"Spendthrift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brighter part of the country's genius descended to effeminate pursuits, and employed itself in the development of amorous fancies. In the comedies which came into favour, the dramatis personae represented a strange society of opulent old men, spendthrift sons, intriguing slaves, and courtezans. If we did not know what temptation there is to make literary capital out of the tender passion, we might suppose that the youth of that day were entirely occupied in clandestine amours, and in buying ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... take a walk in the country, there's the Vagrant Act; and if he has not a penny to hire a cellar in town, he's snapped up by a Burker, and sent off to the surgeons in a sack. It must be owned that no country affords such warnings to the spendthrift. You are one great moral against the getting rid of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... but an assurance of support. Early widowed, the young mother herself may have to earn her children's bread. Or the husband may become crippled, or an invalid, or he may turn out a drunkard and a spendthrift. In any of these circumstances, the responsibility and the burden of supporting the entire family usually falls upon the wife. Is it strange that the group so often drift into undeserved pauperism, sickness and misery, ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... the interest of the drunkard to quit his cups; for the glutton to curb his appetite; for the debauchee to bridle his lust; for the sluggard to be up betimes; for the spendthrift to be economical, and for all sinners to stop sinning. Even if it were for the interest of masters to treat their slaves well, he must be a novice who thinks that a proof that the slaves are well treated. The whole history of man is a record of real interests sacrificed to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... before I go on with my own narrative, that Charles Grammont, with whose murder I lie charged, developed a remarkable and unexpected characteristic. A reckless spendthrift whilst penniless, he became a miser when he found himself possessor of five thousand pounds. He had returned to Naples, and had for some time engaged himself in drinking, to the exclusion of all other pursuits. But he drank sullenly and alone, and had dismissed from his ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... being the Kaiser's tool; he wanted more land; the Armenian was in his way; the Turk was lazy, shiftless and a spendthrift. The Armenian was industrious and hard-working. The Turk's method of living made him poor. The gifts of the Armenian tended towards wealth. Once in twenty years the Turk found himself a pauper and found the Armenian rich; ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... like that, not spending three years. It was spendthrift, even if a good buy. He was planning on winding up somewhere important and to do it he had to ...
— Measure for a Loner • James Judson Harmon
... orphan and without a home, until his father would discover him and bring him back home. After giving up school definitely he worked as a farm hand, earning the ordinary wages paid for this labor. He changed places frequently, was a spendthrift, and assisted his parents financially very little. This mode of existence he led until 1904, when he forged his father's name to a $25 check and received a five-year term of imprisonment, part of which he spent in the Minnesota State Reformatory and part at the State Penitentiary. ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... careless bard, after a successful work, usually precipitated the publication of another, relying on its crudeness being passed over by the public curiosity excited by its better brother. He called this getting double pay, for thus he secured the sale of a hurried work. But Churchill was a spendthrift of fame, and enjoyed all his revenue while he lived; posterity owes him little, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... title of king. The fortunes of this prince, in whose veins flowed the blood of the Asmonaeans and the Herodians, surpassed in romance and vicissitude any recorded of Eastern princes; alternately a fugitive and a favorite, a vagabond and a courtier, a pauper and a spendthrift—according to the varied hatred and favor of the imperial family at Rome. He had the good luck to be a friend of Caligula before the death of Tiberius. When he ascended the throne of the Roman world, he took his friend from prison and disgrace, and gave ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... with his best friend, he spoke, he looked, and he was the great man. He was great in his frivolities, great in his burlesques, great in his humor, great in common conversation; the great lawyer, the great orator, the great blackguard, and the great companion, the great beau, and the great spendthrift: in nothing ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... and successful debater the world ever saw." In his later years, Mr. Fox was as remarkable for carelessness in dress and personal appearance, as he had been for the opposite in his youth. He possessed many pleasing traits of character, but his morals were not commendable; he was a gambler and a spendthrift. Yet he exercised a powerful influence on the politics of his times. This extract is from a speech delivered during a truce in the long war between ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... to pass, all the same, that before the month of May was out they were all settled at Glen Elder. Though "that weary spendthrift," Maxwell of Pentlands, as Mrs Stirling called him, could not break the entail on the estate of Pentlands, as for the sake of his many debts and his sinful pleasures he madly tried to do, he could dispose of the outlying farm of Glen Elder; and Hugh Blair became the purchaser of the farm and of a ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... behalf of his wife, made an unfair division of the family property (which had been originally given to the father of these lads by Theodoric, as a reward for his services). In doing this he has availed himself of the spendthrift character of Neotherius, the elder brother, who was probably ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... the romance of Erebus. He leads us through a haunted world in which something worse than a ghost may spring on us out of the darkness. Ironical, sad, a spectator, he is nevertheless a writer who exalts rather than dispirits. His genius moves enlargingly among us, a very spendthrift of treasure—treasure of recollection, observation, imagery, tenderness, and humour. It is a strange thing that it was not until he published Chance that the world in general began to recognize how great a writer was enriching our time. Perhaps his own reserve ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... has been the making o' me." The property has long passed into other hands, and is now in the family of Hunter; but such was its destination for at least fifty years, during the life of the sergeant, and the greater part of the life of the son, who, being a spendthrift, spent and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... ask you to depart with me, I'll go alone: but this remember still— Gay have I been, a spendthrift and an idler, A brilliant fly that buzzed about the bloom. But I had that in me deep down, and still, Of which you, you alone, possess the key, A sullen nobleness to you disclosed E'en then with shame: and by no other guessed. This you well know: betray not that ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... covered with tiles of every color—peacock blue, vermilion, turquoise, emerald green, burnt orange; no inch of exposed woodwork has escaped the carver's cunning chisel; everywhere gold has been laid on with a spendthrift hand. And in this marvelous setting strut or stroll figures that might have stepped straight from the stage of Sumurun—fantastically garbed functionaries of the Household, shaven-headed priests in yellow robes, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... in the following month that the notorious La Voisin was burned alive, at Paris, for practices to which many of the highest nobility were charged with being privy, not excepting some in whose veins ran the blood of the gorgeous spendthrift who ruled the destinies of France. [Footnote: The equally famous Brinvilliers was burned four years before. An account of both will be found in the Letters of Madame de Sevigne. The memoirs of the time abound in evidence of the frightful prevalence of these ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... a special paper on the subject in the Journal of Philology, vi., 189-95, points out that the same story occurs in the Masnavi of the Persian port Jalaluddin, whose floruit is 1260 A.D. Here a young spendthrift of Bagdad is warned in a dream to repair to Cairo, with the usual result of being ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... which, if there were no higher motive, should induce them to rely on truth alone. A very close vulpine nature, all eyes, all ears, may succeed better in deceit. But it is a sleepless business. Yet, strange to say, it is had recourse to in the most spendthrift fashion, as the first and easiest ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... their faith in the credit of France unimpaired as they lived on the income of the savings of their industry before they retired. You asked gardeners about business, which you knew was good with that ever-hungry and spendthrift British Army "bulling" the market. One day while taking a walk, Beach Thomas and I saw a diver preparing to go down to examine the abutment of a bridge and we sat down to look on with a lively interest, ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... tenants' help and assistance; we will study never to present ourselves in a false light, and we shall at all times claim honest and fair dealings on the tenants' part; doubledealing, deceit, and dishonesty will be punished; the idle-inclined and the spendthrift will meet with encouragement only as they abandon those habits. The careful, honest, active man will receive all help and encouragement in our power. Our desire is to benefit all under our care, and we will do so, unless the tenants ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... be a very cheap one, you mean, and, therefore, will not befit you, Sir Millionaire! It will cost nothing, and, therefore, lose its only charm for you, my Lord Spendthrift," cried the miser, sharply. ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... her mother petulantly. "It's something new every day. I never saw such a spendthrift. It's a good thing ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... the pallid Spirit of Fasting stealing about over the earth with her bundle of twigs on her arm. And she called to him: "Spendthrift, spendthrift! You have wished to celebrate the festival of revenge and reparation during the time of fasting, that is called life. Can you afford such ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... sun ne'er shone on than these isles of Owhyhee, Spendthrift Nature's wild profusion fashioned them like fairy bowers; Yet behind—below the sweetness,—underneath the passion-flowers, Lurked grim deeds, and things of horror, grisly Deaths, and ceaseless Fears, Fears and Deaths that walked in Darkness, ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... of gay abandon, emphasizes their hideousness and renders it more repulsive. Most of them have passed through the successive grades of immorality. Some of them have been the queenly mistress of the spendthrift, and have descended, step by step, to the foul, degraded beings of those human charnel-houses. In some instances fresh-looking girls will be seen, and careful inquiry will discover the fact that they were either emigrant or innocent country ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... Ralph Ellerey, tenth baronet of the name, who was quite ready to believe the very worst that was said of Desmond, remarking that it was little more than he expected. Sir Ralph's cast of mind was perhaps narrow and ungenerous, but, since the sympathy so usually shown to the open-handed spendthrift was not forthcoming in this case, it must be assumed that popular opinion condemned Desmond Ellerey, and sympathized with Sir Ralph. It had been easy, therefore, for Desmond to become a stranger to his native land; it was impossible for him to forget that he was an Englishman: ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... cribbage in the parlour together. For the Cut-rate had not cut his salary, which, sordidly speaking, ranked him star boarder at the Peek's. And he thought of Captain Peek, Katie's father, a man he dreaded and abhorred; a genteel loafer and spendthrift, battening upon the labour of his women-folk; a very queer fish, and, according to repute, not ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... moment; then he felt again with one feverish movement; then his loss burst upon him, and he was covered at once with perspiration. To spendthrifts money is so living and actual—it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune—that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath. And ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... was a prodigal, a wastrel, a spendthrift. Going the pace, he was, with a vengeance, like a ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... conspirator, Verrina, persuaded him to seize for himself the sovereign power to which his rank and talents entitled him. The conspiracy was carefully matured, Fiesco meanwhile, to divert suspicion, acting the part of a giddy spendthrift and man of fashion. On the night of January 2, 1547, the conspirators made their attack upon the city. Gianettino Doria was killed, but the aged Andrea made his escape. The success of Fiesco appeared to be complete, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... through quiet private contributions and donations during the two years he was running the Institute. The sum came to better than two hundred thousand dollars. Grady naturally had wasted none of this in "research" and he was not a spendthrift in other ways. Cavender was, therefore, happy to say that around two thirds of this money was known to be still intact in various bank accounts, and that it would be restored eventually to the generous ...
— Ham Sandwich • James H. Schmitz
... lodgings in the utmost excitement. The whole evening he had sat upon thorns, and silently reproached the spendthrift. He regretted having lent him money, and yet felt it would have ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... wines, and that thou wouldst see so many guests around him, provided thy gold did not work these miracles. At every moment he trembles lest we should leave his house. I see by thy astonishment that thou hast been a spendthrift all thy life, and that thou hast never felt this thirst for gold, which can extinguish all the desires of the heart, and even the most pressing wants of nature. Follow me, but ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... is true, he did not see him any more than I did. Drimdarroch, by all accounts, was a spendthrift, a player, a bavard, his great friends, Glengarry and another ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... "Just talking. You're the original little spendthrift, Harry. I'm going to write home to your folks some time and warn 'em. Hold on, you chaps, don't hurry off. The night is still in its infancy. Wait and watch it grow up. Steve! ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... shillings out of his salary, so that she might attend the sales at the big drapery shops in the West End and inspect the windows containing expensive articles that she could not hope to buy. Mr. Mattingford was an exceedingly thrifty man, and his wife possessed some of the qualities of a spendthrift. Thus it came about that Mr. Mattingford kept up the fiction that he had no savings and that each week's salary must see him through till the next week. Mrs. Mattingford knew that her husband had saved money, and ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... me: I do not think he ever loved me from that hour. Shortly after this my uncle, George Gawtrey, the captain, returned from abroad; he took a great fancy to me, and I left my father's house (which had grown insufferable) to live with him. He had been a very handsome man—a gay spendthrift; he had got through his fortune, and now lived on his wits—he was a professed gambler. His easy temper, his lively humour, fascinated me; he knew the world well; and, like all gamblers, was generous when the dice were lucky,—which, to tell you the truth, they ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... you are no wiser than you are just now. Make the fellow as useful to you as you please. He has a good manner and a frank countenance. He can lie with an assurance that I never saw surpassed, and fight, you say, on a pinch. The scoundrel does not want for good qualities; but he is vain, a spendthrift, and a bavard. As long as you have the regiment in terrorem over him, you can do as you like with him. Once let him loose, and the lad is likely to give you the slip. Keep on promising him; promise to make him a general, if you like. What the deuce do ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... twenty-two, a girl owned by James Harris, named Ellen Turner. Nothing of importance occurred until three years after their marriage, when her master, Harris failed through the extravagance and mismanagement of his wife, who was a great spendthrift and a dreaded terror to the poor slaves and all others with whom she associated in common circumstances, consequently the entire stock was sold by the sheriff to a trader residing in Virginia. On account of the good reputation my mother sustained as a worthy servant and excellent cook, a tyrannical ...
— The Story of Mattie J. Jackson • L. S. Thompson
... night reflecting on his embarrassing position, searching his imagination to secure some means of obtaining the sum necessary to satisfy those creditors who were most importunate, the new spendthrift sought distraction in work, and went to his desk at five o'clock in the morning in order to drive away his painful thoughts; not thinking that at this hour any one would hear him, and while working ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... be more like her style." Then her mind wandered to a story connected with that lady, which had given rise to much speculation on the part of the young Clares. Half a century ago there lived at the Briars a family consisting of a brother and two sisters; the former a gay young spendthrift of twenty-five; the girls, Anna, aged twenty, and Lucy, the present Miss Clare, nine years old respectively. With them resided a maiden sister of their mother's, Marjorie Westford, an eccentric person, whose ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... melancholy reflection which at this moment passes across my mind. How vain, how fleeting, how uncertain are all those gaudy bubbles after which we are panting and toiling in this world of fair delusions! The wealth which the miser has amassed with so many weary days, so many sleepless nights, a spendthrift heir may squander away in joyless prodigality; the noblest monuments which pride has ever reared to perpetuate a name, the hand of time will shortly tumble into ruins; and even the brightest laurels, gained by feats of arms, may wither, and ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... willing enough to make all proper provision for his wife, but he declined absolutely to settle his landed property upon a son who, as he put it, for aught he knew, might prove unworthy to inherit it, who might be a spendthrift, an idiot, or a villain—as a matter of fact, the only son of the marriage turned out most things he should not. Anyhow, Montagu held strong views on the subject, and these he expounded to Richard Steele, who presented them in No. 223 of ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... impatient slave of duty. Sometimes hasty, unjust, or even ungenerous, he was indifferent to the enemies he too needlessly created, and was hated by many and not loved even by those who respected his devotion and competence. He spared neither his subordinates nor, least of all, Edwin Stanton, and spendthrift of vital force and energy went his way, one of the great war ministers like Carnot and Pitt. Now, as they stood about to part, he showed feeling with which few would have given him credit, and for ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... another.(540) When, therefore, the debtor employs the capital that he has borrowed, more productively than the creditor would have done, the whole country is a gainer; as it is a loser, on the contrary, when a person engaged in industry advances to the idler, the frugal man to the spendthrift, the solid man to the wild speculator. In declining nations, where every new development hastens decay, the latter alternative may be the prevailing one; and, especially here, may the usurious giving of credit by the shrewd to the simple lead to ruinous debtor-slavery. Among ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... MAN, a great spendthrift, had run through all his patrimony and had but one good cloak left. One day he happened to see a Swallow, which had appeared before its season, skimming along a pool and twittering gaily. He supposed that summer had come, and went and sold his cloak. Not many days later, winter set in ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... accused. It is only in the light of his past history that the action can be understood. Coming from one of the oldest families of Virginia, an heir to wealth and an honored name, he is but another example of the many who have sold their birth-right for a mess of pottage. A drunkard and a spendthrift, he wasted his youth in gambling and betting on the races while honest men were toiling for their ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... the administration has no measures of relief except loan bills and paper money in the form of treasury notes. No provision is made for their payment; no measure of retrenchment and reform; but these accumulated difficulties are thrust upon the future, with the improvidence of a young spendthrift. While the secretary is waiting to foresee contingencies, we are prevented by a party majority from instituting reform. If we indicate even the commencement of retrenchment, or point out abuses, on this side of the House, we are at once assailed by members of the committee ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... flower drips limpid sweetness. For months this unexcised distillation never ceases. For all the birds and dainty butterflies and sober bees there is free abundance, and every puff of wind scatters the surplusage with spendthrift profusion. Sparkling in the sunbeams, dazzling white, red, orange, green, violet, the swelling drops tremble from the red studs and fall in fragrant splashes as the wanton wind brushes past or eager birds ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... woman, monsieur," added his companion; "a fearful spendthrift, but with no inclination to return generously what is done for her. I can speak knowingly of that; when she first arrived here from Berlin, six months ago, she was very ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... experts are investigating the wastes of society. Their reports indicate that man is a great spendthrift. He seems not so much a husbandman, making the most of the treasures of his life-garden, as a robber looting a storehouse ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... your epical song; and so be pleased to skip those excursive involved glees, and give us the simple air, without the volley of variations. At least in some of your prefaces you should give us the theory of your rhetoric. I comprehend not why you should lavish in that spendthrift style of yours celestial truths. Bacon and Plato have something too solid to say than that they can afford to be humorists. You are dispensing that which is rarest, namely, the simplest truths,—truths which lie next to consciousness, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... longing stirred Within him to revisit that gray coast Where he was born. He landed at the port Whence first he sailed; and, as in fervid youth, Set forth upon the highway, to walk home. Some hoarding he had made, wherewith to enrich His brother's brood for spendthrift purposes; And as he walked he wondered how they looked, How tall they were, how many there might be. At noon he set himself beside the way, Under a clump of willows sprouting dense O'er the weed-woven margin of a brook; While in the fine green branches overhead ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... defiant, until he capped them all with one monstrous yarn. He maintained that in a Hindu family of his acquaintance there had been transmitted the secret of a drug, capable of altering a man's whole temperament until the antidote was administered. It would turn a coward into a bravo, a miser into a spendthrift, a rake into a fakir. Then, having delivered his manifesto he got up ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... was in some parts almost laughable. Everything was to be divided, and every one made alike: houses and lands were to be distributed by lot; and the mighty man and the beggar—the auld man and the hobble-de-hoy—the industrious man and the spendthrift—the maimed, the cripple, and the blind, the clever man of business and the haveril simpleton, made all just brethren, and alike. Save us! but to think of such nonsense!!—At one of their meetings, held at the sign of the ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... a few more barren acres from the grasp of moss and moor; but several times an eccentric genius had scattered to the winds what the rest had won, and Geoffrey seemed bent on playing the traditional role of spendthrift. There were, however, excuses for him. He was an ambitious man, and had studied mechanical science under a famous engineer. Perhaps, because the surface of the earth yielded a sustenance so grudgingly, a love of burrowing was born in the family. Copper was dear and the speculative ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... in your wild, disordered countenance that you are a spendthrift, and this gold, which you have earned honestly, will soon be wasted in boundless follies. It is my duty, as your conscientious master and friend, to prevent this. I cannot allow you to take all of this money—only ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... I a competent knowledge of him? Is he a man of good character; a man of sense? For, be assured, a sensible woman can never be happy with a fool. What has been his walk in life? Is he a gambler, a spendthrift, or drunkard? Is his fortune sufficient to maintain me in the manner I have been accustomed to live, and my sisters do live? and is he one to whom my friends can have no reasonable objection? If these interrogatories can be satisfactorily ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... wish to prevent this marriage; and why, pray? I have heard that Mademoiselle de Mussidan was formerly engaged to M. de Breulh-Faverlay. How comes it that the Count and Countess de Mussidan prefer a ruined spendthrift to a wealthy and strictly honorable man? It is for you to answer this question. It is perfectly plain to me that they hand over their daughter to De Croisenois under pressure of some kind, and that means that a terrible secret exists with ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... coming to live in Nemours, they were seized (in spite of the political events which were just then weighing so heavily on Brie and on the Gatinais) with a devouring curiosity, which was not surprising. Was he rich? Economical or spendthrift? Would he leave a fine fortune or nothing? Was his property in annuities? In the end they found out what follows, but only by taking infinite pains and ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... hills, where the green billows of wild oats carried it on and upwards to the darker crests of pines. For two months she was dazzled and bewildered with color. She had never before been face to face with this spendthrift Californian Flora, in her virgin wastefulness, her more than goddess-like prodigality. The teeming earth seemed to quicken and throb beneath her feet; the few circuits of a plow around the outlying corral was enough to call out a jungle growth of giant grain that almost hid the low walls of ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... say that he was a fashionable young spendthrift, and the other a sheriff's officer of the first water—the genteelest beak that ever was known or heard of—who had been on the look-out for him several days, and with whom the happy youngster was doomed to spend some considerable time at a ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... canst lay aside a spendthrift's air, And condescend to feed on homely fare, Such as we minters, with ragouts unstored, Will, in defiance of the law, afford: Quit thy patrols with Toby's Christmas box,[1] And come to me at The Two Fighting Cocks; Since printing ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... what he might have been. For having thrust him unfinished upon a thoughtless rather than a heartless world he had been trying to punish fate, and had punished only himself. A wastrel, a roisterer by night, a spendthrift, ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... My leader to his side Approach'd, and whence he came inquir'd, to whom Was answer'd thus: "Born in Navarre's domain My mother plac'd me in a lord's retinue, For she had borne me to a losel vile, A spendthrift of his substance and himself. The good king Thibault after that I serv'd, To peculating here my thoughts were turn'd, Whereof I give account in this dire heat." Straight Ciriatto, from whose mouth a tusk Issued on either side, as from a boar, Ript ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... it lead?" he asked, as he drew under the overhanging portal of the great hotel where the star made her home. It was to the man of the West a splendid place. Its builders had been lavish of highly colored marbles and mosaics, spendthrift of light and gilding; on every side shone the signs and seals of predatory wealth. Its walls were like costly confectionery, its ornaments insolent, its waste criminal. Every decorative feature was hot, restless, irreverent, and cruel, quite the sort of avenue one might expect to find in his walk ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... that Colonel Waldeaux had been a drunken spendthrift who had left nothing. The house and farm always had belonged to his wife. She had supported George by her own work all of his life. She could not save money, but she had the rarer faculty of making it. She had ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... squandered all the powers of soul and body in exhausting all the pleasures of earth. The table was in some sort earth itself, the earth that trembled beneath his feet. He was the last festival of the reckless spendthrift who has thrown all prudence to the winds. The devil had given him the key of the storehouse of human pleasures; he had filled and refilled his hands, and he was fast nearing the bottom. In a moment he had felt all that that enormous power could accomplish; in a moment he had exercised it, proved ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... other lives which the world has accepted as the natural expression of their various owners, we at once decided that the case was a hopeless one. And when one night we picked him up out of the Union Ditch, a begrimed and weather-worn drunkard, a hopeless debtor, a self-confessed spendthrift, and a half-conscious, maudlin imbecile, we knew that the end had come. The wife he had abandoned had in turn deserted him; the woman he had misled had already realized her folly, and left him with her reproaches; the associates of his reckless life, who had used ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... Colonel. Ah! if you could but see things from the standpoint of ten years hence, you would admit that my old experience was right. I know what Victor is, that gaiety of his is simply animal spirits—the gaiety of the barracks. He has no ability, and he is a spendthrift. He is one of those men whom Heaven created to eat and digest four meals a day, to sleep, to fall in love with the first woman that comes to hand, and to fight. He does not understand life. His kind heart, for he has a kind heart, will perhaps lead him to give his purse to a sufferer ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... been the young spendthrift that sold the property? Well, but you should you have such an ill-will against him; remember necessity has no law. And then, goodwife, he was not more culpable than Mr. Treddles, whom you ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... incurred By endless riot, vanity, the lust Of pleasure and variety, despatch, As duly as the swallows disappear, The world of wandering knights and squires to town; London engulfs them all. The shark is there, And the shark's prey; the spendthrift, and the leech That sucks him. There the sycophant, and he That with bare-headed and obsequious bows Begs a warm office, doomed to a cold jail And groat per diem if his patron frown. The levee swarms, as if ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... explained that, as there was so much food in the kitchen in anticipation of our supper, she had been afraid to leave the cat alone in the house, lest we should find nothing left to eat when we returned. This was sufficiently prudent for a scatter-brained old spendthrift like Mariuccia. ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... in a flash what the rest of the world does not seem to see so clearly; viz., that the piling up of increased forces opposite entrenched positions is a spendthrift, unscientific proceeding. He wishes to know if I mean to do this. To draw me out he assumes if I get the troops, I would at once commit them to trench warfare by crowding them in behind the lines of Helles or Anzac. Actually ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... literature,—a sound and great understanding, patience, dexterity, and an independent income." Equally judicious and equally well-expressed is the following passage upon the Penns:—"Thomas Penn was a man of business, careful, saving, and methodical. Richard Penn was a spendthrift. Both were men of slender abilities, and not of very estimable character. They had done some liberal acts for the Province, such as sending over presents to the Library of books and apparatus, and cannon for the defence of Philadelphia. If ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... the typical spendthrift, Sire; he is always giving away what he needs most. (Lays papers before the CZAR.) I think, Sire, you will approve of this:—"Love of the people," "Father of his people," "Martial law," and the usual allusions to Providence in the last line. All it requires now is your Imperial ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... a right, either moral or legal, to destroy or squander an inheritance of his children that he holds for them in trust. And man, the wasteful and greedy spendthrift that he is, has not created even the humblest of the species of birds, mammals and fishes that adorn and enrich this earth. "The earth is THE LORD'S, and the fulness thereof!" With all his wisdom, man has not evolved and placed here ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... not. Or, rather, it would add to our population only those who desire to save instead of those who desire to waste. We should increase through the new-comers in virtuous economy, and not as now in spendthrift vainglory. In the end the effect would be the same for civilization as if we shrank to ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... too, how it is that this copybook maxim is now for me a practical reality. For at first, with my growing perception, I was distressed at what seemed to me the lavish waste, the reckless, spendthrift beauty, not in nature merely but in human nature, that passed unrecognized and unacknowledged. The loss seemed so extravagant. Not only that a million flowers waste their sweetness on the desert air, but that such prodigal stores of human love ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... him, and yet you have thrust his father from your heart. You sacrificed me to a man whom I hate—not because he is my successful rival, but because he does not deserve the love of my empress; because he is a heartless spendthrift, and a wretch who is ready to sell his sovereign's honor at any moment, provided the price offered him be worth the treachery. Oh! it maddens me when I think that Gregory Orloff was displaced for ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... repeat her story here. It was only the same old story—of the young girl of fortune marrying a spendthrift, who dissipated her property, estranged her friends, alienated her affections, and then left her penniless, to struggle alone with all the ills of poverty to bring up her three little girls. By her own unaided ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Lovaina was a spendthrift, giving money liberally to relatives, lending it to improvident borrowers, and dispensing it with open hands when she had it, though always herself in debt. Yet she liked to make money, and to have her hotel ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... heartless villain!" she screamed. "Is this, the way you play upon people: bringing me from my home to console a maniac, and, instead of that, you are only what you always were, a spendthrift and a scamp? Finely ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... make you like me and make myself necessary to you. I've tried to give you the impression that I was clever so that in case you wished to make me your heiress you would not hesitate for fear that I might be extravagant and a spendthrift. I can't tell you how bad I am. I've been ashamed of being seen with you on account of the queer way you dressed. I'm not fit to put my head in your lap—no, I'm not fit to stay under your roof any longer," and Ethel's sobs were pitiful to hear. She became ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... crying," she said, "because it's so delightfully and beautifully and terribly like Ronicky to write such a letter and tell of such plans. He's given away a lot of money to help some spendthrift, and now he's gone to get more money by finding a lost mine!' But do you see what it means, Caroline? It means ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... best thing for Wayne himself as well as for the range if he doesn't come back for a long time. Garth is working hard for the interests of both. And if any one should be grateful to the man who is running his range for him it is that young spendthrift. ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... it we can obtain a limited advance on next year's credit at a heavy discount. If a man showed himself a reckless spendthrift he would receive his allowance monthly or weekly instead of yearly, or, if necessary, not be permitted to handle ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... worked out by trial and error in the wilderness of Virginia. Tobacco became the only dependable export and the colony was exploited for the benefit of English commerce. This English commercial policy, plus other factors, caused the Virginia planter to become somewhat of an agricultural spendthrift. For nearly 200 years he followed a system of farming which soon exhausted his land. Land was cheap and means of fertilization was limited and laborious. By clearing away the trees he was able to move north, south, southwest, and west and ...
— Tobacco in Colonial Virginia - "The Sovereign Remedy" • Melvin Herndon
... make no difference, because you know you would have chosen me anyhow; but most girls would make a nice business of it. How are they to know what men really are? They might be gamesters, drunkards, brutal and cruel by nature, idle and spendthrift. What can maidens know of a man's disposition? Of course they only see him at his best. Wise parents can make careful inquiries, and have means of knowing what a man's disposition and habits ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... the string neatly, I went back to Julius, and gave him ginger-cakes. The dear boys grew from year to year. They outgrew their knickerbockers, and had trousers. They outgrew their jackets, and became men; and I felt that I had not lived in vain. I had conquered nature. Pompey, the little spendthrift, was the honored cashier of a savings-bank, till he ran away with the capital. Julius, the miser, became the chief croupier at the New Crockford's. One of those boys is now in Botany Bay, and the other is in ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... saving, I'll admit, unless there's a reason for't. The man who willna spend his siller when the time comes I despise as much as can anyone. But I despise, too, or I pity, the poor spendthrift who canna say "No!" when it wad be folly for him to spend his siller. Sicca one can ne'er meet the real call when it comes; he's bankrupt in the emergency. And that's as true of a nation as ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... he may have; his vices are known to all the world. He is a libertine, a gambler, a rake, a spendthrift. They say he is one of the King's favourites, and that his monstrous extravagances have earned for him the title of 'Magnificent'." He uttered a short laugh. "A fit servant for such a ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... which the heavens made for joy, but where wretchedness buildeth its throne— O prodigal spendthrift of sorrow! and hast thou not heirs of thine own? Thus to lavish thy sons' only portion, and bring one sad claimant the more, From the sweet sunny lands of the south, to thy crowded and sorrowful shore? ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... occasion, however, he contrived to scorch his heart with a double dose of jealousy, for he found two young men visiting the clergyman, each of whom seemed to be a friend of the family. One was a spendthrift named Rentworth—a young traveller of that loose, easy-going type which is occasionally met with in foreign parts, squandering the money of a rich father. He was a decidedly handsome young fellow, but with ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... whole nights in carding and dicing, in rioting and wantonness; thou that countest it a brave thing to swear as fast as the bravest, to spend with the greatest spendthrift in the country; thou that lovest to sin in a corner when nobody sees thee! O thou that for bye-ends dost carry on the hypocrite's profession, because thou wouldst be counted somebody among the children of God,[22] but art an enemy to the things of Christ ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... a dangerous one as the reader is already aware. In the infatuation of her strong, unconquerable, but not less guilty love for the handsome spendthrift Orsini, she had pledged her diamonds to Isaachar ben Solomon for an enormous sum of money, every ducat of which had passed without an hour's delay into the ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... course, been a spendthrift—and so much the better, being otherwise what he was; for a cautious and frugal voluptuary is about the lowest style of man. Hence he had never been out of difficulties, and when, a year or so agone, he succeeded to his brother's ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... a guerdon! This huge payment for a little poem exceeded the glory of Caesar's recompense; for it was enough for the divine Julius to pension with a township the writer and glorifier of those conquests which he had achieved over the whole world. But now the spendthrift kindness of the populace squandered a kingdom on a churl. Nay, not even Africanus, when he rewarded the records of his deed, rose to the munificence of the Danes. For there the wage of that laborious volume was in mere gold, while ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... well done, his three rhymes writ, Sym rose at morn, and packed his kit. "At last!" he cried. "Off and away To meet again the spendthrift Day, As he comes climbing in the East, To bless ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... to spread their agitation and disaffection throughout all France by the still more bewildered Lomenie de Brienne, who was trying his hand at the impossible finances of France after the fall of that magnificent spendthrift, Monsieur Colonne. He, in turn, had been swept from his office and replaced by the pompous and incompetent Necker. Lafayette, the deus ex machina of the times, had asked for his States-General, and now in this ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... the story of Orpheus charming the brutes, by J. Rakewell, esq." By these mementos of extravagance and pride, (for gifts of this kind proceed oftener from ostentation than generosity,) and by the engraved frontispiece to a poem, dedicated to our fashionable spendthrift, lying on the floor, which represents the ladies of Britain sacrificing their hearts to the idol Farinelli, crying out, with the greatest earnestness, "one G—d, one Farinelli," we are given to understand the prevailing dissipation and luxury of the times. Near the ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... spendthrift," put in the major sadly. "But isn't it hereditary, doctor? Perhaps the seed was cultivated, ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... day—to the demands of mere social observances. Which of his Readjusters would have had the time or the inclination to do as he had bound himself to do? But now he was "running" less with reformers than with artists, and these ill-regulated spendthrift folk were prone to break up the day and send its fragments broadcast as they would, without ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... all advice Richard went from bad to worse. He began the study of medicine, soon changed this for law, and lastly decided to enter the army. He was naturally a spendthrift, and as long as his money lasted Harold Skimpole found him a very fine friend and helped him ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... aspirations Hubbard visited Vermont, where he exercised his companionable gifts in an effort to obtain for Clinton the vote of that State. But Hubbard had neither firmness nor strength of intellect. Irregular in his habits, lax in his morals, a spendthrift and an insolvent, he could not resist the incessant attacks upon Clinton, nor the offer of the shrievalty of New York, with its large income and fat fees. When, therefore, Elmendorff finally evidenced a disposition to yield, Hubbard made the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... and Marguerite soon discovered that the worthy man had spent the day as profitably as his wife. He too was quite tired out; and he had reason to be fatigued. First, he had purchased the horses belonging to the ruined spendthrift, and he had paid five thousand francs for them, a mere trifle for such animals. Less than an hour after the purchase he had refused almost double that amount from a celebrated connoisseur in horse-flesh, M. de Breulh-Faverlay. This excellent speculation had put him ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... a spendthrift who has also a shelter in Ephraim Darke's heart—one who does much to thwart his designs, oft-times defeating them. As already said, he has a son, by name Richard; better known throughout the settlement as "Dick"—abbreviations of nomenclature being ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... once and so sweet and for so little time! And the boy beside her smiled with pleasure and embroidered her rich, clear-cut phrasing and annotated it and threw jewels and flowers of unexpected chords through it and mocked the sad, charming fatalism of it as only spendthrift ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... broad enough in youth to survey the field of life with an impartial view. "The years creep slowly by, Lorena," was written in the true youthful, spendthrift spirit. ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... a touch of sorrow in his voice. "But methinks the consolement thou wouldst offer to enamoured maids is far more dangerous than lasting! Thy love to them means ruin,—thy embraces shame,—thy unthinking passion death! What!—wilt thou be a spendthrift of desire?—wilt thou drain the fond souls of women as a bee drains the sweetness of flowers?—wilt thou, being honey- cloyed, behold them droop and wither around thee, and wilt thou leave them utterly destroyed and desolate? Hast thou no ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the Catholic Party, the spendthrift heir of the Tractarians, which, with little of the intellectual force that gave so signal a power to the Oxford Movement, endeavours to make up for that sad if not fatal deficiency by an almost inexhaustible credulity, ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... sat at tables laden with delicacies and slept only on silken beds—the epicurean and sensual spendthrift—lay on the hard wooden bench, groaning with pain and terror, when the soldiers entered his cell. The major stood at the window, and drummed on ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... these youths all being members of the company known as the brigata godereccia or spendereccia, the joyous or spendthrift brigade. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... sending to every man who became noted for some crime or folly a diploma by virtue of which he was admitted to the 'Republic' and had an office conferred on him. Thus, for example, a quack was appointed physician, a coward general, and a spendthrift steward."—Lipiner.] ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... admitted, the fact remains that the Treasury cannot, or can only with great difficulty, be stronger on the side of economy than the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and that the task of the Chancellor of the Exchequer of imposing economy on a spendthrift War Cabinet is one of extreme difficulty. I hope it is not necessary to say that I do not urge economy from any sordid desire to save the nation's money if, by its spending, victory could be secured or brought a day nearer. ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... 'of all the street-boys in the world, those of New York are the most precocious. I have seen a shoe-black, about three feet high, walk up to the table or 'Bank,' as it is generally called, and stake his money (five cents) with the air of a young spendthrift to whom "money ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... air, plenty of physical exertion, a continual instancy of toil—here was what had been hitherto lacking in that misdirected life, and the true cure of vital scepticism. To get the train through, there was the recurrent problem: no time remained to ask if it were necessary. Carthew, the idler, the spendthrift, the drifting dilettante, was soon remarked, praised, and advanced. The engineer swore by him and pointed him out for an example. "I've a new chum, up here," Norris heard him saying, "a young swell. He's worth any two in the squad." The words fell on the ears of the discarded son like music; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... what is he? The tetrarch sank to rise a pettifogger, a spendthrift, ruined by his own follies. Then having got a bad name in this trade, too, by showing his speeches to the other side, he bounded on the stage of public life, where his profits out of the city were as enormous as his savings were small. Now, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... sense of bafflement, of the futility of all human endeavor, which surged through Kate Kildare at that moment. The waste of it! The utter, insensate waste of so much passion and hope and tenderness, of such desperate agony, of such courage to bear...! There is no spendthrift so prodigal as Nature. For one perfected product that pleases her, hundreds of preciously guarded lives, such as this, thrown aside like so many pot-shards, useless, done for—and all to what purpose?... For the moment ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... booths were lined, selling anything from a ten-cent pocket knife to a blue-barreled Colts revolver. The numerous saloons were going full blast, and were doing a profitable business. Nobody is more of a spendthrift than your true cowboy when he is out on pleasure bent, and the fakirs and saloon-keepers were taking ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... Trees, as Jefferies says, "throw away handfuls of flower; and in the meadows the careless, spendthrift ways of grass and flower and all things are not to be expressed. Seeds by the hundred million float with absolute indifference on the air. The oak has a hundred thousand more leaves than necessary, and never hides a single acorn. Nothing utilitarian—everything on ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... Montague had never seen her again. He knew that she had gone to New Orleans to live, and he heard rumours that she was very unhappy, that her husband was a spendthrift and a rake. Scarcely a year after her marriage Montague heard the story of his death by ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... know their bees That wade in honey red to the knees: Their patent reaper, its sheaves sleep sound In dreamless garners underground: 40 We know false glory's spendthrift race Pawning nations for feathers and lace; It may be short, it may be long, "'Tis reckoning-day!" sneers unpaid Wrong. Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! 45 Lachesis, twist! and, Atropos, sever! In the shadow, year out, year in, The silent ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... its mistakes in the direction of aristocratic or merely polite and dissipated life. It displayed more than before of his humour on the tragic side; and, in close connection with its affecting scenes of starved and deserted childhood, were placed those contrasts of miser and spendthrift, of greed and generosity, of hypocrisy and simple-heartedness, which he handled in later books with greater power and fullness, but of which the first formal expression was here. It was his first general picture, so to speak, of the character and manners of his time, which ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... themselves; for when a multitude of particulars are presented to the mind, many are too weak or too indolent to take a comprehensive view of them, but confine their attention to each single point, by turns; and then decide, infer, and act accordingly; e.g., the imprudent spendthrift, finding that he is able to afford this, or that, or the other expense, forgets that all of them together will ruin him." The debauchee destroys his health by successive acts of intemperance, because no one of those ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... writers would tell us, is the parable of Germany and Prussia. The Germans are the gifted, generous, and spendthrift heirs to an illustrious domain. Prussia is the alien, upstart, unpopular, unsympathetic, bullying factor and manager. But to this bullying factor Germany owes the consolidation and prosperity of ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... depths of his lounging-chair; he shunned worry, loathed it, escaped it at every portal, and here it came to him just when he wanted to go to sleep. He could not divest himself of the feeling that, had his own career been different,—less extravagant, less dissipated, less indolently spendthrift,—he might have exercised a better influence, and his brother's young life might have been more prudently launched upon the world. He felt, too, with a sharper pang than he had ever felt it for himself, the brilliant beggary in which he lived, the utter ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... sir, have patience, and see your father To rifle up the treasure of my love, And play the spendthrift upon such an harlot! This same will make me have ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... hasn't the money to spare just now. You know it's near the end of the month, and they've all spent their allowances except Louise, and she says she'll not lend her money to such a spendthrift ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... industry and frugality, that if any of them were to be seen with a long coat made of English cloth, on any other than the first-day (Sunday), he would be greatly ridiculed and censured; he would be looked upon as a careless spendthrift, whom it would be unsafe to trust, and in vain to relieve. A few years ago two single- horse chairs were imported from Boston, to the great offence of these prudent citizens; nothing appeared to them more ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... discovered to be a comic opera, mounted with spendthrift brilliance, which David had taken her to see at the town of Gonzales, just ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... Boston a young man by the name of Collins, a reckless, dissipated spendthrift, of very considerable personal attractions. He had been quite an intimate friend of Franklin; and was so pleased with his descriptions of Philadelphia that he decided to remove there. This proved one of the calamities of ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... been imagined. Extremes of luxury may be forbidden, and agony of penury relieved; but nature intends, and the utmost efforts of socialism will not hinder the fulfilment of her intention, that a provident person shall always be richer than a spendthrift; and an ingenious one more comfortable than a fool. But, indeed, the adjustment of the possession of the products of industry depends more on their nature than their quantity, and on wise determination therefore ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... man, on the other hand, is a fatuous spendthrift of his fortune. He reminds us how close we are of kin to the frolicsome chimpanzee. His attitude was expressed on election night by a young man of Manhattan who ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... and agrees with our present state, look you. But of this elsewhere. As it is in a man's body, if either head, heart, stomach, liver, spleen, or any one part be misaffected, all the rest suffer with it: so is it with this economical body. If the head be naught, a spendthrift, a drunkard, a whoremaster, a gamester, how shall the family live at ease? [700]Ipsa si cupiat solus servare, prorsus, non potest hanc familiam, as Demea said in the comedy, Safety herself cannot save it. A good, honest, painful man many times hath a shrew to his ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... O spendthrift haste! await the Gods; The nectar crowns the lips of Patience; Haste scatters on unthankful sods The immortal gift ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... rolled by. London merchants dreamed of wealth in store for them in Virginia. A company was formed to colonize the country. Many of the merchants had spendthrift sons, who were also idle and given to bad habits. These young fellows thought it degrading to work. In those Western woods across the ocean, along the great rivers and upon the blue mountains, they saw in imagination a wild, roving, reckless ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... end of a year the boy went back to Paris and married the girl to whom he had been betrothed. He was sixteen, she fourteen, but the Duchess considered that the boy had shown that he was neither a spendthrift nor a fool, and that her daughter could be trusted to him. So the two, scarcely more than school children, opened their residence in Paris, and took their place in that gay world which was riding ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland |
