wonders and marvels, with all its (to him) memories and associations, he found to be, to one who had nothing to do but wander idly and purposeless through her thronged and busy streets and thoroughfares,—a mere looker-on in Vienna,—a somewhat dreary and melancholy place. Indeed, the London of 1825-30 was a far different place to Elia from the London of twenty years before, when he resided at No. 4, Inner-Temple Lane, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... die in an instant; and though, if dying at sea, I might sink to the depth, where something of Dorothy remains, I would as soon be reduced to ashes and scattered on the shores of this lake that I have known so long. That would be symbolical of my purposeless and ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... why he had yielded to Nan's entreaty. It all seemed so purposeless now in the broad light of day. He could force himself to live with his wife—under the same roof. Perhaps in time he could even meet her in daily intercourse. She might even become a factor in the great work of the Obar. But the joy of achievement had been snatched from him. All that he had foreseen ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... miles from the Ayrshire shore. There stands the cove, lonely as a foundling, proud as Cheops. But, like the battered brains surmounting the Giant of Gath, its haughty summit is crowned by a desolate castle, in and out of whose arches the aerial mists eddy like purposeless phantoms, thronging the soul of some ruinous genius, who, even in overthrow, harbors ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... Ropes to put that strain on himself, since the main purport of Napoleon's bulletins notoriously was to deceive the public. But if Napoleon had not intended that Ney should occupy Quatre Bras on the night of the 15th, the statement that this had been done would have been a purposeless futility; and if he had intended that Ney should do so it is unlikely that he should have omitted to give him instructions to that effect. Grouchy claims to have heard Napoleon censure Ney for his omission to occupy Quatre Bras; an omission which had its importance, for the reason, among others, ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... memories, of mighty warrior princes, and of lovely ladies with names sweet as music and perfume of potpourri. Wandering in a splendid confusion of feudal and mediaeval relics—walls with carved doorways, and doorways without walls; beautiful, purposeless columns whose occupation had long been gone; carved marvels of fireplaces standing up sadly from wrecked floors of fair ladies' boudoirs or great banqueting halls, the stout, painted woman broke in upon the guide's story to talk of any ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... sought merely a purposeless whirring of machinery. It is important, of course, that every man and woman in the country be able to find work, that every factory run, that business and farming as a whole earn profits. But Government in a democratic Nation does not exist solely, or even primarily, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... hills the train made its way cautiously, making long and apparently purposeless stops between stations, as if haunted by the fear of arriving too early. At such times Peter had leisure to carefully study the monotonous landscape, and he could not help but notice that the disparity in the size of the barn and that of the ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... of Sprot's apparently purposeless lying. His real interest throughout was to persuade the Government that he was giving them genuine Logan letters. This, however, he denied, with truth, yet he lied variously about the nature of his ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... until something occurs that gives one an opportunity of talking to some rational purpose, than to insist that one's tongue shall incessantly utter articulate sounds whether the brain give it anything to say or no. This sort of purposeless talking exerts a positively injurious influence upon the mind, by leading it into the too common error of mistaking sound ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... loud-tongued and incessant, throwing themselves on the beach with a tremendous boom, and drawing the shingle back with them with an equally tremendous rattle, so impolite and noisy, bent only on showing their strength, reckless, rude, self-willed, and inconsiderate! This purposeless display of force, and this incessant waste of power, and the noisy self-assertion in ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... a moral character, and terminates in the highest holiness and happiness of all obedient men and angels; but the atheistic development contemplates and promises only the evolution of animal instinct and passions, the eternal death of the individual, and, for the universe, only purposeless cycles of progress, and ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... and was promptly arrested for inciting a riot. Nobody cared enough seriously for the redoubtable Sam to object to this. The situation was ticklish, but the police handled it tactfully for once, opposing only a passive opposition, leaving the crowd to fritter its energies in purposeless cursing, surging to and fro, and ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... the half-hour; it was half-past one; another quarter, and the next time its ponderous silver hammers woke the house it would be two. Half-past one? Why, then, did not the hands move? Why cling fixed on a point five minutes before the first quarter struck? To and fro, soundless and purposeless, swung the long pendulum. And, ah! what was this thing I had become? I had done with time. Not for me the hands moved on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... passion—to fascinate and influence those more powerful than she—though operant in Elfride, was decidedly purposeless. She had wanted her friend Knight's good opinion from the first: how much more than that elementary ingredient of friendship she now desired, her fears would hardly allow her to think. In originally wishing to please the highest class of man she had ever intimately known, there ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... forgery.