"Heedlessness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... says, "On those shores washed by the Tyrrhene sea, I beheld that stately laurel which always warms my imagination, and, through my impatience, fell breathless into the intervening stream. I was alone, and in the woods, yet I blushed at my own heedlessness; for, to the reflecting mind, no witness is necessary to excite ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... should never close an eye again," said the uneasy youth, gazing at the ingenuous countenance of Alice, where, however, in its sweet solicitude, he read nothing to confirm his half-awakened suspicion. "It is but too true, that after leading you into danger by my heedlessness, I have not even the merit of guarding your pillows as ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... common ground on which to meet distasteful people; we ought to labour hard against self-pity as well as against self-applause; we ought to feel that if we have missed chances, it is out of our own heedlessness and stupidity. Self-applause is a more subtle thing even than self-pity, because, if one rejects the sense of credit, one is apt to congratulate oneself on being the kind of person who does reject ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... winter have not arrived, these open galleries are trodden by Spiders, by Acari, by Anthrenus-grubs and other plunderers, to whom these eggs, or the young larvae about to emerge from them, must be a dainty feast. In consequence of the mother's heedlessness, the number of those who escape all these voracious hunters and the inclemencies of the weather must be curiously small. This perhaps explains why she is compelled to make up by her fecundity ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... the empress Tsz'e Hsi and her Manchu advisers had deliberately set themselves from the beginning to avert the danger by deflecting what might have been a revolutionary movement into anti-foreign channels, or whether with Oriental heedlessness they had allowed it to grow until they were powerless to control it, they had unquestionably resolved to take it under their protection before the foreign representatives at Peking had realized its gravity. The outrages upon native Christians ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Of course I do, a mighty lot," she admitted, laughing. "But you aren't very much more useful than Mrs. Baxter, who told me that my innocent heedlessness might give Mr. Quisante pain. I oughtn't to have told you that, but it was rather funny. I'm sure she's said it to all the Baxter girls in turn, and about all the girls that all the Baxter boys were ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... to say, I've lost it," he answered, and then stood with his eyes on the ground while the Father reproved him for heedlessness of health, and ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... whilst they were growing up to man's estate, he looked to their being taught every art and science; and whilst his life endured he dealt with them and brought them up in love and tenderness as though they had been his very own. And now, O Khusrau Shah, wake from thy sleep of ignorance and heedlessness, and know that these two Princes Bahman and Parwez and the Princess Perizadah their sister are thine own issue and thy rightful heirs." When the King heard these words and was assured of the purport being true and understood the evil doing of those Satans, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... long deposited in her place of rest till I had occasion to find her loss. All my things were kept by her in a most perjink and excellent order; but they soon fell into an amazing confusion; for, as she often said to me, I had a turn for heedlessness; insomuch, that although my daughter Janet was grown up, and able to keep the house, I saw that it would be necessary, as soon as decency would allow, for me to take another wife. I was moved to this chiefly by foreseeing ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... and are much alike. There is the same brilliant cleverness, the same strong feeling, not easy of demonstration, though impetuous in action; but poor Ethel's old foibles, her harum- scarum nature, quick temper, uncouth manners, and heedlessness of all but one absorbing object, have kept her back, and caused her much discomfort; yet I sometimes think these manifest defects have occasioned a discipline that is the best thing for the character in the end. They are faults that show themselves, and which one can tell ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... squalid part of the East End which he came to know so well, and to feel so strangely at home in. He drank the poisonous liquors of those pot-houses which swarm about the docks; he drifted about in whatever company came in his way; he let heedlessness develop into a curious disregard of personal tidiness. In Paris, Les Halles took the place of the docks. At Dieppe, where I saw so much, of him one summer, he discovered strange, squalid haunts about the harbour, where he made friends with amazing innkeepers, and got into ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... Rousseau was an exception, but then Rousseau was in truth a reactionist, and not a loyal member of the great company of reformers. As for Diderot, he valued the author's laurel so cheaply, as we have seen, that with a gigantic heedlessness and Saturnian weariness of the plaudits or hisses of the audience, while supremely interested in the deeper movements of the tragi-comic drama of the world, he left some of his masterpieces lying unknown in forgotten chests. Again, in the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... discoveries among the reminiscences, projects, hopes, apprehensions, weaknesses, and strong points, which he has heretofore shared with nobody. A cautious man is proverbially said to sleep with one eye open. That may be wisdom. But not with both; for this were heedlessness! No, no! Judge ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to Bougival, talking over our projects for the future, which, thanks to our heedlessness, and especially to our love, we saw in the ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... them, in his own prosaic but effective way, and he did not leave them until they were all as well and quiet as the dread circumstances of the situation permitted. Opium slaves are subject to accidents like that which had overtaken Mr. Jocelyn, who, through heedlessness or while half unconscious, had taken a heavy overdose, or else had punctured a vein with his syringe. Not infrequently habitues carelessly, recklessly, and sometimes deliberately end their wretched ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... the accident, to see if they could by any means be liable to an action for damages brought by an employee. But there was no loose nail in the stairway, not the least obstruction. The proprietors were not to blame; it was simply the child's heedlessness, they said. In fact, the fault was with Ellie's shoes: the sole of one, being broken, caught on the top ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... needn't give yourself such a dreadful character. I know you pretty well, and I'm quite pleased, on the whole, with my eldest daughter. But I do want you to learn to be a little less heedless; you know heedlessness is, after all, a sort of selfishness,—a ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... compromises, which at any other time would have amused her, now revolted her. She was in a condition of moral hypersensitiveness, and everything hurt her: her conscience was raw. Her eyes were opened to certain facts which hitherto had escaped her in her heedlessness. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... Each altar of your city's gods that stands Before the fane, each dedicated shrine; And that in safety through the city's ways I may pass onwards: all unlike to yours The outward semblance that I wear—the race that Nilus rears is all dissimilar That of Inachus. Keep watch and ward Lest heedlessness bring death: full oft, I ween, Friend hath slain friend, not knowing whom ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... 'When a bird is about to die, its notes are mournful; when a man is about to die, his words are good. 3. 'There are three principles of conduct which the man of high rank should consider specially important:— that in his deportment and manner he keep from violence and heedlessness; that in regulating his countenance he keep near to sincerity; and that in his words and tones he keep far from lowness and impropriety. As to such matters as attending to the sacrificial vessels, there are the ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... starvation. Let this teach them their dependence upon their neighbours, and let another fact open their eyes to what those neighbours are. England has replied to the senseless clamour, the disgraceful ingratitude, by voting ten millions sterling in a single year to relieve the distresses which the heedlessness and indolence of the Irish had brought upon themselves. We say advisedly, brought upon themselves. For, mark-worthy circumstance! the destruction of the potato crop has been just as complete, and the food of the people has been just as entirely swept away ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... a kind of sacredness which invites the adoption of such principles and regulations as will exclude perversion as well as insure a liberal and generous application of grateful and benevolent designs. Heedlessness and a disregard of the principle which underlies the granting of pensions is unfair to the wounded, crippled soldier who is honored in the just recognition of his Government. Such a man should never find himself side by side on the pension roll with ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... shell; all this is men's work. I had seen this sort of thing before in peace ironworks, but I saw it again with the same astonishment, the absolute precision of movement on the part of the half-naked sweating men, the calculated efficiency of each worker, the apparent heedlessness, the real certitude, with which the blazing hot cylinder is put here, dropped there, rolls to its next appointed spot, is chopped up and handed on, the swift passage to the cooling crude, pinkish-purple shell shape. Down a long line one sees in perspective a practical symmetry, of furnace ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... they had not told simply from heedlessness and want of initiative. He would have flogged the whole lot soundly, but he wanted them fresh for the morrow's work. Cutting down their rations would but weaken them, and as for threatening to dock their pay, such a threat has no effect ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... not to be moved from them after his anger had subsided—as fiery volcanic matters cool and harden into rock. Like many violent and implacable men, he allowed evils to grow under favour of his own heedlessness, till they pressed upon him with exasperating force, and then he turned round with fierce severity and became unrelentingly hard. This was his system with his tenants: he allowed them to get into arrears, neglect ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... more for the solid benefits which were lost to the poor and destitute,—for the alms which would have sent up incense to heaven in behalf of the soul of the giver,—May thought not of herself, only so far as to vow her energies, her labors, her life, to the good of those who, through her heedlessness, had been injured. She was not clear that she did not burn the will; she thought she had not done so, but she would not, for the world, have taken an oath to that effect. It is not to be supposed, however, that so shrewd a man as ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... demands," she went on in hasty exculpation. "I'm not even aiming my remarks at you ... I'm only thinking aloud.... But you see, I can't get any real foothold in society until—until my affairs are more clarified.... To run about the drawing-rooms as an example of frivolous heedlessness—that's not my way.... I can always hear them whisper behind me: 'She doesn't take it much to heart, that shows ...' No, I'd rather stay at home. I have no friends either and what chance had I to make them? You were always my one and only friend.... My books ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... now Mr Quilp's cue to change the subject with all convenient expedition, lest Richard Swiveller in his heedlessness should reveal anything which it was inexpedient for the women to know, he proposed a game at four-handed cribbage, and partners being cut for, Mrs Quilp fell to Frederick Trent, and Dick himself to Quilp. Mrs Jiniwin being very fond of cards was carefully excluded ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... friends dived over the bank—and their haste and heedlessness carried them pell-mell to the bottom—there sounded a yell behind them that certainly was not emitted by the bull. Goodness knows, he roared loudly enough! But this was no voice of a bull that so startled the two girls and Tom Cameron—it ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... and its lighting defective to-day, for Louis XV blocked up all the windows on one side. It remains, however, one of the richest examples of the Franco-Italian decoration of its era, though somewhat tarnished by the heedlessness of ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... which attacked the gentlemen more fiercely than it did the common people, the story of Jamestown would not have been one of disaster brought about by willful heedlessness and stupidity. ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... prove mischievous as that of any other truth. If the gist of the remark be that this is a truth which the populace is especially likely to apply wrongly, in consequence of its ignorance, passion, and heedlessness, we may answer by appealing to history, which is rather a record of excessive patience in the various nations of the earth ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... strength that was in him. Sam Bolton, poised in the stern, holding the canoe while his companion took a fresh hold, noted with approval the boy's physical power, the certainty of his skill at the difficult river work, the accuracy of his calculations. Whatever his heedlessness, Dick Herron knew his trade. It was, indeed, a powerful Instrument that Galen Albret in his wisdom had ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... Then rich-haired Demeter answered her: 'And to you, also, lady, all hail, and may the gods give you good! Gladly will I take the boy to my breast, as you bid me, and will nurse him. Never, I ween, through any heedlessness of his nurse shall witchcraft hurt him nor yet the Undercutter [2508]: for I know a charm far stronger than the Woodcutter, and I know an excellent safeguard ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... it not lamentable that men of a reprobate, unlawful, and dangerous faction should rage against the gods? From the lowest dregs, the more ignorant and women, credulous and yielding on account of the heedlessness of their sex, gathered and established a vast and wicked conspiracy, bound together by nightly meetings and solemn feasts and inhuman meats—not by any sacred rites, but by such as require expiation. It is a people ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... next. The troubled heart is hell. The heart at rest is paradise. The trouble or peace of parents depends upon their children. If their children are virtuous, parents are as the saints: if their children are wicked, parents suffer the tortures of the damned. If once your youthful spirits, in a fit of heedlessness, have led you to bring trouble upon your parents and cause them to weep, just consider the line of argument which I have been following. From this time forth repent and examine your own hearts. If you will become dutiful, your parents ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... monarchs of the feeble state of the garrison, and gave it as his opinion that by a secret and rapid expedition the place might be surprised. King Ferdinand asked the advice of his councillors. Some cautioned him against the sanguine temperament of the count and his heedlessness of danger: Moclin, they observed, was near to Granada and might be promptly reinforced. The opinion of the count, however, prevailed, the king considering him almost infallible in matters of border warfare since his capture of Boabdil ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... with a malignant eye each friendly glance exchanged by the couple in front, and listened to the snatches of their talk with a malevolence that was fanned to fury by their obvious heedlessness of her presence. She felt that the crisis called for decisive action. There was only one person alive to whose judgment Cynthia Vanrenen would bow, and Mrs. Devar began seriously to consider the advisability of ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... rather round; but she had fine long black hair, which hung down in natural curls below her waist; her figure was agreeable, and she was at once both awkward and graceful in her motions; her wit was natural and pleasing; to this gayety, heedlessness and ingenuousness were perfectly suited: she abounded in charming sallies, after which she so little sought, that they sometimes escaped her lips in spite of herself. She possessed several agreeable talents, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... of the myriads of opportunities for committing mistakes of this sort, I wonder that we had so few accidents. The truth is our captain taught us to think before we acted at all times, and we had little of the heedlessness which less experienced children often show. We were in effect small soldiers and carried some of the responsibilities of soldiers into all that ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of victory were gathered by the French. Their immense superiority of numbers gave them the power of overrunning the whole country; and the Imperial court, either from indolence, heedlessness, or intrigue, failed to take any step to support its arms in Italy; so that all which Eugene had taken, sooner or later fell into the enemy's hands, and he himself, disgusted with the neglect he had ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... process was not easy. Simon had many hard lessons to learn. Self-confidence had to be changed into humility. Impetuosity had to be chastened and disciplined into quiet self-control. Presumption had to be awed and softened into reverence. Thoughtfulness had to grow out of heedlessness. Rashness had to be subdued into prudence, and weakness had to be tempered into calm strength. All this moral history was folded up in the words, "Thou ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... who now realised what his heedlessness had done, cursed too late his spirit of curiosity. In his despair he wandered on over the heath, never looking where he put his feet, and full of sorrowful thoughts. At last he saw a light in the distance, which came from ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... any mystery—we were only——" She stopped, for she felt that Helena's eyes were fixed on her, and Freda was not by nature an untruthful child. It was through her heedlessness and wildness that she often got into what she would have called "scrapes," from which there seemed often no escape but by telling falsehoods, or at least allowing what was not the case ...
— The Christmas Fairy - and Other Stories • John Strange Winter
... not be doubted that our stupendous achievements as a people and our country's robust strength have given rise to heedlessness of those laws governing our national health which we can no more evade than human life can escape the laws of God ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... they might the better observe the enlivening sports without—some lay indolently with their legs overhanging the works—others, assuming pugilistic attitudes, dealt their harmless blows at each other,—and all were blended together, men, women, and children, with that heedlessness of thought that told how little of distrust existed within their breasts. The soldiers of the guard, too, exhibited the same air of calm and unsuspecting confidence; some walking to and fro within the square, while the greater portion either ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... Paul, and was determined that the plan should not succeed if it was possible for him to prevent it. He never calculated chances or hesitated at responsibilities, but would undertake any desperate measure to carry a point with the same unreflecting dash and heedlessness of danger that he would plunge his horse into a herd of buffalo, shooting right and left, trusting to luck to extricate him. It happened that Joe was chairman of the committee on enrolled bills of the council, and all bills had to pass through his hands for enrollment and comparison. ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau |
