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Taskmaster   Listen
noun
Taskmaster  n.  One who imposes a task, or burdens another with labor; one whose duty is to assign tasks; an overseer. "All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Taskmaster" Quotes from Famous Books



... who was greatly addicted to adopting the wretched little beings whom he ushered into the world, had conceived the idea of placing her in Father Fouchard's family as small maid of all work. True it was that the old boor was a terrible skinflint and a harsh, stern taskmaster; he had gone into the butchering business from sordid love of lucre, and his cart was to be seen daily, rain or shine, on the roads of twenty communes; but if the child was willing to work she would have a home and a protector, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... down steadfastly on the deities of his worship engendering his destruction beneath him. His cheek—the cheek which had rested in boyhood on his mother's bosom—was pressed against the gilded breast of the god Serapis, his taskmaster in life—his pillow ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... the stone, by their joint efforts, upon the rising wall. The Dwarf watched them with the eye of a taskmaster, and testified, by peevish gestures, his impatience at the time which they took in adjusting the stone. He pointed to another—they raised it also—to a third, to a fourth—they continued to humour him, though with some trouble, for he assigned them, ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott

... vague, too far, to bring comfort and refreshment to the mass of travailing men, or to invest duty with the stern ennobling quality of being done, "if I have grace to use it so as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye." ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... hardly tell you, that to employ the services of a hired spy, and to degrade myself in some sort to the level of a private inquirer, was somewhat revolting to a man, who, in the decadence of his fortunes, has ever striven to place some limit on the outrages which that hard taskmaster, poverty, may have from time to time compelled him to inflict upon his self-respect. But in the furtherance of a cause which I conclude is in no manner dishonourable, since an unclaimed heritage must needs be ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... suppose I do not need to point out, the idea not only of communion, which the former phrase brought to our minds, but that of the inspection of our conduct. 'As ever in the great Taskmaster's eye,' says the stern Puritan poet, and although one may object to that word 'Taskmaster,' yet the idea conveyed is the correct expansion of the commandment given to Abraham. Observe how 'walk before Me' is dovetailed, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... that we should understand one another. I have never lost sight of you since you came to this fatal land of Retz. I have been near you when you knew it not. To accomplish this I have deceived the man who is my taskmaster, swearing to him that in the witch crystal I have seen you depart. And I shall yet deceive him in more ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... Weaving in mortal strains, I've stolen one hour From anxious self, life's cruel taskmaster! And the warm wooings of this sunny day Tremble along my frame and harmonise The attempered organ, that even saddest thoughts Mix with some sweet sensations, like harsh tunes Played ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... other hand, experience is a severe taskmaster, and it taught me to be somewhat insubordinate in my notions. I fear I must confess that this spirit of insubordination has never ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha

... life subject to the taskmaster Popularity are endless. One day he wrote:— "A stranger called here and asked if Shakespeare lived in this neighborhood. I told him I knew ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields

... vanities and levities, played his part to my admiration. He had his own view; he might be wrong; but the performances (he would remind us) were after all his, and he must decide. He was, in this as in all other things, an iron taskmaster, sparing not himself nor others. If you were going to do it at all, he would see that it was done as well as you were able. I have known him to keep two culprits (and one of these his wife) repeating the same action and the same two or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... man's intellect and his reason must be quickened to convince him of the necessity of acting aright. The same is true of any other moral obligation. The instant Duty becomes onerous. Right Reason steps in to prevent our shirking it. Giri thus understood is a severe taskmaster, with a birch-rod in his hand to make sluggards perform their part. It is a secondary power in ethics; as a motive it is infinitely inferior to the Christian doctrine of love, which should be the law. I deem it a product of the conditions ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe

... at her feet, In lonely labour stands mine own, my sweet, Above the quern half-filled with half-ground wheat. O red taskmaster, that thy ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris

... well, above all, I think, to have a just appreciation of one's own powers or lack of powers," said Denham, slowly. "Ambition, without the corresponding strength to gratify it, is a cruel taskmaster." ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield

... must be admitted, had been something miserly in his home life, as Marcia had so rashly reminded his son. But he had never stinted Jocelyn. He had been rather a hard taskmaster, though as a paymaster trustworthy; a ready-money man, just and ungenerous. To every one's surprise, the capital he had accumulated in the stone trade was of large amount for a business so unostentatiously carried on—much larger than Jocelyn ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy

... This gentleman, at all other times ready to proceed with stringent severity wherever he discovered slight breaches of discipline or of the mechanical details of drill, and who knew no clemency where nothing was to be feared for himself by playing the rigid taskmaster, in this instance tolerated this shameful thing; for he knew that interference in this particular would mean for him, in any case, serious inconvenience. Two things were possible. Either he would be charged with falsely accusing ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg

... been my foe? She had been a cockering, fawning nurse to me not so many months ago. Months!—yesterday. Why should the steward, who was used to flatter and caress me, now frown and threaten like some harsh taskmaster of a Clink, where wantons are sent to be whipped and beat hemp. I slunk away scared and cowed, and tried to learn a chapter out of Deuteronomy; but the letters all danced up and down before my eyes, and the one word "Remember," in great scarlet characters, seemed stamped ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... but one way of saying that the Forester should be his own severest taskmaster. The Forester must keep himself up to his own work. In no other profession, to my knowledge, is a man thrown so completely on his own responsibility. The Forester often leads an isolated life for weeks or months at a time, seeing the men under whom he works only at distant intervals. ...
— The Training of a Forester • Gifford Pinchot

... arranged the order of march, she selected the camps, she set the hour for halting and the hour for resuming and though she was inexperienced in such matters, her native intelligence was so far above that of the men or the apes that she did better than they could have done. She was a hard taskmaster, too, for she looked down with loathing and contempt upon the misshapen creatures amongst which cruel Fate had thrown her and to some extent vented upon them her dissatisfaction and her thwarted love. She made them build her a strong protection and ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... No wonder. They had been used to kind treatment. They might pass to a hard taskmaster. Not one of them knew where in another day should be his home—what sort of tyrant should be his lord. But that was not all. Still worse. Friends, they were going to be parted; relatives, they would be torn asunder—perhaps never to meet more. Husband looked upon wife, ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... imagined that the poor invalid little Bill was utterly helpless. On the other hand, Okematan was not unacquainted with the sudden rise to unexpected celebrity of Indian boys in his tribe, and knew something about the capacity of even cripples to overcome difficulties when driven by that stern taskmaster, Necessity. ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne

... Phil had not yet received a penny. This made him somewhat uneasy, for he knew that at night he must carry home a satisfactory sum to the padrone, or he would be brutally beaten; and poor Phil knew from sad experience that this hard taskmaster had ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... the saddest deaths from other causes than consumption was that of a poor feeble-minded man whose brother, a sturdy, devout, severe puritan, was a very hard taskmaster. Poor half-witted Charlie was kept steadily at work,—although he was not able to do much, for his body was about as feeble as his mind. He never could be taught the right use of an axe, and when he was set to chopping ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir

... in Goshen, an incident of great importance occurred. To superintend the service of the children of Israel, an officer from among them was set over every ten, and ten such officers were under the surveillance of an Egyptian taskmaster. One of these Hebrew officers, Dathan by name, had a wife, Shelomith, the daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan, who was of extraordinary beauty, but inclined to be very loquacious. Whenever the Egyptian taskmaster set over her husband came to their house on business connected with his ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... servant; especially because it has been my earnest wish to perform more for you than for any one I ever knew upon the world. But absorbing occupations, which still engage me, have prevented my informing your ladyship of this. Moreover, knowing that you know that love needs no taskmaster, and that he who loves doth not sleep, I thought the less of using go-betweens. And though I seemed to have forgotten, I was doing what I did not talk about in order to effect a thing that was not looked ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... grinned, "and it will make that young Ripley cub feel mighty sore and cheap when he finds that he was the only one who got 'skinned' at this auction. But before you get through cutting and hauling birch bark you may think I'm a pretty hard taskmaster. I'll call it a go, ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock

... Dacier's threw the fancied danger into remoteness. The world was her stepmother, vigilant to become her judge; and the world was his taskmaster, hopeful of him, yet able to strike him down for an offence. She saw their situation as he did. The course of folly must be bravely taken, if taken at all: Disguise degraded her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... but not an extraordinary boy. He formed a few friendships there, in which his attachment appears to have been, in some instances, remarkable. The late Duke of Dorset was his fag, and he was not considered a very hard taskmaster. He certainly did not carry with him from Harrow any anticipation of that splendid career he was destined to run ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... and on the emotions other and greater authors had felt. There was a time, "in the days that were earlier," when the writing of a book was a rare and solemn task, to be approached—like the writing of "Paradise Lost"—after years of devout and arduous preparation, under the "great Taskmaster's eye." Now it is all a rush and a fever and a fret, and the mad breathlessness of the New York newspaper office has spread from journalism to literature, and novelists cheerfully contract to write books in the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... prayed, and a more sincere, heart-touching prayer never went up from human lips to that God "who hath made of one blood all nations that dwell on the face of the earth." Though clothed in rags, and in feeble age at the mercy of a cruel taskmaster, that old slave was richer far than his master. His simple faith, which saw through the darkness around him into the clear and radiant light of the unseen day, was of far more worth than all the wealth and glory of this world. I know not why it was, but as I looked at ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore

... While he raged at them and reviled them for opposing him with the speech of the honest and true, it had scratched his stony heart, and he had perceived the powerlessness of all his wealth to buy them if he had addressed himself to the attempt. So, even while he was their griping taskmaster and never gave them a good word, he had written their names down in his will. So, even while it was his daily declaration that he mistrusted all mankind—and sorely indeed he did mistrust all who bore any resemblance to himself—he was as certain that these two people, surviving him, would be trustworthy ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... under the cold grey sky, God Almighty may be a hard taskmaster, and the Kingdom of Heaven is attained only by much endeavour; but in Cordova these things come more easily. The aged priest walks in the sun and smokes his cigarillo. Heaven is not such an inaccessible place after all. Evidently he feels that he has done ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... in which even the poorest of us may indulge when our taskmaster in the great brickworks of this hot and heavy world is not hard by and pressing us forward with his lash. She had her dreams of what never was and never could be; of old longings, old heart-hungers, old hopes, and loves which never ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... no mistaking his mood, and in the hours that followed he was a far from agreeable taskmaster. He snapped and growled and swore at them impartially, acting generally like a bear with a sore ear whom nothing can please. If he could be said to be less disagreeable to anyone, it was, curiously enough, Bud Jessup, whom he kept down at one end of the line ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames

... living. The work of the school is redeemed from the plane of a task and lifted to the plane of a privilege. The pupil's initiative is given full recognition and inspiriting freedom ensues. The teacher is not a taskmaster but a friend in need. Pupils and teacher live and work together in an enterprise in which they have common interests. The emoluments attending success are shared equally and there is no place for envy in the distribution ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson

... I to say to them?" Lord John spoke but after a long moment, during which he had only looked hard and—an observer might even then have felt—ominously at his taskmaster. ...
— The Outcry • Henry James

... be unhappy about. You know how blameless he has always been at Eton and Oxford; and though he may view his work rather in a school-boy aspect, and me as a taskmaster, as long as he is doing right the growth is going on. Don't be unhappy, Jenny! His great clear young voice is delightful to hear; he is capital at choral practices, and is a hero to all the old women and boys, the more so for the qualities that ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the commiseration of the world because they were scourged to work fourteen hours out of the twenty-four. But there is many a theoretical republican who is a harsher taskmaster to his stomach than this; who allows it no more resting time than he does his watch; who gives it no Sunday, no holiday, no vacation in any sense, and who seeks to make his heart beat faster for the sake of the exhilaration he ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... and lay a little longer. It was a pleasant thought that there was no stern taskmaster to force him up. He might lie as long as he wanted to, till noon, if he chose. Perhaps he might have chosen, but the claims of a healthy appetite asserted themselves, and Sam sprang ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger

... master give us all our ages. I think when they say we was free that meant every man was to be his own boss and not be bossed by a taskmaster. Cose old master was good to us but we wanted to have our own way 'bout a ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration

... and feet of men? She will carry emancipation and abolition with her in every fold of her flag; while your stars, as they increase in numbers, will be overcast by the murky vapors of oppression, and the only portion of your banners visible to the eye will be the blood-stained stripes of the taskmaster." ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy

... these ties, had given him his parents, his children, and that to love them was to love God, to do his duty to them was to do his duty to God. This was part of his walking with God, continually under his great Taskmaster's eye,—walking about his daily business with the belief that a great loving Father was above him, whatever he did; ready to strengthen, and guide, and bless him if he did well, ready to avenge Himself on him if he did ill. These were the fruits of ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... should not have seen him before;—but I heard my father often speak of him as being among the flower of our real old English gentry. By the mode in which he began to school me, I can guess you had a tight taskmaster of him, Albert—I warrant you never wore hat ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... spent it in whistling or numbering my footsteps, should I consider it misspent for that. I should have given my conscience a fair field; when it has anything to say, I know too well it can speak daggers; therefore, for this time, my hard taskmaster has given me a holyday, and I may go in again rejoicing to my breakfast and the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... said Mr Meldrum, shaking the hand outstretched cordially. "I see we understand each other; and, believe me, I'll not be a hard taskmaster." ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson

... Caudle herself was wont to declare, "put upon from the beginning," the slightest means of defence—if we have supplied a solitary text to meet any one of the manifold wrongs with which woman, in her household life, is continually pressed by her tyrannic taskmaster, man,—we feel that we have only paid back one grain, hardly one, of that mountain of more than gold it is our ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold

... of discomfort and vexation endured by simple-hearted citizens in pursuit of a light-hearted Saturday and Sunday, we often wonder how it is that humanity will so gleefully inflict upon itself sufferings which, if they were imposed by some taskmaster, would be ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... services you have rendered us. Think of what I was but an hour since — a captive with the most horrible of all fates before me, and with the belief that my father was dying by inches in the hands of some cruel taskmaster, and now he is beside me and I am free. This has been done by two strangers, men of a nation which I have been taught to regard as an enemy. It seems to me that no words that I can speak could tell you even faintly ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty

... like each other, and yet presenting different facets or aspects of the same great truth. Sometimes we read about 'walking before God' as Abraham was bid to do. That means ordering the daily life under the continual sense that we are 'ever in the great Taskmaster's eye' Then there is 'walking after God,' and that means conforming the will and active efforts to the rule that He has laid down, setting our steps firm on the paths that He has prepared that we should walk in them, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... confidence was out of the question with The Avenger in the hall, which could merely be regarded in the light of an antechamber to the keyhole, I sent him to the Play. A better proof of the severity of my bondage to that taskmaster could scarcely be afforded, than the degrading shifts to which I was constantly driven to find him employment. So mean is extremity, that I sometimes sent him to Hyde Park corner to see what ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... first requisite is to walk before God; that is, to nourish a continual consciousness of His presence, and to regulate all actions and thoughts under the thrilling and purifying sense of being 'ever in the great Taskmaster's eye.' Only we are not to think of Him as only a Taskmaster, but as a loving Friend and Helper. A child is happy in its little work or play when it knows that its father is looking on with sympathy. The sense of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... she answered. "I have had it specially prepared from a recipe given me ten years ago at a time when I thought of resorting to the same contrivance to escape from my taskmaster." ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward

... good-humored imitation of my own. I am satisfied that his particularly soulless laugh was not derived from any amusement he actually felt, yet I could not say it was forced. In his accurate imitations, I fancied he was only trying to evade any responsibility of his own. THAT devolved upon his taskmaster! In the attention he displayed when new ideas were presented to him, there was a slight condescension, as if he were looking down upon them from his three thousand ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte

... when he was producing one of his imaginative works in monthly instalments. He appeared to give himself no rest whatever, when repose, at any rate for a while, was most urgently required. He seemed to have become his own taskmaster precisely at the time when he ought to have taken the repose he had long previously earned, by ministering so largely and laboriously ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... half-formed desire to break away from the herd. It will force him to place the good of society before his own. It is the very strong link that attaches the individual to the whole. And man, subservient to interests he has persuaded himself are greater than his own, makes himself a slave to his taskmaster. He sits him in a seat of honour. At last, like a courtier fawning on the royal stick that is laid about his shoulders, he prides himself on the sensitiveness of his conscience. Then he has no words hard enough ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham

... to agonizing headache. An unfortunate lad, who at thirteen fell from a scaffolding and was taken up for dead, and escaped only with total deafness and a supposed permanent injury to the brain. A hapless apprentice, who suffered at the hands of a cruel taskmaster all that brutality and drunken fury could suggest. A youth, thirsting for knowledge, but able to obtain it only by the hardest ways, peering into booksellers' windows, reading at book-stalls, purchasing cheap books with pennies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... exacting the extreme rights of the conqueror, before, too, the act of conquest had been consummated; for already fresh troops were arriving from Mongolia and Manchuria, and the valor of Sankolinsin was beginning to revive. That the Chinese government had under the hard taskmaster, necessity, made great progress in its views on foreign matters was not to be denied, but somehow or other its movements always lagged behind the requirements of the hour, and the demands of the English were again ahead of what ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... told about the busiest of us, it is not so much want of time as want of intention; it is want of set and indomitable purpose to do it; it is want of method and of regularity such as all business men must have; and it is want, above all, of laying out every hour of every day under the Great Taskmaster's eye. Many country ministers again,—we, miserable men that we are, are never happy or well placed,—complain continually that their people are so few, and so scattered, and so ignorant, and so uninteresting, and so unresponsive, that it is not worth their toil to go up and down ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte

... is a hard taskmaster!" he muttered facetiously. "I'm afraid I'm not very presentable this evening—no bath this morning, and no shave, and, after nearly a month of make-up, that beastly grease paint gets into the skin creases in a most intimate way." He chuckled as the thought of old Jason, his butler, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... no one will pretend that of the millions set free, a bare majority would of themselves contend for the franchise. That argument might have refused them freedom itself, for a large majority of Southern slaves knew too little of it to desire it, however they may have longed to be rid of a taskmaster and the pangs which slavery brought. During the last four years women have been silent about their "rights" in the several States, because pressed by severe duties. Desirous to establish a reputation for discretion, we have refrained ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... sought other exercise. Some distance away stood a house, and at the front gate was a man, and Romulus knew man to be the meanest and most cruel of all living things and the conscienceless taskmaster of weaker creatures. So Romulus avoided the house and struck out across the fields. Presently he came upon a very large thing which awed him. It was a live-oak, and the birds were singing in the foliage. But his persistent curiosity put a ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow

... grovelling on all-fours, standing up in despair, tugging, pushing, snarling at each other venomously, ready to kill, ready to weep, and only kept from flying at each other's throats by the fear of death that stood silent behind them like an inflexible and cold-eyed taskmaster. Oh yes! It must have been a pretty sight. He saw it all, he could talk about it with scorn and bitterness; he had a minute knowledge of it by means of some sixth sense, I conclude, because he swore to me he had remained apart without a ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... to the light and play of life, in which he admitted no [Greek: adiaphora] and only the relaxation of a rare genial laugh, are more satisfactory than his conception of their sanction, which is grim. His "Duty" is a categorical imperative, imposed from without by a taskmaster who has "written in flame across the sky, 'Obey, unprofitable servant.'" He saw the infinite above and around, but not in the finite. He insisted on the community of the race, and struck with a bolt any one who said, "Am I my ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... getting to work. He found the crank go easy enough at first, but the longer he was at it the stiffer it seemed to turn. And after about four hundred turns he was fain to breathe and rest himself. He took three minutes' rest, then at it again. All this time there was no taskmaster, as in Egypt, nor whipper-up of declining sable energy, as in Old Kentucky. So that if I am so fortunate as to have a reader aged ten, he is wondering why the fool did not confine his exertions to saying he had ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... West, stopping in Chicago, where the Doctor preached in his son's church. Everywhere we were invited to be the guests of some prominent resident of the town we were in. It had been so with Dr. Talmage for years. He always refused, however, because he felt that his time was too imperative a taskmaster. For thirty years he had never visited anyone over night, until he went to my brother's house in Pittsburg. But we were constantly meeting old friends of his, friends of many years, in every stopping place of our journeys. I remember particularly one ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage

... of agony, and said: "We will not aid you nor protect you. Though you are ignorant, from you will we demand the works of wisdom. Though you are weak, great things shall be required at your hands." Like the ancient taskmaster, the Nation said: "There shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... for me," answered Odysseus, "I am no stranger to blows, for I have been sore buffeted on land and sea. The belly is a stern taskmaster, which compels us to face both ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell

... he said, steadily controlling himself. "I want to propose that we shall give way a little on both sides. I won't hurry you; I will wait a reasonable time. If I promise that, surely you may yield a little in return. Money seems to be a hard taskmaster, my darling, after what you have told me about your uncle. See how he suffers because he is bent on being rich; and ask yourself if it isn't a warning to us not to follow his example! Would you like to see me too wretched to speak to you, or to eat my breakfast—and all for the ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins

... practising the piano, and one of the earliest stories of his life is of the five-year-old little child made to stand on a bench before the piano laboring over the notes, while the tears flowed fast down his cheeks at the cold and aching pain, from which his hard taskmaster would not release him. Besides his father, a clever musician who lodged in the house, Pfeiffer, an oboist at the theatre, gave him lessons. Beethoven used afterward to say that he had learnt more ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various

... wicked cease from troubling, And there the weary be at rest; There the prisoners repose together, Nor hear the taskmaster's voice. ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon

... him as a certain well-to-do farmer and dairyman who had an unenviable reputation as a cruel taskmaster with his hired help. He was also known to be exceedingly harsh in his treatment of any with whom he had dealings, who chanced to be unable to meet their obligations to the minute. Because he had been ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson

... when he pleased. This slackness of rule might have been ruinous to a boy of slow understanding, who, feeling labour in the acquisition of knowledge, would have altogether neglected it, save for the command of a taskmaster; and it might have proved equally dangerous to a youth whose animal spirits were more powerful than his imagination or his feelings, and whom the irresistible influence of Alma would have engaged in field-sports from morning till night. ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... and his wife were united both in sympathies and in struggles. Robert had experienced "hard times" just in what way, however, was not recorded; his wife had been differently treated, not being under the same taskmaster as her husband. At the time of their arrival all that was recorded of their bondage ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... friends writes of him, "He was a severe and unsparing taskmaster, and allowed no shirking. No other officer could have got half the work out of the men that he did. He used to keep them up to the mark by exclaiming, whenever he saw them flag: 'Another five minutes gone, and this not done yet, my men! We ...
— The Story of General Gordon • Jeanie Lang

... taskmaster, demanding long years of preparation and combination of effort for one end. The political separation of the two countries does not alter the fact that they are, in the military sense, one area of operations and of supply, and, at a time like the ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various

... it would be to be employed by Mr. Graham. Tom Tripp worked early and late for a dollar and a half per week, without board, for a hard and suspicious taskmaster, who was continually finding fault with him. But for sheer necessity, he would have left Mr. Graham's store long ago. He had confided the unpleasantness of his position to Herbert more than once, and enlisted ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... had them flogged by sentence of the court, by the scourger of the district, till the blood streamed from their backs. Knowing how little consideration there is for the unhappy convict in all cases of difference with his taskmaster, and that however unjust or unreasonable the latter's complaints may be, they are always readily entertained by the subordinate authorities, and carefully recorded against the former to his prejudice, I took care to give him no offence. To say nothing of his positive orders, I obeyed his ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various

... executed in the Papal States, as well as his high-handed treatment of matters affecting the Catholic Church in France, brought him into conflict with Pope Pius VII, a gentle but courageous man, who in daring to excommunicate the European taskmaster was summarily deprived of his temporal rule and carried off a prisoner, first to Grenoble, then to Savona, and finally to Fontainebleau, where he resided, heaped with disgrace and insults, until 1814. In 1809 Napoleon formally incorporated ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... the school was all eyes and mouths. Blue-nose Crawford bore the reputation of being a very hard taskmaster, and of holding to the view that severe discipline was one of the virtues that wisdom ought to visit upon the youth. He once lent to Abraham Lincoln Weems's "Life of Washington." The boy read it with absorbing interest, but there ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth

... before you, and seek to propitiate you with grants. They must labour, that you may be supplied with baths and games and spectacles and the like to your satisfaction; you are their censor and critic, their stern taskmaster, who will not always hear before condemning; nay, you may give them a smart shower of stones, if the fancy takes you, or confiscate their property. The informer's tongue has no terrors for you; no burglar will scale or undermine ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... could see nothing but a long wide stretch of desert country, at the horizon of which were a few palms overshadowing dingy, sun-baked mud buildings, houses formed of the brick made of straw now as in the days when the taskmaster-beaten Israelitish bondmen put up ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn

... 'Fire is a good servant but a bad master.' That was the sentence. The times I've written it, thick down strokes, thin upstrokes! Well, that's like any of these ologies—biology especially. It's a good teacher. You don't have to let it be a taskmaster." ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... the legitimate exercise of their functions—we submit to the decrees of Providence, because they are not to be resisted—a coward submits to be insulted—a pusillanimous wretch to be despised—and a knave, if detected, must submit to be scouted—a slave submits to his Taskmaster; but, the Freeholders of Westmoreland, cannot, in reason, be said to submit to the House of Lowther naming their Representatives, unless it can be proved that those Representatives have been thrust upon them by an unjustifiable agency; and that they ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... in the canebrake above, and, when sufficient had been procured, Mr Button struck work for three days. He would have struck altogether, but he had found a taskmaster. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... his judgments, and his ways past finding out. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again?' Who indeed? God is not a tyrant, who must be appeased with gifts; or a taskmaster, who must be satisfied with the labour of his slaves. He is a father who loves his children; who gives, and loveth to give; who gives to all freely, and upbraideth not. He truly willeth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should turn ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... all more or less of a puzzle to her, but it was one which her taskmaster never explained further than the revelations of each day explained it. She understood that he was a scientist, that he undoubtedly had been an operator in some surgical field or was putting into shape the work of another in that field, but what he now was besides a writer of ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond

... in dispatching our meal, when, pointing to a quantity of dry grass at one end of our prison (for I can call it by no other name), he lifted his lanthorn, and left us to ruminate upon our melancholy situation and dreary prospects under such a taskmaster. None of us felt inclined to speak; yet it was some time ere any of us could close our eyes, in consequence of the noise made by the bull-frogs in a swamp near the farm. If we had not heard them as we approached the place, and inquired what caused the, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... vehemence and his crudity of speech. But there was method in his fury, and calculating design and even practical wisdom. He gave an impetus as powerful as that of the Tsar Peter; but he was superior to him in knowledge of detail as well as in point of character. He was a hard taskmaster, but he knew what he was about; and it does not appear that his subjects desired to be governed in another way or that they would have been satisfied with a monarch who did not strain their strength to ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... to think of coming over here now," Peace assured her confidently, and that was all the satisfaction she could get, so she lapsed into silence, and worked like a beaver until the second big bucket was brimming over. Then the small taskmaster drew a deep breath of relief and said graciously, "Now we will go home. These ought to make quite a little jelly. We must have as much as twenty quarts. They don't take ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown

... philosopher chose for himself a severe taskmaster, with plenty of added work, yet, with some special kindliness in trustful tones that proved part-pay, some needed, minor chord was touched in the soul-life of the lad, that gave him hope in himself and in his future, ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara

... dismissing her to the death she longed for; but because the suffering would be short, was I to stand by and to witness the degradation—the pollution—attempted to be fastened upon her. What! to know that her beautiful tresses would be shorn ignominiously—a felon's dress forced upon her—a vile taskmaster with authority to——; blistered be the tongue that could go on to utter, in connection with her innocent name, the vile dishonours which were to settle upon her person! I, however, and her brother had taken such resolutions ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... long as they were out upon the open sea, and in fear of perishing by starvation, they had never had a thought about pirates. Then the sight of a prau—even with the certainty of its being a piratical craft—would have been welcome; since death by the Malay kris, or slavery to the most cruel taskmaster, would have been a relief from the sufferings they were enduring, from hunger as from thirst. Now, however, that these were things of the past, and they were not only safe delivered from the perils of the deep, but seemed in no farther danger ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid

... sovereign remedies for the relief of your sorrow, a life of work, or a life of pleasure. But work needs to be done under the influence of the Gospel of Progress. Without a belief in progress, man cannot believe that work is prayer, and that God is a taskmaster. His soul wakes up. He commits suicide or crime. Or he deserts the city, and goes, as you have done, ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... sick rather than endure the tedium of toil. Or suppose that the grave official is not an angel, but a man of hateful heart or one with a personal spite to vent upon his victim. What then? How could one face a regime in which the everlasting taskmaster held control? There is nothing like it among us at the present day except within the melancholy precincts of the penitentiary. There and there only, the socialist ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock

... a cloudless sky overhead. After breakfast, in which the now resuscitated members of the crew and Constantio took part, Frank called them forward and told them of the fate of Malvoise. None of them seemed particularly grieved, as the man had undoubtedly been a hard taskmaster. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... crowding on his mind, and the dreary prospect spreading before him, to the end of his life, of no change from his rude and slavish occupation under the burning sun, hearing no voice but that of the harsh taskmaster; his eyes saddened and his heart sickened by the open and daily spectacle of immorality and woe, with no ending ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... engaged in their several trades: shoemakers ply the awl, glassmakers blow through their tubes, metal founders watch over their smelting-pots, carpenters hew down trees and build a ship; groups of women weave or spin under the eye of a frowning taskmaster, who seems impatient of their chatter. Did the double in his hunger desire meat? He might choose from the pictures on the wall the animal that pleased him best, whether kid, ox, or gazelle; he might follow the course of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... to blame?' he returned, so harshly that I remained silent: 'it is no fault of yours if people will not be silent. But all the same I am sorry that you know; your opinion of me is quite changed now, eh? You think me a hard-hearted taskmaster of a brother. Well, it does not matter: Gladys would have made ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... — N. director, manager, governor, rector, comptroller. superintendent, supervisor, straw boss; intendant; overseer, overlooker^; supercargo^, husband, inspector, visitor, ranger, surveyor, aedile^; moderator, monitor, taskmaster; master &c 745; leader, ringleader, demagogue, corypheus, conductor, fugleman^, precentor^, bellwether, agitator; caporal^, choregus^, collector, file leader, flugelman^, linkboy^. guiding star &c (guidance) 693; adviser &c 695; guide &c (information) 527; pilot; helmsman; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... and Toby, believing that everything which he had said had been understood by the animals, went out of the door to meet his other taskmaster. ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis

... technical side of the law, not so much by reason of its dry difficulty as through scorn of its admitted weakness, its inability to do more than compromise; through contempt of its pretended beneficences and its frequent inefficiency and harmfulness. In the law he saw plainly the lash of the taskmaster, driving all those yoked together in the horrid compact of society, a master inexorable, stone-faced, cruel. In it he found no comprehension, seeing that it regarded humanity either as a herd of slaves or a pack of wolves, and not as brethren labouring, suffering, ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough

... bloom again, for there is none that renews us—youth. The Helots had their one short, joyous festival in their long year of labour; life may leave us ours. It will be surely to us, long before its close, a harder tyrant and a more remorseless taskmaster than ever was the Lacedemonian to his bond-slaves,—bidding us make bricks without straw, breaking the bowed back, and leaving us as our sole chance of freedom the hour when we shall turn our faces to the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... he was regarded as the head of the Reformed Churches in Scotland, Switzerland, Holland, and France. Besides his "Institutes," he found time to write Commentaries on nearly all the books of the Bible; was a man of masculine intellect and single-hearted devotion to duty, as ever in the "Great Taskmaster's" eye. His greatest work was his "Institutes," published in Basel in 1535-36. It was written in Latin, and four years after translated by himself into French. "In the translated form," says Prof. Saintsbury, "it is beyond ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... and arrogant, caring for naught but his own personal advantage, consulting only his own tastes and pleasures. He was a stern officer to his soldiers, a cruel taskmaster to the serfs he had inherited, and a bitter foe of the Jews whom he ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith

... on whom all this heavy labour had begun to tell, was taking advantage of the absence of his taskmaster, Jacob, to sleep awhile in the hut which they had now built for themselves beneath the shadow of the baobab-tree. As she reached it he came out yawning, and asked her where she had ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard

... hasty critic. It is all true indeed, with a difference; Hawthorne was all that M. Montegut says, minus the conviction. The old Puritan moral sense, the consciousness of sin and hell, of the fearful nature of our responsibilities and the savage character of our Taskmaster—these things had been lodged in the mind of a man of Fancy, whose fancy had straightway begun to take liberties and play tricks with them—to judge them (Heaven forgive him!) from the poetic and aesthetic point of view, the point of view of entertainment and irony. This absence of ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... required sum sobbing bitterly in anticipation of the treatment in store for them. Give them a penny or two, should they ask it, reader. You will not miss it. It will go to the brutal parent or taskmaster, it is true, but it will give the little monkey-faced minstrel a supper, and save him from a beating. It is more to them than to you, and it will do you no harm for the recording angel to write opposite the follies and sins of your life, that you cast one gleam of sunshine into the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... that awaits the military force. Let them hasten to join the national ships, and, if denied your independence and rights, blockade the Hellespont, thus carrying the war into the enemy's country. Then the fate of the cruel Sultan, the destroyer of his subjects, the tyrant taskmaster of a Christian people, shall be sealed by the hands of the executioners who yet obey his bloody commands. Then shall prophecy be fulfilled, and Moslem sway be overthrown by the corruptions itself has engendered. Then shall the ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane

... response to your wishes, whenever and wherever the animal performs his service well, (9) reward and humour him. Thus, when the rider perceives that the horse takes a pleasure in the high arching and supple play of his neck, let him seize the instant not to impose severe exertion on him, like a taskmaster, but rather to caress and coax him, as if anxious to give him a rest. In this way the horse will be encouraged and fall into a ...
— On Horsemanship • Xenophon

... of the torment of existence lies in this, that Time is continually pressing upon us, never letting us take breath, but always coming after us, like a taskmaster with a whip. If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer

... when he woke to a realization of his kinship with the despised and oppressed serfs and an appreciation of the cruel injustice of which they were the helpless victims. Was Moses justified in resisting the Egyptian taskmaster? Are numbers essential to the rightness of a cause? What right had Ramses II to demand forced labor from the immigrants within his border? Was he justified in his method of exacting tribute? Is peonage always disastrous not ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks

... shall lose all real feeling of God being our Father, and we his sons. We shall begin to fancy ourselves his slaves, and not his children; and God our taskmaster, and not our Father. We shall dislike the thought of God. We shall long to hide from God. We shall fall back into slavish terror, and a fearful looking forward to of judgment and fiery indignation, because we have trampled ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley

... broken pipes discharge sewage in the basement living quarters where the bananas are ripening; darkness and filth dwell together in the tenement cellars where the garment-worker sews the buttons on for the sweat-shop taskmaster; goats live amiably with human kids in the cob-webbed basements where little hands are twisting stems for flowers; in the unlovely stable lofts where dwell a dozen persons in a place never intended for one; in windowless attics of tall tenements where frail lives grow frailer ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine



Words linked to "Taskmaster" :   supervisor



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