—While external and internal evidence thus combine to assert the genuineness of these writings, no satisfactory account has been or apparently can be given of them as a forgery of a later date than Ignatius. They would be quite purposeless as such; for they entirely omit all topics which would ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... perfect felicity in which, if we may believe the Secretary of State, the President's speech left the American people. The loyal men of the loyal States do not intend that the war they carried on for great ends shall pass into history as the bloodiest of all purposeless farces, beginning in an ecstasy of public spirit and ending in an ignominious surrender of the advantages of hard-won victory. They demand such guaranties, in the shape of amendments to the Constitution, as shall insure security for the future from such evils as have scourged ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... how it is that some jesting word, trivial and purposeless it may be, will fire a hidden train of thought which was waiting only for some chance spark? "Obliterate the judge," said Hunnicott in grim jest; and straightway Kent saw possibilities; saw a thing to be done, though not yet the ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... because she conceived them to be for her own mere personal benefit, while the task which she had set herself was for a better purpose. But, although she did not study as had been her wont, while she sewed she occupied her mind in a way that was much more beneficial to it than the purposeless acquisition of facts, the solving of mathematical problems, or conning of parts of speech. Beside her was always an open book, it might be a passage of Scripture, a scene from Shakespeare, a poem or paragraph rich in the wisdom and beauty of some great mind; and as she sewed she ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... many rivers, showed the towers of Louviers and red roofs cinctured by the greatest of them; short of the walls were the ranked white tents, columned smoke, waggons, with men and horses, as purposeless, little, and busy as a swarm of bees. In the midst of this array was a red pavilion with a standard at the side, too heavy for the wind. All was set in the clear sunless air of an autumn day in Normandy; the hour, one short of noon. ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... convicting and punishing them, but it seems extremely improbable that a people that once put its female assassins to death would ever have relinquished the obvious advantages of the practice while retaining with purposeless tenacity some of its costly preliminary forms. Whatever may have been the reason, the custom was observed with all the gravity of a serious intention. Gunkux professes knowledge of one or two instances (he does not name his authorities) where matters went so far as conviction and ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... prevent his mind from dwelling on her. He tried to fix his thoughts upon his life as a boyish adventurer, but could not keep to those earlier periods of his career. All of his days before meeting her seemed base or trivial or purposeless. She filled his memory to the exclusion of all other loves and desires. She was at once his wife and his child. He possessed a thousand bright pictures of her swift and graceful body, her sunny smile, her sweet, grave eyes. He recalled the first time ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... 'walketh to and fro,' and implies hurry and bustle, continuous effort, habitual unrest. It thus comes to be parallel with the stronger words which follow,— 'Surely they are disquieted in vain'; and one reason why all this effort and agitation are purposeless and sad, is because the man who is straining his nerves and wearying his legs is but a shadow in regard to duration—'He heapeth up riches, and knoweth ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Between the ability to control one's thoughts and the inability to control them lies all the difference between right actions and wrong actions; between withstanding temptation and yielding to it; between an inefficient purposeless life and a life of purpose and endeavor; between success and failure. For we act in accordance with those things which our thought rests upon. Suppose two lines of thought represented by A and B, respectively, lie before ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... the keeping, and the impulse to fling it away uprears its ugly suggestion. Out in a square of light by the ford I saw Dave Mead standing, looking straight before him. The sorrows of the day were not all mine. I went to him, and we stood there silent together. At length we turned about in a purposeless way toward the open West Prairie. How many a summer evening we had wandered here! How often had our ponies come tramping home side by side, in the days when we brought the cows in late from the farthest draw! It seemed like another ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... as much as you like, but let me tell you that the life of a clergyman's wife—honoured, respected, and useful—is a more profitable one than the idle existence which you lead, utterly purposeless and lazy. You never do one single thing ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... were already beginning to wear a wistful, dejected look. There was a feeling of departure everywhere, a sense that the year's excitements were over. The procession had gone by, and there was an empty, purposeless air of waiting-about upon things, a sort of despairing longing for something else to happen—and a sure sense that nothing more could happen till next year. Every event in the floral calendar had taken place with immemorial punctuality and tragic rapidity. All the full-blooded flowers ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... sound of his voice or reach of his hand. He realized with an overwhelming certainty how badly he needed her, how much he wanted her—not only in ways that were sweet to think of, but as a friendly beacon in the murky, purposeless vista of years that stretched before him. Yes, and before her also. They had not spent all those hours together without talking of themselves. No matter that she was cheerful, that youth gave her courage and a ready smile, there was still a finality about blindness that ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... resentment against the murderers. They give utterance to a wild hopeless song, full of a presentiment of disaster coming on successful wickedness enthroned in power. They are captives from Troy, obliged to look on the deeds of Aegisthus, whether just or unjust, yet they weep for the purposeless agonies of Agamemnon's house. When asked by Electra what prayers she should offer to her dead father, they bid her pray for some avenging god or mortal to requite the murderers. Returning to them from the tomb, she tells them of a strange ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... the country in a state of chronic peaceful war through purposeless mobilization, the present government has brought Greece to the verge of economic, material and moral bankruptcy. This policy, unhappily, is not a dream, but downright folly." He further laid great stress on the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... result? By no rational being could a just and benevolent life be accepted as proof of such astonishing announcements. Miracles are the necessary complement then of the truth of such announcements, which without them are purposeless and abortive, the unfinished fragments of a design which is nothing unless it is the whole. They are necessary to the justification of such announcements, which, indeed, unless they are supernatural truths, are the wildest delusions. The matter and its guarantee are the two parts of a revelation, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... mean the vocation of taking care of me, which you repudiated with scorn—in fact refused to entertain it seriously at all. Of course there may have been other grounds, but the one you laid stress on was that I was lazy and purposeless, and that if you ever did take up such a vocation it would be to take care of some one you could respect. I don't say for an instant that I approach to that altitude, but at least I may say I am no longer ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... of another. In some constitutions there is a natural chemistry, and those constitutions may produce chemic wonders—in others a natural fluid, call it electricity, and these may produce electric wonders. But the wonders differ from Natural Science in this—they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous. They lead on to no grand results; and therefore the world does not heed, and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I saw or heard, a man, human as myself, was the ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... Lolita, serenely working, his silver crescent ear-rings swung a little with the slight tilting of his head, and his fingers, forgotten and unguided by his thoughts, ruffled the strings of the guitar, drawing from it gay, purposeless tendrils of sound. Occasionally, when Lolita knew the song, she would hum it on the roof, inattentively, busy rolling ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... opinions which might aid the enemy, yet, as the value of adding to a nation's enemies became apparent to Authority, it became necessary to turn into enemies of the State those who denounced profiteers for turning blood into money, those who denounced generals for wasting the lives of boys in purposeless actions, those who spoke against the spending of the nation's resources to succor needy contractors, and those who asked whether the war was to go on till all were dead, or whether it might be stopped profitably at any time ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... time since he had seen her shadow crossing the wall, Nora Cavanaugh hesitated. For a flashing instant the watcher got a full view of her face as it was held away from the burglar. The laughter was gone; in its place was fear—pale, dumb fear; the hands which fumbled with the wrap were purposeless, with no direction. And then she, too, disappeared out of the range of ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... enjoy. Summer approached; Diana tried to cheer me: she said I looked ill, and wished to accompany me to the sea-side. This St. John opposed; he said I did not want dissipation, I wanted employment; my present life was too purposeless, I required an aim; and, I suppose, by way of supplying deficiencies, he prolonged still further my lessons in Hindostanee, and grew more urgent in requiring their accomplishment: and I, like a fool, never thought of resisting him—I could ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... which I had intended should be devoted to the National Art Gallery, was wasted—I use the word wasted deliberately—in idle and purposeless contemplation of the show windows in a retail merchandising resort known as the Burlington Arcade. Toward the close of our ever memorable day at Stratford-upon-Avon, as I was discoursing at length on the life and works of the Immortal Bard, I was shocked to hear Miss Henrietta Marble, of Rising ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... gulf of disorder. Here is the passion for gain, the very spirit of the bourgeoise gone drunk with desire. The result is something terrible. Chicago is leaderless, purposeless, slovenly, down at ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... shoulders, with a little gesture of impatience. He had left London at a moment when he could ill be spared, and had not travelled to this out-of-the-way corner of the kingdom to exchange purposeless platitudes with a man whose present attitude towards life at any rate he heartily despised. He seated himself upon a half-broken rail, and lit ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... decreed otherwise, and a subtle spirit under whose power they were but purposeless puppets inspired them to commit an act of folly which was to hurl them from the fools' paradise wherein they were reveling down to the pit ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... mental attributes on which the treatment of his entire subject afterwards depends, and whose terms are repeated in every following page to the very dazzling of eye and deadening of ear (a division, we regret to say, as illogical as it is purposeless), otherwise than by a laconic reference to the assumptions ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... he? Where was the martial air, the flashing eye, the warrior face which she had pictured? There, framed in the doorway, was a huge twisted old man, gaunt and puckered, with twitching hands and shuffling, purposeless feet. A cloud of fluffy white hair, a red-veined nose, two thick tufts of eyebrow and a pair of dimly questioning, watery blue eyes—these were what met her gaze. He leaned forward upon a stick, while his shoulders rose and fell with his crackling, ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... time that it was set up amidst those toilsome streets, was it not charged to overawe the disinherited ones, the starvelings, who, exasperated by everlasting injustice, were always ready for revolt? It was not seen in the districts where wealth and enjoyment reigned. It would there have seemed purposeless, degrading and truly monstrous. And it was a tragical and terrible coincidence that the bomb-thrower, driven mad by want, should be guillotined there, in the very centre of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... grace By Nala met. To whom spake Rituparna:— "Joy go with thee and her, happily joined. But say, Nishadha, wrought I any jot Wrongful to thee, whilst sojourning unknown Within my walls? If any word or deed, Purposed or purposeless, hath vexed thee, friend, For one and all thy pardon grant to me!" And Nala answered: "Never act or word, The smallest, Raja, lingers to excuse! If this were otherwise, thy slave was I, And might not question, but must ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... afternoon when he first saw Sir David's house. The solitary walk awakened very bitter thoughts; the memory of those hopes which had then made the sunshine of his life, and without which existence seemed a weary purposeless journey across a ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... working a revolution in the lives of many who are or who may become sufficiently awake to them, so that with them there will not be that—shall we say—immature passing from middle life into a broken, purposeless, decrepit, and sunless, and one might almost say, soulless ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... Land of Promise would be hard pressed to feed its own people, while the manufactured exports to pay for imported food would not be forthcoming. It should be added that this sensational forecast was no purposeless jeremiad. Mr. Hill told his hearers that the danger which threatened the future of the Nation would be averted only by the intelligence and industry of those who cultivated the farm lands, and that they had it in their power to provide a perfectly practicable and adequate remedy. ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... least resistance has changed in some measure, and the energy which formerly found a vent in predatory activity, now in part takes the direction of some ostensibly useful end. Ostensibly purposeless leisure has come to be deprecated, especially among that large portion of the leisure class whose plebeian origin acts to set them at variance with the tradition of the otium cum dignitate. But that canon of reputability which discountenances all ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... that I were kicked out of Leadenhall with every mark of indignity, and a competence in my fob! The birds of the air would not be so free as I should. How I would prance and curvet it, and pick up cowslips, and ramble about purposeless as an idiot!" ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... some, whom a thirst Ardent, unquenchable, fires, Not with the crowd to be spent, Not without aim to go round In an eddy of purposeless dust, Effort unmeaning and vain. Ah yes! some of us strive Not without action to die Fruitless, but something to snatch From dull oblivion, nor all Glut the devouring grave! We, we have chosen our path— Path to a clear-purposed goal, Path of advance!—but ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... wayward purposeless good-hearted master of the boy, Eugene himself, is as evidently in this: "If they were great things, I, the untrustworthy man in little things, would do them earnestly—But O No, I wouldn't!" What follows has ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... living growing things. The leaves of the great maples in the court-house grounds rustled in the spring breeze, there was the soft incessant hum of insect life, and over all the white wonderful moonlight. But he had no part in this universal renewal—he was to die his purposeless unheroic death in the morning. For himself he could almost believe he no longer cared; he had fully accepted the idea. He had even taken his farewell of the few in Mount Hope who had held steadfast in their friendship, and there only remained for him to die decently; to meet the inevitable ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... therapeutic agents are available. Those that have been brought in are laid on the floor and no one can give them any further care. What could one do when all means are lacking? Under those circumstances, it is almost useless to bring them in. Among the passersby, there are many who are uninjured. In a purposeless, insensate manner, distraught by the magnitude of the disaster most of them rush by and none conceives the thought of organizing help on his own initiative. They are concerned only with the welfare of their own families. It became clear to us during these days that the ...
— The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United States
... with a little laugh. "At least, I shall not be sorry to return to Silverdale. It has a charm of its own, for while one is occasionally glad to get away from it, one is even more pleased to come home again. It is a somewhat purposeless life our friends are leading yonder in the cities. I, of ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... "Otherwise Creation would not only be a senseless joke, but a wicked one! Nay, it would almost be a crime. To cause creatures to be born into existence without their own consent, merely to destroy them utterly in a few years and make the fact of their having lived purposeless, would be worse than the dreams of madmen. For what is the use of bringing human creatures into the world to suffer pain, sickness, and sorrow, if mere life-torture is all we can give them, and death is the ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... other. I constantly endeavoured, by reminiscence and inference, to post him up in the usages of his adopted country; and he regaled me with the folk-lore of the hill-side where his ancestors had passively resisted extinction since the time of Japhet. Purposeless fairy tales and profitless ghost stories for the most part, with another class of legend, equally fatuous; but ah! how legitimately born of that auroral fancy which ceases not to play above the grave of homely ambition, penury—crushed and ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... no hurry to share his happiness. Since his youth he had made few friends, and in all his life had never known comradeship with a woman. Suddenly, and as a well-spring in the desert, Vashti had come into the dull round of his duty—his purposeless, monotonous duty—to refresh it; nor perhaps were the waters less sweet for the feeling that they were stolen. So he lived in the day, and put off thinking of ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... for the simplest manual operations will rouse me to indignation: but if a thing will contribute largely to my ever-growing voluptuousness, I will undergo a considerable amount of labour to accomplish it, though without steady effort, being liable to side-winds and whims, and purposeless relaxations. ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... conscious, land-owning gentleman with a passion for justice in remote places and a whimsical dislike of motor cars in his immediate neighbourhood, may veil the operations of a stupendous intelligence bent upon the regeneration of the world. It may do, but if it does, it is a very amazing and purposeless impersonation. I at any rate do not believe that it does. I do not believe that he or any other Liberal leader or any Conservative minister has any comprehensive aim at all— as we of the new generation measure comprehensiveness. These parties, and the phrases of party exposition—in America ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... adapt themselves to slavery and the rule of a master, develop an idea of goodness very different from that of princes. From our slave ancestry, says Lester Ward, we learnt to work, and certainly it is from slavery we derive the conception that industry, even though it be purposeless industry, is a virtue in itself. The good slave, too, has a morality of restraints; he abstains from the food he handles and hungers for, and he denies himself pride and initiative of every sort. He is honest in not taking, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Madhavi, in course of her purposeless wanderings, came there. Beholding her, those monarchs saluted her and said, "What object hast thou in coming here? What command of thine shall we obey? Thou deservest to command us, for all of us are thy sons, O thou that art endued with wealth of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... stroke, denoting the accomplished oarsman, with which he had urged the little boat through the water, had given way to an idle and purposeless drift. He longed to cast himself down before the little feet, in their smart high-heeled buckled shoes and clocked stockings, which peeped out at him from under her embroidered camlet petticoat in such a maliciously ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... dissatisfied and even resentful silence. The most generous praise of his skill and courage awoke no response. "I reckon the old man waz just spilin' for a fight, and is feelin' disappointed," said a passenger. But those who knew that Bill had the true fighter's scorn for any purely purposeless conflict were more or less concerned and watchful of him. He would drive steadily for four or five minutes with thoughtfully knitted brows, but eyes still keenly observant under his slouched hat, and then, relaxing his strained attitude, would give way to a movement of ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... too, there was a most surprising and notable democratic step. China declared itself a Republic. Considerable fighting preceded this change, warfare of a character rather vague and purposeless; for China is so huge that a harmony of understanding among her hundreds of millions is not easily attained. Yet, on the whole, with surprisingly little conflict and confusion the change was made. The oldest nation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... purposeless fashion, towards the spot where Chilvers held his court. Their personal acquaintance with Bruno and his family was slight, and though Mrs. Warricombe would gladly have pushed forward to claim recognition, natural diffidence restrained her. Sidwell kept in the rear, risking now and then ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... of arts, is unimportant as compared with a realization of the significance of life. The one is superficial—the other is fundamental; the one is temporal—the other is spiritual. There is no more wretched human being than a highly trained but utterly purposeless man—which, after all, is only saying that there is no use in having an education without a religion; that unless someone is going to live in the house there is not much use in elaborately ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... the rival philosophers in France might have motives. We know the character of our David Hume perfectly well, and though it was not faultless, its fault certainly lay rather in an excessive desire to make the world comfortable for everybody, than in anything like purposeless malignity, of which he never had a trace. Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume's agency was exceedingly to his advantage. Hume was not without vanity, and his letters show that he was not displeased at the addition to his consequence which ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... sent for but professed to know nothing of the matter, nor could any inquiry clear it up. Another item had been added to that constant and apparently purposeless series of small mysteries which had succeeded each other so rapidly. Setting aside the whole grim story of Sir Charles's death, we had a line of inexplicable incidents all within the limits of two days, which ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... village on a knoll rising from the marshes. It contains (1) an ancient font, (2) an effigy of Sir W. Botreaux (1420) on the N. side of choir. The internal arrangements of the tower are peculiar. It has three arches, those on the N. and S. being apparently purposeless. ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... Nuncombe Putney. The outward appearance which Dorothy bore on her return home was proof of this. Her clothes, the set of her hair, her very gestures and motions had framed themselves on town ideas. The faded, wildered, washed-out look, the uncertain, purposeless bearing which had come from her secluded life and subjection to her sister had vanished from her. She had lived among people, and had learned something of their gait and carriage. Money we know will do almost everything, and no doubt money had had much to ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... have consented to share in such a life as she was leading before their marriage? And he had to acknowledge their months of desultory wandering from one remote Italian hill-top to another must have seemed as purposeless to her as balls and dinners would have been to him. An imagination like his, peopled with such varied images and associations, fed by so many currents from the long stream of human experience, could hardly picture the bareness of the small half-lit place in which his wife's spirit fluttered. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... had never made a wilder, more purposeless cast than when it brought Clem to Little ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... is waiting amongst the reeds, Grown tame in the silence that reigns around, Broken only, now and then, By shy woodpecker or noisy jay, By the far-off watch-dog's muffled bay; But where never the purposeless laughter of men, Or the seething city's murmurous sound Will ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... work has been going on, and the old lusts of the human heart have been busy sowing the dragon's teeth that shall spring up in wars and fightings. In savage lands warfare rages on, ceaseless, ignoble, unrecorded, and seemingly purposeless as that of animalcules in a drop of water. On civilised soil, men, who love the same Christ and worship Him in the same tongue, are fronting each other at this hour. The war of actual swords, and the war of conflicting ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... instant, as I stood there, it was suddenly driven home to me how poor and purposeless a life I should lead while this crippled friend of ours and the companion of my boyhood were away in the forefront of the storm. Quick as a flash my resolution ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... functions must be a tireless activity working towards an end. Everything He calls into being works toward that end, I myself with the rest. I am not a purposeless bit of jetsam flung out on the ocean of time to be tossed about helplessly. God couldn't so will an existence. It would not be in keeping with His economy to have any entity wasted. As Our Lord puts it, the sparrow cannot ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... When, years ago, she and Clarke had parted, the man had seemed, for once, greatly disturbed and had promised, in his agitation, that some day he would communicate to her what would exonerate him in her eyes. She had answered that all words between them were purposeless, and that she hoped never to see his face again. The experience that the years had brought to her, instead of elucidating the mystery of Reginald's personality, had, on the contrary, made his behaviour appear more and more unaccountable. She had more than once ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... directions and down a side street as well the dwellers in the slums straggled into the open space in front of the "Clarion" office. To Hal they seemed casual, purposeless; rather prankish, too, like a lot of urchins out on a lark. Several bore improvised signs, uncomplimentary to the "Clarion." They seemed surprised when they encountered the rope barrier with its warning placards. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... years of patient endurance to train her in waiting; but the endurance had been passive and purposeless, rather than active, and with a well-defined object. Now that an object was to be attained by action the lessons of patient endurance counted for naught. Instead of determined action against her open revolt, Pierre had been smilingly obsequious ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... and first thinks of returning when his arms have begun to grow weary. He cleaves the waves with haste, scarcely venturing to cast a glance at the distant shore, feeling with every stroke that his strength is failing and that he is making no headway, until at last, purposeless and cramped, he scarcely has any realization of his position; then suddenly his foot touches the firm bottom, and his arm hugs the first rock on the shore. A fresh reality confronted me, and my sufferings were a dream. There are but few ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... interest to us that in planning this monograph we conceived it necessary to consider part of our material under the head of episodic pathological lying and that later we had to omit this chapter. Surely there had been cases—so it seemed to us at first—where purposeless lying had been indulged in for a comparatively short time, particularly during the adolescent period, without expression of a prevaricating tendency before or after this time. When we came to review our material with this chapter in mind we ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... directed at an individual may be the object of criminal sanctions, we cannot deny to a State power to punish the same utterance directed at a defined group, unless we can say that this is a wilful and purposeless restriction unrelated to the peace and well-being of the State."[237] Pointing then to Illinois' bad record in the matter of race riots, he continued: "In the face of this history and its frequent obligato ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... one serious difficulty some girls have to meet. There is a type of older person who is sure that using the mind will harm that precious article. And, finally, there is our inexperience, our own lack of comprehension, our own purposeless ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... Daniel, a poet of the Elizabethan era, "how poor a thing is man!" Without a certain degree of practical efficient force—compounded of will, which is the root, and wisdom, which is the stem of character—life will be indefinite and purposeless—like a body of stagnant water, instead of a running stream doing useful work and keeping the machinery of a district ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... Silver had two guns slung about him—one before and one behind—besides the great cutlass at his waist, and a pistol in each pocket of his square-tailed coat. To complete his strange appearance, Captain Flint sat perched upon his shoulder and gabbling odds and ends of purposeless sea-talk. I had a line about my waist, and followed obediently after the sea-cook, who held the loose end of the rope, now in his free hand, now between his powerful teeth. For all the world, I was led like a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... believe that there is a great deal of hopeless irremediable suffering in the world—suffering of a kind that seems wantonly inflicted, purposeless anguish.... That 'regret must hurt and may not heal' is a terrible thought, which, when we get our first glimpse of human anguish, seems almost sickeningly true. But I have seen a great deal lately of such suffering, and it amazes ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... water. All seasons seem to be alike to it, just so the sun shines; for, during the hottest days of summer and the coldest days of winter (that is, if there is sunlight and no ice on the water), it may be seen on the surface of ponds and streams, gyrating hither and thither in a seemingly mad and purposeless manner. ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... accept its characters and its situations without question. It leaves us inquiring, and, if not actually protesting, at least unconvinced. We might accept the heroine herself as an incarnate spirit of cruel curiosity, inflicting purposeless pain, and to be explained, even if not to be justified, only by her impending maternity,—which she recoils from and is unworthy of. But I, for one, cannot help finding Hedda inconsistent artistically, as tho she was a composite photograph of irreconcilable figures. ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... mingling, purposeless movement. Someone ran to the door—to find that it was locked from the outside. Mr. Eddie, now recognizable by his accent, came toward the prone man, dazed, horrified, and grown very white. Zahara, a beautiful, tragic figure, in her flaming ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... and the natural varieties of animals and plants in their wild state by natural choice of breeds: in the first case, the will of man effects the selection to suit a purpose; in the second, it is effected in a purposeless way by the "struggle for existence." In both cases the transformation of the organic forms takes place through the reciprocal action of the laws of inheritance and of adaptation; in both cases it depends ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... feet chilblained, but all the world was waiting for him to be a man to do him honor. If he could sit for an hour with the old man on the beach, would it bring the boyish feeling back again? He was conscious of a purposeless temptation—unreasonable as that which he had felt at the edge of a precipice to throw himself over. Nonsense! The committee would be waiting; there were appointments for every hour of his stay in Philadelphia; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... familiarity of words which convey these truths for a clear understanding of the truths themselves! If the preceding disquisition, with all its subtlety and all its obscurity, should answer no other purpose, it will still have been neither purposeless, nor devoid of utility, should it only lead us to sympathize with the strivings of the human intellect, awakened to the infinite importance of the inward oracle [Greek: gnothi seauton]—and almost instinctively shaping its course of search in conformity with the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... pawnbroker was impenetrable, and the lawyer was compelled reluctantly to dismiss him. The moment the witness left the box, Brandon sank into a gloomy abstraction,—he seemed quite to forget the business and the duties of the court; and so negligently did he continue to conclude the case, so purposeless was the rest of his examination and cross-examination, that the cause was entirely marred, and a verdict "Not ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... impulse of loyal liking and friendship, and it is doubtful if Bob even saw the daughter's face. Certainly he never noted the lack of heart in her manner. His eyes had flitted almost instantly to Miriam Arnold's, and there they hung. A few minutes of swift, purposeless chat ensued, Mrs. Stannard and Mrs. Sumter doing most of it. Then, somehow, three women seemed to drift away and become engrossed in matters of their own over by the Navajo-covered lounge, and then Miriam lifted up her eyes and ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... swiftly, "retaining my few belongings, and calling me a foul name which made me cower away like a whipped child. I had nothing left—nothing. For a week I had listened to no kind word, met with no kind act. I was upon the street, alone, at night, purposeless, homeless, wandering aimlessly from place to place, weakened by hunger, stupefied by despair. Men spoke to me, and I fled their presence as though they were pestilence; women, painted, shameless creatures, greeted me ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... then and glanced down the single street of Heart's Desire, a street as straggling and purposeless as his own misdirected life—a wavering lane through the poor habitations of a Land of Oblivion. Longer he looked, and stronger the conviction grew. "No, no," he said, clenching his hand; "not here for ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... "clever." I suspect that Dreiser, writing so of his own creed, would be tempted to make it "stupid," or, at all events, "unintelligible." The struggle of man, as he sees it, is more than impotent; it is gratuitous and purposeless. There is, to his eye, no grand ingenuity, no skilful adaptation of means to end, no moral (or even dramatic) plan in the order of the universe. He can get out of it only a sense of profound and inexplicable disorder. The waves which batter the cockleshells change their direction ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... consist of boggy soil covered with a rank growth of coarse grass, reeds, and stunted bush, sparsely dotted here and there with a few gnarled and unwholesome-looking trees, the whole intersected by a labyrinth of canals filled with stagnant water, which wound hither and thither in a most purposeless and bewildering fashion. That insect life abounded there was manifest at the most cursory glance, for great clouds of midges or flies could be seen hovering in the air in every direction, while ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... of the race dwells there now; a man yet in the prime of life, though one who takes but little interest in the doings of the busy world. He leads a melancholy and purposeless existence, and seems, as the years go on, to grow more morbid. Some say that he never got over the shock of his wife's sudden death, and that the terrible accident completely shattered his nerves. Others, chiefly, old wives, who have lived on the estate for years, and are deeply versed in all matters ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... not written to amuse, to create purposeless excitement, or to secure a little praise as a bit of artistic work. It would probably fail in all these things. It was written with a definite, earnest purpose, which I trust will ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... after all, that the police, seeking a clew through motive, should have been driven to frenzy on every occasion in finding themselves forever confronted with what, from every angle they were able to view it, was quite a purposeless crime! On one point only they were right, the old dogma, the old, old cry, old as the institution of police, older than that, old since time immemorial—CHERCHEZ LA FEMME! Quite right—but also quite purposeless! Jimmie Dale's eyes grew wistful. He had been "hunting for the woman in the case" ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... crushed, their hearts bleeding, their lives made useless, withered. The natural thing is to avoid such, stand aloof, be quite scornfully indifferent. The miracle would happen if you went to them, lifted them up, restored them to society. I have said avoid useless people, I mean selfish, lazy, purposeless, aimless people. Sir Humphrey Davy worked a miracle when he took the boy Farrady out of a stable loft and gave him a chance to cultivate his genius. The Sistine Chapel is Angelo's miracle. When the band on the deck of the ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... of achievements of the human mind than as the conquest of any single individual. It has sometimes taken centuries of experience to ascertain the value of a single fact in its various bearings. Like man himself, experience is feeble and apparently purposeless in its infancy, but acquires maturity and strength with age. Experience, however, is not limited to a lifetime, but is the stored-up wealth and power of our race. Even amidst the death of successive generations it is constantly advancing and ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... moment before. He turned eagerly about with the intention of calling some one—the first person he met—to account. But the house that he had just quitted was gone. The wall! Ah, there it was, no longer purposeless, intrusive, and ivy-clad, but part of the buttress of another massive wall that rose into battlements above him. Mr. Clinch turned again hopelessly toward Sammtstadt. There was the fringe of poplars on the ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... put round the table. It is a theory among those who believe that a spirit nourishes all things from within, that there was some competition amongst these chairs as to which should be used at table, so dull, forlorn and purposeless was their life against the wall. Seven pictures hung on that wall; not because it was a mystic number, but because it filled up all the required space; two on each side of the looking-glass and three ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... environment. Sometimes one observes both general resistiveness and specific acts. For instance, Mary G., who said, "Leave me alone," and covered her head or buried it in the pillows, accompanied her muscular resistiveness with laughter. This shows the affective nature of the apparently purposeless muscular tension. The case of Annie K. (Case 5) is more instructive. In the stage of deeper stupor she had the automatic type of resistiveness but also outbursts of anger, particularly toward the nurses, striking ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... far-off intermediate voices scattered on a space of half a mile, but never quite alone; always preoccupied by something else than the actual business on hand; appearing suddenly from ditches, behind trunks, and between fence-rails; cropping up in unexpected places along the road after vague and purposeless detours—seemingly going anywhere and everywhere but to school! So unlooked-for, in fact, was their final arrival that the master, who had a few moments before failed to descry a single torn straw hat or ruined sun-bonnet above his visible horizon, was always startled to find them suddenly ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... Sir Frank Narcombe were not. Furthermore he could perceive no links connecting the three, and no reason why they should have engaged the attention of a common enemy. Such crimes would seem to be purposeless. Assuming that "The Scorpion" was an individual, that individual apparently ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... warmth. His shoulders dried in a little cloud of vapor. He noticed none of these things, but stared ahead, his gaze vacant, the bronze of his face set in the lines of a brown study, his strong capable hands hanging purposeless between his knees. The ride to Mackinaw City was six hours long, and the train in addition lost some ninety minutes; but in all this distance Thorpe never altered his pose nor his fixed attitude of ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... pretenses. For the man, as I now saw him, was obviously shallow and vain, a slave to those poor "man-of-the-world" passions—ostentation and cynicism and skill at vices old as mankind and tedious as a treadmill, the commonplace routine of the idle and foolish and purposeless. A clever, handsome fellow, but the more pitiful that he was by nature above the uses ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... the great majority of the regulars, and was, therefore, the flower of the American force. It was on every account imperative to keep it in good trim; and to keep it in Santiago meant its entirely purposeless destruction. As soon as the surrender was an accomplished fact, the taking away of the army to the north should ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... back to his cell after these purposeless wanderings always with a sense of relief, with the thought of taking refuge from grey. As he lit the gas and opened the desk of his bureau and saw the pile of papers awaiting him, it was as if he had passed from the black skies and the stinging wind and the dull maze of the suburb into ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... to the happy-go- lucky Irish customs, and had died before her time, worn-out with the strain of trying to make both ends meet. When she looked down from heaven with those clear angel eyes, would it seem more noble to her that her baby should preserve a puny social distinction at the cost of a purposeless life, or that she should use the talents which had been given to her for her own good and ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... it was going to be hard. Strong men must have something to lay their hands to. He knew that he could not remain idle very long; he must be doing something. But out of the shops he felt that he would be like a ship without steering apparatus—lost, aimless, purposeless. ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... lamentably shaken the long-since failing man. On the afternoon of the fourth day, Mr. Lisle walked, or rather tottered, into Caleb's stall, and seated himself on the only vacant stool it contained. His manner was confused, and frequently purposeless, and there was an anxious, flurried expression in his face, which Jennings did not at all like. He remained silent for some time, with the exception of partially inaudible snatches of comment or questionings, apparently addressed to himself. At last he said, "I shall take a longer journey ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren |
